Mary Hinson was actually just 14 when she appeared before a court charged with stealing a hat and a pair of shoes.
And the punishment for the young girl – incorrectly assumed by officials to be 17?
Ten years’ transportation, which meant an arduous, four-month long sea journey to Tasmania followed by a life little better than a slave’s.
Mary, who was baptised in Spalding in 1829, was one of 3,000 people from Lincolnshire sent to the other side of the world, often for a crime no more serious than theft.
Of those, 135 were women, sometimes accompanied by children, and it is their compelling tales that Bill Painter tells in his book, The Transportation of 135 Female Convicts from Lincolnshire to Australia, 1787-1851.
As Bill says, the transportation, or banishment, of convicts to “a land beyond the seas” had been used for over 200 years as a means of ridding the country of “troublesome subjects”.
However, he explains the authorities became concerned they were creating a colony made up only of men with convictions for crime, so started transporting women too.
He said: “When they got out there there was nowhere to incarcerate them and the first arrivals were placed as servants to any free settlers there happened to be – prisoners who had served their time – but they were virtually slaves because they didn’t get paid.”
Eventually, secure accommodation – or “female factories”, as they were called – were built for the women, and Bill says “a considerable proportion” of the women in them had children with them.
He says: “In theory, they stayed with the mothers for a year and then went into a nursery. In practice, they went into the nursery and died, most of them. They took a number of diseases out with them. It was tragic really.”
Surprisingly, transportation turned out, once they had served their time, to be a better life for some women, and certainly an opportunity for a fresh start.
Bill says: “Terms were generally seven years, sometimes ten, but it could be 14 years or life. Most of them were pick pockets and shop lifters. But I think most of them eventually made a life for themselves.”
For instance, widow Mary Burrell, whose crime was to steal three aprons from a house in Fleet, when sentenced to 14 years transportation, said: “I am much obliged to you gentlemen.”
Bill’s book, The Transportation of 135 Female Convicts from Lincolnshire to Australia, 1787-1851, costs £8.95 and is available in Bookmark in Spalding.