“After the term of my transportation had expired, I was no better than most of the ‘old hands.’ If I have not committed all the crimes of which many of them are guilty, the reason is, that I had not the temptation: for, I acknowledge, that I have now completely lost the moral power to restrain me from crime.
“I happened to be free when gold was discovered in New South Wales; and, of course. I hastened to the place. After the discovery of the richer diggings here, I came overland to try them.
“In my gold seeking, I cannot complain of want of success; and I have not spent all that I have made.
“I am thinking of going back to England—although my visit to my native country cannot be a very pleasant one. I have, probably, some brothers and sisters still living; but, notwithstanding the strong affection I once had for them, they are nothing to me now. All human feeling has been flogged, starved, and tortured out of me.
“Sometimes, when I reflect on the degradations I have endured, I am ashamed to think of myself as a human being.
“When I look back to the innocent and happy days of my boyhood—of what I aspired to be—only an honest, respectable, hard-working man, when I contrast those days, and those humble hopes, with the scenes I have since passed through, and my present condition—my back scarred with repeated floggings, and my limbs marked by the wear of iron fetters—I am not unwilling to die.
“I am glad to learn that a change has been made in the mode of punishing crime in the mother country. It has not been done too soon: for, bad as many of the convicts are—who are transported from the large cities of the United Kingdom—they cannot be otherwise than made worse, by the system followed here. A convict coming to this country meets with no associations, precepts, or examples, that tend to reform him; but, on the contrary, every evil passion and propensity is strengthened, if it has existed before; and imbibed, if it has not.
“Having told you a good deal of my past, I should like to be able to add something of my future; but cannot. Some men are very ingenious in inventing food for hope: I am not. I don’t know for what I am living: for every good and earnest motive seems to have been stifled within me. Hope, love, despair, revenge, and all the other mental powers that move man to action, are dead within my heart. I having nothing more to tell you of myself; and probably never shall have.”
So ended the sad story of the convict.