by Peter Grose
By all accounts, the men now settled down to something akin to normal life. Jimmy found work and lodgings with a local merchant, Don Lopez. Lopez treated him like family, and Jimmy rewarded him in his usual way, by taking another job.
Jimmy’s narrative in his Norfolk Island journal continues with a series of highly improbable episodes in which he is the dashing hero. He leaves Lopez to act as bodyguard for a widow in danger; then he saves an Indian slave girl from her cruel mistress, namely the widow in question; he almost kills the widow after she attacks him with a knife; he singlehandedly defeats four armed soldiers who had come to kill him; he fights off a drunken Indian who had been paid by the soldiers to kill him; he pleads successfully for the Indian would-be assassin to be spared from being shot, after meeting the assassin’s wife and young child and taking pity on them; and finally, his four soldier assailants confess that they were behind the whole plot to kill Jimmy and he pleads successfully for them to be freed also. Gratitude all round and warm words of praise for Jimmy the Hero.
After his adventures, whatever they may have been, Jimmy returned to Valdivia to work again with Don Lopez. Real trouble stayed away for almost a year. Then it arrived by sea. On 10 February 1835 the Blonde, a British frigate under the command of Commodore Mason, arrived at the Valdivia harbour entrance, undoubtedly in the wake of the Araucano revelations. In Jimmy’s swashbuckling Norfolk Island account, the Blonde sent a small boat into the harbour. As it passed the outer fort guarding Valdivia, the fort gave it a shot across its bows from a 32-pounder, and the sailors beat a hasty retreat.
The Blonde moved out to sea and out of harm’s way. However, after waiting four days at sea, she returned by night to Valdivia harbour with a letter for the governor. The governor responded to this by ordering the arrest of all ten convicts. They were duly locked up in the guardhouse. This, the governor explained, was for their own protection against any attempt by the British to nab them. The governor then asked them to translate Commodore Mason’s letter to him. The letter said that Mason had heard that there were several Englishmen in Valdivia who had ‘come to the coast in a clandestine manner’. Would the mysterious Englishmen like to come aboard the Blonde and explain themselves? Did the convicts want to do as Mason said? the governor asked. The response was loud, clear and predictable: ‘No!’ The governor then said he would ask Commodore Mason if he would like to come ashore, alone, and interview the men. Mason wasn’t having any of this. He gave orders for the Blonde to sail for Valparaiso and the British naval base there. As soon as he was sure the danger had passed, the governor released all ten convicts. Normal life resumed.
To be entirely safe, the convicts still needed a favourable response to Governor Sanchez’s petition to the supreme governor in Santiago, which had asked that the men be allowed to stay in Chile as free men. The response was a long time coming. Indians had captured the courier on his way back from Santiago, so it was said, and there was no way of knowing the supreme governor’s verdict.
During this waiting period, the governorship of Valdivia Province changed hands. The kindly and sympathetic Sanchez returned to Santiago, where he promised he would look into the convicts’ case and send word back to his successor. Before leaving, he explained the convicts’ story to the new governor,16 who agreed to continue the present freewheeling arrangements.
Soon after Sanchez left, the new governor struck. The convicts must all report daily at 6 p.m. to the Officer of the Guard. To the convicts it felt like Macquarie Harbour revisited. They discussed the new situation, and agreed that they would take the first opportunity to escape. That opportunity came when a large American brig, the Ocean, arrived at Valdivia under the command of Captain West. The brig was found to be carrying contraband and impounded. The convicts offered to help the captain recapture his ship by force and to sail it away with him. The captain agreed.
For two days the convicts waited. In that time West managed to raise £2000—a huge sum—in bond money and hand it over to the authorities. He was free to sail away. This he did, but not before three of the convicts—John Dady, John Fair and John Jones—managed to swim to the ship and board it. Three down, seven to go.
Three other convicts—John Barker, James Leslie and Benjamin Russen—had been working on an elaborate and temptingly seaworthy whaleboat intended for the governor’s use. They finished it on a Saturday, and sailed off in it that night. Three more down, four to go.
