Adventure Magazine Cover — page 78: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

642 He was over seventy years of age, erect as a gum-bole, strong almost as a man thirty years his junior, and, withal, gentle as a child, for his feet were very near the grave; and already there were whisperingly chanted in his ears the forewords of the wonderful song that all men shall one day, dying, hear, and that the new-born have not yet for- gotten. The world had dealt with him more cruelly than it does with its beasts, for he was merely a man, and a dull one, which is an animal of no fixed commercial value. This simple soul had been intended to pass through the fur- nace of the world unsullied. Here was a child’s heart in a man’s body, and every- thing had seemed to combine to degrade the mind of the man to the level of the beast. When Stephen Been was arrested in a suburb of London, long ago when the last century was young, he might have been de- scribed on the charge-list thus:. “A clod, eighteen years old.”” At any rate the law recognized that he was a clod, and immedi- ately set about breaking him in twain as a preliminary to fertilizing the barren soil of his mind. The poor, shivering, frightened animal had stolen half a sheep, value five shillings, and the law sentenced him to seven years’ penal servitude to square the accounts. “Debit, one-half sheep, five shillings. Re- ceived payment, with thanks, seven years’ transportation.” If the law had made out the account in a businesslike manner, that is the way it would have read. So the Clod, with a number of other clods, and a fair sprinkling of genuine crim- inals, was embarked for Botany Bay to serve his sentence. Botany Bay was not the Clod’s destina- tion, by the way. Port Jackson was the particular hell he was bound for, but the knowledge of Australian geography held by English state officials at that time was lim- ited. If that voyage did not make of the Clod a fiend, it was not his fault. The genu- ine criminals just referred to were bad enough; the marines and the crew were worse. An earlier voyage of this very ship had lasted nearly two years, for the trans-° port had taken out a cargo of female con- victs on ‘that occasion. And now it had been entrusted with the conveyance of Adventure mostly first offenders, whose chief crimes had been poverty and hunger, and whom the state alleged it intended to reform. And the state’s methods of reformation were the lash, the chain, the tube-gag, the col- lar, the scaffold; in a word, its instrument was the executioner, its example was blood. That orgie was forty years old and strengthened by its experiences when Stephen Been landed at Sydney Cove. Being stupid, he was very quiet, and his jailers, mistaking his stupidity for stubbornness, brought him up for punishment on the pal- triest of excuses. “They would flog the mule out of him,” said they, and instead they flogged a devil in. So he became an animal, and as he passed from the lower vegetable state he had been born in, to the higher life of the carni- vora, he was made what the system called ‘“‘a dangerous felon.’”’ He attempted to escape. Seven years were added to his first sentence—his floggings were more fre- quent; then Hobart Town and Maria Is- land, the aggravated hells of convictdom followed. Just before his additional sen- tence had expired, a member of the Clod’s gang—a hybrid creature, half convict, half convict’s jailer, proposed that the gang should escape in a body. The gang acted on his suggestion and attempted to break jail. Mr. Hybrid sold them to the com- mandant of the station, and all of them were captured. More floggings, more jail, for the animal- clod. The law limited the term of imprison- ment then passed on him, but it did not specify the number of lashes he was to receive. The commandant could attend to that trivial question, and to do him the jus- tice due to a zealous Government official, the commandant did. The informer was at that time about twenty-four years of age. He had yet to serve five years of his sentence for forgery, but the Crown granted him a free pardon as the reward of his treachery, and he left Tasmania for the mainland. Stephen Been returned to his cell in Hobart Jail and received the first of his new series of floggings. He did not feel the strokes; he was repeating to himself—as if he could forget it—the oath he had sworn to kill the informer. He did not flinch from the flogger, for he thought of his re- venge, and revenge is the kindest liniment COMICOOCKKS. ECO