For the Term of His Natural Life

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For the Term of His Natural Life

by Marcus Clarke

DEDICATION

TO

SIR CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY

My Dear Sir Charles, I take leave to dedicate this work to you,
not merely because your nineteen years of political and literary life
in Australia render it very fitting that any work written
by a resident in the colonies, and having to do with the history
of past colonial days, should bear your name upon its dedicatory page;
but because the publication of my book is due to your advice
and encouragement.

The convict of fiction has been hitherto shown only at the beginning
or at the end of his career. Either his exile has been the mysterious end
to his misdeeds, or he has appeared upon the scene to claim interest
by reason of an equally unintelligible love of crime acquired
during his experience in a penal settlement. Charles Reade has drawn
the interior of a house of correction in England, and Victor Hugo
has shown how a French convict fares after the fulfilment of his sentence.
But no writer--so far as I am aware--has attempted to depict
the dismal condition of a felon during his term of transportation.

I have endeavoured in "His Natural Life" to set forth the working
and the results of an English system of transportation carefully considered
and carried out under official supervision; and to illustrate
in the manner best calculated, as I think, to attract general attention,
the inexpediency of again allowing offenders against the law to be
herded together in places remote from the wholesome influence
of public opinion, and to be submitted to a discipline which must
necessarily depend for its just administration upon the personal character
and temper of their gaolers.

Your critical faculty will doubtless find, in the construction
and artistic working of this book, many faults. I do not think,
however, that you will discover any exaggerations. Some of the events
narrated are doubtless tragic and terrible; but I hold it needful
to my purpose to record them, for they are events which have
actually occurred, and which, if the blunders which produced them
be repeated, must infallibly occur again. It is true that
the British Government have ceased to deport the criminals of England,
but the method of punishment, of which that deportation was a part,
is still in existence. Port Blair is a Port Arthur filled
with Indian-men instead of Englishmen; and, within the last year,
France has established, at New Caledonia, a penal settlement which will,
in the natural course of things, repeat in its annals the history
of Macquarie Harbour and of Norfolk Island.

With this brief preface I beg you to accept this work.
I would that its merits were equal either to your kindness or to my regard.

I am,
My dear Sir Charles,
Faithfully yours,
MARCUS CLARKE

THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, MELBOURNE

CONTENTS

DEDICATION
PROLOGUE

BOOK I.--THE SEA. 1827.

I. THE PRISON SHIP
II. SARAH PURFOY
III. THE MONOTONY BREAKS
IV. THE HOSPITAL
V. THE BARRACOON
VI. THE FATE OF THE "HYDASPES"
VII. TYPHUS FEVER
VIII. A DANGEROUS CRISIS
IX. WOMAN'S WEAPONS
X. EIGHT BELLS
XI. DISCOVERIES AND CONFESSIONS
XII. A NEWSPAPER PARAGRAPH

BOOK II.--MACQUARIE HARBOUR. 1833.

I. THE TOPOGRAPHY OF VAN DIEMEN'S LAND
II. THE SOLITARY OF "HELL'S GATES"
III. A SOCIAL EVENING
IV. THE BOLTER
V. SYLVIA
VI. A LEAP IN THE DARK
VII. THE LAST OF MACQUARIE HARBOUR
VIII. THE POWER OF THE WILDERNESS
IX. THE SEIZURE OF THE "OSPREY"
X. JOHN REX'S REVENGE
XI. LEFT AT "HELL'S GATES"
XII. "MR." DAWES
XIII. WHAT THE SEAWEED SUGGESTED
XIV. A WONDERFUL DAY'S WORK
XV. THE CORACLE
XVI. THE WRITING ON THE SAND
XVII. AT SEA

BOOK III.--PORT ARTHUR. 1838.