Both the kindly Sanchez and his successor had warned that if any of the convicts escaped, those left behind could expect to suffer. This proved to be all too true. On the Sunday morning after the escape of Barker, Leslie and Russen in the governor’s whaleboat, all four of the remaining convicts—Jimmy Porter, William Cheshire, Charles Lyon and William Shiers—were arrested and taken to prison, where they were chained together in pairs, Shiers with Jimmy, Lyon with Cheshire. Although they were now all prisoners together, Jimmy’s feud with Cheshire continued. In his Norfolk Island journal he takes to referring to him as the Traitor Cheshire.
In Jimmy’s account, they remained in chains for seven months. Then Jimmy saw a chance to escape, and took it. He slipped his chains, and was on the run for the better part of a week before he was captured and brought before the governor. The governor asked him why he had escaped. Jimmy claims to have responded: ‘Two reasons I had for so doing: first, the cruel treatment and oppression of a Tyrant like yourself; secondly, with the hope of obtaining my liberty.’
If we are to believe Jimmy, the governor’s response was brief and to the point: ‘Take him to the Blacksmith’s shop and see that a pair of Bar Irons is welded on his legs, and tomorrow I will order him to be shot in the Public square.’
So … death sentence number four, and counting.
Towards the morning a priest called Padre Rosa came to Jimmy’s cell. He had not come to administer last rites, as Jimmy must have first thought, but rather to bring good news. Apparently a delegation of priests and ‘females of distinction’ had gone to the governor to plead for Jimmy’s life. After a long argument, the governor relented. Jimmy was to be spared.
At about seven in the morning the governor appeared at Jimmy’s cell and told the prisoner that he had his numerous friends to thank for the fact that he had avoided the fate he richly deserved for absconding. Jimmy responded:
I informed him that I had thanked them in the strongest manner my grateful feeling would allow me, but not for him. I would not thank him for prolonging a life like mine, a life of misery, and in particular he, the Governor being the chief cause of it by his Oppression. He cast a fierce glance at me and then left me to myself.
In Jimmy’s words, ‘days, weeks, and months rolled on’. The fate of the convicts was finally settled by a new intervention by Commodore Mason and the Blonde. The four remaining convicts were told they would be taken that afternoon to the schooner Basilisk, which was then anchored in Valdivia harbour. The Basilisk was, in turn, the tender for the Blonde. The convicts boarded the Basilisk, which set sail for the British naval base in Valparaiso. When they reached Valparaiso they were informed that the Blonde had sailed on to Callao, the port of the Peruvian capital, Lima. The Basilisk finally caught up with the Blonde at Callao, and the four convicts were transferred to the frigate. They were promptly sent below decks and shackled.
While the Blonde was still riding at anchor in Callao harbour, Jimmy decided to seize his chance and escape. It was night, and everybody was supposed to be asleep. He slipped his chains and crept up onto the deck. He was caught by a marine before he could jump from the ship. How was the marine alerted? Cheshire and Lyon had rattled their chains to tell the guards that something was up. Of course.
After several more days at anchor in Callao, the Blonde sailed back to the British naval base at Valparaiso. The four prisoners were transferred to a warship, the 28-gun North Star, bound for England. In England they were transferred to the prison hulk Leviathan before being finally transferred to the Sarah, which had been chartered to tra
nsport convicts to Van Diemen’s Land. There the four would be tried for piratically seizing the brig Frederick, a crime that carried a mandatory death sentence.
The Sarah arrived in Hobart on 29 March 1837, more than three years since the convicts had waved an unfond farewell to Macquarie Harbour. Their trial was scheduled to begin a month later, on 26 April, in Hobart Town.
At this point Jimmy and his three fellow prisoners might have reasonably concluded that they had a few weeks to wait for their trial, perhaps a day or two more to wait for a guilty verdict and the inevitable death sentence, then at best a few months before their appointment with the hangman. They were dead men.
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10 This means that they rigged the whale boat with a single mast which carried a mainsail and a foresail.
