by David Hill
Over the next three months the Matilda, the Atlantic, the Salamander, the William and Ann, the Gorgon, the Active, the Queen, the Albemarle, the Britannia and the Admiral Barrington arrived.
The voyage of the Third Fleet had not been without incident. Before reaching the Canary Islands, some convicts on the Albemarle broke into open mutiny. The ship’s captain managed to shoot one of the ringleaders, William Siney, in the shoulder as he was about to cut down the helmsman and take possession of the wheel of the ship. The ship’s crew and the marine escort then managed to wound a number of the mutineers and force them down into the hold before locking them in the prisoners’ deck.
One of the mutineers, Thomas Pratt, confessed and gave evidence against his colleagues. The captain, Lieutenant Parry Young, had the two ringleaders, William Siney and Owen Lyons, hanged on the fore yardarm as an example and deterrent to the others. When the Albemarle arrived in Sydney and Phillip was told of the event, he was to write to the secretary of the navy board, Phillip Stephens, commending Lieutenant Young for his professional handling of the crisis.
On the voyage of the Third Fleet a total of one hundred and ninety-four men, women and children had died, and hundreds more landed ‘so emaciated, so worn away from want of food’ that it would take many months for them to recover. Phillip thought some of them would never recover and would permanently be a ‘dead weight’ on the stores.24
In April 1791 the food ration was again reduced. Shortages of food would occur again and again and would be met with reduced rations, but the British Government’s announcement to Phillip that a fleet of convicts would in future be sent twice a year guaranteed the arrival of at least some fresh supplies and was to finally remove the threat of starvation.
17
ESCAPE
Several convicts got away from this settlement on board of the transports, which it will be impossible to prevent unless the masters of those ships … are prosecuted with severity …
Attempted escapes from the New South Wales settlement were commonplace from the outset, despite the fact that the convicts had little idea of where they were. Perhaps the first to successfully escape upon arrival in the new colony was a French-born convict named Peter Parris. According to Surgeon White Parris escaped when he was hidden on one of the French ships, either the Astrolabe or the Boussole, by sympathetic French sailors. Many of those who initially escaped, however, were not successful in the long run. Some eventually returned to the settlement starving and emaciated, while others disappeared into the countryside never to be seen again.
Other success stories were those who escaped on the convict transports after they had unloaded their cargoes and were released from government service to return to England. While all of the transports were thoroughly searched before being cleared to leave Sydney, it was extremely difficult to be sure that no one was hidden somewhere deep below the decks inside the ship.
Thomas Gilbert, the captain of the Charlotte, one of the first transports to return to England, described how his ship was searched for convicts by Lieutenant William Bradley of the Sirius:
Before I left England I had entered into the usual obligation, binding myself to the forfeiture of a very considerable sum not to suffer any of the convicts under my charge to escape, nor to bring any with me; it cannot therefore be supposed that with such a risk I should permit any of them to come aboard and being equally conscious of not having given any room for such a suspicion with regard the seamen, I immediately assembled the officers of the ship … and … requested that a thorough search be made. This being done and the lieutenant not being able to find any, departed.1
Bradley obviously wasn’t convinced, because soon afterwards he returned ‘accompanied by some of his own petty officers’ to make another search but ‘with no better success’.
Several weeks after leaving Sydney, Gilbert recorded that two deserters from the Sirius were on the Charlotte and must have been there when the ship was searched before they left.
Arthur Phillip believed some of the masters of the ships may have collaborated in some of the convict escapes and wrote to the British Government asking that action be taken against the offenders:
Several convicts got away from this settlement on board of the transports, which it will be impossible to prevent unless the masters of those ships … are prosecuted with severity for the convicts can … be secreted on board in such a manner as to render any search ineffectual …2
Only a day after writing this, Phillip was able to give details of a case in which a convict had been discovered on the Neptune shortly before it set sail for home. The convict admitted he had been carried out from shore on one of the ship’s boats and secreted by the quartermaster in a concealed section of the Neptune’s hold:
Since my letter yesterday was closed, several convicts being missing, a search was ordered to be made on board the Neptune … and one convict, Joseph Sutton was found concealed in the hold … Now, sir, if the master of the Neptune is not prosecuted … every ship that stops here on her way to China will carry off some of the best convicts, which it will be impossible for any force in this country to prevent.3
The convict who escaped more times than anyone else was almost certainly John Caesar. ‘Black’ Caesar, as he was known, was to become infamous in the first decade of the colony and is recognised as Australian’s first bushranger.
It is believed that he was born in Madagascar and came to England from the West Indies, where he had worked as a slave on a sugar plantation. He was 23 and working as a servant in Deptford when he was charged with having broken into a house owned by Robert Reed and stealing twelve pounds and four pence. He appeared in the Kent Assizes and was sentenced to seven years’ transportation in 1786, being sent with the First Fleet on the Alexander early the following year.