I. A LABOURER IN THE VINEYARD
II. SARAH PURFOY'S REQUEST
III. THE STORY OF TWO BIRDS OF PREY
IV. "THE NOTORIOUS DAWES"
V. MAURICE FRERE'S GOOD ANGEL
VI. MR. MEEKIN ADMINISTERS CONSOLATION
VII. RUFUS DAWES'S IDYLL
VIII. AN ESCAPE
IX. JOHN REX'S LETTER HOME
X. WHAT BECAME OF THE MUTINEERS OF THE "OSPREY"
XI. A RELIC OF MACQUARIE HARBOUR
XII. AT PORT ARTHUR
XIII. THE COMMANDANT'S BUTLER
XIV. MR. NORTH'S INDISPOSITION
XV. ONE HUNDRED LASHES
XVI. KICKING AGAINST THE PRICKS
XVII. CAPTAIN AND MRS. FRERE
XVIII. IN THE HOSPITAL
XIX. THE CONSOLATIONS OF RELIGION
XX. A NATURAL PENITENTIARY
XXI. A VISIT OF INSPECTION
XXII. GATHERING IN THE THREADS
XXIII RUNNING THE GAUNTLET
XXIV. IN THE NIGHT
XXV. THE FLIGHT
XXVI. THE WORK OF THE SEA
XXVII. THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

BOOK IV.--NORFOLK ISLAND. 1846.

I. EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH
II. THE LOST HEIR
III. EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH
IV. EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH
V. MR. RICHARD DEVINE SURPRISED
VI. IN WHICH THE CHAPLAIN IS TAKEN ILL
VII. BREAKING A MAN'S SPIRIT
VIII. EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH
IX. THE LONGEST STRAW
X. A MEETING
XI. EXTRACTED FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JAMES NORTH
XII. THE STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF MR. NORTH
XIII. MR. NORTH SPEAKS
XIV. GETTING READY FOR SEA
XV. THE DISCOVERY
XVI. FIFTEEN HOURS
XVII. THE REDEMPTION
XVIII. THE CYCLONE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

HIS NATURAL LIFE.

PROLOGUE.

On the evening of May 3, 1827, the garden of a large red-brick
bow-windowed mansion called North End House, which, enclosed in spacious
grounds, stands on the eastern height of Hampstead Heath, between Finchley Road
and the Chestnut Avenue, was the scene of a domestic tragedy.

Three persons were the actors in it. One was an old man, whose white hair
and wrinkled face gave token that he was at least sixty years of age.
He stood erect with his back to the wall, which separates the garden
from the Heath, in the attitude of one surprised into sudden passion,
and held uplifted the heavy ebony cane upon which he was ordinarily accustomed
to lean. He was confronted by a man of two-and-twenty, unusually tall
and athletic of figure, dresses in rough seafaring clothes,
and who held in his arms, protecting her, a lady of middle age.
The face of the young man wore an expression of horror-stricken astonishment,
and the slight frame of the grey-haired woman was convulsed with sobs.

These three people were Sir Richard Devine, his wife, and his only son Richard,
who had returned from abroad that morning.

"So, madam," said Sir Richard, in the high-strung accents which
in crises of great mental agony are common to the most self-restrained of us,
"you have been for twenty years a living lie! For twenty years
you have cheated and mocked me. For twenty years--in company with a scoundrel
whose name is a byword for all that is profligate and base--you have
laughed at me for a credulous and hood-winked fool; and now, because
I dared to raise my hand to that reckless boy, you confess your shame,
and glory in the confession!"

"Mother, dear mother!" cried the young man, in a paroxysm of grief,
"say that you did not mean those words; you said them but in anger!
See, I am calm now, and he may strike me if he will."

Lady Devine shuddered, creeping close, as though to hide herself
in the broad bosom of her son.

The old man continued: "I married you, Ellinor Wade, for your beauty;
you married me for my fortune. I was a plebeian, a ship's carpenter;
you were well born, your father was a man of fashion, a gambler,
the friend of rakes and prodigals. I was rich. I had been knighted.
I was in favour at Court. He wanted money, and he sold you.
I paid the price he asked, but there was nothing of your cousin,
my Lord Bellasis and Wotton, in the bond."

