Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations people. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island became the 13th state and the last of the former colonies to ratify the Constitution. Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was one of the original Thirteen Colonies established on the east coast of North America, bordering the Atlantic Ocean. It was an English colony from 1636 until the American Revolution in 1776, when it became the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (commonly known simply as Rhode Island). The land that became the English colony was first home to the Narragansett Indians,
Ross Island Penal Colony the Japanese and also by an earthquake which had struck the island in 1941, and it now appears more like a "jungle-clad Lost City." The earliest known effort to establish a penal colony was by Archibald Blair who found the remoteness of the island as ideal for such a colony. But his initiative failed to go beyond 1796 as malaria prevented it. The First War of Indian Independence in 1857 rekindled the interest of the British Administration in India to establish a penal colony in the Andaman Islands for political prisoners. The first group of 200 prisoners were transported under