Loe raamatut: «The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 14, No. 401, November 28, 1829», lehekülg 6

That is, indeed, an ill-wind which blows no good. We owe every thing, over and above mere subsistence, to the wickedness of the people of England. Who built Sydney? Convicts. Who made the excellent roads from Sydney to Parramatta, Windsor, and Liverpool? Convicts. By whom is the land made to produce? By convicts. Why do not all our labourers exact high wages, and, by taking a large share of the produce of labour, prevent their employers from becoming rich? Because most of them are convicts. What has enabled the landowner readily to dispose of his surplus produce? The demand of the keepers of convicts. What has brought so many ships to Port Jackson, and occasioned a further demand for agricultural produce? The transportation of convicts. What has tempted free emigrants to bring capital into the settlement? The true stories that they heard of fortunes made by employing the cheap labour of convicts. But here are questions and answers enough. The case is plain. Nearly all that we possess has arisen from the happy influence of penal emigration and discipline, on production, distribution, and consumption. Thanks to the system of transportation, we have had cheap labour and a ready market; production, consequently, has exceeded consumption; and the degree of that excess is the measure of our accumulation—that is, of our wealth.

The transportation of at least ten males for one female, maintains a great disproportion between the sexes. This is the greatest evil of all.

A Rover

On the banks of the Illinois, I met with a labouring man, who was always tipsy without ever being drunk. Enervated by dram-drinking, he had not the courage to obtain a bit of forest and settle; but he could earn seven shillings a day by his labour. When I spoke to him, he complained of low wages. "At New York, friend," said I, "five shillings a day are thought quite enough." "I know that," he answered; "I was born there, and came here to get eight shillings a day, which, I was told, was the lowest rate hereabouts." It turned out that he never worked more than three days in the week, and that, in order to obtain twenty-four shillings a week by three days' labour, he had made a circuitous voyage of some thousand miles from the place where he was born, and where he could have earned thirty shillings a week by working every day.

Slang

The base language of English thieves is becoming the established language of the colony. Terms of slang and flash are used, as a matter of course, every where, from the gaols to the Viceroy's palace, not excepting the Bar and the Bench. No doubt they will be reckoned quite parliamentary, as soon as we obtain a parliament.

Bush-ranging

Is a dreadful evil, being a kind of land piracy. None but back settlers, it is true, are exposed to its burnings, rapes, and massacres; but these are as much British subjects as the inhabitants of Sydney or of Downing Street. And, if the inhabitants of towns escape those horrors, they are liable to be murdered in a quiet way, and their property is exposed to every kind of depredation. Their actual losses by robbery, including the expense and loss of time occasioned by prosecutions, are very great.

The concluding observations on "the extension of Britain," and her colonial interests, are in a forcible and liberal tone, but as they take rather too political a turn for our pages, we recommend the anxious reader to the volume itself, which is altogether the production of an original thinker and an impartial writer.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS

THE CRUISE OF H.M. SHIP TORCH

A Fragment

I was the mate of the morning watch, and, as day dawned, I had amused myself with other younkers over the side, examining the shot holes and other injuries sustained from the fire of the frigate, and contrasting the clean, sharp, well-defined apertures, made by the 24 lb. shot from the long guns, with the bruised and splintered ones from the 32 lb. carronades; but the men had begun to wash down the decks, and the first gush of clotted blood and water from the scuppers fairly turned me sick. I turned away, when Mr. Kennedy, our gunner, a good steady old Scotchman, with whom I was a bit of a favourite, came up to me—"Mr. Cringle, the captain has sent for you; poor Mr. Johnstone is fast going, he wants to see you."

I knew my young messmate had been wounded, for I had seen him carried below after the frigate's second broad-side; but the excitement of a boy, who had never smelled powder fired in anger before, had kept me on deck the whole night, and it never once occurred to me to ask for him, until the old gunner spoke.

I hastened down to our small confined berth, and there I saw a sight that quickly brought me to myself. Poor Johnstone was indeed going; a grape shot had struck him, and torn his belly open. There he lay in his bloody hammock on the deck, pale and motionless as if he had already departed, except a slight twitching at the corners of his mouth, and a convulsive contraction and distension of his nostrils. His brown ringlets still clustered over his marble forehead, but they were drenched in the cold sweat of death. The surgeon could do nothing for him, and had left him; but our old captain—bless him for it—I little expected, from his usual crusty bearing, to find him so employed—had knelt by his side, and, whilst he read from the Prayer Book one of those beautiful petitions in our church service to Almighty God, for mercy to the passing soul of one so young, and so early cut off, the tears trickled down the old man's cheeks, and filled the furrows worn in them by the washing up of many a salt spray. On the other side of his narrow bed, fomenting the rigid muscles of his neck and chest, sat Mistress Connolly, one of three women on board—a rough enough creature, heaven knows, in common weather; but her stifled sobs showed that the mournful sight had stirred up all the woman within her. She had opened the bosom of the poor boy's shirt, and untying the ribbon that fastened a small gold crucifix round his neck, she placed it in his cold hand. The young midshipman was of a respectable family in Limerick, her native place, and a Catholic—another strand of the cord that bound her to him. When the captain finished reading, he bent over the departing youth, and kissed his cheek. "Your young messmate just now desired to see you, Mr. Cringle, but it is too late, he is insensible and dying." Whilst he spoke, a strong shiver passed through the boy's frame, his face became slightly convulsed, and all was over! The captain rose, and Connolly, with a delicacy of feeling which many might not have looked for in her situation, spread one of our clean mess table-cloths over the body. "And is it really gone you are, my poor, dear boy!" forgetting all difference of rank in the fulness of her heart. "Who will tell this to your mother, and nobody here to wake you but ould Kate Connolly, and no time will they be giving me, nor whisky—Ochon! ochon!"

