call loss and trass ; amongst which, however, sometimes glances
up a fragment of pure ore that has no business there, or a gleaming
splinter of diamond illuminating the foul opacity. After an hour's
digging and shovelling, I meet perhaps with an authentic piece of
nosier Thomas himself there are two of those in the whole six
beds and once I turned up what made my heart leap " The
Forging of the Anchor " which I straightway rolled forth till
the teak timbers rang. There are a great many not intolerable
wood engravings in the volumes, and some readable topographical
description : but on the whole the thing is of very base material
" Amusements in Science " " Recreations in Religion " no,
but " Easy Lessons on Christian Evidences " much apocryphol



120 JAIL JOURNAL

anecdotage of history, but, above all, abundant illustrations of
British generosity, valour, humanity British wealth, commerce,
and civilisation : statistics of cotton fabric how many million
yards of it are made by the year, and how many times this would
go round the globe, marry, I believe the earth's orbit statistics
of steel pens how many tons of iron are snipped up into pens,
and yet how the quill trade (delightful to know) is not one
feather the worse. What " literature " what commerce there
must be here ! What correspondence what scrip ! How many
indictments, parliamentary reports, and bills in chancery ! What
book-keeping ! What book-making ! Surely there is no end to
the energy, traffic, wisdom, property, virtue, and glory of this
immortal British nation ! This is the character of all popular
British " literature " which is got up in these late years " for the
million " (poor million !) Its look is wholly introverted : it can
see or tell of nothing in the world but the British empire and
colonies. The true British spirit is now-a-days well content with
itself looks no longer above or without itself, but keeps gazing
with stupid delight intently at its own navel. The symptom
may be called omphaloblepsy , and is diagnostic of a very fatal
national disease a thorough break-up, I trust, of the Constitu-
tion.

And how happens it that I can sit for hours turning over (with
many a pooh ! and psha !) leaf after leaf of this same stratified
debris ? If I despise it so sovereignly, cannot I shut it up and lay
it on the shelf ? nobody has set me a task in it. Yet to me in-
tently revolving this matter, it is apparent that the value of any
book is not in the mere thoughts it presents to you, expressed in
black-on-white, but rather in those it suggests, occasions, begets
in you, far outside the intentions and conceptions of the writer,
and even outside the subject of his writing. If some dull rogue
writes you an essay, on what he does not understand, you are no.
bound to follow his chain of reasoning (as perhaps he calls it)
the first link of his chain may fit itself to other links of your own
forging, and so you may have whole trains, whole worlds of
thought, which need not run upon the dull rogue's line, nor stop
at his terminus. One must not disdain to draw matter of reverie
from " even a sot, a pot, a truckle for a pulley, an oil bottle, or a
cane chair." But what talk I of essays and writings ? Some



121

poor wood-cut turning up suddenly in this paltry magazine, by the
fancied likeness of one feature in it a church tower, a tree, a
human eye, or lip to somewhat you have seen far away and long
ago, may carry you, as on a sunbeam, into distant valleys of
vision, and bless your eyes with gleams of a wonderful light,
whose fountain who shall tell ? yes, and place by your side com-
panions old and dear, whose discourse you hear and answer, and
whose fare so real is the presence you would hold it but just
to pay to any ferryman on the crossing of a river a piece of
honest dealing inculcated by Uhland

" Boatman, take this coin, I pray thee ;

Thrice thy fare I cheerfully pay thee
For though thou seest them not, there stand
Anear me, Two from the Phantom Land."

The genesis of our thoughts is a mysterious operation not yet
fully explained by Dr. Thomas Brown, with his Law of Association ;
but thus much seems clear, that in order to think at all, one has
need of some kind of mechanical helps in utter solitude, dark-
ness, and silence, your intellect would soon be extinguished,
drowned in that " stagnant sea of idleness, blind, boundless, mute,
and motionless " and idiocy would ensue, or raving madness.
When a man is shut up in a rigorous confinement for many months
seeing nothing but the same dungeon walls, the same bars, the
same unwearied sun sending the same shadows every evening at
the same pace along the floor, and nothing human, save a most
down-looking and felonious felon, setting daily food before him,
the intellect cannot but stagnate, starve, and grow dull, for lack
of needful food and exercise. It is then one feels the value of
even a very bad book of anything, in short, that will help
imagination and memory to take the place of the senses
and of human converse, furnishing occasion and stimulus to
thought

