The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Only one man escaped from Macquarie Harbor twice. His name was Alexander Pearce (1790–1824), a little, pockmarked, blue-eyed Irishman from County Monaghan who had been transported for seven years at the Armagh Assizes in 1819, for stealing six pairs of shoes.24 He had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1820, and as an assigned servant he gave continuous trouble to his masters by running away, stealing and getting drunk. He soon learned enough bush skills to “stay out” for three months at a stretch with some other absconders. Flogging did not impress him. Eventually, in 1822, he was sent to Macquarie Harbor for forging a two-pound money order and absconding from service. On September 20, 1822, Pearce seized an open boat from Kelly’s Basin on Macquarie Harbor, where he had been working in a sawpit gang. Seven other convicts piled into the craft with him. Two of them had already tried to escape from Van Diemen’s Land by stealing a schooner moored in the Derwent estuary: Matthew Travers, an Irishman under life sentence of transportation, and Robert Greenhill, a sailor from Middlesex. For that failed escape, they had been sent to Macquarie Harbor. The others were an ex-soldier, William Dalton (perjury in Gibraltar, fourteen years); a highway robber, Thomas Bodenham; William Kennelly, alias Bill Cornelius, transported for seven years and re-sentenced to Macquarie Harbor for an escape attempt; John Mather, a young Scottish baker, working a seven-year sentence and then sent to Macquarie Harbor for forging a £15 money order; and a man called “Little Brown,” whose Christian name is unknown and who cannot, due to the commonness of his surname, be identified.

  Flogged with the adrenaline of escape, the eight men rowed across the harbor, ran the boat ashore, smashed its bottom with a stolen axe, and set out on foot. At first they made good time through the dank maze of the shore forest, lugging their axes and their meager rations. They spent the night on the slopes of Mount Sorell, not daring to light a fire, and struck east the next morning toward the Derwent River, where they planned to steal a schooner, sail it downstream past Hobart and out into Storm Bay and so “proceed home,” 14,000 miles to England. The first leg of their route lay across the Darwin Plateau, keeping to the north of the Gordon River.25

  Before them, although they did not know it, lay some of the worst country in Australia. Even today, bushwalkers rarely venture into the mountains between Macquarie Harbor and the inland plains: fold after fold, scarp on scarp, with giant trees growing to a hundred feet from clefts in the steep rock where, clambering along rotted limbs or floundering through the entangling ferns and creepers, one cannot possibly move in a straight line. The convicts struggled along in a gray, dripping twilight from dawn to dusk, with one man beating the scrub in front “to make the road.” At night, like exhausted troglodytes, afraid of winds and shadows, they lit a fire in the cleft of a rock and huddled around it to sleep as best they could. Within a week, the weather turned to gales and sleet and their little store of tinder was soaked. Then they finished the last of their rations. Hungry, cold and failing, the band struggled for another two days through “a very rough country … in a very weak state for want of provisions.”

  But now the fugitives were straggling. “Little Brown … was the worst walker of any; he always fell behind, and then kept cooing [sic] so that we said we would leave him behind if he could not keep up better.”26 No man felt able to gather all the wood for a fire. In the feeble hysteria of exhaustion, they began to squabble about who should do it; in the end, each convict scraped together enough twigs for himself and eight little fires were lit. Kennelly made what might or might not have been meant as a joke. “I am so weak,” he said to Pearce and Greenhill, “that I could eat a piece of a man.”

  They thought about that all night, and “in the morning,” Pearce’s narrative goes on,

  there were four of us for a feast. Bob Greenhill was the first who introduced it, and said he had seen the like done before, and that it eat much like a little pork.

  John Mather protested. It would be murder, he said; and useless, too, since they might not be able to choke the flesh down. Greenhill overrode him:

  “I will warrant you,” said Greenhill, “I will well do it first myself and eat the first of it; but you must all lend a hand, so that you may all be equal in the crime.” We then consulted who should fall. Greenhill said, “Dalton; as he volunteered to be a flogger, we will kill him.”

