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 pretty well occupied in allaying the irritation of his passengers, who were generally of a class not to bear their woes silently.

Between a convict transport and an emigrant ship, the difference in accommodation was little enough—notwithstanding the nonsense that has been written about the horrors of all Australian convict transports. The true reason of the dreadfulness of some of these voyages lay in the fact that the 'tween decks of a convict transport generally carried, necessarily crowded together, for a long spell of idleness, a hundred or more of the worst class of criminals, often as physically diseased as they were unhealthily minded.

Upon Phillip lay the task of conducting, in a fleet of transports on a six months' voyage to a country practically unknown, about a thousand passengers, of whom more than seven hundred were probably in every respect the worst that could have been selected in the gaols of England. Many of them were desperate wretches whose presence on board the ships was a more constant and greater menace to their safety than all the dangers known and unknown of the sea. The conduct of this voyage is, therefore, no unimportant test of the senior officer's fitness to command, and it naturally forms a chapter in his life.

Phillip had under him intelligent and loyal subordinates, and from nearly all of them he received valuable aid from the beginning. But here again all was not plain sailing. Major Ross, the commandant of