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, pardon capital as well as other punishments, 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. His subjects consisted of his subordinates, officers,-for, as captaingeneral, 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 colony, or of any 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 colony.

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, of 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 1822.†

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 ship

* Portsmouth, May; the Nore, June, 1797.

t The Charter of Justice was not formally promulgated until the 17th May, 1824.

WANT OF DISCIPLINE-CLASSIFICATION-RELIGIOUS TEACHING. 39

less 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 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 enjoyed a salary for preaching occasionally to an ignorant uninstructed multitude, of whom one-third were Irish rebels and prisoners transported for agrarian offences, of the Roman Catholic faith. Religious teaching, bedside prayers, the solemn call to repentance were seldom heard in that miserable Gomorrah.

Far from all civilizing, humanizing influences, in such society the finest natures became brutalized 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, whose ears, whose 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 daily visited by numerous individuals of various ranks, where the common-law rights of the subject had been established, where what was considered in those days 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 the plague of cruelty festered and 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 1800, 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, 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 man-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." Consequently, the prisoners are told they must wait for an answer to a despatch to be sent by the first opportunity to England, a period of two or three years. One of the prisoners, not very well pleased with the prospect of such delay, expresses himself

SIX HUNDRED LASHES FOR INSOLENCE.

41

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.

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 1790, the third year of colonization, the four ships arrived filled with convicts, of whom the greater number were in a dying state: two hundred and sixty-one had died at sea; two hundred were brought on shore in the last stage of exhaustion, from scurvy, dysentery, fever, foul food, and foul air. The men had been chained together in rows, and confined below nearly throughout the voyage, in order to save the parties in charge trouble. 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 the horrible fact was not discovered, so slight was the supervision, 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 died commonly like rotten sheep.

Those were the days in which transportation really was a punishment almost as terrible as death. New South Wales was 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 four ships landed one thousand male and two hundred and 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 Rion, "the gallant good Rion" 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, 300lbs. of flour, into the common stock. The weekly allowance of each prisoner had been reduced to 2lbs. of salt pork, 24 lbs. of flour, and 2lbs. of rice. "Labour stood suspended for want of energy to proceed; the countenances of the people plainly bespoke the hardships they underwent." "Garden-robbing became prevalent, the most severe measures were employed to repress the crime caused by, and yet increasing, the effects of the scarcity, but in vain. A man caught by the clergyman stealing potatoes was sentenced to three hundred lashes, to have his ration 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.

"So great was the villany of the people, or the necessity of the times, that a prisoner lying at the hospital from the effects of punishment, part of which he had received, contrived to get his irons off one leg, and in that state was caught robbing a farm;" but the historian reports that at Rosehill, where they had vegetables in abundance, no thefts were committed.

The Justinian, which brought relief from this state of destitution, when within hail was driven off Sydney Heads: it was for some hours doubtful whether she would not strike and become a total wreck on the reefs by Broken Bay. If after that event the twelve hundred and fifty additional convicts had 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 antiBritish? But yet it is not so. The Australians are a loyal, orderloving, 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, 1793.

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