Ten Rogues

by Peter Grose

  There is a legend surrounding the fate of Charles Lyon that is widely believed but almost certainly false. While he was on Norfolk Island, he is said to have been one of the party of six convicts, including two convicts from Van Diemen’s Land, sent in a rowboat to collect some soldiers on a hunting and fishing trip to Phillip Island. Choosing Lyon for this job would make sense. He was an experienced seaman, and Phillip Island, a rocky outcrop about 6 kilometres south of Norfolk Island, was well within his capabilities. But instead of simply picking up the soldiers and rowing back to the main island, the convicts stole the boat and set off into the Pacific. Their fate is unknown, but as the nearest mainland was more than 1400 kilometres away, into wind, their chances of survival in an open rowboat over such a distance were slim. If Lyon was indeed among them, he will have drowned with the rest of them.

  A vastly more plausible story says that Lyon and Cheshire were sent back to Van Diemen’s Land after they were caught trying to build an illicit boat to escape from Norfolk Island. They must have stayed out of trouble back in Hobart, because both received pardons.

  There is a final snippet of information about Cheshire. The 21-ton schooner Trumpeter, a boat he had built at Surveyors Bay on the Huon River in 1851, became stranded while heavily laden with timber at Browns River, south of Hobart, on the night of 26 February 1854. Two of those aboard managed to struggle ashore, but Cheshire and another drowned.

  Like Jimmy, William Shiers was sent back to New South Wales from Norfolk Island. In New South Wales he distinguished himself by helping to rescue the schooner Patterson from deadly danger. For this he received a full pardon, and was henceforward a free man.

  Both Shiers and Cheshire are among the five convicts named by Jimmy as marrying Chilean brides. There is no record of either man ever returning to Chile to reclaim his bride and family. According to Richard Davey, the author of the excellent play The Ship that Never Was, descendants of Shiers now live in Darwin, Australia. One of those descendants, Wally Shiers, was a mechanic aboard Ross and Keith Smith’s Vickers Vimy aircraft on their historic first flight from London to Australia in 1919. Cheshire is also said to have descendants still living in Australia.

  John Dady, John Fair and John Jones had swum for it back in Valdivia harbour, and climbed aboard the American brig Ocean, where the captain agreed they could stay. That is the last anyone heard of them. The highest probability is that they finished up in the United States, where they will have presumably changed their names and disappeared into the no-questions-asked polyglot throng that was America in the mid-nineteenth century.

  John Barker, James Leslie and Benjamin Russen escaped from Valdivia in the governor’s stolen whaleboat. Nothing is known about them beyond the fact that they were seen alive in Jamaica three years later. If they made it to the West Indies in the stolen boat, they must have rounded Cape Horn in it, quite a feat. All three are named by Jimmy as having married Chilean brides who bore them children. They may have returned to Chile to support their families, but somehow I doubt it.

  THE GOOD GUYS

  David Hoy went from strength to strength. After his two-year ‘exile’ building a lighthouse on South Bruny Island, he was recalled to the mainland and became master shipbuilder, using convict labour, at the Port Arthur penal settlement. He also set up his own shipyard in Hobart, and at 49 married Janet Cameron. He lived to the age of 70, and died in Hobart a very wealthy man.

  Alexander Maconochie returned to England in 1844 after transforming the penal settlement on Norfolk Island. In England he wrote a hugely influential book setting out his ideas for penal reform. In 1849 he accepted the job of governor of the new Birmingham prison, where he set about putting his liberal ideas into effect. A man ahead of his time, he faced a storm of criticism from prison officers, supervisors and the police, as well as from newspapers and parliamentarians. In the end, they won: he was sacked. He remained an influential writer and thinker on prison reform.

  Immediately after Maconochie’s departure from Norfolk Island, the settlement reverted to the old ways of terror and cruelty, which continued until it was closed on 5 May 1855. But Maconochie may have had the last laugh. Some 1400 convicts ‘graduated’ from his prison on Norfolk Island, and very few reoffended. None of his predecessors or successors could make the same claim for the convicts they oversaw. He is known today as the ‘father of parole’.

