XVI
FOR SEVERAL MONTHS Mary and her fellow escapees continued to ingratiate themselves with their Dutch and Indonesian hosts and to perpetuate the myth that they were the fortunate survivors of a shipwreck. Once the men recovered their strength they found work, probably well-paying work on the busy wharf, and settled into the life of the small but cosmopolitan port. Kupang was thriving; no doubt the men hoped to thrive with it, and grow rich. If it occurred to them that in continuing to stay there they were risking exposure as impostors, with their true identities discovered, they took no action to protect themselves. Any or all of the men might have hired on as seamen on a merchant vessel, or booked an inexpensive passage to China or Cape Town or Calcutta as passengers. Instead they chose to stay, at least for awhile, in Kupang where the hot, tropical life was full of ease and pleasure, the wages were good and the local beer pungent and free-flowing.
Possibly they quarrelled among themselves, or old grievances began to fester beneath the pleasant surface. It could be that the nine escapees were planning yet another collective voyage, together, and the planning was marred by disagreements or stalemated by unexpected circumstances. Perhaps some wanted to stay in Kupang, others to move on before their luck ran out, and they could not reach a consensus.
Will was angry. In his view he had served his seven-year sentence, and deserved his freedom. Had he stayed in Sydney Cove, the authorities would have forced him to remain in the settlement for many years to support his wife and son and stepdaughter. But he was not under that constraint in Kupang. Once he left the penal settlement, Will reasoned, he was not even legally married any longer. But as long as he stayed in Kupang, he had to maintain the fiction that he was “Will Broad,” as he called himself, family man and first mate of an imaginary whaling ship. He had to stay with Mary, or the entire story would begin to unravel.
But he chafed, or Mary goaded him, until he lost patience. And in his fit of temper, Will betrayed them all.
According to James Martin, “William Bryant had words with his wife and informed against himself, wife and children and all of us.”
1Whether he let the truth out in a drunken rage in a wharfside tavern, or tried to buy his own free passage out of Kupang by bargaining with the Dutch governor or one of his deputies, or whether he simply broke down and blurted out the truth in a moment of weakness, Will’s admission sealed his own fate and that of his comrades.
“We was immediately taken prisoners and was put into the castle,” Martin wrote. Having been deceived by the convicts for two months, the Dutch now showed them no leniency.
All nine adults and the two children were shackled and confined, all their comforts denied them. According to one account, Mary tried to run into the jungle with her children and hide from the Dutch soldiers, only to be captured like the others and deprived of her liberty.
It would have been in character for her to make a desperate dash for freedom, and in keeping with the state in which she now found herself. For Will, though still her husband, had abandoned her and the children, just as he had abandoned his comrades. With a few malicious words he had ensured that all the adults in the escape party would not only be imprisoned once again, but would be condemned to death. Escaped prisoners in Port Jackson, once recaptured, were executed; the convicts could expect nothing less. The Dutch would turn them all over to the British, who would see to it that they all were hanged.
Mary tried to flee, but failed. She was taken, bound, and shut away in the dark and stench of the castle dungeon, with her hapless children. All of the pleasures and delights of the past several months, the abundant food and soft bed, the approval and hospitality, the warm flower-scented breezes, were suddenly snatched away—along with any chance at a future. The open door of freedom was slammed shut. And all because of Will.
Mary’s chagrin, mortification and sheer rage must have been monumental. After all that she had risked, after all that she had endured, the months at sea, the hunger and thirst, the storms and huge waves, the sores and blisters and illness: after all that, to be handed over to new captors by the man she depended on most. She had fought with Will; now she must have wanted to murder him.
Governor Wanjon now had eleven prisoners on his hands. He needed to deliver them to the nearest British authorities, but it might be many months before a British ship called at Kupang. How was he to discharge his obligation?
A solution presented itself, far more quickly than he suspected. The escapees were imprisoned in the castle sometime in August of 1791. In mid-September, four small boats entered Kupang Harbor, filled with British sailors. They were the survivors of the
Pandora, wrecked on a reef in the coral seas. Among them was the
Pandora’s captain, Edward Edwards, and it was to Edwards that Governor Wanjon now delivered his prisoners.
2Edwards was a stern, hard man, a man who subjected those under him to a punishing severity and gave no quarter. He had been prized for his severity, in fact, by the British Admiralty and had been given command of the Pandora because it was felt that he would carry out an unusual mission with exceptional efficiency.
Captain Edwards and his crew had been sent from England in search of the mutinous crew members of William Bligh’s ship Bounty. After a difficult voyage during which many in the crew had come down with fever, Edwards managed to recapture fourteen of the Bounty’s mutineers, who had settled in Tahiti. (The remnant of the mutinous crew members, who had gone to Pitcairn Island, eluded him.)
