The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  On other trading vessels, they ranged even farther afield. The sandalwood trade littered the central Pacific with escaped convicts. For a short time, between about 1812 and 1816, American ships had been kept out of the Pacific by the British-American War. This gave the Sydney traders, merchants like William Campbell and Simeon Lord, a near-monopoly on the cutting of sandalwood, the rare and sweetly aromatic timber for which there was an enormous market among the Chinese. It grew on mid-Pacific islands, most profusely in the Marquesas and the Tuamotus. Between 1811 and 1821, colonial trading vessels out of Sydney, such as Campbell’s diplomatically named Governor Macquarie, brought back perhaps a quarter of the total sandalwood harvest of the Marquesas. On the islands, the wood was not so much gathered as plundered. If a captain ran short of trading goods to exchange for sandalwood, he would steal them from one island to sell to another, as John Martin, master of the Queen Charlotte, stole canoes from Tahuata to sell in Nuku Hiva in 1815.

  No law restrained these captains, and only their own violence—the lash, the battened hatch, the duck’s-foot pistol with its splayed barrels that could blast a fan of slugs down on a companionway and make a shambles of mutineers—could restrain their crews. They would find space on board for any escaping convict. But it was a one-way trip: Such absconders would be cast ashore three thousand miles from Sydney to fend for themselves as beachcombers. Sometimes a captain would be genuinely surprised by their presence on board. Thomas Hammond, master of the Pacific trader Endeavour, did not know he had five escaped convicts until they came blinking from their holes in the ′tween-decks on the way to New Zealand. He wanted to put them ashore there, but the magistrate in the Bay of Islands refused to let them land unless Hammond left six months’ provisions for them, so he sailed on and dumped them on the beach of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas.16

  It is not known how many escaped convicts ended up as beachcombers on the sandalwood islands. Hundreds of them must have been scattered in remote parts of the Pacific. “Strangers in their new societies and scandals to their old,” they contributed their own violence and opportunism, incubated and hardened by the System, to the ruin of the island cultures. By 1850 there was no part of the Pacific where the name of Botany Bay did not carry a sour infected reek—the breath of England, gone carious in double exile.

  It was much harder for convicts to steal a boat for themselves than to stow away on someone else’s; but that did not prevent some from trying. Most attempts to escape from Australia on stolen or secretly built craft failed. The Bryants’ escape became legendary precisely because it was unique. More typical by far was the escape in September 1790 of a party of five life-sentence convicts off the Second Fleet. They stole a punt from Rose Hill, poled it down the Parramatta River to Sydney Harbor, stole a “very small and weak” skiff from the look-out station at South Head and set out for Tahiti with a week’s food, three iron pots, some bedding and no compass. Naturally, no trace of them was ever found. One desperate man tried to get away from Major Foveaux’s atrocious reign on Norfolk Island, around 1800, by stealing a door, cutting two leg-holes in it, and paddling out over the Kingston reef in the hope of somehow floating a thousand miles to the Australian mainland. In secret, men constructed skiffs out of green eucalyptus wood, which opened and sank; risked being skinned by the cat-o’-nine-tails to hide precious iron nails in their mouths, armpits, anuses; stole twine and needles to sew coracles out of kangaroo skin. Thomas Cook, author of The Exile’s Lamentations, spent weeks working by moonlight in relays with four accomplices, building a boat hidden in the bush of Norfolk Island:

  Many sleepless hours did I experience in silent meditation on the schemes of Escape. All consideration of the long and perilous voyage of 1000 miles in a precarious Boat over the watery deep without either chart or compass was waived by the thought of my afflicted Parents, and the impossibility of my ever more seeing them in this world.… Blessed and sweet Liberty, that I had been doomed to forfeit in a place of unparallelled torture & sin, now appeared to me in all its grandeur. Those who I held dear now appeared in my dreams as transported by joy at my presence. But Alas! How visionary my calculations! A clue was gained to the boat by some means then to me unknown.17

  The skiff, nearly finished, was found and destroyed. Such projects could not be kept secret, especially in the confines of Norfolk Island.

