who had sent him notes of the evidence, and on this occasion Field and Macquarie had been in agreement.[1]
Thus fortified in his opinion, Macquarie wrote to the Judge-Advocate, so soon as he had received the reports, that he felt himself compelled by his sense of public duty "to dissent entirely from the opinion given by you and D'Arcy Wentworth, Esq. … as to the degree of criminality of the parties concerned, and of there not being sufficient grounds for committing them for trial in England. … I feel it my indispensable duty to request you will as soon as practicable reassemble your Committee of Enquiry for the purpose of revising your own and Mr. Wentworth's report. I must also request that the Hon. Mr. Justice Field may be solicited to join the Committee and give his legal opinion as to the course which ought to be adopted in regard to the commander of the Chapman, the surgeon-superintendent, the officer commanding the military guard, and three mates of the Chapman, one of whom, Mr. Baxter, appears to have been the most active and sanguinary in the long series of cruelties and atrocities committed on board the Chapman." There followed a paragraph of which the unconscious and impertinent patronage must have made Wylde's blood boil. "After having revised your report," wrote the Governor to his chief Law Officer, "and added thereto the Hon. Mr. Justice Field's legal opinion, I request you will favour me as soon as possible with the result, that I may adopt such measures as may then appear expedient on the occasion."[2] Thus Wylde was to learn worldly wisdom from Mr. Campbell and law from Mr. Justice Field.
Field wisely declined to join the Committee. "I beg leave to submit to your Excellency," he wrote, "that not having had the benefit of hearing all the evidence and inspecting all the documents before that Committee, it is too late for me to come in as a member of the Committee, and give an opinion against
- ↑ Field was never friendly with the Governor, and by 1820 was scarcely on speaking terms. The division between them was due to the emancipist policy of Macquarie, and especially to the fact that when Field opened his Court early in 1817, Macquarie appointed Lord and Wentworth to sit on the Bench with him without telling him of the convict status of Lord and the all but convict status of Wentworth. See Field's Evidence, Appendix, Bigge's Reports. R.O., MS.
- ↑ Macquarie to Wylde, 17th November, 1817. R.O., MS.
