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The Book of the Bush

by George Dunderdale · English · Gutenberg #16349 · 661,825 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Book of the Bush

Author: George Dunderdale

Illustrator: J. Macfarlane


        
Release date: July 24, 2005 [eBook #16349]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16349

Credits: Produced by Amy Zellmer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOOK OF THE BUSH ***




Produced by Amy Zellmer





THE

BOOK OF THE BUSH

CONTAINING

MANY TRUTHFUL SKETCHES OF THE
EARLY COLONIAL LIFE OF SQUATTERS, WHALERS,
CONVICTS, DIGGERS, AND OTHERS
WHO LEFT THEIR NATIVE LAND AND
NEVER RETURNED.


By GEORGE DUNDERDALE.


ILLUSTRATED BY J. MACFARLANE.


LONDON:
WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED,
WARWICK HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE, E.C.
NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE.


[ILLUSTRATION 1]





CONTENTS.

_____________

PURGING OUT THE OLD LEAVEN.

FIRST SETTLERS.

WRECK OF THE CONVICT SHIP "NEVA" ON KING'S ISLAND.

DISCOVERY OF THE RIVER HOPKINS.

WHALING.

OUT WEST IN 1849.

AMONG THE DIGGERS IN 1853.

A BUSH HERMIT.

THE TWO SHEPHERDS.

A VALIANT POLICE-SERGEANT.

WHITE SLAVERS.

THE GOVERNMENT STROKE.

ON THE NINETY-MILE.

GIPPSLAND PIONEERS.

THE ISLE OF BLASTED HOPES.

GLENGARRY IN GIPPSLAND.

WANTED, A CATTLE MARKET.

TWO SPECIAL SURVEYS.

HOW GOVERNMENT CAME TO GIPPSLAND.

GIPPSLAND UNDER THE LAW.

UNTIL THE GOLDEN DAWN.

A NEW RUSH.

GIPPSLAND AFTER THIRTY YEARS.

GOVERNMENT OFFICERS IN THE BUSH.

SEAL ISLANDS AND SEALERS.

A HAPPY CONVICT.


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

ILLUSTRATION 1.
"Joey's out."

ILLUSTRATION 2.
"I'll show you who is master aboard this ship."

ILLUSTRATION 3.
"You stockman, Frank, come off that horse."

ILLUSTRATION 4.
"The biggest bully apropriated the belle of the ball."

* * *


"The best article in the March (1893) number of the 'Austral Light'
is a pen picture by Mr. George Dunderdale of the famous Ninety-Mile
Beach, the vast stretch of white and lonely sea-sands, which forms
the sea-barrier of Gippsland."--'Review of Reviews', March, 1893.

      *     *     *


"The most interesting article in 'Austral Light' is one on Gippsland
pioneers, by George Dunderdale."--'Review of Reviews', March, 1895.

*     *     *

"In 'Austral Light' for September Mr. George Dunderdale contributes,
under the title of 'Gippsland under the Law,' one of those realistic
sketches of early colonial life which only he can write."--'Review
of Reviews', September, 1895.

* * *


THE BOOK OF THE BUSH.

---------------------

PURGING OUT THE OLD LEAVEN.

While the world was young, nations could be founded peaceably.  There
was plenty of unoccupied country, and when two neighbouring
patriarchs found their flocks were becoming too numerous for the
pasture, one said to the other:  "Let there be no quarrel, I pray,
between thee and me; the whole earth is between us, and the land is
watered as the garden of Paradise.  If thou wilt go to the east, I
will go to the west; or if thou wilt go to the west, I will go to the
east."  So they parted in peace.

But when the human flood covered the whole earth, the surplus
population was disposed of by war, famine, or pestilence.  Death is
the effectual remedy for over-population.  Heroes arose who had no
conscientious scruples.  They skinned their natives alive, or
crucified them.  They were then adored as demi-gods, and placed among
the stars.

Pious Aeneas was the pattern of a good emigrant in the early times,
but with all his piety he did some things that ought to have made his
favouring deities blush, if possible.

America, when discovered for the last of many times, was assigned by
the Pope to the Spaniards and Portuguese.  The natives were not
consulted; but they were not exterminated; their descendants occupy
the land to the present day.

England claimed a share in the new continent, and it was parcelled
out to merchant adventurers by royal charter.  The adventures of
these merchants were various, but they held on to the land.

New England was given to the Puritans by no earthly potentate, their
title came direct from heaven.  Increase Mather said:  "The Lord God
has given us for a rightful possession the land of the Heathen People
amongst whom we dwell;" and where are the Heathen People now?

Australia was not given to us either by the Pope or by the Lord.  We
took this land, as we have taken many other lands, for our own
benefit, without asking leave of either heaven or earth.  A
continent, with its adjacent islands, was practically vacant,
inhabited only by that unearthly animal the kangaroo, and by black
savages, who had not even invented the bow and arrow, never built a
hut or cultivated a yard of land.  Such people could show no valid
claim to land or life, so we confiscated both.  The British Islands
were infested with criminals from the earliest times.  Our ancestors
were all pirates, and we have inherited from them a lurking taint in
our blood, which is continually impelling us to steal something or
kill somebody.  How to get rid of this taint was a problem which our
statesmen found it difficult to solve.  In times of war they
mitigated the evil by filling the ranks of our armies from the gaols,
and manning our navies by the help of the press-gang, but in times of
peace the scum of society was always increasing.

At last a great idea arose in the mind of England.  Little was known
of New Holland, except that it was large enough to harbour all the
criminals of Great Britain and the rest of the population if
necessary.  Why not transport all convicts, separate the chaff from
the wheat, and purge out the old leaven?  By expelling all the
wicked, England would become the model of virtue to all nations.

So the system was established.  Old ships were chartered and filled
with the contents of the gaols.  If the ships were not quite
seaworthy it did not matter much.  The voyage was sure to be a
success; the passengers might never reach land, but in any case they
would never return.  On the vessels conveying male convicts, some
soldiers and officers were embarked to keep order and put down
mutiny.  Order was kept with the lash, and mutiny was put down with
the musket.  On the ships conveying women there were no soldiers, but
an extra half-crew was engaged.  These men were called "Shilling-a-month"
men, because they had agreed to work for one shilling a month for the
privilege of being allowed to remain in Sydney.  If the voyage lasted
twelve months they would thus have the sum of twelve shillings with
which to commence making their fortunes in the Southern Hemisphere.
But the "Shilling-a-month" man, as a matter of fact, was not worth
one cent the day after he landed, and he had to begin life once more
barefoot, like a new-born babe.

The seamen's food on board these transports was bad and scanty,
consisting of live biscuit, salt horse, Yankee pork, and Scotch
coffee.  The Scotch coffee was made by steeping burnt biscuit in
boiling water to make it strong.  The convicts' breakfast consisted
of oatmeal porridge, and the hungry seamen used to crowd round the
galley every morning to steal some of it.  It would be impossible for
a nation ever to become virtuous and rich if its seamen and convicts
were reared in luxury and encouraged in habits of extravagance.

When the transport cast anchor in the beautiful harbour of Port
Jackson, the ship's blacksmith was called out of his bunk at
midnight.  It was his duty to rivet chains on the legs of the
second-sentence men--the twice convicted.  They had been told on
the voyage that they would have an island all to themselves, where
they would not be annoyed by the contemptuous looks and bitter jibes
of better men.  All night long the blacksmith plied his hammer and
made the ship resound with the rattling chains and ringing manacles,
as he fastened them well on the legs of the prisoners.  At dawn of
day, chained together in pairs, they were landed on Goat Island;
that was the bright little isle--their promised land.  Every
morning they were taken over in boats to the town of Sydney, where
they had to work as scavengers and road-makers until four o'clock in
the afternoon.  They turned out their toes, and shuffled their feet
along the ground, dragging their chains after them.  The police could
always identify a man who had been a chain-gang prisoner during the
rest of his life by the way he dragged his feet after him.

In their leisure hours these convicts were allowed to make
cabbage-tree hats.  They sold them for about a shilling each, and the
shop-keepers resold them for a dollar. They were the best hats ever
worn in the Sunny South, and were nearly indestructible; one hat
would last a lifetime, but for that reason they were bad for trade,
and became unfashionable.

The rest of the transported were assigned as servants to those
willing to give them food and clothing without wages.  The free men
were thus enabled to grow rich by the labours of the bondmen--vice
was punished and virtue rewarded.

Until all the passengers had been disposed of, sentinels were posted
on the deck of the transport with orders to shoot anyone who
attempted to escape.  But when all the convicts were gone, Jack was
sorely tempted to follow the shilling-a-month men.  He quietly
slipped ashore, hurried off to Botany Bay, and lived in retirement
until his ship had left Port Jackson.  He then returned to Sydney,
penniless and barefoot, and began to look for a berth.  At the Rum
Puncheon wharf he found a shilling-a-month man already installed as
cook on a colonial schooner.  He was invited to breakfast, and was
astonished and delighted with the luxuries lavished on the colonial
seaman.  He had fresh beef, fresh bread, good biscuit, tea, coffee,
and vegetables, and three pounds a month wages.  There was a vacancy
on the schooner for an able seaman, and Jack filled it.  He then
registered a solemn oath that he would "never go back to England no
more," and kept it.

Some kind of Government was necessary, and, as the first inhabitants
were criminals, the colony was ruled like a gaol, the Governor being
head gaoler.  His officers were mostly men who had been trained in
the army and navy.  They were all poor and needy, for no gentleman of
wealth and position would ever have taken office in such a community.
They came to make a living, and when free immigrants arrived and
trade began to flourish, it was found that the one really valuable
commodity was rum, and by rum the officers grew rich.  In course of
time the country was divided into districts, about thirty or
thirty-five in number, over each of which an officer presided as
police magistrate, with a clerk and staff of constables, one of whom
was official flogger, always a convict promoted to the billet for
merit and good behaviour.

New Holland soon became an organised pandemonium, such as the world
had never known since Sodom and Gomorrah disappeared in the Dead Sea,
and the details of its history cannot be written.  To mitigate its
horrors the worst of the criminals were transported to Norfolk
Island.  The Governor there had not the power to inflict capital
punishment, and the convicts began to murder one another in order to
obtain a brief change of misery, and the pleasure of a sea voyage
before they could be tried and hanged in Sydney.  A branch
pandemonium was also established in Van Diemen's Land.  This system
was upheld by England for about fifty years.

The 'Britannia', a convict ship, the property of Messrs. Enderby &
Sons, arrived at Sydney on October 14th, 1791, and reported that vast
numbers of sperm whales were seen after doubling the south-west cape
of Van Diemen's Land.  Whaling vessels were fitted out in Sydney, and
it was found that money could be made by oil and whalebone as well as
by rum.  Sealing was also pursued in small vessels, which were often
lost, and sealers lie buried in all the islands of the southern seas,
many of them having a story to tell, but no story-teller.

Whalers, runaway seamen, shilling-a-month men, and escaped convicts
were the earliest settlers in New Zealand, and were the first to make
peaceful intercourse with the Maoris possible.  They built themselves
houses with wooden frames, covered with reeds and rushes, learned to
converse in the native language, and became family men.  They were
most of them English and Americans, with a few Frenchmen.  They loved
freedom, and preferred Maori customs, and the risk of being eaten, to
the odious supervision of the English Government.  The individual
white man in those days was always welcome, especially if he brought
with him guns, ammunition, tomahawks, and hoes.  It was by these
articles that he first won the respect and admiration of the native.
If the visitor was a "pakeha tutua," a poor European, he might
receive hospitality for a time, in the hope that some profit might be
made out of him.  But the Maori was a poor man also, with a great
appetite, and when it became evident that the guest was no better
than a pauper, and could not otherwise pay for his board, the Maori
sat on the ground, meditating and watching, until his teeth watered,
and at last he attached the body and baked it.

In 1814 the Church Missionary Society sent labourers to the distant
vineyard to introduce Christianity, and to instruct the natives in
the rights of property.  The first native protector of Christianity
and letters was Hongi Hika, a great warrior of the Ngapuhi nation, in
the North Island.  He was born in 1777, and voyaging to Sydney in
1814, he became the guest of the Rev. Mr. Marsden.  In 1819 the rev.
gentleman bought his settlement at Kerikeri from Hongi Hika, the
price being forty-eight axes.  The area of the settlement was
thirteen thousand acres.  The land was excellent, well watered, in a
fine situation, and near a good harbour.  Hongi next went to England
with the Rev. Mr. Kendall to see King George, who was at that time in
matrimonial trouble.  Hongi was surprised to hear that the King had
to ask permission of anyone to dispose of his wife Caroline.  He said
he had five wives at home, and he could clear off the whole of them
if he liked without troubling anybody.  He received valuable presents
in London, which he brought back to Sydney, and sold for three
hundred muskets and ammunition.  The year 1822 was the most glorious
time of his life.  He raised an army of one thousand men, three
hundred of whom had been taught the use of his muskets.  The
neighbouring tribes had no guns.  He went up the Tamar, and at Totara
slew five hundred men, and baked and ate three hundred of them.  On
the Waipa he killed fourteen hundred warriors out of a garrison of
four thousand, and then returned home with crowds of slaves.  The
other tribes began to buy guns from the traders as fast as they were
able to pay for them with flax; and in 1827, at Wangaroa, a bullet
went through Hongi's lungs, leaving a hole in his back through which
he used to whistle to entertain his friends; but he died of the wound
fifteen months afterwards.

Other men, both clerical and lay, followed the lead of the Rev. Mr.
Marsden.  In 1821 Mr. Fairbairn bought four hundred acres for ten
pounds worth of trade.  Baron de Thierry bought forty thousand acres
on the Hokianga River for thirty-six axes.  From 1825 to 1829 one
million acres were bought by settlers and merchants.  Twenty-five
thousand acres were bought at the Bay of Islands and Hokianga in five
years, seventeen thousand of which belonged to the missionaries.  In
1835 the Rev. Henry Williams made a bold offer for the unsold
country.  He forwarded a deed of trust to the governor of New South
Wales, requesting that the missionaries should be appointed trustees
for the natives for the remainder of their lands, "to preserve them
from the intrigues of designing men."  Before the year 1839, twenty
millions of acres had been purchased by the clergy and laity for a
few guns, axes, and other trifles, and the Maoris were fast wasting
their inheritance.  But the titles were often imperfect.  When a man
had bought a few hundreds of acres for six axes and a gun, and had
paid the price agreed on to the owner, another owner would come and
claim the land because his grandfather had been killed on it.  He sat
down before the settler's house and waited for payment, and whether
he got any or not he came at regular intervals during the rest of his
life and sat down before the door with his spear and mere* by his
side waiting for more purchase money.

[Footnote] *Axe made of greenstone.

Some honest people in England heard of the good things to be had in
New Zealand, formed a company, and landed near the mouth of the
Hokianga River to form a settlement.  The natives happened to be at
war, and were performing a war dance.  The new company looked on
while the natives danced, and then all desire for land in New Zealand
faded from their hearts.  They returned on board their ship and
sailed away, having wasted twenty thousand pounds.  Such people
should remain in their native country.  Your true rover, lay or
clerical, comes for something or other, and stays to get it, or dies.

After twenty years of labour, and an expenditure of two hundred
thousand pounds, the missionaries claimed only two thousand converts,
and these were Christians merely in name.  In 1825 the Rev. Henry
Williams said the natives were as insensible to redemption as brutes,
and in 1829 the Methodists in England contemplated withdrawing their
establishment for want of success.

The Catholic Bishop Pompallier, with two priests, landed at Hokianga
on January 10th, 1838, and took up his residence at the house of an
Irish Catholic named Poynton, who was engaged in the timber trade.
Poynton was a truly religious man, who had been living for some time
among the Maoris.  He was desirous of marrying the daughter of a
chief, but he wished that she should be a Christian, and, as there
was no Catholic priest nearer than Sydney, he sailed to that port
with the chief and his daughter, called on Bishop Polding, and
informed him of the object of his visit.  A course of instruction was
given to the father and daughter, Poynton acting as interpreter; they
were baptised, and the marriage took place.  After the lapse of sixty
years their descendents were found to have retained the faith, and
were living as good practical Catholics.

Bishop Pompallier celebrated his first Mass on January 13th, 1838,
and the news of his arrival was soon noised abroad and discussed.
The Methodist missionaries considered the action of the bishop as an
unwarrantable intrusion on their domain, and, being Protestants, they
resolved to protest.  This they did through the medium of thirty
native warriors, who appeared before Poynton's house early in the
morning of January 22nd, when the bishop was preparing to say Mass.
The chief made a speech.  He said the bishop and his priests were
enemies to the Maoris.  They were not traders, for they had brought
no guns, no axes.  They had been sent by a foreign chief (the Pope)
to deprive the Maoris of their land, and make them change their old
customs.  Therefore he and his warriors had come to break the
crucifix, and the ornaments of the altar, and to take the bishop and
his priests to the river.

The bishop replied that, although he was not a trader, he had come as
a friend, and did not wish to deprive them of their country or
anything belonging to them.  He asked them to wait a while, and if
they could find him doing the least injury to anyone they could take
him to the river.  The warriors agreed to wait, and went away.

Next day the bishop went further up the river to Wherinaki, where
Laming, a pakeha Maori, resided.  Laming was an Irish-Protestant who
had great influence with his tribe, which was numerous and warlike.
He was admired by the natives for his strength and courage.  He was
six feet three inches in height, as nimble and spry as a cat, and as
long-winded as a coyote.  His father-in-law was a famous warrior
named Lizard Skin.  His religion was that of the Church of England,
and he persuaded his tribe to profess it.  He told them that the
Protestant God was stronger than the Catholic God worshipped by his
fellow countryman, Poynton.  In after years, when his converts made
cartridges of their Bibles and rejected Christianity, he was forced
to confess that their religion was of this world only.  They prayed
that they might be brave in battle, and that their enemies might be
filled with fear.

Laming's Christian zeal did not induce him to forget the duties of
hospitality.  He received the bishop as a friend, and the Europeans
round Tatura and other places came regularly to Mass.  During the
first six years of the mission, twenty thousand Maoris either had
been baptised or were being prepared for baptism.

Previous to the year 1828 some flax had been brought to Sydney from
New Zealand, and manufactured into every species of cordage except
cables, and it was found to be stronger than Baltic hemp.  On account
of the ferocious character of the Maoris, the Sydney Government sent
several vessels to open communication with the tribes before
permitting private individuals to embark in the trade.  The ferocity
attributed to the natives was not so much a part of their personal
character as the result of their habits and beliefs.  They were
remarkable for great energy of mind and body, foresight, and
self-denial.  Their average height was about five feet six inches,
but men from six feet to six feet six inches were not uncommon.
Their point of honour was revenge, and a man who remained quiet while
the manes of his friend or relation were unappeased by the blood of
the enemy, would be dishonoured among his tribe.

The Maoris were in reality loath to fight, and war was never begun
until after long talk.  Their object was to exterminate or enslave
their enemies, and they ate the slain.

Before commencing hostilities, the warriors endeavoured to put fear
into the hearts of their opponents by enumerating the names of the
fathers, uncles, or brothers of those in the hostile tribe whom they
had slain and eaten in former battles.  When a fight was progressing
the women looked on from the rear.  They were naked to the waist, and
wore skirts of matting made from flax.  As soon as a head was cut off
they ran forward, and brought it away, leaving the body on the
ground.  If many were slain it was sometimes difficult to discover to
what body each head had belonged, whether it was that of a friend or
a foe, and it was lawful to bake the bodies of enemies only.

Notwithstanding their peculiar customs, one who knew the Maoris well
described them as the most patient, equable, forgiving people in the
world, but full of superstitious ideas, which foreigners could not
understand.

They believed that everything found on their coast was sent to them
by the sea god, Taniwa, and they therefore endeavoured to take
possession of the blessings conferred on them by seizing the first
ships that anchored in their rivers and harbours.  This led to
misunderstandings and fights with their officers and crews, who had
no knowledge of the sea god, Taniwa.  It was found necessary to put
netting all round the vessels as high as the tops to prevent
surprise, and when trade began it was the rule to admit no more than
five Maoris on board at once.

The flax was found growing spontaneously in fields of inexhaustible
extent along the more southerly shores of the islands.  The fibre was
separated by the females, who held the top of the leaf between their
toes, and drew a shell through the whole length of the leaf.  It took
a good cleaner to scrape fifteen pounds weight of it in a day; the
average was about ten pounds, for which the traders gave a fig of
tobacco and a pipe, two sheets of cartridge paper, or one pound of
lead.  The price at which the flax was sold in Sydney varied from 20
pounds to 45 pounds per ton, according to quality, so there was a
large margin of profit to the trader.  In 1828 sixty tons of flax
valued at 2,600 pounds, were exported from Sydney to England.

