Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Convict Life in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land: The Story of the Ten Governors, and the Story of the Convicts
Pessimists; time and again, have raised a lachrymose wail about the stain which must always rest on the colony through the criminality of its early life; but these men can never see anything but the evil, and even that evil they would intensify for the sake of making their wailing more mournful. 'tis true that the beginning was in some measure bad, but that bad beginning was better than no beginning at all and, fresh from long and deep research among old records, I am bold to declare that the earlier convicts were not the worst criminals who came out to the colony, and that some of the darker and bloodier stains which deface the first pages of the colony's history were made by men who counted the poor chained wretches under them as worse than the offal in a charnel-house - men who came out free, who lived freely, lied and robbed and murdered freely, and who literally fattened on the blood of other mortals a thousand times better than themselves, although those mortals had' been banished from their fatherland in chains. The facts in proof of this assertion will appear in proper order; at present we must deal with events that transpired before either bond or free from Britain's shores placed foot upon Australian land for the purpose of making it their heme.
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