In 1852, Charles Dickens’s magazine ‘Household Words’ recorded the experienced of a man transported to Australia. The unhappy convict recalled how everyone aboard ship was given a tin pot for his rations, and how on just the second day his own had been claimed by another prisoner, who could even point to his scratched marks of ownership.

The mystery of the pot turned out to be a common trick: one prisoner would exchange his marked pot for another’s, and then claim the marked one back and end up with two. Happily, a fearsome fellow prisoner for whom our man had once done a favour undertook to get him a pot, so he need not forgo his rations.

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