In addition to providing a recruitment station, Sierra Leone also served the purpose of providing settlement for many others who were liberated from captured slave ships. One of these 'liberated slaves' was James Brown, who landed in Van Diemen's Land in 1833, having been sentenced to seven years for stealing shoes in London. To the clerk taking down his conviction he gave this mini-autobiography: 'I was taken when a child as a Slave from the Congo River and sold to a Spanish Slaver. Captured by a British King's Ship and liberated at Sierra Leone. [I was] brought away from thence as servant to Mr McCormack' (Duffield, 2001, pp. 117-135). Brown spoke the truth. John McCormack was an Irish trader who settled in Sierra Leone in 1816 before returning to London in 1830 with his 'apprentice'.  
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[^0]:    18 CON18/15, Archives Office of Tasmania.
19 CO 267/153/328, NAUK.  
While it is rare to find such a direct statement of an enslaved slave past as that of James Brown or Alexander Simpson, for the majority of African convicts transported to Australia, their formative experience was of slavery, be they runaways from North America, liberated from impounded slave ships, chattel slaves on Caribbean plantations or 'apprentices' from Mauritius and the Caribbean. There were even a handful of enslaved people transported from the Cape of Good Hope with tell-tale names such as Adonis and Jacob.