As his Admiralty superiors had foreseen, Edwards showed the mutinous sailors no mercy. They were shackled, their legs and hands bound together, and kept in a specially built prison cell on the Pandora’s deck. No contact between the prisoners and the crew of the Pandora was allowed, and the sufferings of the men, crammed together in their filth-ridden small cell, were an offense to the others on board. To all the others, that is, except Captain Edwards, who thought the treatment appropriate for sailors who had set their own captain adrift to die, and taken over his ship.
Then the Pandora herself became imperilled. On the westward journey to Timor Edwards, as demanding of the sea as he was of his men, and refusing to make allowances for the hazardous reefs of the Torres Strait, sailed his ship across a stretch of dangerous water at night. The decision was foolhardy in the extreme; the ship was driven onto a reef and wrecked.
The panicked crew bailed all night, but could not prevent the ship from foundering. As it went down, the prisoners cried for help. Common humanity demanded that they be released from their shackles to prevent them from drowning. They were not, after all, convicted criminals but accused prisoners awaiting trial. But Edwards refused to release them, and left them to their fate while he himself swam to safety.
The mutineers would all have drowned, had not the bosun’s mate rescued them from their confining cell and removed their heavy iron shackles. Even so, and despite the bosun’s heroism, four of the men drowned. (Edwards was subsequently court-martialled, but that was far in the future.)
Fresh from the extreme trauma of shipwreck, having lost his vessel and recovered only some of the mutineers he had been sent to capture, Edwards was still doggedly duty-bound. Far from chastening or softening him, trauma only hardened him further, and made him severe in his treatment of the British convicts Governor Wanjon turned over to him. Edwards hired a Dutch transport ship, the Rembang, to take his crew and prisoners to Batavia, where he expected to be able to find a British ship for the return journey to England. And he made certain that for all his captives, the voyage aboard the Rembang would be one of stark privation and harsh discipline.
In chains, her children and few possessions with her, Mary went aboard the Rembang in the first week of October, 1791. The ship reeked of cloves, its usual cargo, and of stale cooking and human sweat and ordure—a cloying reek that she recalled immediately from the Dunkirk and the Charlotte. But aboard the prison hulk and the British transport ship she had at least been free to move, and to wash herself and Charlotte, after a fashion, to go on deck occasionally. Through portholes and chinks in the planking she had been able to watch the changing light in the sky and the pattern of clouds and rain, the dark squalls marching across the horizon and, during rough weather, the green swells of heavy seas and tall combers, approaching rank on rank.
On the small Rembang, however, the guards shut her in an airless, lightless enclosure with her fellow convicts, and fastened a heavy iron shackle to her ankles, making it very difficult to move, as the shackle was fastened to a long iron bar attached to the flooring. She was more tightly imprisoned than ever before, her ankles soon raw from the scraping of the irons, her leg and back muscles aching, all her senses quickened in the dimness, her eyes longing for the light. Even the smallest and most needful tasks, such as relieving herself in the common bucket, took great effort. She had no way to wash herself or the children—Captain Edwards had forbidden the convicts any water for washing—and could not prevent the lice that crawled over her from making her skin itch unbearably or the rats that snatched at her food from nipping at the children.
Worst of all, shackled as she was, Mary knew that, should the Rembang founder in a storm, she and the children would surely drown, weighed down as they were and fastened to the thick planks. And Captain Edwards had already driven one ship to destruction, causing many deaths. He might well cause this ship too to wreck itself on some dangerous reef, or capsize in rough weather. Added to her rage at Will and her fear of the death by execution that awaited her once she reached far-off England was the more immediate fear of drowning in the warm tropical ocean, with its sharks and fearsome eels and stinging jellyfish, on the voyage to Batavia in the coming weeks.
She had no idea how far it was to Batavia of course, or what would happen to her once she got there. For all she knew there would be a long delay before the ship sailed, or, just possibly, a form of reprieve. She had been reprieved once, after all, five and a half years earlier when she had been in Exeter jail awaiting execution. Was it just barely conceivable that another official, finding her to be more useful alive than dead, might send her to another penal colony in lieu of returning her to England?
Sanguine as she was, such thoughts may have drifted at the edge of Mary’s consciousness, as much wish or prayer as actual conjecture. Envisioning freedom may have helped to keep her mind from harsher thoughts: the clove-laden stench of the common cell, the appeals of her incomprehending son and daughter, the hateful presence of Will, the discomfiting nearness of the other men, her constant hunger and thirst.
