Notes
Chapter I
1 Mary’s baptismal record in the parish church of Fowey reads: “Mary, daughter of William Broad, mariner, and Grace his wife, of Fowey, was baptized in this church on May 1st 1765 by Nicholas Cory, Vicar.”
The incident for which Mary was jailed was described in the Trial Book of the Western Circuit. She was accused of “feloniously assaulting Agnes Lakeman, spinster, on the King’s Highway, putting her to corporeal fear and danger of her life on this said highway and violently taking from her person and against her will in the said highway of one silk bonnet (value 12d.) and other goods to the value of £11 11s. (her property).”
In the margin opposite this notation was written, “Mary Braund—to be hanged,” along with the fainter inscription “High Roby” [Highway Robbery].” Judith Cook, To Brave Every Danger (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 44-45.
The two other women captured along with Mary were Mary Haydon (aka Mary Shepherd) and Catherine Fryer.
2 English men and women in the eighteenth century perceived that crime was increasing, but as A. G. L. Shaw, in
Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and Other Parts of the British Empire (Irish Historical Press, 1998), p. 38, points out, their perception was distorted by an erroneous assumption that crime is an aberration, not an inevitable dimension of social life, and that in previous centuries England was crime-free.
The enormous growth in population in the later eighteenth century, the relative anonymity of city life, the absence of a police force and the restlessness and tumultuousness of the populace all reinforced the assumption that lawlessness was rising. Whether or not the crime rate was increasing is impossible to say; the great increase in laws intended to punish criminals reflected the general fear of crime rather than any genuine increase.
Another distorting factor, in the closing decades of the century, was the advance in humane sensibility, reflected in an upsurge of opposition to slavery, blood sports and cockfighting. A new moral sentiment was emerging that was quick to identify wickedness of all kinds and apt to exaggerate it.
Chapter II
1 Donald Thomas,
Henry Fielding (New York, 1990), p. 305.
3 According to the description in the Newgate Prison Register, James Martin was 5’9”, with black hair, grey eyes and a sallow complexion. The
Dublin Chronicle claimed that he was from Antrim.
4 Crimes punishable by whipping, imprisonment, confinement in the pillory or hard labor included stealing lead, arson, theft of letters, bigamy, manslaughter, and the solemnizing of a marriage in secret. Theft of a dead body, perjury, fraud, and the keeping of a bawdy house, on the other hand, were only misdemeanors. Shaw, pp. 26-28.
5 Since judges were known to take character into account when determining sentences, and since execution (and transportation for crime) were looked on as a way of getting rid of undesirable members of society, it might be presumed that Mary Broad was of ill repute—as she probably was.
6 The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, ed. Tim Flannery (New York, 1997), p. 120.
7 Thomas, pp. 304, 301. Fielding described dishonest magistrates in London who brought all the human refuse of the streets into their courtrooms, then charged each of the accused a bail fee as an alternative to weeks or months of imprisonment while they waited to be tried.
One Bow Street magistrate, Sir Thomas de Veil, maintained a private room where he took attractive female prisoners, settling their cases and then asking each woman “if she had not a back-door to her lodging, where a [sedan chair] might stop without suspicion?” and “when an amicable visit might be received without interception?”
8 The term “transportation” was first used in the reign of Charles II, in 1680. By the 1760s the usual term for a convict whose sentence had been commuted to transportation was fourteen years. Judges, having condemned prisoners to execution, recommended commutation of the sentence, and the king, after consulting with the home secretary, endorsed the judge’s recommendation. James Martin,
Memorandoms, ed. Charles Blount (Cambridge, 1937), pp. 9-10.
9 Shaw, pp. 46-48. Governor Phillip, in his account of the voyage to New Holland, implied that some convicts were actually sent to Africa, with fatal results. He wrote that when transportation to America ceased to be feasible, “other expedients, well known to the public, have since been tried. . . . Particularly, the transporting of criminals to the coast of Africa, where what was meant as an alleviation of punishment too frequently ended in death.”
The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay; with an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island (London, 1789), p. 6.
10 When the voyage was planned, a proposal was put forward to bring a number of women from the Friendly Isles or New Caledonia to be sexual companions for the men, and so “preserve the settlement from gross irregularities and disorders.” Frederick A. Pottle,
Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay (New York, 1937), p. 22.
