After the Attack - Journey to Colite

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the protectors by dor shachoach

Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Not Enabled Word Wise: Not Enabled Screen Reader: Enabled Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Would you like to report this content as inappropriate? Do you believe that this item violates a copyright? Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. He passed two months in this difficult navigation, mistaking the portions of the coast of Australia which he sighted for islands.

Of this voyage he transmitted a full account in a letter to the King of Spain; but, in accordance with the jealous policy of the age, the record was suppressed, and the existence of Torres Straits remained unknown until they were re-discovered by Captain Cook in During our war with Spain we captured Manilla by storm, and in the archives of that city Mr. Alexander Dalrymple , the historiographer of the British Admiralty, discovered a copy of the letter to the King of Spain, which had been deposited there by Torres. Dalrymple, with that right feeling which should inspire all men of science, did justice to the discoverer by inscribing on the official maps issued from his department, against the intricate passage between Australia and New Guinea, "Torres Straits.

About the same time that Quiros and Torres were pursuing their investigation, the Dutch, then in the height of their maritime power, were prosecuting voyages of discovery in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

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From the instructions prepared for the guidance of Abel Janz Tasman previous to his voyages in and instructions which were signed by the Governor-General Antonio Van Diemen, and four members of the council, at Batavia , in which the previous discoveries of the Dutch in New Guinea and the "Great South Land" were recited, it appears that a Dutch yacht, on a voyage of discovery in , discovered the " South Land," mistaking it for the west side of New Guinea; that a second expedition, in , met with no success; and that, in , a third, consisting of the yachts Pera and Arnhem, was despatched from Amboyna, by which were discovered "the great islands of Arnhem and Spult," being, in fact, the north of Australia, which still bears the name of Arnhem's Land.

Other records show that, up to , the Dutch had, either accidentally or by voyages of exploration, discovered and given names to about half the coast of Australia. Many of these names are preserved to this day, for we have not a passion for re-naming after the standard of our own language. It is curious that none of these explorations led to any permanent settlement; and that in this instance, as in many others in America, at the Cape, and in India England has reaped the fruits of Dutch industry and enterprise. That industrious people have scarcely been more fortunate than the indolent, anti-commercial Spaniard.

The Dutch, of all their rich colonial possessions, retain only Java, and the Spaniards Cuba. The two new gold-fields discovered by Dutch and Spaniards, Australia and California, have fallen into the hands of an English-speaking race. Of Tasman's voyage no account has ever been published.

There was found on one of the islands forming the roadstead called Dirk Hartog's roadstead, at the entrance of Shark's Bay, in , and afterwards again in , a pewter plate, attached to a decayed log half sunk in earth, which bore two inscriptions in Dutch, of different dates, of which the following are translations: She sailed on the 27th of the same month for Bantam.

Our fleet sails hence, leaving the southern territories for Batavia. In successive investigations by Captain Marrion, of the French navy, in ; by Captain Tobias, of the British service, in ; by Captain Cook, in ; and by the French Rear-Admiral D'Entrecasteaux, the coast line to the south and east was further explored; but the insularity of Van Diemen's Land, the harbour of Port Jackson, and the Rivers Hunter, Brisbane, and Yarra, all destined to be the outlets to important districts in future colonies, remained undiscovered.

The many hundred leagues of coast so frequently visited by the Dutch, had afforded no encouragement for the plantation of settlements similar to those which they had founded with such brilliant results in the Indian Seas. The Commander Carstens, sent by the Dutch East India Company to explore New Holland, describes it as "barren coasts, shallow water, islands thinly peopled by cruel, poor, and brutal natives, and of very little use to the company.

In New Holland the natives were hostile and miserably poor, in the lowest state of human existence. They built no huts, wore no ornaments of gold or precious stones, cultivated no ground. Their barren, unfruitful coast, afforded no indigenous fruits for barter; neither the yam, the cocoa, nor the pineapple, the lemon, the citron, the gourd, nor indeed any other fruit grateful to European taste. As the Spaniards were the first, so the British were 'the last, and in their first attempts the least successful; in exploring the coast of Australia.

William Dampier , one of the boldest and most scientific navigators of his age, author of a " Voyage Round the World ," from which Defoe drew many hints, visited New Holland three times on the first occasion with his companions the buccaneers; again as pilot of H. Roebuck when he spent about five weeks in ranging off and on the coast of New South Wales, a length of about leagues; on the third occasion he passed through Torres Straits as pilot to Captain Woodes Rogers, in , when he explored Sharks' Bay, the coasts of New Guinea, New Britain, and New Zealand.

In July, , Captain James Cook, after having observed the transit of Yenus at Otaheite or Tahiti , and cruised for a month among the other Society Islands, sailed southwards in search of the continent Terra Australia Incognita , which geographers for a preceding century had calculated must exist somewhere thereabouts, as a counterpoise to the great tract of land in the northern hemisphere.

In this search he first visited the Islands of New Zealand, which had been previously discovered by Tasman in ; he spent six months in investigating them, and ascertained that they consisted of two large islands. Leaving New Zealand, and sailing westward, he sighted New Holland on the 11th of April, , and on the 27th anchored in the roadstead to which he afterwards gave the name of Botany Bay.

