The Degredo was a penal transportation system put in place by the Portuguese crown to punish serious crimes, such as murder, rape, or theft. Its origins go back as far as the Middle Ages, and it has persisted until the prelude of the Second World War. Such longevity made a deep impression in the mentality of Portuguese subjects and still today people refer to it as an expression of banishment or deprivation. Along with the idea of Desterro, another penal displacement of the Portuguese dictatorship, the relation to death is direct. In our memory, one would perceive going to degredo as a sort of one-way ticket to an infernal land, where death was close to unavoidable. This grim perspective might be an exaggeration, however, mixed by real information and stories of those who were waiting to be shipped overseas. Was this real? Or did this idea of death served the purpose of deterrence of crime? How a system that was discussed as a form of settlement and colonization can also be a promoter of death among those it intends to use as colonization agents? And to what extent much of the representation of death in degredo permeated the historiographic analysis? In the second half of the 19th century, the African colonies received a substantial number of convicts from Portugal. Upon being convicted, despite avoiding a formal capital punishment, those sentenced to degredo faced a perilous journey from the moment of being convicted until the end of the sentence. Serving the sentence meant being detained for weeks, while waiting to depart, embarking in a ship, and traveling imprisoned in the lower deck for a few months until reaching the destination and then surviving variable harsh conditions of sub-Saharan African territories. This paper takes into account the available data to establish the mortality hazard by using individual life course analysis, defining the risk of death at each stage of a convict’s path considering its origin, sex, age and destination. This demographic approach is then combined with an analysis on the representation of death and its association with the penal transportation, the mechanisms used by the convicts to minimize the risk of dying and the policies applied by the State to avoid high death numbers. It is from the discussion of both approaches, with an understanding of the role played by death in Portuguese penal transportation system, that one can evaluate the successes and failures of the degredo in the 19th century.

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