Constable Logan didn’t stand a chance, even if he had tried to resist. At seven to one, the odds against the unarmed overseer were too great. They jumped him during their break for breakfast when his guard was down and he was enjoying his cup of sweet tea. Pearce is vague about exactly what happened next, but it is likely that they tied Logan to a tree in the forest after stripping him of everything they could use, including his clothes.The temptation to wreak some form of revenge on him must have been great, especially given that several of them had probably suffered floggings or punishment because of his reports to the Commandant. But there is no record that they did so, and he was alive and well a year later, and still acting as an overseer in the very gang to which Pearce was assigned after his return to Macquarie Harbour.
The men had arrived at Kelly’s Basin just after dawn and had worked until it was time for their first meal of the day around 9 a.m. It consisted of a serving of bread and skilly, their only meal for the day until they returned to Sarah Island in the evening. Given that they were doing very heavy work, this diet was completely inadequate. To prevent prisoners from hoarding their bread rations for escape attempts, ergot, a fungal disease of rye, was added to the dough in the baking process to make it go stale and then rotten quickly. We now know that ergot has hallucinogenic qualities and there is a possibility that an accumulation of this fungus in their systems may have affected Pearce and the others later on during their ordeal when they came to contemplate the act of cannibalism.
With Logan taken care of, the escape began in earnest and the men returned to their whaleboat tied up at the jetty. About 6 metres (20 feet) in length with places for six oarsmen, the boat was double-ended, very seaworthy and designed for quick turning and use in rough weather. It had no rudder and the steersman guided it with an oar trailing aft.This was the moment when the whole plan could fall apart.They had to make their way out of Kelly’s Basin and turn north across the open entrance to Farm Cove, the next bay, and then on up to Coal Head, a distance of about 11 kilometres (about 6 miles). They still would have been just visible from Sarah Island, except for the brief time when they were behind Philips Island, but it would have been difficult to see something so low in the water and the whaleboat would have been hard to pick out against the shoreline. But they could be spotted by any sharp-eyed overseer or soldier. In their favour was all the activity associated with logging and coal-gathering around the harbour, so convicts, soldiers or anyone else seeing them might well have presumed that they were on official business.
Up at the coal works Bob Greenhill would have been on the lookout for them. Pearce says, ‘as soon as . . . [he] perceived the boat approaching . . . he was in perfect readiness to go with us’. Here there was a bigger whaleboat with a lugsail on a short mast, and while one man remained with the boats, Pearce, Greenhill and the others, armed with axes, went to the miners’ hut, smashed down the door and took ‘therefrom all the provisions we could find’, which amounted to about ten pounds of flour, six pounds of beef and an axe. This was to be their entire food supply for the next week until they turned to the consumption of human flesh. Pearce reports that they also poured water over the wood pyres that had been prepared to signal escapes to prevent the overseers lighting them and sending smoke-signals to the military lookout on Sarah Island to let them know that a convict break-out had occurred. By then it would have been just after midday.
Although Pearce is not clear as to the order in which things happened next, luck was not on their side. It seems that, first, they swamped the smaller boat so it could not be used to pursue them. Then, having loaded their meagre supplies, the men took to the larger whaleboat. Their intention was to row north up the harbour, which would have taken the whole afternoon and early evening, raid Lucas’s store and then slip out under the cover of night through Hell’s Gates. But they had only gone about 500 metres (a third of a mile) when they thought they saw a light astern, and Pearce said, ‘We observed the miners making fires all along the beach’. They had not drenched the signal pyres sufficiently, and the overseers and convicts from the mines had been able to ignite them quickly. Perhaps it was just by chance that someone had seen the boat. In any event, they knew that once the break-out signal had been sighted at Sarah Island, the Commandant would send boats in pursuit and would alert the troops at Hell’s Gates via the semaphore signalling system. The whole escape plan was unravelling.
The escapees had to quickly make a basic decision: should they continue by sea, hoping to out-row any pursuers, or alter their plan and head inland by foot? They chose the bush.
They beached the whaleboat just north of Coal Head, probably at a point where a small creek flowed down to the beach, and Pearce reports that ‘a consultation took place between us respecting the manner in which we should dispose of the boat and sails. Upon which we decided to cut her to pieces and to secret [sic] the sails near the place where we was’. He also says that it was Greenhill, supported by Travers, who suggested destroying the boat. The ex-mariner was already beginning to assume leadership of the group. It is not clear why they went to the trouble of cutting up the boat, but it certainly committed them to an overland escape route. By now it was early afternoon and their only course, short of surrendering, was to head into the bush along the creek, every man carrying an equal share of the luggage.
The overland route would lead them in an easterly direction toward the sparsely populated ‘settled districts’ in the centre of the island. Greenhill and Travers, as well as Pearce, had already lived in the back country to the north-west of Hobart Town and New Norfolk. However, they would have had only the most general notion of where Macquarie Harbour was in relation to the rest of the island. Terry Reid, Senior Ranger for the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service in Queenstown, who was born on the west coast, says that it is easy to make mistakes in navigation in the type of terrain the escapees were now entering.‘We use maps and sometimes fly over the country in a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft in order to pick out a route. Greenhill would have had to do it by trial and error, often in misty, miserable weather’. Reid points out that if the chosen route is impenetrable, modern walkers can always back out and try another approach. But the escapees did not have this luxury. Fear of pursuit meant that they had to keep going no matter what the landscape was like, although the upside was that any soldiers following them would have faced the same difficulties.
Greenhill correctly sensed that they had to head pretty much due east and, despite all the vicissitudes of the journey and the difficulty of the country through which they travelled, he maintained a steady easterly course for more than forty days, until he was killed by Pearce. It was an extraordinary feat of navigation by dead-reckoning, using the sun and stars without the benefit of a compass. The others were totally dependent on him; clearly Greenhill was drawing on his life at sea and his experience of foreign places. Without him the others would have been completely lost.
Their immediate task, however, was to get as far from Macquarie Harbour as they could, in as short a time as possible before Cuthbertson sent troops in pursuit. By going directly inland they precluded the possibility of the soldiers catching up with them by boat. But by choosing such a route they faced an even more formidable reality: the implacability of the natural world, and the indifferent otherness of the Tasmanian bush.
The place on the coast where they abandoned the boat was gently sloping, lightly timbered rainforest without a lot of understorey. It also gave them good cover. After about 3 kilometres (1.8 miles) moving inland they came to open country, but were hidden by the coastal forest from Sarah Island. In this area they would have crossed the creek-sized upper reaches of the Braddon River. They had set out on an east-north-easterly course toward the 1144-metre (3753-foot) Mount Sorell, and Pearce reports that they were at its base by about three o’clock in the afternoon. They had probably followed the creek up to the base of the southern side of the mountain. He says that on ascending Mount Sorell ‘we could very distinctly perceive Macquarie Harbour and the Island which is inhabited by the officers and military. We secreted ourselves as much as we possibly could behind the brushiest parts of the mountain we could find, lest the Commandant by the assistance of his telescope perceive us. The principal part of the mountain being so barren and we being so many in number, we travelled on in this cautious manner until we arrived at the summit of the mountain’.
By nightfall the Pearce party was at the top of Mount Sorell or, more likely, the lower ridge-line to the south of the peak. But they knew that all the way up the steep rock-face they would be exposed because there would be a clear line of sight from Sarah Island 8 kilometres away (5 miles), and the afternoon sun would have provided a spotlight for the Commandant peering through his telescope at the escaping convicts. Unless he was totally incompetent – and nothing indicates that he was – it is most likely that Cuthbertson would have noticed the eight men on the bare and exposed western elevation of Mount Sorell.
The escapees fully expected that the Commandant would send soldiers after them. Yet Cuthbertson’s hands were tied to some extent. Seven months before he had already lost two soldiers and three reliable convicts whom he’d sent on a wild-goose chase after a group of six escaping prisoners. With only a very small military contingent under his command – about sixteen men – it is most likely that he would have decided to allow this second party of fleeing convicts to make their way without pursuit. Either the escapees would soon return from the inhospitable bush, their tails between their legs, to face their punishment, or else nature would do his work for him and, like the previous groups of escapees, Pearce and his companions would be listed in the official records as ‘Supposed to have perished in the woods’. So why waste energy and resources in any attempt to recapture them? For the moment Cuthbertson would have eight fewer mouths to feed, although there would soon be more convicts on their way from Hobart Town to take their places. Even so the men on the run did everything they could to elude ‘the vigilant search we were confident would be made after [us]’.
They had climbed up to at least the ridge-line from sea level in about three hours under difficult conditions. Once at the top they set up camp for the night, ‘after making’, Pearce says, ‘the necessary fires for securing ourselves from the inclemency of the weather and regaling ourselves with a little of our provisions after the fatigues of the day’s journey’. Perhaps they gave three muted cheers for freedom and no doubt they felt that they had ‘beaten the bastards’ back at Sarah Island. But it had started to rain and their clothes were little or no protection from a dampness that would slowly begin to permeate their very beings. It was despera
Vigilance was their watchword: ‘We considered it requisite that one of us should watch while the others slept’.
‘Early the next morning we arose after arranging matters respecting our luggage. [We] kept to the tops of the mountains for our travelling’ whenever possible to avoid any pursuing troops. In other words, they were following the ridge-lines, which experienced bushwalkers in this area agree was probably the best way to go. Pearce tells us that ‘we made toward the east, keeping off Gordon’s River for fear of the soldiers’. Since at this point they were about 17 kilometres (10½ miles) due north of the Gordon River, they had little to fear from the military. But they did not know this.
With the exception of Mount Sorell, Frenchman’s Cap and the Gordon River, none of the geographical features of the landscape had been named in 1822, and Pearce’s narratives of the journey are vague on exact locations. From the information given in the Pearce accounts, a reasonably accurate estimate can be made most of the time to within about 15 kilometres (just over 9 miles) of their actual route.
As soon as they descended the eastern side of Mount Sorell that morning, they would have been in the narrow valley of the Clark River, which at that point was more of a creek. After fording it and getting through some rainforest of medium density, they would have had to climb steeply to the Darwin Plateau, the ridge-line between Mount Darwin and the South Darwin Peak. Like Mount Sorell, the Darwin Range is a steep, rocky, exposed escarpment about 650 metres (2130 feet) high on a direct north to south alignment, and descending from it would have involved in places hand-over-hand rock-climbs.This type of terrain quickly sapped their strength, especially now that they were no longer driven by the adrenalin of escape. Probably no European had ever been through this area before them, and it was only intermittently visited by the Aborigines – the landscape around Macquarie Harbour and the mountains to the east constituted the border between the territories of the North-West and South-West tribes, and there is debate as to how often the Aborigines visited.
