by Peter Grose
None of this is recorded in either of Jimmy’s journals. By Jimmy’s account, his original escape attempt and its aftermath marked a turning point in his fortunes. He says he had been placed in charge of a 25-ton schooner, with two other crewmen. Jimmy can tell the story:
One of the hands being nearly free stole some pine plank to make himself a sea chest and took it on board without my knowledge. I was on shore at the time. He was taken to gaol for it, and me, having charge of the schooner, I was apprehended. The man only wanted ten days to do out of fourteen years. He was nearly broken-hearted and asked if there was any chance of his being saved. I said none, except for me to take it on myself. I consented to get convicted if he would promise to have the whaleboat ready when I got sent to a chain gang, for me to abscond with. He promised he would. I consented, acquitted him, and convicted myself by acknowledging to the planks. I got seven years transportation.6 I was not downcast at this for I depended on the whaleboat. I went to the chain gang and one of the most dreadful places I have ever seen. I preferred death to remaining there three years. And the ungrateful wretch whom I thus sacrificed myself for never came near me. I was determined to escape from this scene of wretchedness or perish in the attempt.
Here the official record and Jimmy’s version of events begin to converge. According to Jimmy’s conduct record, on 19 November 1828 he was tried for stealing 70 boards (planks) valued at £2, the property of the King. Sentence: seven years’ transportation. A bit over a year later, while labouring in irons on a government work gang in Hobart, he made a run for it. He managed to survive at large for a bit over a week, including three days in the bush without food, but was eventually caught, dragged back to Hobart Gaol and charged with ‘feloniously absconding from the Chain Gang when under sentence of the Supreme Court’. This was a serious charge, with dire penalties if he was convicted. His conduct record gives the date of his first court appearance as 7 January 1830. At this hearing, he was remanded in custody for a week. The full trial took place on 30 January. This time there was no acquittal. Sentence: death. It was his second appointment with the hangman.
The details that follow are probably fantasy—the commuting of a death sentence with only minutes to spare is more the stuff of fiction than fact. But Jimmy is a good storyteller, so here is his version:
The humane Captain Walsh again interceded for me and saved my life, though I was not acquainted with it until morning. I was pinioned [had my hands tied behind my back] and going out to be executed. I was then conveyed aboard the brig Prince Leopold for Macquarie Harbour.
At the very last minute, his death sentence was commuted to seven years’ ‘retransportation’. To Sarah Island.
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1 A whitesmith works with white metals such as tin or galvanised iron, or does finishing work on metals.
2 The branch of government tasked with administering ‘assignment’.
3 The word ‘cask’ can allude to a unit of volume rather than a physical barrel. There are various sizes of cask, ranging from 4.5 to 240 imperial gallons. A ‘cask of butter’ would very likely have been smaller than 240 gallons, which would have been beyond one man’s ability to carry.
4 A short-barrelled, muzzle-loading musket with a flared barrel for easy loading and quick (if inaccurate) firing.
5 Probably the bay at the mouth of the Browns River near the present town of Kingston, on the west bank of the Derwent Estuary. Convict brickmaking took place here in the early days of the settlement.
6 This was hardly a harsh outcome—he was already serving a sentence of transportation for life. However, the new sentence included three years on a chain gang, so it was definitely a step in the wrong direction.
Chapter 5
SARAH ISLAND
The all-pervading cruelty of the Sarah Island penal settlement is graphically illustrated by the fate of a convict named John Ollery. He had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in July 1819 aboard the convict ship Coromandel. His conduct record shows that, while he was no model prisoner, he was generally well behaved. On 22 January 1821 he was sentenced to 25 lashes for ‘neglect of duty and [being] absent from muster’. Four days later, he was again accused of ‘neglect of duty’ and was sentenced ‘to labour the same as the Gaol Gang for one week’. These were comparatively minor offences, and the sentence for the first offence was severe. On 19 January 1822 he was tried in Hobart for a much more serious crime, namely stealing cash from a Mr Thomas Stocker. He was sentenced ‘to work in Irons at Macquarie Harbour for three years’.
He was transported to Sarah Island. There, on 27 April 1822, he was sentenced to 25 lashes for ‘disobeying orders and refusing to work’. According to his conduct report, he received ten lashes only—‘the Assistant Surgeon being of the opinion he could not bear the remainder’. Anywhere else but Macquarie Harbour, the authorities might have taken this as a warning of his frailty.
