A crisis arose in the colony over a proposal to make the Cape Colony a convict station. A circular written in 1848 by the third Earl Grey, then colonial secretary, was sent to the governor of the Cape, as well as other colonial governors, asking them to ascertain the feelings of the colonists regarding the reception of a certain class of convicts. The Earl intended initially to send Irish peasants who had been driven to crime by the Great Famine of 1845 to South Africa.