To the east of the Darwin Range they descended into what Pearce calls ‘very rough country’.That is an understatement: they were now heading east–south-east, and although the tops of the mountain ridges are bare, down at the lower levels the escapees had begun to penetrate a wide swathe of implicate rainforest, the scientific name for the thickest, most tangled, inaccessible type of country. But it is not just a matter of getting through. Describing this area, Terry Reid says, ‘Down in the valleys you have scrub, and also you have to cross drainage creeks and then the Andrew River. The Andrew is in a very deep valley. The whole area is well vegetated, with very fast-flowing streams, and in September there is a lot of water around.’
Reid correctly uses the word ‘scrub’ to describe the forests that the eight escapees were now entering. The predominant and most obvious species are the various types of beech trees: botanical name Nothofagus, the remnant vegetation from Gondwana, the original southern super-continent that centred on the South Pole and began to break up and drift northward about 160 million years ago. So Pearce, Greenhill and their six companions were now entering what had been the natural home of the dinosaurs until the great extinction of the reptiles at the end of the Cretaceous period, some 65 million years ago.
These cool temperate beech forests long outlasted the dinosaurs and were the predominant vegetation in Australia until the major changes in climate that occurred between five million years ago and fairly recently. During the recurrent ice ages the atmosphere became drier and the Nothofagus rainforest species slowly disappeared from most areas on the mainland, and the acacias and eucalypts gradually took over across the Australian landscape.They still dominate it. Modern research has shown that especially over the last 750,000 years, the rainforests have expanded and contracted after the major fluctuations in climate brought about by the ice ages. Since the arrival of humankind in Australia, probably as long ago as 60,000 years, the deliberate lighting of fires by Aboriginal people to flush out game and maintain grassy areas has also favoured the eucalypts and acacias over all other species, because these plants need fire for their germination.
It is only in far eastern Victoria and south-western Tasmania that remnant Gondwana vegetation has survived. These forests are quite different from the tropical rainforests of northern Australia and the equatorial regions. That is why they are historically and biologically so important.
But Pearce and his seven companions would have had a very different view of this landscape.The area that they were traversing was dominated by myrtle beech. As far as they were concerned it was an alien landscape full of almost impenetrable scrub through which they would have had to cut a path to make their way. At ground level the beech forest is a twilight world – cool, damp and still. In a mature rainforest these trees form a dense canopy that can vary in height from 7 to 36 metres (20 to 120 feet) above the ground. The ground is littered with rotten fallen trees and branches. There are great festoons of vines and mosses, as well as large and small fern-trees, one of the few species that can grow in this closed atmosphere.
Climbing over fallen trees and pushing their way past branches and vines, the escapees often fell, cutting themselves and putting a terrible strain on their bodies. Occasionally they would have seen an isolated remnant mountain ash, or even a small stand of them, that poked out of the forest-cover like a thin, leafy spire on a cathedral – a sure sign that the rainforest had reclaimed an area that it had surrendered to the eucalypt forests several hundreds of years before, following a wildfire. Besides myrtle beech, Pearce and the others would have also seen southern sassafras, celery-top pine, leatherwood and an occasional stand of Huon pine. In the higher mountain valleys and gullies the predominant species they would have encountered were deciduous beech, celery-top pine, King Billy pine and pencil pine.
But the escapees were too busy and too exhausted to give a darn about the various species of beech and pine, most of which had not been named, let alone catalogued, at that time.They were about two to three days out of Macquarie Harbour when they passed to the north of the Darwin Crater, where a meteorite hit the earth 750,000 years ago, a major source of glass-like silicate, much valued by the Aborigines and widely traded throughout Tasmania. Although they did not know it and nothing in the landscape had been named at that time, they were actually pushing on toward the Andrew River and the Engineer Range, some of the toughest country in the world. Even today there is no walking track, let alone a road that follows their course. Only the best equipped and most experienced twenty-first-century bushwalkers would attempt to follow in the Pearce party’s footsteps, and then only using accurate and detailed survey maps, compasses and probably a Global Positioning System (GPS).
But as the convicts cut their way toward the Andrew River, they soon realised that they were not just facing dense, implicate rainforest, difficult creek crossings, steep mountains and deep valleys.They were also beginning to experience some of the nastiest vegetation in the world. Interspersed with the beech trees and often growing around and through them, especially where fire had disturbed the rainforest, was the notorious horizontal scrub with the odd botanical name of Anodopetalum biglandulosum. This type of scrub literally becomes horizontal rather than vertical, after growing 2 to 5 metres (6 and 15 feet).The main stem grows vertically until it is forced to lean over under its own weight, and it then spreads out, forming a thick tangle of horizontal branches. The whole process is repeated over and over as further stems grow upwards and then bend over under their own weight. The denseness of ‘horizontal’, as it is called in the southwest, creates a near inaccessibility; there is simply no way you can move through it or stand upright in it.You are constantly thrown off balance. It tears at the front of your legs and chest and you can easily fall over and break a limb. There is no way of boring a path through without an axe and much exertion. Even trying to hack a path is often unsuccessful.You can attempt to crawl beneath it, but here you find uneven ground and a clammy, slippery, slimy, wet surface with fallen logs, mosses and debris. As you crawl along, the stems grab at your clothes and skin. It is soul-destroying, and no matter what you do, you quickly tire and become disoriented. So the best you can do is to chop your way through, especially if you can’t go around it. This is what our escapees would have tried to do.
One way of dealing with the horizontal scrub is to walk on top of it. This is possible in some places because it is so dense, although it can be very risky and you can fall through and hurt yourself badly. There is a story told in the south-west of a massive D-8 bulldozer, whose driver felt the vehicle gently rocking from side to side as he drove it along, just as though it was riding on a sponge. Fearing that the dozer would roll over, he jumped down and was amazed to find that he had driven it onto horizontal scrub so strong that it supported the heavy machine. Henry Hellyer, a surveyor for the Van Diemen’s Land Company, reported in March 1827, five years after the Pearce party, that he tried to move across the top of the horizontal: ‘We were obliged to be walking upon these never-dry, slippery branches, covered with moss, as much as twenty feet [six metres] above the ground, which, being in many instances rotten, occasioned us many awkward falls, and tore our clothes to rags. We were not able to force our way on five hundred yards in an hour in some of these horrid scrubs’.
Adding to the inaccessibility of the horizontal are stands of tea-tree that grow to 3 or 4 metres in height (10 to 13 feet), and paperbark trees that can grow up to 9 metres (30 feet). They are often accompanied by silver banksia, a shrub that can also grow to up to 9 metres with a conspicuous honeycomb-like flower. The ground is often sodden underneath these shrubs and trees, with a mixed undergrowth of ferns and mosses. But even more frustrating for Pearce and the other escapees would have been the bauera – pronounced ‘bow-ra’ – a thick understorey shrub. It looks a little like tea-tree and has a rather lovely flower and soft leaves. But it grows in dense clumps, sometimes occurring around and through the horizontal. One of Tasmania’s most experienced bushwalkers, and a campaigner for the Wilderness Society, Geoff Law, describes bauera as ‘a yielding sort of vegetation that absorbs all the efforts you throw at it, and you just end up in a complete tangle. It grows up to 2 to 3 metres [7 to 10 feet] tall. You can push through and down on it, you can try to crush it, and the more you push and crush, the more it falls back in on you. It is like trying to fight with a trampoline!’
Perhaps the most vicious form of vegetation in the southwest is cutting grass. Its name says it all: it cuts any exposed skin it comes in contact with and leaves a nasty wound that usually becomes infected and festering. It grows in tussocks 2 to 3 metres high (9 feet) and often becomes intertwined with other clumps of cutting grass, or attaches to branches and fallen logs. It makes any movement forward almost impossible. The combination of bauera, horizontal and cutting grass, together with sassafras and leatherwood, can tear your clothing to pieces and sap your energy and patience – a completely morale-destroying situation. If it does that for well-fed, fully equipped, modern bush-walkers, you can imagine the effect on a group of poorly equipped, poorly dressed escapees.
After some time battling through this kind of bush, even if you are on a path, you tend to slip into a kind of psychological automatic pilot. You become so tired in body that your mind withdraws and you revert to a semi-conscious state. It is precisely when you are in this state that you can miss your footing and fall over. Going downhill is sometimes worse than going up because you put so much strain on your knees and leg muscles. Certainly you can pick up pace on the downward slope, but if your mind and eyes are not closely focused on where you are walking and where you put your feet, the mud and slippery ground and rocks can give way and lead to serious falls. For the convicts this lack of attention would have been exacerbated by hunger, yet the Pearce party could have survived in this type of bush as long as they did only by withdrawing mentally.
By about day four into the escape there was trouble brewing. Even as they crossed the Darwin Range, Little Brown, the oldest man in the group, was becoming a problem: he could not keep up with the others. Pearce says that even on the second day he was ‘suffering more by the fatigues of the journey than the others’ and that he ‘could not keep pace with us, and was frequently at a considerable distance behind us which compelled us to stop for him’. Little Brown had been in the convict system for a long time. His spirit was already broken, and probably his desire to reach freedom was largely gone. He was ‘the worst walker of any’, Pearce says, ‘which detained us much’. He had really gone along with the others because he was part of the group and he did what they decided. But by now their patience was growing thin, and while they ‘compassionated [with] his sufferings’, he was told bluntly that despite all his ‘remonstrances . . . it was our determination to leave him if he did not endeavour to keep pace with us’. They were adamant that ‘We would not lose so good an opportunity of gaining our liberty through him’. However, to try to help him they shared out among them his ‘burthen’, which can’t have been much. But by now the realities of nature were impinging on them all. Pearce says in an understatement: ‘The ground over which we travelled [had been] dreadfully rough and bushy’, and this slowed them down considerably.
The second night out they ate some more of their provisions. They used a portion of the flour to cook damper, the bush bread made from mixing flour and water, which was then baked on the coals of the fire. It was not particularly nourishing, but it filled their empty bellies.
Things were even worse the next day. Pearce says that they ‘arose at the very dawn of day the third morning and proceeded on the journey through thick woods of brush in a very melancholy state’. They were now in the implicate rainforest to the west of the Andrew River, still difficult country.
The rain that had begun to pour down on the first night did not let up. ‘It kept on a constant rain’, Pearce reports, ‘which greatly added to make us far [more] miserable than we was’. Such weather is typical for south-western Tasmania, where the deluge can last for up to a week or ten days. Even in summer the rain often turns to sleet and sometimes even to thick snow. It is bone-chillingly cold, particularly at night. When the rain stops, frosts or fogs are common. Pearce confirms this when he says that ‘the weather still continuing to be very wet and foggy made it very disagreeable travelling’, and that the rain made them ‘far [more] miserable . . . and [it] was also excessively cold particularly at nights, and not having sufficient nourishment and being exposed so much to the night dews greatly impaired our constitutions’. Also their clothing and footwear, which would have been of poor quality and pretty rough and ready to start with, would now have become torn and frayed and would have offered them little or no protection.
