In the lead up to the American War for Independence, tensions certainly ran high between the colonies and mother country. After the Continental Congress of 1774, the colonies attempted to enforce a general embargo on British goods as a form of political pressure and protest. The embargo had measured success, but it did not prevent the further importation of one infamous item: convict labor.

Britain had been exporting convicts to her colonies almost as long as the colonies existed. Jamestown likely received their first batch within 15 years of settlement, Bermuda had perhaps received them sooner. The importation of convicts to the Chesapeake bay and Delaware river was a thriving business in the decade following the end of the Seven Years War. As many as 13,000 were imported between 1763 and 1775, the ship Justitia crossing at least 10 times with over 100 convicts each trip. After the escalation of hostilities in 1776, Britain found that it no longer had a ready market for it's booming prison population. The conundrum was brought before the Secretary of State for the Northern Department, Henry Howard, Earl of Suffolk. With the other privy councilors, he decided that the best option was to take prisoners and have them "kept to hard labour for the Term of Ten Years in the raising Sand, Soil, and Gravel from and cleaning the River Thames" (SP 44/93/98-100). So, the prisoners who formerly had spent between three and twelve months in prison, were now marched out of Newgate, White Lion, etc. from London down to the banks of the Thames, to dig underwater.

The prisoners were no longer kept in jail cells, but instead kept aboard ships in the harbor, which became known as the infamous prison hulks. In no small amount of irony, the Justitia ceased being a prison transport ship, and simply became a prison. Prisoners were kept at long hours working the banks of the Thames, and eventually were spread to other harbors around the British Isles; the other major center of prison labor was in Dublin. Some prisoners were "lucky" enough to be selected for the British Army instead and escaped the disease ridden ships, but this was a fate for far too few.

By 1779, the misery of the prisoners, and the continued swelling of the prisons made Parliament call for other suggestions for what to do with the prison population that was rapidly expanding. Former merchants in the convict trade suggested Sierra Leone and Senegambia in Africa, but this venture failed as well. After the Treaty of Paris (1783), Britain again tried to sell their convicts to Americans, but when the ship, Swift, arrived in Maryland in 1783, they were met with open hostility. It was after the final rejection in Maryland that Australia was given real consideration as a penal colony. Only a few years later the first ships carrying convicts sailed into Botany Bay.