Resource : The Rajah Quilt

Transportation was an extremely harsh punishment of the 1700s and 1800s, second only to execution. Between 1787 and 1852 as many as 25,000 women were transported from Britain to Australia to work in penal colonies, for crimes as varied as petty theft and poaching, to murder. Their sentences were often miscarriages of justice. Many didn’t survive the long journey. Most of them never returned. This remarkable quilt was made by women transported to Tasmania in 1841.

Resource : The Fighting Temeraire

JMW Turner is one of Britain’s best loved artists. He became known as the ‘painter of light’ due to his trademark style and use of colour in landscapes and seascapes. The Fighting Temeraire, one of his most famous oil paintings, shows the warship Temeraire being towed by a steam-powered tug on its last ever journey before being broken up. It is said to symbolise the decline of Britain’s naval power, the passing of the ‘glorious’ age of sail and the growth of ‘modern’ technology in an increasingly industrialised Britain. The industrial revolution and the history of the Royal Navy were therefore both saluted, through Turner’s revolutionary brand of romantic landscape painting.

Resource : Captured Africans

Kevin Dalton Johnson’s Captured Africans is a memorial to enslaved Africans transported on ships originating out of Lancaster as part of the Transatlantic slave trade. It stands on St George’s Quay in Lancaster and was unveiled in 2005.

Resource : Invention of the lifeboat, Willie Wouldhave, South Shields, 1789

In 1789, a coal ship named Adventure ran aground at the mouth of the River Tyne during a violent storm. The sea was too rough for the local boats and nothing could be done to save the thirteen-man crew. This tragic loss prompted a competition to design a new type of boat, that could carry 24 people and was suitable for rescues in rough and stormy seas. The result was the first ‘Life-Boat’.