Botany Baymen

Botany Baymen were the ships that carried convicts and cargoes to and from the British penal settlement in New South Wales in the late 18th and early 19th centuries – in the same way that ships engaged in trade with the East Indies were known as East Indiamen.

Botany Bay is a small inlet on the south-east coast of Australia, named by the British maritime explorer, James Cook, in 1770. It was the preferred location for the settlement when the Pitt administration decided in August 1786 to establish a convict colony in the south-west corner of the Pacific. When it proved unsuitable, the Governor selected a site in Port Jackson, nine miles to the north - the location of Sydney today. But the name stuck: when contemporaries spoke of 'Botany Bay', they meant the whole settlement, of which Sydney was a part, and by 1800, it had become a synonym for any remote penal colony.

This website is dedicated to the ships which made their way to and from New South Wales in the early years of the colony - between 1787 and 1800 - and the economy that developed there to service them.

Ships and Voyages

Transportation and the experience of other Botany Bay ships

Life on Board

Daily life on a convict ship

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