by Paul Collins
Greenhill, Pearce and the others were forced to put their escape plan into action prematurely on the morning of Friday, 20 September 1822. They had just found out that James Lucas, the pilot at Hell’s Gates, was coming down the harbour that very day with a boatload of whale oil that, as a lucrative sideline, he sold to the officers at Sarah Island. Pearce and the others needed supplies for their journey, and they intended to steal Lucas’s provisions while he was at the island, and then slip out through Hell’s Gates in the dark to avoid being seen by the soldiers stationed at the harbour entrance. Very probably they learned of Lucas’s movements from John Douglas, an intelligent and literate convict who acted as clerk to both the Commissariat and the Commandant, and who was not averse to helping prisoners. Later Douglas was to provide information about excessive and illegal punishment of convicts at Sarah Island to members of parliament in London.
Pearce’s work gang was to be guarded that day by only one overseer, Constable Logan, and they reckoned that they would easily be able to overpower him. The one hitch was that a couple of days before, Greenhill had been assigned to another work gang collecting coal from the superficial excavations on the mainland, just inland from the appropriately named Coal Head. This was 14 kilometres (9 miles) north of Kelly’s Basin where the rest of the group were working in the logging operations. Now they faced a dilemma, for Greenhill’s navigational skills were essential if they were to sail their way to freedom. Quickly they devised a new strategy: the seven of them would overpower Constable Logan at Kelly’s Basin, row north around the coast of the harbour to Coal Head in the boat in which they had come over to the mainland, commandeer another larger whaleboat that was anchored nearby and pick up Greenhill. Then they would destroy their own boat, row up to Hell’s Gates, where they would raid Lucas’s store and escape under cover of darkness through Hell’s Gates out into the Southern Ocean. Given the distances involved this would have taken them all day and it would have been dark by the time they got to the harbour entrance.
Setting a northward course they would sail up the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land and head east through Bass Strait and out into the Pacific Ocean, or wherever fate took them. Pearce says that they also discussed Hobart Town as a possible destination, probably because it was a place they knew and it was relatively close, although there was a considerable risk that they would be recognised. They probably hoped they could steal a bigger boat there; after all, Greenhill and Travers had been sent to Macquarie Harbour precisely for attempting to steal Kemp’s schooner.
The weather at dawn that Friday morning was what one would expect in early spring – overcast and cold. The morning muster began just as a weak sun was beginning to cast some light from behind Mount Sorell. Pearce and the others stood together only half-listening to the instructions being announced by the Commandant, for they were worried about picking up Greenhill. They would now have to land near the mines, find him and get him aboard before they could discreetly row north up the harbour. Their landing at Coal Head was going to add enormously to the risk that they would be caught. If they were captured the flogging that would follow would be severe – 100 lashes – and they would also probably serve time in solitary and several months working in leg-irons and chains.
After the muster, the usual search occurred before they boarded their boat to row across to Kelly’s Basin. As they rowed, Constable Logan sat comfortably in the stern smoking his pipe. Pearce and the other prisoners hated men like Logan, seeing them as class traitors who had ingratiated themselves with the authorities either through good behaviour or by impressing Brevet-Major Thomas Bell, Inspector of Public Works. Overseers like Logan were not paid, but were better treated than ordinary prisoners.They were usually unarmed and their real power lay in their ability to report a man for insubordination, laziness, neglect of work, swearing or even losing an item from slops. A report from Logan to Cuthbertson would almost certainly lead to a flogging, which might even be followed by a stint in solitary confinement or a month or more of working in leg irons. Using prisoners to guard prisoners was effective; it was inexpensive and therefore appealed to the convict administration in Hobart Town and the Colonial Office bureaucrats in Downing Street.
Although rain in early spring was common, there was none that morning, though it was very overcast. When they got to their workplace, the men laboured in a kind of misty half-light. It was this way much of the time and the convicts often longed to see and feel the sun.The area around Kelly’s Basin is generally flat, but it is hard to reconstruct today exactly what the forest would have been like in 1822. In the late 1890s the town of Pillinger was established on Kelly’s Basin as a port for shipping out the copper produced by North Mount Lyell Company. In the late 1890s a 60-kilometre (36-mile) railway line was pushed through to the port by the company from the mine site just east of Queenstown. During the period of Pillinger’s prosperity about 1000 people lived in the area. Much of the rainforest was cleared inland from the Basin; it is only now returning to its pristine state and the torn-up but excellently graded former railway track is used for bushwalking.
However, in Pearce’s time we can assume that the forest was a mixed one in which various types of beech trees as well as extensive stands of Huon pine grew, all of which are now gone. At present stands of wet sclerophyll or eucalypt forest are found on both the northern and southern shores of the Basin, although there is some scrub, and around the former port the rainforest is recovering. From the shoreline to about 5 kilometres (3 miles) inland the landscape is fairly flat. Here the rainforest is relatively open, although near the shallow gullies and swiftly flowing creeks there is a very thick understorey dominated by flowering shrubs, myrtle and leatherwood. So the escape party would have had some experience of rainforests and been familiar with working in waterlogged conditions. But none of this could have possibly prepared them for the difficulties that lay ahead.
