For the Term of His Natural Life

At the bottom of the long luxuriant garden-ground was a rustic seat abutting upon the low wall that topped the lane. The branches of the English trees (planted long ago) hung ab...

There is no need to dwell upon the mental agonies of that miserable night. Perhaps, of all the five, the one least qualified to endure it realized the prospect of suffering most...

The lift of the water-spout had saved John Rex's life. At the moment when it struck him he was on his hands and knees at the entrance of the cavern. The wave, gushing upwards, a...

Maurice found his favourable expectations of Sydney fully realized. His notable escape from death at Macquarie Harbour, his alliance with the daughter of so respected a colonist...

“Society in Hobart Town, in this year of grace 1838, is, my dear lord, composed of very curious elements.” So ran a passage in the sparkling letter which the Rev. Mr. Meekin, ne...

In turning over the pages of my journal, to note the good fortune that has just happened to me, I am struck by the utter desolation of my life for the last seven years.

The lost son of Sir Richard Devine had returned to England, and made claim to his name and fortune. In other words, John Rex had successfully carried out the scheme by which he...

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...

Lieutenant Maurice Frere, late in command at Maria Island, had unexpectedly come down with news from head-quarters. The Ladybird, Government schooner, visited the settlement on...

The evening passed as it had passed a hundred times before; and having smoked a pipe at the barracks, Captain Frere returned home. His home was a cottage on the New Town Road--a...

At seven o'clock there had been also a commotion in the prison. The news of the fever had awoke in the convicts all that love of liberty which had but slumbered during the monot...

Maurice Frere's passion had spent itself in that last act of violence. He did not return to the prison, as he promised himself, but turned into the road that led to the Cascades...

In the year 1825 there lived at St. Heliers, Jersey, an old watchmaker, named Urban Purfoy. He was a hard-working man, and had amassed a little money--sufficient to give his gra...

As Blunt had said, the burning ship lay a good twelve miles from the Malabar, and the pull was a long and a weary one. Once fairly away from the protecting sides of the vessel t...

The coarse tones of Maurice Frere roused him. “What do you want?” he asked. Rufus Dawes, raising his head, contemplated the figure before him, and recognized it. “Is it you?” he...

The “little gathering” of which Major Vickers had spoken to Mr. Meekin, had grown into something larger than he had anticipated. Instead of a quiet dinner at which his own house...

One afternoon ever-active semaphores transmitted a piece of intelligence which set the peninsula agog. Captain Frere, having arrived from head-quarters, with orders to hold an i...

The next morning Rufus Dawes was stirring by daylight. He first got his catgut wound upon a piece of stick, and then, having moved his frail floats alongside the little rock tha...

Two or three mornings after the arrival of the Ladybird, the solitary prisoner of the Grummet Rock noticed mysterious movements along the shore of the island settlement. The pri...

May 12th--landed to-day at Norfolk Island, and have been introduced to my new abode, situated some eleven hundred miles from Sydney. A solitary rock in the tropical ocean, the i...

The felon Rufus Dawes had stretched himself in his bunk and tried to sleep. But though he was tired and sore, and his head felt like lead, he could not but keep broad awake. The...

The mutineers of the Osprey had been long since given up as dead, and the story of their desperate escape had become indistinct to the general public mind. Now that they had bee...

In the breathless stillness of a tropical afternoon, when the air was hot and heavy, and the sky brazen and cloudless, the shadow of the Malabar lay solitary on the surface of t...

“I thought it was a little paradise,” said Meekin. “Captain Frere says that the scenery is delightful.” “So it is,” returned North, looking askance, “but the prisoners are not d...

Convictism having been safely got under hatches, and put to bed in its Government allowance of sixteen inches of space per man, cut a little short by exigencies of shipboard, th...

In the morning, however, Rufus Dawes was first at work, and made no allusion to the scene of the previous evening. He had already skinned one of the goats, and he directed Frere...

John Rex found the “George” disagreeably prepared for his august arrival. Obsequious waiters took his dressing-bag and overcoat, the landlord himself welcomed him at the door. T...

