In late August, a sperm whale beached in Manly Cove. This was the signal for a massive feast for the Aboriginal community, Bennelong and Colby among them, who fell on the stranded animal, slicing off its blubber and meat with the sharp edges of shells and the blades of their spears. A small party including Surgeon White, traveling from Sydney Cove to Broken Bay, stumbled by chance on the festivities. Seemingly unabashed by his escape, Bennelong inquired after Governor Phillip and as the party was leaving gave them several large pieces of blubber, asking that the biggest be given to the governor, whom he was eager to see again.
Pleased at the prospect of reestablishing contact with Bennelong, Phillip set out at once with Collins for Manly Cove and the feasting Aboriginals. Bennelong indeed seemed pleased to see him, “inquiring by name for every person whom he could recollect at Sydney” and especially a lady—Phillip’s housekeeper, Deborah Brooks—“from whom he had once ventured to snatch a kiss.” Phillip offered Bennelong a glass of wine to see whether he retained his taste for it, which—after toasting the king—he drained. The atmosphere seemed friendly, though Phillip and his companions noticed that gradually their little group was being surrounded. A middle-aged man, “short of stature, sturdy, and well-set,” approached Phillip but halted some twenty or thirty yards away. Phillip held out his hands in friendship and advanced slowly toward the man, who, Collins wrote, “not understanding this civility,” began to look agitated. Perhaps thinking that Phillip was about to take him prisoner, the man “lifted a spear from the grass with his foot, and fixing it on his throwing stick, in an instant darted it at the governor.” The twelve-foot-long barbed spear penetrated Phillip’s right shoulder “just above the collar bone” with such force that “the point glancing downward, came out at his back.”
As Phillip’s attacker dashed into nearby woods, other Aboriginals threw more spears. One grazed the hand of one of Phillip’s men, Lieutenant Waterhouse, as he tried to snap off the shaft of the spear in the governor’s shoulder to make it easier to carry him back to the boat. Somehow Phillip’s party managed to get him to the boat. He was bleeding profusely but his companions knew from experience that if they tried to pull out the barbed spear-tip this might prove fatal. They could only try to stanch the blood flow and row as hard as they could the seven miles back to Sydney Cove—a journey that took almost two hours. There in the hospital a young assistant surgeon named William Balmain succeeded in removing the barb and announced that though Phillip was “highly scorbutic,” the wound was “not mortal.”
Those who had been with the governor debated the reason for the attack. Collins thought Phillip had trusted in the Aboriginals too long and the attack should have taught him a lesson that “it might be presumed he would never forget.” Phillip himself wondered whether the attack had been to settle a grievance and concluded it was not in itself significant to a people who settled disputes with their spears “as readily as the lower class of people in England stripped to box.”
Phillip did not blame Bennelong personally and was eager to contact him again, though for the moment he had vanished. When a party led by Surgeon White eventually located him, he seemed pleased that Phillip had survived and claimed to have punished his attacker. However, he was wary of going to Sydney, insisting that Phillip should first visit him. Phillip did so several times until eventually Bennelong felt confident enough to take some companions to Sydney Cove, where he took great pleasure in demonstrating to them the use of candlesnuffers—or “nuffers” as he called them. Thereafter, Bennelong became a regular visitor to Government House, indeed a man of “so much dignity and consequence, that it was not always easy to obtain his company,” according to Tench. When he asked for a brick house to be built for him on the eastern shores of Sydney Cove, Phillip agreed.a
However, Phillip’s patience with Bennelong began to wear thin because of his increasingly erratic behavior and violence toward his two wives, whom he beat regularly and savagely, on one occasion attacking the younger one with a sword. When Phillip ordered her to be carried to the hospital so White could treat her wounds, Bennelong threatened to go after her there and kill her. When Phillip warned he would be shot, Bennelong “treated even this menace with disdain.” The relationship between the two men deteriorated further when Bennelong led a group of spear-wielding Aboriginals to relieve a fishing party of convicts and soldiers of their catch. Summoned to explain himself to Phillip in Government House, Bennelong argued angrily that the fish belonged to his people. When the governor proved unsympathetic, he stormed out and Phillip ordered that thenceforth he be barred from Government House. Collins understood perhaps better than the governor the gulf that still lay between the area’s traditional owners and the new arrivals: “We had not yet been able to reconcile the natives to the deprivation of those parts of the harbour which we occupied. While they entertained the idea of our having dispossessed them of their residences, they must always consider us as enemies.”