By the fourth day of the escape they would have already climbed over Mount Sorell, crossed the Darwin Range, and penetrated the valley of the Andrew River 4 to 5 kilometres (2½ to 3 miles) north of its junction with the Franklin River. Immediately in front of them lay the Engineer Range, and beyond that the south-flowing Franklin, where water levels would have been high with the rain and the melting snow of late winter. As they moved toward the valley the Pearce party passed through forests of myrtle, King Billy pine and Huon pine, and cutting grass and bauera with dense tea-tree and horizontal scrub. As they got close to the river itself they found themselves in a tall eucalypt forest. The Andrew was in full September flood, but they must have found a fairly easy crossing-place because two of the party could not swim. It was probably a couple of kilometres (a mile or so) north of the Looker River’s junction with the Andrew.
Immediately they confronted a steep line of mountains on a more or less north–south axis – the Engineer Range. Although they did not know it, beyond that was the Deception Range, lying on the same axis across their route. While these mountain chains are not particularly high – on average they are about 700 metres (2290 feet) – they are extremely steep and treacherous, comprised of ice- and glacier-eroded Cambrian rock, with a number of sheer cliff faces and drops down to the Franklin River. Terry Reid says that the Engineer Range is not as hard to climb as Mount Sorell, although its difficulty would have depended on the direction in which they approached the ascent. He says that the fact that a couple of them were already exhausted shows that they were perhaps trying to cover too much ground each day.The one prominent point in the whole area that had already been named was Frenchman’s Cap; Greenhill would have used this as a reference point. Reid feels sure that they would have been trying to get to the east of Frenchman’s Cap as fast as they could.Then they would have felt safe from pursuit because they were well beyond the area that could be seen or reached from Sarah Island.
The party had now covered about 23 kilometres (14 miles) as the crow flies from the eastern shoreline of Macquarie Harbour. Pearce says that food was running low and there was ‘not the least prospect of procuring any more for there was not a single reptile in that part of the country where we was’. Aboriginal people would have known where to look for ‘bush tucker’, and there were wallabies around, such as the red-necked wallaby and the Tasmanian pademelon (pronounced ‘paddy-melon’), as well as wombats, ring-tailed and brush-tailed possums, and some species of birds. But the wallabies are shy, fast-moving and good at camouflage, and the possums are nocturnal and tree-dwelling. Without experience of the bush and lacking both the knowledge and wherewithal, Pearce and the others would have had no chance of catching them.There would not have been any birds’ eggs at that time of the year. Some people have suggested that they could have chased and caught wombats by hand, but both Terry Reid and Geoff Law point out that this could only have been said by those who have never tried to catch these seemingly awkward, but tough, burrowing marsupials. Wombats have a real turn of speed when necessary, they are bulky and strong, and when chased they make a bee-line straight back to the safety of their burrows, or they disappear into the scrub or forest. There were also some edible plants, but these were unknown to the escapees. As well there would have been the carnivorous marsupials: the now extinct thylacine (the Tasmanian ‘tiger’), the carrion-eating Tasmanian devil, the catlike spotted-tailed quoll and the smaller eastern quoll.The quolls are nocturnal, and thylacine cautious and well concealed, and the devils are too fast-moving.
The crisis that was brewing among them found its first expression on the fourth night out.They had begun to ascend the Engineer Range, but got caught halfway up when darkness fell, having underestimated how arduous the climb would be in their exhausted state. Pearce describes the range as a ‘high barren hill. On ascending it we could not perceive a single tree, nothing but small sticks of decayed bush’. This tallies with the appearance of the Engineer Range now, a rather narrow ridge whose sides are covered with scrub.The men had to hack their way up the slope, which rises to a series of peaks almost 600 metres (1960 feet) in height. Pearce reports that they had great trouble getting a fire going that night to protect themselves from the cold air and the nocturnal dews. The scrub was probably green, wet and not very combustible.
That night profound doubt began to set in. ‘Some of them began to see their folly’, Pearce says, ‘and wished themselves [back] at Macquarie Harbour, although it was a place where they undoubtedly had to encounter numerous difficulties’. The Knopwood narrative says that they felt that ‘they had plunged themselves into greater miseries and hardships than ever could be experienced at that place [Sarah Island]’, and that they had ‘not the least prospect of ever arriving at any place from whence they might expect to find relief’. It is doubtful whether these are Pearce’s actual words; they sound more like a sanctimonious editorial gloss by Thomas Wells or whoever was the final compiler of the Knopwood manuscript. No doubt that night Greenhill had to use all his leadership skills to keep them focused on the fact that they had come this far and that freedom was still within their grasp.
The men’s relationships were now becoming very strained, with some of them feeling that they had reached the end of their tether. Most probably it was Brown and Kennerly who complained most, with some support from Dalton.They seem to have already formed a group on their own, probably because they were the oldest and therefore the slowest walkers, unable to keep up with the younger group that was setting the pace.The more motivated men – Greenhill, Travers, Pearce, Bodenham and Mather – were much stronger physically and they seemed to be more able to summon up the psychological resources to keep going.
‘On the fifth day’, Pearce says, ‘the weather still continuing to be very wet, the rain falling in torrents, made us very uncomfortable which enabled us to make but very little progress’. They were still either climbing the western face or beginning to descend the equally steep eastern face of the Engineer Range and were particularly exposed. Reflecting on their experience from his own knowledge of the bush, Terry Reid says that they would have been suffering from considerable mental stress. ‘These days we’ve got good clothing and all the necessities, including food and a fuel stove so we can light a fire. We’ve also got an understanding in the back of our mind that we can make it through the bush. They wouldn’t have had any of that. Take that level of stress and add it to their physical condition, the lack of food, not knowing exactly where they are, the fear of being pursued.’ All of this would have brought about a rapid deterioration in physical and psychological attitudes. Reid says that at times you have to get down on your hands and knees to crawl through the scrub and bauera, or you have to jump against it.
As soon as they found some good shelter on level ground on the fifth day, Pearce says they stopped ‘and remained in a very dejected state until the sixth evening’. Obviously, they were so exhausted that they turned this into a rest day. The flour from which they made bush damper and the salted beef they had stolen from Macquarie Harbour were totally inadequate. The damper would have given them some carbohydrates and the meat some protein, but not nearly enough. The escapees were using an enormous amount of energy on their trek and, because of their poor diet at Sarah Island, they probably had little in the way of reserve calories to begin with. For very active people a rule of thumb for daily calorie needs is to multiply body weight by twenty. Estimating the average body weight of the men at 130 pounds (59 kilos) and multiplying by 20, we get a daily requirement of 2600 calories. Pearce and the others were getting nothing like that at Macquarie Harbour, and obviously without some form of nourishment they were in grave danger of dying from starvation.
Exhaustion was one enemy, cold was another. Given the conditions they were in, it would have been a challenge for them to keep warm. Impending or mild hypothermia must have been a risk. Even today, bushwalking in Tasmania can sometimes produce fatalities through exposure and hypothermia if hikers are not properly equipped and aware of the dangers. The rain is so persistent that eventually it penetrates even the best quality Gore-Tex outerwear. Once your underclothes are wet through, the cold seeps right in.
Chilled to the inner core by a cold that is intensified by wet and windy conditions, a person with hypothermia experiences a gradual physical and mental collapse. It is an insidious process and the victim is usually the last to realise what is happening. Normal physiological functioning requires a core body temperature in excess of 37° Celsius (98.6° Fahrenheit). Once the temperature drops so low that the body loses heat faster than it produces it, intense shivering begins, the body’s way of trying to create warmth through a rapid succession of contractions and relaxations of the muscles. If the exposure continues, the person gradually loses the ability to maintain vital functions. As cold reaches the brain, physical coordination declines and the person begins to fall and slip often, speech becomes slurred and judgement impeded. The first signs of hypothermia are tiredness and a reluctance to keep moving, followed by shivering and exhaustion. In advanced cases coma and death can follow quickly. It is surprising that some of the escapees were not already suffering from hypothermia. Possibly the weather was warmer than usual for September, and probably the conditions they had already experienced at Macquarie Harbour had extended their bodies’ tolerance to intense cold.
Making a sheltered camp with a fire on the sixth day also probably halted the advancing effects of hypothermia, but the eight were exhausted and hungry. Their rest day seemed to do them little good psychologically, however, because that evening ‘We were all disputing who should get wood for the fire. Some brought it and made fires for themselves. Kennerly made some tinder this night and put it by as he had some intention of returning to the [Sarah Island] settlement’. This also seems to be the night when Kennerly suddenly said, in what may have been a sick joke, that ‘he was so hungry he could eat a piece of a man’. It was the first mention of cannibalism.
They were now ravenously hungry, not having eaten for a couple of days since their meagre rations ran out. Without sustenance they would die and, as we have seen, their knowledge of bush skills was negligible. Although it is hard to tell from Pearce’s account, Kennerly’s comment was most likely incidental. And indeed he did not participate in the subsequent cannibalism. But they all heard it and it articulated what the ex-mariner, Bob Greenhill, had been thinking. He was already asking himself if the time had not arrived to initiate ‘the custom of the sea’. Greenhill was a strong-minded man, and probably something of a bully, and it was he who was to carry out most of the killings. His intimate friend, Matthew Travers, supported him and together they usually cowed the others into submission. Pearce, although short in stature, was as strong physically as Greenhill and Travers, or maybe even stronger, but he couldn’t navigate and he didn’t have the psychological stability to be a leader.
As Pearce reports it, they were about seven days into their desperate journey when they began to talk seriously about cannibalism. They had spent a couple of days negotiating the escarpment of the Engineer Range and were probably somewhere in the scrub and rainforest country near its south-eastern base, moving eastward toward the Franklin River. Pearce says that on ‘the seventh morning the elements had a promising appearance’, and as they set out, ‘four of us happened to be in front of the others’. The four were Pearce, Greenhill, Travers and Mather. Bodenham must have dropped back with the older men. As they struggled through the bush they began to discuss Kennerly’s comment. Pearce says, most likely quite truthfully, that it was ‘Greenhill [who] . . . first . . . introduced the subject of killing one of their companions and eating him’. He suggested that eating a man was perhaps the only option they had left. Greenhill said, according to Pearce, ‘that he had seen the like done before, and that it tasted very much like pork’.
Mather replied that ‘It would be murder to do it.’
Greenhill retorted, ‘I’ll warrant you, I will eat the first part myself, but you all must lend a hand that we all may be guilty of the crime.’
The unspeakable had been articulated.
