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"the matter for approval immediately." Emancipated convicts desiring to become farmers were to be similarly encouraged.

The horrors of the passage for convicts continued during Hunter's reign, and he remonstrated against them, as Phillip had remonstrated before. Close confinement, poverty of food, and consequent disease swept away large numbers. An agent for transports accompanied the ships sometimes, but even in such a case (as that of Lieut. Bowen, R.N., in 1791, in the Albemarle) his functions were resolved into additional sternness when mutiny occurred. Hunter requested that a naval officer should accompany each ship, and hear appeals from the convicts as to their treatment.

In 1796 information of intended mutiny was given to Hogan, the captain of the Marquis of Cornwallis. He acquainted the soldiers and the crew, who desired to execute the ringleaders.

"It was not without much difficulty I was able to get their lives spared, by promising the seamen and the honest part of the soldiers that each man should take his part in flogging them at the gangway. . . . At 11 a.m. we commenced flogging the villains, and continued engaged on that disagreeable service till forty-two men and eight women received their punishment. (On a subsequent day) "I heard dreadful cries in the prison, and found those who had not been punished were murdering those that gave any information, which were now about twenty, too many to keep on deck. To rescue these from the vengeance of the others, I was obliged to fire amongst them with blunderbusses and pistols; and on appeasing their rage, I hauled out some of the fellows they were destroying, almost speechless. Some of the convicts were killed on this occasion, but many of them dangerously wounded. On this day, punishments being over, and sufficient proof being established against the sergeant, corporal, and James Bullock, as will appear by the following informations, I ordered them to be chained together and put in the convicta' prison on convicts' allowance, with an intent to prosecute them before the Civil and Military Court at New South Wales."

The critical position of a ship in which a sergeant was in league with mutineers without doubt conduced to the approval accorded to the captain after inquiry in Sydney.

Hunter found the government of female convicts more disheartening than that of the men. He wrote in 1796—

"I must express my hope that the three hundred (expected) are all men, and not part men and part women, for of the latter we have already enough. We have scarcely any way of employing them, and they are generally found worse characters than the men;"—(in 1800) "they are far