It is not certain that North Australia may not be found to yield gold in plenty. In a little known manuscript of the seventeenth century, the northwest of Australia is called “The land of gold;” and we are told that the fishermen of Solor, driven on to this land of gold by stress of weather, picked up in a few hours their boat full of gold nuggets, and returned in safety. They never dared repeat their voyage, on account of their dread of the unknown seas; but Manoel Godinho de Eredia was commissioned by the Portuguese Lord Admiral of India to explore this gold land, and enrich the crown of Portugal by the capture of the treasures it contained. It would be strange enough if gold came to be discovered on the northwest coast, in the spot from which the Portuguese reported their discovery.
By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian nights, I left Port Adelaide for King George‘s Sound. A long narrow belt of a clear red-yellow light lay glowing along the horizon to the east, portending heat and drought; elsewhere the skies were of a deep blue-black. As we steamed past Kangaroo Island, and through Investigator Straits, the sun shot up from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from the northern desert, rising on a sudden after the stillness of the night, whirled clouds of sand over the surface of the bay.
CHAPTER XIII.
TRANSPORTATION
AFTER five days’ steady steaming across the great Australian bight, north of which lies the true “Terra Australia incognita,” I reached King George‘s Sound – “Le Port du Roi Georges en Australie,” as I saw it written on a letter in the jail. At the shore end of a great land-locked harbor, the little houses of bright white stone that make up the town of Albany peep out from among geranium-covered rocks. The climate, unlike that of the greater portion of Australia is damp and tropical, and the dense scrub is a mass of flowering bushes, with bright blue and scarlet blooms and curiously-cut leaves.
The contrast between the scenery and the people of West Australia is great indeed. The aboriginal inhabitants of Albany were represented by a tribe of filthy natives – tall, half starved, their heads bedaubed with red ochre, and their faces smeared with yellow clay; the “colonists” by a gang of fiend-faced convicts working in chains upon the esplanade, and a group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with bull-dogs on the pier, while the native women, half clothed in tattered kangaroo-skins, came slouching past with an aspect of defiant wretchedness. Work is never done in West Australia unless under the compulsion of the lash, for a similar degradation of labor is produced by the use of convicts as by that of slaves.
Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia, West Australia, then called Swan River, although one of the oldest of the colonies, was so soon ruined by the free gift to the first settlers of vast territories useless without labor, that in 1849 she petitioned to be made a penal settlement, and though at the instance of Victoria transportation to the Australias has now all but ceased, Freemantle Prison is still the most considerable convict establishment we possess across the seas.
At the time of my visit there were 10,000 convicts or emancipists within the “colony,” of whom 1500 were in prison, 1500 in private service on tickets-of-leave, while 1500 had served out their time, and over 5000 had been released upon conditional pardons: 600 of the convicts had arrived from England in 1865. Out of a total population, free and convict, of 20,000, the offenders in the year had numbered nearly 3500, or more than one-sixth of the people, counting women and children.
If twenty years of convict labor seem to have done but little for the settlement, they have at least enabled us to draw the moral, that transportation and free emigration cannot exist side by side: the one element must overbear and destroy the other. In Western Australia, the convicts and their keepers form two-thirds of the whole population, and the district is a great English prison, not a colony, and exports but a little wool, a little sandal-wood, and a little cotton.
Western Australia is as unpopular with the convicts as with free settlers: fifty or sixty convicts have successfully escaped from the settlement within the last few years. From twenty to thirty escapes take place annually, but the men are usually recaptured within a month or two, although sheltered by the people, the vast majority of whom are ticket-of-leave men or ex-convicts. Absconders receive a hundred lashes and one year in the chain-gang, yet from sixty to seventy unsuccessful attempts at escape are reported every year.
