Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain's Empire by Graham Seal

Author:Graham Seal [Seal, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300246483
Google: PvQqEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 030024648X
Published: 2021-05-18T03:09:05+00:00

. . . prisoners from every part of the British dominions, and, indeed, from almost every part of the world. Besides English, Irish, Scotch, Frenchmen, Italians, and Germans, there were Chinamen from Hong Kong, Aborigines from New Holland, West Indian Blacks, Greeks, Caffres, and Malays. Among these were soldiers, for desertion, idiots, madmen, boys of seventeen, and old men of eighty. All these were indiscriminately herded together, without reference to age, crime, nation, or any other distinction.24

The brutality of the system at Norfolk Island was notorious. Men were flogged for minor offences, left in solitary confinement for lengthy periods, and driven to hard labour in an endless routine of back-breaking work. The only way off the island was by release at the end of a sentence, by escape or by death. It was said that convicts would deliberately attack each other, possibly fatally, in the knowledge that such acts would lead to their execution, so desperate were some to escape. There were rumours of a secret convict society that organized such extreme actions and generally ran the lives of the convicts and their keepers. These surfaced during the Molesworth Inquiry and were later transformed by writers like the pseudonymous ‘Price Warung’ (William Astley) and Marcus Clarke into a shadowy freemasonry known as ‘The Ring’. This group was forty or more of the longest-serving prisoners who swore to be loyal to each other and take reprisals for punishments against them. They enforced a code of silence, not only among themselves, but obliging every prisoner to keep silent. Informing against any of the Ring’s activities meant certain death.

From this basic prison gang the Ring was, over the years, inflated into a clandestine criminal cult with its own hierarchy, obligations, oaths and gory rituals. Its initiations involved drinking blood, accompanied by a dreadful oath of eternal loyalty. When the Ring decided to meet, word went through the prison that no non-member, including guards, should enter the prison yard. The leader, known as ‘the One’, entered the yard first and faced a corner of the wall. He was followed by the Threes, Fives, Sevens and Nines, each arrayed in a semicircle behind him. All were masked. Satanic prayers were intoned:

Is God an officer of the establishment?

And the response came solemnly clear, thrice repeated:

No, God is not an officer of the establishment.

He passed to the next question:

Is the Devil an officer of the establishment?

And received the answer – thrice:

Yes, the Devil is an officer of the establishment.

He continued:

Then do we obey God?

With clear-cut resonance came the negative –

No, we do not obey God!

He propounded the problem framed by souls that are not necessarily corrupt:

Then whom do we obey?

And, thrice over, he received for reply the damning perjury which yet was so true an answer:

The Devil – we obey our Lord the Devil!

And the dreaded Convict Oath was taken. It had eight verses:

Hand to hand,

On Earth, in Hell,

Sick or Well,

On Sea, on Land,

On the Square, ever.

And ended – the intervening verses dare not be quoted:

Stiff or in Breath,

Lag or Free,

You and Me,

In Life, in Death,

On the Cross, never.

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