Thanks to the fact that nowadays more and more books are digitized we are able to read books that are some times for decades no longer available for the public for several reasons. That's quite a pity while these books contains useful information while the archives are destroyed, incomplete or nor accessible.
P. 289:”At the dock-yard we found most of the people busily preparing to heave down the Favourite in order to her thorough refit. A launch for the Lady Franklin, a lighter, and an exquisitely proportioned eighteen ton gun-boat, calculated to carry a long thirty-two pounder, were in a very forward state, and the timbers of a hundred-ton cutter in process of conversion. We visited the Favourite, a very so-so cruiser of 430 tons and eighteen carronades, but with a crew of jolly lads that my quondam acquaintances, Monarch and Vernon, would have leaped skyhigh at.”
“Here at some future, perchance not very distant day, when penitentiaries [this was a penal colony] and penal settlements shall have ceased to exist - here, in one of the most beautiful bays, with a shore of the purest sand, and waters of pellucid hue—here the Tasmanian steamers will flock with their joyous freightage of watering-place visitors, whilst the present settlements, an easy distance off, will eventually resolve itself into one of tile finest and most important naval arsenals—a Plymouth of the south, the security and amplitude of the haven, the facility of equipment, and the superabundance of choice building materials, all conducing to the certainty of such result. On our return we boarded the Lady Franklin, fitting, with the utmost despatch, as a troop and store ship. The brig Tamar shortly afterwards came to anchor, and in the course of the evening the beautiful Eliza, so that Port Arthur boasted a larger fleet than I have sometimes, not many years back, seen in Hobart Town.”
P. 291: “The carrying gang is deemed the most severe. This body, sometimes sixty or seventy in number, transport, on their shoulders, immense spars the masts and yards of a 300-ton ship for example from the forests to the dockyards. The inequality of pressure will at once be obvious, some men during the different stages of transit sometimes sustaining a couple of hundred-weights, sometimes less than forty pounds. The dock-yard gang is scarcely less laborious than the carrying, the men being frequently immersed to the neck in water whilst securing naval timber to the launches for the purpose of transport to the arsenal.”
Source
Fraser’s Magazine for town and country. Vol. XXVI. July-December 1842. London.
