Читать книгу Settlers and Convicts - Alexander Harris - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Magistrates' law in former times—Dark doings at iron-gangs—Military justices—A flogging-scene at Bathurst Gaol—Flogging to extort confession—A prosecutor and judge all in one

BEFORE proceeding with the account of my personal adventures, it is necessary that I should inform the reader of a circumstance which gave me my first and ineradicable impression of the system of convict discipline maintained in the Australian colonies at this time. A gentleman, through misfortunes reduced to the inferior condition of a farm overseer, who had originally come to the colony in possession of a very good property, breakfasted in the same room with me at the Australian hotel. As I was looking over the police reports in 'The Sydney Gazette,' our conversation was led to the subject of convict discipline, and then took in substance the following turn. This gentleman is still alive, though very aged. His character for perseverance and integrity obtained for him, about three years subsequently, a lucrative situation, and finally extensive credit, from his employer, a Sydney merchant. These advantages he so well husbanded that he will in all probability leave his family in independence. My knowledge of the man therefore would put it out of my power to doubt the trustworthiness of his statements, if even I had met no confirmation of them from my own observations.

"You may wonder, my lad," he said, "at what you read about the treatment of prisoners: most people do when they first come. But you'll see things yet up the country that these Sydney doings are only child's play by the side of."

"You don't mean to say," I replied, "that I shall meet with anything worse than this case I have just read? Here is an offence called by three different names; three several charges are made upon it; three several trials, three several sentences, and three several punishments following! A man gets drunk, has his clothes stolen, and is afraid to go home to his master: he is tried first for drunkenness, a second time for making away with his clothing, and a third time for absconding. His sentence is in sum total one hundred lashes, which with the cat-o'-nine-tails is really nine hundred lashes."

"Why, I have known the same act to be called by five different names, and five sentences passed upon the prisoner for it. It was in the case of a government servant belonging to a magistrate near me. The man, as in the case you read, had got a drop of liquor from a travelling dealer; his master's son, a very pert young fellow, began to curse at and threaten him; the man retorted; a constable was sent for, whom he knocked down and escaped from. He then ran off into the bush, taking with him, as he passed his own hut, about three parts of a cake he had by him ready baked. The young fellow prosecuted him for drunkenness, insolence, theft (the piece of bread, for rations are considered the master's till used), and bushranging; and then the magistrate made the constable swear the assault against him. He got twenty-five lashes for drunkenness, twentyfive for insolence, fifty for bushranging, six months to an iron-gang* for stealing the cake, and three months for assaulting a peace-officer in the execution of his duty. The flogging he got before going to the iron-gang frightened him; and on receiving sentence for some trivial offence at the iron-gang, he escaped before the punishment was inflicted, took the bush, joined a gang of bushrangers who had arms, committed several robberies with them, was taken with arms in his hands, and hanged. The man was a quiet, hardworking, honest fellow; but he could not stand flogging, and he was fond of liquor. The crime he was sent here for he committed when drunk, and it was perhaps the only one he had to answer for. That man was murdered! And so hundreds upon hundreds have been, and are being, every year in this cursed country. But the system is not now so bad as it used to be. Since Dr. Wardle and young Mr. Wentworth came out, and began to look after the government and the magistrates, there are not such dreadful doings as there used to be in former times."

[* Prisoners working in irons.]

"How long have you been here then, Sir?" I inquired.

"Nearly a score years. I have seen a good deal with my own eyes, and that makes me believe other things that I have only been told. And then, again, I have often heard men, after they became free, throw into the teeth of overseers the usage they had received at their hands. I recollect once, in coming over the Blue Mountains, it set in to rain very hard, and by the time we got to the punt at Richmond the Hawkesbury River was up, and there was no getting over. Nearly a hundred of us were gathered together about the public-house at the ferry. And here one of the labouring men recognised an overseer who had been over him at the lime-burners' gang at Newcastle. The overseer stoutly contended that he was not the person; but it was of no use. I made sure he'd have got his brains knocked out, and no doubt he would, had not the landlord shut him up in his room."

"What had he done?"

"Oh, nothing more than the other overseers, so far as I heard; but certainly that was enough, when we come to consider; for men are men, and not beasts, let'em be ever such thieves. From all accounts there were some dark doings at that lime-burners' gang. I have heard from twenty sources that Red ——, the overseer, was known to have killed a man with a handspike, and was never tried for it. The commandant was as big a brute as he was, and so was not likely to bring him to justice; and the men were all afraid to say anything. It is a well-known fact that they used to ronse up the poor half-starved skeletons of fellows at midnight to load lime, when the boats happened to come in with a night's tide. They used to have to carry the baskets of unslacked lime a great way into the water in loading the boats; by which means many of their backs were raw, and eaten into holes. But that made no difference. The work they must do. The shed they had to sleep in was close by the water-side; and the slabs were so wide apart that you might almost have galloped a horse through. Many of them, at one time, had scarcely a rag of clothes; nothing more indeed than some piece of an old red shirt that they tied round their middle, and neither bed nor blanket. A man who worked for me told me that such was his case for a long time; and that for warmth they used to gather sea-weed off the beach, and spread it some inches thick on the floor of the hut; and numbers of them would turn in together, covering themselves over with it, and getting warmth from the fermentation of the sea-weed: you may say, in short, they buried themselves in a dunghill to keep warm."

