Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/179

 they were found at Botany Bay. One being wounded in an attempt at plunder, the rest surrendered. Other Irish prisoners made similar unsuccessful attempts, and Collins recorded that they seemed incapable of profiting by experience, always attributing their failures, not to their own folly, but to their "bad luck." Carlum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.

Such, Phillip wrote (Nov. 1791), "is the ignorance of the Irish prisoners that some of them have left the settlement to go to China, which they suppose to be at the distance of only 150 miles; others, to find a town which they supposed to be a few days' walk to the northward."

It was not strange that the convicts ran risks in order to flee from the half-starved settlement. Only the satisfaction of doing duty could reconcile the officers to their exile. Most of the convicts had no pleasure in good deeds, and their main object was to escape to their old haunts.

The want of proper records had prevented Phillip from knowing at what date the sentences of the prisoners expired, and though the power to remit sentences (sent to him in a despatch 13th Nov. 1790) enabled him, after long delay, to surmount some difficulties, it was not easy to employ the energies of the emancipated. In March 1791, he reported that men who alleged that their sentences had expired, wanted to return to England. "To compel these people to remain may be attended with unpleasant consequences; for they must be made to work if fed from the public stores, and if permitted to be their own masters they must rob, for they have no other way to support themselves. . . . . I have no means of knowing when the sentences of any of those convicts expire who came out in the first ship...."

Mutiny on the part of the convicts provoked stern treatment in voyages. On board the Albemarle at sea, Lt. Bowen shot one mutineer (1791) when a mutiny was in full career—coerced the others, and caused one to be hanged at the foreyard-arm, "with unanimous approbation of Lt. Young, the master, officers, surgeon, sergeant, and every other person belonging to the ship, and soon after Lyons