  THE PENAL SETTLEMENTS

  Norfolk Island functioned as a penal settlement from the very beginning of Australian colonisation. Sydney was established on 26 January 1788, and on 6 March of the same year Philip Gidley King arrived on Norfolk Island with fifteen convicts and six soldiers. Six years later, Francis Grose,5 then lieutenant-governor of New South Wales, proposed to close it. In his view, it was too remote and too expensive to maintain. However, it continued to function undisturbed until 1805, when some of the convicts were returned to Sydney. By 1813 it had closed down. All the buildings were deliberately destroyed, and it was left bare.

  In 1824, the British government ordered the governor of New South Wales Sir Thomas Brisbane to reopen Norfolk Island as a prison for the ‘worst of the worst’: reoffenders and those who had been spared from hanging on condition that they be transported to a remote penal settlement for life. The British wanted Norfolk Island to be another tough regime along the lines of Sarah Island, with generous servings of hangings and floggings. As with Sarah Island, the designation ‘worst of the worst’ turned out to be hypocritical claptrap. More than half the prisoners sent to Norfolk Island were not reoffenders at all, and only 15 per cent were sent there as a reprieve for a death sentence. As with Sarah Island, it was simply a place to send awkward prisoners when the authorities took a dislike to them. The majority of prisoners on Norfolk Island had been convicted of non-violent crimes, mostly property offences.

  As transportation began to wind down generally in the mid-nineteenth century, Norfolk Island was again seen as too remote and difficult. It was again abandoned: the last convicts on the island were transferred to Van Diemen’s Land in 1855. What happened then was a triumph for Admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby.6 The British had known since 1814 that the Bounty mutineers had settled on the Pitcairn Islands. However, of the original mutineers only John Adams remained alive in 1814, so there was little point in sending a special expedition to drag him back to England just to hang him, and he was granted amnesty. He died in 1829, on Pitcairn.

  While he was commander-in-chief of Pacific Station, Valparaiso, from 1850 to 1853, Sir Fairfax Moresby visited the Pitcairn Islands twice. He was much impressed by George Hunn Nobbs, who functioned as a kind of island chieftain. So impressed was Sir Fairfax by Nobbs that he personally paid to send him to England, where he was ordained by the Archbishop of Canterbury and met Queen Victoria. He also met and impressed a large circle of influential people in London before returning to Pitcairn, this time as an ordained minister and official spiritual leader. As a result of Sir Fairfax’s generosity and Nobbs’s charisma, the Pitcairn Islanders now had a lot of friends in high places in London.

  By the mid-nineteenth century the Pitcairn community had grown to the point where the islands were not big enough to support them. Something had to give. Sir Fairfax helped to persuade the British government that the Pitcairn Islanders should simply be given the newly emptied Norfolk Island. He also facilitated their transfer from Pitcairn to Norfolk. On 3 May 1856 the entire population of the Pitcairn Islands, all 193 of them, set off in the Morayshire for Norfolk Island. They landed five weeks later, and quickly occupied the empty buildings and farms.7 Their descendants are the elite of today’s Norfolk Island population. There were few family names. The original Bounty mutineers had founded dynasties named Adams, Christian, McCoy, Quintal and Young. The very few outsiders who had made their way to Pitcairn added three more dynasties: Nobbs, Buffett and Evans. These eight family names are still revered on Norfolk Island today.

  Sarah Island, as we have seen, ceased to function as a penal settlement in 1833. It wa
s tentatively revived in 1846–47 as a probation station for convicts sent there to cut timber, but this was not a huge success and it was again abandoned. The various mining rushes brought sporadic development to the west coast of Tasmania, and the miners took to picking apart the various brick buildings on the island and using the bricks to build their houses. Thus the substantial buildings on Sarah Island were slowly whittled away, to the point where they have almost entirely disappeared.

