If a man knows not what harbour he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

Seneca

The ones that got away

JIM HAYNES

BUILDING STURDY SEA-GOING VESSELS in the colony of New South Wales was a risky business in the convict era. Early governors and colonial administrators were faced with a dilemma as far as shipbuilding was concerned.

Ships and boats were the only viable means of transport, not only to and from the colony, but also around the colony. However, due to the British East India Company’s government-approved monopoly, no vessel capable of trading with Asia or the South Seas could be built in the colony.

At first the two government ships, HMS Sirius and Supply, were used along with the whaleboats, cutters and other small vessels that arrived with the First Fleet. When the last of the transports departed in July 1788, leaving only the Sirius and Supply, the harbour had very few boats of any kind to do the carrying, exploring and guarding necessary to the colony’s existence. This became more apparent eighteen months after arriving, when Governor Arthur Phillip decided to set up a second settlement on better farming land at a place he considered more easily defendable than the wide expanses of the harbour. Originally called Rose Hill, this place was generally known early on as Parramatta.

The presence of a second settlement was the main reason that the first substantial vessel was built in the colony. In October 1789, the 12-ton vessel Rose Hill Packet was launched, designed to use sails, oars or poles to carry stores between the two settlements at Sydney and Parramatta. Rose Hill Packet was a rather clumsy, barge-like vessel, universally known as ‘The Lump’. Her brief life was over by 1800, as other government vessels had by then been acquired or built and small private ferries—such as those operated by colourful ex-convict Billy Blue—were operating around the harbour and the river, charging fares for passengers and freight.

Colonial authorities were constantly anxious about escape attempts and sought ways to prevent the possibility of convicts stealing away—so in 1791, after the Bryant family and seven other convicts successfully made off in the government fishing boat, a regulation was introduced prohibiting the building of vessels more than 14 feet in length.

Out of necessity this regulation was later relaxed, but a strict control was kept on boat-building, and ships were not allowed to anchor up in those places in the harbour where they could be easily seized by footloose convicts.

Needless to say, all the efforts of the guards and marines and the New South Wales Corps could not possibly prevent every cunning or desperate bid for freedom—and there were many.

Peter Parris

Escape attempts began as soon as the convicts came ashore. Probably the first man to escape by sea was French-born convict Peter Parris, sentenced to death for burglary in Exeter in 1783 and transported on the Scarborough.

French explorer La Perouse was camped at Botany Bay for many weeks after the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove and, within days of the convicts being set ashore, escaping convicts began visiting his camp, some seeking asylum or places in his crew. La Perouse told Lieutenant Dawes, who visited his camp, that he turned them all away, with scant rations sufficient to get them back to Sydney Cove.

La Perouse was a man of his word, but it does seem odd that Peter Parris, French-born convict, disappeared within days of the colony being established, never to be seen or heard from again. My guess is that he died on Vanikoro with the rest of the La Perouse expedition. Whether the Count knew he was taken on board or not, who can say?

Mary Bryant

While some of the more simple-minded convicts attempted to flee overland and met their death in the bush from starvation or fatal encounters with various Aboriginal tribes, the only ‘sane’ and practical way to escape was by sea. Escape of any kind was highly unlikely to succeed, but life was grim for the convicts whether they stayed or ran. After all, the whole point of sending convicts to ‘Botany Bay’ was that the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury knew it was a place ‘from whence it is hardly possible for persons to return without permission’.

‘Hardly possible’ perhaps, but not entirely impossible.

In September 1790, a former seaman and highwayman, John Tarwood, stole a leaky boat from the South Head lookout station and set off for Tahiti with four other convicts. Five years later, the four survivors of this daring escapade were found alive but somewhat emaciated at Port Stephens, where they had survived due to the generosity of the Aborigines.

Against all odds, the convict Mary Bryant escaped in 1791 and successfully returned to her home in Cornwall; what’s more, she received a pardon and financial aid, from no less a personage than James Boswell, the biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson.

Unlike the spontaneous or opportunistic escapes that occurred from time to time, the escape of William and Mary Bryant, their two children and seven convict companions was carefully planned and well prepared.