But what is this ? Is it the abyss of metaphysics I see yawning
before me ? Assuredly, I will not plunge into that bottomless pit
again, after having drawn myself out of it, with pain and labour,
full fifteen years ago just so long is it since I endeavoured to
walk with my own head in my teeth, like the decapitated Christian
martyr celebrated by Mr. Gibbon or to rival that " Irish saint,"
known to Thomas Carlyle, who swam across the Channel with his



122 JAIL JOURNAL

head so secured " a miracle," saith Carlyle, " which has never
been repeated."

But, halting on this side the brink of psychology, I have yet
made a sort of excuse for a man in solitary imprisonment putting
up with exceedingly bad books. They may be to him a suc-
cedaneum, in some sort, for the various scenes and intercourse of
lite and the ordinary " uses of this world," which you know are
often as weary, stale, and flat almost as the very dullest piece of
" literature " ever heaped together yet out of which you can
always secrete and assimilate so much various pabulum as will
keep the soul from devouring itself. Cor ne edito it is not whole-
some : stay your stomach with any sort of garbage rather than
that.

February $rd. Between my cabin, and the place occupied by
the convicts, are two wooden bulks, or walls, and a room or
passage between those walls yet when the men talk loud in
quarrelling or argument, I often hear their abominable dis-
course. To-day I heard a long and angry dispute, the subject
and phraseology of which I shall not commemorate but all that
comes to my ears, or eyes, of the ways of life in this place, shows
me more and more clearly what a portentous evil is this transporta-
tion system. Each hulk, each mess or ward, is a normal school of
unspeakable iniquity : and young boys who come out, as many
surely do, not utterly desperate and incurable villains, are sure
to become so very soon under such training. I hear enough to
make me aware that the established etiquette amongst them (for
there is a peculiar good breeding for hulks as for drawing rooms)
is to cram as much brutal obscenity and stupid blasphemy into
their common speech as it will hold and that a man is respected
and influential among his messmates in direct proportion to the
atrocity of his language and behaviour. Gambling is common, and
for large sums, four and five pounds being sometimes lost and won
at a game of cards. A few of them, it seems, are able to get
money, partly by stealing, partly by traffic. Those who work in
the quarries and buildings earn threepence per day, of which but
one penny per day is given them to spend : but there are trades-
men, and these sometimes work at their trades after hours ; so that
in one way or another they contrive to carry on a considerable
traffic with the Bermudians, who communicate with them on the



JAIL JOURNAL 123

works in various ways. Many prisoners are employed constantly
about the ship as boatmen, servants, and the like ; and they
have ample opportunities to steal, of which they avail themselves
to the fullest extent. If any of them were to discover a scruple
about stealing, or decline or neglect to steal when he might, I
find it would ba resented as an offence against the laws and
usages of the commonwealth, and punished accordingly. In short,
evil is their recognised good and the most loathsome extremities
of depravity in mind and body are their summum bonum. Think
of a boy of twelve or fourteen years, who has been driven by want
or induced by example to commit a theft, sent to school at Ber-
muda for half his lifetime, in order to reform him ! But what
enrages me more than all is to think of the crowd of starved Irish,
old and young, who have taken sheep or poultry to keep their
perishing families alive in the Famine, sent out to Bermuda to
live in a style of comfort they never knew before even in their
dreams, and to be initiated into mysteries and profound depths
of corruption that their mother tongue has no name for. About
two months before my arrival here, came out a great shipload of
Irish the harvest of the Famine special commission from
twelve years of age up to sixty. They were all about three-
quarters starved, and so miserably reduced by hunger and hard-
ship, that they have been dying off very fast by dysentery. As
to the behaviour of these poor creatures, I learn from the com-
mander that they have no vice in them, are neither turbulent nor
dishonest, nor give any trouble at all. " But," adds the com-
mander, " they will soon be as finished ruffians as the rest." No
doubt they will, poor fellows. He informs me that they were
astonished, at first, at the luxuries provided for them fresh beef
three days in the week, and pork the other days, pea-soup, tea,
excellent loaf-bread things they had never seen before, except in
shops, and which they no more knew how to use than Christophero
Sly. Then they have liberty to write home as often as they like ;
and when they tell their half-starved friends how well a felon is
fed, what can be more natural than that famished Honesty should
be tempted to put itself in the way of being sent to so plentiful a
country ? This man tells me he has many prisoners in the Drome-
dary who have been here before, and not a few in their third term ;
that he has several fathers and sons together ; and that it is