The results of trading with the foreigners were fatal to the natives.
At first the trade was in axes, knives, and other edge-tools,
beads, and ornaments, but in 1832 the Maoris would scarcely take
anything but arms and ammunition, red woollen shirts, and tobacco.
Every man in a native hapu had to procure a musket, or die.  If the
warriors of the hapu had no guns they would soon be all killed by
some tribe that had them.  The price of one gun, together with the
requisite powder, was one ton of cleaned flax, prepared by the women
and slaves in the sickly swamps.  In the meantime the food crops were
neglected, hunger and hard labour killed many, some fell victims to
diseases introduced by the white men, and the children nearly all
died.

And the Maoris are still dying out of the land, blighted by our
civilization.  They were willing to learn and to be taught, and they
began to work with the white men.  In 1853 I saw nearly one hundred
of them, naked to the waist, sinking shafts for gold on Bendigo, and
no Cousin Jacks worked harder.  We could not, of course, make them
Englishmen--the true Briton is born, not made; but could we not
have kept them alive if we had used reasonable means to do so?  Or is
it true that in our inmost souls we wanted them to die, that we might
possess their land in peace?

Besides flax, it was found that New Zealand produced most excellent
timber--the kauri pine.  The first visitors saw sea-going canoes
beautifully carved by rude tools of stone, which had been hollowed
out, each from a single tree, and so large that they were manned by
one hundred warriors.  The gum trees of New Holland are extremely
hard, and their wood is so heavy that it sinks in water like
iron.  But the kauri, with a leaf like that of the gum tree, is the
toughest of pines, though soft and easily worked--suitable for
shipbuilding, and for masts and spars.  In 1830 twenty-eight vessels
made fifty-six voyages from Sydney to New Zealand, chiefly for flax;
but they also left parties of men to prosecute the whale and seal
fisheries, and to cut kauri pine logs.  Two vessels were built by
English mechanics, one of 140 tons, and the other of 370 tons burden,
and the natives began to assist the new-comers in all their labours.

At this time most of the villages had at least one European resident
called a Pakeha Maori, under the protection of a chief of rank and
influence, and married to a relative of his, either legally or by
native custom.  It was through the resident that all the trading of
the tribe was carried on.  He bought and paid for the flax, and
employed men to cut the pine logs and float them down the rivers to
the ships.

Every whaling and trading vessel that returned to Sydney or Van
Diemen's Land brought back accounts of the wonderful prospects which
the islands afforded to men of enterprise, and New Zealand became the
favourite refuge for criminals, runaway prisoners, and other lovers
of freedom.  When, therefore the crew of the schooner 'Industry'
threw Captain Blogg overboard, it was a great comfort to them to know
that they were going to an island in which there was no Government.

Captain Blogg had arrived from England with a bad character. He had
been tried for murder.  He had been ordered to pay five hundred
pounds as damages to his mate, whom he had imprisoned at sea in a
hencoop, and left to pick up his food with the fowls.  He had been
out-lawed, and forbidden to sail as officer in any British ship.
These were facts made known to, and discussed by, all the whalers who
entered the Tamar, when the whaling season was over in the year 1835.
And yet the notorious Blogg found no difficulty in buying the
schooner 'Industry', taking in a cargo, and obtaining a clearance for
Hokianga, in New Zealand.  He had shipped a crew consisting of a
mate, four seamen, and a cook.

Black Ned Tomlins, Jim Parrish, and a few other friends interviewed
the crew when the 'Industry' was getting ready for sea.  Black Ned
was a half-breed native of Kangaroo Island, and was looked upon as
the best whaler in the colonies, and the smartest man ever seen in a
boat.  He was the principal speaker.  He put the case to the crew in
a friendly way, and asked them if they did not feel themselves to be
a set of fools, to think of going to sea with a murdering villain
like Blogg?

Dick Secker replied mildly but firmly.  He reckoned the crew were, in
a general way, able to take care of themselves.  They could do their
duty, whatever it was; and they were not afraid of sailing with any
man that ever trod a deck.

After a few days at sea they were able to form a correct estimate of
their master mariner.  He never came on deck absolutely drunk, but he
was saturated with rum to the very marrow of his bones.  A devil of
cruelty, hate, and murder glared from his eyes, and his blasphemies
could come from no other place but the lowest depths of the
bottomless pit.  The mate was comparatively a gentle and inoffensive
lamb.  He did not curse and swear more than was considered decent and
proper on board ship, did his duty, and avoided quarrels.

One day Blogg was rating the cook in his usual style when the latter
made some reply, and the captain knocked him down.  He then called
the mate, and with his help stripped the cook to the waist and triced
him up to the mast on the weather side.  This gave the captain the
advantage of a position in which he could deliver his blows downward
with full effect.  Then he selected a rope's end and began to flog
the cook.  At every blow he made a spring on his feet, swung the rope
over his head, and brought it down on the bare back with the utmost
force.  It was evident that he was no 'prentice hand at the business,
but a good master flogger.  The cook writhed and screamed, as every
stroke raised bloody ridges on his back; but Blogg enjoyed it.  He
was in no hurry.  He was like a boy who had found a sweet morsel, and
was turning it over in his mouth to enjoy it the longer.  After each
blow he looked at the three seamen standing near, and at the man at
the helm, and made little speeches at them.  "I'll show you who is
master aboard this ship."  Whack!  "That's what every man Jack of you
will get if you give me any of your jaw."  Whack!  "Maybe you'd like
to mutiny, wouldn't you?"  Whack!  The blows came down with
deliberate regularity; the cook's back was blue, black, and bleeding,
but the captain showed no sign of any intention to stay his hand.
The suffering victim's cries seemed to inflame his cruelty.  He was a
wild beast in the semblance of a man.  At last, in his extreme agony,
the cook made a piteous appeal to the seamen:

[ILLUSTRATION 2]

"Mates, are you men?  Are you going to stand there all day, and watch
me being flogged to death for nothing?"

Before the next stroke fell the three men had seized the captain; but
he fought with so much strength and fury that they found it difficult
to hold him.  The helmsman steadied the tiller with two turns of the
rope and ran forward to assist them.  They laid Blogg flat on the
deck, but he kept struggling, cursing, threatening, and calling on
the mate to help him; but that officer took fright, ran to his cabin
in the deckhouse, and began to barricade the door.

Then a difficulty arose.  What was to be done with the prisoner?  He
was like a raving maniac.  If they allowed him his liberty, he was
sure to kill one or more of them.  If they bound him he would get
loose in some way--probably through the mate--and after what had
occurred, it would be safer to turn loose a Bengal tiger on deck then
the infuriated captain.  There was but one way out of the trouble,
and they all knew it.  They looked at one another; nothing was
wanting but the word, and it soon came.  Secker had sailed from the
Cove of Cork, and being an Irishman, he was by nature eloquent, first
in speech, and first in action.  He reflected afterwards, when he had
leisure to do so.

"Short work is the best," he said, "over he goes; lift the devil."
Each man seized an arm or leg, and Blogg was carried round
the mast to the lee side.  The men worked together from training and
habit. They swung the body athwart the deck like a pendulum, and with
a "one!  two!  three!" it cleared the bulwark, and the devil went
head foremost into the deep sea.  The cook, looking on from behind
the mast, gave a deep sigh of relief.

Thus it was that a great breach of the peace was committed on the
Pacific Ocean; and it was done, too, on a beautiful summer's evening,
when the sun was low, a gentle breeze barely filled the sails, and
everybody should have been happy and comfortable.

Captain Blogg rose to the surface directly and swam after his
schooner.  The fury of his soul did not abate all at once.  He roared
to the mate to bring the schooner to, but there was no responsive
"Aye, aye, sir."  He was now outside of his jurisdiction, and his
power was gone.  He swam with all his strength, and his bloated face
still looked red as the foam passed by it. The helmsman had resumed
his place, and steadied the tiller, keeping her full, while the other
men looked over the stern.  Secker said:  "The old man will have a
long swim."

But the "old man" swam a losing race.  His vessel was gliding away
from him:  his face grew pale, and in an agony of fear and despair,
he called to the men for God's sake to take him on board and he would
forgive everything.

But his call came too late; he could find no sureties for his good
behaviour in the future; he had never in his life shown any love for
God or pity for man, and he found in his utmost need neither mercy
nor pity now.  He strained his eyes in vain over the crests of the
restless billows, calling for the help that did not come.  The
receding sails never shivered; no land was near, no vessel in sight.
The sun went down, and the hopeless sinner was left struggling alone
on the black waste of waters.

The men released the cook and held a consultation about a troublesome
point of law.  Had they committed mutiny and murder, or only
justifiable homicide?  They felt that the point was a very important
one to them--a matter of life and death--and they stood in a
group near the tiller to discuss the difficulty, speaking low, while
the cook was shivering in the forecastle, trying to ease the pain.

The conclusion of the seamen was, that they had done what was right,
both in law and conscience.  They had thrown Blogg overboard to
prevent him from murdering the cook, and also for their own safety.
After they had done their duty by seizing him, he would have killed
them if he could.  He was a drunken sweep.  He was an outlaw, and the
law would not protect him.  Anybody could kill an outlaw without fear
of consequences, so they had heard.  But still there was some doubt
about it, and there was nobody there to put the case for the captain.
The law was, at that time, a terrible thing, especially in Van
Diemen's Land, under Colonel Arthur.  He governed by the gallows, to
make everything orderly and peaceable, and men were peaceable enough
after they were hanged.

So Secker and his mates decided that, although they had done nothing
but what was right in throwing Blogg over the side, it would be
extremely imprudent to trust their innocence to the uncertainty of
the law and to the impartiality of Colonel Arthur.

Their first idea was to take the vessel to South America, but after
some further discussion, they decided to continue the voyage to
Hokianga, and to settle among the Maoris.  Nobody had actually seen
them throw Blogg overboard except the cook, and him they looked upon
as a friend, because they had saved him from being flogged to death.
They had some doubts about the best course to take with the mate, but
as he was the only man on board who was able to take the schooner to
port, they were obliged to make use of his services for the present,
and at the end of the voyage they could deal with him in any way
prudence might require, and they did not mean to run any unnecessary
risks.

They went to the house on deck, and Secker called the mate, informing
him that the captain had lost his balance, and had fallen overboard,
and that it was his duty to take charge of the 'Industry', and
navigate her to Hokianga.  But the mate had been thoroughly
frightened, and was loth to leave his entrenchment.  He could not
tell what might happen if he opened his cabin door:  he might find
himself in the sea in another minute.  The men who had thrown the
master overboard would not have much scruple about sending an
inferior officer after him.  If the mate resolved to show fight, it
would be necessary for him to kill every man on board, even the cook,
before he could feel safe; and then he would be left alone in
mid-ocean with nobody to help him to navigate the vessel--a master
and crew under one hat, at the mercy of the winds and the waves, with
six murdered men on his conscience; and he had a conscience, too, as
was soon to be proved.

The seamen swore most solemnly that they did not intend to do him the
least harm, and at last the mate opened his door.  While in his
cabin, he had been spending what he believed to be the last minutes
of his life in preparing for death; he did his best to make peace
with heaven, and tried to pray.  But his mouth was dry with fear, his
tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, his memory of sacred things
failed him, and he could not pray for want of practice.  He could
remember only one short prayer, and he was unable to utter even that
audibly.  And how could a prayer ever reach heaven in time to be of
any use to him, when he could not make it heard outside the
deck-house?  In his desperate straits he took a piece of chalk and
began to write it; so when at last he opened the door of his cabin,
the four seamen observed that he had nearly covered the boards with
writing.  It looked like a litany, but it was a litany of only three
words--"Lord, have mercy"--which were repeated in lines one above
the other.

That litany was never erased or touched by any man who subsequently
sailed on board the 'Industry'.  She was the first vessel that was
piloted up the channel to Port Albert in Gippsland, to take in a
cargo of fat cattle, and when she arrived there on August 3rd, 1842,
the litany of the mate was still distinctly legible.

Nothing exalts a man so quickly in the estimation of his fellow
creatures as killing them.  Emperors and kings court the alliance of
the conquering hero returning from fields of slaughter. Ladies in
Melbourne forgot for a time the demands of fashion in their struggles
to obtain an ecstatic glimpse of our modern Bluebeard, Deeming; and
no one was prouder than the belle of the ball when she danced down
the middle with the man who shot Sandy M'Gee.

And the reverence of the mate for his murdering crew was
unfathomable.  Their lightest word was a law to him.  He wrote up the
log in their presence, stating that Captain Blogg had been washed
into the sea in a sudden squall on a dark night; vessel hove to, boat
lowered, searched for captain all night, could see nothing of him;
mate took charge, and bore away for Hokianga next morning.  When
these untruthful particulars had been entered and read over to the
four seamen, they were satisfied for the present.  They would settle
among the Maoris, and lead a free and happy life.  They could do what
they liked with the schooner and her cargo, having disposed of the
master and owner; and as for the mate, they would dispose of him,
too, if he made himself in any way troublesome.  What a wonderful
piece of good luck it was that they were going to a new country in
which there was no government!

The 'Industry' arrived off the bar at Hokianga on November 30th,
1835, and was boarded by a Captain Young, who had settled seven miles
up the estuary, at One Tree Point, and acted as pilot of the nascent
port.  He inquired how much water the schooner drew, noted the state
of the tide, and said he would remain on board all night, and go over
the bar next morning with the first flood.

The mate had a secret and wanted to get rid of it.  While looking
round at the shore, and apparently talking about indifferent
subjects, he said to the pilot:  "Don't look at the men, and don't
take any notice of them.  They threw Blogg, the master, overboard,
when he was flogging the cook, and they would murder me, too, if they
knew I told you; so you must pretend not to take any notice of them.
What their plans may be, I don't know; but you may be sure they won't
go back to the Tamar, if they can help it."

If the pilot felt any surprise, he did not show it.  After a short
pause he said:  "You go about your business, and don't speak to me
again, except when the men can hear you.  I will think about what is
best to be done."

During the night Captain Young thought about it to some purpose.
Being a master mariner himself he could imagine no circumstances
which would justify a crew in throwing a master mariner overboard.
It was the one crime which could not be pardoned either afloat or
ashore.  Next day he took the vessel up the estuary, and anchored her
within two hundred yards of the shore, opposite the residence of
Captain McDonnell.

It is true there was no government at that time at Hokianga, nor
anywhere else in New Zealand; there were no judges, no magistrates,
no courts, and no police.  But the British Angel of Annexation was
already hovering over the land, although she had not as yet alighted
on it.

At this time the shores of New Zealand were infested with captains.
There was a Captain Busby, who was called British Resident, and,
unfortunately for our seamen, Captain McDonnell had been appointed
Additional British Resident at Hokianga a few weeks previously.  So
far he had been officially idle; there was no business to do, no
chance of his displaying his zeal and patriotism.  Moreover, he had
no pay, and apparently no power and no duties.  He was neither a
Governor nor a Government, but a kind of forerunner of approaching
empire--one of those harmless and far-reaching tentacles which the
British octopus extends into the recesses of ocean, searching for
prey to satisfy the demands of her imperial appetite.

McDonnell was a naval lieutenant; had served under the East India
Company; had smuggled opium to China; had explored the coasts of New
Zealand; and on March 31st, 1831, had arrived at Hokianga from Sydney
in the 'Sir George Murray', a vessel which he had purchased for 1,300
pounds.  He brought with him his wife, two children, and a servant,
but took them back on the return voyage.  He was now engaged in the
flax and kauri pine trade.

The 'Industry' had scarcely dropped her anchor before the Additional
Resident boarded her.  The pilot spoke to him and in a few words
informed him that Blogg, the master, had been pitched into the sea,
and explained in what manner he proposed to arrest the four seamen.
McDonnell understood, and agreed to the plan at once.  He called to
the mate in a loud voice, and said:  "I am sorry to hear that you
have lost the master of this vessel.  I live at that house you see on
the rising ground, and I keep a list in a book of all vessels that
come into the river, and the names of the crews.  It is a mere
formality, and won't take more than five minutes.  So you will oblige
me, mate, by coming ashore with your men at once, as I am in a hurry,
and have other business to attend to."  He then went ashore in his
boat.  The mate and seamen followed in the ship's boat, and waited in
front of the Additional Resident's house.  He had a visitor that
morning, the Pakeha Maori, Laming.

The men had not to wait long, as it was not advisable to give them
much time to think and grow suspicious.  McDonnell came to the front
door and called the mate, who went inside, signed his name,
re-appeared directly, called Secker, and entered the house with him.
The Additional Resident was sitting at a table with the signature
book before him.  He rose from the chair, told Secker to sit down,
gave him a pen, and pointed out the place where his name was to be
signed.  Laming was sitting near the table.  While Secker was signing
his name McDonnell suddenly put a twisted handkerchief under his chin
and tightened it round his neck.  Laming presented a horse-pistol and
said he would blow his brains out if he uttered a word, and the mate
slipped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists.  He was then bundled out
at the back door and put into a bullet-proof building at the rear.
The other three seamen were then called in one after the other,
garrotted, handcuffed, and imprisoned in the same way.  The little
formality of signing names was finished in a few minutes, according
to promise.

If such things could be done in New Zealand, where there was neither
law nor government, what might happen in Van Diemen's Land, where one
man was both law and government, and that man was Colonel Arthur?
The prisoners had plenty of time to make a forecast of their fate,
while the mate engaged a fresh crew and took in a cargo of flax and
timber.  When he was ready to sail, he reshipped his old crew in
irons, returned with them to the Tamar, and delivered them to the
police to be dealt with according to law.  For a long time the law
was in a state of chaos.  Major Abbott was sent from England in 1814
as the first judge.  The proceedings in his court were conducted in
the style of a drum-head court martial, the accusation, sentences,
and execution following one another with military precision and
rapidity.

He adjudicated in petty sessions as a magistrate, and dealt in a
summary manner with capital offences, which were very numerous.  To
imprison a man who was already a prisoner for life was no punishment;
the major's powers were, therefore, limited to the cat and the
gallows.  And as the first gallows had been built to carry only eight
passengers, his daily death sentences were also limited to that
number.  For twenty years torture was used to extort confession--
even women were flogged if they refused to give evidence, and an
order of the Governor was held to be equal to law.  Major Abbott died
in 1832.

In 1835 the court consisted of the judge-advocate and two of the
inhabitants selected by the Governor, Colonel Arthur, who came out in
the year 1824, and had been for eleven years a terror to evil-doers.
His rule was as despotic as he could possibly make it.  If any
officer appointed by the Home Government disagreed with his policy he
suspended him from his office, and left him to seek redress from his
friends in England--a tedious process, which lasted for years.
Disagreeable common people he suspended also--by the neck.  If a
farmer, squatter, or merchant was insubordinate, he stopped his
supply of convict labour, and cruelly left him to do his own work.
He brooked no discussion of his measures by any pestilent editor. He
filled all places of profit with his friends, relatives, and
dependents.  Everything was referred to his royal will and pleasure.
His manners were stiff and formal, his tastes moral, his habits on
Sundays religious, and his temper vindictive.  Next to the articles
of war, the thirty-nine Articles claimed his obedience.  When his
term of office was drawing to a close he went to church on a certain
Sunday to receive the Lord's Supper.  While studying his prayer book
he observed that it was his duty if his brother had anything against
him to seek a reconciliation before offering his gift.  The
ex-Attorney-General, Gellibrand, was present, a brother Christian who
had had many things against him for many years.  He had other
enemies, some living and some dead, but they were absent.  To be
reconciled to all of them was an impossibility.  He could not ask the
minister to suspend the service while he went round Hobart Town
looking for his enemies, and shaking hands with them.  But he did
what was possible.  He rose from his knees, marched over to
Gellibrand, and held out his hand.  Gellibrand was puzzled; he looked
at the hand and could see nothing in it.  By way of explanation
Colonel Arthur pointed out the passage in the prayer-book which had
troubled his sensitive conscience.  Gellibrand read it, and then
shook hands.  With a soul washed whiter than snow, the colonel
approached the table.

Amongst the convicts every grade of society was represented, from
King Jorgensen to the beggar.  One Governor had a convict private
secretary.  Officers of the army and navy, merchants, doctors, and
clergymen consorted with costermongers, poachers, and pickpockets.
The law, it is sad to relate, had even sent out lawyers, who
practised their profession under a cloud, and sometimes pleaded by
permission of the court.  But their ancient pride had been trodden in
the dust; the aureole which once encircled their wigs was gone, and
they were often snubbed and silenced by ignorant justices.  The
punishment for being found out is life-long and terrible.  Their
clients paid the fees partly in small change and partly in rum.

The defence of the seamen accused of murdering Captain Blogg was
undertaken by Mr. Nicholas.  He had formerly been employed by the
firm of eminent solicitors in London who conducted the defence of
Queen Caroline, when the "first gentleman in Europe" tried to get rid
of her, and he told me that his misfortunes (forgeries) had deprived
him of the honour of sharing with Lord Brougham the credit of her
acquittal.

Many years had passed since that celebrated trial when I made the
acquaintance of Nicholas.  He had by this time lost all social
distinction.  He had grown old and very shabby, and was so mean that
even his old friends, the convicts who had crossed the straits,
looked down on him with contempt.  He came to me for an elector's
right, as a vote in our electorate--the Four Counties--was
sometimes worth as much as forty shillings, besides unlimited grog.
We were Conservatives then, true patriots, and we imitated--feebly,
it is true, but earnestly--the time-honoured customs of old England.