It is significant that it was the ex-mariner who initiated this discussion, for it was not unknown for shipwrecked sailors to resort to cannibalism. The term ‘the custom of the sea’, originating in the seventeenth century, referred to the practice of drawing lots in situations of starvation to see who would be sacrificed to save others. Just a year and ten months before the Pearce party escaped from Macquarie Harbour, the Nantucket-based whale ship Essex had been attacked and sunk by a massive and boisterous sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just over 3220 kilometres (2000 miles) almost due west of the Galapagos Islands. The twenty-one officers and crew took to the boats, and after ninety days two whaleboats containing eight survivors were picked up near the coast of Chile. In one boat two emaciated men sat sucking the marrow from the bones of their dead comrades as the rescue ship came alongside.The survivors had drawn lots to see who would be killed, and they did not hesitate to eat the bodies of the dead.
Later there would be the story of the yacht Mignonette, which sank off the coast of West Africa in 1884 after being hit by a 12-metre (40-foot) rogue wave in a storm. It left the four English crewmen adrift in the mid-Atlantic in a small dinghy for over two weeks.They were all starving and the captain announced that they would have recourse to the time-honoured custom. One of the four, a cabin-boy, was already delirious and close to death. Eventually they decided that the captain would kill him and they would all eat him. Three days later they were rescued, but when they got back to England they were charged with murder. The English legal establishment was determined to stamp out this type of customary law, and in a test case the captain was put on trial and condemned to the mandatory death sentence, although this was commuted to six months’ imprisonment ‘without hard labour’. The English Chief Justice, John Duke Coleridge, ruled in convoluted legalese that ‘the temptation to the act which existed here was not what the law has ever called necessity . . . The absolute divorce of law from morality would be of fatal consequence; and such a divorce would follow if the temptation to murder in this case were to be held by law an absolute defence of it’. It is safe to assume that Lord Chief Justice Coleridge had never been lost at sea in an open boat without food or water.
But cannibalism was not confined to shipwrecks. The most famous case of it in United States history is that of the George Donner party, a group of ten unrelated families and sixteen other individuals, eighty-seven people in total, headed for California, who were trapped in the high Sierra Nevada, south-west of Reno, by the early snow of the winter of 1846–47. About half of the survivors resorted to cannibalism, although there was no direct killing of anyone for the purpose of eating them. They simply ate the bodies of those who had died. Cannibalism is thus something that even ‘normal’ people will resort to in extreme situations. What was particularly interesting in the Donner case was that the women had much better survival rates than the men.The reasons for this are twofold: first, women are generally smaller and so they need less food to support their basic metabolism. Second, women have a higher proportion of body fat and a lower basal metabolism than men, giving them better heat insulation against cold. Using less energy than men because of smaller body weight, these fat reserves sustain them longer against hunger.
While survival cannibalism can be distinguished from ritual cannibalism, as found, for instance, in pre-European Mesoamerica, the distinction should not be pushed too far. Dr Tom Waite of Adelaide University argued that cannibalism was very common in nature and also among humans, especially hunter-gatherers, for whom it was a common practice, ‘albeit disguised by various religious or cultural justifications . . . A study in 1974 of pay-back warfare and cannibalism among small isolated groups of Papua New Guineans showed that it contributed 10 per cent of the protein to the diet of people living where game was in chronically short supply’.
There is no strict parallel between these cases and the behaviour of our escapees. By the standards of other situations, they resorted to cannibalism very quickly. There was also seemingly a lot less compunction about it, perhaps because starvation affected them speedily. Pearce also talked constantly about the cold and especially its effects at night. The body temperature of a starving person drops considerably and they have poor circulation, leading to a dangerous interaction between hunger and the threat of hypothermia. Other symptoms of starvation are similar to hypothermia: a tendency to fall over and to trip resulting from a loss of a sense of balance, an inability to walk in a straight line, and a proneness to bump into other people or surrounding objects, leading to bruises, cuts and abrasions. Blackouts and fainting are other characteristic symptoms. Starving people experience severe emotional and psychological effects as well, becoming apathetic, dull, depressed and discouraged, and lacking in empathy for the needs and sufferings of others, having become increasingly focused on their personal need for food. Irritability and a tendency to explode with frustration and anger also characterise very hungry people.
Pearce, Greenhill, Travers and Mather had a brief discussion about the rights and wrongs of cannibalism. Pearce says bluntly: ‘We then consulted who should fall’. According to his account, it was Greenhill who took the lead in nominating the victim: he said it should be Dalton.
Why Dalton? Because, Greenhill argued,‘He had volunteered to be a flogger’. Whether Dalton had volunteered for this duty or not we don’t know, but the others clearly believed it was true, so he was quickly chosen as the first victim.
Pearce vividly describes what happened very early the next morning, well before dawn, on their eighth day out from Macquarie Harbour, in a rainforest somewhere near the western bank of the Franklin River: ‘When we stopped at night, Dalton, Brown and Kennerly had a fire by themselves and a little break-wind. About three o’clock in the morning, Dalton was asleep. Greenhill got up, took an axe and struck him on the head with it, which killed him as he never spoke afterwards. Travers took a knife, cut his throat with it, and bled him. We then dragged the body to a distance, cut off his clothes, tore his insides out and cut off his head.Then Mather,Travers and Greenhill put his heart and liver on the fire to broil, but took them off and cut them before they were right hot. They asked the rest would they have any, but we would not eat any that night. Next morning the body was cut up and divided into equal parts, which we took and proceeded on our journey a little after sun rise’.
There is so much detail in this account that it is unlikely to have been a fabrication. With Travers, Mather, Bodenham and Pearce looking on, Greenhill killed Dalton, as he had said he would. Brown and Kennerly were probably asleep at the time like Dalton, and were too surprised to do anything to defend the Irish ex-soldier. They were also now outnumbered five to two. Pearce cooperated in the killing of his mate without any compunction.
Travers bled and butchered the body with a professional hand, no doubt drawing on his background of slaughtering and butchering sheep in the back country of New Norfolk. It was Mather, Travers and Greenhill who were the first to overcome their repulsion about eating human flesh. They offered to share pieces with the others, who refused. The next morning Bodenham and Pearce also overcame the taboo against cannibalism, but it was too much for the older men, Kennerly and Brown, for Dalton had become something of a mate, sharing a fire with them. They must have realised that one or the other of them would be the next victim, and they decided to flee. There was nowhere to go except back to Macquarie Harbour.
The next morning, after the uncooked portions of Dalton’s body had been cut up and divided, the party prepared to set out. Pearce says that ‘About this time there was a man appointed to go in front every day, who had nothing to carry, but was to clear the road for the others’. His role was to chop a way through the scrub. No doubt strengthened by the protein derived from human flesh, the five stronger men set out on the next stage of the journey with some gusto. Pearce says that ‘Kennerly and Brown said they would carry the tin pots and a little tomahawk, which were given them. We had not got more than a quarter of a mile . . . till they were missing. We stopped and “cooeed” and got no answer; nor could we see anything of them’.
The two older men had quickly retreated in the opposite direction and had begun the journey back to Macquarie Harbour. Although they had no food except their portions of Dalton’s flesh, they made it all the way back to Sarah Island, arriving there on 12 October, twenty-two days after the initial escape and about thirteen days after fleeing the scene of Dalton’s murder and dismemberment. The official report says they ‘were in a state of the greatest exhaustion’, but neither suitable food for starving men nor adequate medical care would have been available for them at Sarah Island. Brown died on 15 October, and Kennerly on 19 October 1822. It seems certain that they had mentioned neither the murder of Dalton nor the cannibalism to Cuthbertson. They were no doubt fearful of the legal consequences for themselves if they confessed to being present at a murder and a cannibalistic feast, even if they did not take part.
The others were at first very worried that the two bolters would give information that would lead to soldiers being sent in pursuit of them, and they were fearful that their information about the murder and cannibalism would hang them all. Their concern was exacerbated by the knowledge that they were close to a large river and they feared that Cuthbertson might send soldiers in a boat in pursuit. Pearce says that they decided not to give chase to Brown and Kennerly for they reckoned the two would not make it back to Macquarie Harbour and would die on the way. Why waste the energy?
So they pushed on. They were now about 28 kilometres (17 miles) north of the confluence of the Franklin and Gordon rivers and, although they thought it was the Gordon, immediately ahead of them was the Franklin, which at that stage had not been named. Crossing it proved to be very difficult as there were few places to ford the river, its banks ‘being so rough and steep’, as Pearce correctly puts it. Both Terry Reid and Geoff Law agree that they probably approached the Franklin somewhere close to the northern end of the Great Ravine, a series of cliffs, gorges and rapids into which the river flows near the southern end of the Engineer Range. Reid says that the Franklin ‘is very narrow, very sheer on both sides.You can get yourself down onto the banks of the river via the little creeks’. Law concurs, saying that, ‘Trying to get down to the river, let alone cross it, would have been horrific. Given September, the river would have been very high.The rocks on the sides of the gorges are very slippery.’
Rising on the western side of the King William Range in central Tasmania, the Franklin runs for much of this part of its length through deep gorges and over dangerous rapids and shallow waterfalls. In early spring it is usually running high and very fast. Nowadays it is one of the premier rafting rivers in the world.
James Erskine Calder, who traversed this area in 1841, describes the Franklin as ‘a beautiful stream, of considerable width, depth and rapidity. Its banks are mostly high, and often perpendicular, overhung with handsome myrtles, and many fine pines; the branches of the latter, like those of the willow, often drooping to its surface in a manner which much contributes to the beauty of the stream’. It is still like this but, as the Pearce party soon found out, the beauty was deceptive. First, how were they to get down to the river? And secondly, how were they to get across?
The rain had started again and it was only ‘with great trouble [that they] effected a passage to the river’ through the tangled maze of rainforest and scrub that surrounded it. After much searching, probably in the area somewhere south of what is now called the Sideslip and probably inside the northern end of the Great Ravine, they eventually found a possible crossing point. It was the evening of the eleventh day out from Macquarie Harbour. Pearce takes up the story: ‘Early the next morning they arose and consulted among themselves respecting the manner in which they could be able to cross the river with safety as two of them could not swim’. The non-swimmers were Travers and Bodenham.To try to get them over they cut down two large trees, hoping to use them as a bridge across the swiftly flowing river. But the current was so strong and fast that it swept the trees away immediately. After some further exploration they found a place ‘where a rock projected from the other side to the middle of the river’.The three swimmers dived in and swam across to the rock, towing behind them ‘a wattle pole of some 30 or 40 feet in length’, which they then used to pull the two non-swimmers across. It must have been a hair-raising experience for them all, but especially for Travers and Bodenham. In these slower, broader parts of the river the water looks black and seemingly bottomless. Plunging into the raging river required rare bravery and, whatever else they lacked, these men certainly had courage.
