Dying

A few years ago, psychological scientist Kurt Gray came across the final statements of 500 Texas inmates executed between 1982 and 2013. (The state’s Department of Criminal Justice posts them online.) As he read these inmates’ surprisingly sanguine last words, Gray wondered if their positivity was a fluke or part of a broader psychological trend.So he conducted a study at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, which compared the words of death row inmates and terminally ill patients to those simply imagining they were close to death. This research —published this summer in Psychological Science — suggests that while it’s natural to fear death in the abstract, the closer one actually gets to it, the more positive he or she becomes.In the first phase of the study,George III (ship)

George III was a British penal transportation convict ship that was shipwrecked with heavy loss of life during her last voyage when she was transporting convicts from England to the Australian Colonies. She was wrecked in the southern end of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, Van Diemen's Land, with the loss of 134 of the 294 people on board.

Career
Captain Alexander Scott acquired a letter of marque on 4 August 1810. George III entered Lloyd's Register (LR) in 1810 with Scott, master, Sir S. Clark, owner, and trade London–Jamaica.

Loss
George III sailed from Woolwich on 14 December 1834 for Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land, under the command of Captain William Hall-Moxey with a total of 308 persons on board. There were 220 male convicts, plus guards, their families, and crew.