In the spring of 1853 the hired transport Palestine, which had been fitting out at Deptford for the reception of a number of convicts, was reported to the Admiralty as ready for sea.

The burthen of the Palestine was 680 tons, and the number of felons she had been equipped to accommodate in her ’tween-decks was 120. My name is John Barker, and I was second mate of that ship. Her commander was Captain Wickham, and her chief officer Joseph Barlow. The Palestine was an old-fashioned craft, scarcely fit for the work she had been hired for. Official selection, however, was probably influenced by the owners’ low tender. Good stout ships got £4 7s. 6d. a ton; I believe the Palestine was hired for £3 15s.

A guard from Chatham came aboard whilst we were at Deptford, consisting of a sergeant and ten privates, under the command of Captain Gordon and Lieutenant Venables. Shortly afterwards Dr. Saunders, R.N., who was going out as surgeon in charge of the convicts, took up his quarters in the cuddy. On the[242] day following the arrival of the doctor and the guard, we received instructions to proceed to Woolwich and moor alongside that well-known prison-hulk H.M.S. Warrior. It was a gloomy, melancholy day; the air was full of dark vapour, and the broad, grey stream of the river ran with a gleam of grease betwixt the grimy shores. A chill wind blew softly, and vessels of all sorts, to the weak impulse of their wings of brown or pallid canvas, dulled by the thickness, sneaked soundlessly by on keels which seemed to ooze through a breast of soup.

I had often looked at the old Warrior in my coming and going, but never had I thought her so grimy and desolate as on this day. A pennant blew languidly from a pole-mast amidships; she was heaped up forward into absolute hideousness by box-shaped structures. Some traces of her old grandeur were visible in a faded bravery of gilt and carving about her quarters and huge square of stern, where the windows of the officials’ cabins glimmered with something of brightness over the sluggish tremble of wake which the stream ran to a scope of a dozen fathoms astern of her rudder. All was silent aboard her. I looked along the rows of heavily grated ports which long ago had grinned with artillery, and observed no signs of life. Indeed, at the time when we moored alongside, most of the criminals were ashore at their forced labour, and those who remained in the ship were caverned deep out of sight hard at work at benches,[243] lasts, and the like in the gloomy bowels of the old giantess.

The Palestine sat like a long-boat beside that towering fabric of prison hulk. We were no beauty, as I have said, and the little vessel’s decks were now rendered distressingly unsightly by strong barricades, one forward of the foremast, leaving a space betwixt it and the front of the topgallant forecastle, and the other a little abaft the mainmast, so as to admit of some area of quarter-deck between it and the cabin front. Each barricade was furnished with a gate; the main-hatch was fortified by oak stanchions thickly studded with iron nails, the foot of them secured to the lower deck. This timber arrangement resembled a cage with a narrow door, through which one man only could pass at a time. The main-hatch was further protected by a cover resembling a huge, roofless sentry-box. To this were attached planks of heavy scantling, forming a passage which went about ten feet forward; there was a door at the end of this passage, always guarded by a sentry with loaded musket and fixed bayonet.

The convicts came aboard at nine o’clock in the morning following the day of our arrival alongside the hulk. We were to receive our whole draught of 120 at once from the Warrior, and then proceed. I stood in the waist and watched the prisoners come over the side. It was an old-world picture, and the like of it will never again be seen. The day was as sullen as that which had gone before; the tall spars and black lines of[244] rigging of our ship glistened with dripping moisture. A guard of six soldiers were drawn up along the front of the poop commanding the quarter-deck; each bayonet soared above the motionless shoulder like a thin blue flame. Captain Gordon and Lieutenant Venables stood near the men; at the break of the poop, grasping the brass rail, was Dr. Saunders, scrutinizing the convicts with a severe, almost scowling face as they arrived.

The unhappy wretches were heavily fettered, and the long chains attached to the leg-irons clanked with a strange effect upon the hearing as the heavy tread of the many feet awoke a low thunder in the hollow deck. They were marched directly to their quarters in the ’tween-decks. I observed their faces as they passed through the hatch, and was struck by a general expression of light-heartedness, as though they were overjoyed at getting away from the horrors of the prison hulk and the spirit-breaking labour ashore, with a bright chance of fortune in the sunny lands beyond the seas to which the ship was bound.