  Sometimes, though not often, a group of convicts would manage to pirate a full-size ship. In 1797 the Cumberland, a Sydney-built smack, the “largest and best boat in the colony,” according to Governor Hunter, was seized by an Irish convict crew on a routine trip delivering stores from Sydney to the Hawkesbury River; she went north and was never seen again, although Hunter sent a rowboat laden with armed men after her for sixty blistering miles.18

  Late one Sunday night in May 1808, as the brig Harrington was riding quietly at anchor in Farm Cove in Sydney Harbor under the very windows of the Pacific trader William Campbell, her owner, a “body of desperadoes”—some fifty convicts—silently came alongside in boats and swarmed over her rail. Her chief officer awoke staring down the bore of a pistol held by the ringleader, Robert Stewart; other convicts stole forward and pinioned the crew. They cut the ship’s anchor-cables and used the rowboats to tow her down the harbor to the Heads, and by dawn they were well out to sea. Stewart put the officers and crew over the side, into the boats. It took them eight hours to row back to Sydney, and by then the Harrington was over the horizon. It was thought that she would never be seen again—she had just been fully provisioned for a voyage to Fiji—but three months later she ran on a reef in the South China Sea and was taken by a Manila-bound British frigate, the Phoenix. Robert Stewart and other ringleaders were shipped back to Sydney and hanged.19

  Despite a widespread belief among the free that convicts who pirated boats wrought orgies of vengeance on their unhappy crews and passengers, the absconders usually showed pity and moderation. In 1826 the brig Wellington was seized by the sixty-six convicts it was taking to Norfolk Island. They killed nobody and, having carried the ship, solicitously treated the minor flesh wounds, cuts and bruises some of the guards had suffered. Having shaped their course for New Zealand, the convicts set up a “Council of Seven” to keep order on board and especially to punish any mutineers who tried to dishonor the escape by brutalizing their former guards. Such people were to be put back in irons and then dropped ashore in New Zealand, “instead of proceeding with us to our ultimate destination.” One of the convicts was actually found guilty of “attempting a revolt and mutiny” by urging his fellow prisoners to revenge and was sentenced to spend the rest of the run to New Zealand in irons day and night on deck. The new masters of the Wellington kept a log of these respectable proceedings, parts of which sound cozy, almost domestic:

  This being Christmas Day, and the only deficiency we have at present found on the part of government, was in not supplying us with plums; issued an order, if any individual on board had any plums they must be given up for all hands; plums were procured, four geese killed, together with three sheep, spent a very comfortable day, moderately indulging ourselves with some gin and brandy.20

  The Wellington and its escapees were recaptured by a whaler in New Zealand, and this log told in their favor at their trial. When their merciful conduct was revealed—and confirmed by the ship’s guards and crew—there was a swell of public sympathy for them, and out of twenty-three men condemned to hang, only five were actually executed.

  The prisoners who seized the brig Cyprus in 1828 were less fortunate, although their escapade became as celebrated in convict lore as the Bryants’. By the early 1830s they had become the subject of one of the “treason songs” or proscribed convict ballads. The men of Cyprus, reconvicted in Van Diemen’s Land for “little trifling offences,” were being taken from Hobart to the penal station of Macquarie Harbor, “that place of tyranny”:

  Down Hobart Town streets we were gathered, on the Cyprus brig conveyed,

  Our topsails they were hoisted, boys,
our anchor it was weighed,

  The wind it blew a nor’-nor’-west, and on we steered straightway,

  Till we brought her to an anchorage in a place called Recherche Bay.

  The facts do not match the song at all points. Far from being guilty of minor offenses, most of the thirty-one convicts going to Macquarie Harbor on the Cyprus had been convicted of capital crimes but had had their sentences commuted. The most intrepid of them was a former sailor, William Swallow. Swallow was a veritable Houdini. In 1810 he had hijacked a schooner in Port Jackson and been sent to Van Diemen’s Land as his secondary punishment. The ship that took him there, the Deveron, was disabled in a storm and Swallow, “remarking that his own life was of little moment,” volunteered to go aloft and cut away a slatting tangle of broken spars and rigging. It seems that the Deveron’s sailors were so grateful for his courage in saving the ship that, as soon as Swallow was landed in Hobart, they smuggled him back on board. Thus he escaped, and got all the way west across the ocean to Rio, where he was captured again by the British authorities. Once more he got free and stowed away on a London-bound boat. But he was finally recognized in London, arrested and shipped out again to Van Diemen’s Land. Such was the man who, “confined within a dismal hole” with his fellow convicts as the Cyprus rode at anchor near the southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land, decided to make a last bid

  To take possession of that brig or else die every man:

  The plan it being approv’d upon, we soon retired to rest,

  And early next morning, boys, we put them to the test.