William was well qualified for the breakaway attempt. He was a Cornish fisherman sentenced to death—commuted to seven years transportation to America—for a smuggling offence (‘resisting revenue officers’) in 1784 at the age of 26. As the American option had already been lost to Britain when the American War of Independence ended a year earlier, William spent the first half of his sentence on the hulks, where he met Mary Broad (referred to as Mary Braund in the court records), daughter of a mariner and also from Cornwall.

Mary was described as being ‘marked with smallpox with one knee bent but not lame’. She was five feet four inches in height, with grey eyes, brown hair and a sallow complexion. Her family were associated with the sea and were also noted sheep-stealers. Mary was sentenced to death, commuted to transportation, for assaulting and robbing a spinster in company with two other young women when she was 20.

William and Mary both travelled on the Charlotte with the First Fleet. William was trusted with the supervision of food distribution, and Mary gave birth to a daughter during the voyage. She gave her daughter the name of the ship on which she was born, Charlotte.

The couple were married at Sydney Cove, along with several other couples, on 10 February 1788 by the Reverend Johnson.

William’s privileged position continued in Port Jackson, where he was given a hut apart from the other convicts and was made the fisherman for the colony. He was also put in charge of the colony’s small boats.

One reason for the hut being set apart from the other convicts on the eastern side of the Tank Stream was to prevent an easy trade in black-market fish developing. However, on 4 February 1789, William was caught selling some of his catch. He was dismissed from his post as fisherman, lost his hut, and received 100 lashes. Mary was forced to deliver their second child, a son, in the convict camp at The Rocks.

William continued in a lesser role, maintaining the colony’s small boats and helping with the fishing, as he was the most skilled and capable man for the job. He took extra care to maintain the government cutter, as he had a plan for escape, but he cunningly waited until there were no ships in the colony capable of pursuit.

The escape was meticulously organised. After the boat was overturned in a squall, Bryant restored it to first-class order with new sails, new masts and a complete refit—all at government expense. He and Mary stashed away 100 pounds of rice, the same of flour and also salt pork, water, tents and tools.

The Sirius was wrecked at Norfolk Island, and the Supply on its way to Norfolk Island, when Dutch supply ship Waaksamheyd sailed out of Port Jackson on 28 March 1791. The Waaksamheyd was a ‘snaw brig’—a two-masted merchant ship—which had been chartered from Batavia by Captain Ball, who had sailed there in the Supply in April 1790. She had arrived in December 1790 with much-needed supplies, having lost most of her crew to fever on the way. After difficult negotiations between Phillip and her Captain, Detmer Smit, she was then chartered to take the crew of Sirius back to Britain for the statutory court-martial, after her loss on the reef on Norfolk Island.

William Bryant knew he was technically a free man: he had served his time. However, Governor Phillip, who was waiting for the convict indents to arrive, had no record of which convicts had served their time and which had not.

Bryant approached Captain Smit for help and outlined his escape plans to the Dutchman. Sailing and rowing a small open boat to Timor meant a voyage of 3250 miles (5200 kilometres). Smit told Bryant that Captain Bligh had made the journey from Tahiti to Timor in a similar boat, and supplied Bryant with a compass, quadrant, two guns, ammunition and detailed charts of the Great Barrier Reef.

At midnight on 28 March 1791, the same day that the Waaksamheyd sailed off to Britain, William and Mary Bryant with their two infant children and seven other convicts rowed out through Sydney Heads and turned north.

They survived storms in which they were lost in ‘mountainous seas’, and encounters with hostile Aborigines who chased them in large canoes. They navigated the Great Barrier Reef, coming ashore for water and supplies and shelter many times, and crossed the Arafura Sea. Finally, after 70 days at sea, all made it safely to Koepang, on Timor.

