My dear friend and fellow writer, GinaWarren Buzby, served a bottle of tasty 19 Crimes 2015 Red Wine when I visited her home a few weeks back. The label spoke to me (as labels often do), and somehow that just seemed such an appropriate blog topic for a mystery writer who loves all things vino! So here goes…
As readers, we read
everything we can get our hands on. That
means at breakfast we peruse the back of the box of cereal. (That reminds me, I’ve
been meaning to look up pyridoxine hydrochloride. It sounds positively toxic!) So
it seems to follow that when we sit with a bottle of wine in front of us, we
read that label, too. This is on the
back of the 19 Crimes wine:
“NINETEEN CRIMES turned
criminals into colonists. Upon
conviction, British rogues, guilty of at least one of the 19 crimes, were
sentenced to live in Australia, rather than death. This punishment by ‘transportation’ began in
1788, and many of the lawless died at sea.
For the rough-hewn prisoners who made it to shore, a new world awaited.”
That got me to thinking (as
wine often does), what were the 19 crimes? I expected a list of serious crimes, such as murder or rape, but those were
handled in Britain and punishable by death. Add “impersonating an Egyptian” to
that list, too.
So what 19 types of crimes were punishable by “transportation”?
