In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare Page A

and Travers suffered. The folder had belonged to Kemp’s obituarist, James Erskine Calder, and inside was a letter written to Calder by a man suffering from vertigo – possibly brought on by his memory of the event. In horrified tones the letter described a flogging by the government executioner, Mark Jeffries, ‘one of the most horrible and inhuman monsters in the shape of man’.
    The lashes fell every 30 seconds, watched by other prisoners who formed a circle. No word was spoken except ‘ NOW ’ and not a word was spoken by the victim until his release – all blood and raw opened flesh, from his neck to his loins.
    â€˜Jeffries threw off his coat, bared his herculean arm and with evident and demoniacal pleasure in his horrible countenance gave the first lash with all his strength, cutting into the flesh and so placed that the wound was one straight and continued line till it ended round by the wretched sufferer’s ribs where the knots of the newly made cat made a deeper and more sanguinary end of that line.
    â€˜Can you imagine what must have been the state of that poor wretch’s back after receiving 50 such lashes from such a monster, can you imagine, can you picture to your mind the awful scene? Those 25 minutes appeared to me like so many hours.’
    Knopwood sentenced Greenhill and Travers to a lashing three times longer. But the clergyman was not done. He ordered the men to be shipped to Sarah Island, a place of secondary punishment that had opened three months before on Tasmania’s remote west coast.

XVI
    BEHIND KNOPWOOD’S SENTENCE ROSE THE SPECTRE OF THE FRENCH revolution. The Tasmanian historian Peter Chapman told me: ‘Knopwood represented a society where crime and social order were a burning concern. “Look what happened in France,” went the thinking of his political masters in London. “They stormed the Bastille and killed everyone. Who’s next?”’ It would not be Knopwood.
    It is hard to resist the conclusion that Van Diemen’s Land – occupied specifically to prevent French occupation – had stumbled into becoming a penal colony, and that it drifted for several years in the wake of New South Wales without a clear strategy and with its government left chiefly in the hands of a rabble of cashiered officers. Until Kemp’s reappearance in Hobart, the occasional boat of convicts had sailed from Sydney, but not until 1818 did regular shipments from England begin. By 1833, an average of 1,700 male and 300 female convicts were sent each year to Van Diemen’s Land and Sorell’s stern successor, Lieutenant Governor Arthur, wrote: ‘The whole territory is [now] one large penitentiary.’
    Nonetheless, as Arthur complained, the colony’s distance from England meant that it was difficult to obtain ‘accurate statements of facts’ about Van Diemen’s Land. Horror in a small place touches everyone and it also travels. Trollope became aware on his 1872 visit that ‘no tidings that are told through the world exaggerate themselves with so much ease as the tidings of horror. Those who are most shocked by them, women who grow pale at the hearing and almost shriek as the stories are told to them, delight to have the stories so told that they may be justified in shrieking.’ Writing to his sister, the exiled Irish MP William Smith O’Brien must have shocked a reader or two with his description of Port Arthur: ‘as near a realisation of a Hell upon earth as can be found in any part of the British dominions except Norfolk Island’. But Lloyd Robson cautions against accepting every description as gospel. ‘The artist who painted the society of Van Diemen’s Land employed a palette well-equipped with blood-red to execute scenes of brutishness, bawdiness and hair-raising and grisly death.’
    The misapprehension survives that those sent as convicts to Hobart were all locked up from