11 The “youngest and handsomest of the women” were selected, according to a witness before the Select Committee on the State of Gaols in 1819. Anne Summers,
Damned Whores and God’s Police (Ringwood, Victoria, 1994), p. 315. In actuality, virtually all healthy women convicts under forty-five were transported. Margaret Weidenhofer,
The Convict Years (Melbourne, 1973), p. 74.
Governor Phillip’s instructions, dated April 25, 1787, ordered him to supplement the women making the journey by taking aboard any other women encountered during the voyage “who may be disposed to accompany them to the said settlement.” Historical Records of Australia, I, p. 14.
Chapter III
1 W. Branch-Johnson,
The English Prison Hulks (London, 1957), p. 33, citing convict James Hardy Vaux.
2 Shaw, p. 164; Nicol, pp. 114ff.
7 Ibid., pp. 9-10, 31-32.
Chapter IV
1 The
Charlotte transport was variously listed by the official registers as 335-345 tons. Charles Bateson,
The Convict Ships, 1787-1868 (Glasgow, 1959), p. 97.
2 Pottle,
Boswell, p. 23. On March 12, two months before the departure of the fleet, Governor Phillip had written Lord Sydney (Thomas Townshend, First Baron Sydney, Home and Colonial Secretary and Governor Phillip’s immediate superior) asking him to put Phillip on record as refusing responsibility for convict and crew deaths. Sydney was not unsympathetic; when Surgeon White appealed for fresh provisions for the convicts who were still in port, Sydney ordered wine and foodstuffs for the sick sent immediately.
4 Pottle,
Boswell, p. 23. “Some part of the clothing for the female convicts” remained undelivered at the time of sailing. Phillip, p. 12.
8 Lieutenant King wrote in his journal that in the quarrel between the seamen and the masters, who had withheld their pay, Commander Phillip backed the masters. Cited in
Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales by John White, Surgeon-General to the First Fleet and the Settlement at Port Jackson, ed. Alec H. Chisholm (Sydney, 1962), p. 51.
9 Though no male convict named Spence is noted in the records of the First Fleet, there was a female convict named Mary Spence listed in Arthur Phillip’s roll call of prisoners. Phillip, p. lxxi. Since Mary Broad’s name is not on the governor’s list, it is quite likely that “Mary Spence” is Mary Broad, listed as the “lag wife” of a convict or guard named Spence. There were also several male prisoners named Spencer; it is possible that one of these men was the father of Mary’s child, and the official who made out baby Charlotte Spence’s birth record left off the final “r” in the name.
11 Ibid., p. 99. Even before the fleet sailed, five women on board the
Lady Penrhyn were put in irons for prostitution, and the second mate was dismissed.
Sex between women convicts and members of the crew tended, by the time the Second Fleet sailed to New South Wales, to become a matter of stable ongoing unions rather than a promiscuous free-for-all. John Nicol wrote how, on the Second Fleet ship Lady Juliana, “when we were fairly out to sea, every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath.” Nicol, p. 121. By 1816 it had become customary for every sailor to take a female convict as his temporary wife, and to be allowed to live with her during the passage. Shaw, p. 125.
12 The two organizers of the mutiny were Phillip Farrell, a former boatswain’s mate, and Thomas Griffiths, formerly master of a French privateer. White, p. 15.
14 White, p. 54. “At length, by an artful petition he [Powell] got written for him,” White wrote, “he so wrought on the governor’s humanity as to procure a release from his confinement.”
Chapter V
1 White, p. 60. The crossing of the Tropic of Cancer took place on June 15, 1787. The convoy did not reach the equator until July 14, but observed the traditional ceremony a month early.
2 A convict who lived through the sweltering heat of the doldrums, John Boyle O’Reilly, described the ordeal in his novel
Moondyne. “The air was stifling and oppressive. There was no draught through the barred hatches. The deck above them was blazing hot. The pitch dropped from the seams, and burned their flesh as it fell. There was only one word spoken or thought—one yearning idea in every mind—water, cool water to slake the parching thirst . . .” Cited in Bateson, p. 72.
