by Paul Collins
There is something rather contrived about this account. You have the feeling that much of the detail is from Thomas Wells, writing with his respectable London readers in mind. Given the physical state the five men were in, it is psychologically unlikely that they would have been able to sit down and calmly and rationally decide who was to be butchered next. Further, the ceremonial quality of the occasion, with the submissive passivity of Bodenham, the prayer for divine forgiveness and the polite way that Greenhill and Travers asked the others to absent themselves while they killed and butchered Bodenham does not tally with what we have seen of these men. One suspects that in his evidence to Knopwood, Pearce was busy casting himself in the best possible light, fearing that he might eventually be committed for trial for murder. Wells, conscious of the need to soften for his readers the appalling brutality of the murder, has injected an almost liturgical quality into the execution. The sermon-like feel of the narrative is reinforced by a short homily that follows the butchering of the body. It is attributed to Greenhill, but it does not sound like the words of a sailor who has already killed two or more men. It was most likely composed by Wells or whoever the editor was. It could almost have been Knopwood himself, given the way it focuses on how Bodenham had fallen ‘a victim to his own folly’.
A very different account of the murder and butchering of Bodenham was given by Pearce to Cuthbertson. It bears the hallmarks of a man who, knowing that he is doomed and that he will hang because he has been caught with human flesh in his pocket, has nothing to hide. It is probably much closer to the truth.
According to this version, by the time they reached the Loddon Plains the remaining five men were desperate with hunger, and Travers, Greenhill and Mather began to discuss who should be killed next. Conveniently for Pearce, he intimated that he was not privy to this discussion and that he and Mather were sent off by Greenhill and Travers to get some more firewood while Bodenham was left standing at the fire, warming himself. Again it was Greenhill who acted as executioner by suddenly attacking Bodenham, and Pearce made sure he let Cuthbertson know that he was not present when the deed was done and that he did not know what was going to happen. He said, ‘In about two minutes I heard a blow given and Mather said “He is done for”’.
As the sole survivor Pearce was in an ideal position to justify himself in these narratives, and one must always bear that in mind while reading the account. It seems most unlikely that Greenhill would send him and Mather off to get firewood just when the deed was about to be done, because from the beginning they had agreed that they were all in it together. While it is probable that Greenhill was again the killer, it is also likely that they were all present for Bodenham’s murder and indeed colluded in it. Travers cut the victim’s throat, bled him and acted as butcher. Pearce reported that ‘Greenhill took his shoes being better than his own’. They only ate the heart and liver that night but, feeling that they now had plenty of provisions, they feasted on the body and rested for the whole of the next day.
Before resuming their journey, they divided the remains into equal parts and then set off ‘thro’ a marshy ground’ for three days, once more in an east–north-easterly direction. This is most probably what is now called ‘the sodden Loddon’ plains. The Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service warns bushwalkers on the nearby Frenchman’s Cap Track, which traverses the western sector of the Loddon Plains, that deep mud is often to be expected, illustrating the warning with a photo of a bushwalker almost up to his waist in mud. Terry Reid maintains that this is more the result of thousands of people trudging across the plains toward Frenchman’s Cap, although others disagree and feel that these plains have always been very wet!
The first professional explorer to investigate this area was the surveyor William Sharland, who came a decade after the Pearce party in March 1832. On the plains near the confluence of the Adelaide and Loddon rivers, just south-west of the Franklin Hills, Sharland found human remains, which he took to be those of a convict. He commented, ‘They may probably be the remains of some of those unfortunate wretches who have absconded from Macquarie Harbour to seek this melancholy termination of their existence’. From the accounts we can assume that the heap of bones found by Sharland was all that was left of Thomas Bodenham.
