by Paul Collins
On the early morning of Saturday, 11 January 1823, they were near Lake Tiberias with some ex-convict mates who did a lot of sheep-stealing. They were sleeping in a rather out-of-the-way and narrow valley just to the west of Jericho, sheltering under a tree from the rising sun, when a party of red-coated soldiers from the 48th appeared. Davis saw them coming and made a run for it but he was shot and wounded. Pearce and Churton were caught sitting under the tree. It was obvious that someone had dobbed them in. Honour among thieves was not absolute, especially if a reward of £10 was involved – the price on the heads of Davis and Churton.
They were marched back to the barracks at Jericho and by Monday night they were secured in Hobart Town jail.
5
THE SUDDEN DEATH OF A SHROPSHIRE LAD
It was the suddenness and sheer violence of the axe attack that took Thomas Cox completely by surprise. He did not even see it coming, so he had no chance to shield himself, let alone offer any defence. Pearce had been standing about a metre away from him, looking out across the river, an ugly scowl on his face. Cox was bending over and blowing on wet sticks and wood, trying to get a fire alight to cook some of the food that they had stolen from the officers’ hunting party the previous morning. The two of them had just had a raging argument. It had arisen because Cox had mentioned that he could not swim, and that he thought they should try to take an inland route so that they would not have to cross all of the rivers that flowed into the sea along the coast. Pearce demanded to know why he had not told him this earlier. The northern Irish accent was very pronounced.
‘I’d never have bolted wit ya if I’d known dat, and I’m fuckin’ not goin’ over the mountains agin,’ he screamed in Cox’s face.
The words were accompanied by a spray of spittle. Cox was tempted to lash out in response, but he backed off; he was suddenly genuinely scared of the older man.The stories that the soldiers and other prisoners were telling about him being a ‘man-eater’ flashed through his mind. For the first time he felt it might have been a bad mistake to have bolted with the Irishman. He decided that silence was probably the best course he could take.
Cox was anxious to get the fire going because he was very hungry and wanted to cook the fish they had caught as well as eat the rest of the pork and bread they had stolen from the officers. All the convicts at Sarah Island knew that the Commandant, soldiers and other officials often went hunting in the forests around Macquarie Harbour to supplement their own food supplies. Two days previously Pearce and Cox were in thick rainforest inland from Sophia Point on the eastern shore when they had heard shooting in the distance and, guessing what was going on, they crept up and hid in the thick bush to see if they could filch anything to eat from the hunting party.The shooters were Spence the surgeon and Lucas the pilot, assisted by the convict John Douglas, who acted as the Commandant’s secretary and commissariat clerk. Lucas shot at a pademelon, which the convict clerk had first spotted in the dense, wet undergrowth, but missed. Spence, who was carrying a large, leather shoulder-bag, absentmindedly put it on the ground. He told Douglas to remember the spot so that they could come back for it. Both of the officers said they were determined not to return to Sarah Island empty-handed and, telling Douglas to look sharp, they handed him their guns. As they moved on, leaving the leather bag behind, both Pearce and Cox could have sworn that Douglas looked in their direction and with a slight nod of the head indicated that they should take it. He then led the officers off over a slight rise and further on into the thick forest, well away from the hiding convicts. The two escapees quickly nabbed the bread and pork in the bag and headed off in the opposite direction.
They had already eaten some of it, but when they reached the King River, Cox was looking forward to finishing it with a feast of cooked fish. After the violent words about his inability to swim, he decided to busy himself preparing the fire, hoping that a good meal would distract Pearce and bring back his good humour.
But behind his back the Irishman was still fuming. The idea that he was stuck with another blockhead like Travers and Bodenham who could not swim and who would hold him up and put him in danger at every river they came to utterly frustrated him. He felt himself becoming more and more angry. But beyond the anger, and somewhere just beyond the edges of his consciousness, he knew he was going to kill the young man for another reason: he wanted to taste human flesh again. He knew he liked the flavour, but most of all he wanted the feeling that he could do what he liked with the body after he had killed the bastard. He could still remember the taste of the meat of Greenhill’s arms. In the end he felt the joke was really on Bob Greenhill because he was the one who told Pearce that the thick part of the arms was the best meat on the human body when they were eating Travers.
A violent paroxysm of both anger and hunger possessed Pearce and he could contain himself no longer. He turned. Cox was kneeling beside the fire, his head bent over it. Pearce picked up the heavy, blunt axe and without a sound hit out at the young man’s head, but his aim was bad and he only hit him a glancing blow. Cox rolled over screaming, trying to cover his head, and twice more Pearce lashed out at the young man with the axe. Then suddenly, without really knowing why, he turned away, walked toward the river and prepared to swim across. Cox was still alive and conscious, but badly injured and in unbearable pain. He called out in a faint voice, ‘For mercy’s sake come back, and put me out of my misery!’ Again without thinking, Pearce turned back and obliged him by smashing the axe into his head a fourth time, killing him instantly. He then laid down the axe, turned away from the dead body and focused his attention on getting the fire going.
