“despotic conduct as commander of the _Bounty_ had driven the crew
to mutiny. Yet he who had proved his incapacity for ruling a small
ship’s company was made absolute ruler of a colony so critically
circumstanced as that of New South Wales.... He was the same rude,
despotic man, whether treading the quarter‐deck of the _Bounty_ or
pacing his reception‐room in Government House at Sydney.”
“Throughout the colony,” continues the judge, “the uncontrolled
use of the lash was resorted to, as an incessant and almost sole
instrument of punishment, and too often those who inflicted this
degrading punishment regarded themselves as irresponsible agents,
and kept no record of their darkest deeds.”
But when the backs and the consciences of the unhappy victims of an
English reformatory process had become alike hardened to this demoralizing
torture, a perverse ingenuity had devised in Norfolk Island a place of
penal torment calculated to destroy in its victims the last vestiges of
humanity. To human beings thus circumstanced the scaffold became rather an
object of desire than of dread. And we learn from Mr. Therry that during
the years 1826, 1827, and 1830 no less than one hundred and fifty‐three
persons were hung out of a population of fifty thousand.
But we have not yet fathomed the lowest depth of imbecility and of guilty
indifference to the commonest dictates of prudence and humanity exhibited
in this nefarious scheme for the reformation, forsooth, of criminals.
Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that by the authors
of the scheme, although their lips were full of the professions we have
quoted, the influence of religion as an agent of reformation was simply
ignored. It had not been their original intention to send out any minister
at all of their religion with the expedition they had planned. It was
owing to the remonstrance of a dignitary of the Established sect that one
was, at the last moment, appointed. This appointment, however, does not
appear to have been made with any view of bringing the influence of
religion to bear on the unfortunate criminals. To them the rudest objects
of self‐interest appear to have been the only motives of reformation held
out. Dr. Porteous—such was his name—would have displayed more than the
ordinary apathy of his class as to any objects of a merely spiritual
interest, and a less than ordinary keenness of perception as to its
material interests, if he had allowed a large colonial expedition to leave
the shores of the mother‐country without any provision whatsoever being
made for the celebration of the worship of the Established religion in the
distant land to which it was bound. We are told by Mr. Flanagan that a
priest of some Spanish ships, which visited the colony in 1793, “observing
that a church had not yet been built, lifted up his eyes with
astonishment, and declared that, had the place been settled by his nation,
a house would have been erected for God before any house had been built
for men” (_Hist. of N. S. W._, vol. 1. p. 95). In 1791 a fresh batch of
convicts, two thousand and fifty in number, arrived at Sydney, making the
sum total of that portion of the population two thousand eight hundred and
twenty‐eight. Yet, for these, for the large staff of officials, the
military guard, and the few free settlers, the only minister of religion
for six years after the foundation of the colony was this churchless
chaplain, and the only religious influences accessible to that multitude
of unfortunates was the form of Sabbatical prayer adopted by his sect. The
one master cause of the inhumanity of the whole scheme was the complete
and profound disregard of religious influences engendered in the minds of
its authors by that embodiment of religious indifference and lifeless
formalism, the established sect in England.
In few, if in any, exiled convicts have the finer sensibilities of our
common nature been utterly extinguished. In nearly all, charred and
unsightly as may their whole natures have become, diligent and patient
labor will come at last to some unquenched fragment of the precious jewel;
remote and all but lost, but waiting only for one smallest crevice to be
opened through the superincumbent mass of gloom and despair, to spring in
light, like a resurrection, to the surface, and fling its delivered lustre
to the sun. In nearly all, he who should tenderly but perseveringly dig
through the filth and refuse which a highly artificial and evilly
constituted state of society has heaped upon its outcasts, would assuredly
come at last to some faint trickle of the living fountain, which death
only wholly dries up, ready to find its level, and even longing to be
released. How many of those sad ship‐loads, when the shores of their
native country for ever faded from their view, succumbed to the anguish of
some, were it only one, rudely riven tie, and, in the nearest feeling to
despair possible out of the place of reprobation, thrilled with a heart’s
agony of which the severest bodily pain is but a feeble symbol! Cruel to
inhumanity would be the jailer who should refuse to a prisoner in his
dungeon the consolation of one ray of the light of day. But who, with the
hearts of men, could have forbidden to those most miserable of their
fellow‐creatures an entrance to the angels of religion? Who would not have
used every effort to secure their ministrations? The Catholic Church, and
she alone, could have brought the light of hope within those darkened
souls. She alone could have taken from despair that painful past and that
ghastly present, have awakened within those hardened consciences the
echoes of a nobler being, have folded around the poor outcasts her
infinite charities, and enwreathed them in their embrace. She alone could
have recalled them through the tears of compunction to the consciousness
that they were still men, and might yet be saints; and, like the memory of
childhood gliding round the frightful abyss that separated them from
innocence, have beckoned, and encouraged, and helped them up the toilsome
steep of penance, to the place where conquerors, who have narrowly escaped
with their lives, receive their kingdoms and their crowns.