The Dutch Governor treated them well and believed their story about being castaways from a shipwreck—until September, when Captain Edward Edwards arrived at Koepang with survivors of his crew from the wrecked Pandora, and his captured mutineers from the Bounty. Edwards questioned the fugitives, who confessed. They were taken to the fever-ridden port of Batavia, where baby Emmanuel Bryant and his father William both died in December, three weeks apart. Mary, Charlotte and the four surviving convicts were taken to the Cape of Good Hope, but three of the others died at sea. The survivors were transferred to HMS Gorgon for the final voyage to Britain, during which Charlotte also died. Ironically Charlotte died in the very same part of the South Atlantic Ocean where she was born, just four and a half years earlier.

The press took up the story and James Boswell appealed to the Home Office for clemency. The five were ordered ‘to remain on their former sentences until they should expire’, but Mary Bryant was finally pardoned in May 1793, six weeks after her original sentence had expired. The four other male convicts were released the following November, and it is believed one of them later enlisted in the New South Wales Corps and returned to the colony.

The last that history knows of the resilient Mary Bryant is a letter of thanks received by James Boswell in November 1794, from her home in Cornwall.

Looking for China

While the Bryants and their crew were well prepared and knew exactly where they were headed, there was a general feeling among the more geographically challenged convicts that China was not far away and could be somehow reached by land or sea from Sydney Cove.

A group of convicts undertook one of the saddest escapes sometime during the first decade of the colony. They stole a boat and seven of them were found in 1798, living on an island near Western Port, in what was later named Bass Strait. The man who found them, a very surprised George Bass, was supposedly the first European to explore the area.

The men had been abandoned there by the rest of the group. Bass set five ashore with directions to Sydney, a compass and rations, and took the two weakest on board for the return trip to Sydney. Those set ashore were never seen again.

Naturally Bass asked them what were they doing on an island off the south coast of the continent. They replied that they had been trying to sail to China! Perhaps those who abandoned their companions on the island perished attempting to find China somewhere in the Great Southern Ocean.

Some forty years later, in an act of daring piracy, a bunch of desperate convicts did steal a ship—the brig Cyprus—and sail to China. But there were other daring escape attempts in the meantime.

The wreck of the Trial

In September 1816 the brig Trial was anchored up near the Sow and Pigs Reef, at Middle Head in Sydney Harbour, waiting for a favourable wind to make a trading trip to Launceston, then more commonly known as Port Dalrymple.

The Trial was owned by ex-convict and successful merchant Simeon Lord, who would spend many years attempting to get around the restrictions placed on his trading by the fact that he was an ex-convict, and also by the monopoly of the British East India Company in Asia. Oddly, the ship had the same name as the first British ship to ever sight the Australian coast. The earlier Tryall (sometimes Tryal or Trial ) was wrecked off the west coast of Australia in 1622 on what became known as Trial Rocks; the captain and some of the crew made it to Batavia in the ship’s boat.

The Trial we are talking about was seized on 12 September 1816, by a party of thirteen convicts who had escaped from Hyde Park Barracks. They not only seized the ship, they kidnapped the captain, crew and passengers, including a stowaway—an escaped convict named Anne Shortis, who had been smuggled on board by a crew member. It is not even known with accuracy who was on board—the passengers and crew numbered between eight and ten, and there were probably three women and one child.

It was an unlucky Friday 13 for Governor Macquarie, who immediately labelled it an act of piracy and noted in his journal:

Friday 13 Sept. About 12,O’Clock this Day, Capt. Piper the Naval Officer sent me a written Report, stating that in the middle of last Night or early this morning before Daylight, a Banditti of Runaway Convicts went on board of the Brig Trial (belonging to Simeon Lord Esqr.), seized and Piratically carried off from Watson’s Bay near the Heads—where she lay at anchor waiting for a fair Wind, and by Day-break She was out of Sight.

Immediately on receiving this intelligence I directed the Colonial Brig Rosetta to be hired and armed to be sent after the Fugitive Pirates, and She accordingly saild [sic] at 5,O’Clock this Evening, having a Party of Soldiers on board.

Exactly two weeks later the governor noted:

Friday 27 Sept. Evening about 7,O’Clock, the Colonial Brig Rosetta— which had been fitted out and sent in Pursuit of the Brig Carried off in the Night of the 12th. Inst. by a Banditti of Convict Pirates—anchored in Sydney Cove, after cruising for a Fortnight in hopes of seeing and retaking the Trial but without Success. The Rosetta extended her Cruise to the Northward as far as Howe’s Island—and then returned—not having seen or heard any thing of the Trial.

