In 1803, King reported that fifteen “infatuated” Irish had made a run to China from Castle Hill; they were out for four days “committing every possible enormity except Murder” (one blew half a constable’s face away with a musket, but he lived). The court sentenced them all to death, but King only hanged two. He then fixed the punishment for bolting at five hundred lashes, plus double chains for the remainder of the sentence. He expressed the hope that “the Convicts at Large will be assured that their ridiculous plans of leaving public labor to go into the Mountains, to China, &c., can only end in their immediate detection and punishment.”3
As the settlement slowly moved outward and tracks were made through the raw bush, even the blindest optimist could see that the convict skeletons that kept turning up must mean something. The will to walk to Peking guttered out as it became clear that the logical escape route from this continental prison was not the land but the sea.
The sea route produced one epic escape in the early 1790s whose notoriety blossomed in London, reached back to Botany Bay and gave heart to would-be absconders for years to come. It was led by a woman, Mary Bryant (b. 1765)—“the Girl from Botany Bay,” as the English press later dubbed her—who, with her two small children, her husband William Bryant, and seven other convicts, managed to sail a stolen boat all the way north from Sydney to Timor, a distance of 3,250 miles in just under ten weeks. As a nautical achievement, this compared with William Bligh’s six-week voyage in a longboat from Tahiti to Timor with the “loyalists” of the Bounty in 1789. No one since James Cook in the Endeavour, twenty-one years before, had sailed all the way up the eastern coast of Australia, through the treacherous Barrier Reef, and lived to tell about it.4
Mary Bryant, née Broad, was a sailor’s daughter from the little port of Fowey, in Cornwall. She had been transported for seven years for stealing a cloak. She went with the First Fleet, on the transport Charlotte. Before the fleet reached Cape Town, Mary Bryant gave birth to a girl and named her Charlotte, after the ship. Soon after the fleet reached Port Jackson, Mary Broad married one of the male convicts, who fathered her second child, Emanuel, born in April 1790. He, too, was Cornish and had come out on Charlotte. He was a thirty-one-year-old fisherman named William Bryant. Like many another Cornishman who kept a boat on that wild and indented coast, Bryant was a smuggler as well as a sailor, and in 1784 he had been convicted of resisting arrest at the hands of excise officers. He had already spent three years in the hulks when the First Fleet sailed, and his full seven-year sentence still loomed before him.
A fisherman was just what the half-starved colony needed. Governor Phillip put Bryant in charge of the boats that hauled the fishing nets every day in the harbor. But the black-market opportunities were too good for a Cornish smuggler to resist. He was caught selling some of his fish on the sly, instead of delivering them all to the Government Store; for this, he got one hundred lashes. If he had not set his heart on it before, Bryant was now determined to escape. At worst, he would rather drown quickly at sea than starve inch by inch on land. He had access to the boats but had no weapons, tools, navigational instruments, charts or food.
In October 1790 an East Indies trader, the Waaksamheyd, lumbered into Port Jackson heavily freighted with stores from Djakarta. Her Dutch captain, Detmer Smit, felt no obligations to the English convict system. He listened to William Bryant and was persuaded to part with a compass, a quadrant, muskets, food and even a chart of the waters between Sydney and Timor. Bryant hid this precious stuff in rolls of bark under the floorboards of his hut and began assembling a crew. He picked his time carefully. In March 1791 the Supply was dispatched to Norfolk Island. At the end of the month, Waaksamheyd, having sold the last of her cargo and finished her repairs, also set sail. Now there were no ships left in Port Jackson—nothing that could overtake an escaping boat. On the night of March 28, in the dark of the moon, the Bryants, their two children and seven other convicts scrambled into the governor’s own six-oar cutter. In nervous silence, holding their breaths every time the oar-blades kissed the dark water, they rowed out into the harbor, past the little island of Pinchgut, heading east to the gate of the Pacific. The lookout on South Head did not see the cutter as it crept by in the night. They turned north toward New Guinea.