On the following day he landed, with Mr. Solander, and a party of seamen. They were all charmed with the bright verdure of the scene, in which all natural objects the kangaroo bounding through the open forest, the evergreen eucalypti, the grass-trees, the birds were unlike anything they had ever seen before in the course of their voyages in various quarters of the globe. After exploring the country for several days, during which a favourable estimate was formed of the capabilities of the district for supporting a colony, [5] and vainly endeavouring to open a communication with natives, through Tupia, a South-sea Islander, Cook sailed to the northward, passing without visiting the opening into Port Jackson: On the 17th of May, Cook anchored in a bay to which he "gave the name of Moreton Bay; and, at a place where the land was not at that time visible, some on board, having observed that the sea looked paler than usual, were of opinion that the bottom of the bay opened into a river;" but Cook came to a contrary conclusion; it was not until that the navigable River Brisbane, which gives access to a fine pastoral country, was discovered.

Leaving Moreton Bay, Cook ran down the coast as far as Cape York, taking possession in the usual form wherever he landed. Afterwards passing between New Guinea and Australia, he proved, as Torres had before him, that they were distinct islands. Cook landed altogether five times on this coast—first at Botany Bay, on the 28th of April, ; secondly on the 22nd of May, when he shot a kind of bustard weighing 17 lbs. The fourth time was on the 18th of June, seven days after his vessel, the Endeavour, had struck upon a coral rock , at Endeavour River, where they refitted.

It was during his stay at Endeavour River that one of his crew came running to the boat declaring that he had seen the devil, " as large as a one-gallon keg, with horns and wings, yet he crept so slowly I might have touched him if I had not been afeared. See Engraving on next page. On the 21st of August of the same year, having passed and named a point on the mainland "Cape York," Cook anchored, landed for the fifth time on an island which lies in lat.

These explorations of Cook completed the circuit of the island commenced and prosecuted from the beginning of the seventeenth century by the Spanish and Dutch, with the exception of the coast opposite Van Diemen's Land, which was reserved for the enterprise of Flinders and Bass. T HE accumulation of criminals in our gaols at the close of the magistrates and the government. Projects for the renewal of transportation, and its effect on criminals, became a subject of discussion among statesmen and philanthropists. Banishment, from a very early period, was an ordinary punishment, which permitted the sentenced to proceed to any country he pleased.

Thus, in Shakspere 's " Richard II. You, cousin Hereford, upon pain of death, Till twice five summers have enriched our fields, Shall not regreet our fair domains, But tread the stranger paths of banishment. Norfolk, for thee remains a heavier doom! Even at the present day it is common, in Guernsey and Jersey, to "banish a criminal to England;" that is to say, to land him at Southampton, and then leave him free to go where he will so long as he does not revisit the Channel Islands. The first legislative trace of the punishment of transportation is to be found in the 39th of Elizabeth, c.

This act James the First converted into an instrument of transportation to America, in a letter written in , addressed to the council of the colony of Virginia, commanding them "to send a hundred dissolute persons to Virginia, that the Knight-Marshal would deliver to them for that purpose. In the same year, as a kind of counterpoise to these dissolute persons, the Company sent ninety agreeable girls, young and incorrupt; and again, in , sixty more, "maids of virtuous education, young, and handsome. The first distinct notice of transportation is to be found in the 18th of Charles II.

The punishment was inflicted very frequently, in an illegal manner, up to the reign of George the First, when its operation was extended and legalised. Defoe, who always drew the outlines of his stories from actual life, no doubt gives a true picture of the life led by the convicts in the American plantations in his " History of Moll Flanders.

During the reign of James the Second, transportation, or rather reduction to slavery, was a favourite, and to certain parties a profitable, punishment. Lingard quotes a petition setting forth that seventy persons, apprehended on account of the Salisbury rising of Penruddock and Grove, had, after a year's imprisonment, been sold at Barbadoes for 1, lbs. Among them were divines, officers, and gentlemen, who were represented as "grinding at the mills, attending at the furnaces, and digging in that scorching island, whipped at whipping-posts, and sleeping in sties worse than hogs in England.

After Argyle's defeat the planters were on the alert to obtain white slaves, and were successful, Some of the common prisoners, and others, who were Highlanders, were by the Privy Council delivered to Mr. Thus it was proposed to give away 1, The King directed Chief Justice Jeffries to give orders for delivering the said numbers "to the above persons respectively, to be forthwith transported to some of his Majesty's southern plantations, viz.

In the end, eight hundred and forty-nine of Monmouth's followers, all from the west, were sold. Penn who acted as broker. But the following Bristol legend of an incident in the life of Jeffries proves that he did not permit aldermen to follow the example of the maids of honour: Now, the mayor, aldermen, and justices of Bristol had been used to transport convicted criminals to the American plantations, and sell them by way of trade; and finding the commodity turn to good account, they contrived a way to make it more plentiful.

Their legal convicts were but few, and the exportation inconsiderable: This trade had been carried on unnoticed many years, when it came to the knowledge of the Lord Chief Justice, who, finding upon inquiry that the mayor was equally involved with the rest of his brethren in this outrageous practice, made him descend from the bench where he was sitting, and stand at the bar in his scarlet and furs, and plead like any common criminal.