Reid thinks that they must have found a spot in the northern part of the Great Ravine where the river widens out and settles down sufficiently for them to have found calmer water. It would have been impossible to cross in the narrower parts of the river where it is 4 to 7 metres (12 to 18 feet) wide and raging. The Franklin is generally about 15 metres (about 50 feet) across – not crossable either for the non-swimmers unless they had a very long pole or, as Pearce says, there were rocks sticking right out into the middle to foreshorten the distance. But even with all this in their favour, Reid warns that ‘The current is very strong. Once you’ve been caught by the current you’re going to get swept away into the rapids and never be seen again. We [the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service] would not recommend that anyone would contemplate going down the river at that time [of the year]’. The Franklin carries a vast volume of water, especially in September, which averages twenty days of rain, to be added to by the melting snows coming down from the mountains.
Once across they made a fire and remained all night. At this stage Mather must have been acutely constipated because Pearce says that ‘Mather took a purging and begged that we remain a little longer’, presumably waiting for his bowels to move. The most common purgative in the early nineteenth century was calomel (mercurous chloride), but it is unlikely that convicts would have access to this unless it had been given to them by the Sarah Island surgeon, James Spence. We can only speculate that Mather might have had it because he had had previous problems with constipation. Perhaps he had saved it, purposely smuggled it over from Sarah Island for the escape and brought it with him. Their state of near-starvation would have affected all of their bodily functions. So they rested on the east bank of the Franklin for another day and night.
Ahead of them was what Pearce calls ‘very mountainous country’. The Deception Range, as it was to be named two decades later by Calder, is a southern spur of the snow-covered Frenchman’s Cap massif, which they could see to the north of them on the occasions when the sky cleared. Calder explains: ‘I called these hills collectively Deception Range, from the frequency with which I was foiled, or deceived in my attempts to lead the path across them. This locality presents no other view but that of a sterile wilderness, and scenes of frightful desolation’. From the 600-metre (1960-foot) ridge the escapees could see back to Macquarie Harbour and estimate how far they had already come: in a direct line it was about 28 kilometres (about 18 miles), but they had probably walked a lot further. When they looked east they saw barren ground, mainly buttongrass plains, for miles ahead of them. This is what Calder was later to name the Lightning Plains because he got caught there in the open one night during a terrible electrical storm.
The ascent of the Deception Range was no less arduous. There were only a few places where they could ascend, and they probably did so somewhere near Mount Lyne (880 metres/2860 feet). At times the grade was so steep that it would have been a near vertical rock-climb. There are 500-metre (1640-foot) cliffs on this range.They would have been trying again to get high and keep to the ridge-lines using Frenchman’s Cap as their reference point. Their aim would have been to avoid constantly having to drop down and climb out of valleys and gullies full of rainforest and impassable vegetation. Along the ridge-lines of both the Engineer and Deception ranges, and around the higher mountains above 1000 metres (3500 feet), you come upon the south- west’s extraordinary alpine vegetation, another survival from Gondwana. Rain, hail, high winds, ice, poor soil and deep snow make life difficult for all but the hardiest plants. There are tough shrubs and herbs that survive in these conditions, some of them with rather beautiful flowers. Perhaps the most unusual is the pandani tree, a kind of giant grass-tree which tends to be found in the wetter areas. It can grow to a height of 12 metres (almost 40 feet). It is also found in a stunted form in alpine herbfields. The nastiest vegetation at the higher levels is scoparia, a flowering coniferous shrub. It has sharp leaves that tears at clothing. There is also the stunted deciduous beech which, as Terry Reid says, ‘is not called tangle-foot for nothing’. There is no water on the ridge-lines so you have to descend through the gorges to the creeks for water. But you can’t see what you are getting into as the country keeps dropping away, and as it get steeper the vegetation gets thicker. Geoff Law says, ‘You keep wondering what’s coming next. You fool yourself that it’s not going to get any steeper, but inside you know that it is.’
Physically the escapees would have now been in very poor shape. Besides starvation, they would have been suffering from cuts, scratches, bruises, sprains and abrasions, many of them quite serious, from frequently falling over. In the type of country they had traversed you regularly slip and slide and fall over, both backwards and forwards, many times every day. Many of these wounds would have become infected, especially those caused by cutting grass. Often on slippery ground they would have fallen over in filthy slime which covers your clothes and hands and any exposed surface and just sticks there. They would also have been bitten by insects and had their blood sucked by leeches that get under clothing and attach themselves to the body. The men had been working in cold water for a long period before their escape, and on the trek they would have been constantly in mud, so trench foot (or immersion foot) would have affected them. This results in a loss of sensation in the feet and an abnormal sensitivity to cold. Their poor physical state would have engendered depression. Every morning they would have woken up and thought, ‘What obstacle will we have to face today?’, knowing that every step on the journey would involve pain.
From his long experience of walking in this type of country, Geoff Law describes how you begin to feel as you try to get through the bush the escapees were facing: ‘Often the problem is that you have little choice, and the only option is to go forward. But by doing so you face a ravine full of horizontal. Then you have these route-finding difficulties: often the easiest way is in the completely opposite direction to the one in which you need to go.The right way is to push straight ahead, but it is the hardest option of all. This is frustrating and depressing. So you have to slow your brain down. Instead of deciding that you have to get to this or that point by the end of the day, you have to modify your expectations. That’s fine if you’ve got plenty of food on board, and you’re actually doing it for fun anyway. But these men in the Pearce party were starving to death, thinking how much longer will this go on? It must have been a hideous prospect.’ Their physical and no doubt psychological state would have made it difficult to think clearly, and this led directly to the next crisis.
Mather had been entrusted with the task of carrying the tinder that was used to light the fires at night. He had it in his shirt to keep it dry, but somehow it dropped down his trousers. Searching for it frantically – dry tinder was vital if they were to have a fire at night – he couldn’t find it. Watching him looking for it, Travers raised his axe in a sudden fit of violence and said he would kill Mather if the tinder wasn’t found immediately. Fortunately Mather managed to find it down his trousers and a fire was made that night under a cliff. But the men were scarcely able to rise the next morning because of starvation and the cold, wet weather. This incident also illustrates the problem they must have had throughout the trip trying to carry things. They had set out inland almost impulsively and, unlike contemporary bush-walkers, they would have had no backpacks in which to carry food and other necessities. Even carrying an axe tied up one hand and left the man unbalanced as he struggled through the bush.
Up until now we can be generally sure of the route that they took. But once they descended the Deception Range and emerged onto the buttongrass of Lightning Plains they were faced with a choice of route.
In describing the landscape of the south-west there is one element that I have omitted. Much of the area is flat, open, but-tongrass plains. Buttongrass, which can also be found in valleys and on mountain slopes, is a kind of reddish-brown-green in colour, growing up to about a metre in height, and it can be found in many environments, but usually on waterlogged plains and in and around eucalypt forests. Growing in peaty soil, it is unsuitable for cattle, and this has fortunately protected the southwest from a destructive invasion of hard-hoofed animals. Buttongrass is extraordinarily hardy; it is fire- and drought-resistant, and regular burning promotes its growth.The extent of buttongrass across the south-west indicates that there has been a regimen of regular burning in the whole region over a long period, resulting either from lightning or regular Aboriginal burning. Dr Jon Marsden-Smedley, an expert on the fire regimen in the south-west and fire officer for the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, says that the evidence is that the Aborigines mostly used low-intensity fires on the moorland when forested vegetation was too wet to burn. Their aim was to flush out game and make access tracks.
The choice the Pearce party faced at the Deception Range was simple: should they head east–north-east or east–south-east? They had had a chance to survey the country from the ridge-line of the Deception before they descended, and they would have seen that directly across their path to the east was the central section of the King William Range, with peaks like Mount King William II rising to 1359 metres (4460 feet). To the north was Mount Arrowsmith (981 metres/3180 feet) and the 1324-metre (4300-foot) Mount King William I, and to the south Mount King William III (1172 metres/3800 feet). This range has a steep escarpment on the western side and an average height of 1200 metres (3900 feet) at the ridge-line. Given their experience, they obviously decided not to tackle the range head-on. We are not certain if they headed east–north-east or east–south-east to try to find a pass through the mountains or a way around them.
Personally, I think that they headed east–north-east because they could see the seemingly easy-to-traverse buttongrass of the Lightning and Loddon plains, intersected only by a low range of hills. To the east–south-east they would have seen the southern end of the King William Range and its apparent continuation in Algonkian Mountain. However, before explaining the east– north-east route which I favour, I will set out the case for the alternative one.
Jon Marsden-Smedley and Sue Rundle, also of the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, both experienced bushwalkers, favour the east–south-east route. Their argument is that the Pearce party would have been naturally funnelled straight across the button-grass of Lightning Plains following the course of the Jane River, turning slightly more south-east to Stannard Flats, crossing to the north of Algonkian Mountain (1073 metres/3490 feet), and then eastward to the south of Mount King William III, the southern extreme of the King William Range. They would have headed due east, crossing the Frith River, the upper reaches of the Gordon, and through beautiful forest country to the Derwent River around the area of present-day Wayatinah. Marsden-Smedley says that this country is ‘pretty awful now, but it was not too bad then. The country was much more open as a legacy of Aboriginal burning’. Geoff Law agrees that the area south of Mount King William III would have been easier to traverse in 1822 because of Aboriginal burning, but he points out that the country around the northern reaches of the Gordon is terrible. He walked there in December 1987 and says that ‘it carved my legs to shreds . . .The upper Gordon breaks up into channels and you have these primeval-seeming streams choked with moss-covered logs. Even when you get down to the rivers you don’t get any sense of space; it can still be very claustrophobic. East of the river is a cutting-grass sort of scrub’.
I quote this because I don’t think there is anything in either of the detailed accounts by Pearce that corresponds chronologically with the type of country on the east–south-eastern route. This is not to say that I think those who favour this route are wrong. In a situation like this you can never be certain. The best argument for this route is that the natural lay of the land would funnel the escape party in this direction. Viewed from the Deception Range, this way would have seemed fairly open. I would just say that, following Dan Sprod and others, it is my interpretation of the Pearce texts that the party actually took the east–north-easterly route.
If this is correct, what happened was that they descended from the Deception Range onto Lightning Plains. They then turned north-east and somehow continued on for four more days across the northern section of these plains, which was largely buttongrass and swamp, turned east–north-east, crossed a low range with a 600-metre (1950-foot) ridge and entered more dense forest until they came to the Loddon Plains, another area of buttongrass swamp where, Pearce says, they stopped for the night. Terry Reid says that a virgin buttongrass plain is ‘quite reasonable to cross’, but it is often bordered by bauera, horizontal, tea-tree and cutting grass. Geoff Law is not so sanguine about buttongrass. He says that ‘it looks easy, but the clumps grow up to one metre tall and then in between them you get scrubby tea-tree and other heath-type species . . . It can be frustratingly slow. You think you’ll walk across in one hour and it takes two. It is demoralising’.
As they came to the Loddon Plains they were again suffering from severe hunger, having eaten all that was left of Dalton’s flesh. The problem with human flesh, especially that of men, is that, while rich in protein, it lacks the carbohydrates needed for energy. Desperation in the face of starvation meant that someone else would have to be killed.
