PENAL GRAVE YARDS. NORFOLK ISLAND AND PORT ARTHUR. A Scrap from the Log of Blue Peter. [From the Southern Cross.] NORFOLK ISLAND.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VII, 23 October 1850, Page 4

PENAL GRAVE YARDS. NORFOLK ISLAND AND PORT ARTHUR. A Scrap from the Log of Blue Peter. [From the Southern Cross.] NORFOLK ISLAND.

It was a gloomy evening on the which I wended ray lonely way to visit the dreary spot where " the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest." The grave-yard at Kingstown is at the eastern confines of that terrible settlement, jammed, as it were, into a desolate, despairing, quadrangle, lashed by the foaming billows of an angry sea, — its restless fury a fitting type of the turbulent lives of multitudes there, for ever low and still enough. It contains, perhaps, .about a , quarter of an acre, thickly studded with mounds bearing a plenteous crop of headstones. No heedful gate barred my entrance, the dilapidated fences permitting the cattle to roam at will its neglected precincts. I experienced a cold shudder as I trod the unhallowed waste. An open grave yawned for its convict prey — another victim of the dysentery, which execrable food entails upon that intractable but wretched raoe. The very trees within the half ruinous enclosure had pined and died ; and nature wore the dismal aspect of the wildest funereal gloom. Ah ! how unlike that placid, soothing, resting-place, the Isle dcs Morts of Port Arthur ! At this Kingstown Golgotha, bond and free are thickly strown. There, many of the soldiery " Sleep the sleep that knows no waiting." There repose the ashes of the first wife and child of the present Ear) of Limerick, who, whilst the Hon. Mr. Perry, resided ten years as superintendent of the agriculture of the island. There, also, the Hon. Captain Best and Mr. Maclaine (both drowned in attempting to cross the perilous bar of the boat harbour) slumber side by side.

Fit this rude bourne where lawless felons sleep, Where prayers are few. — few fhej who pause to weep; Here, by the surges of the sounding sea, That bore them, far from home and liberty, Here, in one horrent graVe-yard, quite forgot, The guards and guarded, all neglected, rot, 'Neath this last verge of Norfolk's dreadful isltf,— What horrors crowd the mnsing soul the while ;<*>^ Here, crime mature ; here, infancy and youth, And woman, in her fond, unspotted truth, With Cain's worst kind one common couch partake, 'Till the last trump to Judgment calls to wake.