According to Judge David Collins:
His frame was muscular and well calculated for hard labour; but in his intellects he did not widely differ from a brute; his appetite was ravenous, for he could in any one day devour the full rations for two days. To gratify this appetite he was compelled to steal from others, all of his thefts were directed to that purpose.4
Caesar’s lust for food was to get him into endless trouble. He was first convicted in the colony in 1789 for stealing four pounds of bread from the tent of another convict, Richard Partridge.
A few weeks later he made his first escape, taking with him some provisions and a cooking pot. However, unlike the Aboriginal people, Black Caesar had difficulty surviving in the Australian bush and for the next month lived on the outskirts of the settlement, periodically stealing any food he could find.
In May 1789 he robbed the small brickmakers’ village of Brickfield, which was about two kilometres upstream from the settlement of Sydney. Despite being pursued by a detachment of marines, he managed to get away and back into the cover of the bush.
Two weeks later he was captured by another convict, William Saltmarsh, while trying to steal food from the shack of the assistant commissary for stores, Zachariah Clark.
Caesar was to be executed, but Phillip spared him with a pardon and he was instead sent in chains to tend the vegetables on Garden Island in the middle of Port Jackson harbour.
When he was released from his irons to work, however, Caesar again made his escape, this time by canoe, taking with him provisions along with ‘an iron [cooking] pot and a musket, and some ammunition’5 he had stolen from a marine private, Abraham Hand. Bradley takes up the story in his journal:
The account [Caesar] gives of his subsisting himself for so long a time was, that when he saw a party of natives with anything on, or about their fire, that he frightened them away by coming suddenly on them and swaggering with his musket, then helping himself to whatever they had left. In this way he made out very well without ammunition, sometimes robbing gardens. When he lost the musket he found it impossible to subsist himself. He was then attacked by the natives and wounded in several places and escaped from a party of the
m through very thick brush when he surrendered himself.6
At this time Governor Phillip was preparing to send more than two hundred convicts from Sydney to Norfolk Island, where Lieutenant King had found the soil more fertile.
It may be that Phillip saw the Norfolk Island venture as an opportunity to be rid of the problem of Black Caesar, as he was included in the contingent. On Norfolk Island there was nowhere for him to escape to, and he was forced to live under the martial law that had been introduced by Major Robert Ross almost immediately after he landed on the island.
Caesar was returned from Norfolk Island to Sydney three years later, at the end of 1793, and again resorted to his former practice of living on the outside of the settlement while plundering the farms and huts on the edge of town.
When caught and severely flogged, Caesar remained defiant of authority and indifferent to punishment; he was reported by Judge Collins to have said of the whipping that ‘all that would not make him better’.7
A little over a year later he fled the settlement again and this time teamed up with other escaped convicts to form a gang of bushrangers. By then Captain John Hunter had returned from England to replace Arthur Phillip as governor of the colony, and Caesar, now armed, had gained the reputation of being public-enemy number one. With practically every theft in the colony during 1795 being blamed on Black Caesar,8 Governor Hunter offered a reward of five gallons of rum – the currency of the day – to anyone who could stop him:
The many robberies which have lately been committed render it necessary that some steps should be taken to put a stop to the practice so destructive of the happiness and comfort of the industrious. And it is well known that a fellow known as Black Caesar has absented himself for some time past from his work, and has carried with him a musket, notice is hereby given that whoever shall secure this man Black Caesar and bring him in with his arms shall receive as a reward five gallons of spirits.9
Only a fortnight after the reward was posted, on Monday 15 February 1796, Caesar was shot dead on the Liverpool Plains, near current-day Strathfield, by a bounty hunter named Wimbrow. As Judge David Collins was to recall:
Information was received that Black Caesar had that morning been shot by one Wimbrow. This man and another, allured by the reward, had been for some days in quest of him. Finding his haunt, they concealed themselves that night at the edge of the brush, which they perceived him enter at dusk. In the morning he came out, when, looking around him and seeing his danger, he presented his musket but before he could pull the trigger Wimbrow fired and shot him. He was first taken to the hut of Rose, a settler at Liberty Plains, where he died in a few hours. Thus ended a man, which certainly, during his life, could never have been estimated at more than one remove above the brute, and who had given more trouble than any other convict in the settlement.10
There is only one known case where convicts of the First Fleet escaped the settlement and reached England, and that is the remarkable story of Mary Bryant. Mary, who was married to another convict on the First Fleet, William Bryant, escaped with her husband, two young children and seven other convicts early in 1791. Stealing a boat from the settlement, they successfully sailed more than five thousand kilometres in sixty-nine days along the Australian coast to Dutch Timor.
Mary Bryant (née Broad, or Braund) was a 21-year-old who, in 1786, was convicted in the Devon court with two other women for highway robbery. She had stolen a silk bonnet and other goods valued at a little more than eleven pounds and twelve shillings. She was condemned to be hanged but the sentence was later commuted to seven years’ transportation.11
William Bryant was an experienced fisherman from Cornwall who had been convicted in 1784 for forgery. Like his wife he had been sentenced to be hanged and the sentence was commuted to seven years’ transportation. He was originally to go to America, but the War of Independence prevented him from being sent so he sat with many others in the increasingly overcrowded prisons and prison hulks until the decision was made to send convicts to New South Wales.