On the road between Albany and Hamilton I saw a man at work in ponderous irons. The sun was striking down on him in a way that none can fancy who have no experience of Western Australia or Bengal, and his labor was of the heaviest; now he had to prise up huge rocks with a crow-bar, now to handle pick and shovel, now to use the rammer, under the eye of an armed warder, who idled in the shade by the roadside. This was an “escape-man,” thus treated with a view to cause him to cease his continual endeavors to get away from Albany. No wonder that the “chain-gang” system is a failure, and the number both of attempts and actual escapes heavier under it than before the introduction of this tremendous punishment.
Many of the “escapes” are made with no other view than to obtain a momentary change of scene. On the last return trip of the ship in which I sailed from Adelaide to King George‘s Sound, a convict coal-man was found built up in the coal-heap on deck: he and his mates at Albany had drawn lots to settle which of them should be thus packed off by the help of the others “for a change.” Of ultimate escape there could be no chance; the coal on deck could not fail to be exhausted within a day or two after leaving port, and this they knew. When he emerged, black, half smothered, and nearly starved, from his hiding-place, he allowed himself to be quietly ironed, and so kept till the ship reached Adelaide, when he was given up to the authorities, and sent back to Albany for punishment. Acts of this class are common enough to have received a name. The offenders are called “bolters for a change.”
A convict has been known when marching in his gang suddenly to lift up his spade, and split the skull of the man who walked in front of him, thus courting a certain death for no reason but to escape from the monotony of toil. Another has doubled his punishment for fun by calling out to the magistrates, “Gentlemen, pray remember that I am entitled to an iron-gang, because this is the second time of my absconding.”
One of the strangest things about the advance of England is the many-sided character of the form of early settlement: Central North America we plant with Mormons, New Zealand with the runaways of our whaling ships, Tasmania and portions of Australia with our transported felons. Transportation has gone through many phases since the system took its rise in the exile to the colonies under Charles II. of the moss-troopers of Northumberland. The plan of forcing the exiles to labor as slaves on the plantations was introduced in the reign of George II., and by an Act then passed offenders were actually put up to auction, and knocked down to men who undertook to transport them, and make what they could of their labor. In 1786, an Order in Council named the eastern coast of Australia and the adjacent islands as the spot to which transportation beyond the seas should be directed, and in 1787 the black bar was drawn indelibly across the page of history which records the foundation of the colony of New South Wales. From that time to the present day the world has witnessed the portentous sight of great countries in which the major portion of the people, the whole of the handicraftsmen, were convicted felons.
There being no free people whatever in the “colonies” when first formed, the governors had no choice but to appoint convicts to all the official situations. The consequence was robbery and corruption. Recorded sentences were altered by the convict-clerks, free pardons and grants of land were sold for money. The convict overseers forced their gangmen to labor not for government, but for themselves, securing secrecy by the unlimited supply of rum to the men, who in turn bought native women with all that they could spare. On the sheep-stations whole herds were stolen, and those from neighboring lands driven in to show on muster-days. Enormous fortunes were accumulated by some of the emancipists, by fraud and infamy rather than by prudence, we are told, and a vast number of convicts were soon at large in Sydney town itself, without the knowledge of the police. As the settlements grew in years and size, the sons of convict parents grew up in total ignorance, while such few free settlers as arrived – “the ancients,” as they were styled, or “the ancient nobility of Botany Bay” – were wholly dependent on convict tutors for the education of their children – the “cornstalks” and “currency girls;” and cock-fighting was the chief amusement of both sexes. The newspapers were without exception conducted by gentleman convicts, or “specials,” as they were called, who were assigned to the editors for that purpose, and the police force itself was composed of ticket-of-leave men and “emancipists.” Convicts were thus the only schoolmasters, the only governesses, the only nurses, the only journalists, and, as there were even convict clergymen and convict university professors, the training of the youth of the land was committed almost exclusively to the felon‘s care.
A petition sent home from Tasmania in 1848 is simple and pathetic; it is from the parents and guardians resident in Van Dieman‘s Land. They set forth that there are 13,000 free children growing up in the colony, that within six years alone 24,000 convicts have been turned into the island, and of these but 4000 were women. The result is that their children are brought up in the midst of profligacy and degradation.
