27 June 1802 9

N. S. Wales

Conduct and Escapes

So far as the account goes, Your Lordship has seen the instructions, such as they were received in " August 1792 . I will now present Your Lordship with the

execution and effect of them: prefacing it with the events of the preceding period of 9 Effect of the want of plan

1. Where there was no plan formed for preventing the return of non- -expirees, expirees were by right - real or pretended of not sending out the papers evidencing the length of their terms.

opposite instruction, or no - instruction, I am unable to say which.

In July 1789 when "little more than two years "had elapsed since the departure" of the first expedition "from Collins p. 74. "England, several Convicts," alledging that their terms were expired, "claimed to be restored to the privilege of freemen." Were the allegations true? This was what could not be ascertained:

to make sure, they were kept on in bondage. The papers (it is said) had been delivered to "the Masters "of the transports:" and these men, instead of bringing them to New South Wales, left them, or pretended to have left them, with their owners in England. (a) The story is (a) Note in p. 60 quoting the passage as curious as it is obscure: Papers sent from the Secretary of States Office, and, directed either to the Governor, or to the Judge Advocate — for to whom else could it they have been directed? Papers thus directed, delivered — not to the person in New South Wales to whom they were directed, but to a person in England, who had no business with them: and that

misdelivery not performed by one person

only, but by an unspecified number of persons, perhaps at the

same time, perhaps at different successive times. Be this as it may, the

affidavits of the claimants were taken and, by the candour and discernment of the Judge Advocate, the allegations were with the

highest appearance of reason regarded (it seems) regarded it appears as true: and indeed they

could scarcely have been otherwise, unless the intelligence of an omission

such as no human ingenuity could have imagined

had found its way to persons in the situation of the convicts:

a fact , neither probable

in itself, nor stated as such by Captain Collins.

In England, the presumption is always, if the so much , and too often even superstitously pursued law is to be believed, in favorum libertatus. Thus, at the antipodes, when justice is turned topsy-turvy,