One of the strangest things about the advance of England is the many-sided character of the form of early settlement: Central North America we plant with Mormons, New Zealand with the runaways of our whaling ships, Tasmania and portions of Australia with our transported felons. Transportation has gone through many phases since the system took its rise in the exile to the colonies under Charles II. of the moss-troopers of Northumberland. The plan of forcing the exiles to labor as slaves on the plantations was introduced in the reign of George II., and by an Act then passed offenders were actually put up to auction, and knocked down to men who undertook to transport them, and make what they could of their labor. In 1786, an Order in Council named the eastern coast of Australia and the adjacent islands as the spot to which transportation beyond the seas should be directed, and in 1787 the black bar was drawn indelibly across the page of history which records the foundation of the colony of New South Wales. From that time to the present day the world has witnessed the portentous sight of great countries in which the major portion of the people, the whole of the handicraftsmen, were convicted felons.
There being no free people whatever in the “colonies” when first formed, the governors had no choice but to appoint convicts to all the official situations. The consequence was robbery and corruption. Recorded sentences were altered by the convict-clerks, free pardons and grants of land were sold for money. The convict overseers forced their gangmen to labor not for government, but for themselves, securing secrecy by the unlimited supply of rum to the men, who in turn bought native women with all that they could spare. On the sheep-stations whole herds were stolen, and those from neighboring lands driven in to show on muster-days. Enormous fortunes were accumulated by some of the emancipists, by fraud and infamy rather than by prudence, we are told, and a vast number of convicts were soon at large in Sydney town itself, without the knowledge of the police. As the settlements grew in years and size, the sons of convict parents grew up in total ignorance, while such few free settlers as arrived—“the ancients,” as they were styled, or “the ancient nobility of Botany Bay”—were wholly dependent on convict tutors for the education of their children—the “cornstalks” and “currency girls;” and cock-fighting was the chief amusement of both sexes. The newspapers were without exception conducted by gentleman convicts, or “specials,” as they were called, who were assigned to the editors for that purpose, and the police force itself was composed of ticket-of-leave men and “emancipists.” Convicts were thus the only schoolmasters, the only governesses, the only nurses, the only journalists, and, as there were even convict clergymen and convict university professors, the training of the youth of the land was committed almost exclusively to the felon‘s care.
A petition sent home from Tasmania in 1848 is simple and pathetic; it is from the parents and guardians resident in Van Dieman‘s Land. They set forth that there are 13,000 free children growing up in the colony, that within six years alone 24,000 convicts have been turned into the island, and of these but 4000 were women. The result is that their children are brought up in the midst of profligacy and degradation.
The lowest depth of villainy, if in such universal infamy degrees can be conceived, was to be met with in the parties working in the “chain-gangs” on the roads. “Assignees” too bad even for the whip of the harshest, or the “beef and beer” of the most lenient master, brutalized still further, if that were possible, by association with those as vile as themselves, and followed about the country by women too infamous even for service in the houses of the up-country settlers, or the gin-palaces of the towns, worked in gangs upon the roads by day, whenever promises of spirits or the hope of tobacco could induce them to work at all, and found a compensation for such unusual toil in nightly quitting their camp, and traversing the country, robbing and murdering those they met, and sacking every homestead that lay in their track.
The clerk in charge of one of the great convict barracks was himself a convict, and had an understanding with the men under his care that they might prowl about at night and rob on condition that they should share their gains with him, and that, if they were found out, he should himself prosecute them for being absent without leave. Juries were composed either of convicts, or of publicans dependent on the convicts for their livelihood, and convictions were of necessity extremely rare. In a plain case of murder the judge was known to say: “If I don‘t attend to the recommendation to mercy, these fellows will never find a man guilty again,” and jurymen would frequently hand down notes to the counsel for the defense, and bid him give himself no trouble, as they intended to acquit their friend.