The lowest depth of villainy, if in such universal infamy degrees can be conceived, was to be met with in the parties working in the “chain-gangs” on the roads. “Assignees” too bad even for the whip of the harshest, or the “beef and beer” of the most lenient master, brutalized still further, if that were possible, by association with those as vile as themselves, and followed about the country by women too infamous even for service in the houses of the up-country settlers, or the gin-palaces of the towns, worked in gangs upon the roads by day, whenever promises of spirits or the hope of tobacco could induce them to work at all, and found a compensation for such unusual toil in nightly quitting their camp, and traversing the country, robbing and murdering those they met, and sacking every homestead that lay in their track.
The clerk in charge of one of the great convict barracks was himself a convict, and had an understanding with the men under his care that they might prowl about at night and rob on condition that they should share their gains with him, and that, if they were found out, he should himself prosecute them for being absent without leave. Juries were composed either of convicts, or of publicans dependent on the convicts for their livelihood, and convictions were of necessity extremely rare. In a plain case of murder the judge was known to say: “If I don‘t attend to the recommendation to mercy, these fellows will never find a man guilty again,” and jurymen would frequently hand down notes to the counsel for the defense, and bid him give himself no trouble, as they intended to acquit their friend.
The lawyers were mostly convicts, and perjury in the courts was rife. It has been given in evidence before a Royal Commission by a magistrate of New South Wales that a Sydney free immigrant once had a tailor‘s bill sent in which he did not owe, he having been but a few weeks in the colony. He instructed a lawyer, and did not himself appear in court. He afterward heard that he had won his case, for the tailor had sworn to the bill, but the immigrant‘s lawyer, “to save trouble,” had called a witness who swore to having paid it, which settled the case. Sometimes there were not only convict witnesses and convict jurors, but convict judges.
The assignment system was supposed to be a great improvement upon the jail, but its only certain result was that convict master and convict man used to get drunk together, while a night never passed without a burglary in Sydney. Many of the convicts’ mistresses went out from England as government free emigrants, taking with them funds subscribed by the thieves at home and money obtained by the robberies for which their “fancy men” had been convicted, and on their arrival at Sydney succeeded in getting their paramours assigned to them as convict servants. Such was the disparity of the sexes that the term “wife” was a mockery, and the Female Emigration Society and the government vied with each other in sending out to Sydney the worst women in all London, to reinforce the ranks of the convict girls of the Paramatta factory. Even among the free settlers, marriage soon became extremely rare. Convicts were at the head of the colleges and benevolent asylums; the custom-house officials were all convicts; one of the occupants of the office of attorney-general took for his clerk a notorious convict, who was actually recommitted to Bathurst after his appointment, and yet allowed to return to Sydney and resume his duties.
The most remarkable peculiarity of the assignment system was its gross uncertainty. Some assigned convicts spent their time working for high wages, living and drinking with their masters; others were mere slaves. Whether, however, he be in practice well or ill treated, in the assignment or apprenticeship system the convict is, under whatever name, a slave, subject to the caprice of a master who, though he cannot himself flog his “servant,” can have him flogged by writing a note or sending his compliments to his neighbor the magistrate on the next run or farm. The “whipping-houses” of Mississippi and Alabama had their parallel in New South Wales; a look or word would cause the hurrying of the servant to the post or the forge as a preliminary to a month in the chain-gang “on the roads.” On the other hand, nothing under the assignment system can prevent skilled convict workmen being paid and pampered by their masters, whose interest it evidently becomes to get out of them all the work possible through excessive indulgence, as intelligent labor cannot be produced through the machinery of the whipping-post, but may be through that of “beef and beer.”