Despite the sweat induced by the back-breaking work of felling, stripping, cutting, pruning and preparing the Huon pine logs for flotation back to the island, they still found it dreadfully cold work. But they were also excited.
Liberty was beckoning, and they looked forward to it nervously.
4
THE TRANSIT OF HELL
Constable Logan didn’t stand a chance, even if he had tried to resist. At seven to one, the odds against the unarmed overseer were too great. They jumped him during their break for breakfast when his guard was down and he was enjoying his cup of sweet tea. Pearce is vague about exactly what happened next, but it is likely that they tied Logan to a tree in the forest after stripping him of everything they could use, including his clothes.The temptation to wreak some form of revenge on him must have been great, especially given that several of them had probably suffered floggings or punishment because of his reports to the Commandant. But there is no record that they did so, and he was alive and well a year later, and still acting as an overseer in the very gang to which Pearce was assigned after his return to Macquarie Harbour.
The men had arrived at Kelly’s Basin just after dawn and had worked until it was time for their first meal of the day around 9 a.m. It consisted of a serving of bread and skilly, their only meal for the day until they returned to Sarah Island in the evening. Given that they were doing very heavy work, this diet was completely inadequate. To prevent prisoners from hoarding their bread rations for escape attempts, ergot, a fungal disease of rye, was added to the dough in the baking process to make it go stale and then rotten quickly. We now know that ergot has hallucinogenic qualities and there is a possibility that an accumulation of this fungus in their systems may have affected Pearce and the others later on during their ordeal when they came to contemplate the act of cannibalism.
With Logan taken care of, the escape began in earnest and the men returned to their whaleboat tied up at the jetty. About 6 metres (20 feet) in length with places for six oarsmen, the boat was double-ended, very seaworthy and designed for quick turning and use in rough weather. It h
ad no rudder and the steersman guided it with an oar trailing aft.This was the moment when the whole plan could fall apart.They had to make their way out of Kelly’s Basin and turn north across the open entrance to Farm Cove, the next bay, and then on up to Coal Head, a distance of about 11 kilometres (about 6 miles). They still would have been just visible from Sarah Island, except for the brief time when they were behind Philips Island, but it would have been difficult to see something so low in the water and the whaleboat would have been hard to pick out against the shoreline. But they could be spotted by any sharp-eyed overseer or soldier. In their favour was all the activity associated with logging and coal-gathering around the harbour, so convicts, soldiers or anyone else seeing them might well have presumed that they were on official business.
Up at the coal works Bob Greenhill would have been on the lookout for them. Pearce says, ‘as soon as . . . [he] perceived the boat approaching . . . he was in perfect readiness to go with us’. Here there was a bigger whaleboat with a lugsail on a short mast, and while one man remained with the boats, Pearce, Greenhill and the others, armed with axes, went to the miners’ hut, smashed down the door and took ‘therefrom all the provisions we could find’, which amounted to about ten pounds of flour, six pounds of beef and an axe. This was to be their entire food supply for the next week until they turned to the consumption of human flesh. Pearce reports that they also poured water over the wood pyres that had been prepared to signal escapes to prevent the overseers lighting them and sending smoke-signals to the military lookout on Sarah Island to let them know that a convict break-out had occurred. By then it would have been just after midday.
Although Pearce is not clear as to the order in which things happened next, luck was not on their side. It seems that, first, they swamped the smaller boat so it could not be used to pursue them. Then, having loaded their meagre supplies, the men took to the larger whaleboat. Their intention was to row north up the harbour, which would have taken the whole afternoon and early evening, raid Lucas’s store and then slip out under the cover of night through Hell’s Gates. But they had only gone about 500 metres (a third of a mile) when they thought they saw a light astern, and Pearce said, ‘We observed the miners making fires all along the beach’. They had not drenched the signal pyres sufficiently, and the overseers and convicts from the mines had been able to ignite them quickly. Perhaps it was just by chance that someone had seen the boat. In any event, they knew that once the break-out signal had been sighted at Sarah Island, the Commandant would send boats in pursuit and would alert the troops at Hell’s Gates via the semaphore signalling system. The whole escape plan was unravelling.
The escapees had to quickly make a basic decision: should they continue by sea, hoping to out-row any pursuers, or alter their plan and head inland by foot? They chose the bush.
They beached the whaleboat just north of Coal Head, probably at a point where a small creek flowed down to the beach, and Pearce reports that ‘a consultation took place between us respecting the manner in which we should dispose of the boat and sails. Upon which we decided to cut her to pieces and to secret [sic] the sails near the place where we was’. He also says that it was Greenhill, supported by Travers, who suggested destroying the boat. The ex-mariner was already beginning to assume leadership of the group. It is not clear why they went to the trouble of cutting up the boat, but it certainly committed them to an overland escape route. By now it was early afternoon and their only course, short of surrendering, was to head into the bush along the creek, every man carrying an equal share of the luggage.
