THE PARADISE AND HELL OF

FELONS

I

It was in January 1788 that Captain Arthur Phillip, R.N., arrived with some few ships at Port Jackson. His little fleet carried six hundred male and two hundred and fifty female convicts. There were besides, a guard of one major commandant and three captains of marines, twelve subalterns, twenty-four non-commissioned officers, and one hundred and sixty-eight privates, with forty women, wives of the marines, and their children. From this curious complement arose one of the most splendid of our colonies.

Not a single free settler had had leave to go out with the transports. Phillip touched the Antipodes destitute of help. He had with him neither agriculturists nor mechanics. He had no one to teach anything to his settlement of convicts.

An inauspicious start was made. Such was the meanness of Captain Phillip's equipment that he had at once to appoint convicts to clerkships in the offices of Government. Some of

these criminal clerks received almost immediately full pardons and grants of land, and thus early they began to realise that there might be worse haps in life than transportation to Botany Bay. Pickings and plunder, pippins and cheese, fell to them. They were mindful (small blame to them!) of their fellows in affliction; sentences were privately altered in the record office; tickets of leave and conditional pardons were adroitly placed upon an eager market; fat slices of land were sold under the rose to some of the most dangerous customers in the community. These were the amazing circumstances in which the colony took its rise.

Governor Phillip resigned in 1792. The policy extemporised by him was the sole choice for his successors. The convict colony, three-parts strangled at birth, had been nine years fighting for life when the Government threw into it the first contingent of free settlers. By this time there were convict clerks in most of the public offices, convict overseers of public works, convict stockmen rounding up cattle on all the Crown pastures. By trickery, fraud, or robbery the cleverest of the six hundred (by no means merely the scum of the Old Bailey) were beginning to pile up money. In the long years before the American War of Independence, when we sowed Virginia with our felons, they were quickly dispersed among and absorbed into the well

settled, well-organised, and industrious population of that country. But in Botany Bay the felon was the very founder of the settlement. He and his guards had the land to themselves; and, early enough, the guards in their turn began to be demoralised. The officers of the New South Wales corps (a force specially raised in and sent from England to act as the colonial guard) acquired or usurped a monopoly of the sale of rum; and in the time of Captain King, the third Governor, the colony was said to be composed of those who sold rum and those who drank it. Captain Bligh, King's successor in the Governorship, was deposed and ousted from the colony by the colonel and officers of this regiment.

Disaffection and revolt, not among the rank and file of the guards, but among the officers, impelled successive Governors to seek the favour of the convicts. Permits were granted them to sell rum, and liquor shops owned by convicts and half-pardoned convicts were numerous. Runaways founded the order of Bushrangers, who, traversing as much of the colony as was settled, robbed and murdered at their pleasure. Marriage was unknown, and among large masses of the population it was next to impossible to start any kind of reputable industry. Soldiers committed thefts that they might enjoy the privileges of the felons.

H

Downing Street had scarcely a notion of what was going on. During the administration of Governor Macquarie a commission was sent out to report upon the state of the colony. Macquarie, being a good and zealous Governor, could count more enemies than friends in Botany Bay, and the commission was chiefly busy in manufacturing charges against him. Assiduous in this business was one Scott, clerk to the commission, who had failed as a wine-merchant in London. For the bankrupt wine-merchant Parliament created an ecclesiastical dignity, and Scott became Archdeacon of New South Wales. It had been a touch more proper to create him Astronomer Royal, or Master of the New South Wales Buckhounds.

But we have now in a rough way traversed the first half-century of the colony; and, somewhat curiously, New South Wales at the end of this period was a ripening community. At the precise age of forty-nine years, the colony had a population of eighty thousand, a handsome capital in the town of Sydney, and was growing into commercial importance to Great Britain. From the point of view of romance a more striking circumstance is this, that to the Botany Bay of this period the criminal classes at home were looking as to a new Eldorado, a land of promise to be reached quickly, at whatever cost. In November 1836 a young man was charged