Poor wretch! The mother that him bore,
If she had been in presence there,
She had not known her child.
In pursuance of the latter part of the last sentence passed by the commandant upon Ralph Rashleigh, he was stripped perfectly naked the ensuing morning, being allowed, however, to retain a portion of his shirt to serve as a garment, similar to the manner of the fig-leaf aprons of our first parents. He was then loaded with another pair of leg irons in addition to those which he had constantly worn since his arrival at Newcastle, and being now placed on board a lime punt in the charge of a constable, was transferred to the north shore of the Coal river, a spot equally sterile and forbidding in appearance to that which he had left, both being mere hummocks of sand, scantily clad with verdure of a peculiar nature consisting only of patches — like angels’ visits, few and far between — of couch grass and a few stunted bushes.
But the naked misery of the limeburners was even worse than that of the side on which the settlement stood, the latter being at least redeemed in some degree from the dull monotony of absolute barrenness by a patch or two of garden ground, beside the bustle incidental to a place which contained full fifteen hundred convicts, some of whom were perpetually passing to and fro. Here, on the contrary, were no gardens and only two ranges of wretched hovels, enclosed within a tall palisade of strips made from the outer coat of the cabbage palm.
At the moment of Ralph’s arrival the miserable beings who were stationed here, being all of them exiles and outcasts even from the horrors of Newcastle, sent from thence for punishment, were busily employed loading boats with marine shells that were burned but not slacked for making lime. This was done, amid coarse vituperation and oft-repeated blows from the convict overseers, by carrying the shells in baskets into the boats, in which the cargoes were stowed in bulk.
Rashleigh had no sooner landed than a basket was given to him. He was ordered to go on with the rest; and when he ventured to urge the soreness of his back from the receipt of a hundred lashes only the day before as a reason why he ought to be put to something else for a short time, the wretch to whom he applied, pretending at first to look very compassionate, asked to see the sore place. When Ralph, with great pain, withdrew the rag from it that he had applied, being the only dressing within his reach, this brute in human shape threw a handful of lime, that he had held concealed, upon the festering sore, and then bestowed a smart cut with his stick upon the suffering spot, bidding the poor fellow, “Begone to your work, you blasted crawling caterpillar, or I’ll soon serve you ten times worse than that.”
Rashleigh was thus fain to take his basket; and though the agitation of the waves soon drenched his sore with salt water, when the slackening lime hissed red-hot among his excoriated flesh, giving him a degree of agony that may far better be imagined than described, he was obliged to keep on at the run until ten o’clock at night; when the last of the boats being loaded, the weary starving wretches, who had now been sixteen hours at unremitted hard work, were at length permitted to withdraw to their as wretched abode, to pass the hours of rest in the best manner they could. Happy was he who had a pile of dry seaweed, and could cajole the overseers into permission to let him keep it. But this was indeed a rare luxury. Perhaps not five out of the 150 men that were then employed at this fit prototype of the infernal regions could boast of any kind of accommodation whatever to lie upon, save the rough slabs that formed the sleeping places.
To give any idea of the state of suffering that was endured by the emaciated wretches about twenty years since at this spot far exceeds the descriptive powers of the author of this tale. Let the reader, however, conceive it from the following brief delineation of some of the circumstances attending a sojourn there, gathered from the different persons consulted as authorities, the most favourable of whose representations have been selected.
In the first place, no clothing save the apron before mentioned, or any bedding whatever, was allowed to be used here, whether in the nearly tropical heats of summer or the freezing nights of winter; but every man wore at least two pairs of irons and very many even four or six pairs each; and at all hours, according to circumstances relating to the state of the tides. the wretched convicts were obliged to labour always breast-high in the sea before they could unload their baskets, as the draught of water required by the boats would not permit them to come nearer than this to the shore; and as before mentioned, there was no wharf. Thus, in the summer the heat of the sun peeled the skin from every portion of their bodies, and in winter the excessive coldness of the ocean on that naked and exposed beach chilled their very marrow. From this labour they were obliged at once to withdraw to a slabbed building pervious on every side to the wind, where their only resource for warmth in the winter nights was to huddle as close as possible together. The allowance of food, also, was miserably insufficient, consisting only of three and a half pounds of maize in cob weekly, with three and a half pounds of very ill-cured salt beef. Even this wretched pittance was subject to the peculations of the overseers, who helped themselves freely out of the common stock and then divided the rest among the wretched labourers, who dared not grumble, or the brutal tyranny of the others would be let loose upon them with all the lawless fury of wicked and ignorant malice.
Last, though not least, there were no stated hours of labour, the only rule being that the overseers were bound to make the men work as long as they could and do as much as they could; which they generally acted up to the spirit of by obliging them four days in the week at least to labour fifteen hours out of the twenty-four.
Besides all this, they were exposed to periodical visitations from the commandant; for although the trebly exiled wretches were put entirely out of the pale of society so far as regarded the comforts and even necessaries of civilized life, yet they were not by any means suffered to deem themselves out of the reach of the iron grasp of discipline, which this petty imitator of the haughtiest monarch that ever wore a crown wielded with a severity that has perhaps been equalled, but certainly never could have been excelled. His presence at any of the outstations under his sway was ever the signal for an inordinate use of the cat. He never travelled a mile to observe the progress made by any working party without being accompanied by two scourgers, who bore an ample supply of their implements of torture; and if his piercing glance detected any flagging from the most arduous exertion on the part of a working man, without deigning to enquire into the cause, whether arising from positive physical inability to keep pace with the others or not, the offender was called to him as he sat on horseback, and after a few imperious words of reproach, tied up to the nearest fence or standing tree, where a number of lashes, never less than fifty, was quickly administered to him, and he was sent back, bleeding from innumerable wounds, to resume his implement of labour.
In fact, whether from depravity of taste or utter want of any feeling, no exhibition appeared to delight this modern Caligula so much as when, on his Sabbath morning amusement, four miserable wretches were groaning and writhing before him at once under the infliction of what is to most men a transcendently revolting punishment to witness. No music appeared to delight his ears more exquisitely than the agonised yells of a wretched being who felt the lash for the first time; and on such occasions the fiendish joy that sparkled in his eyes would appear to dilate his form to nearly double its original size, and his every word and gesture, which, of course, he took no pains to conceal, fully proved that such scenes and sounds were supereminently gratifying to his soul; and accordingly, he took the greatest pains to prolong the enviable enjoyment as long as possible, frequently roaring out to the scourger in tones of thunder, “not to hurry”, “to take time”, “strike harder”, etc.
Nay, upon one occasion, in Rashleigh’s presence, when one of these ministers of torture did not appear to please this humane man of power in the vigour with which he dealt out the lash, the “Captain” rushed upon him and belaboured the scourger himself with a cane, bidding him at the same time, “Go on, sir! Go on!!” And every stroke the scourger applied to the back of the culprit was accompanied by one upon his own shoulders from the commandant’s cane, with a loud shout from the latter, “Harder yet, sir! Harder yet!!” until at last the weapon flew into fragments in the hands of this splendid specimen of a British officer!
When the dreaded commander visited the limeburners’ station, it was no uncommon proceeding, if the number of men brought before him by the overseer for trial, and of course punishment, did not tally with his ideas of propriety, for him to command the whole body of men there, overseers and all, to be ranked in line before him, when he would pick out every second or third man with his own hand and order them to receive f............