On Monday 25 Could 1840, on a distant island 870 miles east of the Australian colony of New South Wales, 1,800 convicts celebrated the birthday of Queen Victoria. The social gathering had been organised by the Norfolk Island penal settlement’s new superintendent, 53-year-old Captain Alexander Maconochie, a retired naval officer who had beforehand been the founding secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and Britain’s first professor of geography. Maconochie had arrived to take command of the island 80 days earlier than, accompanied by the primary of 600 prisoners despatched by the British authorities to take part in an experiment based mostly on his modern penal theories.