Ollery had been in generally poor health, and about a month after the interrupted flogging, he took himself off to the hospital on Sarah Island to report that he was unwell. As a result, he was accused of malingering, brought before the superintendent, and sentenced to 50 lashes. He was tied to the triangle to receive his punishment. According to an eyewitness, he ‘pleaded very hard to be forgiven on the score of illness but it was all to no purpose’.
He was tied up and the punishment went on amidst the most heart-rending screams and cries for mercy, but his appeals were made to men that never forgave a lash. After 30 lashes he never spoke. When he received five more the Superintendent returned to submissively observe that he thought the man had fainted. The doctor then stepped off the gangway and found that he was quite dead. No one knew. The murmurs among the men say that he received five lashes after his death, but the affair ended without a question being asked.
Ollery’s ordeal had lasted two hours. The official report of his death said he died in hospital five days later, probably of heart failure. He was buried in an unmarked grave on Hallidays Island, an uninhabited tree-covered rock just under a mile south of Sarah Island. Afterwards the island was known among the convicts as Ollery’s ’Olidays.
The first superintendent of Sarah Island was a sadistic bully. Lieutenant John Cuthbertson of the 48th Northamptonshire Regiment had extraordinary powers: because the penal settlement was so far away from legal niceties like courts and lawyers, he was judge and jury, manager and magistrate, with the authority to dispatch summary justice. In this he was supported by the soldiers of the 48th Regiment, known as the Steelbacks. The name was not, as might be imagined, a tribute to their unflinching military heroism. It arose because they had been individually flogged so often that their backs were largely impervious to pain, and they didn’t react to the cat-o’-nine-tails. Having been regularly flogged themselves, they saw no reason to treat the convicts with anything other than the same contempt and viciousness.
A graphic description of the mood of the island under Cuthbertson comes from the pen of an anonymous clerk in the commissariat in Hobart. The clerk, known only by the initials G.K., made eleven visits to Macquarie Harbour and Sarah Island between 1822 and 1832.7 This is an extract from his account of his second voyage, in December 1823.
I promised myself I would never return to Macquarie Harbour and Sarah Island. The violence of the place had invaded my sleep; John Ollery did not rest peacefully in my dreams. What I find on arrival is a filthy outpost of lost souls, living in the kind of squalor one might expect among the most benighted of savages. I have never experienced such misery and anger and sullen hatred as I find among these outcasts … welling up from some dark region of their souls. The men themselves are scarcely capable of mutiny: many are desperately ill. From the Hobart Store we have sent down what we thought to be adequate clothing or cloth, foodstuffs, medicinals, enough to maintain good health. But the length of the voyages, the lack of proper storage in such conditions, outright theft by military and prisoner—not to mention the officers and civilians of all ranks—and the seve
rity of the climate have all conspired against them. Dysentery, rheumatics, malnutrition, scurvy, and all manner of infections of the lungs have reduced these men to pitiable wrecks. Those that are capable have taken to the woods in threes and fours to avoid the senseless violence of the military, only to be forced to return by cold and hunger, and have to endure the heavy penalties for absconding. Others have not returned and are presumed to have perished.
The superintendent had five punishments available to him, and Cuthbertson dispensed them daily and liberally: he could order a flogging; he could order the prisoner to work in irons; he could commit a convict to solitary confinement; he could deprive the convict of food, by ordering that he continue to work but on a diet of bread and water, or a diet without meat and therefore without protein; or he could order a demotion from any position of privilege. For major offences such as murder, a convict would be sent to Hobart for trial.
Flogging was Cuthbertson’s regular response to convict misdemeanours. ‘Disrespectful conduct’: 50 lashes. ‘Disobedience of orders and refusal to work’: 50 lashes. On 23 April 1823 he sentenced no fewer than 31 prisoners to 25 lashes each for ‘not assisting to apprehend 7 prisoners in the act of absconding’. In July of the same year, fifteen convicts received a total of 1700 lashes in the space of six days. The whole punishment process lasted more than seventeen hours.
