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The Catalpa Incident - BeTheGoddess - 01-17-2024
This little tidbit of history is little known outside of my little town, even tho it was an act of war from the British toward the US, and the wiki article is 'sanitized" to be more "neutral".
First some context. In 1772 the UK banned slavery in Brittan and all her colonies under the decision of the Somerset case...
Quote:The case was closely followed throughout the Empire, particularly in the thirteen American colonies.[sup][2][/sup] Scholars have disagreed over precisely what legal precedent the case set.
As I said, the wiki on these is sanitised
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart
Well that meant the British had to create this thing called "convicts", Finnian disseats the majority of them. By increasing penalties for things like eating bread or farting in the general direction of an Etonia, they created a "criminal class" and then what did they do?...
Then they sent them here to Australia!. And the most awesome of those sent here were sent to Fremantle Prison.
But the awesome Finnian's were too smart for the British guards, and some escaped, and were picked up by longboats from the US ship the Catalpa. The British prison guards were British military, and by shooting at the longboats, it could be seen as an act of war, and by the time the news got back to Lundun it was too late to even say passive aggressive words and they had already just lost one war to the US so they pretended it didn't happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalpa_rescue
The wiki states they were picked up near modern day Rockingham, but it was South Fremantle where they were rescued, I dont know what revisionist claims Rockingham, but they have never walked that distance if they think so.
