MOST of us have probably heard of the legendary Mary Bryant. The Cornish convict is famous for her amazing escape by open boat from Port Jackson more than 200 years ago.
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Along with her husband and seven other felons, she stole the governor's cutter on a moonless night in 1791 and sailed to freedom. After an epic journey of 69 days, the escapees finally reached Timor, some 3254 miles (5237kilometres) away, where they posed as shipwreck survivors.
At the start of their voyage the Bryants discovered coal near Newcastle, possibly at Glenrock Lagoon, south from Merewether.
But until recently I was unaware of another amazing convict escapade. The escape of a similar band of desperate convicts who had completely slipped under the radar, maybe because it happened nowhere near Sydney, but in far more notorious penal colony in distant Tasmania some 43 years later.
The extraordinary true tale of the seizing of the newly-built brig Frederick by 10 bold convicts occurred in January 1834. The event came as the hell hole of Sarah Island in remote Macquarie Harbour, near present Strahan, was being closed down and the convict population relocated to Port Arthur.
What followed was an astonishing tale of survival as the convict shipbuilders stole an untested and leaky 140-ton timber vessel and, avoiding detection, sailed it across the wide blue Pacific Ocean to Chile in South America.
They did so with neither the help of charts nor a chronometer, but rather by "dead reckoning", a sort of by guess and by God.
Despite their incredible handicaps, the convicts sighted land six weeks and one day after they left Macquarie Harbour and soon decided to abandon their sinking craft and hope they weren't arrested as pirates to be either promptly hanged or shot.
Their voyage, battling wind and storms without even a map, is even more remarkable considering the distance covered. In a straight line, from Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) to the coast of Chile is some 6734 miles (or 10,837kilometres), but the convicts had to deviate to avoid detection, sailing much further also to avoid horrendous Antarctic weather and British warships.
Ten Rogues also has an intriguing central character in convict Jimmy Porter who is documented as having escaped the hangman's noose not once, but five times!
The full, unlikely true story of the small convict band is now told in a new book by author Peter Grose entitled Ten Rogues (Allen & Unwin $29.99), a thoroughly entertaining and revealing look behind the shackles into our convict era.
Painstaking researched, Grose is in admiration of the gutsy escapees, describing their voyage as being a staggering example of seamanship, courage, skill and daring.
He compares the convict ordeal, crossing a stormy ocean with a leaking boat and living on starvation rations, with the incredible journey of Lieutenant William Bligh after the infamous 1789 mutiny on the Bounty.
Bligh was set adrift by mutineers and sailed his launch some 4000 miles from the mid-Pacific to Timor to save his own life and also 18 loyal members of his crew. Like the convicts, Bligh had no charts.
Grose, however, states that "even Bligh's voyage pales before the achievement of the Frederick", arguing that the convicts must have sailed roughly twice as far as Bligh on short rations and with equally limited navigation equipment.
Ten Rogues also has an intriguing central character in convict Jimmy Porter who is documented as having escaped the hangman's noose not once, but five times!
Porter might be described today as a lovable rogue, but he comes across as a colourful con man with charm, a tireless schemer very prone to exaggeration, a killer, a thief and a narcissist. To ensure his own immortality (or, at least, his version of events) he wrote not one but two accounts of his adventures concerning the Frederick. He's also a central character today in what's claimed to be Australia's longest-running play, The Ship that Never Was.
As well, Porter is the inspiration for the character John Rex in the great Australian convict novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, written by Marcus Clarke and published in the 1870s. Some of Rex's words in the novel come directly from Porter's accounts.
The wily Porter certainly had a charmed life, but later, just when he had turned the corner and his sentence of "life" imprisonment was about to be cancelled, his path to freedom was again derailed.
In 1844, for unexplained reasons, Porter was transferred to the former penal settlement for hardened criminals at Newcastle. He didn't behave, but finally achieved the dream for a convict under sentence, of being granted a ticket of leave (becoming a "good" convict who could choose which settler he wished to work for).
It all couldn't last. Porter reoffended by stealing, was jailed, and was sent back to Newcastle, where he absconded, this time for good with speculation he may have gone back to Chile to live happily ever after with his family he'd deserted earlier. Maybe.
Grose's stylish book was initially a disappointment, until I realised how he'd structured his work around the escaping convicts on the Frederick to give fresh insights and a broader picture of a brutal era.
Who might now realise that remote Sarah Island with its renowned sadistic commandants could, under enlightened leadership, work miracles instead.
Between 1829 and 1833, the Hoy shipyard there built 96 ships. Sarah Island became the biggest shipyard in Australia at that time, according to Grose.
The author also reveals that without the American Revolution in 1776, the events of his story might never have happened. For suddenly, Britain had nowhere to dump its convicts. After all, more than 200 offences carried a mandatory death sentence, often later reduced to exile overseas.
Grose reveals it was no coincidence some 22,000 earlier transported convicts ended up in US plantation colonies. English convicts were sold by the boatload.
A generally accepted figure is apparently 52,000 criminals being transported to the American colonies between 1610 and 1776.
The injustice and sheer cruelty of the whole convict system infuriated Grose the more he researched, especially on learning the transportation business had been "privatised" by the time the Second Fleet (in 1790) sailed to Australia. About a quarter of the reasonably healthy convicts onboard, however, died at sea on the voyage.
After the British government passed its first anti-slavery law, a company of shipbrokers then switched cargoes, being awarded the bulk of the early convict charters to Australia instead. They had previously been the biggest slave traders in London.
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