Convicts were required in the towns, as in the country, to be within doors by 8 P. M.; but unhappily this rule was quite a dead letter. The Sydney police was miserably inefficient. Recruited from the convict ranks, they were known on all occasions to favour openly their old associates. If they gave information they were called "noses," which they disliked; or worse, they were hooted, sometimes attacked and half killed. They were known, too, to take bribes, and to be generally most neglectful of their duties. It was not to be expected, therefore, that from them would come any zealous supervision of the convicts still in assignment, even to the extent of sending all such to their homes after 8 P. M., or of preventing the commission of petty offences. But as a matter of fact, the police were never certain whether half the men they met were convicts in assigned service or people actually free. Sydney was by this time so large, and the convicts so numerous, that it was next to impossible for a constable to know every one he met, by sight. None of the assigned servants in towns wore any distinctive dress. Those in government hands wore gray, and the chain-gangs a parti-coloured suit of yellow and brown cloth, but the assigned servants appeared in their masters' liveries, or clothed just as it pleased them. Recognition was not likely to be easy or frequent. Even in our own day, with admirable police machinery, the thorough supervision of criminals at large is not always obtained. In Sydney, seventy years ago, it was lamentably below the mark. Often enough men who had arrived in recent ships, having been assigned in due course, were soon lost sight of, to reappear presently under another name, as men quite free. They had proved themselves so useful that their masters wished to give them sole charge of a business, which, if still convicts, they could not assume. In this way it was discovered that an assigned convict servant had charge of a tan-yard close under the eyes of the police, but here it was proved that the police had connived at a grave neglect of duty.
It followed, too, from the nature of their previous vocations, that the convicts assigned in towns were the sharpest and most intelligent of their class. They were therefore the more prone to dissipation, and the more difficult to restrain within bounds. Knowing their value, they presumed on it, and felt that they were too useful to be sent off as rough farm hands into the interior. Here was another blot in the system of assignment, and generally on the whole principle of transportation. The punishment fell quite unequally on offenders. The biggest villains and the most hardened offenders fell naturally into the lightest "billets;" while the half-educated country bumpkin, whose crime may have been caused by ignorance or neglect, was made a hewer of wood and drawer of water. Prominent among those of the first class were specials, or gentlemen convicts, as they were styled; men sentenced for "genteel" crimes, forgery only, or embezzlement, but whose delicate fingers had never handled the cracksman's jimmy, or tampered with foil or blow. These genteel criminals were forever, through all the days of transportation, a thorn in the side of the administration, and they were always treated with far more consideration than they deserved. Some of these were well-known men, like one who had been a captain in the royal navy, and whose proclivities were so ineradicable that he suffered a second sentence at Norfolk Island for forgery, his favourite crime. From among this class the lawyers selected their clerks, and the auctioneers their assistants. If unusually well-educated they became teachers in schools, and were admitted as such even into the public seminaries of Sydney. A flagrant instance of the consequences of this injudicious practice is quoted by Laing—a clergyman's son, who had a convict tutor, coming himself, under the influence of such a man's teaching, to be also a convict sentenced to transportation for life.
There was another very improper proceeding which for a long time held among the convicts of this superior or more wealthy class. Their wives followed them out to the antipodes, bringing with them often the bulk of their ill-gotten gains. Having thus ample funds, they established themselves well on arrival, and applied for a grant of convicts like the rest of their neighbours. Naturally they took care to secure that their own husbands should be among the number. There was one man who had received a very heavy sentence for the robbery of a custom house, who should have gone direct to Norfolk Island. Through some bribery he was landed at Sydney, and was made overseer at once of a gang working in the street. Within a day or two he absconded. His wife had joined him with the proceeds of the robbery, and they went off together. Mr. Macarthur gives another case of a farrier who was assigned to him. This convict's wife followed him, and asked permission to live with him on Mr. Macarthur's farm. When this was refused the man managed to get returned to Sydney, and was there reassigned to his wife. To something of this kind some of the largest shops in Sydney owed their origin.
Among the many lighter and more remunerative kinds of employment into which the convict of the special class readily fell, was employment on the public press. As time passed there had grown up a strong antagonism between bond and free, and both sides had their newspapers. The organs which were emancipist in tone were not of the highest class, but they were often conducted with considerable ability. Their staff was of course recruited from the convict ships as they arrived, where compositors, leader writers, and even sub-editors were occasionally to be found. The most notorious instance of this description, was the case of W., who was originally assigned as a servant to the proprietor of the Sydney Gazette. This paper, which was then published only three times a week, was an able and influential journal, and its editor and owner was a certain O'S., who had himself been assigned to a former proprietor, and by him employed as a reporter. To him came W., and these two, according to Dr. Laing, bent all their energies to compass "the abolition of all the moral distinctions that the law of God has established in society; to persuade the public that the free emigrant was no better than the convict, that the whole community was equally corrupt, and those of the convict class were no worse than the best in the colony, their situation being the result of misfortune, as they pretended, and not of misconduct."