"Spare me, sir, spare me!" said Lady Ellinor faintly.

"Spare you! Ay, you have spared me, have you not? Look ye," he cried,
in sudden fury, "I am not to be fooled so easily. Your family are proud.
Colonel Wade has other daughters. Your lover, my Lord Bellasis,
even now, thinks to retrieve his broken fortunes by marriage.
You have confessed your shame. To-morrow your father, your sisters,
all the world, shall know the story you have told me!"

"By Heaven, sir, you will not do this!" burst out the young man.

"Silence, bastard!" cried Sir Richard. "Ay, bite your lips;
the word is of your precious mother's making!"

Lady Devine slipped through her son's arms and fell on her knees
at her husband's feet.

"Do not do this, Richard. I have been faithful to you for
two-and-twenty years. I have borne all the slights and insults
you have heaped upon me. The shameful secret of my early love broke from me
when in your rage, you threatened him. Let me go away; kill me;
but do not shame me."

Sir Richard, who had turned to walk away, stopped suddenly,
and his great white eyebrows came together in his red face with a savage scowl.
He laughed, and in that laugh his fury seemed to congeal into
a cold and cruel hate.

"You would preserve your good name then. You would conceal this
disgrace from the world. You shall have your wish--upon one condition."

"What is it, sir?" she asked, rising, but trembling with terror,
as she stood with drooping arms and widely opened eyes.

The old man looked at her for an instant, and then said slowly,
"That this impostor, who so long has falsely borne my name,
has wrongfully squandered my money, and unlawfully eaten my bread,
shall pack! That he abandon for ever the name he has usurped,
keep himself from my sight, and never set foot again in house of mine."

"You would not part me from my only son!" cried the wretched woman.

"Take him with you to his father then."

Richard Devine gently loosed the arms that again clung around his neck,
kissed the pale face, and turned his own--scarcely less pale--towards
the old man.

"I owe you no duty," he said. "You have always hated and reviled me.
When by your violence you drove me from your house, you set spies
to watch me in the life I had chosen. I have nothing in common with you.
I have long felt it. Now when I learn for the first time whose son
I really am, I rejoice to think that I have less to thank you for than
I once believed. I accept the terms you offer. I will go. Nay, mother,
think of your good name."

Sir Richard Devine laughed again. "I am glad to see you are so well disposed.
Listen now. To-night I send for Quaid to alter my will. My sister's son,
Maurice Frere, shall be my heir in your stead. I give you nothing.
You leave this house in an hour. You change your name; you never by word
or deed make claim on me or mine. No matter what strait or poverty
you plead--if even your life should hang upon the issue--the instant I hear
that there exists on earth one who calls himself Richard Devine,
that instant shall your mother's shame become a public scandal.
You know me. I keep my word. I return in an hour, madam; let me
find him gone."

He passed them, upright, as if upborne by passion, strode down the garden
with the vigour that anger lends, and took the road to London.

"Richard!" cried the poor mother. "Forgive me, my son! I have ruined you."

Richard Devine tossed his black hair from his brow in sudden passion
of love and grief.

"Mother, dear mother, do not weep," he said. "I am not worthy of your tears.
Forgive! It is I--impetuous and ungrateful during all your years
of sorrow--who most need forgiveness. Let me share your burden
that I may lighten it. He is just. It is fitting that I go.
I can earn a name--a name that I need not blush to bear nor you to hear.
I am strong. I can work. The world is wide. Farewell! my own mother!"

"Not yet, not yet! Ah! see he has taken the Belsize Road. Oh, Richard,
pray Heaven they may not meet."

"Tush! They will not meet! You are pale, you faint!"

"A terror of I know not what coming evil overpowers me. I tremble
for the future. Oh, Richard, Richard! Forgive me! Pray for me."

"Hush, dearest! Come, let me lead you in. I will write. I will
send you news of me once at least, ere I depart. So--you are calmer, mother!"

