"Armed robbery, murder, lies, treachery, "confession", and a legal tangle that ended in a sensational trial followed by three executions : these are some of the chief ingredients in this grim account of a callous crime committed on the New Zealand goldfields in 1866. This is also an unusual study of the mental make-up of the four lying, brutal Londoners who were responsible for the crime ... Frank Clune traces the lives of the four criminals and shows what influences played an important part in shaping their twisted lives: there were the crowded Thames-side slums created by the Industrial Revolution ... the laws designed to punish rather than to reform ; the rotten prison hulks ; the transportation system ; and the mental cruelty of life in the prisons of the day."--Inside front cover.

As America's finest writer, Mark Twain could make entertaining reading -- and great literature -- out of almost anything. Twain was practically bankrupt in 1894 due to investing heavily into ill-advised schemes. So, in 1895 at age 60, he undertook a two-year round-the-world lecture tour, in which he circumnavigated the globe via steamship, including stops at the Hawaiian Islands, Australia, Fiji Islands, New Zealand, India, South Africa and elsewhere. He describes a rich range of experiences -- visiting a leper colony in Hawaii, shark fishing in Australia, tiger hunting, diamond mining in South Africa, and riding the rails in India. The personalities of the ship's crew and passengers, the poetry of Australian place-names and the success of women's suffrage in New Zealand, among other topics, are the focus of his wry humor and redoubtable powers of observation. An evocative and highly unique American portrait of nineteenth-century travel and custom, this book has a serious thread running through it, recording Twain's observations of the mistreatments and miseries of mankind.