Every scrap of food we stored in the boat, along with as much wood as we could fit. The rest of the fallen trees we manhandled down to the water. We lashed them together into an enormous raft, and towed them astern as we passed through the reefs. I judged that we had enough fuel to last for at least a week, perhaps two. But our boat was so heavy, so dragged by the logs, that our speed was slowed to a crawl.
South and west we went, with the engine going chickadee-chuckatee. I hoped to pass south of all the islands and steam west to the Cape of Good Hope. Surely, I thought, we would find a ship that would take us home.
author's note
Britain sent its first lot of convicts off to Australia in 1787. In one stroke, conditions were improved in overcrowded prisons, and labor was provided to build a new British colony in the land “beyond the seas.”
This wasn't a new idea. Britain had begun transporting convicts to North America more than a hundred and fifty years earlier. English criminals picked tobacco in Virginia, and grew sugarcanes in Jamaica. They helped establish colonies in Barbados and Canada and Singapore.
The “First Fleet” to Australia was made up of eleven ships. Provisioned by the government, and cared for by the navy, the convoy carried about 800 convicts, and everything that was needed to establish a new colony. It was an eight-month voyage to Australia, but every ship of the First Fleet arrived safely, and fewer than thirty convicts died at sea.
Two years later, encouraged by the result, Britain prepared for the “Second Fleet,” increasing the number of convicts to 1,006. But this time the government went about it in a different way. Instead of chartering the ships, they let out a contract to a private company.
The company was in the business of carrying slaves. So it packed the thousand convicts into just three ships, and spent as little as possible on food and supplies. This time the sea voyage killed more than one convict out of every four. Another 150 perished soon after reaching Australia. The transport Neptune left Britain with 499 convicts, but only 72 arrived in good health.
The Second Fleet was a terrible beginning to a new system of transportation. But with its navy needed for wartime duties, the government continued contracting ships to transport its criminals. So it examined the failings of the Second Fleet and laid down guidelines that improved conditions for the convicts. But there were still cruel captains and pennypinching contractors. In 1796, six convicts were flogged to death with the cat-o'-nine-tails on the transport Britannia. In 1798, one third of the convicts aboard the Hillsborough died of starvation and typhus.
As the years went by, the system improved. By the time of Tom Tin, in the 1820s, a convict had a better chance of surviving his time at sea than did an ordinary seaman.
Altogether, until transportation ended in 1868, there was very nearly one shipload of convicts sent to Australia for every prisoner in the First Fleet. In those hundreds of ships in that century of voyages, there was only one successful mutiny. Escape attempts began with the First Fleet, when a convict rowed away from his ship during a stop in the Canary Islands. There is a doubtful story about another convict who is said to have hidden in his ship at sea, intending to emerge secretly in Australia and pass himself off as a free settler. According to the tale, he was deemed to have drowned, and was only discovered when he began pilfering from the captain's supply of champagne.
But many convicts escaped from their penal colonies in Australia. Uneducated, and with little understanding of geography, some thought they could flee overland to China. Some, like Mr. Mullock, took to the sea. One of the most famous escapes involved a woman.
Mary Bryant, of Cornwall, was sentenced to seven years' transportation for the crime of “highway robbery” after she and two other women robbed a lady of a twelve-penny silk bonnet and other small things. Bryant was shipped out in the First Fleet, on the transport Charlotte. It was a long voyage; she arrived in Australia with a newborn baby—named Charlotte, in honor of the ship.
In the penal colony of Botany Bay, Bryant married a male convict. He had been a fisherman in England, and now tended the nets that caught fish for Botany Bay. With him, Mary had another baby—a boy. In 1791, the whole family, and seven other male convicts, escaped in a six-oared cutter belonging to the colony's governor. Bryant's husband had secretly fitted the boat with supplies from a Dutch trader, including a compass and chart, food, and firearms.
The crew of convicts and children voyaged north up the coast of Australia, and on to Timor, where Captain Bligh had landed after the mutiny on his ship, the Bounty. It was a distance of more than 3,000 miles for Mary Bryant and the others, and their voyage stood in comparison to Captain Bligh's for its hazards and unlikely success. They butchered turtles and made jerky from the meat. They used turtle fat to plug the leaks in the cutter's planks. They were chased, for part of the way, by cannibals in canoes.
At Timor, the convicts claimed to be survivors of a shipwreck. But they were eventually found out, and were arrested by a British captain who was hunting for the mutineers of the Bounty. He put them in irons and shipped them to the Cape of Good Hope. Mary's husband and son died on the way. Her daughter died during the voyage from there to England.
Mary Bryant was returned to prison as an escaped convict. She would have been transported for a second time if public sympathy hadn't saved her. Among her champions was the writer James Boswell.
Bryant became famous as the Girl from Botany Bay. She was pardoned for her crimes, and set free in Cornwall again.
acknowledgments
I would like to thank the many librarians who provided research material for this book, and especially Kathleen Larkin of the Prince Rupert Library. They unearthed old and obscure books that I could never have found on my own.
Thanks as well to my agent, Danielle Egan-Miller; my editor, Françoise Bui; and my partner, Kristin, who has probably read this story more times than I've read it myself.
about the author
Iain Lawrence studied journalism in Vancouver, British Columbia, and worked for small newspapers in the northern part of the province. He settled on the coast, living first in the port city of Prince Rupert and now on the Gulf Islands. His previous novels include the High Seas Trilogy: The Wreckers, The Smugglers, and The Buccaneers; as well as Lord of the Nutcracker Men, Ghost Boy, The Light-keeper's Daughter, and The Convicts, the companion to The Cannibals.
You can find out more about Iain Lawrence at www.iainlawrence.com.
Published by Laurel-Leaf
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales
is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2005 by Iain Lawrence
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RL: 5.6
eISBN: 978-0-307-51666-4
June 2007
v3.0
The Cannibals Page 18
