This is damn interesting.

Headphones recommend it.

The year was 1721.

The ship was called the Prince Royal.

Its destination, the American colonies.

And the cake, the cake was gingerbread.

The British crew shouldn't have been surprised to find the metal file in the cake.

Its stasher, James Dalton, a notorious thief and escape artist, had been shuttled

involuntarily between Britain and America more times than a transatlantic diplomat.

Unluckily for Dalton, this particular mutiny fell apart as soon as the cake did.

Luckily for Dalton, there would always be a next time.

After all, as a convict who'd been sentenced to the punishment of transportation multiple times,

Dalton had mutinied before.

While conditions in 18th century British prisons could be horrific, more convicts died in prison than at the gallows,

the most feared punishment didn't take place in prisons at all.

Between 1718 and 1776, British authorities exiled approximately 50,000 convicts

to American colonies in a policy euphemistically known as transportation.

Once in America, the convicts fell under a life of servitude or outright slavery, underfed, and overworked.

They had to obey their masters or risk being imprisoned

with punishment, including whippings. In the early period of transportation, half of these

prisoners died while in bondage. Unsurprisingly, the policy of transportation wasn't so popular

among British convicts. Some prisoners even

...