At length, “necessity,” as he says himself, forced him out; and, the first night, he stole, from a shop in Ludgate Street, property to the amount of four or five pounds, with which he was so much pleased that he returned for his wife, and took her out to walk. Contrary to her earnest remonstrance, they went to a flash-house, near Clare Market, where the landlord betrayed him into the hands of justice, and he was hurried off to the watch-house. Next day he underwent an examination at Bow Street, and was remanded. During the interval between his first and second appearance he had completely metamorphosed his person by cutting his hair and whiskers, and putting on a mean suit of clothes. But all would not do; he was recognised through his disguise, and fully committed. His trial came on at the Old Bailey, February the 15th, 1809, and, the facts being sworn to, he was found guilty—death. His sentence was afterwards commuted to transportation for life, preparatory to which he was conveyed on board the Retribution hulk at Woolwich.
“I had now,” says Vaux, “a new scene of misery to contemplate; and, of all the shocking scenes I had ever beheld, this was the most distressing. There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly six hundred men, most of them double-ironed, and the reader may conceive the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants, the oaths and execrations constantly heard among them; and, above all, from the shocking necessity of associating and communicating more or less with so depraved a set of beings. On arriving on board, we were all immediately stripped, and washed in large tubs of water; then, after putting on each a suit of coarse slop clothing, we were ironed, and sent below, our own clothes being taken from us, and detained till we could sell or otherwise dispose of them, as no person is exempted from the obligation to wear the ship-dress. On descending the hatchway, no conception can be formed of the scene which presented itself. I shall not attempt to describe it; but nothing short of a descent to the infernal regions can be at all worthy of a comparison with it. I soon met with many of my old Botany Bay acquaintances, who were all eager to offer me their friendship and services,—that is, with a view to rob me of what little I had; for in this place there is no other motive or subject for ingenuity. All former friendships or connexions are dissolved, and a man here will rob his best benefactor, or even messmate, of an article worth one halfpenny. Every morning, at seven o’clock, all the convicts capable of work, or, in fact, all who are capable of getting into the boats, are taken ashore to the Warren, in which the Royal Arsenal and other public buildings are situated, and are there employed at various kinds of labour, some of them very fatiguing; and, while so employed, each gang of sixteen or twenty men is watched and directed by a fellow called a guard. These guards are most commonly of the lowest class of human beings; wretches devoid of all feeling; ignorant in the extreme; brutal by nature, and rendered tyrannical and cruel by the consciousness of the power they possess: no others, but such as I have described, would hold the situation, their wages being not more than a day-labourer would earn in London. They invariably carry a large and ponderous stick, with which, without the smallest provocation, they will fell an unfortunate convict to the ground, and frequently repeat their blows long after the poor sufferer is insensible. At noon the working party return on board to dinner, and at one again go on shore, where they labour till near sun-set. On returning on board in the evening, all hands are mustered by a roll, and the whole being turned down below, the hatches are put over them, and secured for the night. As to the food, the stipulated ration is very scanty, but of even part of that they are defrauded. Their provisions, being supplied by contractors, and not by government, are of the worst kind, such as would not be considered eatable or wholesome elsewhere; and both the weight and measure are always deficient. The allowance of bread is said to be about twenty ounces per day. Three days in the week they have about four ounces of cheese for dinner, and the other four days a pound of beef. The breakfast is invariably boiled barley, of the coarsest kind imaginable; and of this the pigs of the hulk come in for a third part, because it is so nauseous that nothing but downright hunger will enable a man to eat it. For supper, they have, on banyan days, burgoo, of as good a quality as the barley, and which is similarly disposed of; and on meat days, the water in which the beef was boiled is thickened with barley, and forms a mess called ‘smiggins,’ of a more detestable nature than either of the two former! The reader may conceive that I do not exaggerate when I state that among the convicts the common price of these several eatables is,—for a day’s allowance of beef, one halfpenny;—ditto, of cheese, one halfpenny;—ditto, of bread, three-halfpence; but the cheese is most commonly so bad that they throw it away. It is manufactured, I believe, of skimmed milk, for this particular contract. The beef generally consists of old bulls or cows who have died of age or famine; the least trace of fat is considered a phenomenon, and it is far inferior upon the whole to good horse-flesh. I once saw the prisoners throw the whole day’s supply overboard the moment it was hoisted out of the boat, and for this offence they were severely flogged. The friends of these unhappy persons are not allowed to come on board, but must remain alongside during their visit; the prisoners are, it is true, suffered to go into their boat, but a guard is placed within hearing of their conversation; and if a friend or parent has come one hundred miles, they are not allowed above ten minutes’ interview: so that, instead of consolation, the visit only excites regret at the parties being so suddenly torn asunder. All letters, too, written by prisoners, must be delivered unsealed to the chief mate for his inspection, before they are sent ashore; and such as he thinks obnoxious are of course suppressed. In like manner, all letters received from the post-office are opened and scrutinised. If I were to attempt a full description of the miseries endured in these ships, I could fill a volume; but I shall sum up all by stating that besides robbery from each other, which is as common as cursing and swearing, I witnessed among the prisoners themselves, during the twelvemonth I remained with them, one deliberate murder, for which the perpetrator was executed at Maidstone, and one suicide; and that unnatural crimes are openly committed.”