  Up steps bold Jack Muldeamon, his comrades three more—

  We soon disarmed the sentry and left him in his gore:

  “Liberty, O liberty! It’s liberty we crave—

  Surrender up your arms, my boys, or the sea shall be your grave!”

  After a rush, a scuffle and some shooting, the convicts overpowered the guard and carried the ship. They put the officer-in-charge, Lieutenant Carew, over the side along with his wife, the soldiers and thirteen convicts who had not joined the mutiny. The Cyprus was heavily laden with stores for Macquarie Harbor, enough to sustain 400 men for six months, but the convicts gave the forty-five castaways a stingy ration—a live sheep, some salt beef, a bag of biscuits and 30 pounds of flour, with no weapons and no boat:

  First we landed the soldiers, the captain and his crew,

  We gave three cheers for Liberty, and soon bid them adieu:

  William Swallow he was chosen our commander for to be—

  We gave three cheers for Liberty, and boldly put to sea.

  Lay on your golden trumpets, boys, and sound their cheerful note!

  The Cyprus brig’s on the ocean, boys, by Justice does she float!

  After prolonged sufferings from exposure and starvation, living on a handful of raw mussels and a quarter-biscuit a day, the castaways eventually got back to Hobart. They might not have done so without a convict named Popjoy, who framed up a 12-foot coracle out of mimosa branches, covered it with hammock canvas (sewn by Mrs. Carew, who had a needle) and waterproofed it with soap and resin. Popjoy and Carew sailed this fragile shell twenty miles to Partridge Island, where they were saved by a passing ship.*

  In the meantime, the Cyprus and her pirates were well away. Swallow shaped his course for Tahiti, and then turned north for Japan, where he and his crew landed some time in 1829; seven of the convicts jumped ship there. Several months later, Swallow and three of his mates appeared in a skiff off the Chinese trading port of Whampoa. They had abandoned the Cyprus. Swallow presented himself to officials in Canton as Captain Waldron of the ship Edward, set on fire and sunk at sea by the Japanese. In this way, Swallow and his mates wangled a free passage home to England. Unfortunately, soon after they sailed, other survivors of the Cyprus turned up in Canton and Swallow’s story began to unravel. Eventually, Swallow and his mates were arrested in England, and were identified by Popjoy, who, by a bizarre stroke of colonial ill-luck, had returned to London after receiving a free pardon for helping save the castaways at Recherche Bay. But Popjoy insisted that Swallow had been forced by his fellow absconders to navigate the ship, and the court believed him. So, although Swallow’s companions were hanged, he was not. For the third time, he was forced to go on board a transport and make the long, lugubrious journey to Australia. It was his last. As soon as he arrived in Hobart, he was shipped to Macquarie Harbor—and this time there was no escape. William Swallow eventually died of tuberculosis in the penal colony of Port Arthur, to which he had been transferred when Macquarie Harbor was closed down in 1834. Unfortunately, he never wrote a memoir of his adventures.21

  But one later absconder did: James Porter, a twenty-six-year-old Londoner who helped his convict companions, ex-sailors among them, to hijack the brig Frederick from the slipway where they had built her for the government at Macquarie Harbor in 1833, just as the settlement was being abandoned. This caused much embarrassment, not least because the vessel had been named after one of Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s seven sons. They cast the guards and crew ashore (all survived) and with remarkable skill and courage sailed clear across the Pacific to the coast of Chile, where they abandoned her to sink and took to the longboat. Reaching Valdivia, they came before its Chilean governor, who assumed that they were pirates, not innocent shipwrecked sailors, and promised to shoot them. Porter saved their skins with a stirring speech (as recorded years later, by himself):

  “Avast there! We as sailors shipwrecked and in distress expected when we made this port to have been treated in a Christian-like manner, not as though we were dogs! Is this the way you would have treated us in 1818 when the British Tars were fighting for your independence, and bleeding in your cause against the old Spaniards? If we were pirates do you suppose we should be so weak as to cringe to your tyranny? Never! I also wish you to understand that if we are shot England will know of it and will be revenged … [S]hould you put your threat into execution we will teach you Patriots how to die.”22