Phillip’s relationship with the Aboriginal community was tested further when, in December 1790, a group of men attacked convict John McEntire, the colony’s chief hunter. McEntire and some companions had been lying in wait for kangaroos when a small group of Aboriginal people approached them. Recognizing one of them, McEntire had told his companions not to be alarmed. Then quite suddenly—in something of a repetition of the attack on Phillip—the man had hurled his spear into the side of McEntire, who crumpled to the ground, crying out, “I am a dead man.”
Until now, according to Tench, Phillip had believed that “in every former instance of hostility”—including the attack on himself—the Aboriginals had acted “either from having received injury, or from misapprehension.” However, in the case of McEntire—who did indeed die, though not for some days—he was convinced the attack had been unprovoked, though in fact a group of Aboriginals had singled out McEntire for punishment for the crime, in their eyes, of killing a dingo, an animal significant in initiation rituals. Ignorant of this and deciding an example had to be made, Phillip ordered Tench to take armed marines and track down those responsible, executing ten of them immediately—cutting off their heads “for which purpose hatchets and bags would be furnished” and capturing two more for public execution in Sydney Cove. A horrified Tench argued that Phillip could make his point equally well by capturing just six Aboriginals, some of whom could be held hostage as a guarantee of future good behavior. Phillip agreed, saying he would hang two and send the rest to Norfolk Island.
Lieutenant Dawes was ordered to go with Tench but, after consulting the chaplain, refused to have anything to do with what he regarded as a punitive mission, holding firm even when Phillip taxed him with “unofficerlike behaviour” and threatened to court-martial him. Setting off with fifty men, Tench spent futile days tramping about in the heat, beating off mosquitoes and sand flies and, probably to his relief, encountering almost nobody except Colby, whom it seemed inconceivable to him to behead or arrest, before returning to Sydney Cove without a single prisoner. Phillip immediately dispatched Tench on a second equally fruitless expedition. When he again returned to Sydney Cove empty-handed, Phillip abandoned his plans for bloody reprisals.
Phillip anyway had other matters to think about. In early December 1790, the Supply returned with provisions from Batavia, followed on December 17 by a vessel that, in accordance with Phillip’s instructions, the Supply’s captain had chartered to bring further supplies—a three-hundred-ton Dutch cargo vessel—a “snow”—named Waaksamheyd, or “Vigilance.” Her cargo—staples like beef, pork, rice, sugar, and flour—was more welcome to Phillip and his senior officers than her captain, a Dutchman named Detmer Smith, who had sold the Waaksamheyd’s services to the struggling colony at what they thought an exorbitant price. Furthermore, the rice on board was light by some 43,000 pounds compared with the amount contracted and paid for. Smith claimed this was nothing to do with him and offered to sell some of his own stocks of rice and flour at a high price, which the commissary had reluctantly to agree to. When Phillip asked to charter his vessel again—this time to take Captain Hunter and some of his crew back to England to face the customary court-martial for the loss of their ship, the Sirius—Smith further annoyed Phillip by his “frantic and extravagant behaviour” in demanding another exorbitant sum. However, as Smith well knew it was a seller’s market. Eventually, if acrimoniously, a contract was agreed for the continued use of the Waaksamheyd.
With Smith frozen out of “official” circles, Mary Bryant and her fisherman husband, William Bryant, befriended him. They had a particular purpose in doing so as he discovered when, in early February 1791, they revealed to him their scheme for escaping from Port Jackson with Mary’s daughter, Charlotte, now three and a half years old, and their eight-month-old son, Emmanuel. The vessel in which they planned to make their bid was nothing less than the governor’s own cutter, well equipped with six oars and two sails.
Venturing across largely uncharted waters in an open boat was a terrible risk, particularly with two small children. Smith must have wondered why William Bryant, whose sentence would expire in a few months, and Mary, who had only two years left to serve, would even contemplate it. Mary may have convinced her husband to do so because she suspected that once he had served his time he would return to England, abandoning her and the children. He was known to take his New South Wales wedding vows lightly: Collins wrote that he had often been heard to express “what was indeed the general sentiment on the subject among the people of his description, that he did not consider his marriage in this country as binding.” If leaving Mary had indeed been Bryant’s plan, the irony is that on learning of Bryant’s comments about marriage Phillip had ruled that no one “who had wives or children incapable of maintaining themselves and likely to become burdensome to the settlement” would be allowed to leave—a pronouncement that Mary could deploy in arguing for escape.
