The Sun.
London, England, 1847-04-03 00:00:00

APRIL 3, 1847.

LORD DUNDONALD.
(From the Times.)
Lord Dundonald has reached a stage of fate which
few men live to gain. He has survived ill-usage, per-
secution, and neglect ; the tardy justice which death
usually insures, even to the most helpless victim of ca-
lumny, has not been conceded to the civil extinction
which has been his hapless lot. Had he sunk under his
sufli!rings, the due tribute would doubtless have been
paid to one of England's greatest sailors • bat obscurity
and degradation were•not powerful enough to turn the
tide of popularfeeling, or to attract the consideration
of the world, and the very self approval which has sup-
ported his strength and protracted his days has, at the
same time, damaged his fortune, and impeded his return
to fame. lie haq been forgotten, without being righted;
the generation which talked of his deeds and witnessed
his sufferings has passed away, and to the majority of
our readers it is probable that the following illu trations
of past times will tell a story elnaost as strange as it
necessarily must be striking.
We will not. presume that many people require to be
reminded that in 1801 Lord Cochrane, being then a com-
mander in the navy, and in charge of a little brig of 14
four-pounder guns with 54 men, encountered a Spanish
frigate of 319 men and 32 heavy guns, captured her, and
carried her off; but perhaps it may not be so well known
that an act of pure generosity on his part neutralised the
merits of the exploit, and laid the foundation of that ob-
loquy which he afterwards experienced. In correspond-
ence with the then First Lord of the Admiralty, be
earnestly pressed that his brave lieutenant might share
in the promotion which had been accorded to himself,
and when it was replied that two ofllccrs could not be
advanced for so trifling an affair, he pointed out the fact
that in this trifling affair more men had fallen than fell in
the flag-ship at a late famous action, of which, notwith-
standing, every officer had received a step. This odious
comparison placed him on the black list of the Admiralty
for life, and the consequences of the remark extended
even to the luckless subordinate whose cause he was
pleading. People in the present day will hardly be able
to credit the fate of this honest lieutenant His com-
mander's rank was delayed five years, and when it was
at l..ngth bestowed, he was appointed at once to the
Rainbow sloop, without, however, being exactly in-
formed atere his ahi was to be found. He was recom-
mended to lob "the West Indies, whither he
forthwith proceeded; but, after spending his time and
his money in a fruitless search, be turned to the Admi-
ral ty, who expressed their " surprise and regret" at the
little mistake, asd left him uncompensated for the past
and unemployed for the future to the end of his days!
At length after a change of Ministry, but even then
only by the influence of a powerful friend, were Lord
Cochrane's notorious abilities once more admitted to an
opportunity of exertion. In a small frigate he was sent
to the east coast of Spain, where with his crew of 350
men he gave employment to 10,000 of the enemy.
Uniting to the enterprise of a Peterborough the
skill of a Nelson, he alarmed the whole coast from
Carthagena to Barcelona; landed boats' crew to de-
fend castles and storm forts ; ;attacked divisions of the
French army on their march ; blew up their roads and
intercepted their convoys ; and on one occasion actually
compelled Duhesme to abandon the whole of his artil-
lery and field ammunition. The capture of the Scheldt
fleet by the French cavalry was hardly a more extra-
ordinary exploit. Yet, with all these proofs of power,
add with the undoubted reputation of being the most
daring officer now remaining to the nation, he never had
a *pennant, save his own, placed under his command.
He had not only affronted the Admiralty, but he had
alarmed the Government. He was a reformer, which,
in those days, meant a desperado. He dared to speak
in the House upon naval abuses, to denounce practices
which hare since been indignantly exploded, to demand
for the poor seaman -comforts which have since been
freely granted, and to express general truths which,
though they are now considered as axioms of nature,
were then held to be suggestions of the Devil. Fcenum
habuit in cornu. He was more feared by the English
Government than even by the French, and the Admi-
ralty gladly rejected his talents to discourage his princi-
ples. A time, however, came when they had no choice.
Things looked bad for England is 1809. The con-
vention of Cintra had demolished the credit of Vimiero;
Lefebre had crushed Castanos and obliterated the me-
mory of Baylen; Sir John Moore had fallen at Corunna;
Joseph was again in Madrid, Lannes in Saragossa, and
Soult in Oporto. A blow was necessary to revive the
hopes of the country, and it was resolved to strike a
bold one. In the Basque roads lay a French squadron
of ten sail-of-the-line and seven frigates, intended
for the West Indies, to relieve their own colonies and
threaten ours. These were to be destroyed; but as
they were protected by land fortifications of tremendous
strength, and by i.hoals and shallows of the utmost dan-
ger, it was not a service for every political favourite. " I
am sure," says this veteran hero, in a memorial of his ser-
vices just published, which has suggested these remarks,
" that hail any other officer been found who did not
despair of the success of the enterprise, I should not have
been appointed." He received, however, this compul.
sory ci mplitnent, betook himself to Rochefort, and in
the dead of a dark and tempestuous night, led the des-
perate attack, steering with his own hand the leading
fireship, charged to the brim with 1,500 barrels of pow-
der and 400 shells, through the coacentracted fire of a
thousand guns. Had he been duly supported, not a ship
of the enemy's could have escaped. As it was, five were
destroyed by his own almost unaided frigate, and the
projected expedition wholly demolished. His rewards