This system, and the demand for labour, led to frequent cases of kidnapping of the poor and friendless, and of parties who had made themselves obnoxious to powerful and unscrupulous individuals. Thus debtors disencumbered themselves of their creditors, wives of their husbands, and guardians of their wards. Even in vengeance the commercial spirit of Britain was displayed: Before the commencement of the American war of independence, the introduction of the more docile and laborious negro had rendered the American planters hostile to the importation of white convicts.

The war put a stop to the traffic in white flesh, and crowded our gaols. At the same period the prison labours of Howard commenced. In his vocation he personally examined every place of imprisonment. He found the convicted prisoner, money in his purse, revelling in debauchery, while the untried poor man was half starved, lodged on damp stones, exposed, from unglazed windows, to every blast, and crowded promiscuously with the vilest of mankind in deep dungeons, where fever and foul pestilence ever smouldered.

Sometimes a black assize swept away prisoners, gaolers, and even judges. The barbarity of the system may be appreciated from the circumstance that Howard considered he had achieved a great triumph, when he at length obtained an order for a daily allowance of a penny loaf and small piece of cheese for each untried prisoner.

Howard was anxious to establish reformatory prisons or penitentiaries, but his humane schemes met with little favour. With the experience we have since had, we cannot imagine that he could have had any success, except in establishing a clean and wholesome system of management. The country was no more prepared then than it is at present, to permit desperate ruffians to be unloosed to renew their crimes on the expiration of their terms of imprisonment. But no one then contemplated the construction of prisons like Reading, as costly and comfortable palaces, in which the hard-labour test would consist in composing moral essays, and collating texts of Scripture.

The annual accumulation of roguery was to be got rid of! Hanging had been stretched to its utmost limits; transportation had been checked by the revolt of a country which decided to employ no slaves who had not at least 25 per cent, of black blood in their veins, and to receive no rogues except those who had escaped unconvicted. Under these difficult circumstances, a proposition for "shovelling" out our criminals on the shores of the antipodes, recently re-discovered by Cook, was eagerly entertained.

There it was presumed, on very insufficient grounds, the place of punishment could be rendered selfsupporting; at any rate, the prisoners would cease to be a nuisance to the life and property of this country. Howard opposed the project, but his opposition was fortunately unheeded, although founded on very sufficient grounds. When we now examine the population, the wealth, the commerce, the sources of annually increasing power and prosperity of the Australian colonies, and the undeniable elements of empire which they enjoy, it is scarcely possible to believe that the first settlement was formed with the overflowings of our gaols and the sweepings of our streets; that, for a long series of years, its very existence was dependent on supplies of food, which the famine resulting from a month's delay of a store-ship would have rendered useless, and on grants of money, voted at a time when votes, except on the grand field-days of contending parties, were passed undiscussed in Parliament and unreported in newspapers.

At this day, when care for the health, education, and religious instruction of criminals is carried to an extent which shows, in painful relief, the neglect our peasantry endure, it is with amazement and horror that we look back on the cool, careless indifference with which the ministers of George the Third, in , set about founding a penal settlement at the opposite side of the world.

Captain Cook and his companions had passed a few days on the intended site of the proposed penal colony, and had found a small river, a profusion of curious plants, and an indifferent harbour. They had not seen any plains of pasture fit to feed live stock; they had found no large edible animals, such as deer, or buffaloes, or pigs. They had no means of ascertaining whether the soil was capable of carrying crops for the support of a considerable population; and the nearest land at which live stock and dry stores could be procured was the Cape of Good Hope, a colony in the possession of the Dutch.

As little judgment, as little forethought, as little common humanity, was displayed in selecting the colonists as the colony. The first detachment consisted of the first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, R. These were the unconvicted section of the intended colony. The prisoners were six hundred men, and two hundred and fifty women, the latter being not only the most abandoned of their sex, but many of them aged, infirm, and even idiotic. This fearful disproportion of sexes was maintained, and even increased, until the proportion of men to women was as six to one, and the results became too horrible to be here recorded.

This "goodly company" was embarked in a frigate, the Sirius, an armed tender, three store-ships, and six transports, under the command of Captain Hunter. At the last moment, by an afterthought, one chaplain was sent on board. There was no schoolmaster, no superintendent, or gaolers, or overseers, except marines with muskets loaded in case of revolt. No agriculturist was sent to teach the highwaymen and pickpockets to plough, and delve, and sow. No system of discipline was planned, nothing beyond mere coercion was attempted. Even the supply of mechanics required for erecting the needful houses and stores was left a matter of chance, dependent on the trades of the six hundred felons; and, as it turned out, there were not half a dozen carpenters, only one bricklayer, and not one mechanic in the whole settlement capable of erecting a corn-mill.

The "first fleet" sailed on the 13th May, , and, after a voyage of eight months, during which they touched at the Cape de Verd Islands, Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Good Hope, being everywhere received with the greatest attention and courtesy, anchored in Botany Bay on the 20th January, Within four-and-twenty hours after landing, Governor Phillip ascertained that Botany Bay was quite unsuitable for the site of a colony, that a sufficient quantity of cultivable agricultural land, and of fresh water, were wanting; and that the harbour was unsafe for ships of burden.