11 If there is a River Beuon in Chile, then neither Google Earth nor The Times Atlas of the World has heard of it. However, a little to the south of Valdivia there is a Rio Bueno (‘Good River’), which Wikipedia says is a promising place to fish. The river even gives its name to the town of Rio Bueno at the heart of Ranco Province in the southern Chilean region of Los Rios (‘The Rivers’). Everything Jimmy tells us is consistent with the idea that their first landfall was near the mouth of the Rio Bueno. Captain Barker had just failed to hit his mark.
12 Jimmy gives the governor’s name as Sanchez in the Norfolk Island journal, and as Don Fernando Martelle in the Hobart journal. I have used ‘Sanchez’ in this narrative, largely because Fernando Martel (or Martell) is the correct name of Jimmy’s father-in-law and this feels like a slip of the pen on Jimmy’s part. Both names may have been inventions as there is no trace of either of these names in the records.
13 That is, the governor agreed to take the convicts’ word for it that they would not run away.
14 The Spanish name for the Mapuche Indigenous people of Chile, who occupied a large area of central Chile.
15 In Spanish culture, the civility doña is the feminine equivalent of don, an acknowledgement of distinction made famous by Cervantes’ noble fool and hero Don Quixote.
16 Jimmy gives the new governor’s name as Thomson, but that is about as reliable as his previous efforts.
Chapter 10
TRIAL
The trial of the four captured Frederick conspirators promised to be sensational, and it did not disappoint. William Cheshire, Charles Lyon, James Porter and William Shiers were charged with ‘feloniously carrying away on the 13th of January 1834 the brig Frederick, Charles Taw master and belonging to Our Sovereign Lord the King, of an estimated value of £1200, from the high seas, to wit Macquarie Harbour on the Coast of Van Diemen’s Land’.
The Hobart Town Courier reported that there were three counts in the indictment. The first charged the four with piracy, and the second with breaking their trust as sworn mariners, or mutiny. The third charge was the same as the second except that it did not state that Charles Taw, the master, had been confirmed in his position by the King. The convicts’ conduct records are less wordy: all four were charged with ‘piratically and feloniously seizing the brig Frederick from Macquarie Harbour 13th January 1834’. For the four men charged, all this play with words didn’t matter much: all the charges carried a mandatory death sentence.
The trial began in the Supreme Court of the colony of Van Diemen’s Land at 10 a.m. on Wednesday 26 April 1837. It was all over by seven that night. To put it mildly, the odds were stacked against the prisoners. They had no legal representation and conducted their own cross-examination of witnesses despite their lack of any legal training or professional advice. On the other side, no less weighty a personage than the solicitor general of the colony conducted the case for the prosecution. The judge was His Honour the Chief Justice, John Pedder, while the jury was entirely military. It speaks well for the four convicts that they appear to have been undaunted by all the flapping silk, quaint wigs and other legal trappings. The Hobart Town Courier went so far as to say that Jimmy Porter’s cross-examination of witnesses was ‘conducted with considerable acuteness’.
As is usual, witnesses for the prosecution were called first. David Hoy, master shipbuilder, was the first witness. He told the court he knew all of the prisoners well. William Shiers and William Cheshire had worked for him in the shipyard on Sarah Island, while Charles Lyon and James Porter were on the crew of the Macquarie Harbour pilot ship. So he was able to identify all four prisoners with complete confidence, and to give an accurate account of the role each had played in the seizure of the Frederick.
Hoy proceeded to deliver a dry, understated account of the events of the evening of 13 January 1834. There was little dispute as to the facts. Hoy’s testimony is the backbone of Chapter 7 of this book, and the chapter reflects his matter-of-fact manner as he recalled what had happened.
Hoy was undoubtedly the Crown’s star witness, and he was asked to go beyond the simple narrative of the seizure of the Frederick. He set before the court the precise nature of the ship’s legal status, without which the charges would not stick. He explained that orders had been received to build the ship at Macquarie Harbour, with Hoy supervising its construction for the government. It was therefore the property of the King. Before the ship was stolen, Major Bailey,1 the commandant of the Macquarie Harbour settlement, had ordered Captain Taw to take charge of the ship. Hoy had personally witnessed Bailey giving this instruction. Hoy had always understood that Taw was a North Briton and a subject of the King. So Taw was the lawful master of the Frederick, and disobeying his orders was mutiny. Finally, Hoy confirmed that the prisoners at the bar were all prisoners of the Crown at Macquarie Harbour before they absconded in the Frederick.
