SOCIETY AT BOTANY BAY. 19 only of humanity, he has several wives, and is filled every day with rum and kangaroo. This, of course, is not lost upon the shopboard; and, for the saving of fifteen pence per day, the foundation of many criminal tailors is laid.-[E. R. 1803.] MORAL EQUALITY OF MAN. ALL honest men, whether counts or cobblers, are of the same rank, if classed by moral distinctions.- [E. R. 1823.] SOCIETY AT BOTANY BAY. Ir is seldom, we suspect, that absolute dunces go to the Bay, but commonly men of active minds, and considerable talents in their various lines who have not learnt, indeed, the art of self-discipline and control, but who are sent to learn it in the bitter school of adversity. And when this medicine produces its proper effect when sufficient time has been given to show a thorough change in character and disposition a young colony really cannot afford to dispense with the services. of any person of superior talents. Activity, resolution, and acuteness, are of such immense importance in the hard circumstances of a new State, that they must be eagerly caught at, and employed as soon as they are discovered. Though all may not be quite so unobjectionable as could be wished "Res dura, et regni novitas me talia cogunt To sit down to dinner with men who have not been tried for their lives is a luxury which cannot be enjoyed in such a country. It is entirely out of the question 20 DINNERS AT SYDNEY. - TRANSPORTATION. and persons so dainty, and so truly admirable, had better settle at Clapham Common than at Botany Bay. Mr. Marsden, who has no happiness from six o'clock Monday morning, till the same hour the week following, will not meet pardoned convicts in society. We have no doubt Mr. Marsden is a very respectable clergyman; but is there not something very different from this in the Gospel? The most resolute and inflexible persons in the rejection of pardoned convicts were some of the marching regiments stationed at Botany Bay-men, of course, who had uniformly shunned, in the Old World, the society of gamesters, prostitutes, drunkards, and blasphemers who had ruined no tailors, corrupted no wives, and had entitled themselves by a long course of solemnity and decorum, to indulge in all the insolence of purity and virtue. [E. R. 1823.] DINNERS AT SYDNEY. AN officer, invited to dinner by the Governor, cannot refuse, unless in case of sickness. This is the most complete tyranny we ever heard of. If the officer comes out to his duty at the proper minute, with his proper number of buttons and epaulettes, what matters it to the Governor or any body else, where he dines? He may as well be ordered what to eat, as where to dine be confined to the upper or under side of the meatbe denied gravy, or refused melted butter. But there is no end to the small tyranny and puerile vexations of a military life. [E. R. 1803.] TRANSPORTATION. MEN are governed by words; and under the infamous term convict, are comprehended crimes of the most dif. TRANSPORTATION. 21 ferent degrees and species of guilt. One man is transported for stealing three hams and a pot of sausages; and in the next berth to him on board the transport is a young surgeon, who has been engaged in the mutiny at the Nore; the third man is for extorting money; the fourth was in a respectable situation of life at the time of the Irish Rebellion, and was so ill read in history as to imagine that Ireland had been ill-treated by England, and so bad a reasoner as to suppose, that nine Catholics ought not to pay tithes to one Protestant. Then comes a man who set his house on fire, to cheat the Phoenix Office; and, lastly, that most glaring of all human villains, a poacher, driven from Europe, wife and child, by thirty lords of manors, at the Quarter Sessions, for killing a partridge. Now, all these are crimes no doubt -particularly the last; but they are surely crimes of very different degrees of intensity, to which different degrees of contempt and horror are attached - and from which those who have committed them may, by subsequent morality, emancipate themselves, with different degrees of difficulty, and with more or less of success. A warrant granted by a reformed bacon-stealer would be absurd; but there is hardly any reason why a foolish hot-brained young blockhead, who chose to favour the mutineers at the Nore when he was sixteen years of age, may not make a very loyal subject, and a very respectable and respected magistrate, when he is forty years of age, and has cast his Jacobine teeth, and fallen into the practical jobbing and loyal baseness which so commonly developes itself about that period of life. Is it to be believed that a governor, placed over a land of convicts, and capable of guarding his limbs from any sudden collision with odometrous stones, or vertical posts of direction, should make no distinction between 22 22 A VOYAGE TO BOTANY BAY. the simple convict and the double and treble convictthe man of three juries, who has three times appeared at the Bailey, trilarcenous-three times driven over the seas?-[E. R. 1823.] TRANSPORT SHIPS. We were a little surprised at the scanty limits allowed to convicts for sleeping on board the transports. Mr. Bigge (of whose sense and humanity we really have not the slightest doubt) states eighteen inches to be quite sufficient twice the length of a small sheet of letter paper. The printer's devil, who carries our works to the press, informs us, that the allowance to the demons of the type is double foolscap length, or twenty-four inches. The great city upholsterers generally consider six feet as barely sufficient for a person rising in business, and assisting occasionally at official banquets. — [E. R. 1823.] A VOYAGE TO BOTANY BAY. WHILE a convict vessel lay at anchor, about to sail, a boat from shore reached the ship, and from it stepped a clerk from the Bank of England. The convicts felicitated themselves upon the acquisition of so gentlemanlike a companion; but it soon turned out that the visitant had no intention of making so long a voyage. Finding that they were not to have the pleasure of his company, the convicts very naturally thought of picking his pockets; the necessity of which professional measure was prevented by a speedy distribution of their contents. Forth from his bill-case this votary of Plutus drew his nitid Newlands; all the forgers and utterers were mustered on deck; and to each of them was well and truly paid into his hand a ARCHITECTURE AT BOTANY BAY. 23 five pound note: less acceptable, perhaps, than if privately removed from the person, but still joyfully received. This was well intended on the part of the directors: but the consequences it is scarcely necessary to enumerate; a large stock of rum was immediately laid in from the circumambient slop boats; and the materials of constant intoxication secured for the rest of the voyage.-[E. R. 1823.] ARCHITECTURE AT BOTANY BAY. ORNAMENTAL architecture in Botany Bay! How it could enter into the head of any human being to adorn public buildings at the Bay, or to aim at any other architectural purpose but the exclusion of wind and rain, we are utterly at a loss to conceive. Such an expense is not only lamentable for the waste of property it makes in the particular instance, but because it destroys that guarantee of sound sense which the Government at home must require in those who preside over distant colonies. A man who thinks of pillars and pilasters, when half the colony are wet through for want of any covering at all, cannot be a wise or prudent person. He seems to be ignorant, that the prevention of rheumatism in all young colonies is a much more important object than the gratification of taste, or the display of skill.— [E. R. 1823.] COLONIAL BREWERIES. WHAT two ideas are more inseparable than Beer and Britannia?-what event more awfully important to an English colony, than the erection of its first brewhouse?-[E. R. 1823.] |