While Cuthbertson probably gives a reasonably accurate account of the murder of Bodenham, the Knopwood version is much more believable in its depiction of the party’s psychological dynamics after that killing. The dependence of Greenhill and Travers upon each other deepened. Pearce says in an oddly convoluted way that ‘they had a respect for each other which they often showed to each other’ in many ways. This may or may not be a roundabout allusion to a homosexual relationship, common among convicts in Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales, as indeed they are in prison life today. Ernest Augustus Slade, the superintendent of the Sydney Convict Barracks, told the British Parliamentary Select Committee in April 1838 in his usual blunt way that among certain convicts ‘sodomy is as common as any other crime’.The reason, he said, was that the men were not able to consort with women. Slade also had a simple solution for any suspected acts of buggery: he ordered a summary flogging when men were caught ‘in an improper, indecent position, with their trowsers [sic] down’. The Catholic Vicar-General of New South Wales, the Reverend William Ullathorne, told the same Select Committee that homosexuality was often practised on the convict ships, and was common in the Convict Barracks in Sydney, where certain boys and men were given female names. It was also prevalent on isolated farms, among stockmen, among the men working on road gangs, and particularly in the places of secondary punishment such as Macquarie Harbour, Moreton Bay and Norfolk Island. Much of what happened in those places was a form of sexual degradation and control, as it usually is in a prison environment. Ullathorne agreed with Slade that the problem would not cease while men were crowded together and the ratio of men to women in the population of the colonies remained so unbalanced.
However, Greenhill and Travers’s friendship went back to their time in the frontier country beyond New Norfolk, and it seems to have been sincere for they certainly looked out for each other. Whether their relationship was sexual or not we cannot, of course, know. Preoccupation with sexual relations is very much a post-Freudian, twentieth-century psychological fixation; in the nineteenth century people were less centrally focused on genitality. But Greenhill and Travers’s closeness inevitably threw Pearce and Mather together as temporary allies, at least in order to guard against any attempts by the two friends to murder either of them for food. In short, the two sets of men were now pitted against each other as they trudged across the Loddon Plains. It was not long before violence broke out again.
After the slaughter of the young Englishman, the four walked on for three more days, ‘subsisting on nothing but the carcass of unfortunate Bodenham which scarcely kept the faculties in motion’. At this point Pearce reports that they again lost the tinder they used to light their camp fire at night and had to go back to search for the tinder, but eventually found it. They would have been in terrible trouble if they had lost it for they would have no means of lighting a fire, their only source of warmth in what was still very wet, cold country, especially at night. To have lost the ability to light a fire would have, quite simply, meant death. Starvation and exhaustion were affecting their judgement and perception and they were dropping and mislaying things with increasing frequency.
They continued in an east–north-easterly direction toward what is now called Mount Arrowsmith at the northern end of the King William Range. Just to the east of Mount Arrowsmith is the King William Saddle, which is actually the ridge connecting Mount Arrowsmith with Mount King William I. It is crossed nowadays by the only sealed road in the whole area, the Lyell Highway from Hobart to Queenstown and on to the town of Strahan on Macquarie Harbour. At the King William Saddle the modern motorist travelling north-westward from Hobart crosses the boundary between the flatter, drier plains in the centre of Tasmania and enters the wetter ra
inforested and wilderness area of the south-west.
Starving, exhausted and suspicious of each other, the four began their ascent of the northern end of the King William Range near Mount Arrowsmith – an area, Pearce reports,‘covered with brush and that so extremely thick [that] it made it very bad walking’. From the top of the range Pearce says that they were able to see marshy ground below them with a large river in the middle of it and very fine trees growing on the banks. This was doubtless the lush King William Valley, now submerged in a lake created by the Tasmanian Hydro-Electricity Commission, and the upper reaches of the Derwent River as it began its long journey south-east to Hobart Town. Pearce also says that they saw plenty of kangaroos, emus and other fauna in the valley, the first time in the entire journey that he mentions native animals. But they were unable, or did not try, to catch any, for Pearce says that they had run out of food again. Although they had assured each other that ‘they would all die than any more should be killed’, when they were alone Pearce says that Mather said to him: ‘Let us go on by ourselves . . . You see what kind of cove Greenhill is. He would kill his father before he would fast one day’. Pearce’s response is not recorded.
