midnight
The history of this desperate struggle for liberty was to her full of vague horror . She had never before realized among what manner of men she had lived . The sullen creatures who worked in the chain-gangs , or pulled in the boats -- their faces brutalized into a uniform blankness -- must be very different men from John Rex and his companions . Her imagination pictured the voyage in the leaky brig , the South American slavery , the midnight escape , the desperate rowing , the long , slow agony of starvation , and the heart-sickness that must have followed upon recapture and imprisonment . Surely the punishment of `` penal servitude '' must have been made very terrible for men to dare such hideous perils to escape from it . Surely John Rex , the convict , who , alone , and prostrated by sickness , quelled a mutiny and navigated a vessel through a storm-ravaged ocean , must possess qualities which could be put to better use than stone-quarrying . Was the opinion of Maurice Frere the correct one after all , and were these convict monsters gifted with unnatural powers of endurance , only to be subdued and tamed by unnatural and inhuman punishments of lash and chain ?