Page 394 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

tified us all. Our story was then made public, and Barker
and Lesly, turning Queen’s evidence against Russen, he was
convicted of the murder of Lyons, and executed. We were
then placed on board the Leviathan hulk, and remained
there until shipped in the Lady Jane, which was chartered,
with convicts, for Van Diemen’s Land, in order to be tried
in the colony, where the offence was committed, for pirati-
cally seizing the brig Osprey, and arrived here on the 15th
December, 1838.’
* * * * * *
Coming, breathless, to the conclusion of this wonder-
ful relation, Sylvia suffered her hand to fall into her lap,
and sat meditative. The history of this desperate struggle
for liberty was to her full of vague horror. She had never
before realized among what manner of men she had lived.
The sullen creatures who worked in the chain-gangs, or
pulled in the boats—their faces brutalized into a uniform
blankness— must be very different men from John Rex and
his companions. Her imagination pictured the voyage in
the leaky brig, the South American slavery, the midnight
escape, the desperate rowing, the long, slow agony of star-
vation, and the heart-sickness that must have followed upon
recapture and imprisonment. Surely the punishment of ‘pe-
nal servitude’ must have been made very terrible for men
to dare such hideous perils to escape from it. Surely John
Rex, the convict, who, alone, and prostrated by sickness,
quelled a mutiny and navigated a vessel through a storm-
ravaged ocean, must possess qualities which could be put to
better use than stone-quarrying. Was the opinion of Mau-