“History has its truth, and so has legend”
Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three (1874)
The voluminous Tasmanian convict records contain one reference to an organisation that might be the Forty Thieves. On arrival in Hobart all convicts were asked to list their trades. Ranked up before the Muster Master and his clerk, each convict was stripped, described and interrogated. This was an exercise in unequal power relations designed to inform each new arrival of their subordinate status. When asked to list his occupation, James Griffiths, a fifteen-year old convict on board the Surrey, answered “Captain of the 40th Juvenile Thieves”. The clerk dutifully noted this down although, perhaps hedging his bets, he also recorded that Griffiths was a labourer. It is possible Griffiths’ declaration was little more than a youthful prank. Our impression of him, gleaned from the records, resonates with a type of juvenile, identified by Nunn, in the satirical ballads circulated by nineteenth-century English broadsi...