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In which we meet some of the fascinating people our man shared a ship with. Including the other James Squire
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These days James Squire is one of the First Fleet’s most well-known convicts. Which is a bit unfair because there are loads of other convicts sharing a ship with Squire who should themselves be better-known. Below decks of, at first the Friendship and later the Charlotte, he was surrounded by others who would also make their name in Australia. One would quite literally help build the country while several others would stage an audacious escape from it. One would quickly become a footnote for managing to die within weeks after first setting foot in this strange new land. Another would receive unfortunate renown for being ridiculously young when sentenced to transportation.
Also in chains in the Friendship were two people whose saga, in this day and age would have set social media ablaze. These would be Susannah Holmes and the red-headed Henry Kable. Kable had been done for burglary but dodged the death sentence while literally standing on the scaffold. According to Gillen’s book The Founders, he and his cohorts (who included his dad Henry) broke into a house and “stripped it of every moveable, took the hangings from the bedsteads and even the meat out of the pickle casks”.
While stuck in Norwich jail, he fell in love with fellow burglar Holmes (she pinched some linen and silver spoons) and the two had a prison child in 1786 named Henry – clearly the Kable family struggled to come up with names for boys.
Baby Henry couldn’t accompany his mum and dad down onto the First Fleet and instead was looked after by the Norwich jailer John Simpson. With she on the Charlotte and he on the Friendship, the new family was completely split up.
Something about their plight touched Simpson – or maybe he just didn’t want to be stuck looking after someone else’s kid. So he started writing letters to those in power. Soon enough the story of the family separated by cruel circumstances caught on with the public and they began to call for the family to be brought together (hashtag “reunited”).
It worked; Simpson brought young Henry down to the docks to hand over to Holmes and then she and bub were transferred to the Friendship to be with the Fanta-headed Kable.
The couple would be among the first to get married in Sydney. They would eventually become a prosperous pair, with Kable’s dealings allowing them to amass a lot of property. Not all were pleased with the way they did it; Governor John Hunter felt Kable in particular liked to use the law to send the opposition broke; “with constant litigation and infamous prosecutions in the courts, they have been accustomed to be gratified”.
Also sharing space with Squire in the bowels of the Friendship was the unfortunate John Hudson, a chimneysweep who was all of nine years old when he was sentenced to seven years transportation in December 1783.
Hudson was convicted of breaking into a house and swiping some shirts, stockings, a pistol and two aprons. He was fingered by the householder, who saw the marks of sooty feet near the window. He took impressions of them with paper and they matched Hudson’s in size and so he confessed. Which means, if he had bathed before committing the crime he would have likely gotten away with it.
Hudson was down to be sent to the United States, but the War of Independence put paid to that and so the boy waited on the hulks in the Thames for four years before journeying to Australia at the ripe old age of 15. Once ashore he would be sent to Norfolk Island and the last known record of him was his receiving 50 lashes in February 1791 for being outside his hut after hours. After that, the First Fleet teen largely disappeared from history.
Hudson wasn’t the youngest convict on the First Fleet. That honour appears to belong to Elizabeth Hayward, who was 13 years old when she set sail on the Lady Penrhyn.
Also travelling on the Friendship was marine, diarist and devoted misogynist Ralph Clark. He would routinely write about the “damned bitches” that were the female convicts on board – so often in fact he ended up using the shorthand “D/B” to describe them. He would also take on James Squire as a servant for a time in the colony.
When Squire was moved to the Charlotte he was in close quarters with the fleet’s other famed diarist, Marine Watkin Tench. Squire mustn’t have made much of an impression on either of them – neither Tench nor Clark make any mention of him during the trip over.
The convict lists on the Charlotte were sprinkled with those who would go on to be famous and infamous. Among the famous was James Bloodworth, the convict with whom Squire was added to the fleet at the last minute.
