Afterword

No one knows what became of Mary Bryant after she returned to Fowey in the fall of 1793. Early the following year Mary’s cousin Ned Puckey wrote to Boswell to send him Mary’s thanks for all his kindness to her, and the note was signed with her initials. Boswell sent Mary her allowance, and received an assurance that she was continuing to conduct herself properly and had not fallen back, as so many convicts did, into a life of crime.

There was no further word of the inheritance.

Then in May of 1795 Boswell died, and his heirs canceled Mary’s annuity.

It is possible that Mary died at about the same time as her benefactor, either in an epidemic or of a recurrence of malaria. Or, since there is no record in Fowey or surrounding parishes of the deaths of either Mary or Dolly or their parents, it is possible that the entire family moved away.

A woman named Mary Bryant is listed in the parish records of another Cornish town, Breage, in October of 1807. This Mary Bryant married a man named Richard Thomas, and had a daughter, Mary Anne, in 1811 and another daughter, Elizabeth, in July of 1812. But by 1812 the Mary Bryant of our story would have been forty-seven years old, assuming she survived, and most women in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century England did not live that long, let alone bear children at such an advanced age.

Very likely we will never know what became of Mary. Like Boswell’s brief record of her journey, and Will Bryant’s log from the voyage up the coast of New Holland, Mary simply vanished into the obscurity that cloaks most far-off things, especially the lives of women. In Australia Mary is known today as a heroine, to the rest of the world she is only a name, and a little-known name. Her remarkable story ends, for us, in a small Cornish town in 1794, in a time of war and a season of gathering darkness.