A Commonwealth of Thieves (30 page)

In February 1789, Will Bryant had been sentenced to be flogged for trading in fish on his own behalf. After the flogging of 100 lashes, he had been kept on in the fishing service because, as Captain Collins said, “Notwithstanding his villainy, he was too useful a person to part with and send to a brick cart.” Bryant burned inwardly however. Like her husband, Mary also resented his punishment, and hated being cast out of her privileged position on the east side of the cove and made to live with her infant daughter, Charlotte, in the squalor of the convict camp in the Rocks (as the west side would become known).

There, in the general camp, not only did she need to listen to the mockery of fellow prisoners and references to her fallen status, but she and her family were exposed to the full hardship of the Sydney Cove diet. Into such deprivation was Mary's second child, Emmanuel, born, and baptised by the Reverend Richard Johnson on 4 April 1790. The dilemma of people like William and Mary Bryant was reflected more urbanely in a slightly overstated but valid letter Surgeon White wrote in April 1790 to a dealer in hams, tongues, and salt salmon in the Strand, London. “Much cannot now be done, limited in food and reduced as people are, who have not had one ounce of fresh animal food since first in the country; a country and place so forbidden and so hateful as only to merit execration and curses; for it has been a source of expense to the Mother Country, and of evil and misfortune to us, without there ever being the smallest likelihood of its repaying or recompensing either. From what we have already seen we may conclude there is not a single article in the whole country that in the nature of things could prove of the smallest use or advantage to the Mother Country or the commercial world. In the name of Heaven, what has the Ministry been about? Surely they have quite forgotten or neglected us? … This is so much out of the world and tract of commerce that it could never answer.”

The Bryants were by no means the only ones who desired escape in those months. In Rose Hill in September 1790, newly arrived John Terwood (or Tarwood) proposed an escape to Tahiti to five others. Terwood was a former sailor and a highway robber and stock thief in the London area. Collins thought him “a daring, desperate character, and the principal in the scheme.” Terwood's accomplice in a theft of bullocks from marshlands at Poplar, on the edge of the city of London, and three others as well, were willing to go along with him.

One night, the group led by Terwood came down the Parramatta River from Rose Hill and into the harbour, and then stole “a wretched weak boat” from the lookout station at South Head, and got away. They were not heard from again for years, and were presumed to have died at sea. Five years later, four of them would be found at Port Stephens some way up the New South Wales coast, very scrawny, praising the kindness of the natives but anxious for return to their own kind. The fifth and oldest man of the group, Sutton, had by then died.

Bryant knew that in his turn, he would go much better equipped than Terwood and company, and that his boat wouldn't be “a wretched weak” one.

When towards the year's end, the
Waaksamheyd
arrived in the wake of the
Supply,
Captain Smith and William Bryant made repeated contact with each other. If the English thought little of Smith, Smith was willing to return the favour and at some stage, in secrecy, sold Will Bryant a compass, a quadrant, and a chart covering the route to Batavia via the eastern coast of New South Wales and Torres Strait. Then, towards the end of February 1791, Bryant called a meeting with five other convicts in his hut proposing the stealing of the boat in which he was employed. A passer-by overheard the discussion, and it was reported to the Governor, who ordered that a watch be kept on Bryant. It was the next day, however, that an accident—the near overturning and swamping of the fishing boat—put the likelihood of an escape out of everyone's mind but Bryant's.

It was an event whose main point at the time was that it helped heal the relationship between Phillip and Bennelong. Bennelong's sister, Karangarang, was fishing in the government cutter with William Bryant, his crew members, and two native children when it was hit by an unexpected and typically violent Port Jackson southerly storm. The boat was over-burdened with a fish catch, and was swamped with water. Karangarang took the two children on her shoulders in a moment and swam ashore with them. Several natives ashore, including Bennelong, seeing that the boat was being driven onto rocks, gave every possible assistance, “without which, in all probability, one of the crew would have been drowned … in these friendly offices Bennelong was very assiduous: this behaviour gave Governor Phillip an opportunity of receiving him in a more kindly manner than he had done since his bad behaviour.”

Everyone thought that the accident to the boat had put an end to Bryant's plans, since it had demonstrated the unsuitability of the cutter for what he had in mind. But he had been enthused, as the officers had been, by the news that had come to Sydney by
Supply
and
Waaksamheyd
of the mutiny on
Bounty,
and of Captain Bligh's journey in an open launch from the mid-Pacific site of the mutiny to Timor. What Bligh could do, Bryant believed he could reproduce. And because of the recent overturn of the boat, it had been refitted at government expense with new sails, mast, and oars.