And certainly the convict in those days was out and away more tenderly dealt with than were the greater mass of the poor, honest emigrants. They were well clothed and better fed than the sailors in the forecastle; those who were ignorant were taught to read and write; they were prayed for and eloquently admonished, and their health was rendered a matter of sincere concern to both the skipper and the doctor in charge. I recollect that the felons in our ship were dressed in coarse grey[245] jackets and trousers, red stripes in the cloth, Scotch caps, and grey stockings, and the ship’s number of the criminal was painted on a square yellow ground on the arm and back.

On the afternoon of the day of embarkation a tug took us in tow, and we went away down the river on a straight course for Dungeness, where the steamer cast us adrift. Until we were clear of soundings I saw little of the convicts. We met with very heavy weather, and most of the prisoners lay as sea-sick as young ladies in their gloomy quarters. I had occasion once in this time to enter the barracks, as the soldiers’ bulkheaded compartments were called, where I got a sight of the convicts in their ’tween-decks. The soldiers slept under the booby-hatch in cabins rudely knocked up for their accommodation. Their quarters were divided from the prison by an immensely strong barricade bristling with triangular-headed nails, and loopholed for muskets, so that, in the event of a disturbance, the soldiers could fire upon the convicts within without passing the barricade. There was a strong door on the starboard side of this barricade, at which a sentinel with a loaded weapon was posted day and night.

I forget the occasion of my going below. It was blowing strong, and a high sea was running, the ship was labouring heavily, and the straining and groaning of the bulkheads and temporary fastenings were so distracting that I could easily believe the convicts supposed[246] the ship was going to pieces. I put my eye to a loophole in the barricade and saw the picture. Sleeping-shelves for the reception of six men in a row ran the length of the ’tween-decks on either hand in two tiers. There was a suffusion of pale light round about the main-hatch, but it was like a sulky, thunderous twilight elsewhere, in the midst of which the shapes of the prisoners moved or lay motionless as though they were phantoms beheld in a dream, tragically coloured by storm, by the cannon-like roar of hurling seas, and the wild springs and dives of a ship in angry waters. That scene of ’tween-decks is the most memorable of my life’s impressions; but I have no words to communicate it. It was not so much the details of the picture itself—the pale light under the hatch, the spirit-like figures of the felons, the lines of glimmering bunks, the bulging bulkheads of the hospital in the gloomy corner right forward; it was the deep human meaning that I found in it—the fancy of the sins, and the conscience, and the memories, the burning hopes, the biting griefs which made up the human life contained in that shadowy timber sea-tossed jail; this it was that gave to the scene its marvellous impressive significance.

Many of the prisoners were under life sentences; some were being exiled for fourteen, and some for terms of seven years. Never a man of them all would probably see England again. Indeed, it used to be said that not one in every hundred transported convicts returned to his native country.

[247]

When we got out of the Channel we met with quiet weather. The prisoners, heavily ironed, were brought up to help to do the ship’s work and take exercise. They were put to assist the seamen in washing the decks down. They were also set to various jobs calculated to prove useful to themselves. It was a strange sight to a sailor’s eye to see the convicts in their barricaded enclosure scrubbing with brushes at the planks, their chains clanking as they toiled, the burly boatswain of the ship bawling at the top of his pipes as he swished the water along, warders (themselves picked convicts) roaring commands to their fellow-prisoners; you saw the red coat of a sentry, the gleam of his bayonet on the forecastle; such another sentry clasped his musket at the main-hatch, and a third stood at the gate of the quarter-deck barricade. Overhead swelled the white sails, lifting to the milky softness of topgallant-sail and royal; the blue sea flashed in silver glory under the newly risen sun; smoke blew briskly away from the chimneys of the convicts’ and the ship’s cabooses; you saw the cook leaning out of his galley door watching the scrubbing convicts: aft, on the sand-white stretch of poop, the captain and the surgeon in charge of the prisoners would be walking, whilst the mate of the watch, with one arm circling a backstay, might be standing at the poop-rail talking to Captain Gordon or the subaltern, answering questions about the ship, the names of sails, her rate of progress, or with long outstretched arm pointing into the dark blue far[248] recess to some growing star of canvas, or to some blackening fibre-like line of steamer’s smoke.