Mr. Nicholas had been a man of many employments, and of many
religions.  He was never troubled with scruples of conscience, but
guided his conduct wholly by enlightened self-interest.  He was a
Broad Churchman, very broad.  As tutor in various families, he had
instructed his pupils in the tenets of the Church of England, of the
Catholics, of the Presbyterians, and of the Baptists.  He always
professed the religion of his employer for the time being, and he
found that four religions were sufficient for his spiritual and
temporal wants.  There were many other sects, but the labour of
learning all their peculiar views would not pay, so he neglected
them.  The Wesleyans were at one time all-powerful in our road
district, and Nicholas, foreseeing a chance of filling an office of
profit under the Board, threw away all his sins, and obtained grace
and a billet as toll-collector or pikeman.  In England the pike-man
was always a surly brute, who collected his fees with the help of a
bludgeon and a bulldog, but Nicholas performed his duties in the
disguise of a saint.  He waited for passengers in his little wooden
office, sitting at a table, with a huge Bible before him, absorbed in
spiritual reading.  He wore spectacles on his Roman nose, had a long
grey beard, quoted Scripture to chance passengers, and was very
earnest for their salvation.  He was atoning for the sins of his
youth by leading the life of a hermit by praying and cheating.  He
has had many followers. He made mistakes in his cash, which for a
while were overlooked in so good a man, but they became at length so
serious that he lost his billet.  He had for some time been spoken of
by his friends and admirers as "Mr. Nicholas," but after his last
mistakes had been discovered, he began to be known merely as "Old
Nick the Lawyer," or "Old Nick the Liar," which some ignorant people
look upon as convertible terms.  I think Lizard Skin, the cannibal,
was a better Christian than old Nick the lawyer, as he was brave and
honest, and scorned to tell a lie.

The convict counsel for the four seamen defended them at a great
expenditure of learning and lies.  He argued at great length:--
"That there was no evidence that a master mariner named Blogg ever
existed; that he was an outlaw, and, as such, every British subject
had an inchoate right to kill him at sight, and, therefore, that the
seamen, supposing for the sake of argument that they did kill him,
acted strictly within their legal rights; that Blogg drowned himself
in a fit of delirium tremens, after being drunk on rum three days and
nights consecutively; that he fell overboard accidentally and was
drowned; that the cook and mate threw him overboard, and then laid
the blame on the innocent seamen; that Blogg swam ashore, and was now
living on an unchartered island; that if he was murdered, his body
had not been found:  there could be no murder without a corpse; and
finally, he would respectfully submit to that honourable court, that
the case bristled with ineradicable difficulties."

The seamen would have been sent to the gallows in any case, but
Nicholas' speech made their fate inevitable.  The court brushed aside
the legal bristles, and hanged the four seamen on the evidence of the
mate and the cook.

The tragedy of the gallows was followed by a short afterpiece.  Jim
Parrish, Ned Tomlins, and every whaler and foremast man in Hobart
Town and on the Tamar, discussed the evidence both drunk and sober,
and the opinion was universal that the cook ought to have sworn an
oath strong enough to go through a three-inch slab of hardwood that
he had seen Captain Blogg carried up to heaven by angels, instead of
swearing away the lives of men who had taken his part when he was
triced up to the mast.  The cook was in this manner tried by his
peers and condemned to die, and he knew it.  He tried to escape by
shipping on board a schooner bound to Portland Bay with whalers.  The
captain took on board a keg of rum, holding fifteen gallons, usually
called a "Big Pup," and invited the mate to share the liquor with
him.  The result was that the two officers soon became incapable of
rational navigation.  Off King's Island the schooner was hove to in a
gale of wind, and for fourteen days stood off and on--five or six
hours one way, and five or six hours the other--while the master
and mate were down below, "nursing the Big Pup."  The seamen were all
strangers to the coast, and did not know any cove into which they
could run for refuge.  The cook was pitched overboard one dark night
during that gale off King's Island, and his loss was a piece of
ancient history by the time the master and mate had consumed the rum,
and were able to enter up the log.

Ex-Attorney-General Gellibrand sailed to Port Philip to look for
country in Australia Felix, and he found it.  He was last seen on a
rounded hill, gazing over the rich and beautiful land which borders
Lake Colac; land which he was not fated to occupy, for he wandered
away and was lost, and his bones lay unburied by the stream which now
bears his name.

When Colonel Arthur's term of office expired he departed with the
utmost ceremony.  The 21st Fusiliers escorted him to the wharf.  As
he entered his barge his friends cheered, and his enemies groaned, and
then went home and illuminated the town, to testify their joy at
getting rid of a tyrant.  He was the model Governor of a Crown
colony, and the Crown rewarded him for his services.  He was made a
baronet, appointed Governor of Canada and of Bombay, was a member of
Her Majesty's Privy Council, a colonel of the Queen's Own regiment,
and he died on September 19th, 1854, full of years and honours, and
worth 70,000 pounds.

Laming was left an orphan by the death of Lizard Skin.  The chief had
grown old and sick, and he sat every day for two years on a fallen
puriri near the white man's pah, but he never entered it.  His spear
was always sticking up beside him.  He had a gun, but was never known
to use it.  He was often humming some ditty about old times before
the white man brought guns and powder, but he spoke to no one.  He
was pondering over the future of his tribe, but the problem was too
much for him.  The white men were strong and were overrunning his
land.  His last injunction to his warriors was, that they should
listen to the words of his Pakeha, and that they should be brave that
they might live.

When the British Government took possession of New Zealand without
paying for it, they established a Land Court to investigate the
titles to lands formerly bought from the natives, and it was decided
in most cases that a few axes and hoes were an insufficient price to
pay for the pick of the country; the purchases were swindles.  Laming
had possession of three or four hundred acres, and to the surprise of
the Court it was found that he had paid a fair price for them, and
his title was allowed.  Moreover, his knowledge of the language and
customs of the Maoris was found to be so useful that he was appointed
a Judge of the Land Court.

The men who laid the foundations of empire in the Great South Land
were men of action.  They did not stand idle in the shade, waiting
for someone to come and hire them.  They dug a vineyard and planted
it.  The vines now bring forth fruit, the winepress is full, the must
is fermenting.  When the wine has been drawn off from the lees, and
time has matured it, of what kind will it be?  And will the Lord of
the Vineyard commend it?



FIRST SETTLERS.

The first white settler in Victoria was the escaped convict Buckley;
but he did not cultivate the country, nor civilise the natives.  The
natives, on the contrary, uncivilised him.  When white men saw him
again, he had forgotten even his mother tongue, and could give them
little information.  For more than thirty years he had managed to
live--to live like a savage; but for any good he had ever done he
might as well have died with the other convicts who ran away with
him.  He never gave any clear account of his companions, and many
people were of opinion that he kept himself alive by eating them,
until he was found and fed by the blacks, who thought he was one of
their dead friends, and had "jumped up a white fellow."

While Buckley was still living with the blacks about Corio Bay, in
1827, Gellibrand and Batman applied for a grant of land at Western
Port, where the whalers used to strip wattle bark when whales were
out of season; but they did not get it.

Englishmen have no business to live anywhere without being governed,
and Colonel Arthur had no money to spend in governing a settlement at
Western Port.  So Australia Felix was unsettled for eight years
longer.

Griffiths & Co., of Launceston, were trading with Sydney in 1833.
Their cargo outward was principally wheat, the price of which varied
very much; sometimes it was 2s. 6d. a bushel in Launceston, and 18s.
in Sydney.  The return cargo from Port Jackson was principally coal,
freestone, and cedar.

Griffiths & Co. were engaged in whaling in Portland Bay.  They sent
there two schooners, the 'Henry' and the 'Elizabeth', in June, 1834.
They erected huts on shore for the whalers.  The 'Henry' was wrecked;
but the whales were plentiful, and yielded more oil than the casks
would hold, so the men dug clay pits on shore, and poured the oil
into them.  The oil from forty-five whales was put into the pits, but
the clay absorbed every spoonful of it, and nothing but bones was
gained from so much slaughter.  Before the 'Elizabeth' left Portland
Bay, the Hentys, the first permanent settlers in Victoria, arrived in
the schooner 'Thistle', on November 4th, 1834.

When the whalers of the 'Elizabeth' had been paid off, and had spent
their money, they were engaged to strip wattle bark at Western Port,
and were taken across in the schooner, with provisions, tools, six
bullocks and a dray.  During that season they stripped three hundred
tons of bark and chopped it ready for bagging.  John Toms went over
to weigh and ship the bark, and brought it back, together with the
men, in the barque 'Andrew Mack'.


WRECK OF THE CONVICT SHIP "NEVA," ON KING'S ISLAND.

She sailed from Cork on January 8th, 1835, B. H. Peck, master; Dr.
Stevenson, R.N., surgeon.  She had on board 150 female prisoners and
thirty-three of their children, nine free women and their twenty-two
children, and a crew of twenty-six.  Several ships had been wrecked
on King's Island, and when a vessel approached it the mate of the
watch warned his men to keep a bright look out.  He said, "King's
Island is inhabited by anthropophagi, the bloodiest man eaters ever
known; and, if you don't want to go to pot, you had better keep your
eyes skinned."  So the look-out man did not go to sleep.

Nevertheless, the 'Neva' went ashore on the Harbinger reef, on May
13th unshipped her rudder and parted into four pieces.  Only nine men
and thirteen women reached the island; they were nearly naked and had
nothing to eat, and they wandered along the beach during the night,
searching amongst the wreckage.  At last they found a puncheon of
rum, upended it, stove in the head, and drank.  The thirteen women
then lay down on the sand close together, and slept.  The night was
very cold, and Robinson, an apprentice, covered the women as well as
he could with some pieces of sail and blankets soaked with salt
water.  The men walked about the beach all night to keep themselves
warm, being afraid to go inland for fear of the cannibal
blackfellows.  In the morning they went to rouse the women, and found
that seven of the thirteen were dead.

The surviving men were the master, B. H. Peck, Joseph Bennet, Thomas
Sharp, John Watson, Edward Calthorp, Thomas Hines, Robert Ballard,
John Robinson, and William Kinderey.  The women were Ellen Galvin,
Mary Stating, Ann Cullen, Rosa Heland, Rose Dunn, and Margaret Drury.

For three weeks these people lived almost entirely on shellfish.
They threw up a barricade on the shore, above high water mark, to
protect themselves against the cannibals.  The only chest that came
ashore unbroken was that of Robinson the apprentice, and in it there
was a canister of powder.  A flint musket was also found among the
wreckage, and with the flint and steel they struck a light and made a
fire.  When they went down to the beach in search of shellfish, one
man kept guard at the barricade, and looked out for the blackfellows;
his musket was loaded with powder and pebbles.

Three weeks passed away before any of the natives appeared, but at
last they were seen approaching along the shore from the south.  At
the first alarm all the ship-wrecked people ran to the barricade for
shelter, and the men armed themselves with anything in the shape of
weapons they could find.  But their main hope of victory was the
musket.  They could not expect to kill many cannibals with one shot,
but the flash and report would be sure to strike them with terror,
and put them to flight.

By this time their diet of shellfish had left them all weak and
emaciated, skeletons only just alive; the anthropophagi would have
nothing but bones to pick; still, the little life left in them was
precious, and they resolved to sell it as dear as they could.  They
watched the savages approaching; at length they could count their
number.  They were only eleven all told, and were advancing slowly.
Now they saw that seven of the eleven were small, only picaninnies.
When they came nearer three out of the other four were seen to be
lubras, and the eleventh individual then resolved himself into a
white savage, who roared out, "Mates ahoy!"

The white man was Scott, the sealer, who had taken up is abode on the
island with his harem, three Tasmanian gins and seven children.

They were the only permanent inhabitants; the cannibal blacks had
disappeared, and continued to exist only in the fancies of the
mariners.  Scott's residence was opposite New Year's Island not far
from the shore; there he had built a hut and planted a garden with
potatoes and other vegetables.  Flesh meat he obtained from the
kangaroos and seals.  Their skins he took to Launceston in his boat,
and in it he brought back supplies of flour and groceries.  He had
observed dead bodies of women and men, and pieces of a wrecked vessel
cast up by the sea, and had travelled along the shore with his
family, looking for anything useful or valuable which the wreck might
yield.  After hearing the story, and seeing the miserable plight of
the castaways, he invited them to his home.  On arriving at the hut
Scott and his lubras prepared for their guests a beautiful meal of
kangaroo and potatoes. This was their only food as long as they
remained on King's Island, for Scott's only boat had got adrift, and
his flour, tea, and sugar had been all consumed.  But kangaroo beef
and potatoes seemed a most luxurious diet to the men and women who
had been kept alive for three weeks on nothing but shellfish.

Scott and his hounds hunted the kangaroo, and supplied the colony
with meat.  The liver of the kangaroo when boiled and left to grow
cold is a dry substance, which, with the help of hunger and a little
imagination, is said to be as good as bread.

In the month of July, 1835, heavy gales were blowing over King's
Island.  For fourteen days the schooner 'Elizabeth', with whalers for
Port Fairy, was hove to off the coast, standing off and on, six hours
one way and six hours the other.  Akers, the captain, and his mate
got drunk on rum and water daily.  The cook of the 'Industry' was on
board the 'Elizabeth', the man whom Captain Blogg was flogging when
his crew seized him and threw him overboard.  The cook also was now
pitched overboard for having given evidence against the four men who
had saved him from further flogging.

At this time also Captain Friend, of the whaling cutter 'Sarah Ann',
took shelter under the lee of New Year's Island, and he pulled ashore
to visit Scott the sealer.  There he found the shipwrecked men and
women whom he took on board his cutter, and conveyed to Launceston,
except one woman and two men.  It was then too late in the season to
take the whalers to Port Fairy.  Captain Friend was appointed chief
District Constable at Launceston; all the constables under him were
prisoners of the Crown, receiving half a dollar a day.  He was
afterwards Collector of Customs at the Mersey.

In November, 1835 the schooner 'Elizabeth' returned to Launceston
with 270 tuns of oil.  The share of the crew of a whaling vessel was
one-fiftieth of the value of the oil and bone.  The boat-steerer
received one-thirtieth, and of the headmen some had one-twenty-fifth,
others one-fifteenth.  In this same year, 1835, Batman went to Port
Phillip with a few friends and seven Sydney blackfellows.  On June
14th he returned to Van Diemen's Land, and by the 25th of the same
month he had compiled a report of his expedition, which he sent to
Governor Arthur, together with a copy of the grant of land executed
by the black chiefs.  He had obtained three copies of the grant
signed by three brothers Jagga-Jagga, by Bungaree, Yan-Yan, Moorwhip,
and Marmarallar.  The area of the land bought by Batman was not
surveyed with precision, but it was of great extent, like infinite
space, whose centre is everywhere, and circumference nowhere.  And in
addition he took up a small patch of one hundred thousand acres
between the bay and the Barwon, including the insignificant site of
Geelong, a place of small account even to this day.  Batman was a
long-limbed Sydney native, and he bestrode his real estate like a
Colossus, but King William was a bigger Colossus than Batman--he
claimed both the land and the blacks, and ignored the Crown grant.

Next, John Fawkner and his friends chartered the schooner
'Enterprise' for a voyage across the Straits to Australia Felix.  He
afterwards claimed to be the founder of Melbourne.  He could write
and talk everlastingly, but he had not the 'robur' and 'as triplex'
suitable for a sea-robber.  Sea-sickness nearly killed him, so he
stayed behind while the other adventurers went and laid the
foundation.  They first examined the shores of Western Port, then
went to Port Philip Bay and entered the River Yarra.  They
disembarked on its banks, ploughed some land, sowed maize and wheat,
and planted two thousand fruit trees.  They were not so grasping as
Batman, and each man pegged out a farm of only one hundred acres.
These farms were very valuable in the days of the late boom, and are
called the city of Melbourne.  Batman wanted to oust the newcomers;
he claimed the farms under his grant from the Jagga-Jaggas.  He
squatted on Batman's Hill, and looked down with evil eyes on the
rival immigrants.  He saw them clearing away the scrub along Flinders
Street, and splitting posts and rails all over the city from Spencer
Street to Spring Street, regardless of the fact that the ground under
their feet would be, in the days of their grandchildren, worth 3,000
pounds per foot.  Their bullock-drays were often bogged in Elizabeth
Street, and they made a corduroy crossing over it with red gum logs.
Some of these logs were dislodged quite sound fifty years afterwards
by the Tramway Company's workmen.



DISCOVERY OF THE RIVER HOPKINS.

"Know ye not that lovely river?
Know ye not that smiling river?
Whose gentle flood, by cliff and wood,
With 'wildering sound goes winding ever."

In January, 1836, Captain Smith, who was in charge of the whaling
station at Port Fairy, went with two men, named Wilson and Gibbs, in
a whale boat to the islands near Warrnambool, to look for seal.  They
could find no seal, and then they went across the bay, and found the
mouth of the river Hopkins.  In trying to land there, their boat
capsized in the surf, and Smith was drowned.  The other two men
succeeded in reaching the shore naked, and they travelled back along
the coast to Port Fairy, carrying sticks on their shoulders to look
like guns, in order to frighten away the natives, who were very
numerous on that part of the coast.  On this journey they found the
wreck of a vessel, supposed to be a Spanish one, which has since been
covered by the drifting sand.  When Captain Mills was afterwards
harbour master at Belfast, he took the bearings of it, and reported
them to the Harbour Department in Melbourne.  Vain search was made
for it many years afterwards in the hope that it was a Spanish
galleon laden with doubloons.

Davy was in the Sydney trade in the 'Elizabeth' until March, 1836; he
then left her and joined the cutter 'Sarah Ann', under J. B. Mills,
to go whaling at Port Fairy.  In the month of May, Captain Mills was
short of boats, and went to the Hopkins to look for the boat lost by
Smith.  He took with him two boats with all their whaling gear, in
case he should see a whale.  David Fermaner was in one of the boats,
which carried a supply of provisions for the two crews; in the other
boat there was only what was styled a nosebag, or snack--a mouthful
for each man.

On arriving off the Hopkins, they found a nasty sea on, and Captain
Mills said it would be dangerous to attempt to land; but his brother
Charles said he would try, and in doing so his boat capsized in the
breakers.  All the men clung to the boat, but the off-sea prevented
them from getting on shore.  When Captain Mills saw what had
happened, he at once pushed on his boat through the surf and
succeeded in reaching the shore inside the point on the eastern side
of the entrance.  He then walked round towards the other boat with a
lance warp, waded out in the water as far as he could, and then threw
the warp to the men, who hauled on it until their boat came ashore,
and they were able to land.

All the provisions were lost.  The water was baled out of the boat
that had been capsized, and she was taken over to the west head.  All
the food for twelve men was in the nosebag, and it was very little;
each man had a mere nibble for supper.  In those days wombats were
plentiful near the river, but the men could not catch or kill one of
them.  Captain Mills had a gun in his boat which happened to be
loaded, and he gave it to Davy to try if he could shoot anything for
breakfast next morning.  There was only one charge, all the rest of
the ammunition having been lost in the breakers.  Davy walked up the
banks of the river early in the morning, and saw plenty of ducks, but
they were so wild he could not get near them.  At last he was so
fortunate as to shoot a musk duck, which he brought back to the camp,
stuck up before the fire, and roasted.  He then divided it into
twelve portions, and gave one portion to each of the twelve men for
breakfast; but it was a mockery of a meal, as unsubstantial as an
echo--smell, and nothing else.

The two boats were launched, and an attempt was made to pass out to
sea through the surf, but the wind was far down south, and the men
had to return and beach the boats.  The sails were taken ashore and
used as tents.  In the evening they again endeavoured to catch a
wombat, but failed.

On the next day they tried again to get out of the river, but the
surf half filled the boats with water, and they were glad to reach
the camp again.

Captain Mills was a native of Australia, and a good bushman; he told
the men that sow thistles were good to eat, so they went about
looking for them, and having found a quantity ate them.  On the third
day they tried once more to get out of the river, but without success.

On the fourth day Mills decided to carry the boats and whaling gear
overland to a bight in the bay to the west.  The gear was divided
into lots among the men, and consisted of ten oars, two steer-oars,
two tubs of whale line each 120 fathoms in length, two fifty-pound
anchors, four harpoons, six lances, six lance warps, two tomahawks,
two water kegs, two piggins for balers, two sheath knives, and two
oil-stones for touching up the lances when they became dull.  These
were carried for about a quarter of a mile, and then put down for a
rest, and the men went back to the camp.  The boats were much lighter
than the gear, being made of only half-inch plank.  One boat was
capsized bottom up, and the men took it on their shoulders, six on
each side, the tallest men being placed in the middle on account of
the shear of the boat, and it was carried about half a mile past the
gear.  They then returned for the other boat, and in this way brought
everything to the bight close to the spot where the bathing house at
Warrnambool has since been erected.  There they launched the boats,
and got out to sea, pulling against a strong westerly breeze.