4 Ibid., p. 69. White gives a date of July 30 for this accident. Other accounts date it toward the end of May.
5 Ibid., pp. 70-71. Surgeon White was impressed with the ingenuity of the convicts, some of whom were professional counterfeiters, in creating high-quality imitation coins under conditions in which they were closely supervised by guards, never allowed to have fires, or artfully hid their apparatus. “The adroitness . . . with which they must have managed,” White wrote, “in order to complete a business that required so complicated a process, gave me a high opinion of their ingenuity, cunning, caution, and address.”
6 The convict James Hardy Vaux described how the guards, sadistic and cruel and bestial in their natures, carried “large and ponderous sticks, with which, without provocation, they beat the convicts, “frequently repeating their blows long after the poor sufferer is insensible.” Cited in Branch-Johnson, p. 33. Some prisoners aboard the hulks confided to an inspector that, having been “penned up like so many dirty hogs,” all that kept them from despair was “one hope of revenge.” Branch-Johnson, p. 76.
Chapter VI
1 During November the convoy covered more than 1,650 miles in sixteen days, an average of 103-plus miles a day. White, pp. 242-243. Scurvy struck the
Charlotte in mid-December, “mostly among those who had the dysentery to a violent degree.” Surgeon White wrote in his journal that he was “pretty well able to keep it under by a liberal use of the essence of malt and some good wine.” Ibid., pp. 103-104.
2 Cited in White, p. 243.
3 Phillip, v. The
Sirius sighted land at noon on January 3, 1788.
Chapter VII
5 Flies in Port Jackson were “so troublesome . . . that no fanning will keep them from coming to one’s face; and without the assistance of both hands to keep them off, they will creep into one’s nostrils, and mouth too, if the lips are not shut very close.” Watkin Tench,
Sydney’s First Four Years.
Being a reprint of A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay and A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (Sydney, 1961), p. 103, editor’s note.
6 Cook, p. 112, cites an instance of two men who lay in wait for women coming from bathing; one of the men was discovered grappling with his half-naked victim on the ground and the women’s companions struggled to free her.
7 Cited in Tench, pp. 98-99; Clark,
Journal, cited in Cook, p. 111.
8 “The very small proportion of females makes the sending of an additional number absolutely necessary,” Phillip wrote to Lord Sydney in England. Summers, p. 314.
9 Clark,
Journal, cited in Cook, p. 111.
11 David Collins wrote in his journal that “Bryant has been frequently heard to express, what was indeed the general sentiment on the subject among the people of his description, that he did not consider his marriage in this country as binding.” Captain David Collins,
An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, ed. James Collier (Christchurch, Wellington and Dunedin, New Zealand, Melbourne, and London, 1910), p. 114.
12 Cook, p. 104, citing Clark,
Journal, February 11, 1788.
Chapter VIII
3 White, p. 298. Surgeon White recorded forty-eight deaths: three marines, two marines’ children, twenty-two male convicts, eight female convicts, nine convicts’ children, four people executed. But Tench’s record was fifty-four convict deaths (“including the executions”), plus one sergeant and two privates, for a total of fifty-seven. Tench, p. 72.
4 Tench, pp. 44, 100-101.
6 Born in either 1762 or 1763, Will may have been the William Bryant whose birth was recorded in Launceston in July of 1762. Cook, p. 26. Although Surgeon White thought Bryant was of good character, Judge Advocate Collins disagreed.
Writing of those convicts singled out to “instruct and direct others in the exercise of professions,” Collins wrote that some “had given evident proofs, or strong indications of returning dispositions to honest industry. There were others, however, who had no claim to this praise. Among those must be particularized William Bryant. . . . He was detected in secreting and selling large quantities of fish, a practice which he had pursued from his first appointment.” Collins, pp. 44-45.
7 Pottle,
Boswell, p. 24. William Bryant was sentenced at the Launceston Assizes in 1784 to seven years’ transportation “for resisting the Revenue officers, who attempted to seize some smuggled property he had.” He was convicted of forgery, for using the name Timothy Cary. Cook, p. 38.
Phillip, p. lvii, lists William Bryant as having been convicted at Launceston on March 20, 1784. The London Chronicle of June 30-July 3, 1792, recorded that Will had been convicted “6 1/2 years ago” at Bodmin, which would have put his conviction at the end of 1786 or early 1787.
8 White, pp. 247-248; Collins, p. 21. In February,1788, the month of Will and Mary’s wedding, eighteen other couples were married, including three couples wed alongside the Bryants on February 10.
