from Boulogne, railway police, taverners and hotel keepers. All corroborated Agar's story that the four men knew each other, and were present together at various stages of the planning and execution of the crime. It took the jury ten minutes to decide on the guilt of the three men, Pierce of larceny, Burgess and Tester of larceny as a servant. The judge, Sir Samuel Martin, showed what the journalist Fergus Linnane calls "a grudging admiration" for Agar during his summing up: The man Agar is a man who is as bad, I dare say, as bad can be, but that he is a man of most extraordinary ability no person who heard him examined can for a moment deny. ... Something has been said of the romance connected with that man's character, but let those who fancy that there is anything great in it consider his fate. It is obvious ... that he is a man of extraordinary talent; that he gave to this and, perhaps, to many other robberies, an amount of care and perseverance one-tenth of which devoted to honest pursuits must have raised him to a respectable station in life, and considering the commercial activity of this country during the last twenty years, would probably have enabled him to realise a large fortune. Burgess and Tester were both sentenced to penal transportation for 14 years. Pierce, as he was not a member of SER staff, was given the lighter sentence of two years' hard labour in England, three months of which would be in solitary confinement. Later Tester and Burgess were transported on board the Edwin Fox convict ship on 26 August 1858; the destination was the Swan River Colony in Western Australia. Burgess was given a ticket of leave in December 1859 and a conditional pardon in March 1862. Tester received his ticket of leave in July 1859 and a conditional pardon in October 1861. He left Australia in 1863. Agar remained in England for a little longer; he is known to have been held in Portland Prison in February 1857, before being transported to Australia on 23 September 1857. He was given his ticket of leave in September 1860, and a conditional pardon in September 1867. He left Australia to travel to Colombo, in modern-day Sri Lanka in 1869. An account of the trial was published in 1857, with illustrations by Percy Cruikshank, the eldest