124 JAIL JOURNAL

not uncommon to find families who have been hulked for three or
four generations. Hulking, as a profession, is as yet confined to
England that it will become a more favourite line of business
there, as the poverty of the English poor shall grow more in-
veterate, cannot be doubted. God's mercy ! is Ireland not to be
torn out of the hands of these ameliorative British statesmen
until they have brought this crowning curse upon her, too ?

There are now about two thousand convicts at Bermuda about
a thousand at Spike Island ; how many may be at Gibraltar and
Australia, not to speak of the several depots for them in England,
I know not ; but on the whole there is an immense and rapidly
growing convict community distributed in all these earthly hells,
maintained in much comfort, with everything handsome about
them, at the cost of the hard-working and ill-fed, and even harder
working and worse-fed people of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
That there is a limit to all this, one may easily see.

What to do, then, with all our robbers, burglars, and forgers ?
Why hang them, hang them. You have no right to make the
honest people support the rogues, and support them better than
they, the honest people, can support themselves. You have no
right to set a premium upon villainy, and put burglars and rick-
burners on a permanent endowment. It is not true to say that in
Bermuda (for instance) the value of their own labour supports
them, because that labour is employed upon most extravagant
public works, which government could not undertake at all with-
out convict labour, and the wages come out of the taxes paid by
the honest people ; in short, they support themselves just as
seamen on board a man-of-war support themselves, and do not
earn their living half so hard. The taxes keep up the " convict
service," just as they keep up the navy and the excise men.

In criminal jurisprudence, as well as in many another thing, the
nineteenth century is sadly retrogressive ; and your Beccarias,
and Howards, and Romillys are genuine apostles of barbarism
ultimately of cannibalism. " Reformation of the offenders " is not
the reasonable object of criminal punishment, nor any part of the
reasonable object, and though it were so, your jail and hulk
system would be the surest way to defeat that object and make
the casual offender an irreclaimable scourge of mankind. Jails
ought to be places of discomfort ; the " sanitary condition "of



JAIL JOURNAL 125

miscreants ought not to be better cared for than the honest, in-
dustrious people and for " ventilation," I would ventilate the
rascals in front of the county jails at the end of a rope.

Feb. 8lh. Tired to death of reading books at least all books
of an instructive sort and have now been devouring (for about
the fifth time) " Ivanhoe " and " The Heart of Mid-Lothian."
My blessing on the memory of Walter Scott ! Surely all prisoners
and captives, sick persons, and they who are heavy of cheer,
ought to pray for his soul. One is almost reconciled to " popular
literature," because it has made the Waverley Novels common as
the liberal air. A famine of books, I begin to find, is very
emaciating : and I know not well how I am to ensure a due supply.
All my own, my well-known, friendly old books are sold off, and
I cannot allow my poor wife to lay out any part of her small
monies on books for me. What a loss to a bookish man is the
loss of his own books ! books in which you can turn to the place
you want as easily as you thread the walks in your own garden,
whose very backs and bindings are familiar countenances. Of
all refinements in royal luxury, I know none more enviable
(though the Pare aux cerfs was well enough) than the great
Frederick's library arrangements. He had five palaces ; and, in
the course of u stirring life, had to spend much time in each ; but
in each was the same library : same editions, same bindings,
same disposition on the shelves ; there was a room for the library
of like size, same figure, same furniture ; so, when he sat down by
his study-fire of an evening, in the same dressing-gown and slip-
pers, the great Frederick was always at home. And if he did not
want to turn to any place in any book, but preferred dozing, he
knew, at least, that he could easily turn to any he might want,
which is often quite as good, or even better.