An additional motive for him was that though he knew his term of transportation had expired—he had been sentenced in 1784—he must have doubted that the papers proving his time had been served would ever turn up. In 1790, Phillip had written to Nepean, asking for further information about how to deal with the people whose time had expired. “We have now near thirty under the circumstances, and their number will increase as well as their discontents.” In
his
discontent, Bryant had by now acquired two muskets and various supplies. His and Mary's accumulated secret cache for their proposed escape included 100 pounds of flour, 100 pounds of rice, 14 pounds of pork, about 8 gallons of water, a new net, two tents, carpenter's tools, and fishing gear. Mary Bryant had also collected a little pharmaceutical kit, included amongst it the triple-veined leaves of the native sarsaparilla. (Some of her
Smilax
leaves would end up, as souvenirs of her escape, all over the world. )

Seven other convicts accompanied them, and while not all of them had seamanship, Samuel Bird and the former seaman William Morton both did. Four of Bryant's escapees had come in the Second Fleet. Amongst them, James Cox, a colonial cabinet-maker, had been one of those who had skipped ship as a result of the mutiny on the
Mercury
in 1782. The wood of New South Wales did not suit his craft. He had a life sentence, and was ready to flee. Before he left, Cox left a letter to his lover, Sarah Young, in the hut where he pursued his cabinet-making. The letter called on her “to give over the pursuits of the vices” which, he told her, prevailed in the settlement. He left her whatever property of his remained, and explained that it was the hopelessness of his situation, “being transported for life, without the prospect of any mitigation, or hope of ever quitting the country,” which drove him to take part in Bryant's plans.

Between nine and midnight on the evening of the day the
Waaksamheyd
departed Sydney, the Bryant party, some of whom were rostered on for fishing that night, stole the government boat and crept downharbour past the light at the lookout station where Sergeant Scott and his men were obliviously posted. They met with gratitude and exhilaration the pulse of the Pacific racing in through the Heads. The laughter, the curses, the cries of triumph which must have characterised that sturdy cutter as the Bryants and their friends went to meet the moonless night of the Pacific would in coming weeks be imagined and sucked on by those without the skill or endurance to match these escapees. This boatload should have been self-doomed, but it worked with an exemplary degree of cooperation. It was not so just that night, but in days to come as well. Mary had delivered her swaddled children, lying in the stern, from bondage.

The day after the escape, Bryant's hut was searched and “cavities under the boards were found.” The authorities knew he had talked about escape, but the search showed that his plans were well thought out and more capable than the authorities had expected. Most of the escapees “were connected with women” and Collins declared, “if these women knew anything, they were too faithful to those they lived with to reveal it.”

The governor would enforce an edict that hereafter only smaller boats be built—in fact, he had already decided on that before the escape, and now he reiterated it with force.

Though great intensity of feeling went into this escape, it was not lightly embarked on. Private Easty declared sympathetically, “It's a very desperate attempt to go in an open boat for a run of about sixteen or seventeen hundred leagues and in particular for a woman and two small children, the oldest not above three years of age, but the thought of liberty from such a place as this is enough to induce any convict to try all schemes to obtain it as they are the same as slaves all the time they are in this country.” Like Easty, Captain Tench expressed something close to sympathy and good wishes “to this little band of adventurers.” There was little doubt, said Tench, “that a scheme so admirably planned, would be adequately executed.”

The Bryants were escaping a colony in which, despite what the
Supply
and the Dutch snow had brought in from Batavia, the ration was reduced again shortly after their departure, this time to 3 pounds of rice, 3 pounds of flour and 3 pounds of pork per week. Hunger would again have the effect of driving people to raid gardens, and to make small thefts. In another sense the absent Bryant had a lasting effect on the scrawny, misbegotten society of New South Wales. It was reported to Phillip that he had frequently been heard expressing what was a common sentiment on the subject amongst convicts—that he did not consider his marriage in this country as binding. It was a marriage for the sake of the alternative world in which fortune had placed him, but he asserted to other convicts that it would not bind him should he return to reality, the established and accustomed earth. Phillip, hearing of Bryant's attitudes after his escape, saw how dangerous this concept was to his community, to all the business of inheritance and ordered life of which monogamy was the keystone. Men who were proven to serve their time and had the means, if former sailors, to sign on with visiting ships and return to the outside world might share that belief and leave behind destitute wives and children who would become a burden on the settlement. Phillip issued an order that no timeserved convict could leave behind in the colony any wife or children who could not support themselves.