The overland route would lead them in an easterly direction toward the sparsely populated ‘settled districts’ in the centre of the island. Greenhill and Travers, as well as Pearce, had already lived in the back country to the north-west of Hobart Town and New Norfolk. However, they would have had only the most general notion of where Macquarie Harbour was in relation to the rest of the island. Terry Reid, Senior Ranger for the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service in Queenstown, who was born on the west coast, says that it is easy to make mistakes in navigation in the type of terrain the escapees were now entering.‘We use maps and sometimes fly over the country in a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft in order to pick out a route. Greenhill would have had to do it by trial and error, often in misty, miserable weather’. Reid points out that if the chosen route is impenetrable, modern walkers can always back out and try another approach. But the escapees did not have this luxury. Fear of pursuit meant that they had to keep going no matter what the landscape was like, although the upside was that any soldiers following them would have faced the same difficulties.
Greenhill correctly sensed that they had to head pretty much due east and, despite all the vicissitudes of the journey and the difficulty of the country through which they travelled, he maintained a steady easterly course for more than forty days, until he was killed by Pearce. It was an extraordinary feat of navigation by dead-reckoning, using the sun and stars without the benefit of a compass. The others were totally dependent on him; clearly Greenhill was drawing on his life at sea and his experience of foreign places. Without him the others would have been completely lost.
Their immediate task, however, was to get as far from Macquarie Harbour as they could, in as short a time as possible before Cuthbertson sent troops in pursuit. By going directly inland they precluded the possibility of the soldiers catching up with them by boat. But by choosing such a route they faced an even more formidable reality: the implacability of the natural world, and the indifferent otherness of the Tasmanian bush.
The place on the coast where they abandoned the boat was gently sloping, lightly timbered rainforest without a lot of understorey. It also gave them good cover. After about 3 kilometres (1.8 miles) moving inland they came to open country, but were hidden by the coastal forest from Sarah Island. In this area they would have crossed the creek-sized upper reaches of the Braddon River. They had set out on an east-north-easterly course toward the 1144-metre (3753-foot) Mount Sorell, and Pearce reports that they were at its base by about three o’clock in the afternoon. They had probably followed the creek up to the base of the southern side of the mountain. He says that on ascending Mount Sorell ‘we could very distinctly perceive Macquarie Harbour and the Island which is inhabited by the officers and military. We secreted ourselves as much as we possibly could behind the brushiest parts of the mountain we could find, lest the Commandant by the assistance of his telescope perceive us. The principal part of the mountain being so barren and we being so many in number, we travelled on in this cautious manner until we arrived at the summit of the mountain’.
Macquarie Harbour area.
By nightfall the Pearce party was at the top of Mount Sorell or, more likely, the lower ridge-line to the south of the peak. But they knew that all the way up the steep rock-face they would be exposed because there would be a clear line of sight from Sarah Island 8 kilometres away (5 miles), and the afternoon sun would have provided a spotlight for the Commandant peering through his telescope at the escaping convicts. Unless he was totally incompetent – and nothing indicates that he was – it is most likely that Cuthbertson would have noticed the eight men on the bare and exposed western elevation of Mount Sorell.
The escapees fully expected that the Commandant would send soldiers after them. Yet Cuthbertson’s hands were tied to some extent. Seven months before he had already lost two soldiers and three reliable convicts whom he’d sent on a wild-goose chase after a group of six escaping prisoners. With only a very small military contingent under his command – about sixteen men – it is most likely that he would have decided to allow this second party of fleeing convicts to make their way without pursuit. Either the escapees would soon return from the inhospitable bush, their tails between their legs, to face their punishment, or else nature would do his work for him and, like the previous groups of escapees, Pearce and his companions would be listed in the official records as ‘Supposed to have perished in the woods’. So w
hy waste energy and resources in any attempt to recapture them? For the moment Cuthbertson would have eight fewer mouths to feed, although there would soon be more convicts on their way from Hobart Town to take their places. Even so the men on the run did everything they could to elude ‘the vigilant search we were confident would be made after [us]’.
They had climbed up to at least the ridge-line from sea level in about three hours under difficult conditions. Once at the top they set up camp for the night, ‘after making’, Pearce says, ‘the necessary fires for securing ourselves from the inclemency of the weather and regaling ourselves with a little of our provisions after the fatigues of the day’s journey’. Perhaps they gave three muted cheers for freedom and no doubt they felt that they had ‘beaten the bastards’ back at Sarah Island. But it had started to rain and their clothes were little or no protection from a dampness that would slowly begin to permeate their very beings. It was despera
Vigilance was their watchword: ‘We considered it requisite that one of us should watch while the others slept’.