ded the great discoverer on his third expedition (1498): they
largely contributed to the disorders which vexed the infant settlement,
and aroused the resentment of the unfortunate Indians.[40]

Banishment was first formally recognised by English law in the reign of
Elizabeth (39 Eliz. cap. 4).[41] It was enacted, that "dangerous rogues,
and such as will not be reformed of their roguish course of life, may
lawfully by the justices in their quarter sessions be banished out of
the realm, and all the dominions thereof, and to such parts beyond the
seas as shall for that purpose be assigned by the privy council." Return
was made felony without benefit of clergy. A brand was affixed upon the
shoulder, of the breadth of an English shilling, with a great Roman R
upon the iron: "for a perpetual mark upon such rogue, during his or her
life."[42]

Until commerce had extended the knowledge of distant parts, and the
constant publication of correspondence with colonies made their affairs
familiar, imagination depicted them as desolate and frightful. The
London apprentice and the plough boy, thought of exile as a severe
calamity. The love of home was rendered more intense, by the universal
wilderness imagined beyond it: thus, loss of country was deemed a
penalty fully equal to ordinary offences, and more severe than any
domestic form of punishment short of the scaffold.

"_Duri est non desiderare patriam. Cari sunt parentes; cari liberi,
propinqui, familiares; sed omnes omnium caritates patria una complexa
est: pro qua quis bonus dubitet mortem oppetere?_"

It is to James I. that the British nation and the colonists owe the
policy, whether salutary or baneful, of sending convicts to the
plantations: "the good sense of those days justly considered that their
labor would be more beneficial to an infant settlement, than their vices
could be pernicious."[43] James directed the sheriff to deliver, and the
governor and court of Virginia to receive one hundred prisoners,
included in the definition of rogues and dangerous persons, and
compelled the proprietors of that colony to become agents in their
deportation.

The Lord Chief Justice Kelyng stated, that about the time of the
restoration it became customary for a prisoner within benefit of clergy
to procure from the king "a conditional pardon," and to send him beyond
the seas to serve five years in some of the king's plantations; there
_to have land assigned him, according to the usage