by Peter Grose
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6 There is some confusion over the number of convicts who stayed behind: a contemporary account in the Hobart Town Courier puts the number at twelve, while most other reports give it as ten. The question of who was and who was not a convict comes down to whether two men, McFarlane and Nichols, were still serving a sentence at the time of the voyage or whether they were free men. The probability is that they were still convicts under sentence, but McFarlane may have been recently freed. He may therefore have felt no need to escape.
7 That part of the bow of the ship serving as sleeping quarters for the crew.
8 The expression ‘under the rose’ referred to something to be kept secret, not discussed with outsiders. In that era, pubs were often decorated with carved roses on the ceiling, to indicate that anything said there should not be repeated outside those walls. The tradition goes back at least as far as Roman times, where banquet rooms had roses painted on the ceilings. The Latin term sub rosa, means ‘in secret’.
9 It is not clear why the shot was required, as there were no collaborators aboard the whaleboat.
10 In a later account, Hoy stated under oath that only Barker and Shiers had accompanied him and Captain Taw down below, and that Jimmy Porter had not been present. The above account comes from Jimmy’s Norfolk Island journal, the main intention of which was to glorify Jimmy’s role in these proceedings.
Chapter 8
VOYAGE
The press had a field day. The 7 February 1834 issue of the Hobart Town Courier set the tone of gleeful handwringing. In those days newspapers carried classified advertisements on their front page and tucked the news away inside.1 On page two of the Courier, after a brief gallop through the bushfire news, the newspaper swung its keen eye in the direction of Sarah Island and the latest outrage. ‘We have the pain this week to announce another of those daring acts of piracy which from time to time have disgraced the annals of these colonies,’ it lamented. There followed a lip-smacking account of the treacherous ingenuity of the convicts in overwhelming the legal masters of the Frederick. The Courier averred that it was a severe lesson for the authorities:
This unfortunate occurrence, which has, it is needless to disguise it, been occasioned by a repetition of the same negligence which was so instrumental in producing the loss of the Cyprus, will, we trust, be a caution on all future occasions, especially to the military.
The Courier even went so far as to suggest that Captain Taw and David Hoy might have tried a bit harder. ‘We must say,’ the newspaper concluded in convoluted prose, ‘that with such numbers and with such a guard and furnished with arms too, we regret that any appearance of supineness was evinced, and that a more determined resistance was not made even after the surprise that appears to have been used, which if it had we cannot help thinking that the piracy would have been prevented’.
The Courier spoke for the whole colony in pointing out that the authorities had not exactly covered themselves in glory. Everybody was laughing at them, and no government likes that.
The Courier did not go into detail about how the nine men left behind at Macquarie Harbour had survived. It merely reported: ‘Capt. Taw, Mr Hoy, and the others who were sent on shore afterwards, made the best of their way to Circular Head, from whence Capt. Taw proceeded to Launceston, and by the mail [mail boat] to Hobart town on Tuesday morning.’
Circular Head is on the northwest corner of Tasmania, and is a good solid walk from Macquarie Harbour. The distance is about 220 kilometres through dense forest. It would be possible to walk via the coast, but this would add distance and involve an awkward crossing of the Arthur River. The overland distance from Circular Head to Launceston is about another 230 kilometres, so that would have been an even longer walk. There is every possibility that Captain Taw made his way by sea from Circular Head, which was a small port, to Launceston, a river port. That would certainly have been quicker than walking, or even travelling on horseback.
Whatever the route and mode of transport, the nine men seem to have overcome their problems quickly. Taw arrived in Hobart on 4 February, three weeks after he and his companions had been unceremoniously dumped on the mainland shore of Macquarie Harbour without so much as a rowboat. Thus did the news of the capture of the brig travel fast, via Captain Taw.
Having cleared the treacherous bar at the entrance to Macquarie Harbour, the convicts aboard the Frederick had a simple and urgent problem. The brig’s non-arrival would be noticed in Hobart, so the authorities would be bound to send someone to find out what was going on. Ships travelling between Hobart and the settlement tended to pass through Bass Strait along the north coast of Van Diemen’s Land, where the weather was not quite as bad as on the west coast. If the convicts wanted literally to steer clear of authority, their best bet was to chance the rough seas and violent winds to the west and south of the colony.
Nor would government ships be their only problem. The ten convicts knew that as soon as their escape was known, the authorities would issue a description of the missing brig. The description the Courier later published read:
The brig may be known at sea by its billet head, flush deck, quarter pieces,2 painted ports, seven on each side—main topsail half worn, considerably too small for the size of the ship—no square main sail, though the pirates may probably bend a cutter’s square sail for a main course. With the exception of the foresail, which is new, all the other sails are half worn.
Every vessel the convicts came across would be a potential threat, capable of identifying them and reporting their whereabouts and course to the authorities.
Being spotted was not their only concern. Their ship was already leaking, and bad weather would only make things worse. But they had little choice. They set a course east-southeast from their position outside the entrance to Macquarie Harbour. This would take them down the coast and around the wild southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land. They manned the pumps.