But enough and to spare of this piping work. The boatswain's whistle now called me to the gangway, to superintend the handing up, from a shore boat alongside, a supply of the grand staples of the island—ducks and onions. The three 'Mudians in her were characteristic samples of the inhabitants. Their faces and skins, where exposed, were not tanned, but absolutely burnt into a fiery-red colour by the sun. They guessed and drawled like any buckskin from Virginia, superadding to their accomplishments their insular peculiarity of always shutting one eye when they spoke to you. They are all Yankees at bottom; and if they could get their 365 Islands—so they call the large stones on which they live—under weigh, they would not be long in towing them into the Chesapeake.

The word had been passed to get six of the larboard guns and all the shot over to the other side, to give the brig a list of a streak or two a-starboard, so that the stage on which the carpenter and his crew were at work over the side, stopping the shot holes above the water line, might swing clear of the wash of the sea. I had jumped from the nettings, where I was perched, to assist in unbolting one of the carronade slides, when I slipped and capsized against a peg sticking out of one of the scuppers. I took it for something else and damned the ring-bolt incontinently. Caboose, the cook, was passing with his mate, a Jamaica negro of the name of Johncrow, at the time. "Don't damn the remains of your fellow-mortals, Master Cringle; that is my leg." The cook of a man-of-war is no small beer, he is his Majesty's warrant officer, a much bigger wig than a poor little mid, with whom it is condescension on his part to jest.

It seems to be a sort of rule, that no old sailor who has not lost a limb, or an eye at least, shall be eligible to the office; but as the kind of maiming is so far circumscribed that all cooks must have two arms, a laughable proportion of them have but one leg. Besides the honour, the perquisites are good; accordingly, all old quartermasters, captains of tops, &c., look forward to the cookdom, as the cardinals look to the popedom; and really there is some analogy between them, for neither is preferred from any especial fitness for the office. A cardinal is made pope because he is old, infirm, and imbecile—our friend Caboose was made cook because he had been Lord Nelson's coxswain, was a drunken rascal, and had a wooden leg; for, as to his gastronomical qualifications, he knew no more of the science than just sufficient to watch the copper where the salt junk and potatoes were boiling. Having been a little in the wind overnight, he had quartered himself, in the superabundance of his heroism, at a gun where he had no business to be, and in running it out, he had jammed his toe in a scupper hole, so fast that there was no extricating him; and notwithstanding his piteous entreaty "to be eased out handsomely, as the leg was made out of a plank of the Victory, and the ring at the end out of one of her bolts," the captain of the gun finding, after a stout pull, that the man was like to come "home in his hand without the leg," was forced "to break him short off," as he phrased it, to get him out of the way, and let the carriage traverse. In the morning when he sobered, he had quite forgotten where the leg was, and how he broke it; he therefore got Kelson to splice the stump with the butt-end of a mop; but in the hurry it had been left three inches too long, so that he had to jerk himself up to the top of his peg at every step. The doctor, glad to breathe the fresh air after the horrible work he had gone through, was leaning over the side, speaking to Kelson. When I fell, he turned round and drew Cookee's fire on himself. "Doctor, you have not prescribed for me yet."—"No, Caboose, I have not; what is wrong?"—"Wrong, sir! why, I have lost my leg, and the captain's clerk says I am not in the return!—Look here, sir, had doctor Kelson not coopered me, where should I have been?—Why, doctor, had I been looked after, amputation might have been unnecessary; a fish might have done, whereas I have had to be spliced." He was here cut short by the voice of his mate, who had gone forward to slay a pig for the gunroom mess. "Oh, Lad, oh!—Massa Caboose!—Dem dam Yankee! De Purser killed, massa!—Dem shoot him troo de head!—Oh, Oh, Lad!" Captain Deadeye had come on deck. "You, Johncrow, what is wrong with you?"—"Why, de Purser killed, captain, dat all."—"Purser killed?—Doctor, is Saveall hurt?" Treenail could stand it no longer. "No, sir, no; it is one of the gunroom pigs that we shipped at Halifax, three cruises ago; I am sure I don't know how he survived one, but the seamen took a fancy to him, and nicknamed him the Purser. You know, sir, they make pets of any thing, and every thing, at a pinch!"

Here Johncrow drew the carcass from the hog-pen, and sure enough a shot had cut the poor Purser's head nearly off. Blackee looked at him with a most whimsical expression; they say no one can fathom a negro's affection for a pig. "Poor Purser! de people call him Purser, sir, because him knowing chap; him cabbage all de grub, slush, and stuff in him own corner, and give only de small bit, and de bad piece, to de oder pig; so, captain"—Splinter saw the poor fellow was like to get into a scrape. "That will do, Johncrow—forward with you now, and lend a hand to cat the anchor.—All hands up anchor!" The boatswain's hoarse voice repeated the command, and he in turn was re-echoed by his mates; the capstan was manned, and the crew stamped round to a point of war most villanously performed by a bad drummer and a worse fifer, in as high glee as if those who were killed had been snug and well in their hammocks on the berth-deck, in place of at the bottom of the sea, with each a shot at his feet. We weighed, and began to work up, tack and tack, towards the island of Ireland, where the arsenal is, amongst a perfect labyrinth of shoals, through which the 'Mudian pilot cunned the ship with great skill, taking his stand, to our no small wonderment, not at the gangway or poop, as usual, but on the bowsprit end, so that he might see the rocks under foot, and shun them accordingly, for they are so steep and numerous, (they look like large fish in the clear water), and the channel is so intricate, that you have to go quite close to them. At noon we arrived at the anchorage, and hauled our moorings on board. Blackwood's Magazine.