The only discipline enforced on board was just so much as was necessary to insure a moderate amount of repression. For this purpose the people were all for a time in irons; for the same reason, only certain fixed proportions of the whole number were allowed upon deck at one time. As a final bulwark behind all, should an ultimate appeal to the strong arm be at any time needed, stood the military guard. Every ship carried a detachment of soldiers: recruits sometimes, going out as drafts to join their regiments in Australia; at others, part of a battalion, which embarked in instalments on ship after ship, ending, according to one writer, with the commanding officer and the band. The guard, or the portion of it actually on duty, always carried loaded firearms; from it came sentries forever on the watch, some at the doors of the prisons, others upon the poop. As a general rule, ships with poops were preferred for convict ships, because the soldiers stationed thereon were sufficiently elevated above the deck to be able to control the movements of the convicts at exercise below, though altogether separated from them. The dread of some outbreak among the "people," or convicts, seems to have been an ever present sensation with those in authority on board these ships. Nor was the alarm confined to those connected with the ship itself. Whenever a strange sail, in those days of profound peace, appeared above the horizon, she was set down always as a convict ship seized by its felon passengers, who were supposed to have turned pirates and to have hoisted the black flag to range the high seas in search of plunder. I suppose there was not one among the hundred ships that left the Nore or the Mother Bank, through the long years that transportation lasted, in which rumours of conspiracy did not prevail at some time or other during the passage. Yet nine times out of ten these fears were absolutely groundless. Outbreaks did occur, of course; but few of them were serious in nature, and nearly all were forestalled by the timely perfidy of one of the conspirators. Colonel Breton, in his evidence before the parliamentary committee of 1837, said that he had heard of one ship with female convicts which had been captured by the crew and carried into Rio. But I can find no corroboration of this statement elsewhere. The same authority talks vaguely of another plot in his own ship, which came to nothing, because another and a more desperate character turned informer. Convict ships with females on board were as a rule more easily managed than those with males. But the following extract from a letter from the matron on board the convict ship _Elizabeth and Henry_, in 1848, relates a curious incident:--