Without disembarking his charge, he set out with a party of three boats, to explore the coast to the northward, and particularly Broken Bay, an inlet favourably mentioned by Captain Cook, distant about eighteen miles from Botany Bay; but, as he sailed along the barrier of cliffs which line the shore, he decided to examine the narrow cleft which Cook had named Port Jackson. The day was mild and serene. The expedition sailed along the coast near enough to see, and hear the wild cries of, the astonished natives, who followed them as far as the rugged nature of the land would permit.

As they approached Port Jackson, the coast wore such an appearance that Captain Phillip fully expected to find Captain Cook's unfavourable impressions realised; but he was destined to be most agreeably disappointed. The first tack carried the expedition out of the long heavy swell of the Pacific Ocean into the smooth water of a canal protected by two projecting "heads;" and soon they came within sight of a vast landlocked lake, stretching as far as the eye could reach, dotted with small islands, whose shores sloped, forest-covered, down to the water's edge.

Black swans and other rare water-birds fluttered up as the white strangers sailed on, charmed with a scene in which every feature was beautiful, yet strange. They had discovered one of the finest harbours in the world. Coasting round the shores of this great natural basin, Governor Phillip determined to plant his colony on a promontory where a small clear stream trickled into the salt water.

After three days spent in exploration, he returned to Botany Bay. On the morning of the 25th January, as they were working out, the English fleet were astonished by seeing two strange ships of war sailing into the bay. These were the Boussole and Astrolabe, the French expedition of discovery under the command of M.

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Having heard at Kamtschatka of the intended settlement, he had expected to have found a town built and market established. The French squadron remained until the 10th March to refresh and refit, and, then departing, were never heard of more, until, in , Mr. Dillon discovered at the Manicola Islands traces of arms and ornaments which proved their mournful fate—shipwrecked, and murdered by savages. Monument to la Perouse. O N the 26th January the English fleet, having been brought round, anchored in deep water close along the shore of Sydney Cove, so called after Lord Sydney, one of the lords of the Admiralty.

After hoisting British colours "near where the colonnade in Bridge-street now stands," the proclamation and commission constituting the colony were read, a salute of small arms was fired, and the career of the province of New South Wales commenced. The whole party landed amounted to one thousand and thirty souls, who encamped under tents, and under and within hollow trees, "in a country resembling the more woody parts of a deer park in England. No sooner had the convict colonists been disembarked, and the erection of the necessary buildings commenced, than the want of a sufficient body of artificers was experienced.

The ships furnished sixteen, and the prisoners twelve, carpenters; and by a piece of unexpected good fortune, which caused much rejoicing, "an experienced bricklayer was discovered among the convicts. He was at once placed at the head of a party of labourers, with orders to construct a number of brick huts: This first example is a fair specimen of the manner in which the penal discipline in the colony was conducted for a long series of years.

A useful man was placed in authority, and allowed a variety of indulgences, quite irrespective of his moral qualities. The greatest ruffians became overseers, and occupied places of trust. Men of no use—mere drudges—were treated worse than beasts of burden.

In the month of May the entire live stock of the colony, public and private, consisted of—2 bulls, 5 cows, 1 horse, 3 mares, 3 colts, 29 sheep, 19 goats, 74 pigs, 5 rabbits, 18 turkeys, 29 geese, 35 ducks; fowls. The cattle were of the Cape breed, humpy on the shoulders, and long-horned—a fact which it afterwards became of consequence to remember.

In the ensuing month it is recorded as a public calamity that two bulls and four cows wandered away from the pickpocket herdsman who had them in charge, and were lost in the woods. In the sequel it was shown that the cattle were better colonists than their owners. The entrance to Port Jackson, as already partly described, is through projecting capes, or two heads, which conceal and shelter the far extent of the harbour. A channel, about two miles in breadth, opens a land-locked harbour, about fifteen miles in length, of irregular form, the shores jagged with inlets, coves, and creeks, which, when the first adventurers landed, were covered to the water's edge with the finest timber.

At the western extremity a current of fresh water mingling with the sea tide gave signs of the winding Paramatta River, navigable for vessels of small burden for eighteen miles. The settlement was planted on the banks of an inlet or "cove," about half a mile in length, and a quarter in breadth, which received a considerable stream of fresh water at the upper end. The native blacks, who then swarmed along the whole coast from Botany Bay, and far beyond in either direction, came to meet the white strangers naked, armed with the shield, the spear, and the boomerang, which the settlers at first took for a wooden sword.

From the circumstance of the aborigines not being subject to the authority of any sort of government except that of the strongest man, from the imperfection of their arms, and their mental incapacity for combination, their communications and skirmishes with the white intruders do not occupy that place in the history of the colony which is filled by the Bed Indian tribes in the history of North America, or the semi-civilised Peruvians and Mexicans in that of Spanish South America.

On the 7th February, , the king's commission for the government of the " territory of New South Wales and its dependencies" vas read. By this instrument the colony was declared "to extend from the northern extremity of the coast called Cape York, in the latitude of 10 37', to the southern extremity of South Cape, in the latitude of 43 39', including all adjacent islands within those latitudes, and inland to the westward as far as the th degree of east longitude.

Under these the governor—or, in his absence, the lieutenant-governor—was authorised, whenever, and only when, he saw fit, to summon a court of criminal jurisdiction, which was to be a court of record, and to consist of the judge-advocate, and six such officers of the sea or land service as the governor should nominate by presents under hand and seal.