9 Tench, pp. 145, 305. Duelling between Assistant Surgeon William Balmain and Surgeon-General John White in August of 1788 was the outcome of a quarrel fomented by the troublemaking marines.
11 Details of the celebrations are in Tench, pp. 60-61, and White, pp. 140, 256.
12 White, pp. 253-254. Despite the governor’s announcement, from June 17, 1788 on he referred in writing to the settlement as “Sydney.”
Chapter IX
1 What became of the two who did not return, Ann Smith and Peter Paris, is not known for certain. La Pérouse denied having given any of the convicts refuge on his ship, but he may have been disingenuous, or his crew may have concealed the convicts aboard without his knowledge. According to what the returned escapees said, Ann Smith and Peter Paris lost their way and died of starvation. White, pp. 114-115.
2 Tench, p. 107. Tench’s editor refers to the “prevailing belief” that the two convicts had managed to escape successfully, probably with La Pérouse’s company.
5 When Mary and her party of escapees reached the far northern part of the Australian continent, they reportedly encountered a group of aboriginals who used bows and arrows. Martin, p. 34.
6 Tench, pp. 46-49, 104-105, 137.
8 Ibid., p. 50. The two murders occurred on May 30, 1788, the assault and abduction on May 21. The severed head seen by Edward Corbett probably belonged to the abductee, Peter Burn.
11 White, p. 154; Tench, p. 136.
14 Judge Advocate Collins, as noted earlier, was in no doubt that Will had “secreted and sold” large quantities of fish “from his first appointment,” and that he was not trustworthy. Collins, pp. 44-45. Surgeon White, however, was a character witness for Bryant at his trial for theft, swearing that he had been trustworthy when on the
Charlotte. But the surgeon was of an overly sanguine disposition, inclined to see the best in people and situations, as his journal frequently reveals. A clever opportunist and con man could have convinced White of his honesty while actually carrying on a brisk illegal trade. It is worth noting that when William Bryant went on trial for stealing fish, only the surgeon spoke up on his behalf; there was no general clamor that he was innocent.
15 Joseph Paget is listed as a prisoner, convicted at Exeter Assizes on January 10, 1786, and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Phillip, p. lxviii.
Chapter X
1 Vaccination, which ultimately eradicated smallpox (except in laboratory samples) in our time, was not begun in England until the late 1790s, nearly a decade after the founding of Port Jackson. Tench, pp. 146-147ff, 306, described the smallpox epidemic among the aboriginal people. Only one of the newcomers came down with the disease, and he was not a European, but a Native American, a seaman aboard the
Supply.
Tench was puzzled about how smallpox could have arisen among the aboriginal people but did note that “our surgeons had brought out variolous matter in bottles”—that is, the smallpox germ. “But,” he added, “to infer that it [the smallpox] was produced from this cause were a supposition so wild as to be unworthy of consideration.” Tench, p. 146.
4 According to Phillip, p. lvii, William Bryant was sentenced to seven years’ transportation at Launceston on March 20, 1784. The
London Chronicle of June 30-July 2, 1792, said that Will was convicted “six and a half years ago”—that is, at the end of 1786 or early 1787, at Bodmin.
8 The weekly sailings from Port Jackson to Botany Bay ended in July, 1789. Tench, p. 162.
Chapter XI
3 Shaw, p. 115. The
Guardian sank on December 23, 1789. With her was lost, besides her crew and officers, £70,000 worth of food stores, livestock and plants.
5 Collins, p. 82, wrote that during the entire first half of May 1790 the fishermen brought in less than 2,000 pounds.
7 Martin is described in the MS Registers of Newgate Prison, 1792-1793 as “age thirty-four [in 1792], height 5’9”, grey eyes, black hair, sallow complexion, born in Ireland.” Pottle,
Boswell, p. 47. He was convicted at Exeter Assizes and sentenced on March 20, 1786, to seven years’ transportation. Phillip, p. lxvii.
Evening Mail, June 29-July 2, 1792.
It was Martin whose Memorandoms provide the most valuable surviving record of the escape from Port Jackson, and who had the strength and initiative to ingratiate himself with the Dutch officials on Timor, earning a large sum of money for his labors and paying for his room and board before he and the rest of the escapees were taken into custody.
