The Land of the Kangaroo Part 4

"We drove to the resident portion of the city and saw a goodly number of private houses of the better sort. A great deal of taste has been displayed in the construction of these houses, and we derived the impression that Adelaide was a decidedly prosperous city. The wheat-growing industry of South Australia is a very large one. Many of the great farmers have their residences in Adelaide and spend only a small portion of their time on their farms, leaving all details to their managers. A considerable amount of American farming machinery finds its way to South Australia, where it has attained a well-deserved popularity."

While our friends were at breakfast the next morning, Harry suggested that if the others were willing, he would like to see one of the Australian prisons containing convicts that had been transported from England.

The doctor smiled,--just a faint smile,--while Ned laughed.

"Oh, you are all wrong, Harry," said Ned. "They gave up that business long ago. I was under the same impression that you are, but learned better from one of our fellow-pa.s.sengers. I meant to tell you about it."

"Well, I will acknowledge my mistake," said Harry. "We are all liable to make blunders, and that is one of them."

"Quite true," Dr. Whitney remarked. "Every visitor to a country that is strange to him makes a great many mistakes, and the frank thing is to acknowledge it."

"The gentleman who corrected my blunder," said Ned, "told me that an American visitor who was very fond of hunting landed once in Sydney, fresh from the United States. The hunting fever was strong in him, and before he was an hour on sh.o.r.e he asked the clerk of the hotel where he could go to shoot Sydney ducks. He had heard of them, and would like to bag a few brace."

"What is the point of the joke?" said Harry; "I confess I cannot see it."

"That is exactly what I said to my informant," replied Ned, "and then he went on and told me that in former times Australian convicts were spoken of as Sydney ducks."

"Oh! I see," said Harry, "that is a very good joke when you come to know all about it. What did the clerk of the hotel say to the inquiring stranger?"

"I don't know," replied Ned, "but I presume he told him that Sydney ducks had gone out of fashion, and were not being shot any more.

Probably he let the man down as gently as possible."

"How did the convicts come to have the name of Sydney ducks?" Harry asked.

"I can't tell you, I am sure," said Ned, "you will have to ask the doctor about it."

"The name came, no doubt," said Dr. Whitney, "from the circ.u.mstance that the first convicts who were brought to Australia were landed at Sydney, and for a good many years Sydney was the princ.i.p.al depot of these involuntary emigrants. The adoption of Australia as the place for convict settlement was brought about by events in America, a statement which may surprise you."

"It certainly is surprising," Harry remarked. "How did it happen?"

"It came about in this way," the doctor continued; "when America was subject to England, offenders of various kinds, whether political or criminal, were sent to the American colonies, princ.i.p.ally to the Southern States and the West Indies, where they were chiefly employed in the cultivation of tobacco. The consumption of tobacco in England was very large, and the revenue derived from it was considerable.

Consequently England was able to kill two birds with one stone; she got rid of her criminals, at the same time, and made a large profit on their work.

"When the American colonies revolted in 1775, and gained their independence eight years later, England found herself deprived of a place to which she could send her convicts, and she looked around for another. She tried the coast of Africa, and found it too unhealthy for her purpose. Captain Cook had recently visited Australia and given a glowing account of it, and the government officials thought that this new country would be an excellent one for criminals. Orders were given for sending out a fleet of ships for that purpose; and, accordingly, eleven vessels, carrying more than one thousand people, sailed for Portsmouth in the month of March, 1787, with orders to proceed to Australia."

"If England had known what was to happen," said Harry, "she need not have been at the trouble of sending her criminals so far away; she might have kept on with America with only slight interruptions. She is sending us her criminals and paupers at present, though she does not designate them properly when she ships them, and most of the continental nations are doing the same thing. We are trying to prevent it, but I don't believe we succeed to a very great extent."

"Did they send a thousand convicts to Australia in this first batch?"

queried Ned.