The two main narratives give different accounts of what happened next. The Knopwood narrative says that they sat down famished and exhausted, and they ‘began to intimate to each other that it would be much better for one to be sacrificed as food for the rest’ – a kind of ‘custom of the sea’ discussion. They agreed that someone would have to die and a ‘horrid ceremony’ began. They cast lots to see who it would be and the lot fell to Thomas Bodenham, who did not beg for mercy or ask to be spared. ‘The only request he had to make was that they would allow him a few minutes to implore pardon of his offended Maker for past offences’ before they killed him. They gave him a half hour for prayer. Then Greenhill again volunteered to be the executioner; he said that he had been in a similar situation before – presumably at sea. He and Travers then politely asked Pearce and Mather to go off some distance to gather wood to light the fire. It was only when the pair were out of sight that Greenhill killed Bodenham with a blow to the head and then, assisted by Travers, cut up the body.
There is something rather contrived about this account. You have the feeling that much of the detail is from Thomas Wells, writing with his respectable London readers in mind. Given the physical state the five men were in, it is psychologically unlikely that they would have been able to sit down and calmly and rationally decide who was to be butchered next. Further, the ceremonial quality of the occasion, with the submissive passivity of Bodenham, the prayer for divine forgiveness and the polite way that Greenhill and Travers asked the others to absent themselves while they killed and butchered Bodenham does not tally with what we have seen of these men. One suspects that in his evidence to Knopwood, Pearce was busy casting himself in the best possible light, fearing that he might eventually be committed for trial for murder. Wells, conscious of the need to soften for his readers the appalling brutality of the murder, has injected an almost liturgical quality into the execution. The sermon-like feel of the narrative is reinforced by a short homily that follows the butchering of the body. It is attributed to Greenhill, but it does not sound like the words of a sailor who has already killed two or more men. It was most likely composed by Wells or whoever the editor was. It could almost have been Knopwood himself, given the way it focuses on how Bodenham had fallen ‘a victim to his own folly’.
A very different account of the murder and butchering of Bodenham was given by Pearce to Cuthbertson. It bears the hallmarks of a man who, knowing that he is doomed and that he will hang because he has been caught with human flesh in his pocket, has nothing to hide. It is probably much closer to the truth.
According to this version, by the time they reached the Loddon Plains the remaining five men were desperate with hunger, and Travers, Greenhill and Mather began to discuss who should be killed next. Conveniently for Pearce, he intimated that he was not privy to this discussion and that he and Mather were sent off by Greenhill and Travers to get some more firewood while Bodenham was left standing at the fire, warming himself. Again it was Greenhill who acted as executioner by suddenly attacking Bodenham, and Pearce made sure he let Cuthbertson know that he was not present when the deed was done and that he did not know what was going to happen. He said, ‘In about two minutes I heard a blow given and Mather said “He is done for”’.
As the sole survivor Pearce was in an ideal position to justify himself in these narratives, and one must always bear that in mind while reading the account. It seems most unlikely that Greenhill would send him and Mather off to get firewood just when the deed was about to be done, because from the beginning they had agreed that they were all in it together. While it is probable that Greenhill was again the killer, it is also likely that they were all present for Bodenham’s murder and indeed colluded in it. Travers cut the victim’s throat, bled him and acted as butcher. Pearce reported that ‘Greenhill took his shoes being better than his own’. They only ate the heart and liver that night but, feeling that they now had plenty of provisions, they feasted on the body and rested for the whole of the next day.
Before resuming their journey, they divided the remains into equal parts and then set off ‘thro’ a marshy ground’ for three days, once more in an east–north-easterly direction. This is most probably what is now called ‘the sodden Loddon’ plains. The Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service warns bushwalkers on the nearby Frenchman’s Cap Track, which traverses the western sector of the Loddon Plains, that deep mud is often to be expected, illustrating the warning with a photo of a bushwalker almost up to his waist in mud. Terry Reid maintains that this is more the result of thousands of people trudging across the plains toward Frenchman’s Cap, although others disagree and feel that these plains have always been very wet!
The first professional explorer to investigate this area was the surveyor William Sharland, who came a decade after the Pearce party in March 1832. On the plains near the confluence of the Adelaide and Loddon rivers, just south-west of the Franklin Hills, Sharland found human remains, which he took to be those of a convict. He commented, ‘They may probably be the remains of some of those unfortunate wretches who have absconded from Macquarie Harbour to seek this melancholy termination of their existence’. From the accounts we can assume that the heap of bones found by Sharland was all that was left of Thomas Bodenham.
While Cuthbertson probably gives a reasonably accurate account of the murder of Bodenham, the Knopwood version is much more believable in its depiction of the party’s psychological dynamics after that killing. The dependence of Greenhill and Travers upon each other deepened. Pearce says in an oddly convoluted way that ‘they had a respect for each other which they often showed to each other’ in many ways. This may or may not be a roundabout allusion to a homosexual relationship, common among convicts in Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales, as indeed they are in prison life today. Ernest Augustus Slade, the superintendent of the Sydney Convict Barracks, told the British Parliamentary Select Committee in April 1838 in his usual blunt way that among certain convicts ‘sodomy is as common as any other crime’.The reason, he said, was that the men were not able to consort with women. Slade also had a simple solution for any suspected acts of buggery: he ordered a summary flogging when men were caught ‘in an improper, indecent position, with their trowsers [sic] down’. The Catholic Vicar-General of New South Wales, the Reverend William Ullathorne, told the same Select Committee that homosexuality was often practised on the convict ships, and was common in the Convict Barracks in Sydney, where certain boys and men were given female names. It was also prevalent on isolated farms, among stockmen, among the men working on road gangs, and particularly in the places of secondary punishment such as Macquarie Harbour, Moreton Bay and Norfolk Island. Much of what happened in those places was a form of sexual degradation and control, as it usually is in a prison environment. Ullathorne agreed with Slade that the problem would not cease while men were crowded together and the ratio of men to women in the population of the colonies remained so unbalanced.
However, Greenhill and Travers’s friendship went back to their time in the frontier country beyond New Norfolk, and it seems to have been sincere for they certainly looked out for each other. Whether their relationship was sexual or not we cannot, of course, know. Preoccupation with sexual relations is very much a post-Freudian, twentieth-century psychological fixation; in the nineteenth century people were less centrally focused on genitality. But Greenhill and Travers’s closeness inevitably threw Pearce and Mather together as temporary allies, at least in order to guard against any attempts by the two friends to murder either of them for food. In short, the two sets of men were now pitted against each other as they trudged across the Loddon Plains. It was not long before violence broke out again.
After the slaughter of the young Englishman, the four walked on for three more days, ‘subsisting on nothing but the carcass of unfortunate Bodenham which scarcely kept the faculties in motion’. At this point Pearce reports that they again lost the tinder they used to light their camp fire at night and had to go back to search for the tinder, but eventually found it. They would have been in terrible trouble if they had lost it for they would have no means of lighting a fire, their only source of warmth in what was still very wet, cold country, especially at night. To have lost the ability to light a fire would have, quite simply, meant death. Starvation and exhaustion were affecting their judgement and perception and they were dropping and mislaying things with increasing frequency.
They continued in an east–north-easterly direction toward what is now called Mount Arrowsmith at the northern end of the King William Range. Just to the east of Mount Arrowsmith is the King William Saddle, which is actually the ridge connecting Mount Arrowsmith with Mount King William I. It is crossed nowadays by the only sealed road in the whole area, the Lyell Highway from Hobart to Queenstown and on to the town of Strahan on Macquarie Harbour. At the King William Saddle the modern motorist travelling north-westward from Hobart crosses the boundary between the flatter, drier plains in the centre of Tasmania and enters the wetter rainforested and wilderness area of the south-west.
Starving, exhausted and suspicious of each other, the four began their ascent of the northern end of the King William Range near Mount Arrowsmith – an area, Pearce reports,‘covered with brush and that so extremely thick [that] it made it very bad walking’. From the top of the range Pearce says that they were able to see marshy ground below them with a large river in the middle of it and very fine trees growing on the banks. This was doubtless the lush King William Valley, now submerged in a lake created by the Tasmanian Hydro-Electricity Commission, and the upper reaches of the Derwent River as it began its long journey south-east to Hobart Town. Pearce also says that they saw plenty of kangaroos, emus and other fauna in the valley, the first time in the entire journey that he mentions native animals. But they were unable, or did not try, to catch any, for Pearce says that they had run out of food again. Although they had assured each other that ‘they would all die than any more should be killed’, when they were alone Pearce says that Mather said to him: ‘Let us go on by ourselves . . . You see what kind of cove Greenhill is. He would kill his father before he would fast one day’. Pearce’s response is not recorded.
It seems that they wandered around Mount Arrowsmith for a couple of days. At one time they were in a small valley full of ferns. Here Mather made some type of concoction out of fern roots which he boiled and drank, perhaps again as a purge. It made him quite sick and he began to vomit, at which point, according to Pearce, Greenhill ‘still showing his spontaneous habit of bloodshed seized the axe and crept up behind him [and] give him a blow on the head’. Mather must have seen it coming and it can’t have done much damage because he shouted, ‘Murder, you will see me killed’. There was a struggle and the younger and stronger Mather grabbed the axe from Greenhill and threw it to Pearce. Oddly enough, Mather did not seek revenge, perhaps because of his natural disposition. Pearce reports that he was a peaceful type who ‘wished to enjoy tranquillity’. Possibly it was also because they all realised that without Greenhill, their navigator and guide, they had no hope of reaching the settled districts. Whatever the reason, it turned out to be a bad mistake on Mather’s part not to kill Greenhill.
When it comes to the murder of Mather, there is again a significant divergence between the two narratives. According to the Cuthbertson version, after the first attack on Mather the men walked on a little further to a creek where they decided to camp for the night. Pearce then says that he wandered away from the others for a short time ‘and on looking around saw Travers and Greenhill collaring Mather who cried out “murder” and when he [Mather] found that they were determined to have his life, he begged they would give him half an hour to pray for himself’. A prayer book that they just happened to have with them was produced and, after he finished his prayers, he handed the book back to Pearce and laid down his head. Greenhill immediately took up the axe and killed him. After that the three men remained two days camping by the creek and then continued their journey, ‘each taking a share of Mather’s body’. This time it is the Cuthbertson narrative that seems very contrived, especially in the depiction of Mather’s apparent surrender, the convenient absence of Pearce when Greenhill’s second attack on Mather occurred, and the sudden and extremely unlikely appearance of a prayer book. However, I think this narrative is believable in saying that Mather was killed on the night after the first attack on him when he was vomiting and at his weakest.