The lawyers were mostly convicts, and perjury in the courts was rife. It has been given in evidence before a Royal Commission by a magistrate of New South Wales that a Sydney free immigrant once had a tailor‘s bill sent in which he did not owe, he having been but a few weeks in the colony. He instructed a lawyer, and did not himself appear in court. He afterward heard that he had won his case, for the tailor had sworn to the bill, but the immigrant‘s lawyer, “to save trouble,” had called a witness who swore to having paid it, which settled the case. Sometimes there were not only convict witnesses and convict jurors, but convict judges.
The assignment system was supposed to be a great improvement upon the jail, but its only certain result was that convict master and convict man used to get drunk together, while a night never passed without a burglary in Sydney. Many of the convicts’ mistresses went out from England as government free emigrants, taking with them funds subscribed by the thieves at home and money obtained by the robberies for which their “fancy men” had been convicted, and on their arrival at Sydney succeeded in getting their paramours assigned to them as convict servants. Such was the disparity of the sexes that the term “wife” was a mockery, and the Female Emigration Society and the government vied with each other in sending out to Sydney the worst women in all London, to reinforce the ranks of the convict girls of the Paramatta factory. Even among the free settlers, marriage soon became extremely rare. Convicts were at the head of the colleges and benevolent asylums; the custom-house officials were all convicts; one of the occupants of the office of attorney-general took for his clerk a notorious convict, who was actually recommitted to Bathurst after his appointment, and yet allowed to return to Sydney and resume his duties.
The most remarkable peculiarity of the assignment system was its gross uncertainty. Some assigned convicts spent their time working for high wages, living and drinking with their masters; others were mere slaves. Whether, however, he be in practice well or ill treated, in the assignment or apprenticeship system the convict is, under whatever name, a slave, subject to the caprice of a master who, though he cannot himself flog his “servant,” can have him flogged by writing a note or sending his compliments to his neighbor the magistrate on the next run or farm. The “whipping-houses” of Mississippi and Alabama had their parallel in New South Wales; a look or word would cause the hurrying of the servant to the post or the forge as a preliminary to a month in the chain-gang “on the roads.” On the other hand, nothing under the assignment system can prevent skilled convict workmen being paid and pampered by their masters, whose interest it evidently becomes to get out of them all the work possible through excessive indulgence, as intelligent labor cannot be produced through the machinery of the whipping-post, but may be through that of “beef and beer.”
Whatever may have been the true interest of the free settlers, cruelty was in practice commoner than indulgence. Fifty and a hundred lashes, months of solitary confinement, years of labor in chains upon the roads, were laid upon convicts for such petty offenses as brawling, drunkenness, and disobedience. In 1835, among the 28,000 convicts then in New South Wales, there were 22,000 summary convictions for disorderly or dishonest conduct, and in a year the average was 3000 floggings, and above 100,000 lashes. In Tasmania, where the convicts then numbered 15,000, the summary convictions were 15,000 and the lashes 50,000 a year.
The criminal returns of Tasmania and New South Wales contain the condemnation of the transportation system. In the single year of 1834, one-seventh of the free population of Van Dieman‘s Land were summarily convicted of drunkenness. In that year, in a population of 37,000, 15,000 were convicted before the courts for various offenses. Over a hundred persons a year were at that time sentenced to death for crimes of violence in New South Wales alone. Less than a fourth of the convicts served their time without incurring additional punishment from the police, and those who thus escaped proved generally in after-life the worst of all, and even government officials were forced into admitting that transportation demoralized far more persons than it reformed. Hundreds of assigned convicts made their escape to the back country, and became bushrangers; many got down to the coast, and crossed to the Pacific islands, whence they spread the infamies of New South Wales throughout all Polynesia. A Select Committee of the House of Commons reported, in words characteristic of our race, that these convicts committed, in New Zealand and the Pacific, “outrages at which humanity shudders,” and which were to be deplored as being “injurious to our commercial interests in that quarter of the globe.”