  In these flat declarative outlines, the scene might come from an Elizabethan revenge-tragedy: the conclave, the ritual to overcome the great taboo, the literary diction, the avenging choice of the flogger as victim. Indeed, it may be too pat; Dalton was never a flogger at Macquarie Harbor, and other “literary” touches in the narrative may come from the amanuensis to whom Pearce eventually dictated his story. But in any case, Dalton was killed. He fell sound asleep at about three in the morning, and Greenhill’s axe

  struck him on the head, and he never spoke a word after … Matthew Travers with a knife also came and cut his throat, and bled him; we then dragged him to a distance, and cut off his clothes, and tore out his inside, and cut off his head; then Matthew Travers and Greenhill put his heart and liver on the fire and eat it before it was right warm; they asked the rest would they have any, but they would not have any that night.

  But the next morning, hunger won. They had been without food for four days. Dalton’s flesh was carved and doled out into seven roughly equal portions, and the band got moving again.

  Brown was walking slower and slower; he must have reflected as he limped along that he, the weakest, would be next. Kennelly, too, was afraid for his life. And so the two of them fell back, and silently disappeared in the forest mazes of the Engineer Range, hoping to get back to Macquarie Harbor. Realizing that their story “would hang us all,” the others tried to catch them but failed. On October 12, Brown and Kennelly were found half-dead from exposure on the shore of Macquarie Harbor, still with pieces of human flesh in their pockets. Brown died in the prison hospital on October 15, and Kennelly four days later.

  Now five convicts were left. They reached the Franklin River, swollen with rain, and spent two days trying to cross it; Pearce, Greenhill and Mather went across first and dragged the other two over with the help of a long pole. Mather was crippled with dysentery and the others “were scarcely able to move, for we were so cold and wet.” But they struggled on across the Deception Range and then the Surveyor Range after that, and on October 15 they saw below them a fine open valley, probably the Loddon Plains. Here, in the long grass by a creek, thoughts of fresh food rose again. It was Bodenham’s turn to die. As he slept, Greenhill split his skull. Ten years later, the first official explorer to reach the Loddon Plains, a surveyor, would find human bones in this valley.27

  Four men were left, and they kept marching. By about October 22, they had apparently reached the first line of the Western Tiers and before them lay “a very fine country,” full of “many kangaroos and emus, and game of all kinds”; but they had no hunting weapons, and the frustration of starving while watching the mobs of shy gray marsupials bounding invulnerably past must have been overpowering. “We then said to ourselves,” Pearce declared, “that we would all die together before anything should happen.”

  But Greenhill had no intention of dying together with anyone, and Mather was very apprehensive. He and Pearce “went to one side, and Mather said, Pearce, let us go on by ourselves; you see what kind of a cove Greenhill is; he would kill his father before he would fast one day.” But on that open button-grass moor, which may have been the King William Plains, they could not have lost Greenhill. Since he carried the only axe they had left, he could not be killed; and none of the famished men could hobble faster than the rest. Thus bound together, they went on; and around the last week in October (from here, the chronology of Pearce’s accounts grows hazier), they stopped by a little creek and lit a fire to boil the last of Bodenham, “which scarcely kept the Faculties in Motion.”28

  Mather could not eat his share. He had gathered some fern roots, which he boiled and wolfed down, but

  he
found it would not rest on his stomach (no wonder) for such a Mess It could not be expected would ever digest in any Mortal whatever, which occasioned him to vomit to ease his Stomach & while in the act of discharging it from his Chest, Greenhill still showing his spontaneous habit of bloodshed seized the Axe & crept behind him gave him a blow on the head.

  It did not kill Mather. He jumped up and grappled with Greenhill, wresting the axe from him. Pearce and Travers managed, for a time, to calm the two men down. But Mather was doomed, and that night the four men made camp around a fire “in a very pensive and melancholy mood.” Greenhill and Travers, bosom friends, were determined to eat Mather next; Pearce, without telling Mather, was secretly on their side. He walked a little way from the fire and looked back: “I saw Travers and Greenhill collaring him.” The team was at work again, and Pearce made no effort to save poor John Mather, who now made ready to die a Christian death, very far from England.

