Northern Times. — 1857-07-27 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

CREW FOR THE FLYING DUTCHMAN. Garratt, the great gold-robber, was for some years the leader of the convict ton in Bermuda 4 His associates regarded him with admiration ; he was the master-spirit of their yellow-coated confederacy. Ultimately, Mr. Kirwan, condemned (justly or not) for the murder of his wife in Ireland's Eye, arrived in the colony. Garratt at once resigned the lead, and said, courteusly, he could not think of refusing precedence to Mr. Kirwan. Upon the same principle, the banks of the. Swan, in Western Australia, may be expected to become the scene of a social flutter; for an aristocracy is to be planted in. the soil. On the 25th of August a good ship will sail from England, bearing to The Swan Sir John Dean Paul, Mr. Strahan, Mr. Bates, Mr. Leopold Redpath, Mr. Robson, Mr. Saward, Mr. Agar—three celebrated embezzlers, three celebrated forgers, and the inimitable, vengeful Agar. With the exception of Agar and Seward, between whom an antipathy may naturally be supposed to rankle, many mutual feelings will harmonise this aristocracy of detested crime. Common reminiscences and a common fate unite them. What strange contrasts in their lives Paul looking back through the gratings of Milibank to that happier time when he sat with Baron Alderson on the bench of justice ; Strahan to his " elegantly planted park and residence in perfect taste ;" Bates to the hour of gratified ambition, in which he became the partner in a firm with a baronet at his head. Through Redpath's dreams may flit the auction at which ho bid successfully against the French Emperor for a wondrous work in buhl ; through Robson's the triumph of his dramatic productions— Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and tie dream ? Neither Agar nor Saward can have sympathies with men or with regrets like these. The latter was for twenty years a miserable Jonathan Wild, a master forger, a burglars' agent, whose nightmare was Newgate; to the former penal . discipline has been the routine of years; he knows what it is to labour in the hulks he must have calculated, half a life ago, upon no euthanasia better than a ticket-of-leave. But, in some respects, Redpath and Robson stand upon a level with him ; they garbled every day, and hazarded liberty for luxury ; they could scarcely have looked for perpetual winnings. Depend upon it, many a time and oft did a prophetic shadow of penitentiaries and the Australian settlements obscure the glitter of Chester-terrace, and the gaiety of Kilburn Priory. We do not believe that the three bankers ever imagined such a possibility; breaking the old bank in the Strand, and losing their commercial reputation—that was, no doubt, the climax of fear in the minds of Paul, Strahan, and Bates. With four hundred inferior criminals they go—these social bankrupts—to Western Australia. Well, there is something upon which to congratulate even this criminal crew. It is a change—from the monotony of that hideous desert of brick and whitewash at Millbank, from the wards of Newgate, from the motionless hulk in the. Thames. They cross the ocean; they have a new life before them ; there will be freshness i❑ the sight of the Australian shores ; there is the prospect of ticketsof-leave. But how the population will crowd to gape at the convict baronet, and revive the story of Redpath's " glory"—upon which ballad-singers have so unctuously expatiated ! How will the old "leading men" of the Swan River Settlement resign their precedence in favour of five gentlemen so accomplished, and, up to a certain point, so flattered by society ? Agar and "Saward will not be similarly respected ; they have only their distorted talents to recommend them : they have never been gentlemen, or sat. on the bench, or inherited estates, or outbid Louis Napoleon, or achieved a dramatic success. But let the captain of the vessel " chartered at Lloyd's look well to his navigation: There is a story that the Flying Dutchman has for ages been wandering in search of a crew. And would not the seven great convicts prefer the perfidious barque, built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark, to the grey soup, canary-coloured •jackets, and dull severity of a penal colony ? Never, perhaps, was a more remarkable band of criminals embarked together, or one in which mutual recognitions were more likely to take place. The five " respectable" individuals moved pretty much in the same " sphere,'' except that their sympathies were different. Robson, although a poet, had not the delicate tastes of Redpath, and as for Sir John Dean Paul, his " seriousness" kept him apart from turfment and philosophical virtuosi.—Leader.