Whatever may have been the true interest of the free settlers, cruelty was in practice commoner than indulgence. Fifty and a hundred lashes, months of solitary confinement, years of labor in chains upon the roads, were laid upon convicts for such petty offenses as brawling, drunkenness, and disobedience. In 1835, among the 28,000 convicts then in New South Wales, there were 22,000 summary convictions for disorderly or dishonest conduct, and in a year the average was 3000 floggings, and above 100,000 lashes. In Tasmania, where the convicts then numbered 15,000, the summary convictions were 15,000 and the lashes 50,000 a year.
The criminal returns of Tasmania and New South Wales contain the condemnation of the transportation system. In the single year of 1834, one-seventh of the free population of Van Dieman‘s Land were summarily convicted of drunkenness. In that year, in a population of 37,000, 15,000 were convicted before the courts for various offenses. Over a hundred persons a year were at that time sentenced to death for crimes of violence in New South Wales alone. Less than a fourth of the convicts served their time without incurring additional punishment from the police, and those who thus escaped proved generally in after-life the worst of all, and even government officials were forced into admitting that transportation demoralized far more persons than it reformed. Hundreds of assigned convicts made their escape to the back country, and became bushrangers; many got down to the coast, and crossed to the Pacific islands, whence they spread the infamies of New South Wales throughout all Polynesia. A Select Committee of the House of Commons reported, in words characteristic of our race, that these convicts committed, in New Zealand and the Pacific, “outrages at which humanity shudders,” and which were to be deplored as being “injurious to our commercial interests in that quarter of the globe.”
Transportation to New South Wales came to its end none too soon: in fifty years, 75,000 convicts had been transported to that colony, and 30,000 to the little island of Tasmania in twenty years.
Were there no other argument for the discountenance of transportation, it would be almost enough to say that the life in the convict-ship itself makes the reformation of transported criminals impossible. Where many bad men are brought together, the few not wholly corrupt who may be among them have no opportunity for speech, and the grain of good that may exist in every heart can have no chance for life; if not inclination, pride at least leads the old hand to put down all acts that are not vile, all words that are not obscene. Those who have sailed in convict company say that there is something terrible in the fiendish delight that the “old hands” take in watching the steady degradation of the “new chums.” The hardened criminals invariably meet the less vile with outrage, ridicule, and contempt, and the better men soon succumb to ruffians who have crime for their profession, and for all their relaxation vice.
To describe the horrors of the convict-ships, we are told, would be impossible. The imagination will scarce suffice to call up dreams so hideous. Four months of filthiness in a floating hell sink even the least bad to the level of unteachable brutality. Mutiny is unknown; the convicts are their own masters and the ship‘s, but the shrewd callousness of the old jail-bird teaches all that there is nothing to be gained even by momentary success. Rage and violence are seldom seen, but there is a humor that is worse than blows, – conversation that transcends all crime in infamy.
It will be long before the last traces of convict disease disappear from Tasmania and New South Wales; the gold-find has done much to purify the air, free selection may lead to a still more bright advance, manufacturing may lend its help; but years must go by before Tasmania can be prosperous or Sydney moral. Their history is not only valuable as a guide to those who have to save West Australia, as General Bourke and Mr. Wentworth saved New South Wales, but as an example, not picked from ancient rolls, but from the records of a system founded within the memory of living man, and still existent, of what transportation must necessarily be, and what it may easily become.
The results of a dispassionate survey of the transportation system are far from satisfactory. If deportation be considered as a punishment, it would be hard to find a worse. Punishment should be equable, reformatory, deterrent, cheap. Transportation is the most costly of all the punishments that are known to us; it is subject to variations that cannot be guarded against; it is severest to the least guilty and slightest to the most hardened; it morally destroys those who have some good remaining in them; it leaves the ruffianly malefactor worse if possible than it finds him; and, while it is frightfully cruel and vindictive in its character, it is useless as a deterrent because its nature is unknown at home. Transportation to the English thief means exile, and nothing more; it is only after conviction, when far away from his uncaught associates, that he comes to find it worse than death. Instead of deterring, transportation tempts to crime; instead of reforming, it debases the bad, and confirms in villainy the already infamous. To every bad man it gives the worst companions; the infamous are to be reformed by association with the vile; while its effects upon the colonies are described in every petition of the settlers, and testified to by the whole history of our plantations in the antipodes, and by the present condition of West Australia and Tasmania, from which, however, New South Wales has happily escaped. We have come at last to transportation in its most limited and restricted sense; the only remaining step is to be quit of it altogether.