Feb. I2th. Mr. Hire, the superintendent, came to-day to
inform me that the governor had received directions to let me
go to the Cape, where, on my arrival, I am to be set at liberty,
but within a limited district, and under police surveillance. So
the worst seems to be over ; that is, if I live to reach the Cape,
of which Dr. Hall seems doubtful.

Mr. Hire tells me further, that there is a good deal of discontent
among the Cape Colonists, at the prospect of having their country
made a receptacle for convicts, but that it seems to be the work



of a faction, and that the Government at home do not pay it any
attention. It seems to me very strange that there should be
" factions " at the Cape on such a question thet they do not rise
up, as one man, to resent and resist such an outrage. But Africa
knows its own business best. It is no concern of mine. Certainly
I shall have no scruple in going anywhere out of Bermuda.

Feb. 2.2nd. Opening of the London Parliament on the ist of
this month, and Queen's Speech. Her Gracious Majesty asks her
Parliament for a continuation of " extraordinary powers " in
Ireland, that is, continued Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act,
and continued powers to thrust anybody in to gaol, without any
charge against him ; for, although, says her gracious Majesty,
" Peace " has happily been preserved, " there still exists a spirit of
disaffection in that country." What ! Even still ! after so much
amelioration being done for them after the very bulwarks of the
Constitution, Habeas Corpus, and Jury-trial, being destroyed for
them and all to maintain the " law ? " after the land-appro-
priators being strengthened by all the powers of government,
special commissions, and a thundering army, to exterminate and
transport them ; and all for their own good. And disaffection
still ! Well, there is no gratitude in sinful man.

A spirit of disaffection ! Yes, I thank God there is.

April ist. Festival of all fools. All March is gone thirty-one
long and slow-pacing days, and the Cape ship not yet arrived. I
am sick to death. Dr. Warner, the medical officer of the hulks,
informs me that he communicated with Dr. Hall, some days ago,
about my bad state of health, and the uncomfortable nature of my
quarters here, and that they both applied to the governor, to have
me removed once more to the hospital ship, where I should have
a much better room and more comforts of various sorts, but without
success. It was not by my wish, or with my knowledge, that such
an application was made, for I never ask for anything or complain
of anything, in respect of my comforts and accommodations. Dr.
Warner, however, tells me, that if any other prisoner in the colony
had been in my condition he would have been sent to the hospital
six months ago, and that without consulting the governor at all.
It is still judged necessary to pietend to be afraid of the Americans
coming and rescuing me, which I now believe to have been but a
pretext from the first. So now, I sit constantly panting and



JAIL JOURNAL K 7

struggling in asthma, both night and day, exposed to a damp and
bitter north wind, that sometimes blows out my candle at night ;
for the ship is old, and the port-hole is much rounded away at
the edges, so that the casement window does not properly fit it.
Of course there is no fire.

I cannot well understand the intentions of the " Government "
with regard to me, or divine whether their instructions to my
keepers here are to be kind to me, or to kill me. I said so to
Dr. Warner to-day, and he only replied by shaking his head. Cer-
tainly ten months' solitary confinement of a sick man in an
unwholesome den is but a doubtful sort of indulgence. But I
await the Cape ship. She is the Neptune, of 700 tons ; and she
sailed from England on the I5th of February. They are now
looking out for her every day. This same cruel north wind,
that blows out my candle at night, is roaring, I trust, upon her
quarter, and straining tack and sheet with her bellying canvas.



CHAPTER VIII

April 2nd, 1849 In my cell, "Dromedary" Hulk. Yesterday
ended ten months of my exile and captivity ten months out of
fourteen years leave one hundred and fifty-eight months. What
mortal can keep Despair and the Devil at bay so long ? and all
alone ; " lone as a corpse within its shroud."

April $th. The Neptune has arrived, and is to sail in about a
fortnight. There is still, I understand, a good deal of agitation at
the Cape against the project of establishing a penal colony there ;
and, assuredly, it is a brutal act of tyranny, if it be indeed done
without their consent. Our authorities here, however, seem to
make very .light of it. They say the opposition is got up by a
parcel of canting Dissenters.