  They told him they would give him half an hour to pray for himself, which was agreed to; he then gave the Prayer-book to me, and laid down his head, and Greenhill took the axe and killed him. We then stopped two days in this place.

  The three men kept heading east, but Travers was sinking. He had been bitten on the foot by a snake and could no longer walk. Terrified that his two companions would eat him, he begged them to leave him to die and go on with what remained of Mather, which might be rations enough to carry them to a settlement. Greenhill refused to abandon him. He and Pearce stayed with the delirious Travers for five days, tending him. Travers lapsed in and out of his fever, “in great agitation for fear that they would dispose of him.… [T]he unfortunate Man all this time had but little or no sleep.”29

  They half-dragged, half-carried Travers for several days more. But it was no use:

  [Greenhill and Pearce] began to Comment on the impossibility of ever being able to keep Traviss up with them for their strength was so nearly exhausted it was impossible for them to think of making any Settlement unless they left him.… It would be folly for them to leave him, for his flesh would answer as well for Subsistence as the others.

  Travers awoke and, through his haze of pain, heard them talking.

  In the greatest agony [he] requested them in the most affecting manner not to delay themselves any longer, for it was morally impossible for him to attempt Travelling any more & therefore it would be useless for them to attempt to take him with them.… The Remonstrances of Traviss strengthened the designs of his companions.30

  They killed Travers with the axe. The victim “only stretched himself in his agony, and then expired.”

  Now they were two. But for the kangaroos, the terrain through which Pearce and Greenhill were now walking was not unlike England: undulating fields of grass sprinkled with little copses, a mild and fruitful landscape ringed with hills, all golden in the early summer light.

  Greenhill began to fret, and said he would never get to any port with his life. I kept up my spirits all along, and thought we must shortly come to some inhabited parts of the country, from the very great length we had travelled.

  But there could be no doubt that one would sooner or later eat the other. Greenhill had the axe, and the two men walked at a fixed distance apart. When Pearce stopped, so did Greenhill. When one squatted, so did the other. There was no question of sleep. “I watched Greenhill for two nights, for I thought he eyed me more than usual.” One imagines them: a small fire of eucalyptus branches in the immense cave of the southern night, beneath the drift and icy prickle of unfamiliar stars; the secret bush noises beyond the outer ring of firelight—rustle of grass, flutter and croaking of nocturnal birds—all sharpened and magnified by fear, with the two men fixedly watching one another across the fire. One night Pearce became convinced of Greenhill’s “bad disposition as to me.” He waited, and near dawn his adversary fell asleep. “I run up, and took the axe from under his head, and struck him with it, and killed him. I then took part of his arm and thigh, and went on for several days.”

  Pearce was now utterly alone. “I then took a piece of a leather belt,” he notes laconically, “and was going to hang myself; but I took another notion not to do it.” He walked on a little further and blundered into his first stroke of good luck since Macquarie Harbor: a deserted aboriginal campsite. The blacks had seen him coming and had fled, leaving pieces of game scattered around their still-lit cooking-fires.

  Pearce settled down and gorged himself on the first non-human meat he had tasted in nearly seven weeks. It gave him strength to keep going for several days until, from a hilltop, he glimpsed the landmark that signalled his arrival in the farmed country of the Derwent Valley: Table Mountain, a hill just south of Lake Crescent. Below him lay the Ouse, a large tributary stream of the Derwent.

  Two days later, following the river down, Pearce came on a flock of sheep. He managed to grab and dismember a lamb. As he was devouring its raw flesh, a convict shepherd emerged from the bush “and said he would shoot me if I did not stop immediately.”