tor winning a victory and Complaining of hia Admiral
were the Order of the Bath and five years' exclusion
from employment; till at last, in 1814, he was nominated
flag captain by his uncle, and was proceeding to change
the character of the American war, when the event took
place which gave his enemies a final and effectual
triumph.

On the 21st of February, 1814, at the very moment
when Napoleon, after routing the allies at Montereau,
was foaming and fretting at Surville over his unproduc-
tive victory, a stranger dressed like a French officer ap-
peared at Dover, announcing that he bore news of the
death of the Emperor and the downfall of Paris, and
from Dover he proceeded to London in a post-chaise-
and four. The Stock-Exchange was in a fever ; Om-
nium rose from 27 to 33, and half-a-million of money
changed hands. In the afternoon the hoax was dis-
covered, and amongst its alleged contrivers was after-
wards prosecuted the hero of the Basque roads. Tne
prisoners were all found guilty, and Lord Cochrane was
condemned to pay a fine of I,OOOL, to be stripped of his
commission, deprived of his rank, and imprisoned for
twelve months in a common gaol. This, of course,
finally concluded his career in his own country's service,
and after amusing fur a while his active spirit in the
New World, where be founded one empire and two re-
publics, he has devoted his energies to procure the revi-
sion of his sentence and the restoration of his cha-
rac!er. That a convicted person should accuse the
judge and impugn the verdict is so common an oc-
currence as hardly of itself to excite attention. But
it is undeniably true that the whole tenor of Lord Dun-
donald's previous arid subsequent life has spoken for his
innocence. He has been incessant in his applications
for further inquiry. lie has constantly kept the case
before Government. And though some twenty years
after the sentence he received a free pardon, with the
restoration of his rank, yet he never acquiesced in this
instalment of justice, but demanded rather a fresh in-
vestigation than a silent condonation. He asked for a
revision, not a remission of his sentence, and is still
more anxious to reclaim his good name than to recover
his fair debts. It is clear, too, that at the moment of
the inquiry he was in the highest degree obnoxious to
the Government, and the authorities of 1814 were less
scrupulous than the authorities of 1847. Nor will our
readers be unlikely to remember that the deed which
was visited with this felon's doom, even if actually com-
mitted, might well seem less than capital in the eyes of
the present generation. how many hundred transac-
tions of last October twelvemonth, in Capel court, in-
volved twice the turpitude and entailed twentyfold the
raid that characterised the cheat in question? And what
has been the fate of these heroes ?