What actually did happen to the Trial was mostly pieced together from conversations with Aborigines, who gave accounts to Captain Thomas Whyte of the government ship Lady Nelson, which sailed from Newcastle in January 1817 to search for the Trial, after reports of a wreck were received from outposts near Port Stephens.

Whyte found remains of the brig and a canvas tent on a beach about 60 miles (100 kilometres) north of Port Stephens, but no trace of any survivors.

Using sign language and drawings in the sand, a story was put together that the Trial came into shore, probably to find water, and was wrecked by the surf after being run aground on a sand bar. After some time ashore, the escaped convicts constructed a boat from the timbers of the wreck and put out to sea. The boat was swamped within sight of the shore, and all aboard her drowned in the surf.

It seems that the passengers and crew, along with several convicts, did not attempt to escape from the beach in the makeshift boat. One group tried to reach Port Stephens, while Anne Shortis and the remaining convicts remained on the beach near the wreck.

It is fairly certain that the men who remained on the beach were killed by the Aborigines, and it seems that Anne Shortis and Emily Bardon, wife of the captain of the Trial, survived for some years, separately, living with the Aborigines.

There were many reports from the area over the ensuing years of a ‘white lubra’. The resulting searches led to the opening up of the area, which had been the far northern limit of the colony when the wreck occurred.

When Port Macquarie was established as a penal colony in 1821, the bay in which the wreck was found was named Trial Bay. A reward offered for knowledge of survivors of the wreck led to a woman, said to be Emily Bardon, being restored to her family in 1831. She was in a ‘wretched and distracted state’ and died shortly afterwards.

The Kempsey area was opened up by cedar-cutters in 1836; the following year, two ‘renegade’ Aborigines were tracked down by police after attacking settlers. One was shot and the other, named Billy Blueshirt, told troopers that his mother was the white woman from the wreck, Anne Shortis.

The amazing Mr Swallow

The runaways who actually did make it to China did so aboard a 110-ton, two-masted brig called the Cyprus.

During August 1829, Cyprus was anchored up in Recherche Bay, on the very southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land, taking shelter from a late winter storm.

About sixty people were crammed on board the 70-foot ship. Thirty-three were convicts being transferred in chains from Hobart to the harsher prison settlement on Sarah Island, at Macquarie Harbour, on the island’s wild west coast.

Lieutenant Carew, a native of Cork and newly arrived from Britain, was in charge of the transfer. Also on board were Captain Harrison and his crew; Dr Wilson, who was in charge of the prisoners’ welfare; twelve soldiers of the 63rd Regiment; Carew’s young wife and two children; and the wife and child of one of the soldiers. In her hold, the Cyprus carried three months supply of food and other goods for the convict settlement at Macquarie Harbour.

While the vessel sheltered in the safe waters of the bay, Lieutenant Carew, in command of the guard but not the ship, allowed the convicts to exercise on deck five at a time without their chains. He also allowed several of them, who were experienced sailors, to work as part of the crew.

Two of those he allowed to work as crewmen became the main players in what occurred next.

Cockney John Pobjoy was aged 29—the same age as Carew— when the Cyprus was seized. At seventeen, he was sentenced to death, commuted to fourteen years transportation, for stealing a horse worth five pounds. In Sydney he was accused of robbery, for which he received 200 lashes and was sent to Van Diemen’s Land.

William Walker—alias Swallow; alias Brown; alias Shields; alias Captain Waldron—was a 40-year-old seaman from North Shields, near Sunderland, who was married with two children. The year before, as William Swallow, he was convicted of house-breaking in Surrey and sentenced to transportation for life to Van Diemen’s Land on the Georgiana. He was actually William Walker, a convict who had escaped from the same colony six years earlier.

