Ten Rogues

by Peter Grose

  Despite the reference to English judges, there is no record of a formal appeal to the House of Lords in London. Jimmy’s journal was sent to the colonial secretary together with a plea for clemency. It appears to have made it as far as the desk of Baron Glenelg, British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies from 1835 to 1839. It is certainly mentioned in the colonial secretary’s correspondence archive, currently held in Hobart.

  As it turned out, the convicts need not have bothered with London. Their fate was ultimately settled in Hobart, not as the result of merciful leanings on the part of the authorities, but because the authorities simply did not know what to do. Their ultimate treatment is quite a saga, and something of a legal mystery.

  Begin by saying that on 26 April 1837 the four men were found guilty of ‘piratically and feloniously seizing the brig Frederick from Macquarie Harbour [on] 13th January 1834’, a charge that carried a mandatory death sentence. But Chief Justice Pedder did not don his black cap and deliver the inevitable sentence on the day of the hearing. Instead the court adjourned for two days. The adjournment was not to give Pedder time to ponder the appropriate sentence for the four men. According to the Hobart Town Courier, the court adjourned until the next case came before it: ‘The trial of the murderers at Norfolk Plains is, we understand, to come on today [Friday 28 April, two days after the trial of the Frederick convicts].’ In all the various writings, from G.K.’s diaries to Jimmy’s journal, it is repeatedly stated that the men had been sentenced to hang, and that they were simply waiting in Hobart Gaol for their appointment with the hangman. Yet there is no reference to a death sentence in any of the four convicts’ conduct records, nor can I find any mention of such a sentence in contemporary Tasmanian newspapers.

  What we do know is that Chief Justice Pedder had doubts about the legality of the whole process. On 27 May 1839, more than two years after the trial and guilty verdict, he wrote a formal letter to Governor Franklin saying he had received contradictory legal advice on the question of whether Macquarie Harbour formed part of the ‘high seas’, so stealing a ship there might or might not be an act of piracy. The implication was clear: the conviction of the four men was unsound. Hanging them would therefore be unjust.

  The governor now knew exactly what to do: the Executive Council met the next day and decided that the men should not hang. This piece of good news was kept back from the condemned men for another seven weeks. On 15 July 1839, two years and three months after their trial and conviction, the governor ruled that the four men should be transported to the Norfolk Island penal settlement. According to Jimmy: ‘We never received any sentence from the court.’ Even then, the men weren’t told the full details of the governor’s sentence.

  So the PR campaign devised by G.K. and Hoy had succeeded brilliantly, if not completely. William Elliston had the circulation boost he needed to start paying off his debts. Sir John was a popular hero for righting an injustice. And the four men had been spared from hanging. Even Jimmy was grateful to the governor. He wrote later: ‘Had not the Colony been under the Government of the humane Sir John Franklin I would not have been alive. Woe to us had the blood thirsty Arthur have ruled.’ So Jimmy’s fifth—and, the reader will be relieved to hear, final—death sentence had gone the way of the previous four.

  Still, the four men remained prisoners. They might or might not have committed an act of piracy, but there was no dispute over the fact that they had stolen a pile of wood belonging to the King. The fact that the wood had been arranged in the form of the brig Frederick was neither here nor there. Stealing wood was a serious offence and merited serious punishment. Norfolk Island had a reputation for brutality almost as ferocious as the late and unlamented Sarah Island. So the governor’s act of mercy, while welcome, had a sting.

  It was only when the men reached Norfolk Island that they learned the details of their new sentence. It was another case of ‘abandon hope, all ye who enter here’. The governor had ordered their transportation to the notorious penal settlement for life.

  _____________

  4 It is a measure of her ‘difficulty’ that her most prominent biography is titled This Errant Lady.

  Chapter 12

  NORFOLK ISLAND

  Norfolk Island is a strange and haunted place. It is 1412 kilometres due east from the Australian coast, a volcanic rock jutting out of the Pacific Ocean. It is only 34.6 square kilometres in area, with a population in 2016 of 1748. In Jimmy Porter’s day the population would have been pretty much the same, made up of 1200 convicts plus soldiers, other supervisors and a smattering of free men and women. Robert Hughes’s superb 1986 book The Fatal Shore described the harsh conditions for convicts exiled to the island.

