| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony, 1839–1850. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 270. $29.95.

This is a fascinating study of nearly a hundred Americans who were captured by British forces during an invasion of Canada in 1838 and transported to Van Diemen's Land. The men were members of antimonarchist militias that hoped to export the American revolution to Canada; through a combination of misfortune and misconception, their escapade ended in military fiasco and penal transportation. While most of the men were pardoned over the course of the 1840s and returned to America, some remained behind, some died in Tasmania, and a few simply disappeared from the record. The last detail is significant because, like Hamish Maxwell-Stewart's other work (Chain Letters, coedited with Lucy Frost), this is really the history of a record, which is a particular set of convict narratives. Some of the Americans wrote retrospectives about their experience, overlaid with an agenda that was heroic, republican, masculine, nationalist, and occasionally abolitionist. Cassandra Pybus and Maxwell-Stewart follow these narratives across time, carefully cross-checking the details of one account against those of another, and the convicts' accounts against the information available in the records of the prison administration.

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