According to historian Mollie Gillen, Bloodworth’s parents lived on Heathen Street, the very same street where Squire’s pub could be found. So it seems reasonable to assume the pair knew each other before becoming passengers on the First Fleet.
Once in Sydney, Bloodworth found his skills as a bricklayer to be very much in demand. He built a number of the buildings in the colony, including the first Government House which was finished in June 1789 – just over a year after construction began. Once his sentence had finished and he was free to leave, Bloodworth chose to stay in the colony as the master bricklayer.
Perhaps the most infamous of those travelling on the Charlotte was Mary Broad, though she would become known as Mary Bryant soon after landing in Sydney Cove when she married fellow Charlotte passenger William Bryant.
Mary was the brains behind the most audacious escape from Sydney Cove – one which saw them return home to England. While a number of convicts ran off into the bush surrounding Sydney Cove looking for freedom, in March 1791, Mary, William, their two small children (aged just two and three) would steal a small fishing boat and sail away, having stockpiled supplies over the previous months.
Their escape was successful – they had waited until there were no faster ships in the harbour that could catch them. They sailed up the east coast and, after 10 weeks at sea, landed at Timor and posed as survivors of a shipwreck. The Dutch governor there looked after them and, in a delicious irony, Bryant and their party drew bills on the British government to buy clothes and supplies.
The fun was over two months later, when their real identities were discovered. They were handed over to the next English ship and taken back home. Once there Bryant became a minor celebrity and would ultimately be pardoned and released in 1793 – not a bad result for a prison escapee.
Also on the Charlotte was a teen named Thomas Barrett, who was unaware he only had a handful of months left on this Earth. He had already twice dodged a death sentence. His first dodge was when, just 12 years old, he was found guilty of stealing a silver watch. Sentenced to death, it was commuted to transportation to Nova Scotia in 1782. He was to travel there onboard the Mercury, but that ship was taken over by the convicts before it left British waters. Once recaptured, he and the other so-called “Mercuries” were sentenced to death, but again, Barrett’s sentence was commuted to transportation – this time to a place called Sydney Cove.
While onboard the Charlotte, Barrett managed to turn a belt buckle and a few old pewter spoons into counterfeit coins so good they very nearly passed undetected. How Barrett managed to melt the metal and recast them into coins while under the watch of marines seemed a mystery – though one of the marines was apparently caught with some of Barrett’s handiwork on him, which suggests at least one of those guarding him was prone to turning a blind eye from time to time.
By the time the Charlotte arrived at Botany Bay, the teenaged Barrett would only have weeks to live.
Over on the Lady Penrhyn is where we find a curious thing – another James Squire (though both still had an S appended to the end of their surname). The other Squire was the second mate on the Lady Penrhyn (which might explain the origin of the incorrect claim that the convict Squire ended up on the female ship). While not a convict, this other Squire did get himself in trouble; on April 19, 1787, before the fleet set sail, he was caught sleeping with a female convict. He was one of five seamen caught, quite literally, with their pants down, and all only narrowly avoided being kicked off the fleet.
It seems this other Squire was a seriously odd cat. After his ship had dropped off its load of convicts and left Sydney, it returned via China. On that voyage, he got in trouble for cruel treatment of the captain’s Tahitian goat. In one of the strangest cases of revenge you’re ever likely to hear about, Squires tied a large stone around the neck of his own dog (yes, his own dog) and threw the poor creature overboard.
Finally, if we were to fly over to another ship, the Prince of Wales, we would find the heavily pregnant Mary Spencer. While she and Squire would in time become quite familiar with each other, when the ships crossed the waters, they were strangers.
Sent away for stealing a corset, two handkerchiefs and a cloak, Spencer boarded the Prince of Wales in April 1787, already around five months pregnant. Perhaps the pregnancy was the result of a last clinch with a lover before leaving England or maybe just a jailhouse romance.
She would give birth to baby Mary on July 1, who would only survive three months in Sydney before dying and being buried under the soil of this strange place on April 5, 1788.