Rum and Reform: The Party on Norfolk Island

On Monday 25 May 1840, on a remote island 870 miles east of the Australian colony of New South Wales, 1,800 convicts celebrated the birthday of Queen Victoria. The party had been organised by the Norfolk Island penal settlement’s new superintendent, 53-year-old Captain Alexander Maconochie, a retired naval officer who had previously 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 before, accompanied by the first of 600 prisoners sent by the British government to participate in an experiment based on his innovative penal theories.