This court was empowered to inquire into and punish all crimes of whatever nature; the punishment to be inflicted according to the laws of England, as nearly as might be, considering and allowing for the circumstances and situations of the settlement and its inhabitants; the charge to be reduced to writing; witnesses to be examined upon oath; the sentence of the court to be determined by the opinion of the majority; but the punishment not to be inflicted unless five members of the court concurred, until the king's pleasure should be known; the provost-marshal to cause the judgment under the governor's warrant.

In this court the judge-advocate was president there was no provision that he should be a man of legal education ; he was also to frame and exhibit the charge against the prisoner, to have a vote in the court, and to be sworn like members of it. The military officers were to appear in the insignia of duty—sash and sword; they had the right to examine witnesses as well as the judge-advocate; he alone centred in his person the offices of prosecutor, judge, and jury.

There was also a civil court, consisting of the judge-advocate and two inhabitants of the settlement, who were to be appointed by the governor, "empowered to decide, in a summary manner, all pleas of lands, houses, debts, contracts, and all personal pleas, with authority to summon parties, upon complaint being made, to examine the matter of such complaint by the oath of witnesses, and to issue warrants of execution under the hand and seal of the judge-advocate.

To this court was likewise given authority to grant probates of wills, and administration of the personal estates of intestate persons dying within the settlement. A vice-admiralty court was also established for the trial of offences committed on the high seas. The governor was captain-general and vice-admiral, with authority to hold general courts-martial, to confirm and set aside sentences.

Powers equal to those of the first governor of New South Wales, if held, have never been exercised by any other official in the British dominions. He could sentence to five hundred lashes, fine five hundred pounds, regulate customs and trade, fix prices and wages, remit capital as well as other sentences, bestow grants of land, and create a monopoly of any article of necessity. All the labour in the colony was at his disposal; all the land, all the stores, all the places of honour and profit; and virtually all the justice, as the case of Governor Bligh afterwards proved.

The governor's subjects consisted of his subordinates, officers—for, as captain-general, the commandant of the troops was under his orders—of the few who resorted to New South Wales to trade whose profits were at his disposal , and the convicts outcasts without civil rights. The distance from England, the few means of communication, the indifference of the English public to the fate of the inhabitants of a penal or any other colony, rendered the governor, so far as the control of law extended, actually irresponsible.

As there was no law, so there was no publicity and no public opinion to restrain the exercise of the despotism which was the only possible government in such a penal settlement. The chief officers were naval and military, of the old school; not the school of Cook and Keppel, Nelson and Collingwood, Wolfe and Cornwallis, but of that school which, by its tyranny, its abuse of power, its neglect of common honesty, of common decency, and common humanity in the treatment, the wages, the clothing, and the food of sailors, created the alarming mutinies of Portsmouth and the Nore.

The powers vested in the governor were exercised without the restraining influence of council or law adviser until Amazement and horror overcome us when we look back on the early days of New South Wales. Under the absolute government described, the settlers were crowded together on a narrow space a promontory cleared of a dense forest.

The soil was a barren sand; every yard required for cultivation had to be gained by removing enormous trees of a hardness that tried the temper of the best axes, wielded in skilled hands. On one side was an unknown shore and a shipless sea; on the other, an apparently limitless country, inhabited by savages, in which not a step could be taken without danger of being totally lost; a country which produced no wild fruit or root fit for the sustenance of man; and, with the exception of a wandering kangaroo, or a shy, swift emu, no game of any size fit for food.

The want of enterprise which marked the early career of the colonists, and left them so long in ignorance of the rich districts on which, after a long interval, the colony became self-supporting, cannot but be attributed to the form of government and to the moral blight caused by the composition of the society. The mass of the community were slaves—slaves without the contented spirit of negroes or Russian serfs, for they had been born in a free country, and could not learn to submit and be happy, even if, in the matter of food and lodging, they had been well provided, instead of being burned with heat, perished with cold, and always half starved.

They were slaves, too, labouring hard, but scarcely producing anything. The long voyage was a bad preparation for useful labour. The convicts were heaped on board ship without selection, the vilest and most venial criminals chained together. No classification of degrees of crime, or for the purposes of useful labour, was attempted. The overseers were prisoners selected by favouritism, or for their bodily strength; and the work was divided between personal service on the officers, handicraft, and mere drudgery.

One chaplain of the Church of England enjoyed a salary for preaching occasionally to an ignorant uninstructed multitude, of whom one-third were Irish Roman Catholics, transported for political or agrarian offences. Religious teaching, the bedside prayer, the solemn call to repentance, were seldom heard in that miserable Gomorrah. Far from all civilising, humanising influences, in such society the finest natures became brutalised into tyrants, while the criminals under their command dragged on a miserable existence or rebelled with all the dogged ruffianism of despair.

Although the chief records of the early days of the colony are drawn from the writings and reports of officials, who were naturally inclined to put the best face on a system of which they were the paid instruments, and whose eyes, ears, consciences were seared by constant contact with misery and tyranny, yet there is more than enough testimony of the cruel and stupid despotism which prevailed.

