e throughout the branch established at Norfolk Island.
Major Childs, the commandant in succession to Captain Maconochie, was
nominated by Lord Stanley. His fitness for the office was assumed from
his reputation as a strict disciplinarian: in this the minister was
mistaken. It must not, however, be forgotten, that many of the most
flagrant evils attributed to his administration, had existed at
different periods during the preceding experiments.

The island was annexed by parliament to the government of Van Diemen's
Land, and thus terminated a connexion with New South Wales, which had
subsisted from the colonization of that country.

Captain Forster, who succeeded to the chief control, was hostile to
Maconochie's system, and proceeded to interdict all the privileges he
had been accustomed to grant. A gang system of labour was restored; the
barter of food was forbidden; vegetable stalls, pork shops and general
stores, herds of swine and private gardens, were swept away. Thus, to
all the prisoners left behind by Maconochie, the new regulations were
equal to an additional sentence.

Two classes of prisoners were sent to Norfolk Island under the new
system. The doubly-convicted colonial prisoners, and persons sentenced
in England to transportation for fifteen years or life: the accumulation
of both was rapid. Many bushrangers and other capital convicts, were
transmitted to that settlement, to whom the arts of a prison were fully
known; who were celebrated as "flash" robbers; and who bore down by
their tyrannical wickedness all the weaker or better men within their
influence. The numbers on the island in 1845, were nearly 2,000; of whom
one-fourth were colonial or doubly-convicted prisoners. For these rapid
additions no preparation was made: the buildings in the island, adapted
for prison purposes, were dilapidated and insufficient. In the sleeping
wards, the hammocks were placed in contact: the men were shut up after
dusk, from eighty to a hundred together, in charge of a convict
wardsman, until the morning. The place of promiscuous association was
called the lumber yard, and was subject to the dominion of a "ring:"
there old and new prisoners met; it was regarded as an _Alsatia_, or
sanctuary. To arrest a prisoner there would have risked the life of the
constable: attempts were sometimes met with concerted resistance: the
whole body would surround the culprit, and draw their knives in
defiance; in several instances the off