iurnal motion of the sun or the monthly revolution
of the moon.

To conclude the history of a people for whom I cannot but feel some share
of affection. Let those who have been born in more favoured lands and who
have profited by more enlightened systems, compassionate, but not despise
their destitute and obscure situation. Children of the same omniscient
paternal care, let them recollect that by the fortuitous advantage of birth
alone they possess superiority: that untaught, unaccommodated man is the
same in Pall Mall as in the wilderness of New South Wales. And ultimately
let them hope and trust that the progress of reason and the splendor
of revelation will in their proper and allotted season be permitted to
illumine and transfuse into these desert regions, knowledge, virtue and
happiness.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Observations on the Convicts.

A short account of that class of men for whose disposal and advantage the
colony was principally, if not totally, founded, seems necessary.

If it be recollected how large a body of these people are now congregated
in the settlement of Port Jackson and at Norfolk Island, it will, I think,
not only excite surprise but afford satisfaction, to learn, that in a
period of four years few crimes of a deep dye or of a hardened nature
have been perpetrated. Murder and unnatural sins rank not hitherto in the
catalogue of their enormities, and one suicide only has been committed.

To the honour of the female part of our community let it be recorded that
only one woman has suffered capital punishment. On her condemnation she
pleaded pregnancy, and a jury of venerable matrons was impanneled on the
spot, to examine and pronounce her state, which the forewoman, a grave
personage between sixty and seventy years old, did, by this short address
to the court; 'Gentlemen! she is as much with child as I am.' Sentence was
accordingly passed, and she was executed.

Besides the instance of Irving, two other male convicts, William
Bloodsworth, of Kingston upon Thames, and John Arscott, of Truro, in
Cornwall, were both emancipated for their good conduct, in the years
1790 and 1791. Several men whose terms of transportation had expired, and
against whom no legal impediment existed to prevent their departure, have
been permitted to enter in merchant ships wanting hands: and as my Rose
Hill journals testify, many others have had grants of land assigned to
them, and are become settlers in the co