More likely, and with echoes of today’s refugee families prepared to hazard all to the sea, is that the deprivation and disease in the colony had convinced the couple that if they remained they would not long survive. An open-boat journey into the unknown was the lesser of two evils. Also, even when Bryant’s term expired, there was no guarantee he would be set free. Phillip was still awaiting records from London that he should have been given when he first sailed confirming the respective lengths of the convicts’ sentences. Several convicts were already claiming their terms had expired and that they should be freed but were unable to prove it, leaving them, as Collins noted with sympathy, “most peculiarly and unpleasantly situated. Conscious in their own minds that the sentence of the law had been fulfilled upon them, it must have been truly distressing to their feelings to find that they could not be considered in any other light … than that in which alone they had been hitherto known in the settlement.” Also, the Bryants may have been encouraged by what Collins described as “a desertion of an extraordinary nature” when in September five convicts had stolen a boat from the lookout post on the South Head, intending to make for Tahiti, and seemed to have got safely away.b
Though the Cornish-born William Bryant was a skilled boat handler—as was probably Mary, the daughter of a fisherman—they knew they could not make the journey alone. In fact, their final escape party would include seven other convicts. Two of these were friends—James Martin and James Cox had been transported with the Bryants aboard the Charlotte. Of the remaining five, two were also First Fleeters: gray-eyed, sandy-haired, forty-nine-year-old John Butcher—alias Samuel Broom—convicted at Shrewsbury of stealing three small pigs, and Samuel Bird—also known as John Simms—convicted of stealing thirty pounds’ worth of saltpeter. The remaining three—fifty-four-year-old Yorkshireman William Allen, transported for stealing twenty-nine handkerchiefs in Norwich; dark-haired, sallow-skinned thirty-eight-year-old Irish-born Nathaniel Lilley, convicted of stealing a fishing net, a watch, and two spoons; and William Morton from Northumberland—were new arrivals on the Second Fleet. The Bryants may have selected some for their skills: Morton, at least, knew something about navigation, and other members of the group would refer to him as their “navigator”; while Allen is described in official records as “a mariner.” Possibly others had learned of the plan and threatened to betray the Bryants if they were not allowed to join. Of the escape party, only Lilley and Cox had been transported for life.
Whatever the reasons behind the composition of the escape party, befriending Detmer Smith, who had no reason to love the colony’s rulers, was certainly part of the plan. The escapees managed to raise enough cash to buy a quadrant and compass from him, together with fourteen pounds of salt pork and a hundredweight apiece of rice and flour, which they hid, together with whatever extra food they could obtain, beneath the floor of the Bryants’ hut. Smith also gave or sold them two muskets, ammunition, a large barrel of water, and a chart showing the route to Batavia through the notorious Torres Strait. The latter, together with Smith’s own advice, was probably what persuaded them to attempt what Bligh had done when put overboard at Tofua and make for the Dutch East Indies. They may also have learned specifically from Smith or others about Bligh’s successful open-boat journey.
They knew they had to make the attempt before the southern hemisphere winds began to gust—usually by April—so time was running out. Then on February 28, all the scheming came close to collapse. William Bryant was returning in Phillip’s cutter from fishing with some fellow prisoners and Bennelong’s sister, Karangaran, and her two children, when a fierce gale blew up and the boat capsized. Bennelong’s sister swam to safety with her children while Bryant and others struggled to right the vessel. Several Aboriginals, including Bennelong, saw that the cutter was being driven onto some rocks and leapt into the sea to help. Captain Hunter witnessed their efforts: “After clearing the boat, they collected the oars and such articles as had been driven on shore in different places … The natives then towed the boat up to the cove.” Hunt was convinced that without Bennelong’s help some of the crew would have drowned. So vital to the colony was the governor’s cutter that carpenters were soon laboring in suffocating heat of more than one hundred degrees Fahrenheit to fit a fresh mast, sails, and planking.