8 Captain Edwards considered Cox to be equally responsible with the Bryants in planning the escape. Edward Edwards,
Voyage of the HMS Pandora, ed. Basil Thomson (London, 1915), p. 82.
10 In actuality La Pérouse and his ships had been lost at sea.
Chapter XII
1 Bateson, p. 129, citing Reverend Richard Johnson.
2 Tench had alluded to the “incredible severity” with which the Second Fleeters had been treated during their voyage—far worse than anything the First Fleeters had experienced. The ship’s master, Nicholas Anstis, deliberately reduced the food rations allotted to each convict in order to sell the uneaten portions for his own profit. Convicts were kept heavily ironed, shackled together, kept in the dim hold and rarely allowed to come up on deck.
Mortality was very high during the voyage, from starvation, scurvy and dysentery, and when convicts died, their corpses remained shackled to the living—a state of affairs actually welcomed by those who survived as it meant they could share the rations allotted to the dead.
On the small Surprize, a “wet ship,” the convicts were “considerably above their waists in water” when the seas were rough. Men with berths in the rear of the ship were “nearly up to the middles.” Bateson, pp. 127-128.
The contrast between the sufferings of the convicts aboard the Surprize, Neptune and Scarborough and the relatively good treatment of the women aboard the Lady Juliana and the crew of the transport Justinian is startling. Mortality aboard the Lady Juliana was relatively low, and the Justinian brought her entire crew into harbor, from Falmouth, in five months without any sickness on board whatsoever. Tench, p. 172.
5 Collins, p. 95, wrote that “information having been received the several convicts proposed making their escape from the colony in [the
Neptune], the governor sent an armed party of soldiers to search the ship, when two men and one woman were found concealed among the firewood. They were taken on shore, and the men punished for their attempt.”
6 The escape is described in Tench, pp. 181-182 and 316, citing Collins. There were five escapees, all men, but one died. The other four were discovered and picked up in 1795 at Port Stephens, where they were living among the aboriginal people.
7 Pottle,
Boswell, pp. 48-49.
8 John Butcher, who used the aliases William Butcher, Samuel Broome and John Brown, was incorrectly described by Pottle,
Boswell, p. 48, as having been on the First Fleet.
After his release Butcher wrote to Home Secretary Henry Dundas offering to return to Sydney Cove as a free settler, and pointing out his usefulness to the colony as an expert farmer. When no response was forthcoming Butcher enlisted as a private in the New South Wales Corps, returned to Sydney Cove, and was eventually given a twenty-five-acre farm at Petersham Hill in 1795. Cook, p. 240.
9 The terrible harm done by “Batavian fever,” or malaria, was unmistakable; when the
Waaksamheyd arrived from Batavia in December of 1790, it carried a midshipman named Ormsby who had caught the fever and eventually recovered. He was, Collins wrote, “the living picture of the ravages made in a good constitution by a Batavian fever.” Collins, p. 144, cited in Tench, p. 321.
Chapter XIII
1 James Martin, in his
Memorandoms, wrote that the escape party had an “open six-oar boat” with a hundredweight of flour, another hundred pounds of rice—probably the weevil-infested rice Captain Smith had brought from Batavia—along with fourteen pounds of pork and about eight gallons of water. Martin also says they had a compass, quadrant and chart.
Contemporary and secondary sources vary in their statements about the equipment and resources the Bryants and their fellow escapees had, and the sources of each of these items. I have attempted to reconcile these varying accounts, and to follow the most reliable of them.
It is greatly to be regretted that the memoir written by William Bryant of the journey he and Mary and the others took from Sydney Cove to Queensland has not survived. William Bligh read Bryant’s memoir in manuscript, and made an attempt to have it copied, but only Bligh’s recorded recollections of it survive, nothing of the text itself.
2 Cook, pp. 149-150. The accident was witnessed by Captain Hunter, who had been in command of the
Sirius when it was wrecked.
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
3 “We remained very happy at our work, for two months,” James Martin wrote, “until William Bryant had words with his wife and informed against himself, wife and children and all of us.” Martin, p. 37.
Chapter XVI
2 In his memoir of the escape from Port Jackson and its aftermath, James Martin wrote that William Bryant’s revelation of the convicts’ true identity came two months after their arrival in Kupang. Since they arrived on June 6, 1791, this would put Bryant’s confession and the convicts’ immediate imprisonment in August. Martin, p. 37.
