300 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



confined to no class. A convict sliip, therefore, carries out to new 

 lands representatives of most of the ranks, professions, and occupa- 

 tions that go to make up a complete society. Time being given — 

 and a long time, for its growth is abnormally slow— it will develop, 

 if only into the apelike caricature of the country that gave it birth. 

 Colonies that have a convict origin, or have at different stages been 

 inoculated with convictism, are numerous. A number of Greek and 

 Eastern communities seem to have had no better beginnings. The 

 depopulated town of Dyme, in Achaia, was settled by Pompey with 

 pirates. A robber chief reconstructed on the Galatian frontier the 

 decayed town afterward named Juliopolis. Five of the ^gean 

 islands were Greek penal settlements. A portion of the bands that 

 invaded England were pirates; the aristocratic and hygienic Isle of 

 "Wight was made by the Jutes a voluntary convict settlement. After 

 the failure of Hispaniola, Columbus had partly to content himself on 

 his third voyage, as on his first, with prisoners respited from the gal- 

 lows. Brazil was at first a penal settlement, and it was afterward re- 

 enforced by a very superior kind of " convicts " — the victims of the 

 Inquisition. The equipment of the early expeditions to Canada was 

 of like kidney. Roberval was granted permission to ransack the 

 prisons and take thence thieves, homicides, and fradulent debtors. 

 " Banished men and the usual complement of villains " made up De 

 Monts's expedition. " Scoundrels of the deepest dye " crowded to 

 Laudonniere's standard. Captain John Smith's company consisted 

 in part of felons and vagabonds. Eighty convicts were among the first 

 French colonists of Louisiana. All through the seventeenth century 

 " N^ewgate birds " were shipped to I^ortli America, especially to 

 Maryland and Virginia. ISTorth Carolina, like ancient Home, was 

 " the sanctuary of runaways." It somewhat moderates our ad- 

 miration of the nobly conceived project of Gustavus Adolphus to 

 find that the Swedish settlement on the Delaware was designed in 

 part as a penal colony. But it was toward the end of the last cen- 

 tury and in the first half of this that penal colonies were established 

 on a colossal scale. For the long period of fifty-two years (1788- 

 1840) New South Wales was the recipient of every variety of con- 

 victed felon — some fifty thousand being dispatched to it from first 

 to last. In 1803 some of the more incorrigible siDccimens were se- 

 lected and sent to Van Diemen's Land, which continued to receive 

 them for half a century. Twenty-one years later the same aban- 

 doned classes were shipped to the colony afterward named Queens- 

 land, but only for eighteen years. A more appalling origin for a 

 colony can not be imagined, and the tragic page of history is black- 

 ened by no more sickening horrors than deface the early annals of 

 Australia. Yet so little were the consequences of the transporta- 