"There were about one thousand people altogether," said Dr. Whitney, "including 757 convicts, and among the convicts were 190 women and eighteen children. They had 160 soldiers to guard the prisoners, with a sufficient number of officers, and forty of the soldiers were accompanied by their wives. They had on the ships a goodly quant.i.ty of cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, and goats, and a large quant.i.ty of seeds from various parts of the world was sent out. It was not expected that the colony would be self-supporting for some time, and so it was arranged that supply ships laden with flour and other provisions should be sent from England at regular intervals. A year or two after the colony was founded one of these ships was wrecked on its way to Australia, and the colonists suffered greatly for want of food. Among the supplies taken by each ship there was usually a fresh batch of convicts, and quite regularly convict ships were despatched from England to Australia."

Ned remarked that he thought a convict ship would not be a pleasant craft to travel on. A good many people did not like crossing the Atlantic on cattle ships, but he thought the cattle ship would be far preferable to one laden with convicts.

"And so it is," replied the doctor. "According to all accounts, the life on board a convict ship from England to Australia was terrible. Remember that in those days prisoners were treated with great harshness; they were not supposed to have any feelings and were never spoken to kindly, and in many instances an order was usually accompanied by a kick or a blow. During the voyage the prisoners were allowed on deck one hour or possibly two hours of each day, care being taken that only a small number would be there at any one time.

"For the rest of the twenty-four hours they were shut up in close, stifling pens or cages, generally with nothing but a little straw to sleep on, and they were fed with the coa.r.s.est and poorest food. Coffee and tea with hard bread formed their breakfast; dinner was the same, with sometimes the addition of a piece of heavily salted beef, so hard that it was no easy matter to cut it into mouthfuls. Supper was the same as breakfast, and this was kept up with hardly any variation.

"The slightest infraction of the rules was punished with the lash, but this did not deter the criminals from making trouble. Constantly the boatswain and his a.s.sistants were kept busy in performing the floggings that were ordered, and sometimes the cat-o'-nine-tails was in steady use from sunrise to sunset. The more severe his discipline, the more highly an officer was regarded by his superiors, and if he occasionally hanged a few men, it rather advanced than r.e.t.a.r.ded his promotion. A good many died on the voyage from England to Australia, partly in consequence of their scanty fare and the great heat of the tropics; but, according to tradition, a very large proportion of the mortality was the result of brutal treatment and privations.

"The pa.s.sengers on the convict ship," said Harry, "seem to have been treated pretty much like those on slave ships."

"You are not far wrong there," the doctor replied; "the sufferings of convicts on their way to Australia were not altogether unlike those of the unhappy negroes that were formerly taken from the coast of Africa to North and South America. The convicts were not crowded quite as densely into the holds of the ships as the slaves were, and the mortality among them was not as great; still they were packed very thickly together, and were treated quite as cruelly as the slave dealers used to treat their human property. Occasionally it happened that the convicts formed a conspiracy and endeavored to take possession of the ship. In nearly every instance they were betrayed by one of their number, and when the time came for action they were so closely guarded that any resistance was useless. Then the conspirators were seized, and after a brief trial were condemned to be hung or shot, generally the former, as it saved ammunition and did not soil the decks of the ship with blood. When there was an actual mutiny the mutineers were shot down without mercy, and those who escaped the bullets were speedily disposed of by hanging at the yard-arms."

"Terrible times those must have been," remarked Ned; "the wonder is that anybody survived."

"Yes, indeed," said Harry; "but man has a tough const.i.tution and can endure a great deal."

CHAPTER IV.

STRANGE ADVENTURES--AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINALS.

One of the youths asked how the convicts were employed after they came to Australia.

"At first," said the doctor, "they were employed almost entirely on government works. A city was laid out, and of course it was necessary to grade the streets, build bridges, and do other things in connection with putting the place into shape. There were prisons, warehouses, wharves, and other buildings necessary to a convict establishment to be erected.

Gardens and fields were to be laid out and planted, and altogether there was no lack of work to be performed. The prisoners were required to work under guard, and the worst of them were ornamented with ball and chain, like the occupants of many a prison in different parts of the world.