Their escape caused consternation next morning. The officers could hardly believe that although most of the men who had escaped had “connections” with female convicts in the settlement, not one woman had breathed a word about the long-laid escape plan. “They were too faithful to those they lived with to reveal it,” observed David Collins. One of the men, a spare-time cabinetmaker named James Cox who had been transported for life on the First Fleet for stealing 12 yards of lace and a pair of stockings, left a note on his workbench for his lover Sarah Young. It was a plain, fond letter, “conjuring her to give over the pursuit of the vices which, he told her, prevailed in the settlement, leaving to her what little property he did not take with him, and assigning as a reason for his flight the severity of his situation, being transported for life, without the prospect of any mitigation, or hope of ever quitting the country.”5
By no means all the guards were unsympathetic to the escape. “They got Clear off,” wrote a marine private, John Easty, in his diary,
but its a very Desperate attempt, to go in an open boat for a run of about 16 or 17 hundred Leags and in pertucalar for a Woman and 2 small Children the eldest not above 3 years of age—but the thoughts of Liberty from such a place as this is Enoufh to induce any Convicts to try all Skeemes to obtain it, as they are the same as Slaves all the time they are in this Country.6
At first the going was easy. At their landings they found edible palms whose hearts they chopped out, “a Varse Quantity of Fish which [was] of a great Refreshment to us,” and natives either friendly or timid. But then the rain poured and the seas rose; for five continuous weeks, they were soaked to the skin and rarely able to light a cooking fire. On the long stretch of surf-bound coast between Port Macquarie and Brisbane they were driven out to sea by an adverse wind, and “making no harbour or Creek for nere three weeks we were much distress’d for water and food.” There was a brief respite for them in “White Bay being in Lattd 27°” probably Moreton Bay. But on leaving it, they were blown out to sea again, helpless before
a heavy Gale of Wind and Current, expecting every Moment to go to the Bottom; next morng saw no Land, the sea running Mountains high … thinking every Moment to be the last, the sea Coming in so heavy upon us every now and then that two Hands was obliged to keep Bailing out and it rained very hard all that night … [We] cou’d make no Land [the next] Day—I will leave you to Consider what distress we must be in, the Woman and the two little Babies was in a bad condition, everything being so Wet that we Cou’d by no means light a Fire, we had nothing to Eat except a little raw rice.7
After several days of this ordeal they were blown ashore, half-dead, on one of the desert islands of the Barrier Reef. On its circling coral they found turtles, one of which furnished “a Noble Meal this Night.” They butchered a dozen and made jerky of their meat. Thus victualled, they made the coast again and kept creeping north, stopping for water wherever they could get ashore, caulking the cutter—whose seams were loosened by the incessant pounding of the ocean—with soap and turtle-fat, fighting skirmishes with hostile blacks. Food was short all the way, but they were all still alive when they turned the point of Cape York Peninsula, the northernmost tip of Australia, and found themselves in the Arafura Sea with a clear run—pursued, part of the way, by stout cannibals in mat-sailed canoes—of five hundred miles of open water to Arnhem Land, and another five hundred to Timor. They reached Koepang in Timor on June 5 and passed themselves off to the local Dutch governor as survivors of a shipwreck on the Australian coast. In new clothes, with full bellies, they settled down to wait for a ship back to England. But after a couple of months, by Martin’s account, Bryant for some unexplained reason told the truth to the Dutch governor. Perhaps he got drunk:<
br />
Wm Bryant had words with his wife, went and informed against himself Wife and children and all of us, [upon] which we was immediately taken Prisoners and was put into the Castle we was strictly examined.
The governor now put them in detention. In mid-September, some more shipwrecked Englishmen appeared from the sea at Koepang: Captain Edward Edwards, who had been chasing the Bounty mutineers in the frigate Pandora. He had captured some of them at Tahiti but lost his ship on a reef south of New Guinea; in the pinnace, longboat and two yawls, he and 120 survivors had escaped the wreck and made their way across the Arafura Sea to Timor. Now Edwards took the Bryants and their comrades prisoner; they were clapped in irons, put on board the Rembang, a Dutch East Indiaman, and shipped to Batavia. In that mephitic port, both William Bryant and his little son Emanuel died of fever just before Christmas 1791.