  The shepherd’s name was McGuire, and he soon realized that he knew the blood-boltered little goblin he had at gunpoint. Before his banishment to Macquarie Harbor, Pearce had worked on a sheep run nearby. McGuire “carried the remains of the lamb, and took me with him into his hut, and made meat ready for me, where I stopped for three days, and he gave me all attendance.” He would not turn a fellow Irishman in to the authorities, and for several weeks more Pearce hid in the huts of McGuire and other Irish convict shepherds. Then he fell in with a pair of bushrangers, Davis and Churton, who armed him; and they skulked about in the bush together for two more months. But his new companions had a £10 reward on their heads, and convict solidarity—never a dependable bond—could not hold up forever against that. On January 11, 1823, near the town of Jericho, the three of them were arrested by soldiers of the 48th Regiment acting on the word of informers and were brought down to Hobart in chains.

  Churton and Davis were tried and hanged, an automatic punishment for bushrangers. While in jail, Pearce confessed the whole story of his escape—cannibalism and all—to the acting magistrate, the Reverend Robert Knopwood. It was transcribed and sealed, and not a word of it was believed. The authorities assumed—in the manner of the Cretan paradox—that since all convicts were liars, this one could only be covering for his “mates,” who must still be alive and at large. This grotesque tall story could only be the invention of a felon’s debased mind. There were no living witnesses to that nightmare trek from Macquarie Harbor to the Derwent, and no corpus delicti. And so Pearce was not executed; instead, they sent him back to Macquarie Harbor, where he arrived in February 1823.

  He became, of course, a celebrity among the convicts. He was living proof that a man could get out of Macquarie Harbor, and only he kept the secret of how to do it. One newly arrived convict, a young laborer named Thomas Cox, kept begging to come along the next time. Finally, Pearce gave in to Cox’s whispered entreaties; but he would not try the eastern route again. Instead, he decided to try and go north to Port Dalrymple—once again, through totally unexplored territory, but perhaps not as bad as the Western Tiers. On November 16, 1823, the two men absconded.31

  They did not get far. On November 21, a lookout on Sarah Island saw a plume of smoke rising from a distant beach. The fire was also seen by a convict transport, the Waterloo, as it made sail for Hell’s Gates. The ship lowered a boat, and the shore guard dispatched a launch. Before dark, the exhaused Pearce was back in the settlement where he told the commandant that he had killed Cox two days before and had been eating him since. By way of proof, he produced a piece of human flesh weighing about half a pound. Next morning he led a search-party to the bank of a stream, where Cox’s body lay “in a dreadfully mangled state,” according to one official report,

  being cut right through the middle, the head off, the privates torn off, all the flesh off the calves of the legs, back of the thighs and loins, also off the thick part of the arms, which the inhuman wretch declared was the
most delicious food.32

  Probably Pearce killed Cox in rage, not gluttony; his own account rings true, despite its apparent gratuitousness:

  We travelled on several days without food, except the tops of trees and shrubs, until we came upon King’s River. I asked Cox if he could swim; he replied he could not; I remarked that had I been aware of it he should not have been my companion.… [T]he arrangement for crossing the river created words, and I killed Cox with the axe.… I swam the river with the intention of keeping the coast around [to] Port Dalrymple; my heart failed me, and I resolved to return.33

  The authorities did the only thing they could. Pearce was shipped straight down to Hobart on the Waterloo, tried and hanged. When he was dead, a local artist, Thomas Bock, drew his likeness. The court had ordered that, as its ultimate brand of infamy, Pearce should be “disjointed” after death—delivered to the anatomizing surgeons. This was done, and Mr. Crockett, the head doctor in the Hobart Colonial Hospital, made a souvenir of the cannibal’s head. He skinned it and scraped the flesh away, plucked out the eyes and the brain, and boiled the skull clean. Thirty years later, the relic was given to an American phrenologist, Dr. Samuel Morton, who was busy assembling his collection of skulls and shrunken heads, more than a thousand specimens, known as “The American Golgotha.” It went into a glass cabinet in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where it may still be seen, a yellowed label pasted across the blackened ivory bone, recording its small role in the taxonomy of an extinct scientific fad.