The cruelty of the floggings is beyond belief. They were carried out with a particularly vicious version of the cat-o’nine-tails whip known as a thief’s cat. The Macquarie Harbour version was an enhanced design: heavier and larger than the ‘cats’ used in the army or navy. Each of the nine double strands of whipcord had at least seven knots tied in it, and the knots were reinforced with wax or even wire to inflict maximum pain and damage. An offending prisoner would have his back bared. Then he would be tied to a wooden tripod, known as a triangle, with his wrists bound to the apex. His legs would be splayed, and his ankles tied to the tripod’s legs. With the victim bound and powerless, the flogging could begin. By the third or fourth stroke the victim’s back would be a mass of blood. By the fiftieth stroke all skin would have been cut away, and the wounds would extend to his neck and arms. It was not uncommon for enough flesh to be peeled away during a flogging to expose the bone beneath. In the twelve years of the Sarah Island settlement, between 1822 and 1833, 1335 convicts received a total of 53,700 strokes of the lash, an average of 40 lashes per sentence.
Cuthbertson added a piece of preening sadism of his own. The triangles on Sarah Island were sited near the edge of the water, and Cuthbertson had a boardwalk constructed alongside, with the triangles near the halfway point and at a right angle to the boardwalk. Army officers wore tight white breeches tucked into polished boots, topped by a tailored crimson coat with plenty of gold and glitter on the collar and cuffs, and a plumed hat, all designed to impress. Cuthbertson turned up to the floggings in full regalia. The rules required that a flogging be witnessed by a doctor, to ensure that it was carried out lawfully; Cuthbertson devised a ritual walk, accompanied by the assistant surgeon Henry Crockett, to control the pace of the flogging.
The sound of his boots on the boards was the metronome. Cuthbertson and the doctor would walk together to one end of the boardwalk, pause, and turn. That was the signal to the flogger to strike. The perpendicular arrangement of boardwalk and triangle meant that from one end of the boardwalk Cuthbertson could see the prisoner’s back, and from the other end he could see his face. So the ghastly ritual continued … thud, thud, thud, thud of the polished boots on the boardwalk, pause, turn to watch, WHACK. Thud, thud, thud, thud, pause, turn, WHACK. At this pace it might take as long as an hour to deliver 50 lashes.
Crockett had the authority to halt a flogging if he thought the prisoner could take no more. According to the meticulous records kept on Sarah Island, in the course of 1268 floggings he witnessed, the surgeon intervened to halt only ten of them.
The daily routine on Sarah Island was inflexible. Here is an extract from regulations affecting convicts, issued on 6 July 1824.
At daylight every morning (Sundays excepted) a Boat proceeds to the Small Island to bring off the bad Characters who are kept there. The Bell then rings for Muster ½ an hour before Sunrise, when every Prisoner attends in the presence of the Superintendent.
They are then divided into Gangs and marched to the Pier, where they are rigidly searched to prevent Provisions, Knives, Fish Hooks etc etc from being taken away.
A quarter of an hour before Sunrise they are embarked in Boats and proceed to the Main [mainland], where they labour at the Farm, felling, rolling and brickmaking, and do not return until Sunset.
At one p.m. on Saturday, Prisoners are exempted from Labour in order that they may mend their Clothes.
At 8 p.m. every evening Prisoners are mustered in the Penitentiary in the presence of the Superintendent, who locks them up in their several Rooms, leaving 1 or 2 Constables in each.
On Sundays, the Church Service is read by the Assistant Colonial Surgeon, in the presence of the Commandant and all the prisoners.
There was a total ban on alcohol and tobacco for prisoners, although a steady black market in both was largely organised by the military. Food was always scarce, particularly as the farm was generally a failure. According to an 1827 report, the daily rations allocated to each convict were: 1 pound 4 ounces (570 grams) of wheatmeal; 1 pound (450 grams) of fresh meat or salt beef, or 10 ounces (280 grams) of salt pork; and 11½ ounces (325 grams) of salt. That was it. The rations were issued once a week in bulk, and it was up to the prisoner to preserve his allocation, prepare his own meals, and make the rations last the full week. Fresh vegetables were added when available, but that was not nearly often enough. Scurvy was a constant problem.
