The Girl From Botany Bay

The flagship of the small fleet, the ship-of-war Sirius, sleek and trim, towered over the squat merchantmen, her tall masts rising to fifty feet or more, while the three supply ships Borrowdale, Golden Grove and Fishburn, and the tender Supply, an old brig-rigged sloop, bobbed in the waves, junior members of the fleet. Nearby was the Hyena, the twenty-four-gun frigate that would escort the fleet out of the harbor and stay with it for the first week of its long journey, until it came safely past the Scilly Isles.

All the ships except the Hyena had been waiting nearly two months in the roadstead for the day of departure, taking aboard crew and stores, supplies and equipment, and waiting for good weather. The contractors hired to provide the many essentials for the voyage—food, live animals, coals, wood, clothing, extra ropes and spare sails, platters, pots, brooms and swabs, casks, blankets—had been late in delivering them. Even now, on the eve of departure, launches came back and forth from the shore to the vessels waiting at anchor in the roads, ferrying supplies.

The convoy was bound for New South Wales, the transports carrying some seven hundred and fifty convicts, nearly two hundred of them women. An equal number of crew members, merchant seamen, naval ratings and officers and marines, plus twenty-eight of the marines’ wives and seventeen of their children, made up the total of nearly fifteen hundred aboard.

The commander of the fleet, Governor Arthur Phillip, was troubled about the coming voyage. He knew the hazards of such a lengthy journey—fifteen thousand miles—and the challenges to navigation and seamanship that it would present. Phillip was an experienced captain with long service in both the English and Portuguese navies, and had been at sea for most of his forty-eight years. He trusted his abilities. But there were serious impediments to the success of the voyage, and now, as the final day of preparation arrived, he was forced to concede that there was nothing more he could do to correct them. He had written letter after letter to the Navy Board, asking that the many defects he was aware of be remedied and warning of disaster if they were not. But his letters had not produced results, and in exasperation, he had gone on record as declining any responsibility for any deaths that might occur because of inadequate preparation and insufficient food and equipment.²

There were so many deficiencies. The transport ships were overcrowded and inadequately provisioned. There was not enough bread, no lime juice for the convicts to drink or sauerkraut for them to eat to prevent scurvy, no adequate regulation prison clothing for the convicts. Contractors had delivered hundreds of prison suits for the men, but they were all of the same size. The boots they supplied were adequate for land use, but fell apart when wet. Hammocks provided for sleeping were so flimsy the men fell through them on first use, and the thin, cheaply woven blankets delivered to the ships gave no warmth.³

The plight of the women convicts was particularly acute, and Phillip was sensitive to it. Prison clothing had been ordered for them, but was not complete by the day of embarkation. The women still wore the clothes in which they had been brought to trial, ragged and dingy after many months aboard the prison hulks.⁴ Phillip complained to the Navy Board about their inadequate concern for the health of the women, many of whom were ill, and a number of whom, including Mary Broad, were pregnant. An epidemic had broken out among the women of the Lady Penrhyn, and there were other ongoing medical emergencies.

The commander was concerned that his Surgeon-General John White, the youngest and ablest of the ship’s surgeons, might desert his post in frustration at the lack of antiscorbutics and medicines, the unhygienic conditions resulting from overcrowding, the lack of proper oversight of the convicts’ living conditions. During the two months that Surgeon White had been attending the convicts, marines and seamen in port, sixteen convicts aboard the Alexander had died, and a contagious mumpslike disease had broken out and was spreading throughout the fleet. There were rumors of a terrible outbreak of “ship’s fever”—typhus—that White had had to refute. Phillip had done all he could to satisfy White, ordering the Alexander cleaned and whitewashed and painted with creosote—White’s sovereign remedy against epidemics—and whitewashing the beams and sides of the ships to prevent the “unwholesome dampness” the surgeon-general detected there. But the much-needed medicines and preventives had not been delivered, and the commander was aware that his sensitive and humane principal medical officer might resign his post rather than face the certainty of more needless disease and death among his hundreds of patients. And if he resigned, he could not easily be replaced in a short time.

In the meantime the commander had other, more immediate concerns. The supply of fresh water, drawn from the noxious Thames, was unhealthy and would soon become undrinkable. Each of the ships in the fleet had been fitted out with a primitive water-freshening device called an Osbridge’s machine, operated by hand, which forced the foul water through a collander-like sieve, reducing it to “numberless drops,” as proponents of the machine explained, “which being exposed in this form to the open air is deprived of its offensive quality.”⁵ Phillip was dubious about the effectiveness of the sweetening machine, and planned to take on more fresh water in Tenerife. On further stretches of the voyage, however, there were bound to be weeks, perhaps a month or more, without any fresh water except rainwater, and this worried him.

