The prisoners sent down from Sydney to Van Diemen's Land, were conveyed in small crafts and small numbers, and without much regard to their health; but as an example of wretchedness, nothing could exceed the usual passage from Hobart Town to Macquarie Harbour. The unhappy men, often destitute of clothing, were placed in the hold of a vessel, without bedding or blankets, and were exposed, sometimes for five or six weeks, to the chills of a wintry voyage: on one such, there were thirty-five men, who had but four blankets among them; and one was found without any other covering than his shirt, in which plight he had been forwarded from the gaol.[73]
The surgeon-superintendent enters on his office at the same moment with the guard: his duties are multiform--the magistrate, the chaplain, the mentor, and the physician. The surgeons are usually popular with the prisoners, and the penal administration with which they are entrusted, is generally the most disguised. Educated men, they are not commonly haughty and capricious: they are able to distinguish moral imbecility from perverseness, and both from disease. The habit of scrutinising quickens their sagacity, and fits them for a station, where the knowledge of the heart is the great secret of control. Accustomed to behold human nature, stript of all its external trappings, the grade of the prisoner, in their estimation, does not wholly debase the man. Witnesses to the wretchedness of humble life, the squalor of its garrets and its cellars--observant that want, which sometimes forms the felon, much oftener makes the martyr, and crowds the hospital rather than the gaol--they are not incapable of pitying either class of victims. The horrors which others feel for disease, whether of the body or the mind, excite no antipathies in men who have devoted their lives to its relief: thus their government of convicts often affords a singular contrast to the agency which precedes or follows them. The recollection of their conduct is mentioned by the prisoner with respect, and even with fondness. No profession can better prepare for practical benevolence: what it withdraws from the sensibility it adds to the understanding; and those in charge of convict vessels have exhibited, in full average, the virtues of their profession.[74]