It seems that they wandered around Mount Arrowsmith for a couple of days. At one time they were in a small valley full of ferns. Here Mather made some type of concoction out of fern roots which he boiled and drank, perhaps again as a purge. It made him quite sick and he began to vomit, at which point, according to Pearce, Greenhill ‘still showing his spontaneous habit of bloodshed seized the axe and crept up behind him [and] give him a blow on the head’. Mather must have seen it coming and it can’t have done much damage because he shouted, ‘Murder, you will see me killed’. There was a struggle and the younger and stronger Mather grabbed the axe from Greenhill and threw it to Pearce. Oddly enough, Mather did not seek revenge, perhaps because of his natural disposition. Pearce reports that he was a peaceful type who ‘wished to enjoy tranquillity’. Possibly it was also because they all realised that without Greenhill, their navigator and guide, they had no hope of reaching the settled districts. Whatever the reason, it turned out to be a bad mistake on Mather’s part not to kill Greenhill.
When it comes to the murder of Mather, there is again a significant divergence between the two narratives. According to the Cuthbertson version, after the first attack on Mather the men walked on a little further to a creek where they decided to camp for the night. Pearce then says that he wandered away from the others for a short time ‘and on looking around saw Travers and Greenhill collaring Mather who cried out “murder” and when he [Mather] found that they were determined to have his life, he begged they would give him half an hour to pray for himself’. A prayer book that they just happened to have with them was produced and, after he finished his prayers, he handed the book back to Pearce and laid down his head. Greenhill immediately took up the axe and killed him. After that the three men remained two days camping by the creek and then continued their journey, ‘each taking a share of Mather’s body’. This time it is the Cuthbertson narrative that seems very contrived, especially in the depiction of Mather’s apparent surrender, the convenient absence of Pearce when Greenhill’s second attack on Mather occurred, and the sudden and extremely unlikely appearance of a prayer book. However, I think this narrative is believable in saying that Mather was killed on the night after the first attack on him when he was vomiting and at his weakest.
The Knopwood narrative describes a much longer and more complex interaction. After he is attacked the first time while vomiting, Mather understandably becomes more and more fearful and defensive. It is the intimacy between Greenhill and Travers that especially worries him. Mather tells Pearce that he is convinced that Greenhill and Travers are determined to kill him and says it would be wise for Pearce and himself to be on their guard and ‘make each other acquainted with whatever they perceived in any way treacherous or deceitful in either Greenhill or Travers’. Although the weather had now improved considerably, they walked on for two days ‘in a far worse state than before’. By now Pearce’s loyalties were shifting, and though he had sworn ‘to be [Mather’s] confidential friend’ and warn him if the other two were plotting anything, he begins to associate more with Greenhill and Travers and to abandon his erstwhile ally. It did not take Mather long to work out that Pearce had withdrawn from him and had joined in a coalition with the others to kill him.
They made camp and sat around the fire ‘in a very pensive and melancholy mood’. The young baker from Dumfries only had one option: to try to keep some distance between himself and the other three. But he could not keep up his guard forever, and eventually one of them crept up on Mather ‘under the pretence of gathering wood for the fire’. All three jumped him, dragged him to the ground, ‘striking him with the axe on the head and soon terminating his existence’.The body was then dissected ‘and having appeased their cannibal appetites [they] laid themselves down by the fire’.