As did the extreme shortage of ammunition for the marines. There was only enough ammunition to provide for “immediate service,” not for the entire voyage. The defect was an oversight, the result of neglect and incompetence.⁶ So far the shortage of ammunition had been kept as a closely guarded secret, but in the event of a convict rebellion—something Phillip and his officers considered quite likely to happen—the marines would be vulnerable. Aboard the Alexander, there were only thirty-five marines to guard 213 male convicts; aboard the Scarborough, only thirty-three marines to guard 208 unruly, desperate men. Only adequate firepower could prevent mutiny.

Having failed in all his appeals to the Navy Board, and with the sailing season advancing, Commander Phillip decided to embark. So, with misgivings, on the afternoon of May 12, 1787, with a fresh wind rising, he gave orders for the fleet to weigh anchor and set sail.

Commander Phillip managed to deal with the emergency, sending his second lieutenant on the Sirius, Lieutenant King, to settle affairs forcibly, no doubt threatening the rebellious crew members with irons and the lash—and within a few hours the seamen were beginning the arduous tasks of hauling in the heavy, slime-covered anchor cables and climbing the rigging to set the sails.⁸ The eleven ships of the fleet and their Hyena escort began to move slowly out to sea. A brisk wind from the southeast filled their sails as they moved, in the early hours of May 13, 1787, out of the roadstead and past the Isle of Wight.

Mary Broad, aboard the Charlotte transport with nineteen other convict women and some eighty-eight male prisoners, heard the anchor cables being hauled in and felt the rocking of the swell as the wind filled the Charlotte’s sails. She was five months pregnant, and the motion of the ship made her nauseous. To be sure, she was often nauseous; the smell of bad food, the reek of the ship made her stomach churn and heave.

She had not aborted the child when her menses stopped and she suspected her condition—or, at any rate, she had not succeeded in aborting it. Nothing is known of her relationship with the baby’s father, the mysterious Mr. Spence: whether he was a fellow convict or a guard or an officer, whether he and Mary were affectionate lovers, or whether he raped her, or whether they coupled casually, in the dark of the hold, in a momentary assuaging of mutual lust.⁹ Mary may have offered sex to Spence in return for an extra ration of food, or to avoid a beating—or to prevent being locked in the Black Hole, the lightless, all but airless cell at the bottom of the Dunkirk, full of rats and roaches, to which the most unfortunate of the prisoners aboard the hulk were sent for punishment.

Whatever the circumstances under which Mary’s child was conceived, or whatever her feelings toward its father, she continued to carry the baby, her rounded belly prominent under her ragged gown. Spence may or may not have been aboard the Charlotte, but there were several other men whom Mary had known on the Dunkirk who were now her sailing companions on the Charlotte. There was James Martin, the black-haired Irishman from County Antrim who had been convicted along with Mary at the Exeter Assizes, and James Cox, a daring, aggressive convict who was in the third year of his life sentence. William Bryant, a Cornishman and a smuggler, also in the third year of his sentence (his crime had been assaulting a revenue officer), must have come to know Mary in the course of his daily duties. He was entrusted with the job of giving out provisions at mealtimes; he was to play a prominent part in Mary’s story. Bryant, Cox and Martin were most likely similar in appearance to the “many fine young fellows” whom the prison reformer John Howard observed when he went aboard the Dunkirk a few years earlier, in 1783, made thin by their scant meals, but otherwise able-bodied.

The nineteen women who were Mary’s constant companions ranged from London streetwalkers to thieves, shoplifters and receivers of stolen goods. No doubt there were a few country girls among the group, well behaved and modest, who tried to keep to themselves and avoid contact with the rougher convicts. But most of the women were “females of daring habits,” experienced in crime and somewhat inured to the hardships of prison life. Not a few of the women were pregnant, or became pregnant during the course of the voyage. Some had babies at the breast. One or two may have been quite elderly, like the eighty-two-year-old woman on the Lady Penrhyn who was dying of dropsy when she came aboard and did not live long into the voyage.¹⁰

Mary and her fellow convicts were in poor health, shivering with cold at night (it had been an exceptionally cold, wet and rainy spring), handcuffed together and confined to the gloom belowdecks, suffering with colds and with chilblains on their hands. Some had frostbitten toes. Using sex as barter, they slept with the seamen, enduring the punishments subsequently doled out to them for prostitution, trying to break into the wine stores (perhaps with the seamen’s help) and open the casks of porter.

They were incorrigible. Even when shut in “the box,” a narrow cubicle on deck, a wooden straitjacket that kept the prisoner standing, painfully, for hours, they “wailed so loudly, and used their tongues so freely,” one of the officers wrote, “that it was found necessary to place a cistern of water on the top of the box.” Only when drenched were the women temporarily silent.

A punishment the women convicts particularly hated was having their heads shaved. Whipping with rope on the arms and legs was less efficacious, as was the barrel torment. Holes were cut in the top and sides of an empty flour barrel, then the barrel was dropped over the prisoner, her head and arms sticking out. Like the box, the barrel prevented lying down or sitting, and was very painful. But it did not prevent shrill tirades. Marine guards, weary of the women’s tongue-lashings, tended to confine them in the dark of the coalhole, where they were served only bread and water.

