Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 2.djvu/28

 12 PHILLIP AND BOSS. 1791 statement of officers. Their wounded feelings. shore/' no person coold be tried for any offence^ desertion excepted^ committed more than three years before the issne of the warrant. That time having expired^ Captain Tench and the other officers who had constituted the Court asked that the arroEt might be remoyed. They made the ap^)iUoa* tion : — " Not as culprits, conscious of having committed a crime which we shrink to have investigated, or hesitate to meet, but as soldiers indignant at the novelty and disgrace of a situation unexampled in the British military annals — ^the members of a Court-martial under arrest on a charge which, if proved against them, extends not only to the deprivation of their most gracious Sovereign's favour and dismission from the service, but to the forfeiture ol their lives and honours, doing duty as prisoners, from the necessity, of service, for three years While a hope of relief from our situation by the decision of a General Court-martial existed we were silent — we were patient. That hope is now at an end, and, therefore, to remain without representation longer in our present degraded situation would argue that we are become insensible of ignominy and familiar with humiliation." The situation was, no doubt, galling to the officers con- cerned, but the language employed in describing it was unnecessarily strong. Captain Tench and his companions in misfortune were not in a '^degraded situation,'^ nor were they exposed to '^ignominy/' Their status in the community was no lower than it was before they were placed under arrest. They were not regarded as men in disgrace, but rather as the victims of an extraordinary and unwarranted assertion of authority on the part of their commanding officer. If they suffered at all, it was in the loss of promotion; beyond that they could not complain of any material injury. But they had been brooding over their wrongs for three years in a place where there was little to divert their atten- tion from their personal grievances, and the circumstances may, perhaps, excuse the extravagance of language which led them to ask for release from the " confinement under which we have so long laboured."