At the same time the final preparations were being made to the Waaksamheyd, which by March 28 was ready to sail. As well as Hunter and his men and several officers of marines whose tours of duty in the colony had ended, the ship was to carry the usual numerous dispatches and letters. These included one from Phillip to Nepean asking for a second time to be allowed to return to England (Phillip had first requested this a year earlier from Lord Sydney), and again citing his need to attend to his financial affairs but also his deteriorating health: He was suffering sharp pains in his left kidney, probably the result of prolonged eating of highly salted food. To William Grenville, who had succeeded Sydney as Home Secretary, he expressed his belief that the colony was “now so fully established, that the great labour may be said to be past” and again asked for permission to return home. To Banks he wrote, “I am sorry I cannot send you a [Aboriginal] head. After the ravages made by the smallpox … the natives burned the bodies.”
The excitement and activity surrounding the Waaksamheyd’s departure provided useful camouflage for the escapees as they made their final preparations, and not coincidentally chose the evening of her sailing, March 28, to leave. At about eleven P.M. on what was a moonless night, the convicts crept along the shore with all the goods and equipment they had accumulated, including a bag of “sweet tea” leaves that Mary had gathered. As well as the items Detmer Smith had sold or given them they had a new seine net for fishing and carpenter’s tools. In their haste, they dropped “a handsaw, a scale and four or five pounds of rice.”
The governor’s newly repaired cutter was moored out in the cove, and someone swam out, cut the rope, and towed it closer to the shore. As silently as they could, the escapers climbed in. Using the oars was too risky in case anyone on shore picked up the sound of their splash. Instead, they allowed the current to carry them past tiny Pinchgut Island and out past the South Head, where in the darkness the sentry on duty—Sergeant James Scott—failed to see them. As the Pacific swells moved beneath them, they raised their sail and their voyage began.
The escape was not discovered until around dawn the next day, when it roused surprise but also some sympathy. Watkin Tench could easily understand why people should wish “to brave every danger and every hardship rather than remain longer in a captive state.” He also thought that the colony’s rulers had failed them: “I every day see wretches pale with disease and wasted with famine, struggle against the horrors of their situation … toil cannot be long supported without adequate refreshment. The first step in every community … should be to set the people above want.”
Knowing some of the group to be “competent navigators,” Tench had no doubt that “a scheme so admirably planned, would be adequately executed … After the escape of Captain Bligh which was well known to us, no length of passage or hazard of navigation seemed above human accomplishment.” Private John Easty thought it a “very desperate attempt to go in an open boat for a run of about 16 or 17 hundred leagues and in particular for a woman and two small children the oldest not above three years of age. But the thoughts of liberty from such a place as this is enough to induce any convicts to try all schemes to obtain it as they are the same as slaves all the time they are in this country.”
Following the departure of the Waaksamheyd, there were no seagoing vessels in the harbor: the Supply had left for Norfolk Island a few days earlier. Impotent to undertake a serious pursuit, Phillip and his officers could only try to reconstruct what had happened. From a source he did not name, Advocate-General Collins wrote, “we learned that Detmer Smith … had sold [Bryant] a compass and a quadrant and had furnished him with a chart, together with such information as would assist him in his passage to the northward.” A search of the Bryants’ hut revealed “cavities under the boards” where they had concealed items. What puzzled many was how the convicts had kept their escape bid secret. Collins wrote that most of the escapers “were connected with women; but if these knew anything, they were too faithful to those they lived with to reveal it.”
Some clearly had not known. The next morning, Sarah Young, partner of James Cox, discovered a letter he had left for her “conjuring her to give over the pursuit of the vices which, he told her, prevailed in the settlement, leaving to her what little property he did not take with him, and assigning as a reason for his flight, the severity of his situation, being transported for life, without the prospect of any mitigation or hope of ever quitting the country but by the means he was about to adopt.”
Collins, whose own intention was “to embrace the first opportunity that offers of escaping from a country that is nothing better than a place of banishment for the outcasts of society,” may, like Tench, have felt some empathy with the fugitives. The general assumption was, he wrote, that “they would steer for Timor, or Batavia, as their assistance and information were derived from the Dutch snow.” With their boat “a very good one, and in excellent order,” and provided “no dissension prevailed among them, and they had but prudence enough to guard against the natives wherever they might land,” like Tench he did not doubt their succeeding. But he thought “what story they could invent on their arrival at any port, sufficiently plausible to prevent suspicion of their real characters, it was not easy to imagine.”
aToday the Sydney Opera House stands on the site of Bennelong’s house, on land known as Bennelong Point.
bThe escapees did not reach Tahiti. Five years later four of them were found living farther up the coast, where they had survived with the help of the Aboriginal people. The fifth man had died.