* * * * * *

Sir Richard Devine, knight, shipbuilder, naval contractor, and millionaire,
was the son of a Harwich boat carpenter. Early left an orphan
with a sister to support, he soon reduced his sole aim in life
to the accumulation of money. In the Harwich boat-shed, nearly
fifty years before, he had contracted--in defiance of prophesied
failure--to build the Hastings sloop of war for His Majesty King George
the Third's Lords of the Admiralty. This contract was the thin end
of that wedge which eventually split the mighty oak block
of Government patronage into three-deckers and ships of the line;
which did good service under Pellew, Parker, Nelson, Hood;
which exfoliated and ramified into huge dockyards at Plymouth,
Portsmouth, and Sheerness, and bore, as its buds and flowers,
countless barrels of measly pork and maggoty biscuit. The sole aim
of the coarse, pushing and hard-headed son of Dick Devine was to make money.
He had cringed and crawled and fluttered and blustered, had licked
the dust off great men's shoes, and danced attendance in
great men's ante-chambers. Nothing was too low, nothing too high for him.
A shrewd man of business, a thorough master of his trade,
troubled with no scruples of honour or of delicacy, he made money rapidly,
and saved it when made. The first hint that the public received
of his wealth was in 1796, when Mr. Devine, one of the shipwrights
to the Government, and a comparatively young man of forty-four or thereabouts,
subscribed five thousand pounds to the Loyalty Loan raised
to prosecute the French war. In 1805, after doing good, and it was hinted
not unprofitable, service in the trial of Lord Melville, the Treasurer
of the Navy, he married his sister to a wealthy Bristol merchant,
one Anthony Frere, and married himself to Ellinor Wade, the eldest daughter
of Colonel Wotton Wade, a boon companion of the Regent, and uncle
by marriage of a remarkable scamp and dandy, Lord Bellasis. At that time,
what with lucky speculations in the Funds--assisted, it was whispered,
by secret intelligence from France during the stormy years
of '13, '14, and '15--and the legitimate profit on his Government contracts,
he had accumulated a princely fortune, and could afford to live
in princely magnificence. But the old-man-of-the-sea burden
of parsimony and avarice which he had voluntarily taken upon him
was not to be shaken off, and the only show he made of his wealth
was by purchasing, on his knighthood, the rambling but comfortable house
at Hampstead, and ostensibly retiring from active business.

His retirement was not a happy one. He was a stern father and
a severe master. His servants hated, and his wife feared him.
His only son Richard appeared to inherit his father's strong will
and imperious manner. Under careful supervision and a just rule
he might have been guided to good; but left to his own devices outside,
and galled by the iron yoke of parental discipline at home,
he became reckless and prodigal. The mother--poor, timid Ellinor,
who had been rudely torn from the love of her youth, her cousin,
Lord Bellasis--tried to restrain him, but the head-strong boy,
though owning for his mother that strong love which is often a part
of such violent natures, proved intractable, and after three years
of parental feud, he went off to the Continent, to pursue there
the same reckless life which in London had offended Sir Richard.
Sir Richard, upon this, sent for Maurice Frere, his sister's son--the abolition
of the slave trade had ruined the Bristol House of Frere--and bought for him
a commission in a marching regiment, hinting darkly of special favours to come.
His open preference for his nephew had galled to the quick his sensitive wife,
who contrasted with some heart-pangs the gallant prodigality of her father
with the niggardly economy of her husband. Between the houses of parvenu
Devine and long-descended Wotton Wade there had long been little love.
Sir Richard felt that the colonel despised him for a city knight,
and had heard that over claret and cards Lord Bellasis and his friends
had often lamented the hard fortune which gave the beauty, Ellinor,
to so sordid a bridegroom. Armigell Esme Wade, Viscount Bellasis and Wotton,
was a product of his time. Of good family (his ancestor, Armigell,
was reputed to have landed in America before Gilbert or Raleigh),
he had inherited his manor of Bellasis, or Belsize, from one Sir Esme Wade,
ambassador from Queen Elizabeth to the King of Spain in the delicate matter
of Mendoza, and afterwards counsellor to James I, and Lieutenant of the Tower.
This Esme was a man of dark devices. It was he who negotiated with
Mary Stuart for Elizabeth; it was he who wormed out of Cobham the evidence
against the great Raleigh. He became rich, and his sister
(the widow of Henry de Kirkhaven, Lord of Hemfleet) marrying into the family
of the Wottons, the wealth of the house was further increased
by the union of her daughter Sybil with Marmaduke Wade. Marmaduke Wade
was a Lord of the Admiralty, and a patron of Pepys, who in his
diary [July 17,1668] speaks of visiting him at Belsize. He was raised
to the peerage in 1667 by the title of Baron Bellasis and Wotton,
and married for his second wife Anne, daughter of Philip Stanhope,
second Earl of Chesterfield. Allied to this powerful house,
the family tree of Wotton Wade grew and flourished.