“This order was designed as a check on the erroneous opinion which was formed of the efficacy of Mr. Johnson's nuptial benediction.” Here was another instance of Arthur Phillip declaring that New South Wales was not virtual reality; it was
their
world, and the contracts made here bound people to the same pieties as contracts made anywhere. Thus, he intended to centre their lives in the colony. In so doing, he was making the first families of a non-Aboriginal Australia.

Meanwhile, David Collins thought, with some injustice towards Mary, that Will took her along only as a means of preventing her from betraying his great scheme. Certainly, she saw her connection with Bryant as the chief hope for her children, but in all other aspects of her life that we know of, she was no mere token of fallen womanhood, but a vigorous and equal participant. Like many a male, Bryant might have had fantasies of flight, but he was not likely to get away without Mary as fellow-spirit and conspirator. Indeed Captain Tench would later declare that he admired both of them, and he obviously saw Mary as something more than the convict's token, southwest Pacific wife. The journey they were about to make, to this day one of the two longest open-boat excursions in maritime history, could not have been made without a united, refined, and mature sense of purpose.

twenty-four

T
HE FOLLOWING YEAR
, the by now notorious William Bligh, restored to normal naval command after the mutiny on the
Bounty,
and promoted to post-captain, called again at the Dutch port of Koepang in Timor and heard the tale of the Bryant party's voyage from the Dutch officials who were still talking about it. The Dutch governor at Koepang gave Bligh a journal entitled
Remarks on a Voyage from Sydney Cove, New
South Wales, to Timor,
which was said to be Bryant's true account. All we retain of it is what an enthused and remarkably sympathetic Bligh extracted for inclusion in his own journal. He did not have time to copy more than a quarter of the account, and one of his officers was able to get more of the account of Bryant and the others down. The other source for the Bryant journey is an extraordinary document written by at least one of the escapees and entitled
Memorandums,
later published in London in 1792.

Early in the journey, we learn by reading Bligh and the
Memorandums,
only two days sail north of Sydney, the Bryant party put in through the surf to a creek where so much coal lay “we thought it was not unlikely to find a mine … we picked with an axe as good coals as any in England—took some to the fire, and they burned exceedingly well.” It is interesting that there is a certain patriotic pride in that “as any in England.” Bryant saw himself as a Briton, fulfilling a destiny—freedom—and the remark implied that he, Mary, and the others saw England as their destination, not some lotus-eating island in the Pacific.

It was hard and skilled work beaching the boat and getting it out again through the waves. But despite the perils, regular landings and rest periods were essential for the health of all the parties to the adventure.

There was a night when rain drenched them, and a typical coastal storm in which the seas ran “mountains high”—that recurrent nautical description—while two of the crew bailed feverishly. What nursery rhymes and songs did Mary sing to soothe the children at such a time? Resting ashore when a landing was possible, they kept a fire burning and a system of watches for the natives, many of whom along the coast of New South Wales and the reef-girt shores of what is now Queensland were friendly, though some were hostile. With all the aplomb of such gentlemen as Tench or Phillip, Bryant claimed that shooting above the natives' heads always dispersed them. As they travelled north, temperatures increased. And although the draught of their cutter was not deep, the Irish convict Martin needed all his navigational skills amongst the reefs, islands and inlets of the Barrier Reef coastline. At one point the party was driven out of sight of land for “near three weeks” and by the time they reached a beach again were “much distressed for water and food.”

As they passed Cape York into Torres Strait, between New Guinea and Australia, they encountered several small islands occupied by natives. The Torres Strait Islanders were of Melanesian background, but had interbred with coastal Aboriginals. These natives' canoes were more sophisticated than those found in Sydney Cove— “The sails seemed to be made of matting.” The escapees “fired a musket over them, and immediately they began firing their bows and arrows at us.”

