II

TWO MONTHS LATER a cart bumped along the new turnpike road that led upland from Plymouth, making good time as the road was paved and its few ruts kept regularly repaired. Spring had nearly come, the forsythia were in bud, the showy flowers of the mesembryanthemum just beginning to appear among clumps of bright fleshy green leaves. As the road rose higher, beginning to skirt the edge of Dartmoor, the prisoners could glimpse the sea in the distance, its blue expanse dotted with fishing boats, its surface dimpled with ripples and the froth of breaking waves.

Immense granite boulders rose up out of the moorland, the bogs bright green and the gushing streams broad and swift after months of rain. Many hours after leaving Plymouth the cart rounded Hay Tor, and from its height, the prisoners could look across to the red cliffs of Budleigh Salterton and down into the lush estuary of Teignmouth.

But to Mary Broad, and the companions to whom she was shackled by heavy iron chains, the wide vistas, the warm sun and soft air brought scant comfort. They were dirty, hungry, thirsty, and desperately uncomfortable, and all that awaited them at the end of their journey was more dirt, hunger, thirst and misery—and then, most likely, execution.

Villagers shouted at them and threw clods of earth as they passed, even the children yelling out abuse. No shelter was provided for them during the cold night hours, no privacy, no way even to relieve themselves, as they were kept shackled. The beauties of the Exe Valley, the waterfalls, budding apple orchards, fields of wild daffodils, passed in a blur. At last the towers of Exeter Cathedral came into view, and then the roofline of the medieval guildhall, and the spires of the lesser churches. The cart trundled on toward Exeter Castle where the prisoners were taken off and led to the jail.

The Lenten Assizes opened with some ceremony, the two presiding justices, Sir James Eyre, Baron of the Court of Exchequer, and Sir Beaumont Hotham, his deputy, processing solemnly in their long black gowns, elaborate wigs and tricorn hats along Exeter High Street accompanied by the Lord Mayor, barristers, the sheriff and under-sheriff and an array of lesser dignitaries. The Quarter Sessions were an important occasion, a solemn season in the town’s year. They combined pomp and the gravity of the law with the aweful spectacle of justice being done to malefactors—for at the conclusion of the sessions, those condemned to death were hanged. The townspeople expected their quota of hangings; if enough thieves, murderers, counterfeiters and embezzlers were executed, then the law was thought to be effectively combatting crime.

Sir James Eyre, in his gown and high-piled wig, was the solemn representative of none other than His Majesty George III; the justice he dispensed was the king’s own justice. The assizes were called into session in the king’s name, the prisoners indicted, tried and sentenced on his behalf. When Mary and her companions were ushered into the courtroom where Mr. Justice Eyre and Mr. Justice Hotham presided, they were, by extension, standing in the presence of royalty, and were expected to conduct themselves accordingly.

But the room in which they found themselves was, if contemporary accounts are to be trusted, nothing fit for royalty—rather the reverse. Courtrooms stank of the reeking clothes and infected bodies of prisoners, many of whom had “the itch”—a scabrous skin disease—and all of whom were crawling with lice. The courtroom air, one magistrate wrote, was “the most unwholesome, as well as nauseous, air in the universe.”¹ At some Quarter Sessions, jail fever (typhus) carried off not only prisoners but jurymen, barristers, even judges. Spectators in the courtroom brought scented handkerchieves and bunches of flowers to hold under their noses while they watched the proceedings; when they left, they checked their coat sleeves and petticoats for fleas and lice.

When Mary’s name was called she went forward to stand before the wooden frame of the bar, a strapping, dark-haired, grey-eyed young woman, five feet four inches tall, grimy but stalwart and unabashed. No doubt she looked much coarsened by life, her hands chapped and rough, her speech raw and thick with the local accent of Fowey, her complexion reddened from drink and exposure to the sun and the stinging Cornish wind.

The clerk who took down the bare details of Mary’s court appearance did not record anything of her truculent stoicism as she faced Justice Eyre and his black-robed colleagues. Her accusation was read out: that she did “feloniously assault Agnes Lakeman, spinster, on the King’s Highway, putting her to corporeal fear and danger of her life” and that she stole, “violently,” a silk bonnet and other goods worth eleven pounds eleven shillings. The judges were stern, the law unforgiving. Mary Broad was sentenced to be hanged for highway robbery.

Highway robbers were noted for their nonchalance in the face of death; the most notorious of them gave banquets in prison on the night before their hangings, and went to the scaffold the following morning swaggering and grinning.² Mary did her best to emulate her predecessors, steeling herself not to react to the words of condemnation, remaining stalwart and outwardly unafraid, though her knees felt weak and she could not help seeking out her accomplices Catherine Fryer and Mary Haydon, who were in the courtroom with her, awaiting their own trials.

As soon as her sentence was read out, Mary was taken away and another prisoner brought to the bar.

There was a long file of prisoners coming up to stand before the bar that day, young and old, robust and withered, some demoralized, some loud and obstinate, a few broken in spirit, more calloused, annealed by years of conflict with the law. The roll call of prisoners was a melancholy one: Elizabeth Cole, who stole a few bits of pottery, Elizabeth Baker, who stole a calf skin, Susannah Handford, who was being tried posthumously for having “taken powders” to produce an abortion (the powders made her ill, and ultimately she bled to death). Most of the accused were being tried for theft, or assault, or breach of the peace.

James Martin, a tall, muscular Irishman from County Antrim, twenty-six years old, was convicted of stealing eleven heavy iron bolts from the Powderham Castle estate of his employer, Viscount Courtney.³ The viscount being a prominent figure, the case drew local interest; when Martin was sentenced to be hanged, there may have been an audible sigh of satisfaction in the courtroom.

