To illustrate in a single story all the most prominent and pernicious features of the transportation system, Clarke had to invent a case of crime in which the criminal, unlike the majority of the worst offenders sent to the settlements, should always be worthy of the reader's sympathy. It was necessary that the felon be a victim as well as a felon; that he should not regain his liberty in any form, but continue by a series of offences against the authority of his gaolers to experience and display all the successive severities of Macquarie Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island. A fundamental fact to be exhibited was the impassable gulf of misunderstanding that might exist between capricious or incompetent prison officials and a criminal who, for any reason, had once come to be regarded as hopelessly vicious. 'We must treat brutes like brutes,' says the prime martinet of the story: 'keep 'em down, sir; make 'em _feel_ what they are. They're here to work, sir. If they won't work, flog 'em until they will. If they work--why, a taste of the cat now and then keeps 'em in mind of what they may expect if they get lazy.' The author chose to represent the extreme case of a man who, innocent of a murder charged against him, allowed himself to be transported under an assumed name in order to prevent the exposure of a long-concealed act of unfaithfulness on the part of a beloved mother. Richard Devine is the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms the wife is spared. Richard Devine goes on the instant. Crossing Hampstead Heath, he comes upon a robbed and murdered man, and presently is arrested for the crime. The explanation that would save him would also cause the dreaded exposure of his mother, and so he withholds it, gives a false name, and, having put himself beyond the means of defence and the recognition of friends, is convicted and sentenced to transportation for life. In making all the subsequent career of Rufus Dawes abnormally painful--that of a dumb sufferer who in sixteen years' confinement, ending only in a tragic death, experiences by turns every form of punishment and oppression--the author often touches, though it cannot be said he ever exceeds, the limits of possibility.