THE SETTLEMENT OF 1803 35 



of the expense of keeping them, as he finds them in general " a 

 necessitous and worthless set of people ". It is evident that the 

 functions of the free settler did not harmonise with the Colonel's 

 idea of the main object of his mission, for he writes to Governor 

 King that, if there are any free people in Sydney who may be 

 desirous of visiting Port Phillip, ha trusts that he will not at 

 any time suffer them to come, as they could only prove extremely 

 troublesome to him under present circumstances. 



On the whole he appears to have been humane and considerate 

 in his ruling of the convicts. Their hours of labour, which were at 

 first fixed from sunrise to sunset, with an interval of half an hour 

 for breakfast and an hour for dinner at noon, were soon afterwards 

 commuted to from five till eight o'clock, from half-past eight till 

 noon, and from two till seven P.M. Further concessions were subse- 

 quently made, giving them an extra hour's rest in the forenoon of 

 Tuesdays, and closing the day's labour on Saturdays at eleven A.M., 

 from which hour until Monday morning they were not required to 

 work for the public good. Seeing that nothing was attempted in 

 the way of cultivation, it must really have taxed the inventive 

 powers of the staff to keep three hundred people continually at 

 work. To enable them to rise with the sun, they were all required 

 to be within their tents for the night, and all lights out, at nine 

 P.M., the latter precaution being rendered necessary by the discov- 

 ery that the men preferred to pass the night in the excitement 

 of gambling rather than in wholesome sleep. The weekly rations 

 were on a generous scale ; Sunday puddings were a set-off against 

 the infliction of one of Mr. Knopwood's sermons, and even the 

 festive ideas associated with the English Christmas found expres- 

 sion in the issue of a pound of raisins to each prisoner wherewith 

 to make merry with his friends. The regulation clothing was 

 sufficient and liberally supplied, and cleanliness was insisted on 

 in person, clothing and habitation. Altogether, the lot of these 

 involuntary emigrants was, as far as their physical comforts were 

 concerned, infinitely better than that of tens of thousands of the 

 hopeless poor of London and other large cities who had remained 

 honest enough to keep out of the grasp of the criminal law. 



Yet how essentially strained and artificial was foe character 



3* 