W. was a Scotchman, who had been outlawed for some misdemeanour in the office of a solicitor by whom he had been employed in Edinburgh; he then went to London, and was taken into a large mercantile house, Morrison's; from which, for embezzlement, he was transported for fourteen years. He was sent out in Governor Darling's time, and was sent to Wellington Valley, then a penal settlement for educated convicts. He stayed there but a short time, thanks to his interest with the superintendent, and returning to Sydney obtained a ticket-of-leave, being afterwards employed as a clerk in the corporation office, under the archdeacon of the colony. On the dissolution of the corporation he was no longer required there, but he found great demand for his services from editors of newspapers, having two sub-editorships offered to him at the same time. He went to the Sydney Gazette, and thenceforward had it under his entire control, the ostensible editor being a person of dissipated habits, who let him do as he pleased. This W. was a man of considerable talent. From that time forth he proved a source of prodigious demoralisation from the sentiments he disseminated, and the use he made of the powerful engine he had under his control, in endeavouring to exasperate the prison part of the population against the free emigrants. He was tried at length on a charge of having bribed a compositor to steal a printed slip from another newspaper office in the colony. The printed slip was a proof of a letter that had been sent for publication to the editor of the paper, and which contained libellous matter, reflecting on the character of a certain emancipist. The letter was not very carefully examined by the editor until it had been set up in type, but on discovering the nature of its contents he considered that he ought not to publish it. Though actually printed, it never appeared in the paper. W. came to know that such a paper was in type, and he bribed a convict compositor in the office to which the letter had been sent to purloin a copy, or one of the proofs of the letter. He then sent the letter in an envelope through the post to the person libelled, in order that there might be proof of its publication. The person to whom the letter referred thereupon brought an action against the editor of the paper to which it had been sent, and endeavoured to establish the fact of publication from the circumstance of his having received the letter through the public post; but the action failed. On inquiry, W.'s complicity in the matter was discovered, and he was tried for being a party to the theft. Of this he was acquitted, as the property found was not of value sufficient to constitute grand larceny; but the judge considered that he should not be allowed to remain at Sydney, and the governor sent him to Port Macquarie, a station for gentlemen convicts. Though now two hundred and fifty miles from Sydney, he still continued to contribute articles to the Sydney Gazette; and soon afterwards the widow of the late proprietor of the paper, into whose good graces he had insinuated himself, went down to Port Macquarie and married him. He then got into trouble by stirring up a feud between the harbour master and a police magistrate. In the investigation which followed, both these officials were dismissed and W.'s ticket-of-leave was cancelled. He was sentenced to be classed again with the convicts in government hands, and on hearing this he absconded. Nothing more was heard of him.
I think it will be evident from what I have said that the actual condition of men who were in assigned service was not very disagreeable if they were skilful hands and useful to their masters. This much established, they found their lives were cast in pleasant places. They did not want for money: they were allowed openly a portion of their earnings, and these gains were often largely increased by illegal methods. Besides this, many masters gave their servants funds to provide for themselves. They even went so far as to allow their men to marry—saddling themselves with the responsibility of having perhaps to keep both convict and his family. These convict marriages, when permitted, took place generally in the convict class, though cases were known of free women who had married assigned servants, and vice versa. Among the latter, Byrne, in his "Travels," speaks of a certain old lady, the mother of very respectable people, who had married when a convict, and who did not, to the day of her death, quite abandon the habits of her former condition. Her husband had been an officer of high rank, and her sons rose to wealth and prosperity in the colony; but no considerations for the feelings of those belonging to her were sufficient to wean her from her evil propensities. She was so passionately addicted to drink, that it was in vain her children sought to keep her with them: she always escaped, taking with her all on which she could lay hands, and returned to her favorite associates—the brick-makers in the suburbs of Sydney.
But such marriages as these were the exception. As a general rule the assigned servant, whether in town or country, paid a visit to Parramatta factory, and made his case known to the matron by whom it was governed. "Turn out the women of such and such a class," forthwith cries Mrs. G., and the marriageable ladies come trooping down, to be ranked up in a row like soldiers, or like cattle at a fair. Benedict walks down and inspects, then throws his handkerchief, and if the bride be willing, the two retire to a corner to talk a little together. If the conversation is not quite satisfactory to "Smith, Aboukir," or "Jones, Lady Dacre,"[1] he makes a second selection; and so on, perhaps, with three or four. Cases were known of fastidious men who had run through several hundreds, and had declared in the end that there was not a single woman to suit. Others were less particular. Men up country have been known to leave the choice to their masters, upon the latter's next visit to Sydney. There was of course no security against bigamy: often both parties to the colonial marriage had wife or husband alive at home, and just as inevitably the conduct of these factory brides was most questionable after the new knot was tied.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] A convict in Australia was always known by his name and the name of the ship in which he had come out.