The Girl From Botany Bay

He had just received his food in his cupped hands when he fell, dropping to his knees, the precious flour and peas and fish spilling out onto the earthen floor of the storehouse. Tench ordered the old man carried to the hospital, where he died. When the surgeon opened his stomach to determine the cause of his death, it was found to be empty.¹

The old man was only the latest in a series of starvation deaths, the numbers growing during April and May 1790. To the extreme distress caused by lack of food was added another blow. The Sirius, sent on another provisioning voyage in March, went aground on a reef off Norfolk Island and sank. Now no more long-range voyages for provisions were possible.

The governor, in pain from his kidney stone and gravely concerned for those under his command, had acknowledged several months earlier that “vigorous measures were become indispensable” if the colonists were to survive. But by May he had taken all the vigorous measures he could think of, and still there was far too little to eat. He had taken stock of what was left in the storehouses. With lowered rations, he calculated, and with nearly three hundred of the convicts and marines sent to Norfolk Island to find their own food, there would be enough salt meat to last until the end of June, sufficient flour to last until the middle of August, and enough rice and peas to last until the end of September. And with the numbers in Sydney Cove dwindling by the day from starvation, the meager rations might last even longer.

These were grim calculations indeed. Famine “was approaching with gigantic strides,” Tench wrote, “and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance. Men abandoned themselves to the most desponding reflections, and adopted the most extravagant conjectures.”² Words failed Tench as he tried to convey the general depression. “The misery and horror of such a situation cannot be imparted, even by those who have suffered under it.”

What the colonists could not know was that a naval storeship, the Guardian, had been on its way to them when it struck an iceberg off the Cape of Good Hope and sank.³ They had not been abandoned after all, but fate and the peril of the seas had deprived them of the supplies they badly needed.

In desperation Governor Phillip decided to send the Supply to the Dutch colony of Batavia (modern Indonesia) for emergency supplies of food. The monsoon season had begun, the Supply would likely have rough sailing. On the day she left, April 17, 1790, the colonists watched her departure anxiously, waving and calling out weak cries of Godspeed. The Supply carried the hope of Port Jackson with her; no one could say how many of those who gathered in dismal groups on the beach to watch her go would still be alive on her return—if she returned.

In the meantime, all energies had to be applied to the single overarching task of gathering food. A hunting party was sent out, made up of the most capable marksmen, to shoot kangaroos. All the able-bodied men went fishing every night, even the surgeons and the chaplain, and every boat, “public and private,” Tench wrote, was commandeered to join the modest fishing fleet.

Because of their extra exertions, the hunters and fishermen were given a small additional portion of flour and salt pork—but this meant that there was even less food for the rest of the convicts and marines, and especially for the women and children.

The salt pork, which by April 1790 was nearly four years old, was only marginally fit to eat. It was so old and dry that, when boiled, it shrivelled to half its size. Toasted on a fork, it yielded a few drops of fat, which were caught on a slice of bread or in a saucer of rice and eaten greedily. Compared to fresh fish, the pork gave little nourishment.⁴ Yet the fish remained elusive. Some days the nets were full, but most days the catch was thin, with a daily average of only sixty fish altogether.⁵ And only three small kangaroos were shot. Were it not for the remains of the flour brought from Cape Town on the Sirius a year earlier, far more of the convicts would have died that fall.

Half-starved though she herself was, Mary suckled her tiny son, and wrapped him as warmly as she could in patchwork blankets made of odd scraps of cloth pieced together. He did not thrive, but he did not die either, as so many of the colony’s babies and young children did, and by the end of May he was two months old. Charlotte, now two and a half, was lethargic from constant hunger and growing thinner, living as she now did on the common children’s ration of a pound of salt pork every week plus a bit of flour and rice.

Each day there was less to eat, less to hope for, more hunger and cold and more suffering.