Captain Edwards and the remnant of his crew and passengers did not arrive in Kupang until September 15, by which time Mary and Will and the others had been in the castle dungeon for a month or more.
Cook, in To Brave Every Danger, pp. 171ff, speculates, departing from Martin’s clear chronology, that it was the arrival of Edwards that led to Will Bryant’s admission and the subsequent imprisonment of the Port Jackson convicts. But this is an unwarranted embroidery on the slender but unambiguous contemporary evidence.
Chapter XVII
1 Mary, Charlotte and Will Allen sailed on the
Horssen. James Martin, Nate Lilley and John Butcher sailed on the
Hoornwey, along with the two convicts who died on the voyage, Will Morton and Sam Bird.
Chapter XVIII
1 James Martin wrote that “We was brought ashore at Purfleet and from there conveyed by the constable to Bow Street office, London, and was take to Justice Bond and was fully committed to Newgate.” p. 40.
Chapter XIX
1 Evan Nepean, Under Secretary at the Home Office, told Boswell that “Government would not treat [Mary and the four men] with harshness, but at the same time would not do a kind thing to them, as that might give encouragement to others to escape.” Pottle,
Boswell, p. 36.
2 Pottle,
Boswell, facing p. 36, reproduction of holograph.
3 Though a 1751 Act of Parliament prohibited the sale of spirits in prisons, the law was not enforced and prison keepers were usually publicans; in some small prisons, convicts drank alongside tavern customers from off the street, and the two groups played skittles together. M. Dorothy George,
London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1965), pp. 300-301. In the King’s Bench prison, there were said to be thirty gin shops.
4 As noted earlier, Will Bryant kept a log of the escape journey, but it has not survived.
5 Pottle,
Boswell, p. 54, citing Public Record Office, Correspondence and Warrants, Entry Book, H.O. 13/9f. p. 221; Newgate Register H.I. 26/56, p. 57.
Chapter XX
1 James Boswell,
Papers, Journal, Vol. 18, p. 194.
2 Boswell’s brother David lived in Titchfield Street, Mary Bryant in Little Titchfield Street. On the night of his mugging, it is possible that Boswell was visiting Mary, but unlikely. Their relationship seems to have been entirely platonic and disinterested on Boswell’s part; in his journal he writes of Mary in a quite different tone from the one he used to describe or allude to his many casual mistresses and the prostitutes he picked up in the street and in taverns. Possibly she rebuffed his attempts at seduction. Possibly he had scruples where Mary was concerned, or perhaps she didn’t appeal to him. More likely the protective role he took toward her precluded any erotic liaison.
3 Frank Brady,
James Boswell: The Later Years, 1769-1795 (New York, Toronto and London, 1984), p. 477.
4 Boswell,
Papers, Journal, Vol. 18, pp. 246, 203. Boswell was still complaining of severe pain at the end of August.
5 In October 1793 Mary told Boswell “she was sure her relations would not treat her well” once she returned to Fowey. Boswell,
Papers, Journal, Vol. 18, p. 217.
6 The incident with Mr. Castel is described in detail in Boswell,
Papers, Journal, Vol. 18, p. 200.
8 Boswell wrote of Dolly that she was “a very fine, sensible young woman, and of such tenderness of heart that she yet cried and held her sister’s hand.”
Dolly was so slim and young-looking that Boswell took her to be much younger than she was, calling her “a fine girl of twenty.” Boswell, Papers, Journal, Vol. 18, pp. 203, 200.
Chapter XXI
1 On August 25, 1793, Boswell wrote in his journal, “It was now fixed that Mary should go by the first vessel to Fowey to visit her relations.” Boswell,
Papers, Journal, Vol. 18, p. 204.
2 Mary’s relatives had promised to give Boswell a generous reward for all his efforts on Mary’s behalf. The warm and generous Dolly Broad had “expressed herself very gratefully” to Boswell and told him that “if she got money as was said, she would give [him] a thousand pounds.” Boswell,
Papers, Journal, Vol. 18, p. 203. Mary echoed this sentiment. Ibid., p. 204.
3 Boswell’s account of his leavetaking from Mary is in his
Journal, Vol. 18, pp. 217-218.