The survivors were shipped back to the Cape. Three of the men died at sea. At the Cape, Mary Bryant, her daughter and the remaining four convicts—James Martin, William Allen, James Brown and Nathaniel Lucas—were put on board the Gorgon, the man-o’-war which was carrying the marine detachment (just replaced by the newly formed New South Wales Corps) back from Australia to London. “We was well known by all of the marine officers which was all Glad that we had not perished at sea,” Martin noted. That he did not exaggerate this is shown by the remarks of Captain Watkin Tench, of the Royal Marines, who had known the Bryants and Martin on the outward voyage of the First Fleet (“always distinguished for good behavior”) and now, seeing them on board the Gorgon, could not suppress his esteem for them. “I confess that I never looked at these people,” he wrote, “without pity and astonishment. They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty; after having combated every hardship, and conquered every difficulty … I could not but reflect with admiration, at the strange combination of circumstances which had again brought us together, to baffle human foresight, and confound human speculation.”8
Mary Bryant’s sufferings were not over yet. On May 5, her three-year-old Charlotte died and was buried at sea. When she reached London and was committed to Newgate as an escaped felon, all she could look forward to was another transport ship, more irons and a second voyage to Botany Bay. But Mary Bryant soon acquired friends. Word got out about that indomitable curiosity, “the Girl from Botany Bay,” who had so far overcome the inherent weakness of her sex to make this epic voyage through cannibals, coral, fever-isles and mountainous seas, from the edge of the chart back to England and civilization. Surely a just government could not send this bereaved heroine and her companions back to the thief-colony? So thought James Boswell, for one; and this kind-hearted writer pressed Dundas, the home secretary, and Evan Nepean, the undersecretary of state, with letters urging clemency and pardon for her. In May 1793, Mary Bryant received an unconditional pardon. Boswell then settled an annuity of £10 on her, and back she went to Cornwall. In November 1793 her four companions were pardoned, too; one of them promptly, if unexpectedly, enlisted in the New South Wales Corps and set sail again for Botany Bay.9
Boswell’s interest in Mary Bryant was such that his friends, used to his amatory divings among the lower classes, joked that Botany Bay had given him a new mistress. One of them, William Parsons, penned a “Heroic Epistle from Mary Broad in Cornwall to James Boswell, Esq., in London.” Mary languishes in her new, Cornish exile, pining for the Apollo of Auchinleck:
Was it for this I braved the ocean’s roar,
And plied those thousand leagues the lab’ring oar?
Oh, rather had I stayed, the willing prey
Of grief and famine in the direful bay!
Or perished, whelmed in the Atlantic tide!
Or, home returned, in air suspended died!
Instead, she dreams of being united with her Boswell in the ultimate transport of bliss, their liebestod on the scaffold at Tyburn—a new thrill for her, and even for him:
Great in our lives, and in our deaths as great,
Embracing and embraced, we’ll meet our fate:
A happy pair, whom in supreme delight
One love, one cord, one joy, one death unite!
Let crowds behold with tender sympathy
Love’s true sublime in our last agony!
First let our weight the trembling scaffold bear
Till we consummate the last bliss in air.10
But despite the elegantly turned prurience of his friends, there is nothing to suggest that Boswell’s interest in Mary Bryant—who faded from the newspapers and from history, on her return to Cornwall—was inspired by anything but compassion. His only souvenir of her (apart from some receipts for the annuity) was a packet of dried Australian “sweet tea” leaves, which she had held on to through thick and thin and given to him as a curiosity; they now repose in the archives of Yale University, very far from Botany Bay.