  Norfolk Island has rich red soil, so it is good farming land. Its biggest problem—given that most of its supplies have to come by sea—has always been the lack of any proper port or harbour. Today there is a wharf of sorts called Kingston Jetty at Slaughter Bay on the southern coast, and another called Cascade Pier at Cascade Bay on the northeast side of the island. Neither wharf can accept cargo ships, and goods still have to be loaded into whaleboats and ferried ashore to the two jetties.

  Today, the island is an external territory of the Commonwealth of Australia, and is run by an administrator appointed from Canberra. It had a brief period of independence, from 1979 to 2006, during which time it was a tax haven: residents paid no income tax. One of those residents was the international bestselling author Colleen McCullough (of The Thorn Birds fame), who moved there in the late 1970s and lived there until her death in 2015. This bold tax-free policy eventually and inevitably unravelled, and the island went bust. On 6 November 2010, Chief Minister David Buffett announced that the island would end its tax haven status in return for a bailout from the Australian government.

  Visitors can prod around the convict ruins and explore the surviving history. However, tourism has never really caught on there, despite the much-improved airport and five flights a week from Auckland, Sydney and Brisbane. The island has some nice beaches, and the subtropical climate makes it a good place to spend a few lazy days. I doubt that anything quite so agreeable was enjoyed by Jimmy Porter and his fellow convicts.

  Jimmy learned from day one that Norfolk Island deserved its reputation for harsh and mindless brutality. As he tells it:

  One Major Bumbry [Thomas Bunbury] was Commandant when I landed, and I saw a specimen of his cruelty the moment I landed. A man was being dragged before him, with irons on, he could scarce crawl in, and before he could reach the office he [Bunbury] ordered him 50 lashes without even enquiring into the cause.

  Bunbury lasted less than a year in the job, to be temporarily replaced by Thomas Ryan (whose name Jimmy spells as Rian), an altogether more sympathetic character. As Jimmy tells it:

  He proved himself to be as much the father to the poor exiles as Bumbry did the Brute. Things went on very well at this time, and whenever Major Rian would converse with the prisoners he would inform them that one Captain Maconochie would soon make his appearance among us and that he was a better and kinder Commandant than himself.

  Ryan forecast correctly. Alexander Maconochie was a prison reformer whose ideas have survived to this day. He first came into contact with the prison world in Hobart, where he had been assigned as Sir John Franklin’s private secretary. Previously he had served with distinction in the Royal Navy, joining in 1803 as a midshipman, after which he moved up through the ranks until he was promoted to commander in 1815. His ship HMS Calliope fought in the British–American War of 1812–15, which ran alongside the Napoleonic Wars. He accompanied Sir John to Hobart, arriving in January 1837. One of his first actions was to write a damning report on prison discipline. The report found its way into the hands of Lord Russell, the British Home Secretary at the time, and is credited with marking the beginning of the end of the transportation system. He argued that, as cruelty debases both the victim and society, punishment should not be vindictive but should aim at the reform of the co
nvict. This piece of pure common sense attracted huge criticism from the hangers and floggers who then dominated penal policy in Britain and elsewhere in the empire, to the point where Sir John felt compelled to fire his reform-minded secretary.

  Maconochie languished in Hobart until the British Colonial Secretary Lord Normanby stepped in. Normanby had decided that reports of conditions on Norfolk Island were so disturbing that something must be done. What was needed was a new commandant more concerned with the moral welfare of the convicts than with either hanging them or stripping the flesh off their backs with a cat-o’-nine-tails. He chose Maconochie. The change on Norfolk Island was immediate. Let Jimmy tell it:

  When he at last arrived, as proof of his Humanity the Gallows that used to stare us in the face was by his orders cut down and burned, a sure sign of a good feeling. His whole study has been to make us prisoners comfortable, and by Kind and Humane treatment to work a reformation in us. It had the desired effect on many refractory Characters that could not be ruled by harsh and cruel treatment. I speak for myself and five more young men that would rush upon the points of Bayonets to obtain our liberty previous to Captain Maconochie’s arrival on the island. The Captain has placed dependence on us and we have proved to him and to all the officers on the island that our Commandant’s Humanity has brought us to a sense of our duty never to lose the only thing an exile doth possess, his word.