"The crucem sceleris pretium-tulit, hic diadems."
At this moment, after the lapse of three-and-thirty
years of disgrace, is Lord Dundonald still entreating an
opportunity of vindicating his honour. The chief wit-
nesses against him have since been convicted of crimes
utterly destructive of their testimony. Even at the time,
Mr. Ponsouby, Mr. Whitbread, Lord Wharnclitle, and
others, acknowledged their disbelief of his guilt ; and
their sentiments have been echoed and adopted by the
latest and most popular historian of these eventful days.
But Lord Dundonald's recompense need not yet be left
to the historian., Ile is still alive to hear the reversal of
his own sentence, aid the convictions of a repentant na-
tion. King William IV. began the work in restoring to
the navy its greatest ornament—a step which all ap-
pioved, but which was either clear injustice or most im-
perfect justice. No lapse of years can destroy the
expediency of the inquiry prayed for, since, as his Lord-
ship most truly asserted in the memorial he vainly ad-
dressed to the late Ministry—" Time cannot, indeed, add.
to the justice of the verdict, if just it was ; but it must
aggravate its injustice, if just it was not."

The railroad from Leipsic to Oderburg (Austria);
the point of junction railroad of Prussian Silesia, was to
be opened on the Ist of this month. The great bridge
over, the Danube, which was damaged by the breaking
up a the ice, has been completely repaired, and the
trains can again go over it.
LITERARY MEN.—Sir Walter Scott, in a htter
written in 1821, against the formation of the Literary
Society founded by George IV., for pensioning and con-
ferring other rewards on authors, thus describes the dif-
ferences and resemblances of the genus irritabile
" Leave us at a distance from each other, and we may ob-
serve decorum; but force into one body a sot of literary
men, differing so widely in politics, in taste, in temper,
and in manners, having no earthly thing in common ex-
cept their general irritability of temper and a black speck
on their middle finger—what can be expected but all
sorts of quarrels, tracasseries, lampoons, libel,and duels?'
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.—His fate furnishes a re-
markable instance of the instability of human greatness, and
there is no doubt that his dislike to medicine remotely caused
his early dissolution ; for rather than take some simple
remedy, he allowed disease to gain the ascendancy over his
constitution, and death was the result. Thus it is that per-
sons cannot be too watchful of their state of health, ar.d being
always provided with a safe and efficient medicine, such as
Frainpton's Pill of Health, enjoy the two greatest blessings of
this world, health and long life.

PRICE SD.

VAN DIEMEN'S LAND.

Copies of Correspondence between the Secretary of
State and Sir Eardley Wilmot, Bart, relative to the
Recall of the latter from the Government of Van
Diemen's Land.

COPY OF A DISPATCH FROM MR. SECRETARY GLADSTONE
TO LIEUTENANT-GOVERNOR SIR E. EARDLEY WILMUT,
DART.