  Impressed by this magnificent bluff, the governor let them stay unmolested, and asked his superiors in Santiago to issue them with residence permits. Porter and his companions now settled down to a picaresque life among the ladies and knife-wielders of Chile. But the governor was replaced soon afterward, and his successor—suspicious that Porter and his shipmates were, in fact, escaped convicts—alerted a passing British frigate, HMS Blond. Thus they were taken again, first back to England, and then on a second transport ship to Van Diemen’s Land. On the weary voyage south, Porter was falsely denounced as a mutineer by two of his former shipmates, Charles Lyon and William Cheshire, who hoped to curry favor with the captain and escape hanging for piracy when, as seemed inevitable, they were recognized in Hobart. “Knowing my innocence I stood nearly petrified,” he recounted:

  I was seized by the soldiers and seamen, lashed to a grating (and to that degree until the blood hoosed from the parts where the lashings went round different parts of my person) and a lump of a black-fellow flogged me across the lines and every other part of my body until my head sank on my breast. As for the quantity of lashes I cannot say, for I would not give them the satisfaction to scringe to it, until nature gave way through exhaustion.

  Then he and his mate William Shires were chained below, bleeding and infected, hands manacled behind their backs, in a steaming rat’s-hole and were given no more than quarter-rations of water and food for three weeks, until they presented “the appearance of anatomies [i.e., skeletons] more than living beings.” “I craved for death,” Porter noted, but on recovering the use of his arms he wrote a pathetic verse on a scrounged leaf of paper:

  How wretched is an Exile’s state of mind

  When not one gleam of hope on earth remain,

  Through grief worn down, with servile chains confined,

  And not one friend to soothe his heartfelt pain.

  Too true I know that man was made to mourn,

  A heavy portion’s fallen to my lot

  With angu
ish full my aching heart is torn

  Far from my friends, by all the world forgot.

  The feathered race with splendid plumage gay

  Extent their throats with a discordant sound,

  With Liberty they spring from spray to spray,

  While I a wretched Exile gaze around.

  Farewell my sister, Aged Aunts dear,

  Ere long my glass of life will cease to run,

  In silence drop a sympathetic tear

  For your Unhappy, Exiled, Long-Lost Son.

  O cease, my troubled aching Heart, to beat,

  Since happiness so far from thee has fled!

  Haste, haste unto your silent cold retreat

  In clay-cold earth to mingle with the Dead.

  But Porter was not to die; or not yet. He survived the voyage and landed in Hobart in March 1837, where he was instantly recognized as one of the pirates of the Frederick. He was tried and convicted of piracy, despite his ingenious argument in defense: As the vessel had not been formally commissioned by the government—“it was canvas, rope, boarding and trenails, put together shipwise—yet it was not a legal ship: the seizure might be theft, but not piracy.” Luckily for him, “the bloodthirsty Arthur” had left Van Diemen’s Land five months earlier, “and had not the colony been under the Government of the humane Sir John Franklin I should not now have been alive to have given this small Narrative.” So Porter and Shires did not hang. They ended up on Norfolk Island, where Porter was able to write his memoirs under the kindly eye of Captain Alexander Maconochie.

  These were the last men to escape from Macquarie Harbor, but they were by no means the first. Ever since 1821, when Lieutenant-Governor Sorell had pitched this dreaded prison settlement on the isolated west coast of Van Diemen’s Land, convicts had been trying to get away from it, mostly on foot. In 1822 and 1823, one man in ten disappeared. In 1824, the rate rose to nearly one in seven. They went inland, trying to reach the settled and farmed districts to the east, and most of them died. In the long list of Macquarie Harbor absconders for the first six years of settlement, only eight carry a brief remark like “Reported to have reached the cultivated part of the island: this requires confirmation.” The rest is a gray official litany, punctuated by sparks of saturnine humor. Timothy Crawley, Richard Morris, John Newton, June 2, 1824: “Seized the soldiers’ boat, provicions, fire-arms &c., and supposed to have perished in their way across the interior. The boat was afterwards found moored to a Stump, and written upon her stern, with chalk, ‘to be Sold.’ ” But the usual requiem was “Supposed to have perished in the woods.”23