But early next morning there was trouble in the house.  The watch was missing, and nobody knew anything about it.  Jemima helped her mother to look for it, and could not find it.  A constable was sent for, and he questioned everyone in and about the house, and searched everywhere without result.  Last of all Jack was asked if he knew anything of the missing watch.  He was faithful and true.  How could he betray Jemima, his future partner in life?  He said he “had never seen no watch, and didn’t know nothing whatsomever about no watch,” and the next instant the constable pulled the watch out of Jack’s pocket.

At his trial he was asked what he had to say in his defence, and then he told the truth, and said Jemima gave him the watch to keep until she should ask for it.  But there is a time for all things; and Jack could never learn the proper time for telling the truth, or for telling a lie; he was always in the wrong.  The judge, in passing sentence, said he had aggravated his crime by endeavouring to implicate an innocent young lady in his villany, and gave him seven years.

He was taken on board a hulk, where he found two or three hundred other boys imprisoned.  On the evening of his arrival a report was circulated among them that they were all to be sent to another ship, which was bound for Botany Bay, and that they would never see England again.  They would have to work and sleep in chains; they would be yoked together, and whipped like bullocks; and if they escaped into the bush the blacks would kill and eat them.  As this dismal tale went round, some of the boys, who were quite young and small, began to cry, and to call for their mothers to come and help them; and then the others began to scream and should and yell.  The warders came below and tried to silence them, but the more they tried the louder grew the uproar, and it continued for many hours during the night.

“Britons rarely swerve
 From law, however stern, which tends their strength to serve.”

Discipline must be maintained; so next morning the poor little beggars were brought up on deck in batches, stripped, triced up, and severely flogged.  Jack, and a number of other boys, said they had not cried at all, but the officer in charge thought it was better that a few of the innocent should suffer rather than that one of the guilty should escape, so they were all flogged alike, and soon after they were shipped for New South Wales.

On his arrival n Sydney, Jack was assigned as a servant to a squatter, and taken into the bush a long way to the west.  The weather had been very hot for a long time, all the grass had withered to dust, and the cattle were starving.  The first work which he was ordered to do was to climb trees and cut off the branches, in order that the cattle might keep themselves alive by eating the leaves and twigs.  Jack had never been used to handle an axe or tomahawk, so he found the labour of chopping very hard.  He did his best, but that was not good enough for the squatter, who took him to a magistrate, and had him flogged by the official scourger.