The men were very weak, having had nothing to eat for four days but
some sow thistles and a musk duck, and the pull to Port Fairy was
hard and long.  They landed about four o'clock in the afternoon, and
Captain Mills told them not to eat anything, saying he would give
them something better.  At that time there was a liquor called "black
strap," brought out in the convict ships for the use of the
prisoners, and it was sold with the ships' surplus stores in Sydney
and Hobarton.  Mills had some of it at Port Fairy.  He now put a
kettle full of it on the fire, and when it was warmed gave each man a
half a pint to begin with.  He then told them to go and get supper,
and afterwards he gave each of them another half pint.

Rum was in those days a very profitable article of commerce, and the
trade in it was monopolised by the Government officers, civil and
military.  Like flour in the back settlements of the United States,
it was reckoned "ekal to cash," and was made to do the office of the
pagoda tree in India, which rained dollars at every shake.

The boat that was lost by Smith at the Hopkins was found in good
condition, half filled with sand.  Joe Wilson went for it afterwards,
and brought it back to Port Fairy.  He was a native of Sydney, and
nephew of Raibey of Launceston, and was murdered not long afterwards
at the White Hills.  He was sent by Raibey on horseback to Hobarton
to buy the revenue cutter 'Charlotte', which had been advertised for
sale.  He was shot by a man who was waiting for him behind a tree.
He fell from his horse, and although he begged hard for his life, the
man beat out his brains with the gun.  The murderer took all the
money Wilson had, which was only one five-pound note, the number of
which Raibey knew.  A woman tried to pass it in Launceston, and her
statements led to the discovery and conviction of the murderer, who
was hanged in chains at the White Hills, and the gibbet remained
there for many years.



WHALING.

"I wish I were in Portland Bay,
Oh, yes, Oh!
Harpooning whales on a thirtieth lay,
A hundred years ago."

In the year 1837, J. B. Mills had charge of the Portland Fishery, and
Davy went with him in the 'Thistle' schooner as mate and navigator,
and they were over a month on the passage.  Charles Mills was second
in command at the station at Portland, and Peter Coakley, an
Irishman, was third; the remainder of the crew required for whaling
was on board the 'Thistle'.  Among them was one named McCann, a
Sydney native, a stonemason by trade, and father of the McCann who
was afterwards member of Parliament for Geelong.  During a westerly
gale the schooner ran to Western Port for shelter.  In sailing
through the Rip, McCann, who was acting as steward, while going aft
to the cabin, had to cross over a colonial sofa which was lashed on
deck.  Instead of stepping over it gently, he made a jump, and the
vessel lurching at the same time, he went clean overboard.  Davy, who
was standing by the man at the helm, told him to put the helm down
and let the vessel come to.  He then ran forward and got a steer-oar
from underneath the boots, and threw it overboard.  McCann, being an
expert swimmer, swam to the oar, a boat was launched, four men got
into it, picked him up, and brought him aboard again none the worse.
There was too much sea on to hoist in the boat, as there were no
davits, and while she was being towed in she ran ahead of the vessel,
which went over her and filled her with water.  On arriving in
Western Port the boat was found to have been not much damaged.  There
was on board the 'Thistle' an apprentice whom Davy had stolen in
Sydney after he had served four years of his time to a boat-builder
named Green.  This apprentice repaired the boat, which afterwards
proved to be the fastest out of forty-one boats that went out whaling
in Portland Bay every  morning.

There were in 1837 eight parties of whalers in Portland Bay, and so
many whales were killed that the business from that year declined and
became unprofitable.  Mills' party in the 'Thistle' schooner, of
which Davy was mate and navigator, or nurse to Mills, who was not a
trained seaman, had their station at Single Corner; Kelly's party was
stationed at the neck of land where the breakwater has been
constructed.  Then there were Dutton's party, with the barque
'African'; Nicholson's, with the barque 'Cheviot', from Hobarton;
Chamberlain's, with the barque 'William the Fourth', of Hobarton; the
'Hope' barque, and a brig, both from Sydney.  The Hentys also had a
whaling station at Double Corner, and by offering to supply their men
with fresh meat three times a week, obtained the pick of the whalers.
Their head men were Johnny Brennan, John Moles, and Jim Long,
natives of Sydney or Tasmania, and all three good whalers.

When the 'Thistle' arrived at Portland Bay every other party had got
nearly one hundred tuns of oil each, and Mills' party had none.  He
started out next morning, choosing the boat which had picked up
McCann at Western Port, and killed one whale, which turned out six
tuns of oil.  He did not get any more for three weeks, being very
unlucky.  After getting the schooner ready for cutting in, Davy went
to steer the boat for Charles Mills, and always got in a mess among
the whales, being either capsized or stove in among so many boats.
At the end of three weeks Captain Mills got a whale off the second
river, halfway round towards Port Fairy.  She was taken in tow with
the three boats, and after two days' towing, she was anchored within
half-a-mile of the schooner in Portland Bay, and the men went ashore.
During the night a gale of wind came on from the south-west, and the
whale, being a bit stale and high out of the water, drove ashore at
the Bluff, a little way past Henty's house.

In the morning Mills said he would go and see what he could get from
her on the beach, and ordered his brother, Charles Mills, and Coakley
to go out looking for whales.  All the boats used to go out before
daylight, and dodge one another round the Bay for miles.  It was cold
work sitting in the boats. The men stayed out until ten or eleven
o'clock, and went ashore that day on the Convincing Ground, which was
so-called because the whalers used to go down there to fight, and
convince one another who was the best man.

In the afternoon, about two o'clock, it was Davy's turn to go up a
tree to look for whales.  In looking round the Bay towards the Bluff,
he saw a boat with a whiff on.  He jumped down, and told Charles
Mills, who said:  "Come on."  there was a great rush of all the
boats, but Mills' boat kept well forward of the lot.  When they
arrived off the Bluff they found Captain Mills had fastened to a
whale, two other loose whales being near.  They pulled up alongside
him, and he pointed out a loose whale, to which they fastened.
Mansfield, of the Hobarton party, fastened to the third whale.  Davy
came aft to the steer-oar, and Charles Mills went forward to kill his
whale.  He had hardly got the lance in his hand when the whale threw
herself right athwart the nose of the boat.  He then sent the lance
right into her and killed her stone dead.  Mansfield, in hauling up
his whale got on top of Captain Mills' whale, which stove in
Mansfield's boat, and sent all his men flying in the air.  There was
a rush then to pick up the men.  Charles Mills, finding his whale
dead, struck a whiff in the lance-hole he had made when he killed
her, cut the line that was fast to her, and bent it on to another
spare iron.  Mansfield's whale then milled round and came right on to
Charles Mills' boat, and he fastened to her.  This gave him a claim
of one half of her, so that Mills and his men got two and a half out
of the three whales.  The men were all picked up.  Mills' whales were
anchored about half-a-mile from the schooner, and the boats went out
next morning and took them in tow.

The whales tow very easily when fresh killed, but if they are allowed
to get stiff their fins stand out and hinder the towing.  When the
two whales were brought alongside the schooner, the boats of Kelly's
party were seen fast to a whale off Black Nose Point.  Charles Mills
pulled over, and when he arrived he found a loose whale, Mansfield
and Chase being fast to two other whales.  Mills fastened to the
loose whale, and then the three whales fouled the three lines, and
rolled them all together like a warp, which made it difficult to kill
them.  After the men had pulled up on them for some time with the
oars, two of them began spouting blood and sickened, and Chase's boat
got on to them and capsized.  Then the whales took to running, and
Mansfield cut his line to pick up Chase and his crew.  Mansfield's
whale being sick, went in a flurry and died.  Mills' whale and
Chase's worked together until Mills killed his whale; he then whiffed
her and fastened to Chase's whale, which gave him a claim for half,
and he killed her; so that his party got one and a-half out of the
three whales.  Chase and his crew were all picked up.

 From that day the luck of Mills and his party turned, and they could
not try out fast enough.  In four months from the time the 'Thistle'
left Launceston she had on board two hundred and forty tuns of oil.

In the year 1836, the Hentys had a few cattle running behind the
Bluff when Major Mitchell arrived overland from Sydney, and reported
good country to the north.  They then brought over more cattle from
Launceston, and stocked a station.

The first beast killed by the Hentys for their whalers was a heifer,
and the carcase, divided into two parts, was suspended from the
flagstaff at their house.  It could be seen from afar by the men who
were pulling across the bay in their boats, and they knew that
Henty's men were going to feed on fresh meat, while all the rest were
eating such awful stuff as Yankee pork and salt horse.  The very
sight of the two sides of the heifer suspended at the flagstaff was
an unendurable insult and mockery to the carnivorous whalers, and an
incitement to larceny.  Davy Fermaner was steering one of the boats,
and he exclaimed: "There, they are flashing the fresh meat to us.
They would look foolish if they lost it to-night."

There was feasting and revelry that night at Single Corner.  Hungry
men were sharpening their sheath-knives with steel, and cutting up a
side of beef.  A large fire was burning, and on the glowing coals,
and in every frying-pan rich steaks were fizzing and hissing.  It was
like a feast of heroes, and lasted long through the night.  They sang
responsively, like gentle shepherds--shepherds of the ocean fields
whose flocks were mighty whales:

"Mother, the butcher's brought the meat,
What shall I do with it?
Fry the flesh, and broil the bones,
And make a pudding of the su-et."

Next morning the Hentys looked for the missing beef up the flagstaff,
and along the shore of the ever-sounding ocean, but their search was
vain.  They suspected that the men of Kelly's party were the thieves,
but these all looked as stupid, ignorant, and innocent as the adverse
circumstances would permit.  There was no evidence against them to be
found; the beef was eaten and the bones were burned and buried.
Mills' men were the beef lifters, and some of Kelly's men helped them
to eat it.

The whales killed at the Portland fishery were of two kinds, the
right or black whale, and the sperm whale.  The right whale has an
immense tongue, and lives by suction, the food being a kind of small
shrimp.  When in a flurry--that is, when she has received her
death-stroke with the lance--she goes round in a circle, working
with her head and flukes.  The sperm whales feed on squid, which they
bite, and when in a flurry they work with the head and flukes, and
with the mouth open, and often crush the boats.

After the crew of the 'Thistle' had spent their money, they were
taken back to Port Fairy for the purpose of stripping bark, a large
quantity of wattle trees having been found in the neighbouring
country.  Sheep were also taken there in charge of Mr. J. Murphy, who
intended to form a station.  John Griffiths also sent over his
father, Jonathan, who had been a carpenter on board the first
man-of-war that had arrived at Port Jackson, three old men who had
been prisoners, four bullocks, a plough, and some seed potatoes.  A
cargo of the previous season's bark was put into the 'Thistle', and
on her return to Launceston, was transferred to the 'Rhoda' brig,
Captain Rolls, bound for London.  More sheep and provisions were then
taken in the 'Thistle', and after they were landed at Port Fairy,
another cargo of bark was put on board.  For three days there was no
wind, and a tremendous sea setting in from the south-east, the
schooner could not leave the bay.  On the night of December 24th a
gale of wind came on from the south-east; one chain parted, and after
riding until three o'clock in the morning of Christmas Day, the other
chain also parted.  The vessel drew eight feet, and was lying in
between three and four fathoms of water.  As soon as the second chain
broke, Davy went up on the fore-yard and cut the gaskets of the
foresail.  The schooner grounded in the trough of sea, but when she
rose the foresail was down, and she paid off before the wind.  The
shore was about a mile, or a mile and a half distant, and she took
the beach right abreast of a sheep yard, where her wreck now lies.
The men got ashore in safety, but all the cargo was lost.

A tent was pitched on shore near the wreck, but as there was no
vessel in the bay by which they could return to Launceston, the four
men, Captain Mills, D. Fermaner, Charles Ferris, and Richard
Jennings, on December 31st, 1837, set sail in a whaleboat for Port
Philip.  Davy had stolen Jennings from the 'Rhoda' brig at
Launceston, when seamen were scarce.  He was afterwards a pilot at
Port Philip, and was buried at Williamstown.

The whaleboat reached Port Philip on January 3rd, 1838, having got
through the Rip on the night of the 2nd. Ferris was the only man of
the crew who had been in before, he having gone in with Batman, in
the 'Rebecca' cutter, Captain Baldwin.  Baldwin was afterwards before
the mast in the 'Elizabeth' schooner; he was a clever man, but fond
of drink.

The whaleboat anchored off Portsea, but the men did not land for fear
of the blacks.

At daylight Davy landed to look for water, but could not find any;
and there were only three pints in the water-bag.  The wind being
from the north, the boat was pulled over to Mud Island, and the men
went ashore to make tea with the three pints of water.  Davy walked
about the island, and found a rookery of small mackerel-gulls and a
great quantity of their eggs in the sand.  He broke a number of them,
and found that the light-coloured eggs were good, and that the dark
ones had birds in them.  He took off his shirt, tied the sleeves
together, bagged a lot of the eggs, and carried them back to the
camp.  Mills broke the best of them into the great pot, and the eggs
and water mixed together and boiled made about a quart for each man.

After breakfast the wind shifted to the southward, and the 'Henry'
brig, from Launceston, Captain Whiting, ran in, bound to Point Henry
with sheep; but before Mills and his men could get away from Mud
Island the brig had passed.  They pulled and sailed after her, but
did not overtake her until she arrived off the point where Batman
first settled, now called Port Arlington; at that time they called
the place Indented Heads.

When the whaleboat came near the brig to ask for water, two or three
muskets were levelled at the men over the bulwarks, and they were
told to keep off, or they would be shot.  At that time a boat's crew
of prisoners had escaped from Melbourne in a whale boat, and the
ship-wrecked men were suspected as the runaways.  But one of the crew
of the 'Henry', named Jack Macdonald, looked over the side, and
seeing Davy in the boat, asked him what they had done with the
schooner 'Thistle', and they told him they had lost her at Port Fairy.

Captain Whiting asked Macdonald if he knew them, and on being
informed that they were the captain and crew of the schooner
'Thistle', he invited them on board and supplied them with a good
dinner.  They went on to Point Henry in the brig, and assisted in
landing the sheep.

Batman was at that time in Melbourne.  Davy had seen him before in
Launceston.  After discharging the sheep the brig proceeded to
Gellibrand's Point, and as Captain Whiting wanted to go up to
Melbourne, the men pulled him up the Yarra in their whaleboat.
Fawkner's Hotel at that time was above the site of the present
customs House, and was built with broad paling.  Mills and Whiting
stayed there that night, Davy and the other two men being invited to
a small public-house kept by a man named Burke, a little way down
Little Flinders Street, where they were made very comfortable.

Next day they went back to the brig 'Henry', and started for Launceston.

In May, 1838, Davy was made master of the schooner 'Elizabeth', and
took in her a cargo of sheep, and landed them at Port Fairy.  The
three old convicts whom Griffiths had sent there along with his
father Jonathan, had planted four or five acres of potatoes at a
place called Goose Lagoon, about two miles behind the township.  The
crop was a very large one, from fifteen to twenty tons to the acre,
and Davy had received orders to take in fifty tons of the potatoes,
and to sell them in South Australia.  He did so, and after four days'
passage went ashore at the port, offered the potatoes for sale, and
sold twenty tons at 22 pounds 10 shillings per ton.  On going ashore
again next morning, he was offered 20 pounds per ton for the
remainder, and he sold them at that price.

On the same day the 'Nelson' brig, from Hobarton, arrived with one
hundred tons of potatoes, but she could not sell them, as Davy had
fully stocked the market.  He was paid for the potatoes in gold by
the two men who bought them.

He went up to the new city of Adelaide.  All the buildings were of
the earliest style of architecture, and were made of tea-tree and
sods, or of reeds dabbed together with mud.  The hotels had no
signboards, but it was easy to find them by the heaps of bottles
outside.  Kangaroo flesh was 1s. 6d. a pound, but grog was cheap.
Davy was looking for a shipmate named Richard Ralph, who was then the
principal architect and builder in the city.  He found him erecting
homes for the immigrants out of reeds and mud.  He was paid 10 pounds
or 12 pounds for each building.  He was also hunting kangaroo and
selling meat.  He was married to a lady immigrant, and on the whole
appeared to be very comfortable and prosperous.  Davy gave the lady a
five-shilling piece to go and fetch a bottle of gin, and was
surprised when she came back bringing two bottles of gin and 3s.
change.  In the settlement the necessaries of life were dear, but the
luxuries were cheap.  If a man could not afford to buy kangaroo beef
and potatoes, he could live sumptuously on gin.  Davy walked back to
the port the same evening, and next day took in ballast, which was
mud dug out among the mangroves.

He arrived at Launceston in four days, and then went as coasting
pilot of the barque 'Belinda', bound to Port Fairy to take in oil for
London.  The barque took in 100 head of cattle, the first that were
landed at Port Fairy.  He then went to Port Philip, and was employed
in lightering cargo up the Yarra, and in ferrying between
Williamstown and the beach now called Port Melbourne.  He took out
the first boatman's licence issued, and has the brass badge, No. 1,
still.  Vessels at that time had to be warped up the Yarra from below
Humbug Reach, as no wind could get at the topsails, on account of the
high tea-tree on the banks.



OUT WEST IN 1849.

I did not travel as a capitalist, far from it.  I went up the
Mississippi as a deck passenger, sleeping at night sometimes on
planks, at other times on bags of oats piled on the deck about six
feet high.  The mate of a Mississippi boat is always a bully and
every now and then he came along with a deck-hand carrying a lamp,
and requested us to come down.  He said it was "agen the rules of the
boat to sleep on oats"; but we kept on breaking the rules as much as
possible.

Above the mouth of the Ohio the river bank on the Missouri side is
high, rocky, and picturesque. I longed to be the owner of a farm up
there, and of a modest cottage overlooking the Father of Waters.  I
said, "If there's peace and plenty to be had in this world, the heart
that is humble might hope for it here," and then the very first
village visible was called "Vide Poche."  It is now a suburb of St.
Louis.

I took a passage on another boat up the Illinois river.  There was a
very lordly man on the lower deck who was frequently "trailing his
coat."  He had, in fact, no coat at all, only a grey flannel shirt
and nankeen trousers, but he was remarkably in want of a fight, and
anxious to find a man willing to be licked.  He was a desperado of
the great river.  We had heard and read of such men, of their
reckless daring and deadly fights; but we were peaceful people; we
had come out west to make a living, and therefore did not want to be
killed.  When the desperado came near we looked the other way.

There was a party of five immigrant Englishmen sitting on their
luggage.  One of them was very strongly built, a likely match for the
bully, and a deck-hand pointing to him said:

"Jack, do you know what that Englishman says about you?"

"No, what does he say?"

"He says he don't think you are of much account with all your brag.
Reckons he could lick you in a couple of minutes."

Uttering imprecations, Jack approached the Englishman, and dancing
about the deck, cleared the ring for the coming combat.

"Come on, you green-horn, and take your gruel.  Here's the best man
on the river for you.  You'll find him real grit."

The stranger sat still, said he was not a fighting man, and did not
want to quarrel with anybody.

Jack grew more ferocious than ever, and aimed a blow at the peaceful
man to persuade him to come on.  He came on suddenly.  The two men
were soon writhing together on the guard deck, and I was pleased to
observe the desperado was undermost.  The Englishman was full of
fear, and was fighting for his life.  He was doing it with great
earnestness.  He was grasping the throat of his enemy tightly with
both hands, and pressing his thumbs on the wind-pipe.  We could see
he was going to win in his own simple way, without any recourse to
science, and he would have done so very soon had he not been
interrupted.  But as Jack was growing black in the face, the other
Englishmen began to pull at their mate, and tried to unlock his grip
on Jack's throat.  It was not easy to do so.  He held on to his man
to the very last, crying out:  "Leave me alone till I do for him.
Man alive, don't you know the villain wants to murder me?"

The desperado lay for a while gulping and gasping on his bed of
glory, unable to rise.  I observed patches of bloody skin hanging
loose on both sides of his neck when he staggered along the deck
towards the starboard sponson.

There was peace for a quarter of an hour.  Then Jack's voice was
heard again.  He had lost prestige, and was coming to recover it with
a bowie knife.  He said:

"Where's that Britisher?  I am going to cut his liver out."

The Englishman heard the threat, and said to him mates:

"I told you so!  He means to murder me.  Why didn't you leave me
alone when I had the fine holt of him?"

He then hurried away and ran upstairs to the saloon.

Jack followed to the foot of the ladder, and one wild-eyed young lady said:

"Look at the Englishman [he was sitting on a chair a few feet
distance].  Ain't he pale?  Oh! the coward!"

She wanted to witness a real lively fight, and was disappointed.  The
smell of blood seems grateful to the nostrils of both ladies and
gentlemen in the States.  A butcher from St. Louis explained it thus:

"It's in the liver.  Nine out of ten of the beasts I kill have liver
complaint.  I am morally sartin I'd find the human livers just the
same if I examined them in any considerable quantity."

The captain came to the head of the stairs and descended to the deck.
He was tall and lanky and mild of speech.  He said:

"Now, Jack, what are you going to do with that knife?"

"I am waiting to cut the liver out of that Englishman.  Send him
down, Captain, till I finish the job."