ii
AFTER THE BRYANTS made their escape from Sydney, security there had to be tightened. Collins, in April 1791, described the new arrangements: a sentinel at night on each wharf at Sydney Cove, and no boats allowed to leave the cove without direct spoken word from the officer of the guard, who also had to have a written list of all personnel, convict or free, allowed to use the fishing skiffs after sunset. Sydney Harbor was the gate to this little police-state and it had to be kept locked. In the beginning, with few ships coming and going, this was easy. But as traffic increased, the loophole widened. The Bryants’ escape gave absconders new heart. “The lenity and compassion expressed in England [for them],” Hunter grumbled, “I fear may have contributed to encourage similar attempts now. Had those people been sent back and tried in this country for taking away the boat … we should not have any schemes of that kind projected now.”11
American whaling captains out of Nantucket and Sag Harbor, who cared not a spit for English penal policies, let convicts stow away when they needed new crewmen. Some English transports, turned back into trading vessels for the homeward voyage, also let convicts on board—no less than thirty absconders were flushed from the transport Hillsborough as she made ready to leave Sydney in 1799. Even the French captain Nicolas Baudin, while mapping the southern coast of Australia in 1802–3, found eight convict stowaways on board; he cast them ashore on King Island in the Bass Strait, without holding out much hope of their survival.12
There were natural sympathies between convicts and sailors, for some tyrannous captains treated tars little better than prisoners. Crewmen would sometimes stow prisoners away in crannies that were unknown even to their officers. Before a ship sailed from Sydney or Hobart, the constables would swarm through her, banging on casks and prodding bales and sacks with their bayonets. Watchers on shore would see white smoke pouring from the ship’s ports and ventilators, a sign that sulphur bombs had been ignited to smoke the stowaways out of their hiding places like rabbits from a warren. In 1814 a search of the trader Earl Spencer produced twenty-eight escapees, some concealed in barrels of flour and cheese and one wrapped up in a spare jib in the sail-locker. When the Harriet, a merchant ship out of Sydney, was found to have brought sixteen escaped convicts to the Cape even though she had been “diligently Searched” before sailing in December 1817, Governor Lachlan Macquarie complained to Lord Bathurst that
it is scarcely possible to find these Runaways, when the Sailors are in league with them and Connive at their Concealment on board, few ships leaving this Port without Carrying off some Convicts of both Sexes in the same way … [T]he Convicts, who have been the Shortest Time in the Colony, are always those who are the Most Anxious to make their Escape from it.13
In 1826 a memo to George Arthur, lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land, outlined some of the security problems in Hobart. The seal trade in Bass Strait was mainly carried on by runaways working for mainland businessmen, most of whom were Emancipists themselves. Arthur’s correspondent lamented
the facility with which a Prisoner gets conveyed away from the Colony in the boats and small Vessels employed in Sealing … They s
oon find Employment in the Straits, become sharers in Plunder, and finally get away to New Zealand, or some other more distant Country.14
Arthur clamped such strict port regulations on Hobart that not even a mouse, one would have thought, could get through them. Every ship in the Derwent River had to have a 24-hour officer watch, or else face severe and automatic fines. All vessels leaving were “searched and smoked”—fumigated with sulphur to drive stowaways out. For every convict found on board a vessel, each officer and seaman was fined a month’s wages, to be paid in full by the captain before the ship could sail. Informers were exempt from this, and any informer got half the total fine from the ship’s crew if a convict were found on board, the search-party receiving the other half. Since any seaman who informed in this way—and ended up with his shipmate’s wages—would face an unusually short and unpleasant life after his vessel cleared the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, Arthur’s regulations permitted the informer to “have his discharge from the ship should he require it,” unless he had actually brought the absconders on board himself.15
By 1820, Hobart was the main port for whaling and sealing, and Sydney the same for island trading in sandalwood, pearlshell, bêche-de-mer and New Zealand spar timber, throughout the South Pacific. Each had to be both a jail and a port of call—an awkward contradiction. In stowing away, most convicts merely exchanged one kind of imprisonment for another. It was a fine arrangement for the ship’s masters because, once on board, the convict could not return to land—not, at any rate, to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land—without risking the gallows. He was shanghaied, and there was no romance in this cramped world of the fo’c’sle and the skinning-knife. Yet it was better than the chain gang. By the 1830s the southern bays and refuges, from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand (a veritable rookery of absconders) to the Recherche Archipelago on the west coast of Australia, were littered with grim little communities and patriarchal clans of convicts.
The Fatal Shore Page 31