  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Union Steam Ship Company leased the entire island, and promoted it as a good place for picnics. The island was taken over as a tourist reserve by the Tasmanian government in 1926, and in 1971 Sarah and Grummet islands were declared historic sites. Today they form part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Nobody lives on Sarah Island today, and the island is simply a tourist site. It is still possible to see remnants of the convict era in the form of the old penitentiary, some sunken logs that once functioned as boat slips, and some foundations. The rest has either rotted away or been stolen.

  The nearest population centre is the village of Strahan, on the northern mainland shore of Macquarie Harbour. From there visitors can take a cruise on the Gordon River, fish, go for walks or simply laze about. The river cruises usually include a visit to Sarah Island, where the tourist has a choice of either following a guide or taking the self-guided walking tour while clutching an annotated map. The island is quite small: an hour is plenty of time for the self-guided tour.

  Anyone visiting Strahan should be sure to include one of the daily performances of The Ship that Never Was, which is now Australia’s longest-running play. It was first performed in 1984; the current season opened in January 1994, and the play has been running continuously ever since. It tells the story of the seizing of the Frederick and is great fun, with plenty of audience participation. ‘Jimmy’, ever the partisan, even requires the audience to hiss and boo whenever the name Cheshire is mentioned. Well, why not?

  THE BRIG FREDERICK

  After the convicts sighted the shore of Chile in February 1834, they simply abandoned the Frederick. The brig was allowed to sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It went down some 40 miles (64 kilometres) off the Chilean coast, probably near the mouth of the Bueno River. This is not far from the Peru–Chile Trench, a huge valley in the floor of the Pacific Ocean which can sometimes go as deep as 8000 metres. The water off Rio Bueno is anywhere between 500 metres and 2000 metres deep. So the wreck is well beyond the reach of scuba divers and has never been recovered or even seen. Given that it was built with Huon pine timber, it is probably still pretty much intact even after almost 200 years.

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  5 No relation, I’m happy to reveal!

  6 My wife’s middle name is Moresby, and she comes from a long line of British Navy officers, including two admirals named Moresby. Her great-great-grandfather was Rear Admiral Sir Fairfax Moresby, and Port Moresby was named after his son, Admiral John Moresby. Sir Fairfax is revered on Norfolk Island. On the strength of the Moresby name, my wife and I were treated like VIPs when we visited, and invited to dinner at Government House. We were also introduced to the chief minister, who greeted us in shorts and an old T-shirt while carrying out his day job running the local garden centre.

  7 Some of them suffered from migrant’s remorse, and within seven years 44 of them returned to Pitcairn. The returnees formed the basis of the current Pitcairn community.

  Edward Willmann’s 1840 print shows the thriving and busy Valparaiso harbour as it must have looked when Royal Navy ships were based there. At the time, it was the Royal Navy’s South America Station. (Alamy)

  The road between Valparaiso and Santiago, depicted by the French naturalist Claude (‘Claudio’) Gay. The etching is almost certainly from the years 1834–43, when Gay lived in Santiago. Jimmy Porter’s marriage to Narcissa Martel took place around 1820, and her parents gave the young couple a farm situated along this road. Travelling along the road must have been quite an adventure. (iStock)

  The Iglesia de la Matriz del Salvador is in the port district of Valparaiso. It was much frequented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the wealthy and fashionable families of Valparaiso, so it is a fair guess that Jimmy and Narcissa were married there. In 1822 it was flattened in an earthquake and had to be rebuilt.

  An 1830 engraving by Edward Duncan from a painting by W.J. Huggins, Marine Painter to His Majesty, shows Hobart harbour in the mid-1820s, a few years after Jimmy first arrived. At that time, Hobart was still not much bigger than a village, but the multi-story buildings in the distance are evidence of an ambitious building program. (NLA)

  This undated drawing or painting is an important record of the improvements to the penal colony at Sarah Island. Based on the elaborate fencing and building work, it must have been created well after the arrival of Captain James Butler as commandant in April 1825. (Tasmanian Archives, NS1013-1-1866)