In conjunction with all punishment, we should secure some means of separating the men one from another as soon as the actual punishment is terminated: to settle them on land, to settle them with wives where possible, should be our object. The work which really has in it something of reformation is that which a man has to do, not in order that he may avoid whipping, but that he may escape starvation; and it is from this point of view that transportation is defensible. A man, however bad, will generally become a useful member of society and a not altogether neglectful father if allowed to settle upon land away from his old associates; but morbid tendencies of every kind are strengthened by close association with others who are laboring under a like infirmity: and where the former convicts are allowed to hang together in towns, nothing is to be expected better than that which is actually found – namely, a state of society where wives speedily become as villainous as their husbands, and where children are brought up to emulate their fathers’ crimes.
To keep the men separate from each other, after the expiration of the sentence, we need to send the convicts to a fairly populous country, whence arises this great difficulty: if we send convicts to a populous colony, we are met at once by a cry that we are forcing the workmen of the colony into a one-sided competition; that we are offering an unbearable insult to the free population; that, in attempting to reform the felon, in allowing him to be absorbed into the colonial society, we are degrading and corrupting the whole community on the chance of possible benefit to our English villain. On the other hand, if we send our convicts to an uninhabited land, such as New South Wales and Tasmania were, such as West Australia is now, we build up an artificial Pandemonium, whither we convey at the public cost the pick and cream of the ruffians of the world, to form a community of which each member must be sufficiently vile of himself to corrupt a nation.
If by care the difficulty of which I have spoken can be avoided, transportation might be replaced by short sentences and solitary confinement, and low diet, to be followed by forced exile, under regulations, to some selected colony, say the Ghauts of Eastern Africa, opposite to Madagascar, or the highlands that skirt the Zambesi River. Exile after punishment may often be the only way of providing for convicts who would otherwise be forced to return to their former ways. The difficulties in the way of discharged convicts seeking employment are too terrible for them not to accept joyfully any simple plan for emigration to a country where they are unknown.
In Western Australia, transportation has not been made subservient to colonization, and both in consequence have failed.
On going on board the Bombay at King George‘s Sound, I at once found myself in the East. The captain‘s crew of Malays, the native cooks in long white gowns, the Bombay serangs in dark-blue turbans, red cummerbunds, and green or yellow trowsers; the negro or Abyssinian stokers, and passengers in coats of China-grass; the Hindoo deck-sweepers playing on their tomtoms in the intervals of work; the punkahs below; the Hindostanee names for every one on deck; and, above all, the general indolence of everybody, all told of a new world.
A convict clerk superintended the coaling, which took place before we left the harbor for Ceylon, and I remarked that the dejection of his countenance exceeded that of the felon-laborers who worked in irons on the quay. There is a wide-spread belief in England that unfair favor is shown to “gentlemen convicts.” This is simply not the case; every educated prisoner is employed at in-door work, for which he is suited, and not at road-making, in which he might be useless; but there are few cases in which he would not wish to exchange a position full of hopeless degradation for that of an out-door laborer, who passes through his daily routine drudgery (far from the prison) unknown, and perhaps in his fancy all but free. The longing to change the mattock for the pen is the result of envy, and confined to those who, if listened to, would prove incapable of pursuing the pen-driver‘s occupation.
Under a fair and freshening breeze, we left the port of Albany, happy to escape from a jail the size of India, even those of us who had been forced to pass only a few days in West Australia.