Yet was this mere tribute to the humanity of those forlorn ones wholly
withheld from them. The rigors of penal discipline, increasing in severity
with the progressive depravity of their unhappy victims, reduced them at
length to a condition by comparison of which the lot of the sorriest brute
that was ever becudgelled by a ruffian owner was enviable. What a depth of
misery, and, worse still, what a bitter consciousness of it, is revealed
in the keen reproach of one of them: “When I came here, I had the heart of
a man in me, but you have plucked it out, and planted the heart of a brute
in its stead!” To talk to such men of reformation could only have been a
ghastly jest. Not so much as even a moral motive appears to have been
suggested to them. Nothing but the unlovely object of worldly self‐
advantage.
Of such a system there could be but one result. No longer do we experience
any surprise at finding that the aborigines, who were to have been
civilized, and who, at first, evinced the most friendly disposition
towards the new settlers, were shot down and even poisoned by the
squatters, soldiers, emigrant adventurers, and emancipists, the standard
of whose morality appears to have been about equally high; that men in the
highest judicial stations were notoriously immoral; that amongst the most
prosperous and respectable of Sydney tradesmen were receivers of stolen
goods; that in the time of one governor,
“the marriage ceremony fell into neglect, and dissolute habits
soon prevailed; rum became the regular and principal article of
traffic, and was universally drunk to excess”;
and that, when he left the colony in 1800, “_it was then in a state of
deep demoralization_” (_Therry_, p. 71); that, under the rule of his
successor, to quote Mr. Therry’s own description:
“The licentiousness that had prevailed in the time of Hunter was
carried to the highest pitch. Not only was undisguised concubinage
thought no shame, but the sale of wives was not an unfrequent
practice. A present owner of broad acres and large herds in New
South Wales is the offspring of a union strangely brought about by
the purchase of a wife from her husband for four gallons of rum”
(p. 72).
Lamentable as must have been the condition of a reformatory colony wherein
the religious sentiment and all concern for a future life were entirely
disregarded, its effects were more terrible to the Catholic portion of the
convicts than to their Protestant fellow‐criminals. The latter, born
blind, were not sensible of the blessing of which they were deprived. To
them religion was a matter of the merest unconcern. The parson was one of
the gentlefolk, nothing more. He made no claim of spiritual power. It was
not likely that they should invest him with it. They felt no need of him
in death, any more than they had throughout their lives. Indeed, they had
all along been taught that it was the special birthright of an Englishman
to die as independently as he had lived. It must be owned, therefore,
that, as far as they were concerned, no privation was experienced nor any
practical loss occasioned by the circumstance that only one Protestant
minister was appointed in the colony during six years, and for another six
years only two.
How different the case of the Catholic portion of the convicts! For them
to be deprived of priestly ministration was a loss all but irreparable.
The clear and rigid dogmatism of the church places the three future states
of existence before her children with a positiveness and reality which the
mysterious power of evil may enable them to brave, but never to ignore.
The intermediate state of temporal punishment forbids the most loaded with
crimes to abandon hope, even at the moment of dissolution. But for this
salvation the sacraments are ordinarily essential, of which the priests,
and only the priests, are the dispensers. To deprive, thus, of priestly
ministrations those poor creatures who stood most in need of them, to drag
them to despair and final impenitence—the only sin from whose guilt the
sacraments are powerless to rescue the sinner—was a cruelty which would
have been diabolical if it had been intentional.