They were treated just as rigorously as they had been on board the ships that brought them out. Their lodgings were somewhat more s.p.a.cious, but by no stretch of fancy could they be called luxurious. The supply of food in the colony was not large, and the fare of the prisoners was scanty.

"Free emigration to Australia began a few years after the convict emigration, and most of the free emigrants came here with the view to employ the convicts under contracts with the government. They were princ.i.p.ally men of capital, and the most of them established farms or factories near Sydney and entered into agreements with the government to supply them with labor. Where they were close to the city, the convicts were sent out to their work in the morning and returned to prison at night; but where the distance from the city was considerable, other plans had to be followed. Sometimes soldiers were detailed to guard the convicts at their working places, and in others the employer himself supplied the guard. The convicts were also made to understand very clearly that if they ran away they would be caught and severely punished.

"I should think they would run away in spite of all these threats, especially where their sentences were for long terms," Harry remarked.

"It was not so easy as it may seem for anybody to escape," said the doctor. "A man could not stay around the colony more than a day or two, or a few days at the farthest, without being discovered, and when found he was sure to be severely flogged, put on bread and water, and shut up in a dark cell. If he escaped into the bush, he was pretty certain to starve to death unless found by the natives, in which case he was generally murdered. Many a convict ran away to the bush and was never heard of. Others remained there until starvation forced them to come in and give themselves up."

"Did the free settlers increase as fast as the convicts?"

"Yes, they increased faster as the word went out through the British Islands that Australia offered great possibilities for emigrants. For twenty years the military and convicts were more numerous than the free settlers; but by the end of thirty years the latter were in the ascendency. In the year 1830, there were twenty-seven thousand convicts in the colony, and forty-nine thousand others.

"By 'others' I don't mean other settlers, altogether, though I do mean free people. By that time a good many convicts had served out their sentences and become free. They were known as 'emancipists,'

and consequently there were three kinds of people in the colony,--emancipists, convicts, and free settlers. The free settlers would not a.s.sociate with the emancipists, and they in turn would not a.s.sociate with the convicts. The free settlers wanted the emancipists to be deprived of all civil rights and kept practically in the same position as the convicts. The officers of the government used to take the side of the emancipists, and there were many bitter quarrels between them and the free settlers in consequence."

Here the doctor paused for a moment, and then asked:--

"Did you ever read about the mutiny of the _Bounty_?"

"Oh, yes," replied Harry; "I read about it two or three years ago. The crew of the ship _Bounty_ mutinied, and put the captain and others in an open boat to take care of themselves the best way they could. The _Bounty_ then cruised about the Pacific for awhile, and finally went to Pitcairn's Island, where the mutineers landed and destroyed the ship.

Their fate was not known until nearly thirty years afterwards, when an American ship touched at the island, and found it peopled by the descendants of the mutineers, who had taken some women from Tahiti to become their wives. Only one of those concerned in the mutiny was then alive. The captain and his companions in the open boat made a voyage of four thousand miles, enduring great hardships, and eventually reached the Dutch settlements in the island of Timor."

"A very good account for a brief one," said the doctor. "Do you remember the name of the _Bounty's_ commander?"

"Yes," replied Harry. "I believe it was Bligh; in fact, I am sure of it."

"Well, that same Captain Bligh was one of the early governors of New South Wales, as the colony was then called. He caused the mutiny on the _Bounty_ by want of tact and by undue severity, and the same spirit that he showed on the deck of his ship caused a rebellion in New South Wales.

Of course, the convicts had no influence or part in the rebellion, but the free settlers were very active in it, and so were a good many of the officers. Bligh caused himself to be thoroughly disliked by interfering with local trade, and also by his very intemperate talk concerning free settlers and emancipists. He was deposed and sent to England, while a temporary governor was installed in his place. To a certain extent he triumphed over his enemies, as the officers who had taken part in the rebellion were either reprimanded or dismissed. Governor Bligh came back with the authority to a.s.sume the position of governor for just one hour."