with convicts, of whom the greater number were in a dying state: two hundred and sixty-one had died at sea; two hundred were brought on shore in the last stage of exhaustion, from scurvy, dysentery, fever, bad food, and foul air. In order to save the parties in charge trouble, the men had been chained together in rows, and confined below nearly throughout the voyage. On board one of the ships, the Neptune, several of the prisoners had died in irons; their companions concealed their deaths in order to share the extra allowance of provisions, and so slight was the supervision, that the horrible fact was not discovered until betrayed by the offensiveness of putrefaction.
Many years elapsed before a system was adopted by which the preservation of the health of prisoners and troops became the interest as well as the duty of the surgeon in charge. At that time the more and the sooner prisoners died the more profitable the transaction was to the contractor; so they commonly died like rotten sheep.
Those were the days in which transportation really was a punishment almost as terrible as death. New South Wales was then an awful over-sea gaol, offering no prospect of advancement or liberation; where the will of a prisoner-turnkey was law, where death was the punishment of the most trifling crimes, and a reproachful look was punished with the lash.
A few days before the four ships landed one thousand male and two hundred and fifty female convicts, the arrival of one storeship, the Justinian, saved the whole colony from perishing of famine. The Guardian, laden with a great supply of provisions, stores, and live stock, under the command of Riou, "the gallant good Riou," of Campbell's "Battle of Copenhagen," had struck on an iceberg, and, after almost all the cargo had been thrown overboard, was with difficulty carried into the Cape of Good Hope. For weeks before the arrival of the Justinian, the whole settlement had been put on short allowance, The governor, says Collins, had thrown his store, 300 lbs. of flour, into the common stock. The weekly allowance of each prisoner had been reduced to 2 lbs. of salt pork, 2½ lbs. of flour, and 2 lbs. of rice. "Labour stood suspended for want of energy to proceed; the countenances of the people plainly bespoke the hardships they underwent." "Garden-robbing became prevalent; the most severe measures were employed to repress the crime caused by, and yet increasing, the effects of the scarcity, but in vain. A man caught by the clergyman stealing potatoes was sentenced to three hundred lashes, to have his rations of flour stopped for six months, and to be chained for that period to two others caught robbing the governor's garden; but this and many similar
