Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/316

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

confined to no class. A convict ship, therefore, carries out to new lands representatives of most of the ranks, professions, and occupations that go to make up a complete society. Time being given—and a long time, for its growth is abnormally slow—it will develop, if only into the apelike caricature of the country that gave it birth. Colonies that have a convict origin, or have at different stages been inoculated with convictism, are numerous. A number of Greek and Eastern communities seem to have had no better beginnings. The depopulated town of Dymê, in Achaia, was settled by Pompey with pirates. A robber chief reconstructed on the Galatian frontier the decayed town afterward named Juliopolis. Five of the Ægean islands were Greek penal settlements. A portion of the bands that invaded England were pirates; the aristocratic and hygienic Isle of Wight was made by the Jutes a voluntary convict settlement. After the failure of Hispaniola, Columbus had partly to content himself on his third voyage, as on his first, with prisoners respited from the gallows. Brazil was at first a penal settlement, and it was afterward re-enforced by a very superior kind of "convicts"—the victims of the Inquisition. The equipment of the early expeditions to Canada was of like kidney. Roberval was granted permission to ransack the prisons and take thence thieves, homicides, and fradulent debtors. "Banished men and the usual complement of villains" made up De Monts's expedition. "Scoundrels of the deepest dye" crowded to Laudonnière's standard. Captain John Smith's company consisted in part of felons and vagabonds. Eighty convicts were among the first French colonists of Louisiana. All through the seventeenth century "Newgate birds" were shipped to North America, especially to Maryland and Virginia. North Carolina, like ancient Home, was "the sanctuary of runaways." It somewhat moderates our admiration of the nobly conceived project of Gustavus Adolphus to find that the Swedish settlement on the Delaware was designed in part as a penal colony. But it was toward the end of the last century and in the first half of this that penal colonies were established on a colossal scale. For the long period of fifty-two years (1788-1840) New South Wales was the recipient of every variety of convicted felon—some fifty thousand being dispatched to it from first to last. In 1803 some of the more incorrigible specimens were selected and sent to Van Diemen's Land, which continued to receive them for half a century. Twenty-one years later the same abandoned classes were shipped to the colony afterward named Queensland, but only for eighteen years. A more appalling origin for a colony can not be imagined, and the tragic page of history is blackened by no more sickening horrors than deface the early annals of Australia. Yet so little were the consequences of the transporta-