We learn from the journals of Howard, and the reports of the parliamentary inquiries instituted through his influence, how frightful were the abuses practised on tried and untried prisoners at the close of the eighteenth century in England, where the gaols were visited by numerous individuals of various ranks, where the common-law rights of the subject had been established, where what was considered in those clays a free press flourished, where, from Sabbath to Sabbath, Christian ministers assembled and led Christian congregations to prayer and praise, where a parliament held its sittings whose orators made Europe resound with their denunciations of tyranny, and where laws were administered by incorruptible, independent judges.

We may more easily imagine how in New South Wales, where there was no law but the law of the lash, tyranny became chronic, and cruelty spread through the whole body corporate of the colony. A singular succession of serious, pitiable, ludicrous, and disgraceful incidents, mark the history of the settlement, from the day of proclaiming the king's commission to the end of the year , which has been minutely recorded by Collins. At one time "a person named Smith, on his way to India, professing some knowledge of agriculture," is engaged by the government, and created a peace-officer at Rosehill, the site of the future town of Paramatta , the said Smith being apparently the only freeman with any claims to the kind of knowledge on which the subsistence of the colony was likely to depend.

At another time one Bryant, a Devonshire prisoner, employed in his calling of a fisherman, is detected in secreting and selling large quantities of fish, and is severely punished; but, "being too useful a person to part with, and send to the Brick Cart," he is retained to fish for the settlement. This man afterwards escaped with his family and a party of other prisoners in an open boat to the Island of Timor; he was there captured by a mari-of-war, and carried to Batavia, where he died. His wife was conveyed to England, tried, and confined in Newgate until the term of her original sentence expired.

Then we find convicts, "when little more than two years had elapsed," claiming their discharge on the ground that the time of their sentence had expired, which was possible, as it would date from the day of their sentences. When, in answer to these claims, inquiries are made for the documents containing the particulars, "it is found that they have been left in England, and that, therefore, it is impossible to affirm or deny the claims. One of the prisoners, not very well pleased with the prospect of such delay, expresses himself disrespectfully of the lieutenant-governor in the presence of the governor.

Thereupon he is seized, tried by a criminal court, found guilty, and sentenced to receive six hundred lashes, and wear irons for the space of six months.

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About the same time a soldier having been found guilty of a horrible criminal assault on a female child, his sentence is commuted to banishment for life to the auxiliary agricultural settlement of Norfolk Island. These are but a few gems of the judicial system by which New South Wales was ruled for nearly the first quarter of a century of its existence. In , the third year of colonisation, four ships arrived filled with convicts, of whom the greater number were in a dying state: In order to save the parties in charge trouble, the men had been chained together in rows, and confined below nearly throughout the voyage.

On board one of the ships, the Neptune, several of the prisoners had died in irons; their companions concealed their deaths in order to share the extra allowance of provisions, and so slight was the supervision, that the horrible fact was not discovered until betrayed by the offensiveness of putrefaction. Many years elapsed before a system was adopted by which the preservation of the health of prisoners and troops became the interest as well as the duty of the surgeon in charge.

At that time the more and the sooner prisoners died the more profitable the transaction was to the contractor; so they commonly died like rotten sheep. Those were the days in which transportation really was a punishment almost as terrible as death. New South Wales was then an awful over-sea gaol, offering no prospect of advancement or liberation; where the will of a prisoner-turnkey was law, where death was the punishment of the most trifling crimes, and a reproachful look was punished with the lash.

A few days before the four ships landed one thousand male and two hundred arid fifty female convicts, the arrival of one storeship, the Justinian, saved the whole colony from perishing of famine. The Guardian, laden with a great supply of provisions, stores, and live stock, under the command of Riou, "the gallant good Riou," of Campbell 's " Battle of Copenhagen ," had struck on an iceberg, and, after almost all the cargo had been thrown overboard, was with difficulty carried into the Cape of Good Hope. For weeks before the arrival of the Justinian, the whole settlement had been put on short allowance, The governor, says Collins, had thrown his store, lbs.

The weekly allowance of each prisoner had been reduced to 2 lbs. A man caught by the clergyman stealing potatoes was sentenced to three hundred lashes, to have his rations of flour stopped for six months, and to be chained for that period to two others caught robbing the governor's garden; but this and many similar punishments produced no more effect than the clemency of the governor, who remitted three hundred out of four hundred lashes to which one man was sentenced.

The proverb that "hunger will break through stone walls," was exemplified night and day. The Justinian, which brought relief from this state of destitution, was driven off Sydney Heads when within hail: Had that event occurred, and the twelve hundred and fifty additional convicts safely made the port, death by starvation, or in a struggle for food, must have been the fate of the whole settlement. Could it be wondered if, under such a system of despotism, without discipline in the colony, and in the face of such neglect at home, the descendants of these men had grown fiercely disloyal and anti-British?

But yet it is not so. The Australians are a loyal, order-loving, law-obeying race, as they have recently proved more than once. Even gold-digging has not corrupted their honest hearts. It was not until five years after Governor Phillip's landing that a temporary church was erected, and divine service performed on the 25th August, The founders of New England—themselves tyrannical and intolerant, although flying from tyranny and intolerance—did not let a week elapse without making permanent arrangements for religious worship and education, which endure to this day, and have spread their humanising influences all over the wide empire of the American republic.