There are only two existing accounts of the voyage of the Frederick, and Jimmy Porter wrote both of them. As mentioned, the two accounts disagree on detail, and sometimes contradict one another, depending on Jimmy’s target audience. However, they are the only accounts available. Where the two accounts clash, I have simply settled on what I judged to be the most plausible version.
The convicts aboard the Frederick were not well equipped for a long sea voyage. They had no charts, for instance. The most sophisticated piece of navigation equipment they had was a quadrant, a large, old and clumsy version of the sextant still used by sea navigators today. Like a sextant, the quadrant could measure the angle between the horizon and the sun, and could also determine when the sun was at its highest point above the horizon. When the sun is at its highest, the local time is noon.
The angle between the sun and the horizon at noon would determine latitude, while the difference between the time at a datum (usually the Greenwich meridian or 0°) and noon aboard the ship would allow the navigator to determine the ship’s longitude. In skilful hands, a quadrant and a good clock used together could pinpoint a ship’s position fairly accurately.
Measuring the time difference, however, would need a very accurate clock, usually called a chronometer. This was the significance of the convicts’ seizure of David Hoy’s and Captain Taw’s watches. Today the word ‘watch’ usually refers to a small timepiece worn on the wrist. Watch mechanisms today are very often ‘quartz’, which means the watch is battery driven and keeps accurate time for months at a stretch. But in 1834 a ‘watch’ was usually what we would now call a ‘fob watch’, an institution that has largely disappeared from 21st-century lives.
A fob watch was four or five times the size of a modern wristwatch, and much heavier. It usually hung from the end of a chain, and was tucked into the fob pocket of the wearer’s waistcoat. The mechanism was driven by a wind-up spring, which meant it had to be wound daily or it would stop. In general, spring mechanism watches were not accurate enough for navigation, as they gained or lost several minu
tes a day. However, some of the better fob watches were accurate enough to be used as chronometers,3 and that probably applied to the watches carried by Hoy and Taw.
Without a chart, the information supplied by the quadrant was of limited value anyway. Suppose the navigator, John Barker (who was also acting as captain),4 having taken his quadrant readings and consulted his various navigation tables, had been able to pinpoint the ship’s position as 17°20' south, 149°35' west. Without a chart, that would not tell him whether the island off the starboard bow was Tahiti (French and good) or Pitcairn Island (full of British mutiny-on-the-Bounty descendants and bad). Barker will have known that the coast of Chile ran from a northern border with Peru at about 18° south to Cape Horn at about 55° south, and that cities like Valparaiso were in the middle at about 33° south. So if the Frederick could keep sailing across the Pacific Ocean in an easterly direction, and stay between 18° and 55° south, the voyage would end in Chile.
Barker did most of his navigation by what is known as ‘dead reckoning’. This simply consists of saying that the boat is here and travelling in a certain direction at a certain speed and therefore must have sailed from here to there after a certain time. Dead reckoning cannot take ocean currents into account, and is not much better than informed guesswork. Most sailors would agree that any position arrived at by dead reckoning will be not too far out after one day, fairly unreliable after a few days, and totally useless after a week. Barker sailed by dead reckoning for weeks on end.
The other big consideration was the wind and the weather. This book is a historical narrative, not a textbook on meteorology, and anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of that subject will flinch at the generalisations that follow. Nevertheless, a few broad principles will not go amiss.
As a huge generalisation, because of the earth’s rotation and other factors, the world’s surface air near the equator tends to flow from east to west; surface air in the mid-latitudes tends to flow west to east; and surface air near the poles tends to flow from east to west again.5 The surface winds blow accordingly. There are massive local variations, and localised weather systems that send winds in different directions, but the general principle holds good.
As a further generalisation, weather systems begin at an imaginary line in the ocean where warm equatorial waters meet cold polar waters. The line shifts with the seasons: in the southern hemisphere it moves south in the summer and north in the winter. A kink in the line, given a shove from behind by the earth’s rotation, will create a depression. From modest low-pressure areas to legendary, howling storms, the bulk of the world’s weather systems start at this imaginary line. As the Frederick’s journey began in the southern summer month of January, the line will have shifted to somewhere around 55° south.
So the convicts aboard the Frederick faced some invidious choices. If they took the Frederick north—say, between the equator and 25° south—they would be sailing mostly into wind, and running the risk of fighting end-of-season tropical storms. As well, they could find themselves too far north and miss Chile altogether, landing in less-friendly Peru instead. If they stayed in the middle latitudes—between 25° and 55° south, say—then they would have following winds and milder weather. However, they would not be alone: most other ships would be doing the same, so their chances of being spotted and either attacked or reported would be much greater. Finally, they could opt for a much shorter southerly route, between 55° south and the South Pole. In this case they would be sailing into the wind, in the notoriously wild Antarctic Ocean, with the risk of icebergs and other hazards in their path.
