Several reasons offer themselves to justify one in pronouncing this proceeding at the Cape, on the part of the local authorities, respecting the obtrusion of the sixteen additional prisoners, as being, at the very least that may be said of it, _harsh_. This is stated not from any personal inconvenience which could arise to myself from an increase of professional duty; but the term is applied to that proceeding from reference to the former number of convicts even more than the ship’s proper number,—the Neptune in a subsequent voyage having carried out only one hundred and fifty-six, that being, it appears, the complement proper for her accommodation.
Lest my opinion of this transaction should seem in any respect unjust, I am desirous of explaining why I consider the putting such an extraordinary number into a vessel already overcrowded, as must appear from her having one hundred and seventy prisoners on board, instead of her proper complement of one hundred and fifty-six, highly injudicious and dangerous. A convict ship laid out for a certain number of prisoners cannot prudently be altered for the reception of more, without a manifest risk of inconvenience and danger;—the former, on account of confining their sleeping-places, seats, exercise, &c. and the latter, from the foulness of the atmospheric medium, in which the crowd must respire the doubtful or perhaps diseased exhalations from each other’s lungs.
In the present case this was the more striking, as even with all the care, regular exercise, and the most careful attention to the daily state of the convicts; even with all my experience of their constitutions and disorders, during the time the ship was proceeding from the Thames to the Cape of Good Hope; still an extreme hazard was incurred by the admission of a fresh number of men, besides including the seven invalids, all of course strangers to the regimen previously used; and perhaps, as might be suspected, tainted with infectious diseases.
These sixteen men having escaped from New South Wales, must have endured such hardships and privations as would be likely to superinduce contagious disease, and the miserable state in which they were when taken on board, excited strong apprehensions to that effect. Having made minute inquiry from one of the number, I learned that these wretched men had contrived to secrete themselves in the hold of the Harriet, where they lay concealed for more than a month before they were discovered; having subsisted that time on some miserable matters they had brought away with them, and on a small store belonging to the owner, to which they had penetrated privately. In this wretched state they continued in a horrible and disgusting condition, so that they were of an appearance extremely forbidding when brought on board.