It was not until they had scrambled up the beach to safety that the absconders became fully aware of the loss of another of their companions. As they stood on the break of the b...

The drifting log that had so strangely served as a means of saving Rufus Dawes swam with the current that was running out of the bay. For some time the burden that it bore was a...

It was late in the afternoon when Sarah Purfoy awoke from her uneasy slumber. She had been dreaming of the deed she was about to do, and was flushed and feverish; but, mindful o...

At the moment when, seeing Burgess's boat near the sand-spit, he had uttered the warning cry heard by Vetch, he turned back into the darkness, and made for the water's edge at a...

Mrs Vickers, pale and sick with terror, yet sustained by that strange courage of which we have before spoken, passed rapidly under the open skylight, and prepared to ascend. Syl...

In the prison of the 'tween decks reigned a darkness pregnant with murmurs. The sentry at the entrance to the hatchway was supposed to “prevent the prisoners from making a noise...

Though the house of the Commandant of Norfolk Island was comfortable and well furnished, and though, of necessity, all that was most hideous in the “discipline” of the place was...

An hour after sunrise, the frail boat, which was the last hope of these four human beings, drifted with the outgoing current towards the mouth of the harbour. When first launche...

Along the south coast of the Australian continent, though the usual westerly winds and gales of the highest latitudes prevail during the greater portion of the year, hurricanes...

Frere's fishing expedition had been unsuccessful, and in consequence prolonged. The obstinacy of his character appeared in the most trifling circumstances, and though the fast d...

The method and manner of Frere's revenge became a subject of whispered conversation on the island. It was reported that North had been forbidden to visit the convict, but that h...

Three wooden staves, seven feet high, were fastened together in the form of a triangle. The structure looked not unlike that made by gypsies to boil their kettles. To this struc...

On or about the 8th of December, Mrs. Frere noticed a sudden and unaccountable change in the manner of the chaplain. He came to her one afternoon, and, after talking for some ti...

The Pretty Mary--as ugly and evil-smelling a tub as ever pitched under a southerly burster--had been lying on and off Cape Surville for nearly three weeks. Captain Blunt was get...

----“That is my story. Let it plead with you to turn you from your purpose, and to save her. The punishment of sin falls not upon the sinner only. A deed once done lives in its...

Having got out of eye-shot of the ungrateful creatures he had befriended, Rufus Dawes threw himself upon the ground in an agony of mingled rage and regret. For the first time fo...

The house in Clarges Street was duly placed at the disposal of Mrs. Richard Devine, who was installed in it, to the profound astonishment and disgust of Mr. Smithers and his fel...

Rex told Mr. Meekin, who, the next day, did him the honour to visit him, that, “under Providence, he owed his escape from death to the kind manner in which Captain Frere had spo...

That afternoon, while Mr. Meekin was digesting his lunch, and chatting airily with Sylvia, Rufus Dawes began to brood over a desperate scheme. The intelligence that the investig...

The two discoverers of this awkward secret held a council of war. Vickers was for at once calling the guard, and announcing to the prisoners that the plot--whatever it might be-...

Rufus Dawes was believed to be dead by the party on board the Ladybird, and his strange escape was unknown to those still at Sarah Island. Maurice Frere, if he bestowed a though...

Rufus Dawes hearing, when “on the chain” the next day, of the wanton torture of his friend, uttered no threat of vengeance, but groaned only. “I am not so strong as I was,” said...

Sylvia had become the wife of Maurice Frere. The wedding created excitement in the convict settlement, for Maurice Frere, though oppressed by the secret shame at open matrimony...

The town house of Mr. Richard Devine was in Clarges Street. Not that the very modest mansion there situated was the only establishment of which Richard Devine was master. Mr. Jo...

At this happy conclusion to his labours, Frere went down to comfort the girl for whose sake he had suffered Rex to escape the gallows. On his way he was met by a man who touched...

The usual clanking and hammering was prevalent upon the stone jetty of Port Arthur when the schooner bearing the returned convict, Rufus Dawes, ran alongside. On the heights abo...

Gabbett, guided by the Crow, had determined to beach the captured boat on the southern point of Cape Surville. It will be seen by those who have followed the description of the...