Nearly four hours were devoted to the trial of Thomas Ruffel, a steward accused of the murders of his master and mistress. Ruffel professed his innocence, presented witnesses in his defense and insisted that the murders were committed by another or others. But Justice Eyre and his colleagues were implacable, the evidence was against Ruffel and he was sentenced to be hanged, and afterwards to be dismembered and “anatomized.”

No one expected leniency, particularly when the accused were adjudged to be guilty of crimes punishable by death—which included everything from treason and murder to shoplifting, malicious maiming of cattle and shooting at a revenue officer. Cutting down trees was punishable by execution, as was sending threatening letters or pulling down houses or counterfeiting or kidnapping an heiress.⁴ It was not unheard-of for a justice to take into account the character of the accused, and the circumstances under which his or her crime was committed. But most prisoners were assumed to be “abandoned characters,” incapable of amendment or moral rehabilitation, better off dead.⁵ Pregnant women convicted of capital crimes could apply to be examined by a panel of matrons who might recommend that they be spared, at least until their babies were born.⁶ Some judges took bribes, especially from women prisoners, offering the women liberty in exchange for “amicable visits.”⁷ Justice Eyre and his fellow judges seem to have been incorruptible, and the assizes took their inexorable course, with prisoner after prisoner condemned to be whipped or pilloried, to be imprisoned or, in many cases, to die.

After several days, the long list of cases having come to an end, the hangings began. The townsfolk of Exeter gathered at Heavitree to watch the executions. When Thomas Ruffel was dragged to the scaffold, struggling and shouting out great oaths, they watched—some shuddering, some laughing, some crossing themselves in superstitious fear—as he lashed out at the hangman and, failing in his efforts to free himself, swung and danced crazily at the end of the rope until he strangled.

Mary was waiting her turn, unaware that events in London were to bring about her deliverance.

In the fall of 1786 the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury ordered that a new colony was to be planted, in New South Wales, on the southeastern corner of the vast continent that the Dutch claimed under the name of New Holland—and that we now know as Australia. The English Captain Cook, traveling in the Endeavour with the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, had charted the fertile east coast of the continent in 1770, and the British claimed that coast, and all the adjacent islands, in the name of King George.

The plantation of the new colony was intended not only to undergird the British claim to the land but to solve the growing problem of jail overcrowding. For well over a century it had been customary to transport British convicts to colonial areas; convict labor had been an essential element in the widening and strengthening of the empire.⁸ With the outbreak of the American War of Independence, they could no longer be sent to the American colonies. New settlements had to be considered. One proposal was that a colony be started on the River Gambia, on the Atlantic coast of Africa. A survey ship was sent out, the sloop Nautilus, in August of 1785, but the officers reported that the coast was dry and inhospitable. The Caffre Coast was also considered, before being rejected because the British government preferred not to risk conflict with the Dutch, who were well established there. Other locales were evaluated: Madagascar, Tristan da Cunha, Algiers, Canada, the West Indies. Entrepreneurs suggested sending convicts to work in the herring fisheries in the North Sea, or to mine coal or work in lead factories.⁹ But New South Wales, despite its distance from Britain, seemed to offer the best combination of qualities—a temperate climate, inviting terrain and thousands of square miles of empty land. Virgin territory, tabula rasa, a clean slate, where prisoners could work out their years of exile while building a self-sufficient community subject to the British crown.

By the time the Easter Assizes were being held in Exeter, six transport vessels and three supply ships had been chartered and officers and crew assigned for the journey to New South Wales.

Throughout the fall and winter of 1786-1787, vessels were acquired, mariners and officers appointed, purveyors of food and supplies contracted. Only one requisite was missing: female companions for the hundreds of convicts and unmarried soldiers and officials. (An all-male community was not to be contemplated; its probable sexual vagaries would be an abomination.) At first the suggestion was made that Polynesian women could be kidnapped and brought to the new colony as companions for the men, but that tentative plan was set aside.¹⁰ Instead, an ingenious idea was put forward, that female convicts, who were all assumed to be “abandoned” women, ought to be provided for the men, serving their sexual needs while at the same time helping to clear the overcrowded jails.

Justice Eyre and his colleagues had been ordered to choose, from among the men and women condemned to execution or prison, those who were relatively young and strong for transportation to New South Wales.¹¹ Sixteen were chosen, their names read out in a sonorous roll call: Thomas Watson, Anthony Mayne, James Martin the tall Irishman from County Antrim, William Coombe called “Kneebone,” and so on until the final three names, Mary Haydon, Catherine Fryer and Mary Broad.

Reprieve!

When she heard her name read, all Mary’s stoic defiance fell away, replaced by a puzzled hopefulness. She and the others were to be “transported beyond the seas” to an unnamed destination. They would serve out their seven-year sentences in this unknown place, and after that they would be free.

She was free now—free of the dread of death. Seven years was not such a long time, only about one-third of her life so far. In seven years she would be twenty-seven, nearly twenty-eight. Young enough to start afresh. Catherine and Mary would be going along to the new place, to serve their sentences alongside her. She would not be completely friendless there.

With some slight apprehension, mingled with a deep relief, Mary heard the clerk announce the term of her sentence. His Majesty had been graciously pleased to extend the royal mercy to her; she had been saved.

With iron shackles attached to her ankles, and chained to her fellow convicts by an iron chain, Mary Broad was put aboard a cart to be taken away. But this journey was far different from the one she had taken only a few short days before. As the cart rumbled along the high road out of Exeter, her iron bonds felt lighter, the air fresher and warmer, the newly opened flowers of the forsythia bright with color. And when they reached the edge of Dartmoor, on the high ground, she looked out eagerly toward the horizon for her first glimpse of the sea, knowing that before long a ship would be waiting in the harbor to take her to a new life.