The Knopwood narrative describes a much longer and more complex interaction. After he is attacked the first time while vomiting, Mather understandably becomes more and more fearful and defensive. It is the intimacy between Greenhill and Travers that especially worries him. Mather tells Pearce that he is convinced that Greenhill and Travers are determined to kill him and says it would be wise for Pearce and himself to be on their guard and ‘make each other acquainted with whatever they perceived in any way treacherous or deceitful in either Greenhill or Travers’. Although the weather had now improved considerably, they walked on for two days ‘in a far worse state than before’. By now Pearce’s loyalties were shifting, and though he had sworn ‘to be [Mather’s] confidential friend’ and warn him if the other two were plotting anything, he begins to associate more with Greenhill and Travers and to abandon his erstwhile ally. It did not take Mather long to work out that Pearce had withdrawn from him and had joined in a coalition with the others to kill him.
They made camp and sat around the fire ‘in a very pensive and melancholy mood’. The young baker from Dumfries only had one option: to try to keep some distance between himself and the other three. But he could not keep up his guard forever, and eventually one of them crept up on Mather ‘under the pretence of gathering wood for the fire’. All three jumped him, dragged him to the ground, ‘striking him with the axe on the head and soon terminating his existence’.The body was then dissected ‘and having appeased their cannibal appetites [they] laid themselves down by the fire’.
Eighteen years later, in December 1840, the explorer and Deputy Surveyor-General James Erskine Calder discovered items that indicated that escaped convicts had been in the area in a small, open valley through which the modern Lyell Highway passes, which was later named Wombat Glen, just to the west of Mount Arrowsmith. Calder, an experienced bushman and a big man with a strong physique, reports that he found ‘in the last stages of decay, several articles which indicated that a party of runaway convicts from Macquarie Harbour, had, many years ago, passed this way.They were placed in the hollow of a fine old tree, which had been the means of preventing their entire destruction. They consisted of an old yellow jacket, a pea jacket, a blanket, and a pair of boots. On searching about we found a large gimblet [a tool for boring holes], a hammer and a broken iron pot. Several trees had been marked’.These may or may not have been Mather’s belongings and Calder does not indicate the state of the convict remains. But it does indicate that it was possible for a party of convicts to have got this far from Macquarie Harbour. Wombat Glen is at the northern end of the Loddon Plains and right at the base of Mount Arrowsmith, and it makes sense for the party to have rested here before pushing on over the Saddle and down into the King William Valley.
At this point the Knopwood narrative has Greenhill delivering a monologue justifying their actions in killing Mather. Even a superficial reading indicates that Wells or the editor has taken over – this was written with a reading audience in mind and Wells could not resist the temptation to moralise. From this narrative it is clear that they did not have the means to survive, and that once they had chosen cannibalism as a means of sustenance, there was no turning back. Perhaps Pearce’s betrayal of Mather was merely a recognition that his only chance for survival lay in throwing in his lot with Greenhill and Travers. Of course, by doing that, Pearce was running a terrible risk. Given that the other two were so close, he was setting himself up as the next victim. But, as he saw it, he had no other viable choice.
The clue to Pearce’s decision can be found in Greenhill’s comments after the ‘sumptuous repast’ following the slaughter of Mather. Greenhill says that they ‘must be drawing very near to some settlement or habitation’. In fact, they still had some considerable distance to go to reach the settled districts, but all three men had worked in the back country near the centre of the island and the landscape they had seen across the King William Saddle was beginning to look familiar to them. If they were as close to the settled districts as they thought they were, Pearce no doubt reasoned that he could make a run for it on his own and leave the other two to their own devices. Greenhill also said that he feared that as soon as an opportunity offered, Mather would have gone to Hobart Town to ‘give information against them for the murder’ of Bodenham, another indication that they thought that they were near the end of their journey.
Once they crossed the King William Saddle the feel and shape of the country changed significantly.They had entered into what are now called the Navarre Plains. Here the country was more open and easier to traverse, and the weather was improving because it was less under the influence of the Roaring Forties. At the Saddle you cross what today is called the ‘quartzite line’. Here the structure and geology of the landscape changes and you leave behind the predominantly dolerite mountains of western Tasmania and enter a flatter, drier, semi-alpine landscape. Pearce, Greenhill and Travers found themselves traversing the more open and rather beautiful eucalypt forests that predominate in the high plains of central Tasmania. The dominant trees at higher altitudes were the 20-metre (65-foot) Eucalyptus pauciflora, which are usually known as snow gum, and at the lower levels they encountered the straight and tall alpine ash (Eucalyptus delegatensis). Throughout, the undergrowth was much more open and there were many native animals.
There were also humans – the Aborigines. Once they had crossed the Saddle, the local clan of the Big River tribe, the Larmairremener, would have begun to observe them, although the three escapees were oblivious to this. While there is evidence from burning patterns that the Aborigines ranged across the whole of the south-west, they did not live in the difficult landscape of the far west permanently. But once the escape party entered Big River land they would have been carefully watched and their behaviour monitored. It is probably only because they were in such poor shape and were perceived as posing no threat that they were not killed.
Four days after the slaughter of Mather, Pearce reports that ‘Travers had his foot stung by some venomous reptile’. Snakes hibernate between April and October, so the one that got Travers must have just been coming out of hibernation and was probably fairly lethargic. It would have been either lying in the sun or else looking for a sunny spot. Tiger snakes are quite territorial and, except during the breeding season in January when males are looking for a mate, they are shy of humans, so it is likely that the sluggish snake was slow in getting out of Travers’s way. The bite incapacitated him, thus holding the party up for another four or five days.
Australia is famous for having among its 760 known species of reptiles the most venomous snakes in the world. Only two of these are to be found in the south-west of Tasmania: the white-lipped whip snake and the Tasmanian tiger snake, both of whose venom is highly toxic. However, the men were also close to the border of the range of the lowland copperhead, another deadly species found in central, eastern and northern Tasmania. The Navarre Plains is a place where you are likely to encounter snakes, including the copperhead.
Terry Reid and Geoff Law think that it is most likely that Travers was bitten by a tiger snake.The Tasmanian sub-species can grow up to 2 metres (6 feet) or more in length, and manifest considerable colour variation from black to brown, yellow or cream. The predominant colour in the south-west is jet-black, which is an adaptation to its environment that allows the snake to absorb light and heat more effectively in the cold, wet climate. Tiger snakes love frog-infested swamps, although they also eat birds, lizards and small mammals. While its bite is potentially fatal, the tiger snake is well down the evolutionary scale and its fangs are small and underdeveloped. Thus the venom is not injected efficiently into the limb, much of it being lost on the skin surface. Today if the bite is dealt with quickly with the antivenenes that have been available since the 1920s, survival is likely, especially when the victim is an adult. No such antitoxins were available in 1822.
The bite of the tiger snake has a neurotoxic effect and can cause a range of reactions, but usually the first symptom is a massive frontal headache. Vomiting can quickly follow, and the victim lapses in and out of consciousness. The poison flows through the lymphatic system and the nerves controlling the heart and lungs can be adversely affected. It can also cause paralysis and respiratory failure. Bleeding often occurs from both nose and ears, blood clots occasionally form and a heart attack can result. In the Knopwood narrative, Travers is convinced that he is dying – a reasonable supposition given the symptoms – and he exhorts Greenhill to leave him behind. He appeals to their friendship: ‘That as they had been companions for so long a time both in days of prosperity as well as in the present days of adversity, where they had always communicated to each other . . . on every subject and had entrusted each other with the most guarded secrets . . . He trusted and hoped that they [Greenhill and Pearce] would not delay time in waiting for him, but to proceed on their journey and leave him where he was that he might have an opportunity of making peace with his Maker’. Despite being very moved by Travers’s heroic speech, Greenhill refuses to leave him, convinced that he would recover.Travers soon becomes delirious, although he is ‘apprehensive that Pearce would instil into the mind of Greenhill the thought of murdering him’, a not unreasonable fear. In response, in an unusual show of emotion, Greenhill tells his mate that ‘he would never think of leaving him’, that he would carry him all the way, if necessary, because the tie of affection between them was so strong.
So Greenhill and Pearce wait with Travers for five days. It was the correct decision because rest is the best way to deal with tiger-snake bites. Eventually Greenhill felt that Travers had recovered sufficiently for them to proceed. So they set off again, Greenhill and Pearce half-carrying, half-dragging Travers, whose foot was very swollen. They crossed another mountain range, probably the Wentworth Hills, and on the eastern side they came to a large river, the Nive. Travers, as we have seen, was a non-swimmer, so Greenhill swam across carrying the axe and Pearce crossed with the scraps of Mather’s flesh that remained. They then cut a long wattle pole and pulled Travers across, camping on the east bank of the Nive River that night. Now in flatter, much more open forest country, they struggled on for two more days eastward from the Nive.
At this stage the inflammation in Travers’s foot was turning black, a sign that gangrene was setting in. Pearce states that on the second night after crossing the river,Travers, who was now in great pain, said again that it would be better for them to abandon him and go on. When the sick man eventually fell asleep, Pearce and Greenhill went off to get some wood for the fire and discussed what they were going to do. According to Pearce it was Greenhill who took the initiative again. He now comes across as appallingly objective and callous about the fate of his friend. The narrative claims that Greenhill said, ‘Pearce, it is of no use being detained any longer by Travers, and we will serve him as the rest’. According to the Cuthbertson narrative, Pearce refused to play any part in this murder, but in the Knopwood account ‘they unanimously agreed to act by him as they had done by the other two’ – actually three, if you count Dalton.
When they returned to the camp fire, Travers was awake because of the pain, and he begged them to kill him and be done with it. Soon afterwards he fell into a deep sleep. ‘One of them took the axe [most likely Pearce] being driven by the greatest distress and hunger and gave him a blow to the head which soon terminated his life.’ Pearce had no doubt that if the tiger snake had not intervened, it would have been he who would have been killed at this time to provide food for the other two. Despite his earlier callousness, Greenhill ‘was much affected by this horrid scene and stood quite motionless to see one who had been his companion . . . compelled to be slaughtered as food’. They cut Travers’s throat and dissected his body, cooked parts of it on the fire and ate them. ‘Having appeased their appetite they lay themselves down to sleep.’
For two days Greenhill and Pearce remained where they were and did nothing ‘but gorge themselves on the carcass and sleep’. They then took as much of the body as they could carry and continued on ‘through a very fine country’. Throughout the journey Greenhill had used the sun and moon to maintain an easterly direction, and now they were confident that they were somewhere near the settled districts, or at least close to an isolated stock run.
From this point the Cuthbertson narrative becomes increasingly sparse in detail, whereas the Knopwood account becomes almost lost in minutiae and editorialising, although in my view maintaining more verisimilitude.The Knopwood text describes a dramatic and increasingly tense interaction between Greenhill and Pearce as they run out of food again and begin to eye each other off as a source of sustenance. By this stage they were probably somewhere west–north-west of the present-day town of Ouse. If this is correct they were actually 16 to 18 kilometres (10 to 12 miles) from the nearest isolated sheep run.