In 1784, Philip, third Baron, married the celebrated beauty, Miss Povey,
and had issue Armigell Esme, in whose person the family prudence seemed
to have run itself out.

The fourth Lord Bellasis combined the daring of Armigell, the adventurer,
with the evil disposition of Esme, the Lieutenant of the Tower.
No sooner had he become master of his fortune than he took to dice,
drink, and debauchery with all the extravagance of the last century.
He was foremost in every riot, most notorious of all the notorious "bloods"
of the day.

Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785,
mentions a fact which may stand for a page of narrative. "Young Wade,"
he says, "is reported to have lost one thousand guineas last night
to that vulgarest of all the Bourbons, the Duc de Chartres, and they say
the fool is not yet nineteen." From a pigeon Armigell Wade became a hawk,
and at thirty years of age, having lost together with his estates
all chance of winning the one woman who might have saved him--his cousin
Ellinor--he became that most unhappy of all beings, a well-born blackleg.
When he was told by thin-lipped, cool Colonel Wade that the rich shipbuilder,
Sir Richard Devine, had proposed an alliance with fair-haired gentle Ellinor,
he swore, with fierce knitting of his black brows, that no law of man
nor Heaven should further restrain him in his selfish prodigality.
"You have sold your daughter and ruined me," he said; "look to
the consequences." Colonel Wade sneered at his fiery kinsman:
"You will find Sir Richard's house a pleasant one to visit, Armigell;
and he should be worth an income to so experienced a gambler as yourself."
Lord Bellasis did visit at Sir Richard's house during the first year
of his cousin's marriage; but upon the birth of the son who is the hero
of this history, he affected a quarrel with the city knight,
and cursing him to the Prince and Poins for a miserly curmudgeon,
who neither diced nor drank like a gentleman, departed, more desperately
at war with fortune than ever, for his old haunts. The year 1827
found him a hardened, hopeless old man of sixty, battered in health
and ruined in pocket; but who, by dint of stays, hair-dye, and courage,
yet faced the world with undaunted front, and dined as gaily
in bailiff-haunted Belsize as he had dined at Carlton House.
Of the possessions of the House of Wotton Wade, this old manor,
timberless and bare, was all that remained, and its master rarely visited it.

On the evening of May 3, 1827, Lord Bellasis had been attending a pigeon
match at Hornsey Wood, and having resisted the importunities
of his companion, Mr. Lionel Crofton (a young gentleman-rake,
whose position in the sporting world was not the most secure),
who wanted him to go on into town, he had avowed his intention
of striking across Hampstead to Belsize. "I have an appointment
at the fir trees on the Heath," he said.

"With a woman?" asked Mr. Crofton.

"Not at all; with a parson."

"A parson!"

"You stare! Well, he is only just ordained. I met him last year
at Bath on his vacation from Cambridge, and he was good enough to lose
some money to me."

"And now waits to pay it out of his first curacy. I wish your lordship
joy with all my soul. Then, we must push on, for it grows late."

"Thanks, my dear sir, for the 'we,' but I must go alone,"
said Lord Bellasis dryly. "To-morrow you can settle with me
for the sitting of last week. Hark! the clock is striking nine.
Good night."