"Still, even this was better than so much flogging."

"Ha! but you must understand that the flogging went on full swing along with all this. But the fact is, flogging in this country is such a common thing that nobody thinks anything of it. I have seen young children practising on a tree, as children in England play at horses. I have now got a man under me who received 2600 lashes with the cat in about five years, and his worst crime was insolence to his overseer. The fact is, the man is a red-hot Tipperary man; and when his blood gets up, you could not make him hold his tongue if you were to threaten to hang him. Since I have had him he has never had a lash, just because I take no notice of what he says. The consequence is, there is nothing in the world that man would not do for me if be could. Some years ago, a little way up the country, a man actually died under the eat: of course it was all quietly hushed up."

"But do you really think such things can be true?"

"Why, of course, when I see the very like of them under my own eyes. For instance, there is a lieutenant (a mere boy), who is now magistrate over a gang that are making a road not three miles from the farm where I stop. Whenever this lad means to send a man to the lock-up for the night, he makes the lock-up keeper start three or four buckets of water over the floor, under pretence of keeping it free from vermin, but really for the purpose of tormenting the culprit by compelling him to walk about all night; and then he will have the poor wretch tied up to the triangles the first thing in the morning, before breakfast. This I know to be true, because I have it from the lock-up keeper himself. The fact is that officers, and especially young officers, when made magistrates, get irritated at the hardihood of a class of men whom they have made up their minds to despise; and the cat being a soldier's natural revenge, they fly to it directly. It is as common, you know, for one soldier to revenge himself upon another by getting him flogged, as it is for women, when they fight, to pull one another's hair."

"One can hardly conceive such things possible."

"Ah! you must not judge of this country by England. What I tell you now, I tell you on the authority of my own eyes. I was sent for to Bathurst Court-house to identify a man supposed to have taken the bush from the farm I have charge of. I had to go past the triangles, where they had been flogging incessantly for hours. I saw a man walk across the yard with the blood that had run from his lacerated flesh squashing out of his shoes at every step he took. A dog was licking the blood off the triangles, and the ants were carrying away great pieces of human flesh that the lash had scattered about the ground. The scourger's foot had worn a deep hole in the ground by the violence with which he whirled himself round on it to strike the quivering and wealed back, out of which stuck the sinews, white, ragged, and swollen. The infliction was a hundred lashes, at about half-minute time, so as to extend the punishment through nearly an hour. The day was hot enough to overcome a man merely standing that length of time in the sun; and this was going on in the full blaze of it. However, they had a pair of scourgers, who gave one another spell and spell about; and they were bespattered with blood like a couple of butchers. I tell you this on the authority of my own eyes. It brought my heart into my mouth."

"Well, I can only say that, for disgusting brutality, it exceeds anything I ever yet heard of as practised under the sanction of British law."

"It is nevertheless true; and many much worse things than any I have yet enumerated are true. For instance, there are some magistrates who habitually flog to compel men to confess anything of which they suppose them guilty. I heard of a case only the other day where a man had several 'fifties,' on several consecutive days, to compel him to confess a robbery. No doubt in many such instances there is a sort of certainty of the man's guilt; but then again there have been very many cases where it turned out that the suspicion was totally unfounded. I know of several poor creatures who have been entirely crippled for life by these merciless floggings; and, which is worst of all, oftentimes for offences which no considerate and right-thinking person would dream of considering heinous and unpardonable. I will give one instance more of the summary jurisdiction of magistrates. The commandant at ——, a police station near my hut, was walking out one summer-evening about twelve months ago with his lady; he was in plain clothes, all but his military foraging cap, an article of dress that many private gentlemen wear. Two men accosted him, and asked the way to a farm in the vicinity, to whose owner they had been assigned. Considering they did not address him quite respectfully enough, he gave them some sharp language, which they returned: here-upon, but still without telling them that he was a magistrate, he laid hands on one of them, who immediately tripped him up. On this his lady began to shout out most lustily, which brought the soldiers of the party under his command out of their hut close by. The men were presently seized and confined. The next day the worshipful peace-breaker deposed against them himself, before himself, pronounced them guilty himself, and sentenced them himself to twelve months at an iron-gang."

At the present stage of my narrative I shall make no remarks of my own upon this subject: proper opportunities for such remarks will, I am sorry to say, but too frequently present themselves to allow the subject to be forgotten.