One and all were compelled to lodge their applications for assigned servants with the assignment board, where practically the decision rested. This board was governed latterly by the clear and explicit rules laid down by Sir Richard Bourke, to which I have referred in the last chapter, but before these regulations were framed many malcontents among the settlers were ready to declare that assignment all depended upon favour and affection. "If you had no friend on the board," says one, "you might get a chimney-sweep when you wanted a cabinetmaker." In the same way complaints were made that the members of this board, and other officials in high place, were given as many assigned servants as they asked for. Thus the Chief Justice of the colony had forty, the Colonial Secretary fifty or sixty, the Brigade Major eight or ten. The principal landowners, too, were liberally supplied. One, a salt manufacturer, had sixty or seventy; another, with a farm of forty thousand acres, employed a couple of hundred servants. Laing declares that the assignment of useful hands depended often on petty services rendered to government, and that many of the settlers succeeded in getting on the weak side of the governor and his advisers. But to return to the ship, which meanwhile lay out in the stream. No one was allowed to communicate with her, except the Colonial Secretary or his assistant. One of these officials having gone on board to muster all hands, inspect them, and investigate any complaints, as soon as these preliminaries were concluded the disembarkation took place at the dockyard. Male convicts were at once marched to the Hyde Park barracks, where they paraded for the inspection of His Excellency the governor. Then the assignees, having been first informed of the numbers they were to receive, waited in person or sent for them, paying on receipt one pound per head for bedding and the convict clothes. Assignees failing to appear, or to remove the lots assigned to them, forfeited the grant. With the women the system was much the same. They were first mustered, then they landed, decked out in their finest feathers. There was no attempt to enforce a plain uniformity of attire; each woman wore silks and satins if she had them, with gay bonnets, bright ribbons, and showy parasols. Persons who had applied for female servants were present at the dockyard to receive them. After that all who remained on government charge--and their numbers were large, for female convicts were not in great demand--passed on next to the great central depot or factory at Parramatta. As the Hyde Park barracks and the Parramatta factory were to a certain extent depot prisons for males and females respectively, a word about both will not be out of place here.