  Both Charles Constantini and Thomas Lempriere were prolific recorders of Sarah Island life, and this undated watercolour is likely by one of them. Constantini was a convict sentenced to transportation for forgery; Lempriere was not a convict but the commissariat officer, in charge of all Macquarie Harbour stores including food, clothing and medical supplies. (NLA)

  A gruesome collection of manacles, leg-irons, handcuffs, a ball and chain and firearms—some of the equipment used for convict ‘discipline’. The whip or cat-o’nine-tails in the picture is an altogether less cruel device than the Sarah Island whip, or ‘thief’s cat’, which was designed to cut and injure, not just to inflict pain. (NLA)

  An 1830 drawing showing Philips Island cultivation. The scene it depicts is more romantic than accurate. Philips Island, one of three work sites for convict gangs, was a few kilometres north of Sarah Island, inside Macquarie Harbour. There were endless attempts to grow potatoes and wheat on the island, but the wheat crop regularly failed. (NLA)

  An old black and white photograph of the site of the original docks on Sarah Island, where the Frederick was likely built. (Tasmanian Archives, AB713-1-3948)

  Lempriere’s 1831 sketch shows a ship entering Macquarie Harbour via Hell’s Gates, as seen from the pilot’s station. The small islands partially blocking the narrow channel added to the already considerable difficulties of navigating the heads. The nine men in the bottom left corner of the drawing appear to be launching a large rowboat, presumably the pilot boat. (Tasmanian Archives, SD_ILS 653853)

  A 1952 etching by Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Ingleton, The Brig FREDERICK departs from Sarah’s Island, Macquarie Harbour, VDL. Ingleton’s drawing meticulously and accurately depicts the Frederick’s appearance and rigging. However, it is unlikely that the Frederick would have been under full sail approaching the narrow and tricky harbour exit at Hell’s Gates. (NLA)

  This plan of the Frederick was for ship modellers, so it illustrates what the ship looked like from the outside but not below decks. There were probably two more deck levels below the open main deck. The captain’s cabin was usually at the stern (rear) of the ship, on the middle deck (the upper of the two levels), while the forecastle (fo’c’sle) will have been at the bow end, on the same deck as the captain’s cabin. The soldiers’ quarters were next to the captain’s cabin. The lower level was the hold, used for carrying cargo and probably housing the pumps. The plan shows a large hatch on the open top deck between the masts, and this will have been the main access to the middle deck via a steep flight of stairs. It also shows a smaller hatch (marked ‘access’) on the top deck just to the rear of the main mast. This must have been the hatch to the captain’s cabin. There will have been a large hatch on the middle deck, again probably between the masts and directly below the large hatch on the open deck, allowing access to the hold. (Tasmanian Archives, PH30/1/2879)

  An engraving of a Valdivia street scene in the spring of 1835 gives a good idea of the life and atmosphere of a provincial Chilean town at the time Jimmy arrived there. The church on the left sug
gests that the street was fairly central to the town, yet the dirt road probably became a mudbath after rain and most buildings have been constructed of wood. (Alamy)

  Thomas Seller painted this watercolour of Norfolk Island in 1839, around the time Jimmy was ‘transported’ there. Seller was an engineer and free man who held the position of foreman of works on the island. The painting is an optimistic version of what was likely a much less orderly and productive scene. (NLA)

  APPENDIX I

  This is a reproduction of the original document chartering the Asia to take Jimmy and 249 other convicts to Van Diemen’s Land. Naturally, the document was handwritten but in something akin to copperplate writing. I have reproduced it using Lucida Calligraphy typeface, the nearest I could find to the original. The reader will quickly discover that the charter was a straightforward commercial transaction. Notice that ownership of the convicts and their future labour passes to the shipbroker Joseph Lachlan, on the understanding that Lachlan will ensure that the convicts are delivered to New South Wales and that, once they are there, this ownership will pass to Governor Brisbane.

  To all to whom these presents shall come Joseph Lachlan of Great Alie Street Goodmans Fields in the county of Middlesex Ship Broker Sends Greeting.