It was not until we had closed the Madeira parallels, where the weather was hot and the azure slope of billow winked with the leaps of flying-fish, that the doctor gave orders for the convicts’ irons to be removed. The whole of the prisoners were massed on deck and harangued by him before they were freed. Dr. Saunders had a stern face; he was a dark-skinned, smooth-shaven man, with heavy eyebrows and a lowering look, and I thought him a bully until I had sat a few times at the table when he was present, and exchanged a few sentences with him on deck, and then I guessed that he was belied by his expression of feature and was a good man at root, kind, and even warm-hearted, though sternly masked for professional and penitentiary purposes. He addressed the mass of upturned faces on the quarter-deck, sermonized them indeed, assured them that it grieved him as much to hear the clank of their chains as the wearing of the irons oppressed and degraded them. He begged them to live on good terms with one another, to guard against evil language, to love God and keep His Word, and so to resolve as to assure themselves in the time coming, in a new land, in the day of their enlargement, of an honourable and prosperous future. Some listened doggedly, some as though they would like to laugh out, some with a little play of emotion in their faces. They then went below, and their irons were taken off.

Until we reached the latitude of (call it) 5° N.[249] all went as things should with us. The convicts were orderly and seemed well under the control of the doctor. Every day schools were held above or between decks; addresses on all sorts of topics were delivered to the prisoners by the doctor; Divine service was celebrated three times on Sundays; you’d sometimes hear the fellows down the hatchways singing psalms of their own accord. The doctor once at table with a well-pleased countenance told the captain that one of the worst of the many ruffians who were being lagged was now become the most penitent of all the prisoners.

“He talked to me about his past,” Dr. Saunders said, “with the tears in his eyes, and in a voice broken by grief. I have great hopes of the poor fellow. Time was, and not long ago, when I looked upon him as a Norfolk Islander: I should never be surprised to hear that he was favoured when out in the colony and was doing exceedingly well.”

“Is it the square powerfully-built man, pitted with smallpox, with little black eyes, and a coal-black crop of hair?” asked Captain Gordon.

The doctor inclined his head.

“His name’s Simon Rolt,” said Lieutenant Venables. “I was in town at the time of his trial, and, having plenty of leisure, went one day down to the Old Bailey. He was convicted——”

Dr. Saunders lifted his hand with an expressive look. Indeed, it was never his wish that the prisoners should be named, and he was deaf to all inquiries[250] concerning the crimes for which they were being transported.

Well, we had been driven by prosperous winds to the parallel of 5° N. Here the breeze failed. It was the zone of equatorial calms, where the dim, hot, blue water fades out into a near silver faintness of sky, and where the lofty white canvas of the stagnated ship melts into the azure brine under her, like quicksilver cloudily draining through the keel. For the past week the heat had been fierce; but always had there been a breeze to fill the windsails and render the roasting atmosphere of the ’tween-decks endurable. But now, when the wind was gone, the temperature was scarcely to be supported, even by the most seasoned of our lobscousers. The pitch lay like butter in the seams of the planks; the wheel, flaming its brass-clad circle to the small high sun, turned red-hot in the grip of the helmsman; the tar came off the rigging in strings upon the fingers like treacle, and the hush of the heat lay upon the plain of ocean as the silence of the white desert dwells upon its leagues of dazzling sand.

I had charge of the ship during the second dog-watch, that is, from six to eight. Some little time after sundown, and when the sky over our mastheads was full of large, dim, trembling stars, whilst the sea floated from alongside in a breast of ink into the obscurity of the horizon, Dr. Saunders approached Captain Gordon, who was talking to the commander of the ship close to where I stood, and exclaimed—

[251]

“The heat is too much for the people below. A hundred and twenty souls in those low-pitched contracted ’tween-decks! The sufferings of slaves in the Middle Passage can’t be worse.”

“What’s to be done, sir?” said Captain Wickham. “The wind don’t come to the mariner’s whistle in these times.”

“We must have detachments of them on deck,” said Dr. Saunders. “We must let a third of them at a time breathe the open air and relieve the demands upon the atmosphere below. It may be done,” he added, with perhaps the least hint of doubtfulness in his manner.

Captain Wickham did not speak.

“It ought to be done,” said Lieutenant Venables, crossing the deck out of the shadow to port with a lighted cigar in his mouth. “It’s hell, Gordon, in the barracks.”

“You’ll want the guard to fall in, doctor?” said Captain Gordon.