Once the Rembang got under way, however, it was hard to find any distraction, mental or otherwise, from the lurching of the pitching, rolling ship. With every shift in the vessel’s horizontal, the convicts’ ankle shackles slid along the metal bar, jamming Mary and the children up against the men, with bruising force. So yanked and thrust about, it was nearly impossible to sleep or eat, and at times even breathing was a struggle against the contrary force of the waves and wind.
As had been true during Mary’s long voyage from Sydney to Timor, she had to live hour by hour alongside men, with no privacy—not when she nursed Emanuel, not when she attended to her menstrual needs, not when she was seasick or suffering from cramps or bowel complaints.
And suffering there must have been, general suffering, in the dimness of the foul-smelling chamber, where with the merciless rocking of the ship the convicts must have vomited over one another and lived in the reek of one another’s noxious effluvia. With little light and no fresh air, scant food and water, no exercise and no relief from their common misery—for Captain Edwards had ordered that the convicts never be allowed to go on deck or have their shackles loosened—the prisoners soon became thin and despondent. When the Rembang sailed into the path of a destructive hurricane, their despondency gave way to sheer terror.
It was the most violent, most spectacular storm the English officers had ever seen. Sudden brilliant flashes of lightning split the sky with a crack and thunder, with a roar as of a thousand cannon, boomed a fearsome reply.
“This storm,” wrote the overawed Surgeon Hamilton, lately of the Pandora, “was attended with the most dreadful thunder and lightning we had ever experienced.” The cyclonic wind tore the sails of the Rembang to shreds before the sailors could take them in, while high seas, churned to boiling froth, swept over the Rembang’s deck in wave after pounding wave until the ship sprang a leak. Pumps could make no headway against such a torrent of angry water; they soon became clogged, and in the hold, the bilge rose, threatening to flood the deck where the convicts and the Bounty mutineers were confined.
Pitched crazily from side to side, wet through from all the flooding, unable to see the storm but hearing the loud boom of the thunder and the whiplike crack of each bolt of lightning, Mary and the others knew the fear of imminent death. They yelled to the Rembang crew, begging to be released from their shackles and let out of their cell. They cursed and swore, they damned Will to hell—as they had often done before—and when no one came in response to their pleas, they used all their strength to try to get free of the thick irons by smashing them against one another and pulling and straining.
It was futile. The old shackles held firm. The iron bar could not be torn out of the floor. The Dutch crew, who according to Surgeon Hamilton were “struck with horror” and hid belowdecks, ignored the convicts’ yells and pleas. And the British sailors, having survived the sinking of the Pandora and desperate to save themselves and the Rembang from a similar fate, were fully engaged in trying to prevent the ship from being driven against the shore of nearby Flores Island.
“She was driving down, with all the impetuosity imaginable, on a savage shore, about seven miles under our lee,” wrote Hamilton. But though the “abyss of destruction” yawned before them all, and every force of nature seemed to conspire against them, the “manly exertions” of the sailors were in the end effectual. The Rembang was steered clear of the dangerous coast, her bilges were pumped and the flooding slowed, her leak patched and eventually, after many hours of being tossed in the massive chaotic waves, the storm died down.
Mary and the others were wet, feverish, exhausted and shaken. But they were alive.
They were alive—yet weakened, and becoming ill. By the second or third week of the voyage, many in the crew and among the passengers had fevers, and were listless and glassy-eyed, their appetites gone and their muscles lax and sore. Mary may have been feverish herself. Her baby certainly was, little Emanuel, now a year and a half old, able to walk and talk but subdued by the trauma he had been through and by the disease that had invaded his small body. He cried in his suffering, and Mary did what little she could to offer him comfort, as the Rembang, with new sails in place, ran on along the islands of the Bali Sea toward Java.
A burning, scorching sun shone down on the Dutch ship after the storm passed. It was November, near the height of the equatorial summer, and the vessel floated on a warm sea blanketed in thick moist air. The convicts were parched, but Captain Edwards had strictly limited their supply of water, with no exceptions made for those who had come down with the fever. Surgeon Hamilton may have examined those of the convicts who were ill, including baby Emanuel, and if he did, most likely he recognized the onset of malaria, and knew that there was little he could do to counteract it. Infants were particularly susceptible, and suffered more acutely than adults from what was called “brain fever” because of the delirium it caused.
As for Mary, debilitated herself and longing for relief from the heat, she held her son and tried to nurse him—though she probably had no milk to give him—and did her best to comfort Charlotte through the last trying days before the Rembang reached Batavia and dropped anchor in the wide harbor, the sea flecked with a million sparkling points of light under the fiercely shining sun.