William Walker/Swallow/Brown/Shields had a remarkable life. Born in 1792, he worked on coal boats from the age of fifteen and was press-ganged into the navy at eighteen. He served two years and then fell victim to the depression and unemployment that followed the Napoleonic Wars. In 1820 he was sentenced at Durham Assizes to seven years transportation for stealing a quilt and goods valued at eight pence.

On the way to London to be put aboard the hulks, he evidently convinced another prisoner to jump overboard. The poor fellow did so and drowned, while Walker used the diversion to slip over the other side himself and stay afloat using some cork he had found on board. He was picked up by a passing ship and put ashore in London, claiming he was a sailor who had fallen from the rigging.

After earning some money as a rigger he grew a beard, called himself Brown and returned to Sunderland as a crewman on a collier. He was recognised and arrested, convicted of absconding, sent to the hulks and transported to Van Diemen’s Land on the Malabar in 1821.

In early 1822 Walker and several other convicts stole a schooner, belonging to influential grazier and merchant Anthony Kemp, from the Derwent River and escaped. Walker was found living in Sydney as John Shields, posing as a seaman apprenticed to a merchant ship.

For attempting to escape he was sentenced to 150 lashes and transportation to the more brutal Tasmanian penal settlement of Sarah Island. He was placed on board a ship called the Deveron, which was almost wrecked in a huge storm on the way back to Hobart. Walker saved the day by climbing the mast in mountainous seas to cut away the top-mast, which was broken and fouling the rigging of the ship. No doubt due to his heroism on the Deveron, his transfer to Sarah Island was cancelled.

In 1823, Walker somehow stowed away on the Deveron and escaped again, eventually returning to England via Rio de Janeiro. He lived with his wife and two children for six years—until his arrest for house-breaking led to his life sentence and return, as William Swallow, on the Georgiana.

William Swallow was put to work on boats for a month, and was then part of the crew loading the Georgiana, which had been chartered to take wheat, onions and potatoes to Sydney after unloading the convicts. He was found hiding among the cargo after the ship’s departure was delayed, and sentenced to 50 lashes and transportation to Sarah Island, yet again, for ‘absconding from the public works with the intention of escaping’.

Walker was flogged, but again escaped being sent to Macquarie Harbour by claiming he fell asleep in the hold. His luck was about to run out, however, as about this time someone realised who he was, and he and another convict were locked in the cells for ‘being runaways and returned under second sentence of transportation’.

William Walker/Swallow should have been hanged; it was the mandatory sentence for the crime. Instead he was put aboard the brig Cyprus to be sent to Sarah Island, Macquarie Harbour. But it would be two years before he arrived there.

William Walker and John Pobjoy were working as part of the crew when the Cyprus was anchored up in Recherche Bay. There are two versions of what happened next.

One version says security was lax and Lieutenant Carew and Dr Williams went fishing in the longboat with Pobjoy, and their negligence allowed the mutiny to unfold.

The other version has it that the fishing trip was a ploy to enable Pobjoy to inform Carew and Williams that a plot was afoot against the ship by Walker and some others.

Nevertheless, while they were in the longboat, the plot was sprung. The guards were overwhelmed by the four unchained convicts, who were exercising on deck. A chicken coop was used to block the hatchway and keep the other soldiers below decks while the prisoners were freed. The soldiers fired up through the decks, but the convicts poured water down on them to make their muskets useless. They secured the ship and told the soldiers they would not be harmed if they surrendered their weapon.

Fearing for his family’s safety, Carew complied with the convicts’ directions. All passengers, crew and convicts unwilling to take part in the plan were conveyed to the shore with a few rations, which took five trips. Last to leave the ship was Pobjoy, who dived overboard as Walker set sail and swam ashore.

Apart from two guards who were knocked on the head at the start, no-one was hurt and the Cyprus sailed off with eighteen men aboard, leaving 44 people marooned on the beach at Recherche Bay.

Some bark shelters were built and two convicts set out to walk back to Hobart along the coast. After swimming the Huon River, they encountered hostile Aborigines and fled without their clothes, swimming back across the river and returning to the others. Another five convicts then set off for Hobart, going inland through the bush.

