Fled

by Meg Keneally

  The seamanship seemed to have skipped a generation: Richard had fallen out of most boats he had ever been in. His talents lay elsewhere.

  ‘We need lawyers in Penmor too,’ Mrs Gwyn had said while she gripped his arm after the service, as though afraid he might go back to London. ‘You don’t have to like the sea to live near it.’

  No one knew where the money had come from for his education. Mrs Gwyn was one of the most successful boat owners on the coast, but even she would have struggled to find the funds needed for top-drawer legal training. There were whispers of a mysterious benefactor – but then, there were whispers about a lot of things.

  Including the identity of Richard’s father. There had been a half-remembered scandal when she’d sailed into Penmor Harbour with Richard in her womb and no chance that her deceased husband was the father, and there were still whispered stories of a less-than-upright past.

  No one, though, could imagine Penmor without her, especially as a significant number of the village’s young men worked for her in the summer months. She paid them fairly and treated them well. She even let them keep a small share of the catch. But if one more fish than their allotted ration went home with them, they never got work from her again.

  There were plenty of lads to replace them, and the men in her employ cheered and whistled whenever she appeared at the dock.

  ‘We haven’t seen you in a week,’ said Sarah’s husband, Jack, when Mrs Gwyn came to see off the fleet on one of the last trips of the summer. ‘We thought you’d forgotten about us!’

  ‘Such a handsome flotilla?’ she said. ‘I’d never.’

  Jack vaulted up to the dock from the boat he’d been standing in, and drew close to her. ‘Should we worry about you, Mrs Gwyn? Have you need of anything?’

  ‘You’re sweet, Jack. No, please only worry about the fish. There’s nothing wrong with me save the occasional creak. To be expected I suppose. Do you know, since Enid Luttrell died I’m the oldest person in the village.’

  ‘And the most creative. You have my boy believing in otters with duckbills, and giant jumping rats. And sea dragons, of course. I haven’t the heart to tell him it’s make-believe.’

  ‘Oh, you must never do that,’ said Mrs Gwyn. ‘If they don’t listen to the fantasies, they will never hear the truth.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is based on the life of Mary Bryant, the woman behind one of history’s most daring escapes. Many of the major elements are based on events which actually occurred and people who actually lived. It is, however, a work of fiction, and some elements of the story have been changed or invented.

  Jenny versus Mary

  Mary was illiterate, so there’s no record of her thoughts and feelings, and the only record of her words is in court transcripts. We can only guess, based on her actions, at her personality and what she felt. It seemed wrong to ascribe thoughts, emotions and beliefs to her when I had no idea whether they were actually hers; it felt better to have a fictional character who could fully own all of this.

  A few characters have been named after their real-life counterparts: Charlotte, Emanuel, Dolly, Will and Mary’s victim Agnes Lakeman. All of the ships are named after those of the First and Second Fleets, and others that visited the colony.

  Mary’s early life

  Mary Broad (or Braund, as she is in some official documents) was born on or around 1 May 1765 to Will and Grace Broad of Fowey, Cornwall. She had a sister, Dolly, who went into service, and a brother who died in infancy.

  There’s no evidence her father was a smuggler, although it can’t be ruled out. He was certainly a mariner, and like others in Fowey would have been hit hard by the combination of the disappearance of the pilchards and steep taxes on the salt needed to preserve them.

  The death of Will Broad’s fictional counterpart, Will Trelawney, is the first of a number of departures from historical fact.

  We don’t know an awful lot about the circumstances surrounding Mary’s descent into crime, and Mr Black is a complete fiction. However, court documents list her as a forest dweller, and she was convicted of robbing Agnes Lakeman. Two other women – Mary Haydon and Catherine Fryer – were also convicted in relation to the crime, and were also transported. There is no way of knowing if Mary’s relationship with them mirrored that of Jenny with Elenor and Bea. The courtroom scenes throughout the novel are fabricated.

  Transportation and the colony

  Jenny meets her future husband Dan Gwyn (and sympathetic officer Captain James Corbett) aboard the hulk Dunkirk and makes the journey to Australia with them on the Charlotte. Mary met her husband Will Bryant (transported for resisting a revenue officer) under the same circumstances, and also seems to have had a good relationship with Watkin Tench, the inspiration for Corbett.

  We don’t know the identity of another important man in Mary’s life: Charlotte’s father. The name Mary gave for her child’s father was Spence, but no one of that name appears on the Dunkirk’s manifest – and given the date of Charlotte’s birth, the Dunkirk would certainly have been where Mary conceived.

  Dan’s flogging, the reasons behind it, and his insistence that his marriage wasn’t valid are all based on fact, as is the edict preventing convicts with dependents from leaving the colony; however, Joe and Elenor’s role in the flogging and in Jenny and Dan’s dispossession are invented.

  Pietr Vorst is based on Dutch captain Detmer Smit, who did have a vicious argument with Governor Arthur Phillip over supplies and the cost of passage from their colony. He sold Mary and Will a chart, quadrant and two muskets.