In 1824, the sadistic Lieutenant Cuthbertson came to a suitably sticky end. The schooner Governor Sorell was inside Macquarie Harbour when it broke loose from its mooring in a storm. It looked as though the ship would drift onto rocks and be lost forever. Cuthbertson led a rescue party, ordering a small boat out into the storm. The Governor Sorell obliged the rescuers by drifting onto a beach, where it could come to no further harm. The rescuers turned for home, into the teeth of the storm. Cuthbertson was a soldier, not a sailor, and he did not understand that facing into the wind and waves was the safest option for his tiny vessel. Instead he ordered his helmsman to turn around, away from the wind. The helmsman told him they risked being swamped if they began a turn that would put them side-on to the storm, but Cuthbertson would have none of it. The boat duly overturned. The helmsman grabbed an oar and used it as a float, allowing the wind to blow him to safety. Cuthbertson ordered the rest of the crew to stay with the upturned boat. They all drowned, including Cuthbertson. It was whispered afterwards that Cuthbertson might have been rescued, but nobody could be bothered.
It made little difference. The flogging triangles stayed busy.
Some convicts took an extraordinary path to death, which they saw as preferable to the tormented life of Sarah Island. On the night of 27 October 1827, a group of convicts on Small Island overpowered Constable George Rex. They captured three more prisoners—two convicts and a junior constable, Robert Grew—to act as witnesses to what followed. All four were bound and gagged and dragged down to the beach. The group then captured two more convicts and bound and gagged them, too. In the morning, they untied Rex, leaving his gag in place, led him down to the water and drowned him, making sure the bound and gagged others could see what was happening. The prisoners then summoned the soldiers and gave themselves up. In all, nine convicts were tried in Hobart for the murder of Constable Rex, and hanged. That was their escape plan successfully implemented. As a bonus, the witnesses had a nice trip to Hobart for their day in court, which meant a welcome break from Sarah Island.
It is fair to say that escape was uppermost in the minds of most of the convicts at Macquarie Harbour. Prisoners regularly absconded, either alone or in groups, but it seldom ended well. The most notorious
escapee was one Alexander Pearce, who absconded with seven others on 20 September 1822. They set off for Hobart Town by land, which would involve a 300-kilometre hike across high mountains and through dense, trackless forest. After eight days, three of the fleeing convicts had had enough and turned back to Macquarie Harbour, preferring punishment to starvation. It turned out to be a good call. The remaining five pushed on. After fifteen days their supplies ran out. However, Pearce astonished everyone by making it alone to the east coast of Van Diemen’s Land. He rested up briefly in the countryside with some bushrangers, before being captured and taken to Hobart, his intended destination. In Hobart he confessed he had survived in the bush by eating his fellow escapees. A legal loophole meant he could not be tried in Hobart for murder, so he was simply returned to Sarah Island. He escaped again on 16 November 1823 with another convict, Thomas Cox, but was captured again within ten days. This time there was no loophole to save him. On 19 July 1824 he was tried for murdering and cannibalising Thomas Cox, and hanged in Hobart.
Another important escapee was Matthew Brady. He had assumed leadership of a convict rebellion at Macquarie Harbour in June 1824. On 7 June he escaped with thirteen others. He fled by sea before melting into the bush, and set himself up as the leader of a ragtag guerrilla army. The authorities were profoundly perturbed—they thought Brady and his men might attract more followers, which could lead to a general uprising. Indeed, that was what the prisoners at Macquarie Harbour hoped. There were endless rumours that Brady would shortly be arriving with his army, who would put the soldiers to flight and free the prisoners. Superintendent Wright, Cuthbertson’s successor, even asked for extra soldiers to fight off an expected assault by Brady’s men. The assault never happened. Instead, Brady and his gang abandoned their guerrilla ambitions and settled down to the steady work of bushranging. At one point, Governor Arthur offered a reward for information leading to Brady’s capture. In response, Brady offered a reward of 20 gallons (230 litres) of rum to anybody who could deliver Governor Arthur to him. As so often with dreams of salvation, it all ended badly. After 22 months on the run—a long time in the life of a bushranger—Brady was captured, and on 4 May 1826 he was hanged in Hobart Gaol. Of the fourteen original escapees, twelve were hanged. When news of Brady’s fate reached Macquarie Harbour, there was despondency among the convicts. Clearly the guerrilla army would not be coming to their rescue. So, while escape from Macquarie Harbour remained every convict’s dream, the odds against success were dauntingly high.
