Twice during this month it became necessary to assemble the court of
criminal judicature: at one of which, a man named Mobbs was capitally
convicted of robbing the public stores, upon the evidence of an
accomplice, who was admitted on the part of the crown. They had stolen at
different times an incredible quantity of clothing, provisions, and
various other articles, and ought to have been much sooner detected.
Mobbs suffered death, and exhibited himself at the gallows as a wicked
and hardened offender.
For offenders not deserving of capital punishment, Norfolk Island had
been for some time a place of banishment; and the convicts in general
felt this second transportation more severely than the first:
notwithstanding which, they continued to commit offences that they knew
must end in that punishment. Four prisoners, one of them a soldier, were
at this time sentenced to seven years exile to that island, for different
offences; and when viewed in this light, as a place of confinement for
some of her worst members, Norfolk Island might be considered as an
useful appendage to the principal settlement.
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