In New South Wales, under the rule of a sovereign which some, disparaging the present, are accustomed to glorify as the reign of a specially Christian king, the penalties of lash, the pillory, the gallows, were administered as freely as teaching and preaching were neglected. It sounds strangely in this age to hear that "the clergyman complaining of non-attendance at divine service," which was generally performed in the open air, alike unsheltered from wind and rain, as from the fervour of the summer's sun, "it was ordered that three pounds of flour should be deducted from the ration of each overseer, and two pounds from each labouring convict who should not attend prayers once on each Sunday, unless some reasonable excuse for absence should be assigned.

In April we find Mr. Schaffer, a German, arriving from England as a superintendent of convicts; but on discovery that as he spoke no English he was unable to discharge his duties, he retired, and accepted a grant of land of acres at Rosehill. One cannot help feeling curious to know under whose patronage and for what services a German, not speaking English, was sent as superintendent of convicts at the antipodes. Is it possible that Miss Burney's friend, Madame Schwellenberg, could have had anything to do with this little appointment?

At the same time James Ruse received a grant of a similar quantity of land as a reward for being the first settler who declared he was able to support himself on a farm he had occupied fifteen months, and to dispense with an allowance from the government stores. These incidents, with the arrival, in two detachments, of a regiment raised for the purpose of serving in the colony, under the title of the New South Wales Corps, are the most remarkable events during 1 the latter years of the reign of Governor Phillip, who resigned his office to Lieutenant-Governor Grose, [11] and returned to England on the 11th December, At that date there were sixty-seven settlers, holding under grant three thousand four hundred and seventy acres, of which four hundred and seventeen acres were in cultivation, and a hundred more cleared.

We have no means of ascertaining where all these grants were situated, but the greater part is now occupied as building land, and was miserably barren for agricultural purposes, although covered with gigantic gumtrees. This summary of the cultivation by free or freedmen settlers is interesting, because it marks the first step towards rendering the colony self-supporting. These settlers were, if they required, victualled and clothed from the public store for eighteen months from the time of their going on their grants, furnished with tools and implements of husbandry, grain to sow their grounds, such stock as could be spared from the public, and, at the discretion of the governor, the use of as many convicts as they would undertake to clothe, feed, and employ.

Every free or freed man had a hut erected on his farm at public expense. On ground of ordinary fertility, with settlers of average industry, these terms would have insured early independence; but the greater part of the district was and is as barren as the sea-shore, and the majority of the settlers who were not idle were perfectly ignorant of agriculture.

The difficulties of cutting down and removing the forest were so great that, without the use of compulsory convict labour for a quarter of a century, the Sydney district never could have been cleared. During this period the government was obliged to carry on cultivation as well as it could on public account, although with indifferent success.

A principle as old as the first step the first tribes made toward civilisation—which, however, many statesmen and economists even now appear not to understand—was forcibly illustrated in the answer of a settler, reproached with not having worked so well for the joint-stock account as he did on his own grant of land—"We are working for ourselves now.

The following were the prices of agricultural stock and produce at the close of At these famine prices the mortality among the convict population was fearful. Between the 1st January and the 31st December, , there died two persons of the civil department, six soldiers, four hundred and eighteen male convicts, eighteen female convicts, and seventy-nine children. Governor Phillip took with him to England two of the aborigines, with whom, throughout the period of his government, he had endeavoured to promote a good understanding—a task involving great difficulties, arising from the brutality of the convicts and the untameable nature of the savages.

The tribes that swarmed round Port Jackson and Botany Bay have, with one exception, all died out; the character and customs of those who survive in less settled districts remain unchanged, or at any rate not more changed than the fox chained in a courtyard, or a pheasant reared in an aviary. In September, , Governor Hunter arrived, superseded Lieutenant- Governor Grose, and remained the usual term of five years. His office was no sinecure. He had had a large body of convict colonists under his command who would not work, who would drink, and who were therefore dependent for subsistence on supplies imported from England and India.

By every ship that left the harbour there was an attempt, generally successful, to escape, on the part of convicts; fifty were taken from one ship at a time "when the loss of the labour of one man was important. At this period, and for more than twenty years, spirits were the ordinary currency of the colony. Almost all extra work was paid for in spirits, and it was thought quite proper to stimulate the diligence of prisoners, in unloading a vessel laden with government stores, by giving half a pint of spirits to each. Among free and bond, drunkenness was a prevailing vice.

The tyranny of the prisoner-overseers was so great that the best-inclined convicts were goaded to recklessness and crime. Criminal assaults on women were so common that "the poor unfortunate victims were designated by a title expressive of the insults they had received. The whole population, on the arrival of Captain Hunter, with the exception of one hundred and seventy-nine, were dependent on the public stores for rations, many of the exceptions being reputed thieves, presumed to subsist on plunder from stores and gardens. The most favourable feature of this epoch was the extension of cultivation by settlers along the rich alluvial land on the banks of the River Hawkesbury, one of the first districts which seemed to yield a fair return to industry.

