Opinions have greatly differed, whether or not their language be copious.  In one particular it is notoriously defective.  They cannot count with precision more than four.  However as far as ten, by holding up the fingers, they can both comprehend others and explain themselves.  Beyond four every number is called great; and should it happen to be very large, great great, which is an Italian idiom also.  This occasions their computations of time and space to be very confused and incorrect.  Of the former they have no measure but the visible diurnal motion of the sun or the monthly revolution of the moon.

To conclude the history of a people for whom I cannot but feel some share of affection.  Let those who have been born in more favoured lands and who have profited by more enlightened systems, compassionate, but not despise their destitute and obscure situation.  Children of the same omniscient paternal care, let them recollect that by the fortuitous advantage of birth alone they possess superiority:  that untaught, unaccommodated man is the same in Pall Mall as in the wilderness of New South Wales.  And ultimately let them hope and trust that the progress of reason and the splendor of revelation will in their proper and allotted season be permitted to illumine and transfuse into these desert regions, knowledge, virtue and happiness.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Observations on the Convicts.

A short account of that class of men for whose disposal and advantage the colony was principally, if not totally, founded, seems necessary.

If it be recollected how large a body of these people are now congregated in the settlement of Port Jackson and at Norfolk Island, it will, I think, not only excite surprise but afford satisfaction, to learn, that in a period of four years few crimes of a deep dye or of a hardened nature have been perpetrated.  Murder and unnatural sins rank not hitherto in the catalogue of their enormities, and one suicide only has been committed.

To the honour of the female part of our community let it be recorded that only one woman has suffered capital punishment.  On her condemnation she pleaded pregnancy, and a jury of venerable matrons was impanneled on the spot, to examine and pronounce her state, which the forewoman, a grave personage between sixty and seventy years old, did, by this short address to the court; ‘Gentlemen! she is as much with child as I am.’  Sentence was accordingly passed, and she was executed.

Besides the instance of Irving, two other male convicts, William Bloodsworth, of Kingston upon Thames, and John Arscott, of Truro, in Cornwall, were both emancipated for their good conduct, in the years 1790 and 1791.  Several men whose terms of transportation had expired, and against whom no legal impediment existed to prevent their departure, have been permitted to enter in merchant ships wanting hands:  and as my Rose Hill journals testify, many others have had grants of land assigned to them, and are become settlers in the country.