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Armitage I was convicted of breaking my country's
laws, and was sentenced to transportation. Do not
think very harshly of me, laddie. It was a debt of
honor, so called, which I had to pay, and I used money
which was not my own to do it, in the certainty that I
could replace it before there could be any possibility
of its being missed. But the most dreadful ill-luck
pursued me. The money which I had reckoned upon never
came to hand, and a premature examination of accounts
exposed my deficit. The case might have been dealt
leniently with, but the laws were more harshly
administered thirty years ago than now, and on my
twenty-third birthday I found myself chained as a
felon with thirty-seven other convicts in 'tween-decks
of the bark _Gloria Scott_, bound for Australia.

"'It was the year '55 when the Crimean war was at its
height, and the old convict ships had been largely used
as transports in the Black Sea. The government was
compelled, therefore, to use smaller and less suitable
vessels for sending out their prisoners. The Gloria
Scott had been in the Chinese tea-trade, but she was
an old-fashioned, heavy-bowed, broad-beamed craft, and
the new clippers had cut her out. She was a
five-hundred-ton boat; and besides her thirty-eight
jail-birds, she carried twenty-six of a crew, eighteen
soldiers, a captain, three mates, a doctor, a
chaplain, and four warders. Nearly a hundred souls
were in her, all told, when we set sail from Falmouth.

"'The partitions between the cells of the convicts,
instead of being of thick oak, as is usual in
convict-ships, were quite thin and frail. The man
next to me, upon the aft side, was one whom I had
particularly noticed when we were led down the quay.
He was a young man with a clear, hairless face, a
long, thin nose, and rather nut-cracker jaws. He
carried his head very jauntily in the air, had a
swaggering style of walking, and was, above all else,
remarkable for his extraordinary height. I don't
think any of our heads would have come up to his
shoulder, and I am sure that he could not have
measured less than six and a half feet. It was
strange among so many sad and weary faces to see one
which was full of energy and resolution. The sight of
it was to me like a fire in a snow-storm. I was glad,
then, to find that he was my neighbor, and gladder
still when, in the dead of the night, I heard a
whisper close to my ear, and found that he had managed
to cut an opening in the board which separated us.

"'"Hullo, chummy!" said he, "what's your name, and
what are you here for?"

"'I answered him, and asked in turn who I was talking
with.

"'"I'm Jack Prendergast," said he, "and by God! You'll
learn to bless my name before you've done with me."

"'I remembered hearing of his case, for it was one
which had made an immense sensation throughout the
country some time before my own arrest. He was a man
of good family and of great ability, but of incurably
vicious habits, who had by an ingenious system of

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