So far I have made but little reference to the female convicts. Indeed, during the first years after the reopening of the Penitentiary, except in isolated cases, they appear to have conducted themselves quietly enough. But the contagion from the male pentagons could not but spread, sooner or later. The news of the removal of the worst men to the hulks no doubt acted as a direct incitement to misconduct. Had not this power of removal been accompanied, in the case of the males, with authority to inflict corporal punishment, we should have seen a great and continuous increase of the riotous disturbances described already. A certain number, it is true, had gained their ends; but if those who remained were ambitious to tread the same path, it was possible that sound flogging would be tried before removal to the hulks. With the women it was different—they could not be flogged, so they had it much their own way. It was the same then as now: the means of coercion to be employed against females are limited in the extreme, and a really bad woman can never be tamed, though she may in time wear herself out by her violence. We shall see more than one instance of the seemingly indomitable obstinacy and perversity of the female character, when all barriers are down and only vileness and depravity remains. Long before the women broke out into open defiance of authority there were more than rumours that all was not right in the women’s pentagon. “Irregularities are on the increase there,” observes the governor in his journal. The object of the agitation was no secret. The women wanted to get away from the Penitentiary as the men had done. One having abused a matron in the most insolent terms, swore, if not sent at once to the hulks, or abroad, she would have some one’s life. Another sent for the governor, saying she had something particular to confide to him. “Well?” asked Captain Chapman. “You must send me to the hulks or to New South Wales,” she answered. Other women made the same request, pleading that they had not a friend on earth, and when released they must return to their old vicious courses. “I told them,” says the governor, “they could only be sent to the hulks when they were incorrigible, and to qualify for that they must pass months in the dark. Then I exhorted them to return to their work and better thoughts.” But they both at once flatly refused either to work or to think better of it, demanding to be sent immediately to the dark, a wish which was gratified without further delay.