"Yes, I see.  He has been peeling your neck pretty bad, ain't he?
Powerful claws, I reckon.  Jack, you'll be getting into trouble some
day with your weepons."  He took a small knife out of his pocket.
"Look here, Jack.  I've been going up and down the river more'n
twenty years, and never carried a weepon bigg'n that, and never had a
muss with nobody.  A man who draws his bowie sometimes gets shot.
Let's look at your knife."

He examined it closely, deciphered the brand, drew his thumb over the
edge, and observed:

"Why, blame me, if it ain't one of them British bowies--a
Free-trade Brummagen. I reckon you can't carve anyone with a thing
like this."  He made a dig at the hand-rail with the point, and it
actually curled up like the ring in a hog's snout.  "You see, Jack, a
knife like that is mean, unbecoming a gentleman, and a disgrace to a
respectable boat."  He pitched the British article into the river and
went up into the saloon.

As Jack had not yet recovered his prestige, he went away, and
returned with a dinner knife in one hand and a shingling hammer in
the other.  He waited for his adversary until the sun was low and the
deck passengers were preparing their evening meal.  Two of the
Englishmen came along towards the stairs and ascended to the saloon.
Presently they began to descend with their mate in the middle.  Jack
looked at them, and for some reason or other he did not want any more
prestige.  He sauntered away along the guard deck, and remained in
retirement during the rest of the voyage.  He was not, after all, a
very desperate desperado.

During the next night our boat was racing with a rival craft, and one
of her engines was damaged.  She had then to hop on one leg, as it
were, as far as Peoria.  The Illinois river had here spread out into
a broad lake; the bank was low, there were no buildings of any kind
near the water; some of the passengers landed, and nobody came to
offer them welcome.

I stood near an English immigrant who had just brought his luggage
ashore, and was sitting on it with his wife and three children.  They
looked around at the low land and wide water, and became full of
misery.  The wife said:

"What are we boun' to do now, Samiul?  Wheer are me and the childer
to go in this miserable lookin' place?"

Samiul:  "I'm sure, Betsy, I don't know.  I've nobbut hafe a dollar
left of o' my money.  They said Peoria was a good place for us to
stop at, but I don't see any signs o' farmin' about here, and if I go
away to look for a job, where am I to put thee and the childer, and
the luggage and the bedding?"

"Oh!" said Betsy, beginning to cry; "I'm sorry we ever left owd
England.  But thou would come, Samiul, thou knows, and this is the
end on it.  Here we are in this wild country without house or home,
and wi' nothin' to eat.  I allus thowt tha wor a fool, Samiul, and
now I'm sure and sartin on it."

Samiul could not deny it. His spirit was completely broken; he hung
down his head, and tears began to trickle down his eyes.  The three
children--two sturdy little boys and a fair-haired little girl--
seeing their dad and ma shedding tears, thought the whole world must
be coming to an end, and they began howling out aloud without any
reserve.  It was the best thing they could have done, as it called
public attention to their misery, and drew a crowd around them.  A
tall stranger came near looked at the group, and said:

"My good man, what in thunder are you crying for?"

"I was told Peoria was a good place for farmin'," Samuel said, "and
now I don't know where to go, and I have got no money."

"Well, you are a soft 'un,"  replied the stranger.  "Just dry up and
wait here till I come back."

He walked away with long strides.  Peoria was then a dreary-looking
city, of which we could see nothing but the end of a broad road, a
few frame buildings, two or three waggons, and some horses hitched to
the posts of the piazzas.

The stranger soon returned with a farmer in a waggon drawn by two
fine upstanding horses, fit for a royal carriage.  The farmer at once
hired the immigrant at ten dollars a month with board for himself and
family.  He put the luggage into his waggon, patted the boys on the
head and told them to be men; kissed the little girl as he lifted her
into the waggon, and said:

"Now, Sissy, you are a nice little lady, and you are to come along
with me, and we'll be good friends."

Never was sorrow so quickly turned into joy.  The man, his wife, and
children, actually began smiling before the tears on their cheeks
were dry.

Men on every western prairie were preparing their waggons for the
great rush to California; new hands were wanted on the lands, and the
immigrants who were then arriving in thousands, took the place of the
other thousands who went westward across the plains.  There was
employment for everybody, and during my three years' residence on the
prairies I only saw one beggar.  He was an Italian patriot, who said
he had fought for Italy; he was now begging for it in English,
badly-broken, so I said:

"You are a strong, healthy man; why don't you go to work?  You could
earn eight or ten dollars a month, with board, anywhere in these
parts."

But the Italian patriot was a high-class beggar; he was collecting
funds, and had no idea of wasting his time in hard work.  He gave me
to understand that I had insulted him.

Besides this patriot, there were a few horse-thieves and hog duffers
on the prairies, but these, when identified, were either stretched
under a tree or sent to Texas.

In those days the prairie farmers were all gentlemen, high-minded,
truthful, honourable, and hospitable.  There were no poor houses, no
asylums.  All orphans were adopted and treated as members of some
family in the neighbourhood.

I am informed that things are quite different now.  The march of
empire has been rapid; many men have grown rich, to use a novel
expression, beyond the dreams of avarice, and ten times as many have
grown poor and discontented.

The great question for statesmen now is, "What is to be done for the
relief of the masses?" and the answer to it is as difficult to find
as ever.

But I have to proceed up the Illinois river.

The steamboat stopped at Lasalle, the head of navigation, and we had
then to travel on the Illinois and Michigan canal.  We went on board
a narrow passenger boat towed by two horses, and followed by two
freight barges.  We did not go at a breakneck pace, and had plenty of
time for conversation, and to look at the scenery, which consisted of
prairies, sloughs, woods, and rivers.  The picture lacked background,
as there is nothing in Illinois deserving the name of hill.  But we
passed an ancient monument, a tall pillar, rising out of the bed of
the Illinois river.  It is called "Starved Rock."  Once a number of
Indian warriors, pursued by white men, climbed up the almost
perpendicular sides of the pillar.  They had no food, and though the
stream was flowing beneath them, they could not obtain a drink of
water without danger of death from rifle bullets.  The white men
instituted a blockade of the pillar, and the red men all perished of
starvation on the top of it.

The conversation was conducted by the captain of the canal boat, as
he walked on the deck to and fro.  He was full of information.  He
said he was a native of Kentucky; had come down the Ohio river from
Louisville; was taking freight to Chicago; reckoned he was bound to
rake in the dollars on the canal; was no dog-gonned Abolitionist;
niggers were made to work for white folks; they had no souls any more
than a horse; he'd like to see the man who would argue the point.

Mrs. Beecher Stowe was then writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin," at too great
a distance to hear the challenge, but a greenhorn ventured to argue
the point.

"What about the mulatto? Half black, half white.  His father being a
white man had a whole soul; his mother being black had no soul.  Has
the mulatto a whole soul, half a soul, or no soul at all?"

The captain paused in his walk, with both hands in his pockets, gazed
at the argumentative greenhorn, turned his quid, spat across the
canal, went away whistling "Old Dan Tucker," and left the question of
the mulatto's soul unsolved.

When I arrived at Joliet there was a land boom at Chicago.  The canal
company had cut up their alternate sections, and were offering them
at the usual alarming sacrifice.  A land boom is a dream
of celestial bliss.  While it lasts, the wisest men and the greatest
fools walk with ecstatic steps through the golden streets of a New
Jerusalem. I have been there three times.  It is dreadful to wake up
and to find that all the gold in the street is nothing but moonshine.

I proceeded to the Lake City to lay the foundation of my fortune by
buying town lots.  I laid the foundation on a five-acre block in West
Joliet, but had to borrow seven dollars from my nearest friend to pay
the first deposit. Chicago was then a small but busy wooden town,
with slushy streets, plank sidewalks, verandahs full of rats, and
bedrooms humming with mosquitoes.  I left it penniless but proud, an
owner of real estate.

While returning to Joliet on the canal boat my nearest friend, from
whom I had borrowed the seven dollars, kindly gave me his views on
the subject of "greenhorns."  (The Australian equivalent of
"greenhorn" is "new chum."  I had the advantage of serving my time in
both capacities).  "No greenhorn," he observed, "ever begins to get
along in the States until he has parted with his bottom dollar.  That
puts a keen edge on his mind, and he grows smart in business.  A
smart man don't strain his back with hard work for any considerable
time.  He takes out a patent for something--a mowing machine, or
one for sowing corn and pumpkins, a new churn or wash-tub, pills for
the shakes, or, best of all, a new religion--anything, in fact,
that will catch on and fetch the public."

I had parted with my bottom dollar, was also in debt, and therefore
in the best position for getting along; but I could not all at once
think of anything to patent, and had to earn my daily bread some way
or other.  I began to do it by hammering sheets of iron into the
proper curves for an undershot water-wheel.  After I had worked two
days my boss suggested that I should seek other employment--in a
school, for instance; a new teacher was wanted in the common school
of West Joliet.

I said I should prefer something higher; a teacher was of no more
earthly account than a tailor.

The boss said:  "That might be so in benighted Britain, but in the
Great United States our prominent citizens begin life as teachers in
the common schools, and gradually rise to the highest positions in
the Republic."

I concluded to rise, but a certificate of competency was required,
and I presented myself for examination to the proper official, the
editor and proprietor of 'The True Democrat' whose office was across
the bridge, nearly opposite Matheson's woollen factory. I found the
editor and his compositor labouring over the next edition of the
paper.

The editor began the examination with the alphabet.  I said in
England we used twenty-six letters, and I named all of them correctly
except the last.  I called it "zed," but the editor said it was
"zee," and I did not argue the point.

He then asked me to pick out the vowels, the consonants, the flats,
the sharps, the aspirates, the labials, the palatals, the dentals,
and the mutes.  I was struck dumb; I could feel the very foundation
of all learning sinking beneath me, and had to confess that I did not
know my letters.

Then he went on to spelling and writing.  My writing was barely
passable, and my spelling was quite out of date.  I used superfluous
letters which had been very properly abolished by Webster's
dictionary.

At last the editor remarked, with becoming modesty, that he was
himself of no account at figures, but Mr. Sims would put me through
the arithmetic.  Mr. Sims was the compositor, and an Englishman; he
put me through tenderly.

When the examination was finished, I felt like a convicted impostor,
and was prepared to resume work on the undershot water-wheel, but the
two professors took pity on me, and certified in writing that I was
qualified to keep school.

Then the editor remarked that the retiring teacher, Mr. Randal, had
advertised in the 'True Democrat' his ability to teach the Latin
language; but, unfortunately, Father Ingoldsby had offered himself as
a first pupil; Mr. Randal never got another, and all his Latin oozed
out.  On this timely hint I advertised my ability to teach the
citizens of Joliet not only Latin, but Greek, French, Spanish, and
Portuguese.  My advertisement will be found among the files of the
'True Democrat' of the year 1849 by anyone taking the trouble to look
for it.  I had carelessly omitted to mention the English language,
but we sometimes get what we don't ask for, and no less than sixteen
Germans came to night school to study our tongue.  They were all
masons and quarrymen engaged in exporting steps and window sills to
the rising city of Chicago.

When Goldsmith tried to earn his bread by teaching English in
Holland, he overlooked the fact that it was first necessary for him
to learn Low Dutch.  I overlooked the same fact, but it gave me no
trouble whatever.  There was no united Germany then, and my pupils
disagreed continually about the pronunciation of their own language,
which seemed, like that of Babel, intelligible to nobody.  I composed
their quarrels by confining their minds to English solely, and
harmony was restored each night by song.

The school-house was a one-storey frame building on the second
plateau in West Joliet, and was attended by about one hundred
scholars.  In the rear was a shallow lagoon, fenced on one side by a
wall of loose rocks, infested with snakes.  The track to the cemetery
was near, and it soon began to be in very frequent use.  One day
during recess the boys had a snake hunt, and they tied their game in
one bunch by the heads with string, and suspended them by the
wayside.  I counted them, and there were twenty-seven snakes in the
bunch.

The year '49 was the 'annus mirabilis' of the great rush for gold
across the plains, and it was also an 'annus miserabilis' on account
of the cholera.  In three weeks fourteen hundred waggons bound for
California crossed one of the bridges over the canal.  I was desirous
of joining the rush, but was, as usual, short of cash, and I had to
stay at Joliet to earn my salary.  I met the editor of the 'True
Democrat' nearly every day carrying home a bucket of water from the
Aux Plaines river.  He did his own chores.  He sent two young men who
wished to become teachers to my school to graduate.  One was named
O'Reilly, lately from Ireland; I gave him his degree in a few weeks,
and he kept school somewhere out on the prairie.  The other did not
graduate before the cholera came.  He was a native of Vermont, and he
played the clarionet in our church choir.  The instrumental music
came from the clarionet, from a violin, and a flute.  The choir came
from France and Germany, Old England and New England, Ireland,
Alsace, and Belgium.  It was divided into two hostile camps, and the
party which first took possession of the gallery took precedence in
the music for that day only.  There was a want of harmony.  One
morning when the priest was chanting the first words of the Gloria,
the head of a little French bugler appeared at the top of the gallery
stairs, and at once started a plaint chant, Gloria, we had never
rehearsed or heard before.  He sang his solo to the end.  He was
thirsting for glory, and he took a full draught.

I don't think there was ever a choir like ours but one, and that was
conducted by a butcher from Dolphinholm in the Anglican Church at
Garstang.  One Sunday he started a hymn with a new tune.  Three times
his men broke down, and three times they were heard by the whole
congregation whispering ferociously at one another. At length the
parson tried to proceed with the service, and said:  "Let us pray."
But the bold butcher retorted:  "Pray be hanged.  Let us try again,
lads; I know we can do it."  He then started the hymn for the fourth
time, and they did it.  After the service the parson demanded
satisfaction of the butcher, and got it in a neighbouring pasture.

The cholera came, and we soon grew very serious.  The young man from
Vermont walked with me after school hours, and we tried to be
cheerful, but it was of no use. Our talk always reverted to the
plague, and the best way to cure it or to avoid it.  The doctors
disagreed.  Every theory was soon contradicted by facts; all kinds of
people were attacked and died; the young and the old, the weak and
the strong, the drunken and the sober.  Every man adopted a special
diet or a favourite liquor--brandy, whiskey, bitters, cherry-bounce,
sarsaparilla.  My own particular preventive was hot tea, sweetened
with molasses and seasoned with cayenne pepper.  I survived, but that
does not prove anything in particular.

The two papers, the 'Joliet Signal' and the 'True Democrat', scarcely
ever mentioned the cholera.  It would have been bad policy, tending
to scare away the citizens and to injure trade.

Many men suddenly found that they had urgent business to look after
elsewhere, and sneaked away, leaving their wives and families behind
them.

On Sunday Father Ingoldsby advised his people to prepare their souls
for the visit of the Angel of Death, who was every night knocking at
their doors.  There were many, he said, whose faces he had never seen
at the rails since he came to Joliet; and what answer would they give
to the summons which called them to appear without delay before the
judgment seat of God?  What doom could they expect but that of
damnation and eternal death?

The sermon needed no translation for the men of many nations who were
present.  Irishmen and Englishmen, Highlanders and Belgians, French
and Germans, Mexicans and Canadians, could interpret the meaning of
the flashing eye which roamed to every corner of the church, singling
out each miserable sinner; the fierce frown, the threatening gesture,
the finger first pointing to the heaven above, and then down to the
depths of hell.

Some stayed to pray and to confess their sins; others hardened their
hearts and went home unrepentant.  Michael Mangan went to Belz's
grocery near the canal.  He said he felt pains in his interior, and
drank a jigger of whisky.  Then he bought half-a-gallon of the same
remedy to take home with him.  It was a cheap prescription, costing
only twelve and a half cents, but it proved very effective.  Old Belz
put the stuff into an earthenware bottle, which he corked with a
corncob.  Michael started for home by the zigzag path which led up
the steep limestone bluff, but his steps were slow and unsteady; he
sat down on a rock, and took another dose out of his bottle.  He
never went any further of his own motion, and we buried him next day.
We were of different opinions about the cause of his death; some
thought it was the cholera, others the pangs of conscience, some the
whisky, and others a mixture of all three; at any rate, he died
without speaking to the priest.

Next day another neighbour died, Mr. Harrigan.  He had lost one arm,
but with the other he wrote a good hand, and registered deeds in the
County Court.  I called to see him.  He was in bed lying on his back,
his one arm outside the coverlet, his heaving chest was bare, and his
face was ghastly pale.  There were six men in the room, one of whom
said:

"Do you know me, Mr. Harrigan?"

"Sure, divil a dog in Lockport but knows you, Barney," said the dying man.

Barney lived in Lockport, and in an audible whisper said to us:  "Ain't
he getting on finely?  He'll be all right again to-morrow, please
God."

"And didn't the doctor say I'd be dead before twelve this day?"
asked Harrigan.

I looked at the clock on the mantelshelf.  It was past ten.  He died
an hour later.

One day the young man from Vermont rose from his seat and looked at
me across the schoolroom.  I thought he was going to say something.
He took down his hat, went to the door, turned and looked at me
again, but he did not speak or make any sign.  Next morning his place
was vacant, and I asked one of the boys if he had seen the young man.
The boy said:

"He ain't a-coming to school no more, I calkilate.  He was buried
this morning before school hours."

That year, '49 was a dismal year in Joliet.

Mr. Rogers, one of the school managers, came and sat on a bench near
the door.  He was a New Englander, a carpenter, round-shouldered,
tall and bony.  He said:

"I called in to tell you that I can't vote for appinting you to this
school next term.  Fact is the ladies are dead against you; don't see
you at meeting on the Sabbath; say you go to the Catholic Church with
the Irish and Dutch.  I a'n't a word to say agen you myself.  This is
a free country; every man can go, for aught I care, whichever way he
darn chooses--to heaven, or hell, or any other place.  But I want
to be peaceable, and I can't get no peace about voting for you next
term, so I thought I'd let you know, that you mightn't be
disappointed."

In that way Mr. Rogers washed his hands of me.  I said I was sorry I
did not please the ladies, but I liked to hear a man who spoke his
mind freely.

Soon afterwards the Germans brought me word that the Yankees were
calling a meeting about me.  I was aware by this time that when a
special gathering of citizens takes place to discuss the demerits of
any individual, it is advisable for that individual to be absent if
possible; but curiosity was strong within me; hitherto I had never
been honoured with any public notice whatever, and I attended the
meeting uninvited.

The Yankees are excellent orators; they are born without bashfulness;
they are taught to speak pieces in school from their childhood; they
pronounce each word distinctly; they use correctly the rising
inflection and the falling inflection.   Moreover, they are always in
deadly earnest; there is another miserable world awaiting their
arrival.  Their humorists are the most unhappy of men.  You may smile
when you read their jokes, but when you see the jokers you are more
inclined to weep.  With pain and sorrow they grind, like Samson, at
the jokers' mill all the days of their lives.

The meeting was held in the new two-storey school-house.

Deacon Beaumont took the chair--my chair--and Mr Curtis was
appointed secretary.  I began to hate Deacon Beaumont, as also Mr.
Curtis, who was the only other teacher present; it was evident they
were going to put him in my place.

Each speaker on rising put his left hand in the side pocket of his
pants.  I was not mentioned by name, but nevertheless I was given
clearly to understand that I had been reared in a land whose people
are under the dominion of a tyrannical monarch and a bloated
aristocracy; that therefore I had never breathed the pure air of
freedom, and was unfitted to teach the children of the Great Republic.

Mr. Tucker, an influential citizen, moved finally that the school
managers be instructed to engage a Mr. Sellars, of Dresden, as
teacher at the West Joliet School.  He said Mr. Sellars was a young
man from New England who had been teaching for a term at Dresden, and
had given great satisfaction.  He had the best testimony to the
character and ability of the young man from his own daughter, Miss
Priscilla Tucker, who had been school marm in the same school, and
was now home on a visit.  She could give, from her own personal
knowledge, any information the managers might require.

Mr. Tucker's motion was seconded.  There was no amendment proposed,
and all in favour of the motion were requested by Deacon Beaumont to
stand up.  The Yankees all rose to their feet, the others sat still,
all but old Gorges, a Prussian, who, with his two sons, had come to
vote for me.  But the old man did not understand English.  His son
John pulled him down, but Deacon Beaumont had counted his vote, and
the motion was carried by a majority of one.  So I was, in fact, put
out of the school by my best friend, old Gorges.

I went away in a dudgeon and marked off a cellar on my real estate,
30 feet by 18 feet, on the top of the bluff, near the edge of the
western prairie.  The ground was a mixture of stiff clay and
limestone rock, and I dug at it all through the month of September.
Curious people came along and made various remarks; some said
nothing, but went away whistling.  One day Mr. Jackson and Paul
Duffendorff were passing by, and I wanted them to pass, but they
stopped like the rest.  Mr. Jackson was reckoned one of the smartest
men in Will county.  He had a large farm, well stocked, but he was
never known to do any work except with his brains.  He was one of
those men who increased the income of the State of Illinois by
ability.  Duffendorf was a huge Dutchman, nearly seven feet in
height.  He was a great friend of mine, great every way, but very
stupid; he had no sense of refinement.  He said:

"Ve gates, schoolmeister?  Py golly!  Here, Mr. Shackson, is our
schoolmeister a vurkin mit spade and bick.  How vas you like dat
kind of vurk, Mr. Shackson?"