Meanwhile, a Welsh convict called Morgan constructed a coracle from canvas and wattle, made waterproof with wax and soap brought ashore with personal effects. Morgan and Pobjoy used the flimsy craft to cross the d’Entrecasteaux Channel to Partridge Island, where they found the ship Orelia, which they had attempted to signal days earlier as it passed by.

The Orelia sent a boat to pick up those on the beach. Another boat from Hobart found the other five convicts a few days later.

Lieutenant Carew was court-martialled, found guilty of negligence and cashiered, but then pardoned and allowed to keep his commission. He later served with the regiment in India, fathered three more children and died in Ireland in 1847.

John Pobjoy received a full pardon and returned to London, where he came to the notice of the police when he bashed the father of a woman he was ‘courting’. He was soon in trouble again: arrested and brought before the Thames Street magistrates for house-breaking. In what was to prove a crucial event, he used his patriotic exploits in Tasmania as character references to secure his acquittal.

Meanwhile, the remarkable William Walker/Sparrow sailed the Cyprus to New Zealand, and then past Tahiti to Keppel Island in Tonga, where seven convicts left the ship. One man was lost overboard, and three others went ashore on islands in the China Sea, before the remaining seven finally reached the coast of China.

There the Cyprus was scuttled. The convicts used the longboat to reach shore, where they spun a concocted story that they were survivors of a wrecked ship called the Edward.

Walker, using the alias Captain Waldron, and three others returned to London after signing on as crew on the Charles Grant. The other three sailed to America on a Danish ship and were never heard of again. Meanwhile, the three who left the Cyprus for the islands of the China Sea arrived in Canton and told different versions of the alibi story. Then news arrived from Sydney of the mutiny, and one of the survivors confessed. The Kellie Castle sailed to London, with one of the convicts as a prisoner, and arrived six days before the Charles Grant. Three of those on the Charles Grant were arrested; Swallow escaped, but was later found and stood trial with them.

The case against the four was confused and flimsy until, as luck would have it, they were brought to court at Thames Street, and the clerk of court remembered John Pobjoy’s story and he was called as a witness.

Two of the convicts, Davis and Watt, were hanged at Execution Dock—probably the last men hanged for piracy in Britain.

Swallow somehow convinced the court that he was forced to do as the others ordered and was only an unwilling member of the mutiny. He and the other two were sent back to Hobart and finally arrived at Sarah Island prison in Macquarie Harbour—just as the authorities were closing it down.

Another of the men who left the ship in the Pacific was later found and hanged in Hobart.

Pobjoy was outraged that the leader of the mutiny escaped the noose, and attempted to secure a pension as a reward for his part in the affair. However, Queen Adelaide, Viscount Melbourne, the Duke of Wellington and the Admiralty refused Pobjoy’s requests for some reward. He returned to the sea and died when swept overboard from his ship, returning from a voyage to bring timber from Canada in August 1833. He had married in June 1832, and a daughter was baptised two months after his death.

William Walker spent a year at Sarah Island and was then sent to Port Arthur, where he died of tuberculosis in May 1834. Amazingly, his official convict record noted that he was ‘a very good man’.

Postscript—the Frederick

During the year that William Walker spent at Sarah Island, the noted ship-builder David Hoy supervised the construction of a 20-foot brig, the Frederick, as a project to give skills and trades to the younger convicts. A group of ten felons stayed on after the gaol closed down, to complete the project.

The same group of convicts who helped build the ship commandeered her while she was being trialled in January 1834, put the overseers and prison guards ashore, and sailed 6000 miles (9600 kilometres) in forty days to the coast of Chile, where they used the longboat to get to shore, posing as shipwrecked mariners.

The leader of the escapade, Londoner James Porter, who had spent time at sea and lived in Chile before being transported for life for theft, was hunted down and arrested in 1836. He was sentenced to death for piracy, but the sentence was commuted to life. Porter spent four years on Norfolk Island before returning to Newcastle— only to escape again in 1847, as a stowaway on the brig Sir John Byng. He was never heard of again.

William Walker would have approved.

Even forty years after Governor Phillip’s ban on boat-building, assembling sturdy sea-going vessels was a risky business.