With each bleak new dawn the fishermen came back from their long nights of labor, tired from having hauled in their near-empty nets. During the morning news of more deaths passed through the camp—deaths of friends, of friends’ children, of pitiable acquaintances. During the day there were funerals, and burials—the shovelling of earth in the cemetery seemed to go on constantly. There were also punishments. The Night Watch caught a convict stealing potatoes from the chaplain’s garden. He was given three hundred lashes, then sentenced to be deprived of his flour ration for six months. (The governor soon relented, however, knowing that without his flour ration the man would die; the ration was restored.)⁶ After the sparse portions of fish were distributed, the settlers ate their minuscule daily meal of pork, fish, rice (each grain of rice, Tench thought, “a moving body”), boiled flour with scurvy grass and fern roots. Then they lay down hungry, shivering in the cold, the children crying, the convicts swearing, quarrels and hostilities erupting on all sides from sheer frustration and deprivation.

Late into the night, the talk in the huts, in the barracks, in the governor’s brick house and in Sodom was of food, and the shortage of food, and the dismal prospects for rescue. Everyone knew that it was too late in the sailing season for a ship from England to arrive in Port Jackson. The winds were wrong, the seas far too treacherous. The Supply might or might not return from Batavia. If it did, the return could be months away.

In the Bryants’ hut the talk was of food, and food shortages, and of the contrary winds and the bleak sailing season. But there was also talk of a plan that was taking shape, a bold plan, one that would require great daring and entail great risk.

There was talk of escape.

Mary and Will and three friends met frequently to discuss how it might be possible to get away from Port Jackson and take their freedom. One of the three was James Martin, the black-haired Irishman who had been convicted at Exeter Assizes along with Mary, had been on the prison hulk Dunkirk with her, and had made the journey to New Holland with Mary and Will aboard the Charlotte. Martin was in his late twenties, a little above average height and of an enterprising nature. Like Will, he was literate, and in 1790 he was some four years into his seven-year sentence. James Martin had shared the Bryants’ hardships for a long time; now he meant to share their attempt at freedom .⁷

The second of the trio of friends, James Cox or “Banbury Jack,” was serving out a sentence of transportation for life for stealing some thread lace—almost certainly one of many crimes he had committed. Cox may have been a leading planner of the escape; he had daring and courage, as future events were to show. Of his age and appearance nothing is known, but his dashing nickname suggests a strong persona, with a certain mystique. Banbury Jack was a man to be reckoned with—and a strong partner in the Bryants’ plans.⁸

The third of the trio of friends, Samuel Bird of Croydon, is the most shadowy. He had been convicted, with his brother John, in July of 1785, of breaking into a warehouse and stealing a thousand pounds of saltpeter—a component of gunpowder, and a valuable commodity. (The Birds’ thousand pounds of saltpeter were worth thirty pounds, a very large sum in the 1780s.) Both brothers were sentenced to seven years’ transportation, and both came to Port Jackson on the First Fleet. Beyond that, little is known of Sam Bird—and nothing of his brother. Had John Bird perished in the famine? Or was he ill, or disinclined to discuss escape? Perhaps he had had a falling out with Sam, or with Will Bryant. Or perhaps John Bird had escape plans of his own. In any case, only Sam pledged himself to join the venture that was taking shape.

Mary, Will, James, Sam and Banbury Jack: they would get away, as best they could, as soon as they could, before they starved.

Shouting and the sound of running feet along the main street of Sydney Cove brought everyone out into the cold evening of June 3, 1790. In the sunset light the lookout flag had been glimpsed. A ship had been sighted.

It had been raining all day, a driving, tempestuous rain, and the colonists who ran down to the beach, hugging one another wetly and kissing their children and crying for joy, were soon soaked to the skin, their bare feet caked with mud.

“The flag’s up! The flag’s up!” they cried out again and again.

Captain Tench—he had been promoted to captain—snatched up his spyglass and immediately ran to the nearest hill, another officer following him. From the top the two men could clearly see, through the squally clouds, a large ship flying English colors, making her way through the harbor entrance.