  The Bryants also appear to have had a friendship with Bennelong and Barangaroo, on whom Yarramundi and Mawberry are based. Jenny’s interactions with Mawberry are fictional (and it’s unlikely she was the one to introduce native sarsaparilla to the colonists), but the help Dan receives when his boat capsizes is broadly based on an actual incident. We will never know whether Bennelong farewelled the Bryants as Yarramundi does the Gwyns.

  The escape

  The journey to Kupang, West Timor (or Coepang, as it was known in the late eighteenth century) took sixty-nine days for both Jenny and Mary; however, Mary made more stops, including a likely visit to Moreton Bay in Queensland. We know this because James Martin, one of Mary’s fellow escapees, left a bare-bones description that is the only existing personal account of the voyage. It has been wonderfully interpreted by Tim Causer of University College London. Will Bryant apparently also wrote an account, but this has been lost.

  On the subject of the escapees, I have greatly reduced the number of people in the boat. Mary and Will escaped with nine other convicts in addition to their two children.

  In The Girl from Botany Bay, Carolly Erickson suggests Mary tied her children to the bench or to herself, and I have adopted this as it’s hard to see how the children could have survived otherwise.

  It does seem as though Will was to blame for the group’s recapture after two months in Kupang. Martin says that Will argued with Mary and betrayed everyone. In To Brave Every Danger, Judith Cook suggests it is unlikely Will would have done so in a premeditated way, as such a betrayal would probably result in his own death. I agree, and have used a combination of drunkenness and pride as the cause of their recapture.

  Captain Edward Edwards was every bit as vile as his fictional counterpart, Andrews, and did indeed have a cage known as Pandora’s box in which he kept the Bounty mutineers captured at Otaheite (Tahiti). His treatment of the convicts probably cost Will Bryant and little Emanuel their lives. They died in Batavia (Indonesia), not aboard ship as they do in the book.

  Shortly afterwards, aboard the Gorgon, Mary saw Watkin Tench again, as Jenny sees Corbett. Reflecting on the meeting, Tench wrote: ‘I confess that I never looked at these people without pity and astonishment. They had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty, having combated every hardship and conquered every difficulty.’ As Jenny’s daughter does, little Charlotte Bryant died aboard the Gorgon and was bur
ied at sea.

  Mary’s hearings before the stipendiary magistrate would have taken place in an office rather than a courtroom, and there is no evidence that people visited her cell in Newgate for entertainment (though the practice wasn’t unknown).

  As for the other significant man in Mary’s life, James Boswell did put her up in a house and then sent her a stipend after she returned to Cornwall, until his death. The nature of their relationship remains uncertain, although there was at least one risqué poem about them that did the rounds of London.

  And that is the last we know of Mary for certain. Another Mary Bryant married in a different part of Cornwall many years later, but as Judith Cook points out, the girl from Botany Bay (as she was dubbed by writer Frederick Pottle) would have been in her late forties at a time when female life expectancy was forty.

  So the epilogue is a complete fabrication: I wrote for Jenny the ending I feel Mary deserves.

  The books and documents I relied on in writing this story include:

  •A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson in New South Wales, Watkin Tench

  •An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, David Collins

  •The Voyage of Arthur Phillip to Botany Bay, Arthur Phillip

  •Memorandoms by James Martin, ed. Tim Causer, University College London

  •The Transportation, Escape and Pardoning of Mary Bryant, C.H. Currey

  •Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay, Frederick A. Pottle

  •To Brave Every Danger, Judith Cook

  •The Girl from Botany Bay, Carolly Erickson

  •Mary Bryant – Her Life and Escape from Botany Bay, Jonathan King

  •1788: The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet, David Hill

  •The Colony, Grace Karskens

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I owe more than I can say to Tom and Judy Keneally, both generally and in relation to this book. Tom is the one who first told me the story of Mary Bryant, and he and Judy were massively generous with their time in reading early drafts and giving feedback.

  I’m also indebted to Jonathan King for his advice, Tony Curtis for sharing his maritime expertise, Gay Hendrickson for her friendship and historical nous, and Aunty Edna Watson for reading the book from an Aboriginal perspective.

  Of course there’s no book without a publisher, and I’m so grateful to Angela Meyer of Bonnier Publishing Australia for her unflagging passion and commitment to the project.

  I’m also indebted to my agent, Fiona Inglis, for believing in this book from the beginning.

  Finally, to Craig, Rory and Alex, for putting up with the strange creature tapping away in the corner. I love you all.

  Meg Keneally started her working life as a junior public affairs officer at the Australian Consulate-General in New York, before moving to Dublin to work as a subeditor and freelance features writer. On returning to Australia, she joined the Daily Telegraph as a general news reporter, covering everything from courts to crime to animals’ birthday parties at the zoo. She then joined Radio 2UE as a talkback radio producer, before working for many years in corporate affairs.

  Meg is co-author with Tom Keneally of The Soldier’s Curse, The Unmourned and The Power Game, the first three books in The Monsarrat Series. She lives in Sydney with her husband and two children.