Among the events of this five years may be noted the use of a printing-press, the discovery of the lost herd of cattle, and the foundation of a settlement, called Newcastle, on the Coal or Hunter's River. A printing-press had been sent out with the first fleet, but no printers. All public and private announcements were made in manuscript, or by the bellman, until Governor Hunter discovered a printer among his convict subjects, and established a government gazette. In this age of newspapers, it seems incredible that a number of officers and gentlemen should have been satisfied for so many years without something in the shape of a newspaper; but the colony was divided into slavedrivers and slaves, who were equally content to spend their time in feeding pigs and getting drunk.

The reports of the natives led the governor to send out as scouts men employed as hunters, to collect fresh provisions for public use; and they discovered, feeding on rich pastures on the other side of the River Nepean, still known as Cow Pastures, a herd of sixty cattle, the produce of the five cows and two bulls lost in To realise this sight, so pleasant to the eyes of men condemned to perpetual rations of salt meat, rarely varied by fresh pork, the governor himself set out on an expedition, and tracked and viewed the herd with great delight.

An old bull, fiercely and obstinately charging, was slaughtered in self-defence; he proved to be of the humpy-shouldered Cape breed of the lost stock, which left no doubt of the identity of the herd, and dispelled the notion of indigenous cattle. The party made a delicious meal, and a few pounds were carried back thirty-eight miles, over a rough road, to Paramatta, the rest being left to the native dogs and hawks, with deep regret, "as meat, fresh or salt, had long been a rarity with the poor sick in the hospital. These wild cattle were preserved, and increased greatly, dividing into "mobs," each under the charge of a victorious bull, until the general increase of stock diminished their value.

Many were consumed by surrounding small settlers, and the rest, being fierce and a nuisance, were destroyed by order of the government, when beef ceased to be a luxury. About the time these wild herds were discovered, three miserable cows of the Indian breed sold for , and two years afterwards two colonial ships were employed eight months in bringing 51 cows, 3 bulls, and 90 sheep from the Cape, at a cost exceeding the highest price ever paid for the finest short-horns.

Governor Hunter, with the best intentions and an excusable ignorance of the laws of political economy, more than once endeavoured to fix the wages of labour, by a convention of employers, and mutual agreement not to outbid each other. Harvest wages were settled at 10s. At this period officers were allowed the use of ten prisoners for agricultural and three for domestic services, and so on in a diminishing scale to every description of settler down to the emancipist, who was allowed the use of one prisoner to assist in tilling his grant.

All these servants were fed and clothed by the crown. In the first school building was erected for the benefit of three hundred children, and the chaplain, the Rev. Johnson, began to catechise them after the service on each Sunday. That instruction was much needed among all classes there can be no doubt; for on one occasion the sails of the public mill, by which the corn of the settlers was gratuitously ground, were stolen in the absence of the miller.

On another, with a superstition worthy of the middle ages, the authorities compelled a soldier suspected of murdering his comrade to handle the dead body, in order to see whether it would bleed, and so accuse him. In a great Irish expedition in search of China took place.

We laugh at it, yet it was not more foolish than many expeditions and theories patronised in the nineteenth century. It is also memorable for the foundation of the first brick church, built on the model of the stables of a citizen's mansion, with clock-tower. A return made in this year shows 6, acres in crop with wheat or maize, a much larger quantity of arable land in proportion to the population than is now cultivated in any of the Australian colonies. Among the more industrious settlers, George Barrington, the celebrated pickpocket, figures as the owner of twenty acres of wheat, thirteen sheep, fifty-five goats, and two mares.

He was a constable. In the following year the colony was again threatened with famine, partly owing to the deficiency of live stock, and partly to the incurable barrenness of the Sydney district. Under Governor King the Female Orphan School was founded, and the first issue of copper coin took place. An insurrection of prisoners, two hundred and fifty strong, armed with muskets, broke out at Castlehill, on the 4th March, , and was defeated in fifteen minutes by Major Johnstone, of the New South Wales Corps, with twenty-four men.

Sixty-seven insurgents fell on the field; ten were tried and five hung. In the first instance he proceeded to Port Phillip, hut unfortunately landed on the eastern arm, where there was a deficiency of water; and being, as most military men are, a bad colonist, he abandoned it and proceeded to the Derwent. Had he made his way to the Yarra Yarra River the probability is that Sydney would have become the second settlement; and, with the profusion of white slave labour then available applied on the fine agricultural land of Port Phillip, by this time a population of several millions would have been established there.

The Hawkesbury, in ordinary periods, winds in a strangely tortuous course through a deep valley, between the precipitous banks above which, on the occurrence of heavy rains, it rises as much as thirty feet in a very few hours. These floods are not periodical. Until none of importance had occurred, and people had settled down on the rich "interval" land, the deposit of former overflowings.

Crops, houses, and many colonists, were all swept away in one night. Famine was the immediate result.

The two-pound loaf rose to 5s. A serious flood had occurred in , but this far exceeded it. It is difficult to teach caution in such matters. This great flood on the Hawkesbury caused eventually a complete rearrangement of the cultivation and occupation of that district. Calamities, according to popular prejudice, seldom come single.

It was certainly the casein New South Wales in , for the clock-tower fell, and Governor Bligh arrived. Captain King resigned his command on the 13th of March. On the Hawkesbury and its tributaries the first successful agricultural colonists were planted, and there dwelt, in , a few representatives of the first fleeters.

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