It looked like an open-and-shut case: the four men had been part of a gang that had organised a mutiny against the lawful command of Captain Taw and illegally seized the King’s ship. Off to the gallows with them, then.
The convicts had a simple objective: to escape hanging. There was no point arguing that they hadn’t taken the ship and sailed it to Chile. Everyone knew they had, and everyone also knew that the penalty for piracy and mutiny was death by hanging. So instead the convicts set out to prove that they had behaved decently, humanely and, above all, non-violently, and that they were therefore worthy of the court’s mercy.
William Shiers was the first to cross-examine a witness. He began by asking Hoy if he recalled that in the early stages of the takeover of the Frederick he (Shiers) had given Hoy a pocket compass and apologised for the fact that he was not able to give more. Shiers had also wrapped a bottle of whisky in a shirt and handed it to Hoy, urging him to keep it out of sight. Did Hoy agree that the convicts had given the shore party about 181 pounds of meat and 61 pounds of flour? They had also told the shore party that plenty of potatoes and cabbages could be found at the pilot’s house. Finally, the shore party also received an iron pot, two or three tin pannikins, and an axe. Hoy agreed that all this was so.
Hoy had given evidence that during the takeover of the ship Shiers pointed a pistol at Hoy’s head and threatened: ‘We have got the vessel, and if you don’t give yourself up, I will blow your brains out.’ Shiers set out to argue that it wasn’t a working pistol but a dummy made with a bar of iron. Hoy was indignant. The weapon presented by Shiers had every appearance of a pistol. Hoy did not think it was merely a bar of iron. He had reason to know that there were arms on board, and in any case prisoners were not allowed to carry arms. Furthermore, another of the convicts, John Barker, was ‘a very ingenious man’ and used to repair arms for the civilians and the military on the settlement: he might have made some kind of rough pistol out of old iron.
Charles Lyon then briefly cross-examined Hoy but, in the judgement of the Hobart Town Courier, ‘elicited nothing of consequence’. He was followed by Jimmy Porter, who went to great lengths to establish the quantity of provisions on board the ship when it was seized, and the generosity of the convicts in willingly and voluntarily handing over half of them. He also drew out from Hoy the fact that w
hen the convicts were leaving the men ashore, Hoy had said to him that the humanity and kindness the shore party had received from the prisoners was so great and unexpected that he could not forget it.
William Cheshire now took the floor. He spent his time seeking Hoy’s agreement that he (Cheshire) had been a good and useful member of the shipbuilding team. Hoy was happy to concur. Hoy also agreed that he had told Cheshire that he would put in a good word for him when they reached Hobart, provided Cheshire continued his good behaviour.
One of the military jurors now had a question. Had Captain Taw directed the soldiers to go fishing? No, said Hoy, he had not. Taw had given them permission to leave the ship for an hour, but with strict instructions that they were to keep the ship in sight at all times. Finally, in response to a juror’s question, it was established that the potato-gathering expedition of the previous day had not delayed the ship to the point of preventing them from leaving Macquarie Harbour. No, the wind had done that. The wind was ‘not fair to carry [the Frederick] across the bar’.
At this point the convicts might have just about persuaded themselves that the trial wasn’t going too badly. The prosecution’s star witness had been far from hostile, and everybody seemed to agree that the convicts had behaved with restraint and humanity.
The next witness for the prosecution was James Tait, the acting mate of the Frederick. He added some details to Hoy’s account of the seizure of the ship, but generally supported Hoy’s version of events. He was first cross-examined by Charles Lyon. Tait was happy to confirm that Captain Taw was a habitual drunk and that his drunkenness led to incompetence. He had, for instance, cut the ship’s lower rigging so badly that it was ruined. On the other hand, in Tait’s opinion, Taw had been ‘in a state of sobriety’ on the day the ship was seized. (If so, it must have been a first.)