  Thus you will find, my gentle reader, after all my trials and troubles I am safe moored at Norfolk Island, under a Commandant that alleviates the sufferings of the wretched Exile, and I now live in hopes by my good conduct of once more being a member of good Society.

  Jimmy’s Norfolk Island journal ends with these ingratiating words. He signs off with the word ‘Concluded’, then adds a scrawled signature: ‘Js Porter’. Being Jimmy, there is quite a flourish to the final ‘r’ in Porter.

  Jimmy was true to the final words of his journal … and, later, true to his character. He had ended his Norfolk Island journal by saying he lived in hope that through good conduct he could be redeemed and rejoin society as a free man. In the vastly improved atmosphere of Norfolk Island under the command of Alexander Maconochie, Jimmy and his fellow convicts began the process of redeeming themselves.

  In May of 1841, after less than two years on the island, Jimmy risked his life to take part in the rescue of some army officers whose boat had overturned in bad weather. For this act of bravery, his sentence was reduced from ‘life’ to fourteen years. Then in October 1842 the brig Lunar, standing off Norfolk Island in similarly foul seas, sent a distress signal saying it was desperately short of water. Jimmy volunteered to lead a rescue, and he and seven other convicts ferried 70 gallons (318 litres) of water through horrendous waves to relieve the ship. For this his sentence was reduced to seven years. Then, in October 1843, he was sent to Sydney with a recommendation that his sentence be ‘remitted’.

  However, a year later, for unexplained reasons, he was transferred to Newcastle, north of Sydney. In general, Newcastle functioned as a penal settlement for hardened criminals, so this transfer will have been punishment for some minor misdemeanour.

  In Newcastle, Jimmy seems to have gone off the rails again. He was still under sentence, and therefore needed to watch his step. Instead he briefly disappeared, and on his return was sentenced to seven days’ gaol for ‘absenting’. Four months later, in February 1845, he received another seven days in gaol for ‘disobedience’. Two months later he spent two weeks in gaol for ‘assault’. That same month he reported an illicit still, an action that seems to have done him some good in the eyes of the authorities, because in June he was transferred back to Sydney. He worked for a while as a wardsman at the Hyde Park Barracks. Seven months later, on 22 January 1846, Jimmy achieved that highest of all goals for a convict still under sentence. He was granted a ticket of leave.

  But true to form, Jimmy soon went off the rails yet again. On 11 February he was convicted of stealing, and gaoled for two months. His ticket of leave was cancelled. As part of his punishment he was sent back to Newcastle. Then he absconded, this time for good. He was last heard from sailing to New Zealand on the Sir John Byng, a 168-ton brig. We simply don’t know whether he went as passenger or crew, or even stowed away. What happened next? He will have been in his mid-forties at the time, so he had plenty of life ahead of him. There is one final, laconic entry in his convict record book: in December 1853 he was officially struck off the records.

  Chapter 13

  WHATEVER HAPPENED TO …

  Research for this chapter did not come easily. Quite simply, a large number of the characters in this book had a strong and direct interest in disappearing from sight, and they have proved all too successful in doing so. Nevertheless, my excellent Chilean researcher Madeleine Blumer managed to track down some remarkable traces they left behind.

  Whatever the difficulty of pinning down the final fate of my characters, the very happiest thing that can be said of them is that they all exited from this narrative as free men. As best as I can find out, this is what happened.

  JIMMY PORTER

  Did Jimmy Porter return to Chile, find Narcissa and their now adult son, and live happily ever after? Did he stay in New Zealand? Or did he return to England, or go somewhere completely new, like Greece or China? Whatever he did, he seems to have made pretty sure to leave no trace. Bear in mind that he was an absconding convict and liable to arrest if he was caught and identified. Having been grabbed once in Chile and hauled back as a prisoner to Van Diemen’s Land, he would certainly have been anxious to avoid making that mistake again. So he is bound to have covered his tracks as best he could. If that is what he did, then his efforts have well and truly succeeded.