Both Mary Braund and William Bryant were put on the Charlotte, which carried both men and women convicts. During the voyage to New South Wales Mary gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Charlotte after the ship. It is not clear who the father was. Since the baby was born in September, a few weeks before the fleet reached Cape Town, she probably became pregnant in early January 1787 before she was put aboard the Charlotte in Plymouth.
Mary and William were married in Sydney, and Mary was to give birth in April 1790 to a second child, whom they named Emanuel. William Bryant became a trusted convict and, given his experience as a fisherman, was put in charge of the governor’s fishing boats. Making the most of this opportunity, William was selling fish on the side – fish that should have been put with all the other public stores. When caught, he was given one hundred lashes.
In 1791 William Bryant’s term was almost completed, but he was one of a number of convicts whose records were not sent to Australia and therefore, according to Phillip, could not be released. It must have seemed to them they might never be free.
Early that year there were only two ships in Sydney Harbour: the Supply, which had recently returned from Batavia carrying the much-needed food supplies, and the Waaksamheyd, which had been contracted in Batavia to carry additional supplies to the colony. After they unloaded their cargo, both ships left, the Waaksamheyd to return to Batavia and then on to England, and the Supply to Norfolk Island. The colony then had no ships in its harbour.
This left William Bryant and the other escapees in a position to make an escape from Sydney in the governor’s small, single-masted, six-oared fishing boat with no risk that they could be chased down and recaptured by a larger ship.
On the night of 27 March, the same day the Waaksamheyd left, the Bryants made their escape. William and Mary, their children Emanuel and Charlotte and seven other convicts boarded the little cutter, which made off down Sydney Harbour and out into the ocean. Among the escapees were First Fleeters Samuel Bird and William Morton, who was an experienced navigator. The remaining five, Nathaniel Lilley, Samuel Broom (alias John Butcher), James Cox, James Martin and William Allen, had arrived on the Second Fleet in 1790. Of the eleven who escaped, six would die over the next year and only five would survive and eventually reach England.
According to escapee James Martin the convicts took provisions, which included ‘one hundredweight of flour, one hundredweight of rice, fourteen pounds of pork, eight gallons of water, a compass, quadrant and chart’.12 The details are obscure but it seems that Bryant was able to acquire the quadrant, the compass and a chart of the east coast of Australia and the Torres Strait from the captain of the Waaksamheyd, Ditmar Smith, before he left.
According to marine sergeant James Scott a longboat was launched in pursuit of the escapees at six o’clock the following morning, but by that time the Bryants and their colleagues were long gone.13
After leaving Sydney they headed north on one of the most extraordinary voyages in seafaring history. The little boat was to travel five thousand kilometres along the eastern coast of Australia, past the Great Barrier Reef and through the Torres Strait to the Dutch-controlled port of Koepang on the island of Timor.
Initially they kept fairly close to the coast, landing where it was possible and eating fish and edible palms. Two hundred miles north of Sydney and roughly off the coast from Port Stephens, the escapees’ little boat was blown out to sea. For several weeks in heavy rain they were only rarely able to reach shore to light a fire.
James Martin also described how on one occasion they were forced to hastily return to the open sea when confronted by hostile Aboriginal people:
There came natives in vast numbers with spears and shields … we … made signs to pacify them … we fired a musket thinking to afright them but they took not the least notice.14
As they reached the Torres Strait, they were chased by hostile natives in canoes before they finally reached the open sea, sailing across t
he Gulf of Carpentaria and into the Timor Sea, a journey that took four and a half days, ‘having aboard little fresh water and no wood to make a fire’.15
When they reached Koepang, they successfully masqueraded as shipwrecked travellers and were given clothes while they waited for the next passing ship that could take them back towards England. According to James Martin the convicts were treated well until two months later William Bryant revealed their true identity:
We went on shore to the Governors house where he behaved extremely well to us … filled our bellies and clothed double … [We] were very happy … for two months before Will Bryant had words with his wife, went and informed against himself, wife and children and all of us, which was immediately taken prisoner and was put in the castle.16
The convicts were also unlucky that the next English officer to arrive at the port of Koepang was to be Captain Edward Edwards, the cruel master of the Pandora. The Pandora had been sent out from England in November 1790 following the arrival of the news of the mutiny on the Bounty, to hunt down the mutineers. The pursuers reached Tahiti in 1791 and captured fourteen of the mutineers, whom Edwards ordered to be caged in a box on the deck of the Pandora. He did not find the other mutineers, who had sailed with Fletcher Christian on to Pitcairn Island, where they sank the Bounty and remained undetected by the British.
Returning to England with the captured mutineers, the Pandora smashed onto the northern end of the Barrier Reef in the Torres Strait. The ship was lost and thirty-one crew and four of the convicts drowned, although the others made it to shore. Edwards, pitiless even in a time of crisis, would not allow the mutineers to shelter in the tents, leaving them at the mercy of the sun. It was treatment such as this that fuelled his reputation for cruelty.