To conclude the history of a people for whom I cannot but feel some share
of affection. Let those who have been born in more favoured lands and who
have profited by more enlightened systems, compassionate, but not despise
their destitute and obscure situation. Children of the same omniscient
paternal care, let them recollect that by the fortuitous advantage
of birth alone they possess superiority: that untaught, unaccommodated
man is the same in Pall Mall as in the wilderness of New South Wales.
And ultimately let them hope and trust that the progress of reason and the
splendor of revelation will in their proper and allotted season
be permitted to illumine and transfuse into these desert regions,
knowledge, virtue and happiness.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Observations on the Convicts.
A short account of that class of men for whose disposal and advantage
the colony was principally, if not totally, founded, seems necessary.
If it be recollected how large a body of these people are now congregated
in the settlement of Port Jackson and at Norfolk Island, it will, I think,
not only excite surprise but afford satisfaction, to learn, that in a
period of four years few crimes of a deep dye or of a hardened nature
have been perpetrated. Murder and unnatural sins rank not hitherto in the
catalogue of their enormities, and one suicide only has been committed.
To the honour of the female part of our community let it be recorded
that only one woman has suffered capital punishment. On her condemnation
she pleaded pregnancy, and a jury of venerable matrons was impanneled
on the spot, to examine and pronounce her state, which the forewoman,
a grave personage between sixty and seventy years old, did, by this short
address to the court; 'Gentlemen! she is as much with child as I am.'
Sentence was accordingly passed, and she was executed.
Besides the instance of Irving, two other male convicts, William
Bloodsworth, of Kingston upon Thames, and John Arscott, of Truro,
in Cornwall, were both emancipated for their good conduct, in the years
1790 and 1791. Several men whose terms of transportation had expired,
and against whom no legal impediment existed to prevent their departure,
have been permitted to enter in merchant ships wanting hands: and
as my Rose Hill journals testify, many others have had grants of land
assigned to them, and are become settlers in the country.
In so numerous a community many persons of perverted genius and of
mechanical ingenuity could not but be assembled. Let me produce the
following example. Frazer was an iron manufacturer, bred at Sheffield,
of whose abilities as a workman we had witnessed many proofs. The
governor had written to England for a set of locks to be sent out for the
security of the public stores, which were to be so constructed as to be
incapable of being picked.