Downing-street, 30th April, 1846.
Sir—it has beJome my p tinful duty to apprise you
that her Maje.ty is please,l to dispense with your futur,
ssrviaes in the administration of affairs in Van Diemen's
Land, and that you may expect the early arrival of a
successor to you in that charge.
In stating to you the reasons by which her Msj« sty's
Government have been induced to tender this advice to
her Majesty, I shall have occasion to point out that you
are not recalled from the office which you hold on account
of incompetency, either real or alleged, for the ordinary
duties attaching to the chief executive oflk.er, of the
dependencies of the Crown, but from a regard to the
special exigencies of that particular colony over which
you have been appointed, and have undertaken to
preside, and to the very defective manner in which,
according to the judgment of her Majesty's Govern-
ment, those exigencies have been met by you.
You assumed the government of Van Diemen's Land
at a period when a new system of convict discipline had
been adopted, and was in course of establishment. It was
a system brought into use for the purpose of affording a
solution to one of the most difficult of social problems ;
it was also to be tried under circumstances of the utmost
severity, not such as choice would have dictated, with a
nice adaptation to its immature and experimental state,
but such as were determined, by the exigencies of the
mother country and the previous and concurrent course
of events, so fur, at least, as to render inevitable the
influx of a very large number of convicts into Van
Diemen's Land during the period of your government,
and so far, likewise, as to render that necessity pefectly
clear and evident beforehand. This new system had been
adopted with a view not to economical, but to
'moral. purposes. Dissatisfaction with the moral
working of transportation as it stood when assign-
ment was in practice had led to a determination to
try an experiment founded on an opposite principl,• ;
that is to say, on a method of management in which
the«, transported•;_priione*ljnctead of being separated
one front another, and intersideiied—iiiiViirtfre,- free pa:,
pulation, should be separated from the-frde population.
at least during the earlier portion of their terms, and
associated together in probation parties. You had be-
fore you, without doubt, a very arduous task. It was
requisite to maintain in these probation parties that
severity of character which it was thought could not be
insured without a somewhat broad separation between
them and the general community, and yet to neutralise,
by discipline and by religious and humanising influences,
all those dangers which arise from the close juxtaposi-
tion and constant intercourse of criminals among them-
selves.
That you should not, in a short period, have attained
a complete success in the trial of such a system could
Not justly have been made matter of complaint against
you. Where other men and other methods have par-
tially or entirely failed, it would have been to deal out
a hard inequitable measure towards you to have alleged
such a state of facts as being necessarily a cause of
blame, or to have withheld support and sympathy from
your efforts.
But the case, as it has presented itself to her Majesty's
Government, has borne a very different aspect. The
question with them has been whether you have, upon
the whole, during the period of nearly three years
through which you have held your office, applied your
mind with due diligence and with earnest concern to the
Government and improvement of that portion of the
population tinder your charge which is perhaps, now,
the most numerous undoubtedly, and by far the most
dependent—l know not, also, whether the one exercis-