About ten years after the settlement of the colony, the number of Catholic
convicts was greatly increased by large deportations from Ireland after
the unsuccessful insurrection of 1798. But they were a very different
class of men from ordinary convicts. They were superior to the ordinary
political derelicts. If the most brutal and insulting tyranny that ever
goaded a people to rebellion can justify an insurrection against
established authorities, that justification they had to the full. Those
Irish exiles of ’98 were no more criminal than the ministry that arraigned
them or the judges who pronounced their doom. The finer sensibilities of
these men had not been blunted nor their domestic affection stifled by low
associations and long habits of crime. They were, for the most part, men
of blameless manners, and of a people remarkable for virtue. To such men
the rude snapping asunder of the fondest heart‐ties, the being dragged
away for ever from the old spot of home, endeared by all blissful and
innocent memories, from the familiar scenes, the beloved faces, the
cherished friends, the heart‐owned relatives, young and aged, from the
graves of their ancestors, and the country of their birth, to be shipped
off as criminals to the uttermost parts of the earth, with their country’s
deadly enemies for their jailers, must have been a fate from which death
would have been hailed as a deliverer. To deprive those unfortunate
patriots of the consolations and benedictions of their religion was indeed
to make them empty the cup of sorrow to its bitterest dregs. In the year
1829, about forty years after the commencement of transportation from
Ireland, they numbered nearly ten thousand souls. Yet, we are informed by
Mr. Therry,
“up to that time they were dependent solely on such ministrations
as could be rendered by a single priest, and for a considerable
portion of that period there was no priest in the colony.”
How different would have been the organization of the expedition, how far
different its results, if the church had still owned England’s heart, and
her statesmen had been Catholics! The most worldly and ill‐living of such
would not have dreamed of equipping a colony without making full provision
for the celebration of Christian worship and the ministrations of the
church. It would have been their first care. Had they designed to make the
colony subservient to the noble object of reforming those unfortunates
whom society had cast out of its pale, nothing would have been advertently
left undone to bring all the salutary influences of religion to bear upon
them, and to place at their service every one of its supernatural aids.
What is the church, in her actual working in the affairs of men, but a
divinely organized reformatory system? Now a fundamental principle of that
system is that forgiven crime is buried out of sight and out of mind. When
the minister of the divine pardon has opened the doors of the eternal
prison, and has stricken off the deadly fetters from the self‐condemning
penitent, he who was just now kneeling at his side in bonds and death,
together with all the crimes he has committed, are alike forgotten by him.
He is to him quite a new and other man. And with the Christian benediction
he sends him forth reinvested with the royalty of his birth and his
consanguinity to God, to mingle, mayhap, if he correspond to the grace
given, with the most virtuous on the earth, as though he had never broken
its peace or given scandal to his brethren. Men are what their religion
makes them. And no Catholic statesman would have sent out a convict colony
to a distant shore without providing for such as would be reformed a
destination where the past might be at once forgotten and repaired. The
angels of the Gospel, inflamed with the noblest charity that ever dawned
over the everlasting hills on an ice‐bound world, would have been scarcely
ever absent from the prison cells, never weary of importuning their
inmates to save themselves, and to reclaim their place amongst their
fellows by a reformation which would at the same time restore them to
their hopes as immortal men. Far from permitting to them every license of
lust, and the indulgence of every criminal passion which did not interfere
with jail discipline; by their moral reformation, and by it alone, would
they have attempted their reformation as citizens. They would have been
ever at hand to aid them with priestly counsels and the supernatural grace
of the sacraments in those frequent falls and relapses of which nearly
every history of reformation consists. And those who were sufficiently
reformed to be able to conform thenceforth to the easy standard of public
virtue would have found, in the new career to which they were committed,
precisely the same divine system, with its supernatural aids and
exhaustless charities ready to carry on in their behalf the work of
restoration, through the love of man, to the reward of God.
Even in the case of those pitiable beings, in whose crime‐clogged souls
the loving accents of religion appeared to awake no echoes, never would
the indiscriminating and wholesale torture of the lash have been summoned
to its unholy and brutalizing work to deepen still more their moral
degradation and place their reformation for ever out of hope. Restrained
as they were from doing further mischief to society, the church, whose
heart, as of a human mother, yearns with most fondness towards the most
vicious of her children, would never have abandoned, still less have ill‐
treated, the poor outcasts. She would have hoped against hope. Nor would
she for one moment have ceased her importunities, her ministrations, and
her prayers, until final impenitence had taken away the unhappy beings for
ever from the counsels of mercy, or human obduracy had capitulated, at the
hour of death, to the exhaustless love of God.
The Veil Withdrawn.
Translated, By Permission, From The French Of Mme. Craven, Author Of “A
Sister’s Story,” “Fleurange,” Etc.