“Oh yes, if you please.”

The necessary orders were given; five or six soldiers mounted the poop ladder, and ranged themselves along the break, the muskets loaded and the bayonets fixed as usual. The doctor left the deck, and in some ten minutes’ time a file of shadowy figures wound, serpent-like, past the main-hatch sentry into the barricaded enclosure. They broke into little companies, and all were as still as the dead; but I could feel in their[252] postures, in their manner of grouping themselves, the exquisite relief and delight they found in drinking in the moist night air.

This detachment remained an hour on deck. When they went below, and the next lot came up, the time was half-past eight. I had been relieved at eight bells by the chief officer; but the heat in the cabin was so great that after I had stayed a few minutes in my berth I filled a pipe and went on to the quarter-deck, where I stood smoking in the recess under the poop. The quarter-deck barricade was about six feet tall, and the figures of the convicts behind it were not to be seen where I stood. Nothing was visible but the stars over either bulwark-rail, and the festooned cloths of the main course on high, and the dim square of the becalmed topsail above it floating up and fading in the darkness of the night.

All on a sudden an odd, low whistle sounded forward or aft—I can’t tell where; an instant later the figure of a convict sprang on to the top of the starboard bulwarks, where, poising himself whilst you might have counted ten, he shrieked aloud, “O God, have mercy upon me! O Christ, have mercy upon me!” and went overboard.

Silence lasting a moment or two followed the splash; the hush of amazement and horror was broken by loud cries from the convicts, sharp orders delivered over my head in the voice of Captain Gordon, followed by the tramp of the soldiers striding quick to the break of the[253] poop clearly to command the people within the barricades with their muskets. I heard Mr. Barlow, the mate, roar to the man at the wheel, “Do you see anything of him there?” And Captain Wickham shouted once or twice, “Man overboard! Aft, some hands, and clear away the starboard quarter-boat.” Meanwhile I had observed the form of Dr. Saunders rush down the poop ladder and run headlong past the sentry into the barricaded enclosure, where now at this time his stern, clear voice rang out strong as he ordered the convicts to fall in and return to their quarters.

I sprang to the side to look for the man that was gone, but saw nothing. The sea was like black slush: there was scarce an undulation in it to flap the softest echo out of the lightest canvas. I saw no fire in the water. Something was wrong with the quarter-boat. They were a long time bungling with the falls, and I heard the voice of an enraged seaman harshly yell, “Who the blooming blazes has bin and stopped ’em in this fashion!”

“Jump for the port boat, men! jump for the port boat!” shouted Mr. Barlow. “The man’ll have sounded the bottom whilst you’re messing about with those tackles.”

I ran on to the poop to lend a hand. The captain, quickly making me out, told me to get into the boat and take charge. We were lowered, and rowed away round the vessel under her counter to look for the man to starboard, from which side he had jumped. The oars[254] as they dipped made no fire in the water. We headed for the spot whence the convict had sprung, and then worked our way along the bends and afterwards went a few strokes astern, and then rowed round to port, conceiving that the poor devil might have risen on t’other side the ship.

“Do you see anything of him?” shouted Captain Wickham.

“Nothing, sir.”

“Hook on! He’s gone—there’s no more to be done,” called down the captain.

We had spent half an hour in the hunt and the man was undoubtedly drowned.

Who was the convict that had destroyed himself? After I had regained the ship, and whilst I was ordering one of the boat’s crew to go aft and coil away the end of the starboard main-brace, which I had noticed hanging over the side, the doctor arrived on the poop, walking slowly. The guard was by this time dismissed: all was silent and motionless on the main-deck betwixt the barricades; the only figures down there were the main-deck and quarter-deck sentries; but there was much stir forward upon the forecastle, where the sailors were stepping from side to side, peering over the rail with some fancy, no doubt, of catching sight of the floating body of the drowned convict.

The doctor, Captain Wickham, Captain Gordon, and the subaltern came together in a group within easy earshot of where I stood.

[255]

“It’s the man Simon Rolt,” said the doctor. “I shall be blamed for allowing the convicts to come on deck after the regulation hours.”

“Rolt! D’ye mean your religious enthusiast, doctor?” said Captain Gordon.

“Lucky he was the only one!” exclaimed the commander of the ship. “Suicide should be contagious in this heat amongst fellows primed with such memories as sweeten the sleep of your people.”