"Never could be such a darned fool; sooner steal," answered Jackson.

Duffendorf laughed until he nearly fell into the cellar.  Now this
talk was very offensive.  I knew Mr. Jackson was defendant in a case
then pending.  He had been charged with conspiring to defraud; with
having stolen three horses; with illegally detaining seventy-five
dollars; and on other counts which I cannot remember just now.  The
thing was originally very simple, even Duffendorff could understand
it.

Mr. Jackson was in want of some ready money, so he directed his hired
man to steal three of his horses in the dead of night, take them to
Chicago, sell them to the highest bidder, find out where the highest
bidder lived, and then return with the cash to Joliet.  The hired man
did his part of the business faithfully, returned and reported to his
employer.  Then Mr. Jackson set out in search of his stolen horses,
found them, and brought them home.  The man expected to receive half
the profits of the enterprise.  The boss demurred, and only offered
one-third, and said if that was not satisfactory he would bring a
charge of horse-stealing.  The case went into court, and under the
treatment of learned counsel grew very complicated.  It was
remarkable as being the only one on record in Will county in which a
man had made money by stealing his own horses.  It is, I fancy, still
'sub judice'.

Both the old school and the new school remained closed even after the
cholera ceased to thin out the citizens, but I felt no further
interest in the education of youth.  When winter came I tramped three
miles into the forest, and began to fell trees and split rails in
order to fence in my suburban estate.  For some time I carried a
rifle, and besides various small game I shot two deer, but neither of
them would wait for me to come up with them even after I had shot
them; they took my two bullets away with them, and left me only a few
drops of blood on the snow; then I left the rifle at home.  For about
four months the ground was covered with snow, and the cold was
intense, but I continued splitting until the snakes came out to bask
in the sun and warm themselves.  I saw near a dead log eight coiled
together, and I killed them all.  The juice of the sugar maples began
to run.  I cut notches in the bark in the shape of a broad arrow,
bored a hole at the point, inserted a short spout of bark, and on
sunny mornings the juice flowed in a regular stream, clear and
sparkling; on cloudy days it only dropped.

One evening as I was plodding my weary way homeward, I looked up and
saw in the distance a man inspecting my cellar.  I said, "Here's
another disgusting fool who ain't seen it before."  It certainly was
a peculiar cellar, but not worth looking at so much.  I hated the
sight of it.  It had no building over it, never was roofed in, and
was sometimes full of snow.

The other fool proved to be Mr. Curtis, the teacher who had written
the resolution of the meeting which voted me out of the school.  He
held out his hand, and I took it, but reluctantly, and under secret
protest.  I thought to myself, "This mine enemy has an axe to grind,
or he would not be here.  I'll be on my guard."

"I have been waiting for you some time," said Mr. Curtis.  "I was
told you were splitting rails in the forest, and would be home about
sundown.  I wanted to see you about opening school again.  Mr. Rogers
won't have anything to say to it, but the other two managers, Mr.
Strong and Mr. Demmond, want to engage you and me, one to teach in
the upper storey of the school, the other down below, and I came up
to ask you to see them about it."

"How does it happen that Mr. Sellars has not come over from Dresden?"
I said.

"Joliet is about the last place on this earth that Mr. Sellars will
come to.  Didn't you hear about him and Priscilla?"  asked Mr. Curtis.

"No, I heard nothing since that meeting; only saw the school doors
were closed every time I passed that way."

"Well, I am surprised.  I thought everybody knew by this time, though
we did not like to say much about it."

I began to feel interested.  Mr. Curtis had something pleasant to
tell me about the misfortunes of my enemies, so I listened
attentively.

It was a tale of western love, and its course was no smoother in
Illinois than in any less enlightened country of old Europe.  Miss
Priscilla reckoned she could hoe her own row.  She and Mr. Sellars
conducted the Common School at Dresden with great success and
harmony.  All went merry as a marriage bell, and the marriage was to
come off by-and-by--so hoped Miss Priscilla.  During the recess she
took the teacher's arm, and they walked to and fro lovingly.  All
Dresden said it was to be a match, but at the end of the term Miss
Priscilla returned to Joliet--the match was not yet made.

It was at this time that the dissatisfaction with the new British
teacher became extreme; Miss Priscilla fanned the flame of
discontent.  She did not "let concealment like a worm i' th' bud feed
on her damask cheek," but boldly proposed that Mr. Sellars--a
true-born native of New England, a good young man, always seen at
meetings on the Sabbath--should be requested to take charge of the
West Joliet school.  So the meeting was held:  I was voted out, Mr.
Sellars was voted in, and the daughters of the Puritans triumphed.

Miss Priscilla wrote to Dresden, announcing to her beloved the
success of her diplomacy, requesting him to come to Joliet without
delay, and assume direction of the new school.  This letter fell into
the hands of another lady who had just arrived at Dresden from New
England in search of her husband, who happened to be Mr. Sellars.
The letter which that other lady wrote to Miss Priscilla I did not
see, but it was said to be a masterpiece of composition, and it
emptied two schools.  Mr. Tucker went over to Dresden and looked
around for Mr. Sellars, but that gentleman had gone out west, and was
never heard of again.  The west was a very wide unfenced space,
without railways.

"The fact is," said Mr. Curtis, "we were all kinder shamed the way
things turned out, and we just let 'em rip.  But people are now
stirring about the school being closed so long, so Mr. Strong and Mr.
Demmond have concluded to engage you and me to conduct the school."

We were engaged that night, and I went rail-splitting no more.  But I
fenced my estate; and while running the line on the western boundary
I found the grave of Highland Mary.  It was in the middle of a grove
of oak and hickory saplings, and was nearly hidden by hazel bushes.
The tombstone was a slab about two feet high, roughly hewn.  Her
epitaph was, "Mary Campbell, aged 7.  1827."  That was all.  Poor
little Mary.

The Common Schools of Illinois were maintained principally from the
revenue derived from grants of land.  When the country was first
surveyed, one section of 640 acres in each township of six miles
square was reserved for school purposes.  There was a State law on
education, but the management was entirely local, and was in the
hands of a treasurer and three directors, elected biennally by the
citizens of each school district.  The revenue derived from the
school section was sometimes not sufficient to defray the salary of
the teacher, and then the deficiency was supplied by the parents of
the children who had attended at the school; those citizens whose
children did not attend were not taxed by the State for the Common
Schools; they did not pay for that which they did not receive.  In
some instances only one school was maintained by the revenue of two
school sections.  When the attendance in the school was numerous, a
young lady, called the "school-marm," assisted in the teaching.
Sometimes, as in the case of Miss Priscilla, she fell into trouble.

The books were provided by the enterprise of private citizens, and an
occasional change of "Readers" was agreeable both to teachers and
scholars.  The best of old stories grow tiresome when repeated too
often.  One day a traveller from Cincinnati brought me samples of a
new series of "Readers," offering on my approval, to substitute next
day a new volume for every old one produced.  I approved, and he
presented each scholar with copies of the new series for nothing.

The teaching was secular, but certain virtues were inculcated either
directly or indirectly.  Truth and patriotism were recommended by the
example of George Washington, who never told a lie, and who won with
his sword the freedom of his country.  There were lessons on history,
in which the tyranny of the English Government was denounced; Kings,
Lords and Bishops, especially Bishop Laud, were held up to eternal
abhorrence; as was also England's greed of gain, her intolerance,
bigotry, taxation; her penal and navigation laws.  The glorious War
of Independence was related at length.  The children of the Puritans,
of the Irish and the Germans, did not in those days imbibe much
prejudice in favour of England or her institutions, and the English
teacher desirous of arriving at the truth, had the advantage of
having heard both sides of many historical questions; of listening,
as it were, to the scream of the American eagle, as well as to the
roar of the British lion.

Mr. Curtis was a good teacher, systematic, patient, persevering, and
ingenious.  I ceased to hate him; Miss Priscilla's downfall cemented
our friendship.  We kept order in the school by moral suasion, but
the task was sometimes difficult.  My private feelings were in favour
of the occasional use of the hickory stick, the American substitute
for the rod of Solomon, and the birch of England.

The geography we taught was principally that of the United States and
her territories, spacious maps of which were suspended round the
school, continually reminding the scholars of their glorious
inheritance.  It was then full of vacant lots, over which roamed the
Indian and the buffalo, species of animals now nearly extinct.  We
did not pay much attention to the rest of the world.

Elocution was inculcated assiduously, and at regular intervals each
boy and girl had to come forth and "speak a piece" in the presence of
the scholars, teachers, and visitors.

Mental arithmetic and the use of fractions were taught daily.  The
use of the decimal in the American coinage is of great advantage; it
is easier and more intelligible to children than the clumsy old
system of pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings.  It is a system
which would no doubt have been long ago adopted by England, if it had
not been humiliating to our national pride to take even a good thing
from rebellious Yankees, and inferior Latin races.  We cling fondly
to absurdities because they are our own.  In Australia wild rabbits
are vermin, in England they are private property; and if one of the
three millions of her miserable paupers is found with a rabbit in
each of his coat pockets, he is fined 10s. or sent to gaol.  Pope
Gregory XIII. demonstrated the error of the calendar then in use, and
all Catholic nations adopted his correction.  But when the adoption
of the calendar was proposed in Parliament, John Bull put his big
foot down at once; he would receive no truth, not even a mathematical
one, from the Pope of Rome, and it was only after the lapse of nearly
200 years, when the memory of Gregory and his calendar had almost
faded away from the sensitive mind of Protestantism, that an Act was
passed, "equalising the style in Great Britain and Ireland with that
used in other countries of Europe."

A fugitive slave with his wife and daughter came to Joliet.  One day
he was seized by three slave-hunters, who took him towards the canal.
A number of abolitionists assembled to rescue the slave, but the
three men drew their revolvers, and no abolitionist had the courage
to fire the first shot.  The slave was put in a canal boat and went
south; his wife remained in Joliet and earned her bread by weaving
drugget; the daughter came to my school; she was of pure negro blood,
but was taught with the white girls.

The abolitionists were increasing in number, and during the war with
the South the slaves were freed.  They are now like Israel in Egypt,
they increase too rapidly.  If father Abraham had sent them back to
Africa when they were only four millions, he would have earned the
gratitude of his country.  Now they number more than eight millions;
the Sunny South agrees with their constitution; they work as little
and steal as much as possible.  In the days of their bondage they
were addicted to petty larceny; now they have votes, and when they
achieve place and power they are addicted to grand larceny, and they
loot the public treasury as unblushingly as the white politicians.

The nigger question has doubled in magnitude during the last thirty
years, and there will have to be another abolition campaign of some
kind.  The blacks are incapable of ruling the whites; no time was
given to educate them for their new duties, if teaching them was
possible; the Declaration of Independence was in their case a mockery
from the beginning.  When all the old abolitionists and slave-holders
are dead, another generation of men grown wiser by the failure of the
policy of their forefathers may solve the black problem.

Complaint is made that the American education of to-day is in a
chaotic condition, due to the want of any definite idea of what
education is aiming at.  There is evidence that the ancients of New
England used to birch their boys, but after independence had been
fought for and won, higher aims prevailed.  The Puritan then believed
that his children were born to a destiny far grander than that of any
other children on the face of the earth; the treatment accorded to
them was therefore to be different.  The fundamental idea of American
life was to be "Freedom," and the definition of "Freedom" by a
learned American is, "The power which necessarily belongs to the
self-conscious being of determining his actions in view of the
highest, the universal good, and thereby of gradually realising in
himself the eternal divine perfection."  The definition seems a
little hazy, but the workings of great minds are often unintelligible
to common people.  "The American citizen must be morally autonomous,
regarding all institutions as servants, not as masters.  So far man
has been for the most part a thrall.  The true American must worship
the inner God recognised as his own deepest and eternal self, not an
outer God regarded as something different from himself."

Lucifer is said to have entertained a similar idea.  He would not be
a thrall, and the result as described by the republican Milton was
truly disastrous:

"Him the Almighty Power
Hurl'd headlong
down
to bottomless perdition
Region of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell."

The manner in which the American citizen is to be made "morally
autonomous, and placed beyond the control of current opinion," will
require much money; his parents must therefore be rich; they must already
have inherited wealth, or have obtained it by ability or labour.  The
course of training to be given to youth includes travelling for six
years in foreign countries under private tutors, studying human
history, ethnic, social, political, industrial, æsthetic, religious;
gems of poetry; the elements of geometry; mechanics; art, plastic,
and graphic; reading Confucius, Sakya-muni, Themistocles, Socrates,
Julius Caesar, Paul, Mahommed, Charlemagne, Alfred, Gregory VII., St.
Bernard, St. Francis, Savonarola, Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Columbus,
Washington, Lincoln, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, and Lowell.

The boys on the prairies had to earn their bread; they could not
spend six years travelling around and studying all the writers above
mentioned, making themselves morally autonomous, and worshipping
their own deepest and eternal selves.  The best men America has
produced were reared at home, and did chores out of school hours.

When I was expelled from school by the Yankees, Mr. McEvoy, the
leading Irish politician, called me aside and said:  "Whisper, you
just hang round until next election, and we'll turn out the Yankee
managers, and put you in the school again."  The Germans were slow in
acquiring political knowledge as well as in learning the English
language; but language, politics, and law itself are the birthright
of the Irish.  By force of circumstances, and through the otherwise
deplorable failure of Miss Priscilla, I resumed work in the school
before the election, but Mr. McEvoy, true to his promise, organised
the opposition--it is always the opposition--and ejected the
Yankee managers, but in the fall of 1850 I resigned, and went a long
way south.

When I returned, Joliet was a city, and Mr. Rendel, one of my German
night scholars, was city marshal.  I met him walking the streets, and
carrying his staff of office with great dignity.  I took up my abode
in an upper apartment of the gaol, then in charge of Sheriff
Cunningham, who had a farm in West Joliet, near a plank road, leading
on to the prairie.  I had known the Sheriff two years before, but did
not see much of him at this time, though I was in daily communication
with his son, Silas, the Deputy Sheriff.  It was under these
favourable circumstancesthat I was enabled to witness a General Gaol
Delivery of all the prisoners in Joliet.  One, charged with killing
his third man, was out on bail.  I saw him in Matheson's
boarding-house making love to one of the hired girls, and she seemed
quite pleased with his polite attentions.  Matheson was elected
Governor of the State of Illinois, and became a millionaire by
dealing in railways.  He was a native of Missouri, and a man of
ability; In '49 I saw him at work in a machine shop.

The prisoners did not regain their freedom all at once, but in the
space of three weeks they trickled out one by one.  The Deputy
Sheriff, Silas, had been one of my pupils; he was now about seventeen
years of age, and a model son of the prairies.  His features were
exceedingly thin, his eyes keen, his speech and movements slow, his
mind cool and calculating.  He never injured his constitution by any
violent exertion; in fact, he seemed to have taken leave of active
life and all its worries, and to have settled down to an existence of
ease and contemplation.  If he had any anxiety about the safe custody
of his prisoners he never showed it.  He had finished his education,
so I did not attempt to control him by moral suasion, or by anything
else, but by degrees I succeeded in eliciting from him all the
particulars he could impart about the criminals under his care.
There was no fence around the gaol, and Silas kept two of them always
locked in.  He "calkilated they wer kinder unsafe."  They belonged to
a society of horse thieves whose members were distributed at regular
intervals along the prairies, and who forwarded their stolen animals
by night to Chicago.  The two gentlemen in gaol were of an
untrustworthy character, and would be likely to slip away.  About a
week after my arrival I met Silas coming out of the gaol, and he said:

"They're gone, be gosh."  Silas never wasted words.

"Who is gone?" I inquired.

"Why, them two horse thieves.  Just look here."

We went round to the east side of the gaol, and there was a hole
about two feet deep, and just wide enough to let a man through.  The
ground underneath the wall was rocky, but the two prisoners had been
industrious, had picked a hole under the wall and had gone through.

"Where's the Sheriff?" I asked.  "Won't Mr. Cunningham go after the men?"

"He's away at Bourbonnais' Grove, about suthin' or other, among the
Bluenoses; can't say when he'll be back; it don't matter anyhow.  He
might just as well try to go to hell backwards as catch them two
horse thieves now."

Silas had still two other prisoners under his care, and he let them
go outside as usual to enjoy the fresh air.  They had both been
committed for murder, but their crime was reckoned a respectable one
compared to the mean one of horse stealing, so Silas gave them
honourable treatment.

One of the prisoners was a widow lady who had killed another lady
with an axe, at a hut near the canal on the road to Lockport.  She
seemed crazy, and when outside the gaol walked here and there in a
helpless kind of way, muttering to herself; but sometimes an idea
seemed to strike her that she had something to do Lockport way, and
she started in that direction, forgetting very likely that she had
done it already; but whenever Silas called her back, she returned
without giving any trouble.  One day, however, when Silas was asleep
she went clean out of sight, and I did not see her any more.  The
Sheriff was still absent among the Bluenoses.

The fourth prisoner was an Englishman named Wilkins who owned a farm
on the prairie, in the direction of Bourbonnais' Grove.  A few weeks
before, returning home from Joliet with his waggon and team of
horses, he halted for a short time at a distillery, situated at the
foot of the low bluff which bounded the bottom, through which ran the
Aux Plaines River.  It was a place at which the farmers often called
to discuss politics, the prices of produce, and other matters, and
also, if so disposed, to take in a supply of liquor.  The corn whisky
of Illinois was an article of commerce which found its way to many
markets.  Although it was sold at a low price at home, it became much
more valuable after it had been exported to England or France, and
had undergone scientific treatment by men of ability.  The corn used
in its manufacture was exceedingly cheap, as may be imagined when
corn-fed pork was, in the winter of '49, offered for sale in Joliet
at one cent per pound.  After the poison of the prairies had been
exported to Europe, a new flavour was imparted to it, and it became
Cognac, or the best Irish or Scotch whisky.

Wilkins halted his team and went into the whisky-mill, where the
owner, Robinson, was throwing charcoal into the furnace under his
boiler with a long-handled shovel.  He was an enterprising Englishman
who was wooing the smiles of fortune with better prospects of success
than the slow, hard-working farmer.  I had seen him first
in West Joliet in '49, when he was travelling around buying corn for
his distillery.  He was a handsome man, about thirty years of age,
five feet ten inches in height, had been well educated, was quite
able to hold his own among the men of the West, and accommodated
himself to their manners and habits.

There were three other farmers present, and their talk drifted from
one thing to another until it at last settled on the question of the
relative advantages of life in England and the States.  Robinson took
the part of England, Wilkins stuck to the States; he said:

"A poor man has no chance at home; he is kept down by landlords, and
can never get a farm of his own.  In Illinois I am a free man, and
have no one to lord it over me.  If I had lived and slaved in England
for a hundred years I should never have been any better off, and now
I have a farm as good as any in Will County, and am just as good a
man as e'er another in it."

Now Wilkins was only a small man, shorter by four inches than
Robinson, who towered above him, and at once resented the claim to
equality.  He said:

"You as good as any other man, are you?  Why there ain't a more
miserable little skunk within twenty miles round Joliet."

Robinson was forgetting the etiquette of the West.  No man--except,
perhaps, in speaking to a nigger--ever assumed a tone of insolent
superiority to any other man; if he did so, it was at the risk of
sudden death; even a hired man was habitually treated with civility.
The titles of colonel, judge, major, captain, and squire were in
constant use both in public and private; there was plenty of humorous
"chaff," but not insult.  Colonels, judges, majors, captains, and
squires were civil, both to each other and to the rest of the
citizens.  Robinson, in speaking to his fellow countryman, forgot for
a moment that he was not in dear old England, where he could settle a
little difference with his fists.  But little Wilkins did not forget,
and he was not the kind of man to be pounded with impunity. He had in
his pocket a hunting knife, with which he could kill a hog--or a
man.  When Robinson called him a skunk he felt in his pocket for the
knife, and put his thumb on the spring at the back of the buckhorn
handle, playing with it gently.  It was not a British Brummagem
article, made for the foreign or colonial market, but a genuine
weapon that could be relied on at a pinch.

"Oh, I dare say you were a great man at home, weren't you?" he said.
"A lord maybe, or a landlord.  But we don't have sich great men here,
and I am as good a man as you any day, skunk though I be."

Robinson had just thrown another shovelful of charcoal into the
furnace under his boiler, and he held up his shovel as if ready to
strike Williams, but it was never known whether he really intended to
strike or not.

The three other men standing near were quite amused with the dispute
of the two Englishmen, and were smiling pleasantly at their
foolishness.  But little Wilkins did not smile, nor did he wait for
the shovel to come down on his head; he darted under it with his open
knife in the same manner as the Roman soldier went underneath the
dense spears of the Pyrrhic phalanx, and set to work.  Robinson tried
to parry the blows with the handle of the shovel, but he made only a
poor fight; the knife was driven to the hilt into his body seven
times, then he threw down his shovel, and tried to save himself
behind the boiler, but it was too late; the dispute about England and
the States was settled.