“We could not speak,” Tench wrote. “We wrung each other by the hand, with eyes and hearts overflowing.”⁹ They had all been wrong in thinking no ship would arrive so late in the sailing season. For here was this vessel—as she came closer, they made out the word “London” on her stern—that had come halfway around the world in spite of storms and contrary winds, icebergs and mountainous seas. Providence had not abandoned them. They had been spared.

The governor got into his cutter and had himself rowed out toward the harbor entrance to meet the incoming ship, a few fishing boats following in the cutter’s wake. Tench had taken his place in the cutter, eager to be among the first to welcome the vessel. The closer they came to the large ship, the more worried they got; the ship appeared at first to be in danger (“we were in agony,” Tench recalled), but then seemed to be holding her own against a strong southerly wind that made it difficult for her to progress up the harbor.

The oarsmen in the cutter pulled with all their strength, disregarding the rain, which continued to shower down, causing the men to have to bail.

“Pull away, my lads! She is from Old England!”

“A few strokes more, and we shall be aboard!”

“Hurrah for a belly-full, and news from our friends!”

They read her name: Lady Juliana. A transport. She would be one of several ships, there had to be more coming. Surely an entire flotilla was on its way into Port Jackson, of which this vessel was only the first.

Crew and passengers were shouting and waving, the men in the cutter answering in kind. Governor Phillip, realizing the enormity of what he was seeing, and the challenges to come, with so many people arriving for whom no accommodation had been prepared, got out of the cutter and into one of the attendant fishing boats, and had himself rowed back to Sydney Cove at once. Tench and the others, however, approached the ship and went aboard.

The first thing they saw was an immense crowd of women, ragged-looking and in chains, many with an unhealthy pallor, staring down at them from the deck. They were a tough-looking group—in fact they had given the marines and crew aboard the Lady Juliana a very hard time during the voyage, as the memoirs of their steward, John Nicol, were to attest. Jubilant, cocky, defiant, the women stood on deck, arms akimbo, some with pipes in their mouths, sizing up the marines from Sydney Cove as they pulled closer and came aboard.

Amid the excitement there came a clamor of questions from Tench and the others. How long had the Lady Juliana been at sea? Did she carry any letters for the settlement at Port Jackson? What was the news from England? How many more ships were coming? What news of La Pérouse and his ships, which had left Botany Bay two years earlier? Had La Pérouse carried two escapees from Port Jackson on board?

“We continued to ask a thousand questions on a breath,” wrote Tench, while letters were torn open eagerly and their contents devoured.

No, the marines were told by the Lady Juliana’s captain, Captain Aitken, La Pérouse had not been heard from.¹⁰ There were four ships in the Lady Juliana’s fleet, with over a thousand convicts plus crew and marines.

The Lady Juliana, the crew told Tench and the others, had been at sea in all a year minus one day. They had called in at Tenerife and St. Jago and Rio and Cape Town, and had made their run from Cape Town in seventy-five days. They had nearly come to grief when one of the ship’s carpenters overturned a pot of boiling pitch on deck, starting a fire. But the steward had thrown a blanket over the fire and it hadn’t spread.

As far as events in the larger world, there had been a revolution in France, and the king had been put in his place. And the English King George, God bless him, had been very ill but was now well again, according to the latest news to reach Cape Town. The Guardian had sunk on its way to Port Jackson, loaded with supplies.

And there was another remarkable piece of news. Captain William Bligh, late of HMS Bounty, had been relieved of command during a mutiny in April of the previous year, 1789, in the Friendly Isles and had managed to sail all the way to Batavia in a twenty-three-foot launch with eighteen of his crew. Who had ever heard of such a thing!¹¹ A journey of upwards of four thousand miles across open ocean in such a small vessel.

Tench and his companions listened with the greatest interest, astounded by all the news from the distant outside world, as the Lady Juliana tried in vain to sail up the harbor to Sydney Cove amid the hard southerly wind and pelting rain.