  On my behalf, Madeleine Blumer pursued the name Porter through Chilean census data, genealogical texts and even Facebook. (For example, she wrote to everybody in Chile on Facebook whose surname or middle name was Porter.) There turned out to be several tribes of Porters in Chile. Madeleine found that a George (or Jorge) Porter had been married to a Mariana Wilkinson, with whom he had a son, Guillermo Porter Wilkinson. Guillermo married Catalina de los Santos in Valdivia in 1863. Was George the long-abandoned son of Jimmy’s marriage to Narcissa? Was Jimmy there, on the groom’s side of the aisle, to see his grandson married? Sadly not, as it turned out. George Porter arrived in Chile in 1807 from Strabane in Northern Ireland, and was entirely unconnected with Jimmy.

  While researching, Madeleine spoke to one of George Porter’s grandsons, who knew of another Porter family living in or near Concepción in central-southern Chile, between Valparaiso and Valdivia. That sounded promising, but at the time of writing this family was proving elusive.

  If Jimmy did return, what might he have found in Chile? Would Narcissa have waited for him? Or did she find some way to remarry and build a second life? Despite Madeleine’s diligent search through old records, no authoritative answers are forthcoming.

  The story of the Frederick and its convict crew is comparatively well known in Chile, particularly in the area around Valdivia, where it has become part of local folk history and legend. The story is usually referred to as Los evadidos de Tasmania (‘The escapees from Tasmania’). In Madeleine’s words: ‘Basically it’s the same adventure that Jimmy describes in his journal about his second arrival in Chile in 1834, after the voyage of the Frederick.’ Madeleine tells me there are many versions of the story (she has read at least ten), including some that go on to remind us that Jimmy Porter had a wife and son waiting for him in Chile, and that he might well have rejoined them there. And there are those who see this as a real possibility.

  The Chilean novelist and historian Fernando Lizama-Murphy—a Chilean-Irish name if ever I heard one—published a brief but well-researched account under the title James Porter, el bandido enamorado (‘James Porter: the bandit in love’). It is readily available. Anyone with a smattering of Spanish can read it at fernandolizamamurphy.com/2016/07/23/james-porter-el-bandido-enamorado. Señor Liz
ama-Murphy begins his story with a slightly nervous assertion: ‘Many Valdivians still think this story is a legend, but I assure you that most of it is true.’ He concludes his account with the suggestion that Jimmy may have made it back to Chile and died in Valparaiso or Valdivia, having been reunited with his Chilean family. So that happy ending has at least one thoughtful and erudite supporter in Chile.

  Much as I would like to end this story on a high note and endorse Lizama-Murphy’s conclusion, I can’t. It seems to me that Jimmy’s stated imperative throughout his life was to live as a free man. If he returned to Chile and Narcissa, his chances of being caught would have been intolerably high.

  I doubt he would have stayed in New Zealand, then a British colony and too close to Australia for comfort. He might have picked up work in a ship’s crew, maybe even on a whaler, which could have taken him back to Chile. But it’s my guess that he headed off to somewhere unpredictable, like Japan or Russia. He might even have headed for America, where there was little love for the British and few questions were asked of strangers. Perhaps he regularly exchanged Christmas cards with John Barker, James Leslie or Benjamin Russen, who invited him to join them in the West Indies.

  We will probably never know.

  THE OTHER FREDERICK CONVICTS

  William Cheshire, Charles Lyon and William Shiers were all sent to Norfolk Island with Jimmy Porter. Jimmy continued his feud with Cheshire to the bitter end. He had blamed Cheshire for falsely accusing him of plotting a mutiny on the voyage from England. He also wrote that Cheshire had tried to incriminate him again when they reached Hobart. Jimmy recounts improbable tales of magistrates and other gentlemen nodding in solemn and sympathetic agreement as Jimmy unfolds his tale of treachery and woe. It all strikes me as paranoid nonsense, and I have generally ignored it in the narrative.