Wilkins took his team home, then returned to Joliet and gave himself
into the custody of the squire, Hoosier Smith.  At the inquest he was
committed to take his trial for murder, and did not get bail.  His
wife left the farm, and with her two little boys lived in an old log
hut near the gaol.  She brought with her two cows, which Wilkins
milked each morning as soon as Silas let him out of prison.  I could
see him every day from the window of my room, and I often passed by
the hut when he was doing chores, chopping wood, or fetching water,
but I never spoke to him.  He did not look happy or sociable, and I
could not think of anything pleasant to say by way of making his
acquaintance.  After much observation and thought I came to the
conclusion that Sheriff Cunningham wanted his prisoner to go away; he
would not like to hang the man; the citizens would not take Wilkins
off his hands; if two fools chose to get up a little difficulty and
one was killed, it was their own look-out; and anyway they were only
foreigners.  The fact was Wilkins was waiting for someone to purchase
his farm.

The court-house for Will County was within view of the gaol, at the
other side of the street, and one day I went over to look at it.  The
judge was hearing a civil case, and I sat down to listen to the
proceedings.  A learned counsel was addressing the jury.  He talked
at great length in a nasal tone, slowly and deliberately; he had one
foot on a form, one hand in a pocket of his pants, and the other hand
rested gracefully on a volume of the statutes of the State of
Illinois.  He had much to say about various horses running on the
prairie, and particularly about one animal which he called the
"Skemelhorne horse."  I tried to follow his argument, but the
"Skemelhorne horse" was so mixed up with the other horses that I
could not spot him.

Semicircular seats of unpainted pine for the accommodation of the
public rose tier above tier, but most of them were empty.  There were
present several gentlemen of the legal profession, but they kept
silence, and never interrupted the counsel's address.  Nor did the
judge utter a word; he sat at his desk sideways, with his boots
resting on a chair.  He wore neither wig nor gown, and had not even
put on his Sunday go-to-meeting clothes.  Neither had the lawyers.
If there was a court crier or constable present he was indistinguishable
from the rest of the audience.

Near the judge's desk there was a bucket of water and three tumblers
on a small table.  It was a hot day.  The counsel paused in his
speech, went to the table, and took a drink; a juryman left the box
and drank.  The judge also came down from his seat, dipped a tumbler
in the bucket and quenched his thirst; one spectator after another
went to the bucket.  There was equality and fraternity in the court
of law; the speech about the Skemelhorne horse went on with the
utmost gravity and decorum, until the nasal drawl of the learned
counsel put me to sleep.

On awakening, I went into another hall, in which dealings in real
estate were registered.  Shelves fixed against the walls held huge
volumes lettered on the back.  One of these volumes was on a table in
the centre of the hall, and in it the registrar was copying a deed.
Before him lay a pile of deeds with a lead weight on the top.  A
farmer came in with a paper, on which the registrar endorsed a number
and placed at the bottom of the pile.  There was no parchment used;
each document was a half-sheet foolscap size, party printed and
partly written.  Another farmer came in, took up the pile and
examined the numbers to see how soon his deed was likely to be
copied, and if it was in its proper place according to the number
endorsed.  The registrar was not fenced off from the public by a wide
counter; he was the servant of the citizens, and had to satisfy those
who paid him for his labours.  His pay was a fixed number of cents
per folio, not dollars, nor pounds.

When I went back to gaol I found it deserted.  Wilkins had sold his
farm and disappeared.  His wife remained in the hut.  Sheriff
Cunningham was still away among the Bluenoses, and Silas was 'functus
officio', having accomplished a general gaol delivery.  He did not
pine away on account of the loss of his prisoners, nor grow any
thinner--that was impossible.  I remained four days longer,
expecting something would happen; but nothing did happen, then I left
the gaol.

I wrote out two notices informing the public that I was willing to
sell my real estate; one of these I pasted up at the Post Office, the
other on the bridge over the Aux Plaines River.  Next day a German
from Chicago agreed to pay the price asked, and we called on Colonel
Smith, the Squire.  The Colonel filled in a brief form of transfer,
witnessed the payment of the money--which was in twenty-dollar gold
pieces, and he charged one dollar as his fee.  The German would have
to pay about 35 cents for its registration.  If the deed was lost or
stolen, he would insert in a local journal a notice of his intention
to apply for a copy, which would make the original of as little value
to anybody as a Provincial and Suburban bank note.

In Illinois, transfers of land were registered in each county town.
To buy or sell a farm was as easy as horse-stealing, and safer.
Usually, no legal help was necessary for either transaction.

By this time California had a rival; gold had been found in
Australia.  I was fond of gold; I jingled the twenty dollar gold
pieces in my pocket, and resolved to look for more at the
fountainhead, by way of my native land.  A railway from Chicago had
just reached Joliet, and had been opened three days before.  It was
an invitation to start, and I accepted it.

Nobody ever loved his native land better than I do when I am away
from it.  I can call to mind its innumerable beauties, and in fancy
saunter once more through the summer woods, among the bracken, the
bluebells, and the foxglove.  I can wander by the banks of the Brock,
where the sullen trout hide in the clear depths of the pools.  I can
walk along the path--the path to Paradise--still lined with the
blue-eyed speedwell and red campion; I know where the copse is
carpeted with the bluebell and ragged robin, where grow the alders,
and the hazels rich with brown nuts, the beeches and the oaks; where
the flower of the yellow broom blazes like gold in the noontide sun;
where the stockdove coos overhead in the ivy; where the kingfisher
darts past like a shaft of sapphire, and the water ouzel flies up
stream; where the pheasant glides out from his home in the wood to
feed on the headland of the wheat field; where the partridge broods
in the dust with her young; where the green lane is bordered by the
guelder-rose or wayfaring tree, the raspberry, strawberry, and
cherry, the wild garlic of starlike flowers, the woodruff, fragrant
as new-mown hay; the yellow pimpernel on the hedge side.  I see in
the fields and meadows the bird's foot trefoil, the oxeye daisy, the
lady smocks, sweet hemlock, butterbur, the stitchwort, and the
orchis, the "long purpled" of Shakespeare.  By the margin of the pond
the yellow iris hangs out its golden banners over which the dragon
fly skims.  The hedgerows are gay with the full-blown dog-roses, the
bells of the bilberries droop down along the wood-side, and the
red-hipped bumble bees hum over them.  Out of the woodland and up
Snaperake Lane I rise to the moorland, and then the sea coast comes
in sight, and the longing to know what lies beyond it.

I have been twice to see what lies beyond it, and when I return once
more my own land does not know me.  There is another sea coast in
sight now, and when I sail away from it I hope to land on some one of
the Isles of the Blest.

I called on my oldest living love; she looked, I thought, even
younger than when we last parted.  She was sitting before the fire
alone, pale and calm, but she gave me no greeting; she had forgotten
me.  I took a chair, sat down beside her, and waited.  A strange lass
with a fair face and strong bare arms came in and stared at me
steadily for a minute or two, but went away without saying a word.  I
looked around the old house room that I knew so well, with its floor
of flags from Buckley Delph, scoured white with sandstone. There
stood, large and solid, the mealark of black oak, with the date,
1644, carved just below the heavy lid, more than 200 years old, and
as sound as ever.  The sloping mirror over the chest of drawers was
still supported by the four seasons, one at each corner.  Above it
was Queen Caroline, with the crown on her head, and the sceptre in
her hand, seated in a magnificent Roman chariot, drawn by the lion
and the unicorn.  That team had tortured my young soul for years.  I
could never understand why that savage lion had not long ago devoured
both the Queen and the unicorn.

My old love was looking at me, and at last she put one hand on my
knee, and said:

"It's George."

"Yes," I said, "it's George."

She gazed a while into the fire and said:

"Alice is dead."

"Yes, Alice is dead."

"And Jenny is dead."

"Yes, and Jenny.  They are at the bottom of the sea."

In that way she counted a long list of the dead, which she closed
by saying:

"They are all gone but Joe."

She had been a widow more than twenty-five years.  She was a young
woman, tall and strong, before Bonaparte, Wellington, the United
States, or Australia, had ever been heard of in Lancashire, and from
the top of a stile she had counted every windmill and chimney in
Preston before it was covered with the black pall of smoke from the
cotton-mills.



AMONG THE DIGGERS IN 1853.

I.

I lost a summer in 1853, and had two winters instead, one in England,
the other in Australia.

It was cold in the month of May as we neared Bendigo.  We were a
mixed party of English,  Irish, and Scotch, twelve in number, and
accompanied by three horse-teams, carrying tubs, tents, and
provisions.  We also had plenty of arms wherewith to fight the
bush-rangers, but I did not carry any myself; I left the fighting
department to my mate, Philip, and to the others who were fond of
war.  Philip was by nature and training as gentle and amiable as a
lamb, but he was a Young Irelander, and therefore a fighter on
principle.  O'Connell had tried moral suasion on the English
Government long enough, and to no purpose, so Philip and his fiery
young friends were prepared to have recourse to arms.  The arms he
was now carrying consisted of a gleaming bowie knife, and two pistols
stuck in his belt.  The pistols were good ones; Philip had tried them
on a friend in the Phoenix Park the morning after a ball at the
Rotunda, and had pinked his man--shot him in the arm.  It is
needless to say that there was a young lady in the case; I don't know
what became of her, but during the rest of her life she could boast
of having been the fair demoiselle on whose account the very last
duel was fought in Ireland.  Then the age of chivalry went out.  The
bowie knife was the British article bought in Liverpool.  It would
neither kill a man nor cut a beef-steak, as was proved by experience.

We met parties of men from Bendigo--unlucky diggers, who offered to
sell their thirty-shilling licenses.  By this time my cash was low;
my twenty-dollar gold pieces were all consumed.  While voyaging to
the new Ophir, where gold was growing underfoot, I could not see any
sound sense in being niggardly.  But when I saw a regular stream of
disappointed men with empty pockets offering their monthly licenses
for five shillings each within sight of the goldfield, I had
misgivings, and I bought a license that had three weeks to run from
William Matthews.  Ten other men bought licenses, but William
Patterson, a canny Scotchman, said he would chance it.

It was about midday when we halted near Bendigo Creek, opposite a
refreshment tent.  Standing in front of it was a man who had passed
us on the road, and lit his pipe at our fire.  When he stooped to
pick up a firestick I saw the barrel of a revolver under his coat.
He was accompanied by a lady on horseback, wearing a black riding
habit.  Our teamsters called him Captain Sullivan.  He was even then
a man well known to the convicts and the police, and was supposed to
be doing a thriving business as keeper of a sly grog shop, but in
course of time it was discovered that his main source of profit was
murder and robbery.  He was afterwards known as "The New Zealand
Murderer," who turned Queen's evidence, sent his mates to the
gallows, but himself died unhanged.

While we stood in the track, gazing hopelessly over the endless heaps
of clay and gravel covering the flat, a little man came up and spoke
to Philip, in whom he recognised a fellow countryman.  He said:

"You want a place to camp on, don't you?"

"Yes," replied Philip, "we have only just come up from Melbourne."

"Well, come along with me," said the stranger.

He was a civil fellow, and said his name was Jack Moore.  We went
with him in the direction of the first White Hill, but before
reaching it we turned to the left up a low bluff, and halted in a
gully where many men were at work puddling clay in tubs.

After we had put up our tent, Philip went down the gully to study the
art of gold digging.  He watched the men at work; some were digging
holes, some were dissolving clay in tubs of water by stirring it
rapidly with spades, and a few were stooping at the edge of
water-holes, washing off the sand mixed with the gold in milk pans.

Philip tried to enter into conversation with the diggers.  He stopped
near one man, and said:

"Good day, mate.  How are you getting along?"

The man gazed at him steadily, and replied "Go you to hell," so
Philip moved on.  The next man he addressed sent him in the same
direction, adding a few blessings; the third man was panning off, and
there was a little gold visible in his pan.  He was gray, grim, and
hairy.  Philip said:

"Not very lucky to-day, mate?"

The hairy man stood up, straightened his back, and looked at Philip
from head to foot.

"Lucky be blowed.  I wish I'd never seen this blasted place.  Here
have I been sinking holes and puddling for five months, and hav'n't
made enough to pay my tucker and the Government license, thirty bob a
month.  I am a mason, and I threw up twenty-eight bob a day to come
to this miserable hole.  Wherever you come from, young man, I advise
you to go back there again.  There's twenty thousand men on Bendigo,
and I don't believe nineteen thousand of 'em are earning their grub."

"I can't well go back fifteen thousand miles, even if I had money to
take me back," answered Philip.

"Well, you might walk as far as Melbourne," said the hairy man, "and
then you could get fourteen bob a day as a hodman; or you might take
a job at stone breaking; the Government are giving 7s. 6d. a yard for
road metal.  Ain't you got any trade to work at?"

"No, I never learned a trade, I am only a gentleman."  He felt mean
enough to cry.

"Well, that's bad.  If you are a scholar, you might keep school, but
I don't believe there's half-a-dozen kids on the diggin's.  They'd be
of no mortal use except to tumble down shafts.  Fact is, if you are
really hard up, you can be a peeler.  Up at the camp they'll take on
any useless loafer wot's able to carry a carbine, and they'll give
you tucker, and you can keep your shirt clean.  But, mind, if you do
join the Joeys, I hope you'll be shot.  I'd shoot the hull blessed
lot of 'em if I had my way.  They are nothin' but a pack of robbers."
The hairy man knew something of current history and statistics, but
he had not a pleasant way of imparting his knowledge.

Picaninny Gully ended in a flat, thinly timbered, where there were
only a few diggers.  Turning to the left, Philip found two men near a
waterhole hard at work puddling.  When he bade them good-day, they
did not swear at him, which was some comfort.  They were brothers,
and were willing to talk, but they did not stop work for a minute.
They had a large pile of dirt, and were making hay while the sun
shone--that is, washing their dirt as fast as they could while the
water lasted.  During the preceding summer they had carted their
wash-dirt from the gully until rain came and filled the waterhole.
They said they had not found any rich ground, but they could now make
at least a pound a day each by constant work.  Philip thought they
were making more, as they seemed inclined to sing small; in those
days to brag of your good luck might be the death of you.

While Philip was away interviewing the diggers, Jack showed me where
he had worked his first claim, and had made 400 pounds in a few days.
"You might mark off a claim here and try it," he said.  "I think I
took out the best gold, but there may be a little left still
hereabout."  I pegged off two claims, one for Philip, and one for
myself, and stuck a pick in the centre of each.  Then we sat down on
a log.  Six men came up the gully carrying their swags, one of them
was unusually tall.  Jack said:  "Do you see that big fellow there?
His name is McKean.  He comes from my part of Ireland.  He is a
lawyer; the last time I saw him he was in a court defending a
prisoner, and now the whole six feet seven of him is nothing but a
dirty digger."

"What made you leave Ireland, Jack?" I asked.

"I left it, I guess, same as you did, because I couldn't live in it.
My father was a fisherman, and he was drowned.  Mother was left with
eight children, and we were as poor as church mice.  I was the
oldest, so I went to Belfast and got a billet on board ship as cabin
boy.  I made three voyages from Liverpool to America, and was boxed
about pretty badly, but I learned to handle the ropes.  My last port
there was Boston, and I ran away and lived with a Yankee farmer named
Small.  He was a nigger driver, he was, working the soul out of him
early and late.  He had a boat, and I used to take farm produce in it
across the bay to Boston, where the old man's eldest son kept a
boarding-house.  There was a daughter at home, a regular high-flier.
She used to talk to me as if I was a nigger.  One day when we were
having dinner, she was asking me questions about Ireland, and about
my mother, sisters, and brothers.  Then I got mad, thinking how poor
they were, and I could not help them.  'Miss Small,' I said, 'my
mother is forty years old, and she has eight children, and she looks
younger than you do, and has not lost a tooth.'

"Miss Small, although quite young, was nearly toothless, so she was
mad enough to kill me; but her brother Jonathan was at table, and he
took my part, saying, 'Sarves you right, Sue;' why can't you leave
Jack alone?'

"But Sue made things most unpleasant, and I told Jonathan I couldn't
stay on the farm, and would rather go to sea again.  Jonathan said
he, too, was tired of farming, and he would go with me.  He could
manage a boat across Boston Harbour, but he had never been to sea.
Next time there was farm stuff to go to Boston he went with me; we
left the boat with his brother, and shipped in a whaler bound for the
South Seas.  I used to show him how to handle the ropes, to knot and
splice, and he soon became a pretty good hand, though he was not
smart aloft when reefing.  His name was Small, but he was not a small
man; he was six feet two, and the strongest man on board, and he
didn't allow any man to thrash me, because I was little.  After
eighteen months' whaling he persuaded me to run away from the ship at
Hobarton; he said he was tired of the greasy old tub; so one night we
bundled up our swags, dropped into a boat, and took the road to
Launceston, where we expected to find a vessel going to Melbourne.
When we were half-way across the island, we called just before
sundown at a farmhouse to see if we could get something to eat, and
lodging for the night.  We found two women cooking supper in the
kitchen, and Jonathan said to the younger one, 'Is the old man at
home?'  She replied quite pertly:

"'Captain Massey is at home, if that's what you mean by 'old man.'

"'Well, my dear,' said Jonathan, 'will you just tell him that we are
two seamen on our way to Launceston, and we'd like to have a word
with him.'

"'I am not your dear,' she replied, tossing her head, and went out.
After a while she returned, and said:  'Captain Massey wanted to
speak to the little man first.'  That was me.

"I went into the house, and was shown into the parlour, where the
captain was standing behind a table.  There was a gun close to his
hand in a corner, two horse pistols on a shelf, and a sword hanging
over them.  He said:  'Who are you, where from, and whither bound?'
to which I replied:

"'My name is John Moore; me and my mate have left our ship, a whaler,
at Hobarton, and we are bound for Launceston.'

"'Oh, you are a runaway foremast hand are you?  Then you know
something about work on board ship.'  He then put questions to me
about the work of a seaman, making sail, and reefing, about masts,
yards, and rigging, and finished by telling me to box a compass.  I
passed my examination pretty well, and he told me to send in the
other fellow.  He put Jonathan through his sea-catechism in the same
way, and then said we could have supper and a shake-down for the
night.

"After supper the young lady sat near the kitchen fire sewing, and
Jonathan took a chair near her and began a conversation.  He said:

"I must beg pardon for having ventured to address you as 'my dear,'
on so short an acquaintance, but I hope you will forgive my boldness.
Fact is, I felt quite attached to you at first sight.'  And so on.
If there was one thing that Jonathan could do better than another it
was talking.  The lady was at first very prim and reserved; but she
soon began to listen, smiled, and even tittered.  A little boy about
two years old came in and stood near the fire.  Having nothing else
to do, I took him on my knee, and set him prattling until we were
very good friends.  Then an idea came into my head.  I said:

"'I guess, Jonathan, this little kid is about the same age as your
youngest boy in Boston, ain't he?'

"Of course, Jonathan had no boy and was not married, but the sudden
change that came over that young lady was remarkable.  She gave
Jonathan a look of fury, jumped up from her seat, snatched up her
sewing, and bounced out of the kitchen.  The old man came in, and
told us to come along, and he would show us our bunks.  We thought he
was a little queer, but he seemed uncommonly kind and anxious to make
us comfortable for the night.  He took us to a hut very strongly
built with heavy slabs, left us a lighted candle, and bade us
good-night.  After he closed the door we heard him put a padlock on
it; he was a kindly old chap, and did not want anybody to disturb us
during the night, and we soon fell fast asleep.  Next morning he came
early and called us to breakfast.  He stayed with us all the time,
and when we had eaten, said:

"'Well, have you had a good breakfast?'

"Jonathan spoke:

"'Yes, old man, we have.  You are a gentleman; you have done yourself
proud, and we are thankful, ain't we, Jack?  You are the best and
kindest old man we've met since we sailed from Boston.  And now I
think it's time we made tracks for Launceston.  By-bye, Captain.
Come along, Jack.'

"'No you won't, my fine coves,' replied the captain.  'You'll go back
to Hobarton, and join your ship if you have one, which I don't
believe.  You can't humbug an old salt like me.  You are a pair of
runaway convicts, and I'll give you in charge as sich.  Here,
constables, put the darbies on 'em, and take 'em back to Hobarton.'

"Two men who had been awaiting orders outside the door now entered,
armed with carbines, produced each a pair of handcuffs, and came
towards us.  But Jonathan drew back a step or two, clenched his big
fists, and said:

"'No, you don't.  If this is your little game, captain, all I have to
say is, you are the darndest double-faced old cuss on this side of
perdition.  You can shoot me if you like, but neither you nor the
four best men in Van Diemen's Land can put them irons on me.  I am a
free citizen of the Great United States, and a free man I'll be or
die.  I'll walk back to Hobarton, if you like, with these men, for I
guess that greasy old whaler has gone to sea again by this time, and
we'll get another ship there as well as at Launceston.'

