“What do you do with 'em?”
“Oh, flog the worst, you know; but I don't flog more than a man a week, as a rule, and never more than fifty lashes. They're getting quieter now. Then we iron, and dumb-cells, and maroon them.”
“Do what?”
“Give them solitary confinement on Grummet Island. When a man gets very bad, we clap him into a boat with a week's provisions and pull him over to Grummet. There are cells cut in the rock, you see, and the fellow pulls up his commissariat after him, and lives there by himself for a month or so. It tames them wonderfully.”
“Does it?” said Frere. “By Jove! it's a capital notion. I wish I had a place of that sort at Maria.”
“I've a fellow there now,” says Vickers; “Dawes. You remember him, of course—the ringleader of the mutiny in the Malabar. A dreadful ruffian. He was most violent the first year I was here. Barton used to flog a good deal, and Dawes had a childish dread of the cat. When I came in—when was it?—in '29, he'd made a sort of petition to be sent back to the settlement. Said that he was innocent of the mutiny, and that the accusation against him was false.”
“The old dodge,” said Frere again. “A match? Thanks.”
“Of course, I couldn't let him go; but I took him out of the chain-gang, and put him on the Osprey. You saw her in the dock as you came in. He worked for some time very well, and then tried to bolt again.”
“The old trick. Ha! ha! don't I know it?” says Mr. Frere, emitting a streak of smoke in the air, expressive of preternatural wisdom.
“Well, we caught him, and gave him fifty. Then he was sent to the chain-gang, cutting timber. Then we put him into the boats, but he quarrelled with the coxswain, and then we took him back to the timber-rafts. About six weeks ago he made another attempt—together with Gabbett, the man who nearly killed you—but his leg was chafed with the irons, and we took him. Gabbett and three more, however, got away.”