THE CONVICT SHIP.
In the last chapter the reader was casually introduced to a convict
ship, and as it is now about half a century since they became
obsolete, it may not be altogether without interest to some readers to
have a short account of them from one who can say _quorum pars
fui_. I will therefore venture upon a short digression, which,
though it introduces a subject foreign to the one which this little
book professes to treat upon, nevertheless may yet bring a coach upon
the stage when least expected.
Probably to the mind of some readers the very name of a convict ship
will conjure up all sorts of horrors, culminating in a surprise, the
capture of the ship by the convicts, and in all who resisted them
being thrown overboard.
Well, at any rate, no such thing occurred on board the "Layton," nor
did it ever on board any vessel carrying male convicts; though I have
heard that such a thing did happen once to one conveying women, which
having no military guard on board, the crew intrigued with the
prisoners and carried the ship into some port on the South American
coast.
The convicts were under the immediate charge of a naval surgeon, and,
as I have already mentioned in the last chapter, he was supported by a
small military guard. When first brought on board every man had irons
on his legs, but upon the ship getting to sea, these were gradually
knocked off as the surgeon considered could be done with safety.
One-third of the guard were always on duty on the poop of the ship,
with their muskets (it was in the time of old "Brown Bess," with flint
locks) loaded, and placed in a rack ready to hand; and to prevent any
sudden rush to attack them, a strong wooden barricade was erected just
abaft the mainmast, about seven feet high, with no opening through it
except a small, low door in each gangway, just large enough to admit
of one person passing through in a stooping posture.
With very few exceptions, the convicts gave no trouble. They had a
saying among themselves that they were patriots, who left their
country for their country's good; and an opportunity occurred during
the voyage for some of them to do good service, which greatly improved
their condition upon landing.
As is not very unfrequently the case in that latitude, when off the
Cape de Verd Islands, the ship was caught in a violent squall, when
the chief mate, who was in charge of the deck, "luffed up," and had
commenced to take in sail, till the skipper appeared on the scene,
who, without giving himself sufficient time to consider, immediately
put the ship before the wind. By this action the sails, which were
being reefed, were refilled suddenly, with the result of several of
the masts and spars being carried away; and the saddest thing was that
several of the crew, who were aloft at the time, went overboard with
the rigging, and three poor fellows were drowned, notwithstanding all
that could be done to save them.
I believe sailors recognize two ways of acting under these
circumstances: the one what the mate did, to reduce sail; the other
what the captain did, to run before the wind. As a land-lubber, I give
no opinion between them; but a mixture of the two cannot help being
fatal, as was the case with us. Never shall I forget the crash, crash,
crash, of the falling masts. If, however, the skipper made a mistake
this time, he showed himself quite equal to the occasion at a
subsequent period of the voyage.
He and I were pacing the poop together, when suddenly the cabin-boy
came up and whispered something to him which I did not catch, but
which had the effect of making him scuttle at double-quick time. In
about a quarter of an hour he returned, saying, "What do you think I
was wanted for?" Of course, I answered, "I do not know." "Why," he
replied, "they had set fire to a cask of spirits in the lazaret."
"What on earth did you do?" I said. "Well," says he, "I sat upon the
bunghole." This move on his part had the effect of excluding the air,
and, consequently, of extinguishing the fire. It was a quick, smart
thing to do, and saved what would have been an awful catastrophe--a
ship on fire at sea, with about five hundred souls on board, and not
boat accommodation enough for one hundred.
At the end of nearly a five months' voyage we found ourselves sailing
up the beautiful Storm Bay, and never did land appear so lovely to my
eyes before. The anchor was soon let down in the river Derwent, and
the convict ship lay with her living freight off Hobart Town.
It is wonderful how time passes on board ship where there is nothing
to mark it, and in this case the only break we had to the daily
routine was occasional tiffs between the surgeon and the skipper. The
former was anxious to get to the end of the voyage as quickly as
possible, as he received ten shillings a head for all the prisoners
that landed alive, and was sorely put out when every effort was not
made to keep the old tub moving. The skipper, on the other hand, being
paid by the month, preferred his comfort, and was fond of making all
snug for the night in rough weather, and turning in, whilst we
soldiers looked on with patience, if not contentment, for, as was the
usual custom, we had received an advance of four months' pay upon
leaving England, and didn't much care about landing till some more had
become due. It is poor fun to go on shore with an empty pocket.
I believe it was unfortunate for the convicts that the system of
transportation was obliged to be abandoned, as any of them in those
new countries were able to return to an honest life if they really
chose to do so, which, in an old and thickly populated country like
England, is a very difficult thing to do. At the time I am writing
about, the system of assigned servants was in practice, and though it
was liable to much abuse, and was largely abused, still it had this
advantage, that it admitted of their return to ordinary life long
before their sentences had expired.
The system though, as I think, good in itself was shamefully
administered, especially in the earliest years of the colony. At that
time any free man or woman who had settled in the colony was not only
entitled to a convict servant or servants, but could have any prisoner
they liked, and this naturally led to the grossest abuses, of which
the following is an example:--
Some men in England managed to find out that on a certain night, one
of the mail coaches (and here comes in the coach) was to carry a large
amount of bullion, which they concluded would be placed in the front
boot of the coach, as the safest place, and in this they were not
disappointed. They then secured the four inside places for that night,
and whilst on the journey set to work to make a way into the boot and
abstract the coin. Upon arriving at the end of the journey they
immediately handed this over to their wives, who were in readiness to
receive it, and straightway made off with it. The men were taken up,
tried and convicted of the robbery, and sentenced to transportation.
Soon after they landed in the new country they were assigned to their
respective wives as servants, and, as is said in the children's story
books, "lived very happily ever after."
