Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/216

 arrival in England, they were tried—and acquitted. Macquarie had later the humiliation of receiving through the Colonial Office the following letter to Goulburn from the Home Office:—

"I am directed to request you that you will call Lord Bathurst's serious attention to the public inconvenience which attended these trials. To omit several points of minor importance, it may be sufficient to particularise that it has been necessary to set at large no less than thirteen convicts (some of them of the worst description) who were sent to England as witnesses, but were incompetent without a free pardon to give evidence in this country. Lord Sidmouth is well aware that as Governor Macquarie is not invested with jurisdiction to try any offences committed on the high seas, no prosecution could in this case have been instituted in New South Wales. But his Lordship recommends that the Governor should be apprised of the serious inconvenience attending such a trial in England, and should be enjoined, in the event (Lord Sidmouth trusts the very improbable event) of the recurrence of so unfortunate a transaction as has led to the present inquiry, not to send a case for trial in this kingdom unless he shall be strongly impressed with the belief that the crime imputed to the accused will be proved to the satisfaction of a jury by a body of evidence worthy of credit."

When Macquarie had sent the last papers concerning the Chapman to England in 1817, he had written:—

"Altho' I cannot but despair of effectual justice being rendered by the mode I have, under the advice of the Judge-Advocate, been induced to adopt, yet I still hope that sufficient may be effected at least to protect the persons of convicts in future on their passage hither from the cruelties and violence to which they have heretofore been, in a certain degree, exposed, chiefly owing to the rude and boisterous description of men who generally command merchant ships, and to the little care they take to prevent their petty officers from exercising tyrannical and unnecessary severities towards them."

He little thought that the evidence which had been accepted