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Updated: June 13, 2025
Men did not live long in the chain-gang, in Van Diemen's Land, in those days, brother. Men would knock out one another's brains in order to get hung, and escape it. Men would cry aloud to the judge to hang them out of the way! It was the most terrible punishment known, for it was hopeless. Penal servitude for life, as it is now, gives the very faintest idea of what it used to be in old times.
From time to time the slave-drivers would jog them along with a few lashes from a four-cornered "hippo" hide kiboko, or whip. Quite naturally the life was far from pleasant to the chain-gang and they watched eagerly for a chance to escape. Finally one dark night, when the sentinels were asleep, a bunch of ten succeeded in creeping away into the darkness.
Beside the chain-gang, each of Spinola's ships was manned by two hundred soldiers, while thirty- six musketeers from the Flushing garrison were the only men-at-arms in De Moor's whole squadron. But those amphibious Zeelanders and Hollanders, perfectly at home in the water, expert in handling vessels, and excellent cannoneers, were more than a match for twenty times their number of landsmen.
He is working in the chain-gang to which Hankey was made sub-overseer. Blind Mooney, an ophthalmic prisoner, who was removed from the gang to hospital, told me that there was a plot to murder Hankey, but that Dawes, to whom he had shown some kindness, had prevented it. I saw Hankey and told him of this, asking him if he had been aware of the plot. He said "No," falling into a great tremble.
Antam ante annum is a word of Thunes slang, which signified the past year, and by extension, formerly. Thirty-five years ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great chain-gang, there could be read in one of the cells at Bicetre, this maxim engraved with a nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys: Les dabs d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coesre.
We became pretty chummy, and my heart bounded when he cautioned me to follow his lead. He called me "Jack," and I called him "Jack." The train stopped at a station about five miles from Buffalo, and we, the chain-gang, got off. I do not remember the name of this station, but I am confident that it is some one of the following: Rocklyn, Rockwood, Black Rock, Rockcastle, or Newcastle.
"What sort of a chap?" he mused and fixed the judge a moment with the same stare that Flora remembered to have first confronted her. "What sort? Sort of a criminal," the judge smiled. "They all look alike." "Still," Clara suggested, "such a man could hardly have been ordinary " "In the chain-gang oh, yes," said Buller with conviction. "Oh! Then the picture wasn't worth anything?"
When he was retaken and brought back to the settlement, he was thrown back again upon the government, and put into the "chain-gang," where he worked in irons with the other incorrigibles. From this, after a while, he was transferred to a quarry party, and again made over to a settler as an assigned servant.
"To keep you here is about as sacrilegious as it would have been to thrust St. Catherine among the chain-gang in the galleys," muttered the doctor. "No doubt duty called her to much worse places; therefore, when she died, the angels buried her on Sinai," answered the prisoner; before whose wistful eyes drifted the memory of Luini's picture.
"Why, the nig colored people have built themselves a six-hundred dollar church; we white folks helped them," said Garnet, who had given fifty cents. "See that new sidewalk? Our chain-gang did that, sir; made the bricks and laid the pavement." The court-house was newly painted. Only Hotel Swanee and the two white churches remained untouched, sleeping on in green shade and sweet age.
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