The party crossed the Gulf of Carpentaria, that great indentation on the northern Australian coast, in four and a half days. Then Martin navigated them across the treacherous Timor Sea where they met the southern shore of Timor and reached the Dutch port of Koepang on 5 June 1791. Their prodigious open-boat journey had been eclipsed only by the earlier journey of Bligh, after he had been cast off the
Bounty
two years before. They had covered 3,254 nautical miles and it had taken them, rests ashore included, ten weeks.

As they had agreed, they explained themselves to the Dutch Governor of Timor, Mynheer Timotheus Wanjon, as survivors from the wreck of a whaler named
Neptune
in Torres Strait, and claimed “that the captain and the rest of the crew probably will follow in another boat.” This was a credible enough scenario. “The governor,” Martin wrote, “behaved extremely well to us, filled our bellies and clothed double with every[thing] that was wore on the island.”

Koepang proved a delightful place, favoured for recuperation by those who had suffered fevers in Batavia. Its landscape of hills and headlands was spectacular, but it was not free of curses—an ugly skin disease marred some of its inhabitants. But there was no question that after the journey they had made, it represented deliverance to the Bryant party. Adding a further dimension to the stylishness of their escape, Bryant and his party drew bills on the British government and so were supplied with everything they needed by the administration.

B
Y THE TIME OF THE
escape of the Bryants, already a larger third flotilla, the Third Fleet, had been authorised by Whitehall. The contract was made in November 1790, and nine ships would sail on 27 March 1791. For the overall contract, Camden, Calvert and King were to be paid up to £44,658 13 shillings 9 pence, but they had plans beyond that—six of the Third Fleet transports were also chartered to trade in Bombay cotton on the company's account after they had discharged their duty of convict transportation. The other ships of the group would go whaling off New South Wales and in the Southern Ocean. Camden, Calvert and King's own ships carried about £30,000 in coin, to lay the foundations of monetary exchange in New South Wales.

The government and its bureaucracies such as the Navy Board, having made an outrageously inappropriate contract, seemed content that the disaster of the Second Fleet should go unreported in London. But via the Second Fleet ships returning, a letter from a literate unnamed female convict from the
Lady Juliana
would make its eloquent way into the
London
Chronicle
of 4 August 1791, and arrest the attention of the British public. The woman reflected on seeing the victims of Camden, Calvert and King and their officers brought ashore. “Oh, if you had but seen the shocking sight of the poor creatures that came out of the three ships, it would make your heart bleed. They were almost dead, very few could stand, and they were obliged to fling them as you would goods, and hoist them out of the ships, they were so feeble; and they died ten or twelve a day when they first landed…. The governor was very angry and scolded the captains a good deal, and I heard, intended to write to London about it, for I heard him say it was murdering them…. What a difference between us and them.” The writer expressed gratitude to the good agent of the
Lady
Juliana
—Lieutenant Edgar. For the
Lady Juliana
had landed 223 women and twelve children in good health after only three women and one child died on the voyage.

Those Britons outraged by the murderous policies of Camden, Calvert and King, and particularly of Captain Donald Trail of the
Neptune,
included an activist London attorney, Thomas Evans, who brought
Neptune
seamen before magistrates to swear statements against Trail and his first mate, William Ellerington. Evans did not mind whether the death for which they paid the price would be that of a convict or a seaman, but it was ultimately for the murder of a seaman that Trail and Ellerington were tried at the Old Bailey Admiralty sessions in 1792, long after the Third Fleet had already been sent.

Evans became another victim of the Sydney experiment. Neither the Navy Board nor the Home Office welcomed the attention the trial attracted. But in the end the charges failed, the judge mysteriously discounting the evidence and directing the jury to bring in a not-guilty verdict. The attorney-general, encouraged perhaps by Evans's over-exuberance in prosecution, refused to allow a second trial, and it was Evans who suffered, being eventually disbarred.

The same attorney-general produced a report for the King in July 1792 in which he nonetheless partly agreed with Evans and attributed the “unusual mortality” in the Second Fleet to the “tonnage of the ship being less than was capable of containing for so long so large a number of persons without hazard of their lives.” If this was so, if the tonnage of the
Neptune
had been fraudulently exaggerated as a way of overcharging government, then no one paid for it, the Navy Board simply wanting the whole embarrassment to vanish. Trail, a mass murderer, would return with impunity to the Royal Navy and serve as a master to Lord Nelson. “I considered him one of the very best masters I had ever met with, and from what I have seen since I have no reason to alter that opinion,” wrote Nelson in the coming decade. As for Camden, Calvert and King, after putting together the third convict flotilla, the company was thereafter never used again.