August 24th.--There has been but one entry in my journal since the 30th June, that which records the advent of our new Commandant, who, as I expected, is Captain Maurice Frere.

October 21st.--I am safe for another six months if I am careful, for my last bout lasted longer than I expected. I suppose one of these days I shall have a paroxysm that will ki...

The morning after this, the Rev. Mr. North departed in the schooner for Hobart Town. Between the officious chaplain and the Commandant the events of the previous day had fixed a...

Rufus Dawes had been a fortnight at the settlement when a new-comer appeared on the chain-gang. This was a young man of about twenty years of age, thin, fair, and delicate. His...

The insubordination of which Rufus Dawes had been guilty was, in this instance, insignificant. It was the custom of the newly-fledged constables of Captain Frere to enter the wa...

The hospital was nothing more nor less than a partitioned portion of the lower deck, filched from the space allotted to the soldiers. It ran fore and aft, coming close to the st...

The question gave the marooned party new hopes. Maurice Frere, with his usual impetuosity, declared that the project was a most feasible one, and wondered--as such men will wond...

Captain Frere had inspected the prison that very afternoon, and it had seemed to him that the hammers had never fallen so briskly, nor the chains clanked so gaily, as on the occ...

“Hell's Gates,” formed by a rocky point, which runs abruptly northward, almost touches, on its eastern side, a projecting arm of land which guards the entrance to King's River....

“Thank God!” he cried, “there's a breeze at last!” and as the overpowered Gabbett, bruised, bleeding, and bound, was dragged down the hatchway, the triumphant doctor hurried upo...

December 7th.--I have made up my mind to leave this place, to bury myself again in the bush, I suppose, and await extinction. I try to think that the reason for this determinati...

It was not far to the sheds, and after a few minutes' walk through the wooden palisades they reached a long stone building, two storeys high, from which issued a horrible growli...

The hospital of Port Arthur was not a cheerful place, but to the tortured and unnerved Rufus Dawes it seemed a paradise. There at least--despite the roughness and contempt with...

“I asked for the chaplain,” said Rufus Dawes, his anger with himself growing apace. “I am the chaplain,” returned Meekin, with dignity, as who should say--“none of your brandy-d...

The south-east coast of Van Diemen's Land, from the solitary Mewstone to the basaltic cliffs of Tasman's Head, from Tasman's Head to Cape Pillar, and from Cape Pillar to the rug...

“Well,” said Frere, as they went in, “you'll be out of it soon. You can get all ready to start by the end of the month, and I'll bring on Mrs. Vickers afterwards.”

“The “employment” at Port Arthur consisted chiefly of agriculture, ship-building, and tanning. Dawes, who was in the chain-gang, was put to chain-gang labour; that is to say, br...

They looked again, the tiny spark still burned, and immediately over it there grew out of the darkness a crimson spot, that hung like a lurid star in the air. The soldiers and s...

“Give you up? No. But the police will be after us as soon as that woman can speak, and her brother summon his lawyer. I know what her promise is worth. We have only got about fi...

“You must try and save him from further punishment,” said Sylvia next day to Frere. “I did not mean to betray the poor creature, but I had made myself nervous by reading that co...

CHAPTERS III., IV. Sessional Papers printed by order of the House of Lords, 1847. Enclosure to No. XI. Extract of a paper by the Rev. T. B. Naylor. Enclosure 3 in No.XIV. Copy o...

“Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science”, etc., vol. ii. Account of Macquarie Harbour, by T. G. Lempriere, Esq., A.D.C.G., pp.17, 107, 200. Tasmania: Henry Dowling. London: John M...

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 C...

CHAPTERS I,IV,V,VII. Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the state of the colony of New South Wales. Printed by order of the House of Commons, 1822.

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 HARBOU...

“...Two or three men murdered their fellow-prisoners, with the certainty of being detected and executed, apparently without malice and with very little excitement, stating that...

“The examination of the prisoners who were concerned in the attempt upon the Malabar was concluded on Tuesday last. The four ringleaders, Dawes Gabbett, Vetch, and Sanders, were...

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. WOMA...