Have been reading in Tail's Magazine an elaborate review of a
new book by the indefatigable Government literator, Macaulay
no less than a " History of England." Tail gives copious extracts
from which I easily perceive that the book is a piece of authentic
Edinburgh Reviewing, declamatory in style, meagre in narrative,
thoroughly corrupt in principle, as from all this man's essays on
subjects of British history must have been expected.*

April I2th. At length British vigour is checked in Ireland,
provided it be now firmly met. Mr. Duffy has been tried for his
felony a second or a third time, and the Crown is beaten again ;
that is, they have failed in obtaining a conviction, \\hich is to
them utter defeat. Matters have arrived at the point I aimed at
from the first ; the " Government " have come to be ashamed of
the barefaced packing of so many successive juries ; or have

* BothweH, V.D.L., tfh August, 1851. I have read the book itself here ;
for, having become one of the most popular books in the world, it is even
in the village library of Bothwell. Mem. It is a clever, base, ingenious,
able, and shallow political pamphlet, in two volumes. This writer has

the rare art of colouring a whole narrative by an apparently unstudied
adjective or two, and telling a series of frightful falsehoods by one of the
most graceful of adverbs. What is worse, the fellow believes in no human
virtue proves Penn a pimping parasite, because he hated penal laws ; and

nakes a sort of Brom\vicham hero out of the dull Dutch Deliverer

128



JAIL JOURNAL 129

begun to see that it is impolitic and so they allowed a Repealer
or two to stand amongst the twelve who tried him. And of course
these men not only refused to agree with the rest in finding him
guilty (knowing that no Irishman can be guilty, in Ireland, of any
offence against the Queen of England) but some of them insisted
on applauding the national sentiments of the prisoner's counsel,
with " Hear, hear," and clapping of hands. This is very good and
right, and highly satisfactory. British " law" in Ireland stands
on the very brink of the bottomless pool. But what now will my
Lord Clarendon do ? He cannot, and dare not, allow himself to be
beaten in this case : and I think he will boldly pack on rhe ncv
trial, and secure this one conviction at all hazards ; for Duffy is not
only editor of the Nation, but is the very man who urged poor
O'Brien upon his Tipperary war. If they even stay proceedings
against him now, they are finally vanquished, and he can drive
Government into the sea. He can : but will he ? dare he ? Alas I
the unfortunate man is too evidently cowed and prostrated to the
earth he produced on his trial evidence of character literally,
people to bear witness of his good moral character in private life
and not only that, but of his legal and constitutional character.
I read that Father Mathew and Bishop Blake were brought for-
ward to prove that Mr. Duffy is not only a very amiable and
religious person, but also far from being the sort of a man to
meditate illegal violence, or the disturbance of " social order "
not he. Carleton, too, is produced to give his testimony to the
prisoner's general character of which Carleton is an admirable
judge. And, what is almost worse than all, the poor man tries to
evade the responsibility of some of the prosecuted articles, by
proving that they were not written by himself. This is all very
wretched work ; yet still, unless there be some utterly ignomini-
ous concession, " Government " will not be relieved from the
difficulty. He is led back to prison ; and try him they must at
the next Commission ; and they must pack the jury, and that very
closely, or oh ! it is a fine thing to see a " liberal," a " progressive

" conciliatory " British Government brought to this.

I shall be very anxious to hear the result of the next trial. Would
*o God there were someone found in Ireland to press the enemy
hard now ! Would to God it were in this man to do his duty ! He
this Duffy, might now win to himself the immortal honour of



130 JAIL JOURNAL

abolishing English law in Ireland, if his fine private character
would but allow him. It is absolutely necessary to try out this
legal controversy a drawn battle will not do ; all constitutional
rubbish must be swept away, and the ground cleared for the trial
of the final issue. The battle of the (Irish) Constitution must be
fought, in the jury-box first, then in the streets, lastly in the
fields.

To-day, without a moment's warning, I was carried off from the
Dromedary in a boat, and brought to the hospital-ship once more.
The Neptune is to sail within a week ; and it seems I am to have a
few days' hospital treatment, to fit me for so long a voyage ; " lest
they should find it necessary," says Dr. Hall, " to lower you from
the yard-arm between this and the Cape." He says that he pro-
cured this arrangement with difficulty, by distinctly certifying
that I am too ill to be put on board ship, and that in his opinion
there is danger I may not survive the voyage. I did not think I