T
HE CHIEF SCANDAL OF THIS
Third Fleet would prove to be the alleged short rations for the Irish convicts on the
Queen.
On 26 February 1791, the
Freeman's Journal
of Dublin reported, “The gaoler of Limerick set off for Cork with a number of prisoners, where a large transport is waiting to carry all the convicts in the kingdom to Botany Bay.” It was not all the convicts in Ireland who fitted aboard the
Queen,
but 133 men and twenty-two women, plus four children. A receipt for these prisoners, dated 11 April 1791, was signed by the naval agent and given to the Mayor and Sheriff of the City of Cork, Sir Henry Brown Hayes, a United Irishman nationalist who would himself one day be sent to New South Wales for abducting an heiress. The
Queen
's indent list, however, would be left behind and, echoing earlier oversights, would not reach Sydney until eight years after these convicts had arrived. A future governor of New South Wales, John Hunter of the
Sirius,
would complain of the manner of transportation from Ireland as “so extremely careless and irregular.” For many Irish convicts of
Queen,
their time would expire and they would not be in a position to prove it.

The nine ships of the Third Fleet proper sailed from England in two divisions just before the
Queen
left Cork: the
Atlantic,
the
Salamander,
and the
William and Anne,
with Lieutenant Richard Bowen as naval agent, left Plymouth on 27 March, less than two weeks before the store ship
Gorgon,
and the same day the
Albemarle,
the
Active,
the
Admiral Barrington,
the
Britannia
and the
Matilda
left Portsmouth under agent Lieutenant Robert Parry Young.
Queen,
though belonging to the Portsmouth division,embarked her convicts at Cork and had her own naval agent, Lieutenant Samuel Blow. The Irish newspapers noticed that women seemed more keen to go than the men.
Queen
sailed at the beginning of April with orders to rendezvous with the rest of the division at St. Jago in the Cape Verde Islands.

So a great number of ships were on the interminable seas making for Sydney Cove. The
Mary Ann
was well ahead with her 150 English female convicts, nine of whom would die at sea. She did not call in anywhere but the Cape Verdes for fresh supplies, and that ensured a brisk passage. The converted frigate HMS
Gorgon,
the store ship which also carried 29 male convicts selected for their trades, would lose only one male. The Third Fleet proper followed, and some of them would overtake the
Gorgon.

Separated at sea, the
Atlantic, Salamander,
and the aged
William and
Anne
all met up at Rio, and then made the journey to Port Jackson without stopping at the Cape. The
Atlantic
had eighteen deaths but these were blamed on the condition in which men had been loaded from the
Dunkirk
hulk at Plymouth. At least a dozen of the men Surgeon James Thompson had been required to take on board were so weak that they had been unable to climb the ship's side and needed to be lifted up in a chair. Surgeon Thompson had wanted to exchange them for men physically able to face the passage, but there were harbour works proceeding in Plymouth for which the fittest men from
Dunkirk
were needed still. Six of the newly boarded died before sailing. But Surgeon Thompson took many pragmatic steps on diet and exercise time spent on deck to prevent scurvy developing. While only nine men had to go from the
Atlantic
to the hospital in Sydney Cove, the old 370-ton
William and Anne
would land a great number of convicts who were very ill on arrival. Its master, Captain Bunker, was ultimately fined for assaulting and beating some of the Irish members of the New South Wales Corps during the passage, so the conditions for the prisoners must have been harsh indeed.

The ships from the Portsmouth group,
Matilda, Britannia, Admiral
Barrington,
and
Albemarle,
were blown apart by a gale, and the
Albemarle
was on its own in the North Atlantic when the convicts attempted an uprising. The rising on
Albemarle
began with an assault on the quarterdeck, where an officer of the watch shot the leader of the mutiny, Siney, just as he was about to cut down the helmsman. The mutineers retreated to the convict deck, where they were rounded up. The wounded leader, Siney, and his confederate, Lyons, were hanged at the fore-yardarm, and several others were subjected to floggings. But the convicts would hand Lieutenant Bowen a document in which they argued that the mutiny had been encouraged by two seamen who also had a dream of America. These two sailors had equipped the prisoners with knives, which mutineers had converted into files so that they could escape their bonds. The two seamen believed to be responsible were ultimately landed in Madeira in irons.