The place that they were trying to reach, the ‘summit of their hope’, as Pearce calls it, was Table Mountain, a 1095-metre (3350-foot) peak immediately south of Lake Crescent, and at the southern end of the tiers that border the central mountain plateau of the island. This was about 40 kilometres (about 24 miles) east–north-east from where they were, but they did not know that. Pearce knew the Table Mountain area because he had ranged through this country after absconding from his assignment and before being sent to Macquarie Harbour. He knew that there were Irish convicts around that region who would help them. But Table Mountain proved peculiarly difficult to find, probably because by this stage they were unable to think straight and maintain a steady direction. Throughout this period the Aborigines would have continued their observation of the two white escapees.
Pearce says they left the place where they had slaughtered Travers, protesting to each other ‘the greatest fidelity and friendship, and as they had always travelled by the sun or moon they were confident that they could not be very far from some settlement or stock run’. But despite finding some very good country, any traces of white settlement or even of sheep or cattle runs proved elusive. Pearce then reported that he and Greenhill saw smoke, which turned out to be coming from an Aboriginal camp. He says that knowing that the Aborigines usually have freshly caught game, they decided to charge into the camp brandishing the axe and a large stick, flaying anyone who got in their way. Pearce boasts that the two of them chased off forty to fifty men, women and children, then destroyed the Aborigines’ spears and made off as quickly as possible, ‘for although these natives are not cannibals, there has been several instances of people being barbarously murdered by them in several parts of the The Transit of Hell colony’. Pearce claims that a few days later they repeated the performance with another group of between eighteen and twenty Aborigines.
These stories of attacks by two half-starved white men on large groups of Aborigines seem most unlikely and were almost certainly invented by Pearce. The clans and warriors of the Big River tribe would not have tolerated such behaviour.
Knowing their home ranges well, the Aborigines would have had no trouble quietly observing the activities of a couple of escaped convicts wandering directionlessly through them. Aborigines were constantly astonished at what they considered the gross ignorance of Europeans.They saw the whites not only as violent people, but also as amazingly stupid when it came to surviving in what they experienced as a plentiful land. The Big River people did not perceive Pearce and Greenhill as a threat, or else they would have been killed, quickly and efficiently. Given the way in which the Tasmanian Aborigines were being dispossessed of their land and abused by well-armed settlers, they would have felt justified in giving short shrift to two half-crazed escapees encroaching their hunting grounds. The most that the two of them probably ever did was to scavenge some remnants of food from abandoned Aboriginal camps, or search for small reptiles, or even look for edible grubs under fallen trees or by tearing off rotten bark.They were perhaps inspired by the yellow-tailed black cockatoos, which tore bark from trees in an attempt to find the larvae of the wood-boring insects that lived underneath.
Their state was accurately described by Pearce when he says that the two of them ‘were terribly reduced in strength and their constitutions dreadfully impaired by the fatigues of this distressing journey. Being exposed to the night dews and cold, they being nearly naked and quite barefoot, their flesh was dreadfully lacerated and torn by the rocks and briars, [with] ulcers showing themselves in several parts of their bodies’. More and more the journey seemed endless. They were probably not making much headway and wandering around in circles. Also as the days went by they became increasingly suspicious of each other, with a dreadful hopelessness setting in and psychologically sapping the little energy they had left. Greenhill always kept the axe in his possession, which made Pearce wary and edgy. They kept their distance from each other during the day and at night Pearce always made a fire ‘at such a distance from Greenhill as he considered far enough to prevent an attack that might be made by him’. Greenhill always slept with the axe under his head. Pearce became more fearful than ever. He seldom slept. ‘I acted with the greatest precaution never trusting myself near him particularly at night.’
One night they were both pretending to be asleep when Pearce realised that Greenhill was getting ready to attack him. ‘I immediately rose as though out of a slumber, [pretending] I had not perceived him.’ Greenhill backed off and Pearce reflected that he was lucky he was not really asleep, or else he would have shared the same fate as the other men. So he says he resolved to try to give Greenhill the slip. But this was easier said than done in the country through which they were now travelling. Pearce then decided that he had to get the axe and kill Greenhill in self-defence. He says that they continued along,‘watching each other’. He also claims that Greenhill made several attempts to kill him during this period, but ‘I always guarded against such attempts’.
In the end this cat-and-mouse game became a test of who could stay awake the longest. It was Pearce who had the staying power. ‘One evening while he was asleep I crept slyly to the brush where he lay and took the axe from under his head, gave him a severe blow on the head which deprived him of his life’. It was as simple as that. He was alone and safe from his companions at last. Pearce bluntly told Cuthbertson that after killing Greenhill ‘I cut off part of his thigh and arm which I took with me, and went on for several days until I had ate it all’.
But he had still not found Table Mountain. He was soon starving again and struggled on for several more days, when he was lucky enough to catch two ducks which he ate raw. But the end of the journey was near. ‘On the seventh day after leaving Greenhill while travelling through a large marsh I was suddenly surprised at hearing the noise of a flock of sheep, I could not believe my ears.’
He had not exactly arrived at Table Mountain, the ‘summit of his hope’, but as it turned out he was about 30 kilometres (about 18½ miles) to the south-west of it. Not bad, given that he had been walking through some of the most difficult country in the world for at least forty-nine days. Pearce’s feat in surviving such a journey, by whatever means, was remarkable.
Pearce’s time of freedom started at that moment at the end of his trek from the harbour. He had been walking for so long that he had lost all sense of time and direction and he feared that he would never get to Table Mountain. It was a hot day and he was in a large, flat, marshy, open plain, bordered on either side by stunted trees with pale cream trunks. His figure was gaunt, his beard long, his whole body covered with cuts, sores and festering wounds. He was hungry again, as it was about four days since he had caught and eaten the ducks. At this stage he felt he was going batty because he had this feeling that someone was always watching him. The feeling had first come upon him after he killed and ate Greenhill, and over the last days and nights he had become absolutely convinced that there was always somebody observing his every move. Several times he had screamed, ‘Come out you bastard and face me’, but no one appeared and all he ever heard was the echo of his own voice.
When he suddenly heard the familiar plaintive bleating of the sheep from over in the trees, he started to shake and felt like crying. Somehow, he had made it to the settled districts. He had beaten all that the bastards had thrown at him, and he had got through to where other white men lived.
It did not take him long to find the sheep. At one end, the marshy plain narrowed into a rocky crevice. Beyond that the ground dropped away sharply down a forested hill to a river in a deep, narrow valley. He had always been good at herding sheep; he had once got into a fight because some stupid cove had said it was because he had a lot in common with them! He positioned himself so that he could corral the sheep into the rocky crevice. Despite his hunger, he slowly manoeuvred the mob into place. When frightened, sheep tend to crowd in together, and then jump on and over the top of each other. He quickly spotted a large, well-fed one and grabbed it.The animal was smart enough to turn away from the area into which he had herded the flock, and it dragged him twenty or thirty yards over rocks toward the wooded hillside down to the river. In the end he had to let the sheep go because he was badly cut and bruised. He had also bashed his head severely on an overhanging rock as he tried to stand up to get a better grip on the animal.
He lay where he fell until the pain cleared a little, and then slowly dragged himself to his feet again. Most of the herd were still standing close by. Sheep are such stupid buggers, he thought, so he tried again to drive a group of them back into the crevice. He cornered about a dozen of them, and grabbed a lamb, dragged it aside, quickly slit its throat and carved it up.The other sheep had scattered in the nearby undergrowth.
He had hardly started eating when he heard the noise of dogs. He looked up, and a man appeared from behind him and held a musket to his head. With a strong Irish accent he said, ‘Leave the bloody sheep alone, you bastard, or I’ll blow yer brains out! I’ve been tryin’ to find this mob all day, and now, by God, you’ve frightened ’em off again.’
Looking up at the man Pearce realised that it was one of the McGuire brothers. Pearce smiled and said, ‘I’ll help you find ’em, Paddy.’
McGuire recognised Pearce’s voice immediately. He dropped the musket.‘Well, fuck me, if it isn’t me ol’ pal, Alex Pearce.What are you doin’ here, me lad? Last I heard you was at Sarah’s Island. What’s wrong wit ya? You look shockin’.’
As quickly as he could Pearce told McGuire the story of the escape, and of the trek across the wilderness. He did not say what had happened to the others.
McGuire took pity on him and assured him that he would look after him. There was some honour, after all, among thieves. They slowly walked to Paddy’s nearby hut at Mosquito’s Creek close to the high plains, crossing both the Ouse and Shannon rivers on the way. McGuire explained to him that while he was officially assigned to a drunken idiot, George Salter, who had a run nearby on the Derwent River, he had actually been hired out to that mean bastard Tom Triffett, whose sheep Pearce had cornered. His brother, Michael McGuire, was also assigned to Salter and he was still at the Dunrobin run looking after Salter’s sheep.
When they got to the hut, Paddy McGuire nursed him as best as he could. It took Pearce some time to get used to ordinary food again, and all he did for several days was sleep and eat. He stayed five days with Paddy, who treated him very kindly, and once he was able to walk he moved on again, as there was always the danger that an unexpected visitor might arrive who recognised him.
Supplied with provisions by McGuire, he headed south, following the narrow valley of the Ouse River to its junction with the Derwent. Near here he stayed for another eleven days with Mick, Paddy’s brother. Once he was restored to full health at Mick’s hut, he moved on to his own secret hut, which he had built while he had last been on the run. From there he could range right across the country, knowing the lay of the land exactly. He stayed in his own place for seven days and then returned to Mick McGuire’s while Mick was away in Hobart Town.
Late on the second night at Mick’s he heard a repeated whistle from outside the hut.When he went out to investigate he found two armed men with several kangaroo dogs.They thought he was a military spy of some sort and threatened to kill him. Eventually he was able to persuade them that he was who he said he was. As he suspected, the men were also escaped convicts on the run.Their names were Ralph Churton and William Davis.The long and the short of it was that he threw in his lot with them. His experience on the run was that he was always better off with a couple of others than on his own. He stayed with them for about seven weeks. Once they had nearly been caught by a party of soldiers from the 48th Regiment when they were droving 180 stolen sheep. They just managed to escape, but they had to abandon the sheep and all their belongings.
On the early morning of Saturday, 11 January 1823, they were near Lake Tiberias with some ex-convict mates who did a lot of sheep-stealing. They were sleeping in a rather out-of-the-way and narrow valley just to the west of Jericho, sheltering under a tree from the rising sun, when a party of red-coated soldiers from the 48th appeared. Davis saw them coming and made a run for it but he was shot and wounded. Pearce and Churton were caught sitting under the tree. It was obvious that someone had dobbed them in. Honour among thieves was not absolute, especially if a reward of £10 was involved – the price on the heads of Davis and Churton.
They were marched back to the barracks at Jericho and by Monday night they were secured in Hobart Town jail.