Eighteen years later, in December 1840, the explorer and Deputy Surveyor-General James Erskine Calder discovered items that indicated that escaped convicts had been in the area in a small, open valley through which the modern Lyell Highway passes, which was later named Wombat Glen, just to the west of Mount Arrowsmith. Calder, an experienced bushman and a big man with a strong physique, reports that he found ‘in the last stages of decay, several articles which indicated that a party of runaway convicts from Macquarie Harbour, had, many years ago, passed this way.They were placed in the hollow of a fine old tree, which had been the means of preventing their entire destruction. They consisted of an old yellow jacket, a pea jacket, a blanket, and a pair of boots. On searching about we found a large gimblet [a tool for boring holes], a hammer and a broken iron pot. Several trees had been marked’.These may or may not have been Mather’s belongings and Calder does not indicate the state of the convict remains. But it does indicate that it was possible for a party of convicts to have got this far from Macquarie Harbour. Wombat Glen is at the northern end of the Loddon Plains and right at the base of Mount Arrowsmith, and it makes sense for the party to have rested here before pushing on over the Saddle and down into the King William Valley.
At this point the Knopwood narrative has Greenhill delivering a monologue justifying their actions in killing Mather. Even a superficial reading indicates that Wells or the editor has taken over – this was written with a reading audience in mind and Wells could not resist the temptation to moralise. From this narrative it is clear that they did not have the means to survive, and that once they had chosen cannibalism as a means of sustenance, there was no turning back. Perhaps Pearce’s betrayal of Mather was merely a recognition that his only chance for survival lay in throwing in his lot with Greenhill and Travers. Of course, by doing that, Pearce was running a terrible risk. Given that the other two were so close, he was setting himself up as the next victim. But, as he saw it, he had no other viable choice.
The clue to Pearce’s decision can be found in Greenhill’s comments after the ‘sumptuous repast’ following the slaughter of Mather. Greenhill says that they ‘must be drawing very near to some settlement or habitation’. In fact, they still had some considerable distance to go to reach the settled districts, but all three men had worked in the back country near the centre of the island and the landscape they had seen across the King William Saddle was beginning to look familiar to them. If they were as close to the settled districts as they thought they were, Pearce no doubt reasoned that he could make a run for it on his own and leave the other two to their own devices. Greenhill also said that he feared that as soon as an opportunity offered, Mather would have gone to Hobart Town to ‘give information against them for the murder’ of Bodenham, another indication that they thought that they were near the end of their journey.
Once they crossed the King William Saddle the feel and shape of the country changed significantly.They had entered into what are now called the Navarre Plains. Here the country was more open and easier to traverse
, and the weather was improving because it was less under the influence of the Roaring Forties. At the Saddle you cross what today is called the ‘quartzite line’. Here the structure and geology of the landscape changes and you leave behind the predominantly dolerite mountains of western Tasmania and enter a flatter, drier, semi-alpine landscape. Pearce, Greenhill and Travers found themselves traversing the more open and rather beautiful eucalypt forests that predominate in the high plains of central Tasmania. The dominant trees at higher altitudes were the 20-metre (65-foot) Eucalyptus pauciflora, which are usually known as snow gum, and at the lower levels they encountered the straight and tall alpine ash (Eucalyptus delegatensis). Throughout, the undergrowth was much more open and there were many native animals.
There were also humans – the Aborigines. Once they had crossed the Saddle, the local clan of the Big River tribe, the Larmairremener, would have begun to observe them, although the three escapees were oblivious to this. While there is evidence from burning patterns that the Aborigines ranged across the whole of the south-west, they did not live in the difficult landscape of the far west permanently. But once the escape party entered Big River land they would have been carefully watched and their behaviour monitored. It is probably only because they were in such poor shape and were perceived as posing no threat that they were not killed.
Four days after the slaughter of Mather, Pearce reports that ‘Travers had his foot stung by some venomous reptile’. Snakes hibernate between April and October, so the one that got Travers must have just been coming out of hibernation and was probably fairly lethargic. It would have been either lying in the sun or else looking for a sunny spot. Tiger snakes are quite territorial and, except during the breeding season in January when males are looking for a mate, they are shy of humans, so it is likely that the sluggish snake was slow in getting out of Travers’s way. The bite incapacitated him, thus holding the party up for another four or five days.