"Captain Massey did not like to venture on shooting us off-hand, so
at last he told the constables to put up their handcuffs and start
with us for Hobarton.

"After we had travelled awhile Jonathan cooled down and began to talk
to the constables.  He asked them how they liked the island, how long
they had been in it, if it was a good country for farming, how they
were getting along, and what pay they got for being constables.  One
of them said:  'The island is pretty good in parts, but it's too
mountaynyus; we ain't getting along at all, and we won't have much
chance to do any good until our time is out.'

"'What on airth do you mean by saying "until you time is out?"  Ain't
your time your own?' asked Jonathan.

"'No, indeed.  I see you don't understand.  We are Government men,
and we ain't done our time.  We were sent out from England.'

"'Oh!  you were sent out, were you?  Now, I see, that means you are
penitentiary men, and ought to be in gaol.  Jack, look here.  This
kind of thing will never do.  You and me are two honest citizens of
the United States, and here we are, piloted through Van Diemen's Land
by two convicts, and Britishers at that.  This team has got to be
changed right away.'

"He seized both carbines and handed them to me; then he handcuffed
the constables, who were so taken aback they never said a word.  Then
Jonathan said, 'This is training day.  Now, march.'

"The constables walked in front, me and Jonathan behind, shouldering
the guns.  In this way we marched until we sighted Hobarton, but the
two convicts were terribly afraid to enter the city as prisoners;
they said they were sure to be punished, would most likely be sent
into a chain gang, and would soon be strangled in the barracks at
night for having been policemen.  We could see they were really
afraid, so we took off the handcuffs and gave them back the carbines.

"Before entering the city we found that the whaler had left the
harbour, and felt sure we would not be detained long, as nothing
could be proved against us.  When we were brought before the beak
Jonathan told our story, and showed several letters he had received
from Boston, so he was discharged.  But I had nothing to show; they
knew I was an Irishman, and the police asked for a remand to prove
that I was a runaway convict.  I was kept three weeks in gaol, and
every time I was brought to court Jonathan was there.  He said he
would not go away without me.  The police could find out nothing
against me, so, at last, they let me go.  We went aboard the first
vessel bound for Melbourne, and, when sail was made, I went up to the
cross-trees and cursed Van Diemen's Land as long as I could see it.
Jonathan took ship for the States, but I went shepherding, and grew
so lazy that if my stick dropped to the ground I wouldn't bend my
back to pick it up.  But when I heard of the diggings, I woke up,
humped my swag, and ran away--I was always man enough for that--
and I don't intend to shepherd again."

When Philip returned from his excursion down the gully, he gave me a
detailed report of the results and said, "Gold mining is remarkable
for two things, one certain, the other uncertain.  The certain thing
is labour, the uncertain thing is gold."  This information staggered
me, so I replied, "Those two things will have to wait till morning.
Let us boil the billy."  Our spirits were not very high when we began
work next day.

We slept under our small calico tent, and our cooking had to be done
outside.  Sometimes it rained, and then we had to kindle a fire with
stringy bark under an umbrella   The umbrella was mine--the only
one I ever saw on the diggings.  Some men who thought they were witty
made observations about it, but I stuck to it all the same.  No man
could ever laugh me out of a valuable property.

We lived principally on beef steak, tea, and damper.  Philip cut his
bread and beef with his bowie knife as long as it lasted.  Every man
passing by could see that we were formidable, and ready to defend our
gold to the death--when we got it.  But the bowie was soon useless;
it got a kink in the middle, and a curl at the point, and had no edge
anywhere.  It was good for nothing but trade.

A number of our shipmates had put up tents in the neighbourhood, and
at night we all gathered round the camp fire to talk and smoke away
our misery.  One, whose name I forget, was a journalist,
correspondent for the 'Nonconformist'.  Scott was an artist, Harrison
a mechanical engineer.  Doran a commercial traveller, Moran an
ex-policeman, Beswick a tailor, Bernie a clogger.  The first lucky
digger we saw, after Picaninny Jack, came among us one dark night; he
came suddenly, head foremost, into our fire, and plunged his hands
into the embers.  We pulled him out, and then two other men came up.
They apologised for the abrupt entry of their mate.  They said he was
a lucky digger, and they were his friends and fellow-countrymen.  A
lucky digger could find friends anywhere, from any country, without
looking for them, especially if he was drunk, as was this stranger.
They said he had travelled from Melbourne with a pack horse, and,
near Mount Alexander, he saw a woman picking up something or other on
the side of a hill.  She might be gathering flowers, but he could not
see any.  He stopped and watched her for a while and then went
nearer.  She did not take any notice of him, so he thought the poor
thing had been lost in the bush, and had gone cranky.  He pitied her,
and said:

"My good woman, have you lost anything?  Could I help you to look for it?"

"I am not your good woman, and I have not lost anything; so I don't
want anybody to help me to look for it."

He was now quite sure she was cranky.  She stooped and picked up
something, but he could not see what it was.  He began to look on the
ground, and presently he found a bright little nugget of gold.  Then
he knew what kind of flowers the woman was gathering.  Without a word
he took his horse to the foot of the hill, hobbled it, and took off
his swag.  He went up the hill again, filled his pan with earth, and
washed it off at the nearest waterhole.  He had struck it rich; the
hill-side was sprinkled with gold, either on the surface or just
below it.  For two weeks there were only two parties at work on that
hill, parties of one, but they did not form a partnership.  The woman
came every day, picking and scratching like an old hen, and went away
at sundown.

When the man went away he took with him more than a hundredweight of
gold.  He was worth looking at, so we put more wood on the fire, and
made a good blaze.  Yes, he was a lucky digger, and he was enjoying
his luck.  He was blazing drunk, was in evening dress, wore a black
bell-topper, and kid gloves.  The gloves had saved his hands from
being burned when he thrust them into the fire.  There could be no
doubt that he was enjoying himself.  He came suddenly out of the
black night, and staggered away into it again with his two friends.

One forenoon, about ten o'clock, while we were busy, peacefully
digging and puddling, we heard a sound like the rumbling of distant
thunder from the direction of Bendigo flat.  The thunder grew louder
until it became like the bellowing of ten thousand bulls.  It was the
welcome accorded by the diggers to our "trusty and well-beloved"
Government when it came forth on a digger hunt.  It was swelled by
the roars, and cooeys, and curses of every man above ground and
below, in the shafts and drives on the flats, and in the tunnels of
the White Hills, from Golden Gully and Sheep's Head, to Job's Gully
and Eaglehawk, until the warning that "Joey's out" had reached to the
utmost bounds of the goldfield.

There was a strong feeling amongst the diggers that the license fee
of thirty shillings per month was excessive, and this feeling was
intensified by the report that it was the intention of the Government
to double the amount.  As a matter of fact, by far the larger number
of claims yielded no gold at all, or not enough to pay the fee.  The
hatred of the hunted diggers made it quite unsafe to send out a small
number of police and soldiers, so there came forth at irregular
intervals a formidable body of horse and foot, armed with carbines,
swords, and pistols.

This morning they marched rapidly along the track towards the White
Hills, but wheeling to the left up the bluff they suddenly appeared
at the head of Picaninny Gully.  Mounted men rode down each side of
the gully as fast as the nature of the ground would permit, for it
was then honeycombed with holes, and encumbered with the trunks and
stumps of trees, especially on the eastern side.  They thus managed
to hem us in like prisoners of war, and they also overtook some
stragglers hurrying away to right and left.  Some of these had
licenses in their pockets, and refused to stop or show them until
they were actually arrested.  It was a ruse of war.  They ran away as
far as possible among the holes and logs, in order to draw off the
cavalry, make them break their ranks, and thus to give a chance to
the unlicensed to escape or to hide themselves.  The police on foot,
armed with carbines and accompanied by officers, next came down the
centre of the gully, and every digger was asked to show his license.
I showed that of William Matthews.

It was not that the policy of William Patterson was tried and found
wanting.  He was at work on his claim a little below mine, and
knowing he had no license, I looked at him to see how he would behave
in the face of the enemy.  He had stopped working, and was walking in
the direction of his tent, with head bowed down as ifin search of
something he had lost.  He disappeared in his tent, which was a large
one, and had, near the opening, a chimney built up with ironstone
boulders and clay.  But the police had seen him; he was followed,
found hiding in the corner of his chimney, arrested, and placed among
the prisoners who were then halted near my tub.  Immediately behind
Patterson, and carrying a carbine on his shoulder, stood a well-known
shipmate named Joynt, whom poverty had compelled to join the enemy.
He would willingly have allowed his friend and prisoner to escape,
but no chance of doing so occurred, and long after dark Patterson
approached our camp fire, a free man, but hungry, tired, and full of
bitterness.  He had been forced to march along the whole day like a
convicted felon, with an ever-increasing crowd of prisoners, had been
taken to the camp at nightfall and made to pay 6 pounds 10s.--viz.,
a fine of 5 pounds and 1 pound 10s. for a license.

The feelings of William Patterson, and of thousands of other diggers,
were outraged, and they burned for revenge.  A roll-up was called,
and three public meetings were held on three successive Saturday
afternoons, on a slight eminence near the Government camp.  The
speakers addressed the diggers from a wagon.  Some advocated armed
resistance.  It was well known that many men, French, German, and
even English, were on the diggings who had taken part in the
revolutionary outbreak of '48, and that they were eager to have
recourse to arms once more in the cause of liberty.  But the majority
advocated the trial of a policy of peace, at least to begin with.  A
final resolution was passed by acclamation that a fee of ten
shillings a month should be offered, and if not accepted, no fee
whatever was to be paid.

It was argued that if the diggers stood firm, it would be impossible
for the few hundreds of soldiers and police to arrest and keep in
custody nearly twenty thousand men.  If an attempt was made to take
us all to gaol, digger-hunting would have to be suspended, the
revenue would dwindle to nothing, and Government would be starved
out.  It was, in fact, no Government at all; it was a mere assemblage
of armed men sent to rob us, not to protect us; each digger had to do
that for himself.

Next day, Sunday, I walked through the diggings, and observed the
words "No License Here" pinned or pasted outside every tent, and
during the next month only about three hundred licenses were taken
out, instead of the fourteen or fifteen thousand previously issued,
the digger-hunting was stopped, and a license-fee of forty shillings
for three months was substituted for that of thirty shillings per
month.

II.

As no man who had a good claim would be willing to run the risk of
losing it, the number of licenses taken out after the last meeting
would probably represent the number of really lucky diggers then at
work on Bendigo, viz., three hundred more or less, and of the three
hundred I don't think our gully could boast of one.  All were finding
a little gold, but even the most fortunate were not making more than
"tucker."  By puddling eight tubs of washdirt I found that we could
obtain about one pound's worth of gold each per day; but this was
hardly enough to keep hope alive.  The golden hours flew over us, but
they did not send down any golden showers.  I put the little that
fell to my share into a wooden match-box, which I carried in my
pocket.  I knew it would hold twelve ounces--if I could get so much
--and looked into it daily and shook the gold about to see if I were
growing rich.

It was impossible to feel jolly, and I could see that Philip was
discontented.  He had never been accustomed to manual labour; he did
not like being exposed to the cold winds, to the frost or rain, with
no shelter except that afforded by our small tent.  While at work we
were always dirty, and often wet; and after we had passed a miserable
night, daylight found us shivering, until warmth came with hard work.
One morning Philip lost his temper; his only hat was soaked with
rain, and his trousers, shirt, and boots were stiff with clay.  He
put a woollen comforter on his head in lieu of the hat.  The
comforter was of gaudy colours, and soon attracted public attention.
A man down the gully said:

"I obsarved yesterday we had young Ireland puddling up here, and I
persave this morning we have an Italian bandit or a Sallee rover at
work among us."

Every digger looked at Philip, and he fell into a sudden fury; you
might have heard him at the first White Hill.

"Yesterday I heard a donkey braying down the gully, and this morning
he is braying again."

"Oh! I see," replied the Donkey.  "We are in a bad temper this morning."

Father Backhaus was often seen walking with long strides among the
holes and hillocks on Bendigo Flat or up and down the gullies, on a
visit to some dying digger, for Death would not wait until we had all
made our pile.  His messengers were going around all the time;
dysentery, scurvy, or fever; and the priest hurried after them.
Sometimes he was too late; Death had entered the tent before him.

He celebrated Mass every Sunday in a tent made of drugget, and
covered with a calico fly.  His presbytery, sacristy, confessional,
and school were all of similar materials, and of small dimensions.
There was not room in the church for more than thirty or forty
persons; there were no pews, benches, or chairs.  Part of the
congregation consisted of soldiers from the camp, who had come up
from Melbourne to shoot us if occasion required.  Six days of the
week we hated them and called "Joey" after them, but on the seventh
day we merely glared at them, and let them pass in silence.  They
were sleek and clean, and we were gaunt as wolves, with scarcely a
clean shirt among us.  Philip, especially hated them as enemies of
his country, and the more so because they were his countrymen, all
but one, who was a black man.

The people in and around the church were not all Catholics.  I saw a
man kneeling near me reading the Book of Common Prayer of the Church
of England; there was also a strict Presbyterian, to whom I spoke
after Mass.  He said the priest did not preach with as much energy as
the ministers in Scotland.  And yet I thought Father Backhaus' sermon
had that day been "powerful," as the Yankees would say.  He preached
from the top of a packing case in front of the tent.  The audience
was very numerous, standing in close order to the distance of
twenty-five or thirty yards under a large gum tree.

The preacher spoke with a German accent, but his meaning was plain.

He said:

"My dear brethren' 'Beatus ille qui post aurum non abiit'.  Blessed
is the man who has not gone after gold, nor put his trust in money or
treasures.  You will never earn that blessing, my dear brethren.  Why
are you here?  You have come from every corner of the world to look
for gold.  You think it is a blessing, but when you get it, it is
often a curse.  You go what you call 'on the spree'; you find the
'sly grog'; you get drunk and are robbed of your gold; sometimes you
are murdered; or you fall into a hole and are killed, and you go to
hell dead drunk.  Patrick Doyle was here at Mass last Sunday; he was
then a poor digger.  Next day he found gold, 'struck it rich,' as you
say; then he found the grog also and brought it to his tent.
Yesterday he was found dead at the bottom of his golden shaft, and he
was buried in the graveyard over there near the Government camp."

My conscience was quite easy when the sermon was finished.  It would
be time enough for me to take warning from the fate of Paddy Doyle
when I had made my pile.  Let the lucky diggers beware!  I was not
one of them.

After we had been at work a few weeks, Father Backhaus, before
stepping down from the packing-case, said:

"I want someone to teach in a school; if there is anyone here willing
to do so, I should like to see him after Mass."

I was looking round for Philip among the crowd when he came up, eager
and excited.

"I am thinking of going in to speak to the priest about that school,"
he said.  "Would you have any objection?  You know we are doing no
good in the gully, but I won't leave itif you think I had better not."

Philip was honourable; he would not dissolve our short partnership,
and leave me alone unless I was quite willing to let him go.

"Have you ever kept school before?"

"No, never.  But I don't think the teaching will give me much
trouble.  There can't be many children around here, and I can surely
teach them A B C and the Catechism."

Although I thought he had not given fortune a fair chance to bless
us, he looked so wistful and anxious that I had not the heart to say
no.  Philip went into the tent, spoke to the priest, and became a
schoolmaster.  I was then a solitary "hatter."

Next day a man came up the gully with a sack on his back with
something in it which he had found in a shaft.  He thought the shaft
had not been dug down to the bedrock, and he would bottom it.  He
bottomed on a corpse.  The claim had been worked during the previous
summer by two men.  One morning there was only one man on it; he said
his mate had gone to Melbourne, but he had in fact killed him during
the night, and dropped him down the hole.  The police never hunted
out that murderer; they were too busy hunting us.

I was not long alone.  A beggarly looking young man came a few days
later, and said:

"I hear you have lost your mate Philip, and my mates have all gone
away and taken the tent with them; so I want to ask you to let me
stay in your tent until I can look round a bit."

This young man's name was David Beswick, but he was known simply as
"Bez."  He was a harmonious tailor from Manchester; he played the
violoncello, also the violin; had a good tenor voice, and a talent
for the drama.  He, and a man named Santley from Liverpool, had taken
leading parts in our plays and concerts on shipboard.  Scott, the
artist, admired Bez; he said he had the head, the features, and the
talent of a Shakespeare.  He had a sketch of Bez in his portfolio,
which he was filling with crooked trees, common diggers, and ugly
blackamoors.  I could see no Shakespeare in Bez; he was nothing but a
dissipated tailor who had come out in the steerage, while I had
voyaged in the house on deck.  I was, therefore, a superior person,
and looked down on the young man, who was seated on a log near the
fire, one leg crossed over the other, and slowly stroking his
Elizabethan beard.  I said:

"Yes, Philip has left me, but I don't want any partner.  I understand
you are a tailor by trade, and I don't think much of a tailor."

"Well," replied Bez, "I don't think much of him myself, so I have
dropped the business.  I am now a sailor.  You know yourself I sailed
from Liverpool to Melbourne, and, anyhow, there's only the difference
of a letter between a tailor and a sailor."

There was a flaw somewhere in the argument, but I only said, "'Valeat
quantum valere potest.'"  Bez looked solemn; a little Latin goes a
long way with some people.  He was an object of charity, and I made
him feel it.

"In the first place this tent is teetotal.  No grog is to come inside
it.  There is to be no mining partnership.  You can keep all the gold
you get, and I shall do the same.  You must keep all trade secrets,
and never confess you are a tailor.  I could never hold up my head
among the diggers if they should discover that my mate was only the
ninth part of a man.  You must carry to the tent a quantity of clay
and rocks sufficient to build a chimney, of which I shall be the
architect.  You will also pay for your own tucker, chop wood, make
the fire, fetch water, and boil the billy."  Bez promised solemnly to
abide by these conditions, and then I allowed him to deposit his swag
in the tent.

The chimney was built in three days, and we could then defy the
weather, and dispense with the umbrella.  Bez performed his part of
the contract well.  He adopted a rolling gait and the frown of a
pirate; he swore naval oaths strong enough to still a hurricane.
Among his digging outfit was a huge pick; it was a two-man pick, and
he carried it on his shoulder to suggest his enormous strength.  He
threw tailordom to the winds; when a rent appeared in his trousers he
closed it with pins, disdaining the use of the needle, until he
became so ragged that I ordered him into dock for repairs.

One day in passing Philip's school I peeped in at the flap of the
tent.  He had already acquired the awe-inspiring look of the
schoolmaster.  He was teaching a class of little boys, whose
wandering eyes were soon fixed on my face, and then Philip saw me.
He smiled and blushed, and came outside.  He said he was getting
along capitally, and did not want to try digging any more.  He had
obtained a small treatise called "The Twelve Virtues of a Good
Master," and he was studying it daily in order to qualify himself for
his new calling.  He had undertaken to demonstrate one of Euclid's
propositions every night by way of exercising his reasoning
faculties.  He was also making new acquaintances amongst men who were
not diggers--doctors, storekeepers, and the useful blacksmiths who
pointed our picks with steel.  He had also two or three friends at
the Governmnt camp, and I felt inclined to look upon him as a traitor
to the diggers' cause but although he had been a member of the party
of Young Irelanders, he was the most innocent traitor and the poorest
conspirator I ever heard of.  He could keep nothing from me.  If he
had been a member of some secret society, he would have burst up the
secret, or the secret would have burst him.

He had some friends among the diggers.  The big gum tree in front of
the church tent soon became a kind of trysting place on Sundays, at
which men could meet with old acquaintances and shipmates, and
convicts could find old pals.  Amongst the crowd one Sunday were five
men belonging to a party of six from Nyalong; the sixth man was at
home guarding the tent.  Four of the six were Irish Catholics, and
they came regularly to Mass every Sunday; the other two were
Englishmen, both convicts, of no particular religion, but they had
married Catholic immigrants, and sometimes went to church, but more
out of pastime than piety.  One of these men, known as John Barton--
he had another name in the indents--stood under the gum tree, but
not praying; I don't think he ever thought of praying except the need
of it was extreme.  He was of medium height, had a broad face, snub
nose, stood erect like a soldier, and was strongly built.  His small
ferrety eyes were glancing quickly among the faces around him until
they were arrested by another pair of eyes at a short distance.  The
owner of the second pair of eyes nudged two other men standing by,
and then three pairs of eyes were fixed on Barton.  He was not a
coward, but something in the expression of the three men cowed him
completely.  He turned his head and lowered it, and began to push his
way among the crowd to hide himself.  After Mass, Philip found him in
his tent, and suspecting that he was a thief put his hand on a
medium-sized Colt's revolver, which he had exchanged for his duelling
pistols, and said:

"Well, my friend, and what are you doing here?"

"For God's sake speak low," whispered Barton.  "I came in here to
hide.  There are three men outside who want to kill me."

"Three men who want to kill you, eh?  Do you expect me to believe
that anybody among the crowd there would murder you in broad
daylight?  My impression is, my friend, that you are a sneaking
thief, and that you came here to look

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