The journey started at Macquarie Harbour, which is about 42° south. John Barker first set course to take the Frederick around the southern tip of Tasmania, which is a bit beyond 43° south. So the ship and its convict crew began by committing themselves to the southern half of the mid-latitudes. This zone is well known to sailors, to the point of being notorious: not for nothing are the winds referred to as the Roaring Forties.
The voyage had barely got underway when the wind sprang up from the northwest. The Frederick was now making 12 knots, a very decent speed, with only two sails hoisted, a main topsail and a foresail. The tailwind was so strong that it needed two men to handle the helm. Hoy’s warning about leaks proved to be only too true. In Jimmy’s words: ‘We got the pumps to work and they were kept going all the voyage—we dare not neglect them two hours at a time.’6 There were four experienced seamen on board: Jimmy, Charles Lyon, John Jones and John Fair. They divided themselves into two watches, making sure there were two seamen who knew what they were doing on each watch.
The strong winds continued and heavily reduced the effectiveness of the makeshift crew. Five of the ten suffered badly from seasickness, most notably the ‘captain’, John Barker. The rough seas also sent William Shiers, Benjamin Russen, William Cheshire and James Leslie down below. Happily, none of the experienced sailors was forced to take to his bunk, and they and John Dady bore the brunt of the work until the invalids found their sea legs. Throughout this time the crew faced one of those insoluble dilemmas: they needed to go fast to be sure of staying ahead of any pursuers, but the more they piled on sail, the more the Frederick leaked, and the more water the exhausted crew had to pump.
John Barker recovered from his seasickness, and at noon on 16 January, two days after the journey began, he was able to take a quadrant reading, which placed the Frederick below the southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land. Barker now altered course from east-southeast to southeast, pushing the Frederick further south, further into the Roaring Forties. The new course was necessary to take the brig south of the South Island of New Zealand, while still staying clear of the main shipping lanes. The southernmost point in New Zealand is Stewart Island, which is about 47° south.7 So the Frederick’s push into cold and stormy southern waters continued with renewed vigour.
Barker began to worry that the brig was sailing too far south. He ordered a new course a little more to the east. This brought the brig, as sailors say, ‘nearer the wind’—the friendly following wind became more of a side wind, making the brig harder to handle. If Jimmy is to be believed, at one point Charles Lyon at the helm lost his nerve and swung the ship back onto its old course, to take advantage of the easier sailing with a following wind. This was not noticed until the next day, when Barker’s quadrant reading showed the ship was ‘scores of miles’ out of position. There must have been some kind of informal trial among the convicts when this treachery was discovered. In Jimmy’s words: ‘When the rascals were taxed with this gross neglect of duty they told the truth, and we were going to give Lyon a short passage over the side—but all ended in peace and it was looked over with a caution not to do the like again at his peril or he should certainly DIE.’
The convicts had given away half their provisions, and the food they kept was hardly going to last them the whole distance to Chile. They rationed the little they had, caught fish when they could, and collected rainwater.
Then Barker fell ill again. At one point he stayed below decks for nine days; no quadrant readings were taken during this time, which meant the ship was sailing on blind faith and the deadest of dead reckoning. There was a scare when the convicts spotted vast quantities of seaweed in the ocean. Seaweed needs warm water to flourish. Was the Frederick too far north? The men begged Barker to come up on deck and take a look. Barker took a cursory look at the seaweed, and the position of the sun, and announced: ‘Do not be in the least dubious as to my knowledge or capability of performing what I have taken in hand, for I can take you safe to South America, even although I had no quadrant on board, for I could do it by keeping a dead reckoning, it being a straight course.’ The men took him at his word, having no choice in the matter.
On 31 January, seventeen days into the journey, Barker was well enough to take another quadrant reading. Miraculously, the brig was not too far out of position. However, in the light of the new reading, Barker was able to alter course to northeast, still with favoura
ble winds. The more northerly course eased the Frederick away from the worst of the southern weather. Barker informed his fellow convicts that he intended to make landfall in Chile somewhere between the ports of Valparaiso and Valdivia. This generous target gives some measure of the vagueness of Barker’s navigation: Valdivia, at 39° of latitude, is more than 750 kilometres south of Valparaiso at 33°.
It is worth pointing out here that the port of Valparaiso was then a major British naval base, known as the South America Station. (Its name later changed to the Pacific Station.) It was headquarters to the Royal Navy’s Pacific fleet, a status it had enjoyed since 1826. At the time of the Frederick’s voyage, the nominal commander-in-chief was Rear-Admiral Sir Michael Seymour. He had died en route to the station, and was not replaced until 16 September 1834, when Vice-Admiral Graham Hammond took command. Although the men on the Frederick could not have known it, the fact that there was no settled British commander in Valparaiso would be likely to work in their favour.
However, none of these comings and goings would have been of much interest to the ten convicts as they battled wind, weather and a leaky boat, not to mention starvation rations. All they knew was that if Barker made their landfall too close to Valparaiso, they could expect trouble. So south it had to be.