“I would rather have lost five hundred pounds than that it should have happened,” said Dr. Saunders.

“Do the prisoners take it quietly?” inquired Captain Gordon.

“As I could wish,” answered the doctor. “They seemed awed and frightened.”

The conversation ran thus for awhile. The party then went below to drink some grog, and after finishing my pipe on the quarter-deck I turned in.

I was aroused at midnight to take charge of the ship. I walked the deck until four, and nothing whatever happened saving that at about five bells there suddenly blew a fresh little breeze out of the north-west gloom: it brightened the stars, and the night felt the cooler for the mere sound of foam alongside. This breeze was blowing when I left the deck, and we were then moving through the water at five knots.

At six o’clock I was awakened by the chief officer putting his hand upon my shoulder. The look in his face startled me, and instantly gave me my wits.

[256]

“Mr. Barker,” said he, “the captain lies dead in his bunk. He’s been strangled—garrotted somehow. Come along with me. Who in the devil’s name done it?”

I sprang out of my bunk and clothed myself quickly. The morning had fully broken: it was another brilliant day and the wind gone, and my cabin porthole glowed in a disc of splendour against the sea under the sun. I followed the mate to the captain’s cabin. The poor man lay with his face dark with strangulation: his features were convulsed and distorted, his eyes were starting from their sockets, and froth and blood were on his lips. Dr. Saunders stood beside the body: it seems that the mate had roused him before coming to me.

“Is he dead, sir?” inquired Mr. Barlow.

“Ay; he has been throttled in his sleep. This must be the work of one of your crew,” said Dr. Saunders, speaking low and deliberately, and sending a professional glance under a frown full of thought and wonder at the corpse.

“Why one of the crew,” cried Mr. Barlow, “in a shipload of convicts? With ten soldiers and a sergeant besides?”

“Convicts!” exclaimed the doctor. “You’ll not wish me to believe, sir, that the guard is in collusion with the prisoners? And you’ll have to prove that to persuade me this is the work of a convict.”

Mr. Barlow retorted; whilst they argued the dreadful matter I looked about me, but witnessed nothing to speak to a struggle. Through the large open stern[257] window the silver-blue sea was sheeting to the horizon, and the cabin was full of the light glowing upon the water. I was very well acquainted with the furniture of the captain’s cabin, which was right aft on the starboard side; everything was in its place. The doctor exposed the throat of the body, and showed us certain livid marks, which he said signified that the captain had been killed through compression of the windpipe by a pair of giant-strong hands. Powerful indeed the murderer must have been to destroy so vigorous a frame as Captain Wickham’s in silence, suffocating him as he lay, with never a sound to penetrate to the adjacent cabins where Gordon slept and Dr. Saunders and Lieutenant Venables.

I roused those officers; they viewed the body, and then the lot of us went into the cuddy, where we held a council. Dr. Saunders again asserted that the murder must have been done by one of the sailors—at all events by some one belonging to the ship. The mate would not hear of this. Yes, if there was nobody but the ship’s company in the vessel, then indeed the murderer would have to be sought for in the forecastle.

Captain Gordon said that he knew his men; he’d stake his life upon their dutifulness and loyalty.

“If the murderer is one of my people,” said Dr. Saunders, “he passed the sentry to enter the cuddy. How was that managed unless the sentry permitted him to pass?”

“The sentry might have been dozing,” said I.

[258]

“No, sir,” cried Lieutenant Venables, bringing his fist in a passion on the table; “you are a sailor, Mr. Barker; you don’t know soldiers.”

“Could the convict have returned to his quarters unobserved even supposing him to have slipped past a nodding sentry? A preposterous conjecture!” exclaimed the doctor. “How would he know where the captain slept? The murderer is no convict, Gordon.”

It was settled that the mate and I should overhaul the ship’s company for evidence, whilst the doctor and the military officers made inquiries for themselves amongst the prisoners and soldiers. I followed the mate on deck. He called to the boatswain to pipe all hands. The whole of the crew assembled on the quarter-deck, and Mr. Barlow told them that Captain Wickham had been murdered. He added that the ship must be searched from end to end, and he called upon the crew to do their utmost to help me and the boatswain to ransack the forecastle for evidence.

“I have no fear of the result, my lads,” he exclaimed. &l............