ing the most decisive influence upon the condition and
destinies of the colony. Of all the objects that could
challenge the attention even of a superficial observer.
and much more of the person honoured with the confi-
dence of her Majesty and the management of her affairs
in Van Diemen's Land, by far the most prominent as
well as the most momentous was the care of the un-
happy perpetrators and victims of crime ; and the very
first among the tasks belonging to your position was that
of impressing deeply a moral and reformatory character
upon the whole scheme of their management, or if this
could not be effected, then of demonstrating, by the assi-
duity and anxiety as well as the prudence of your efforts
to accomplish it, that the absence of successful results
must be ascribable to the inherent defects of the system,
and not to the apathy and neglect of those to whose
charge it had been committed.
To the inquiry whether you have duly, according to
the measure which may and must in justice be exacted
from public servants, given your time and mind to the
presiti.) exigencies of convict discipline, her Majesty's
Government are compelled, after a careful and anxious
consideration, to reply, without doubt, hi the negative;
and, further, they have concluded, that it would be vain
and futile to anticipate that during the term which, ac-
cording to ordinary usage, would still run before the ex
piration of your government, this defect would be repaired.
I conceive that if the facts of the case, as they have lain
beneath your immediate and daily view, could not of
themselves attract your attention, aid I would even say
compel your interest, no written instructions from hence
could posFibly produce a result involving so great and
fundamental a change. To such instructions recourse
may justly be had for repairing omissions or for correct-
ing faults of detail. They might elicit mere information
if there were no other lack to be supplied, as indeed they
have already been employed for that purpose; but the Go-
vernment consider that you have altogether failed in u
principal portion of your public duty—namely, the active
care of the moral interests involved in the system of con-
vict discipline, and that verbal suggestions, however ela-
borate, can never be adequate to supply so great a defi-
ciency. They have no hope remaining of being enabled,
through your instrumentality, to bring the character and
results of transportation to a fair issue, of being enabled
either to achieve success or even to ascertain failure.
The imrnense interests involved in that method of punish-
ment for this country, for the colony, and for the indi-
viduals, absolutely forbid her Majesty's Government to
allow them to be gratuitously compromised.
I do not now advert particularly to the occasions on
which it has been the duty of my predecessor or my own
to express dissatisfaction with the mode in which, as to
this or that particular, you have transacted the public
business, although those occasions have been numerous,
to such a degree as even, when taken apart from greater
matters, materially to impair the confidence and satisfac-
tion with which I should otherwise have hoped tocarry on
our official intercourse. With these it might have been pos-
sible to deal in a manner less decisive. Nor do I now declare
it as the conviction of her Majesty's Government that you
have tailed in the discharge of duty under ordinary or
easy circumstances. You have been placed, I freely
avow, in circumstances of difficulty. So far as that dif-
ficulty has been economical and financial, you have given
it your attention, and have endeavoured to meet it, if not
always in such a manner as to command the concur.
rence of her Majesty's Government, yet by no means so
as, upon these grounds alone, to have necessitated the
cessation of your tenure of office. But so far as the dif-
ficulty which you had to meet was a moral one, and this
I must add was its chief characteristic, it has not only
not been overcome, but it does not appear from the in
formation with which yoa have supplied me, that any
adequate or sustained effort has been made to contend
against it. Indeed I might even proceed one step fur-
ther, and observe that your statements, taken strictly as
they stand, do not show so much as a consciousness of its
existence, far less of its grave and formidable character.
You have under your charge and responsibility many
thousand convicts formed into probation parties, or liv-
ing together at government depots. It is only with ex-
treme rarity that you advert in your despatches to the
morel condition of these men. You have discussed the
economical questions connected with their maintenance
or their coercion, and you have even entered into argu-
ment, though in a manner too little penetrating, upon
their offences against the laws. But into the inner world
of their mental, mural, and spiritual state, either you
have not made it a part of your duty to examine, or else,
which for the present issue is, I apprehend, conclusive,
you have not placed her Majesty's Government in pos-
session of the results; and I need scarcely point out to you
that this is the region in which reformatory efforts are to
operate, and that it is a region very distinct from that
of offences actually brought under the cognizance
of the law. Indeed, it would appear from almost every
account of the colony which reaches me, except your
own, that there is supposed to prevail in these probation
parties a state of things the most formidable, perhaps,
of all ; in which the very absence of the external notes
of crime is but the sign of the extensive and undisputed
reign of some of its very worst and most revolting ex-
cesses, and of the all-powerful combination by which it
is sheltered from the light. This is not, it is true,
systematically stated to me in official reports, because
those by whom it ought either to be stated or denied,
are altogether silent on the matter. I am not able to
judge to what precise extent the horrible impres-
sions which prevail upon these subjects correspondto
with the fact, or how far they may be referable
apprehension, magnified through obscurity. But from
indirect,
though, evidence before me, fragmentary and
though, I regret to add, too concordant as it
is, I can entertain no doubt of so much as
this, that the ideas to which I refer have a foundation,
and that of no inconsiderable breadth, in the real state of
things ; and here I must broadly and once for all dis-
tinguish as between the rumours and the extent of actual
facts corresponding with them ; so between the inac-
tivity which I have to impute to you, and any supposi-
tion that you are indifferent to the horrors of which I
now speak. In the first place I cannot doubt that
you
disbelieve much of what is alleged with respect to them,
perhaps the whole of it. In the second place, without
attempting to account for your silence and inaction by
jany reference to inward motives, of which I am not the
udge, I can have no hesitation in declaring the strongest
persuasion, that they are not owing to apathy or to any
approach to apathy on your part, with respect to the
atrocities themselves that are stated to prevail. I might,
perhaps, say that the rumours themselves which exist,
even if they can be proved to be wholly at variance with
fact, yet from their effect both here and in the colony,
had such a claim on your attention, that your entire
disregard, in practice, of that claim, has
amounted to an error of judgment so serious as to
render it altogether inexpedient that you should