* * * * * *

At half-past nine Richard Devine quitted his mother's house to begin
the new life he had chosen, and so, drawn together by that strange fate
of circumstances which creates events, the father and son approached
each other.

* * * * * *

As the young man gained the middle of the path which led to the Heath,
he met Sir Richard returning from the village. It was no part of his plan
to seek an interview with the man whom his mother had so deeply wronged,
and he would have slunk past in the gloom; but seeing him thus alone
returning to a desolated home, the prodigal was tempted to utter
some words of farewell and of regret. To his astonishment, however,
Sir Richard passed swiftly on, with body bent forward as one in the act
of falling, and with eyes unconscious of surroundings, staring straight
into the distance. Half-terrified at this strange appearance,
Richard hurried onward, and at a turn of the path stumbled upon something
which horribly accounted for the curious action of the old man.
A dead body lay upon its face in the heather; beside it was
a heavy riding whip stained at the handle with blood, and
an open pocket-book. Richard took up the book, and read, in gold letters
on the cover, "Lord Bellasis."

The unhappy young man knelt down beside the body and raised it.
The skull had been fractured by a blow, but it seemed that life yet lingered.
Overcome with horror--for he could not doubt but that
his mother's worst fears had been realized--Richard knelt there
holding his murdered father in his arms, waiting until the murderer,
whose name he bore, should have placed himself beyond pursuit.
It seemed an hour to his excited fancy before he saw a light pass
along the front of the house he had quitted, and knew that Sir Richard
had safely reached his chamber. With some bewildered intention
of summoning aid, he left the body and made towards the town.
As he stepped out on the path he heard voices, and presently
some dozen men, one of whom held a horse, burst out upon him,
and, with sudden fury, seized and flung him to the ground.

At first the young man, so rudely assailed, did not comprehend
his own danger. His mind, bent upon one hideous explanation of the crime,
did not see another obvious one which had already occurred to the mind
of the landlord of the Three Spaniards.

"God defend me!" cried Mr. Mogford, scanning by the pale light
of the rising moon the features of the murdered man,
"but it is Lord Bellasis!--oh, you bloody villain! Jem, bring him
along here, p'r'aps his lordship can recognize him!"

"It was not I!" cried Richard Devine. "For God's sake,
my lord say--" then he stopped abruptly, and being forced on his knees
by his captors, remained staring at the dying man, in sudden and
ghastly fear.

Those men in whom emotion has the effect of quickening circulation
of the blood reason rapidly in moments of danger, and in the terrible instant
when his eyes met those of Lord Bellasis, Richard Devine had
summed up the chances of his future fortune, and realized to the full
his personal peril. The runaway horse had given the alarm.
The drinkers at the Spaniards' Inn had started to search the Heath,
and had discovered a fellow in rough costume, whose person was unknown
to them, hastily quitting a spot where, beside a rifled pocket-book
and a blood-stained whip, lay a dying man.

The web of circumstantial evidence had enmeshed him. An hour ago
escape would have been easy. He would have had but to cry,
"I am the son of Sir Richard Devine. Come with me to yonder house,
and I will prove to you that I have but just quitted it,"--to place
his innocence beyond immediate question. That course of action
was impossible now. Knowing Sir Richard as he did, and believing,
moreover, that in his raging passion the old man had himself met
and murdered the destroyer of his honour, the son of Lord Bellasis
and Lady Devine saw himself in a position which would compel him
either to sacrifice himself, or to purchase a chance of safety
at the price of his mother's dishonour and the death of the man
whom his mother had deceived. If the outcast son were brought a prisoner
to North End House, Sir Richard--now doubly oppressed of fate--would be
certain to deny him; and he would be compelled, in self-defence,
to reveal a story which would at once bring his mother to open infamy,
and send to the gallows the man who had been for twenty years
deceived--the man to whose kindness he owed education and former fortune.
He knelt, stupefied, unable to speak or move.