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The lieutenant-governor addressed the convicts, after which the whole gave three cheers, and then every person, beginning with the lieutenant-governor and Captain Hunter, passed under the Union in token of a promise or oath to submit and be amenable to the law-martial then declared.
Bob Harvey had seized, on the shores of Norfolk Island, this brig, which was loaded with arms, ammunition, utensils, and tools of all sorts, destined for one of the Sandwich Islands. All his gang had gone on board, and pirates after having been convicts, these wretches, more ferocious than the Malays themselves, scoured the Pacific, destroying vessels, and massacring their crews.
They assert stoutly that they are free labourers who have lost their papers, and who cannot earn their living through the winter. The authorities know, of course, that they are escaped convicts, but they have no means of identifying them.
To own property, is to own its product. Are children born of convicts, government property? Besides, can property be guilty? Are chattels punished? Restraints upon freedom. Children are restrained by parents pupils, by teachers patients, by physicians corporations, by charters and legislatures, by constitutions.
Diodorus gives us a vivid description of the gangs of captives and convicts employed in these mines, and the miserable cruelty with which they were goaded on to work until they died of fatigue. He also gives some interesting details as to the processes of abstracting gold, which tally well with what we saw on the spot.
The officers purchased all the spirits, and paid the wages of the convicts who were assigned to them with the liquor; not only this, but they hired extra convict labour, paying for it the same way, and strong drink became the medium of exchange. All this has been an apparent digression from the history of the New South Wales Corps, but, as will be seen, the subjects are intimately connected.
Of late years, a number of vessels have been seized and carried away by the convicts, amongst whom there must ever be numbers who will eagerly grasp at any project of emancipating themselves which occurs to their minds. Lately, the Venus, a brig belonging to Messrs.
The soldiers went in front; then came the convicts condemned to hard labour, clattering with their chains; then the exiled and those exiled by the Communes, chained in couples by their wrists; then the women. After them, on the carts loaded with sacks, came the weak. High up on one of the carts sat a woman closely wrapped up, and she kept shrieking and sobbing.
"I can," he said, slowly, "but I won't!" How would you have felt in such a case? Could you ever forget it? and would you not be ready, for that official's sake, to hate mankind, and to curse God and die? But you perhaps believe that convicts have no human feelings, and that they are cheerful under such treatment.
The colonists followed him, and reached the borders of the little stream, shaded by large trees. And there, in the bright moonlight, what did they see? Five corpses, stretched on the bank! They were those of the convicts who, four months previously, had landed on Lincoln Island! How had it happened? Who had killed the convicts? Was it Ayrton? No, for a moment before he was dreading their return.
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