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Visitors to Cork’s Elizabeth Fort can now avail of self-guided audio tours of the city’s star fort and view fascinating new illustrations of Cork in the 17th century in a new permanent exhibition developed as part of an EU Interreg project.

Produced by Abarta Heritage, the Elizabeth Fort audio tours are available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and German. In the coming weeks, Irish and Italian guides will be added.

The new exhibition entitled ‘Walls, Women, Water’ by Deirdre Black & Associates (Oli and Mark Thompson Design) was launched at the fort earlier this week. The permanent exhibition tells the story of the development of the fort - and of Cork - through maps, images and text.

It also recounts the tragic story of the 150 female convicts and their children whose tragic last steps on dry land were from Elizabeth Fort to their ill-fated ship, ’The Neva’. In their book, ‘The Wreck of The Neva’, Cal McCarthy and Kevin Todd recounted in detail how just six of the women from Elizabeth Fort survived.

An exciting feature of the exhibition is a newly-commissioned artwork by archaeological illustrator, Philip Armstrong of ‘Paint the Past’

The Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr John Sheehan said: “Working closely with archaeologists in City Hall, Philip has produced a wonderful watercolour depicting Cork between 1624 -26. The archaeological detail and quality achieved in this new artwork is impressive and will be an attraction in its own right for years to come. Visitors to the Fort on Culture Night 2019 enjoyed a sneak preview of the exhibition and this illustration proved particularly popular with Corkonians and tourists alike”.

Cork City Council has been a partner in the EU Atlantic Area ‘Maritime, Military and Industrial Atlantic Heritage’ (MMIAH) project which is concerned with the sustainable recovery and re-use of under-utilized elements of the MMIAH heritage of coastal Atlantic cities.

The focus of the MMIAH project in Cork is on the enhancement of visitor services at Elizabeth Fort, which was opened to the public five years ago and has seen rising visitor numbers every year since. Last year, it was visited by 60,000 people. The MMIAH project provided significant European Regional Development Funding (ERDF) to improve the Elizabeth Fort visitor experience.

Penal transportation to Australia, and later to Bermuda and Gibraltar, covered the years 1791 until 1853, when the sentence of penal transportation was commuted to a prison sentence in Ireland.

The National Archives holds a wide range of records relating to the transportation of convicts from Ireland to Australia covering the period 1788 to 1868, which are available on a the Transportation database. In some cases, these include records of members of convicts’ families transported as free settlers. While the collection of convict petitions dates from the beginning of transportation from Ireland to Australia in 1791, all transportation registers compiled before 1836 were destroyed in 1922. Therefore, if the person you are researching was convicted before 1836, but was not the subject of a petition, he or she will not appear on this database as the records from which the transportation database was compiled are incomplete. A successful search in the records may produce not just a bald official summary, but perhaps one of the thousands of petitions submitted by, or on behalf, of prisoners. The records relating to transported convicts comprise:

Register of Convicts on Convict Ships, 1851–1853.
The database index of transportation records is designed to be searched by surname, but may also be searched under place of trial, crime or date. Microfilms containing full copies of the records are available in the Reading Room and the index and microfilms are also available in state libraries in Australia. If the search of the transportation database and the microfilms has been successful there may be enough information to pursue the search in other National Archives’ sources, including the Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers, which includes Outrage Reports, or in newspapers held in the National Library of Ireland.

The exact origin of the use of transportation as a punishment for crime is obscure, but it seems to have developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from a need to avoid what were considered the destabilising influences of particular groups within society. When, during the course of the eighteenth century, the death penalty came to be regarded as too severe for certain capital offences, transportation to North America became popular as a means of mitigating the sentence. Except for very serious crimes, transportation came to largely replace capital punishment. After the American War of Independence, New South Wales replaced North America as a penal colony and capital punishment was largely replaced by a sentence of transportation.