From the misery of the hulks he was removed on the 15th of June 1810, for the second time, to Botany Bay. His wife, who had all along manifested the utmost attention, was prevented by a succession of unfortunate circumstances from seeing him previous to his departure; nor does it appear that he knew what become of her afterwards. On the 16th of the following December, the transport arrived at Sydney Cove, where Vaux found that the report of his exploits in London had preceded him. He endeavoured to make interest with the governor, in the hope of being employed as a clerk; but this being his second visit, he was listened to with distrust, and was sent up the country to a settler, who used him with great barbarity. To escape from this tyranny Vaux feigned himself sick, and thus procured his removal to the hospital, from which he was discharged in a month, and appointed overseer to a town gang. He now resolved to lead a correct life, and establish, if possible, a character for himself, seeing, as he says, the necessity of good conduct, from the consequences that invariably attend on an improper one. If we believe him, he adhered firmly to his vows of rectitude; but his notorious character operated against him, and he fell a victim to prejudice and the depravity of a youth, who was a veteran in iniquity. This young villain’s name was Edwards. He was servant to Mr. Bent the judge-advocate, from whom he purloined bills and money. Vaux, suspecting his dishonesty, warned him of his danger; but the artful thief accounted for his being so flush in money by the presents he was in the habit of receiving from his master’s visitors.
One evening he came running into Vaux’s lodgings, and requested of him to keep some articles and parcels which he put into his hand. Vaux at first refused, but was ultimately prevailed on to keep them for a few minutes. Edwards had scarcely departed when he thought he did wrong, and acquainted his landlord with the transaction. That person desired him to go immediately and deliver the property up to the judge-advocate in a public manner, as the only way left him to escape being implicated with Edwards, and with this advice Vaux resolved to comply, but having stopped first to smoke a pipe, before he had finished it, two officers entered and apprehended him. His conduct was open, and his landlord deposed in his favour; but Edwards accused him, in revenge for giving up the property, of being an accomplice, and he was finally banished to the Coal River, where he continued doing all kind of work for two years, after which he was permitted to return to Sydney, where he was once more placed in the town-gang.
Again he renewed his vows of rectitude, but was unable to obtain any station less degrading than the one in which he was placed. The picture before him was disheartening in the extreme—an exile for life—and compelled to labour at the basest and lowest employment of mankind. A British sailor took compassion on him and offered, in 1814, to conceal him in his vessel, until she should sail, and he embraced the generous proposal; but after lying close and undiscovered for four days, some one on board gave information, and the unfortunate wretch was dragged ashore, punished with fifty lashes, and sentenced to transportation to the Coal River for one year.
“In a few days,” says he in his Memoirs, “I was accordingly embarked with eleven other prisoners, and a second time landed at Newcastle, from whence I had been absent nearly twelve months. On my arrival, it happened that the storekeeper of that settlement was in want of a clerk, and he applying to the commandant for me, I was appointed to that situation, in which I still continue; and having scrupulously adhered to my former vows of rectitude, and used every exertion to render myself serviceable to my employer, and to merit his good opinion as well as that of the commandant. I have had the satisfaction to succeed in these objects; and I am not without hope that, when I am permitted to quit my present service and return to Sydney, my good conduct will be rewarded with a more desirable situation. I have now been upwards of seven years a prisoner, and, knowing the hopeless sentence under which I labour, I shall, I trust, studiously avoid in future every act which may subject me to the censure of my superiors, or entail upon me a repetition of those sufferings I have already too severely experienced. I have thus described (perhaps too minutely for the reader’s patience) the various vicissitudes of my past life. Whether the future will be so far diversified as to afford matter worthy of being committed to paper, either to amuse a vacant hour, or to serve as a beacon which may warn others to avoid the rocks on which I have unhappily split, is only known to the great Disposer of events.”
The “Memoirs written by himself,” from which we have extracted the most interesting passages, here terminate.
We have been the more willing to give the adventures of this notorious villain, as he gives them,—although we confess that we are of opinion that there is some exaggeration in what he states—because, however great may be the depravity, of which he admits he was guilty, his punishments and his miseries convey a moral, most forcibly depicting the danger of such a line of conduct as he adopted. His memoirs were written by himself in the year 1816, and were published in London in about three years afterwards. Of his subsequent career we know little, but we learn by recent accounts received from Sydney, that this hoary old sinner, at the age of fifty-seven, has been convicted and sentenced to an imprisonment of two years’ duration, upon a charge of indecently assaulting a girl of tender age. Whatever may have been his course of life in later years, however frightful may have been his career of sin in his younger days, we hold that this new offence, of which he has been found guilty, is the crowning crime of the whole; and we regret that the human heart should have arrived at such a degree of profligacy as to admit the guilt of youth, and to be unable to withstand its temptation, in old age.