died on the voyage in consequence of the inhuman treatment they received; in some cases the deaths were a fourth of the entire number. On their arrival in Australia they were put at work in Government establishments, or on public roads and wharves, or were hired out to agricultural and other colonists. You must remember that those were the days of brute force, and no officer in charge of convicts ever thought of such a thing as moral suasion and kindness, however much combined with firmness. Flogging was of daily and almost hourly occurrence, and administered for trivial offences; a historian of the colony says that any man who failed to go to church on Sundays received twenty lashes on his bare back. Prisoners were put in irons often at the mere caprice of their keepers, their food was scanty, their clothing often insufficient for the weather, and if a man ventured to run away he was pursued by blood-hounds and bull-dogs and brought back, unless killed by the natives or dead from starvation.
"Settlements were formed at several places along the coast of Australia and in Van Dieman's Land (now Tasmania). The first convict settlement in Tasmania was on a peninsula, and a row of bull-dogs was chained across the narrow isthmus that connected the peninsula with the main-land, so close together that it was impossible for a man to pass between any two of them."
"I suppose the prisoners rarely managed to escape?" said Frank.
"Very rarely," said the gentleman. "There were many runaways, but they were generally brought back and punished, and if their escape was accompanied with violence they were hanged or shot. In the bush they were liable to starve, and many a convict's bones are whitening where he perished of hunger; the natives were hostile, and if a runaway escaped recapture and starvation, he was very likely to fall before the spear of a black man.
"Some of the Irish convicts of 1798 were so struck by the similarity between the Blue Mountains, about eighty miles from Sydney, and the Connaught Hills of Ireland that they rushed off expecting to reach their homes without difficulty. One man who had tried on the voyage out to fathom the mystery of the mariner's compass felt sure that he could find his way home if he only had the thing to steer by. He stole a copy of a work on navigation, and tore out the first leaf, which had the picture of a compass upon it. His theft was detected and punished, and he never had an opportunity to try his system of paper-compass navigation.
"A goodly portion of the emigrants thought China was only a little