Such a glaring case as this of course could hardly occur a second
time, but sufficient care was never taken to see that convicts were
only assigned to those masters whose character and position warranted
it. At last, like many other things, good in themselves, it was
abandoned altogether, instead of the trouble being taken to administer
it properly.
There was one institution I must mention connected with convict life,
as I suppose it was quite peculiar to Van Diemen's Land. A penal
settlement was established for those who committed offences after
their arrival in the colony, situated on a small peninsula called Port
Arthur, and separated from the mainland by a very narrow isthmus.
Across this, called Eagle Hawk Neck, there was placed a line of savage
dogs, each one chained to a kennel with just sufficient length of
chain to prevent anyone passing through the cordon without being
seized, and at the same time short enough to prevent the dogs fighting
each other.[2]
[2] Two works giving a vivid picture of convict life in
Australia have appeared--_The Broad Arrow_, and _For the
Term of his Natural Life_, by the late Marcus Clarke.
What strides have been made since then! Whether greater by sea or land
appears doubtful; but one thing is certain--that the last forty years
has produced more change on both elements than the previous hundred.
In the year 1772 Captain Cook started on his voyage of discovery in a
vessel of four hundred and sixty tons--about the same size as those
that were in use at the time I have treated of; and I need not remind
the reader of the immense growth in the size of ships since then. The
time consumed in going from one part of the world to another has also
been altered in a no less remarkable manner.
If to those who, at the present day, would shrink from trusting their
lives and comforts for a long voyage to any vessel of less than three
or four thousand tons, a ship of only five hundred tons, such as I
have already mentioned, seems uncomfortable, if not hazardous, what
will they say when I mention that the vessel on board of which I
returned to England measured only two hundred and eight tons--probably
about the same size as the largest boat carried on board some of the
leviathan steamers of the present day.
But, however hazardous they may think it, I believe that so far from
any extra danger being incurred from sailing in these small ships, it
was not only as safe, but, judging from the accounts we read of the
damage sustained by these monsters of the deep in heavy weather, the
balance may be in favour of the smaller craft. They were so buoyant
that they rose with the waves instead of going through them, and, like
the little "Eudora," in which I made the homeward voyage, were like a
duck upon the water.
In my own case, the small size of the ship had a special advantage, as
I was allowed to take the wheel whenever I liked, which could hardly
have been the case in a large one; and really the steering her over
the grand waves in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in half a gale of
wind was not very much inferior to driving a racing coach.
One day, however, I was let in for rather more than I bargained for.
It was blowing an increasingly heavy gale off Cape Horn, such as it
knows how to blow in that part of the world in winter, and the hands
were all aloft taking in sail, when the skipper turned to me and said,
"I wish you would take the wheel and send the man forward, as I want
more strength aloft." Thus the whole crew were in the rigging, and if
by any mistake I had allowed the sail they were reefing to fill, they
must have been carried overboard with it.
It may seem rather a happy-go-lucky way of sending a ship to sea, for
the crew to be so short-handed as to make it necessary to call in the
aid of a passenger in such an emergency, but those were the
"pre-Plimsoll days," and before ships' masters and other officers were
subjected to examinations. In one ship on board which I sailed, the
owner was overheard to say to a friend who had accompanied him on
board, "With such a captain and such a mate, I only wonder the ship
ever comes home safe again."
If we return to the other element we shall see that though
improvements had taken place, to some extent, as early as the
beginning of this century, still little had been effected before the
year 1820. From that date great improvements were made in everything
connected with road travelling, so much so, that we in England
congratulated ourselves that it had pretty well arrived at perfection,
when, lo and behold! a new power asserted itself, and produced such a
metamorphosis that few persons not exceeding fifty years of age have
ever taken a long road journey in their lives. Road travelling is as
much a thing of the past as "pigtails," and if it were not for the few
coaches running in the summer from Hatchett's and other places in
London, the shape of such a thing would be forgotten by most people.
As it is, those give but a slight notion of what a long coach used to
look like when commencing its journey of 150 or 200 miles.
It would be looked upon as a curiosity if one was placed in the Baker
Street Bazaar, or some other suitable site, loaded as they used to be.
Probably there are not twenty of us now living who have put one of
these loads on with our own hands, or would have any idea of how to
build it up.
[Illustration: THE EXTRA COACH AT CHRISTMAS.]
The loads, especially about Christmas, on the night coaches used to be
"prodigious," as Dominie Samson would have said. An inexperienced eye
would almost expect the coach to collapse under them when the load was
of such dimensions that the ordinary luggage strap was not long enough
to span the pile, but had to be supplemented with what was called a
lengthening strap, which consisted of a strap about four feet long,
with a buckle at one end, and the whole length perforated with holes.
Nothing saved them but their admirable construction, which combined
the greatest strength with moderate weight; those built to carry the
heaviest loads seldom exceeding a ton or twenty-two hundredweight, and
the perch being short was favourable to draught. For a great many
years they were nearly all perch coaches, as it was pretty well the
universal opinion that under-spring coaches were not so steady or well
calculated for heavy loads and high speed.
This opinion, however, was in later years considerably modified, and
most coachmen that I was acquainted with had arrived at a conclusion
favourable to the under-spring build. I can say this for them, that
the fastest work I ever did was on one of them, and also that the
heaviest load I ever drove was on another of that description; and I
cannot but "speak well of the bridges which carried me safe over," for
they performed their journeys admirably. They certainly possess the
advantage of weighing two or three hundredweight less, and, from the
splinter-bar being higher, the line of draught from the wheel horses'
collars to the roller bolts is straighter. Though they are lighter,
they lose nothing in strength when originally so constructed; but I
would not recommend anyone to convert a perch coach, as I once did so
with the result that the front boot came away from the body.