Five or six days out from Spithead, the marine officers aboard the Scarborough detected and forestalled a mutiny. Two convicts, both experienced seamen, had attempted to organize the two-hundred-plus prisoners on board to take over the ship, planning to overpower the thirty-three marines on board (some of whom were ill) and to coerce the seamen into cooperating.¹² With supplies of ammunition pitifully low, the marines must have been both alarmed that a mutiny had been fomented and immensely relieved that it had been prevented. The two convicts who had been the organizers were hauled aboard the Sirius and given twenty-four lashes each by the boatswain’s mate, as an example and a warning.¹³

Mary must have known of the attempted mutiny; news of it would have spread rapidly through the fleet. Like most of the prisoners, she was probably acutely seasick during the early weeks of the voyage, when the seas ran so high Commander Phillip could not sit down to write his log and the Charlotte was pitched and tossed dreadfully. After a week Mary and her companions were released from their shackles and allowed on deck, but she may have been too ill to take advantage of this relative freedom. Dozens of prisoners were ill—though the mysterious mumpslike disease Surgeon White had been treating before the fleet sailed had receded, those who had come down with it responding to a dose of an emetic—and eight had died in the early days of the journey. In the third week the lookouts sighted a hillock on the horizon, and watched it rise slowly out of the sea. It was the ten-thousand-foot peak on Tenerife, the first visible landfall of the Canary Islands.

The fleet anchored in the Santa Cruz roads, opposite the jagged black rocks that erupted in erratic piles at the coastline. A boat was sent ashore for fresh water, meat and vegetables. The convicts were apprehensive. The great peak, it was said, was a mountain of fire, spewing out hot molten rock that at any moment might come pouring down the mountain’s flanks and into the sea. The air was hot, the southerly wind blowing up from Africa very warm and dry. A tropical sun blazed overhead, and set rapidly in the evening, with no lingering twilight. The ocean was not the opaque, roiling, midnight blue of the Cornish coast but a heavenly azure, clear enough, at ten fathoms, to allow Mary to look down into its depths.

He was not immediately missed, and had time to search for a means to get away from the island. Among the many ships in the harbor was a Dutch East Indiaman, an immense vessel requiring a large crew. The convict, John Powell, put himself forward as a seaman looking for a berth, and approached the first crew members he encountered. His dress, or something in his demeanor, made them wary; even though the ship was undermanned, they offered him no berth.

Unwilling to arouse suspicion, Powell let his boat drift until he was driven onto a small island in the harbor. He took shelter there, but left the boat and oars on the shore, there being no means of concealing them other than to try to sink the boat, which he was unwilling to do. The following morning a search party, seeing the boat, captured Powell and returned him to the Sirius.

Like the thwarted mutiny, the abortive escape of John Powell soon became notorious. Powell was put in irons, and punished. But his daring made him a hero to the other convicts, and his cleverness soon helped him to avoid the unpleasant aftereffects of his brief attempt at liberation. Knowing Commander Phillip to be just and compassionate, Powell appealed to his kindness. He managed to have a petition drawn up on his behalf, and delivered to the commander. Phillip relented, released Powell from his shackles and confinement, and let him take his place again among the other convicts. ¹⁴

Escape! The thought of it gnawed at the convicts, monopolized their conversations, invaded their dreams. John Powell had very nearly gotten away. It was possible. Sooner or later some bold individual or group would succeed. It was only a matter of time—and opportunity. Meanwhile they had to survive, and the news from Tenerife was not good. It was early in the growing season on the island. There were very few vegetables to harvest, besides onions, and no fruit at all. Boats sent ashore came back nearly empty. There would be no fresh greens or citrus on the long, hot, hungry journey to Rio, a journey of several months. All the ships had their share of sick, and the sickness could hardly be combatted without healthful, plentiful rations. On board the Charlotte, among Mary’s fellow convicts, fifteen were ill, one near death.

Dark squalls marched across the ocean, rank on rank, on June 10, 1787, the day the fleet weighed anchor for the voyage across the Atlantic, and a blazing sun scorched the parched, rocky hills of Tenerife. There was little wind. With the others, Mary was called to the deck of the Charlotte for the funeral of the second convict to die in four days.

Mary was six months pregnant now, and it was becoming more difficult, with the added bulk of her growing belly, to keep her balance amid the constant movement of the ship. Waves slapped against the hull as the chaplain read the funeral service and the corpse, covered in a shroud made from a shredded sail, was tipped overboard to sink into the azure depths. Afterwards Mary made her way, a little unsteadily, down the companionway into the hold as the fleet sailed on westward, avoiding the calms to be encountered on the African coast, into the hot latitudes, headed for the equator and points south.