It was early in the evening of Sunday, 21 November 1823 when the attack occurred. The two escapees had arrived at the King River about half an hour before, and had begun to make camp on the sand near the edge of the forest bordering the south bank of the river, some 360 metres (400 yards) upstream from where it flowed into the northern end of Macquarie Harbour. They had worked out that at this spot the fire would be well hidden by a headland and a small island from any passing boat that might be heading up or down the harbour. They were also pretty sure that the soldiers from the 48th Regiment had given up looking for them because it was nine days since they had escaped from Constable Logan’s work gang in the rainforest near Kelly’s Basin, and for the last few days they had seen no sign whatsoever that anyone from the Sarah Island penal settlement was actively looking for them. Pearce had laughed a lot about escaping a second time from Logan. He hoped the fucking bastard would cop a ‘bull’ (seventy-five lashes) from the Commandant for letting him bolt again.
However, Cox had noticed that for much of this particular Sunday his mate was not his usual jocular, garrulous self. Somehow he seemed to have withdrawn into himself and gone quiet, but Cox put it down to the older convict’s exhaustion; he was known by all the men back at the island as a moody mongrel. Right from the beginning Pearce had been adamant that they were not going to try the inland route. He insisted to Cox that it was far too arduous and that once was enough; he was not prepared to try it again. So they had remained in the Macquarie Harbour area working their way slowly north, not trying to cover too much territory, always on the lookout for an opportunity to steal food from the stores at the mines, or anywhere else that provisions might be taken. They had had no luck except with the hunting party. Some of the territory they had traversed was dense and hard to penetrate, but other parts were more open. It had been raining for the last day and a half and they were wet and cold. When the rain finally stopped, they came out of the forest and made camp on the small beach on the southern shore of the King River.
Their intention was to make a fire, dry out their clothes, rest overnight and then try to catch some more fish. After that they hoped to begin their trek northward along the west coast, intending ultimately to get beyond the reach of British justice. Not that Cox had thought it out very carefully or talked with Pearce about where the two of them were actually going. Their escape was guided more by
impulse than forward planning.Their primary aim was to escape from the penal oppression of Sarah Island and Macquarie Harbour. The general idea was that after they had made their way up the coast to the north, they would cut across toward Port Dalrymple or even Launceston, and then work out where to go from there. Beyond that, Cox and Pearce largely trusted to instinct and luck.
Pearce was a hero for young Cox, as he was for many of the other 230 prisoners at Sarah Island in November 1823. Everyone knew about his feat in getting through the wilderness of rugged mountains and dense rainforests to the settled districts in the centre of Van Diemen’s Land. After a two-month period as a bushranger and outlaw on the edges of the settled areas north of Hobart Town, Pearce had been recaptured and interrogated. The 33-year-old Irish thief from County Monaghan was then shipped to Macquarie Harbour to serve out the rest of his sentence.
When he got back to Sarah Island in November 1823, Pearce relished the role of convict celebrity, much to the frustration of Commandant Cuthbertson, who cursed the idiots in Hobart Town who foisted more and more troublesome no-hopers like No. 102 on him.The Lieutenant wished that they had hung him, or at least kept him in Hobart Town, where stories of escaping and making it through to the settled districts would not have created so much expectation among the prisoners. At night in the penitentiary Pearce told wild stories about the escape to anyone who would listen, and he often had an enthralled audience. He boasted how Greenhill and Travers had killed the bastard Dalton who had volunteered to be a flogger, and how Greenhill had suggested that they eat his flesh. He made sure that everyone knew it was Greenhill who was the prime mover in the killing and subsequent cannibalism. He told his fellow prisoners that the authorities were lying when they said that you could not escape from the harbour, and he assured them that strong men could make it through to the settled districts. He suggested that they ought to plan some type of mass break-out. At least some of them would make it back to the grog and fleshpots of Hobart Town. When they asked him what had happened to his other mates, he became vague and confused and said that the old fool parson, ‘Bobby’ Knopwood, had treated him as a liar and had told everyone that his testimony about Greenhill and Travers killing people was merely a concocted and ‘depraved’ cover story for his mates, who were probably still alive and at large in the bush. As he recounted the story he imitated Bobby’s upper-class, high-church accent, much to the amusement of everybody.
When pushed on what had really happened by a couple of the more intelligent prisoners, Pearce simply replied that he had become separated from the others and that he did not know where they were or what had transpired. The story was hopelessly inconsistent, but most of his fellow prisoners did not spend a lot of time analysing it. The fact that he had ‘made it through’ to at least a brief period of freedom gave them hope. Hope was what they needed most, that there was something beyond the slavery of Sarah Island. Anyway, what if there had been a few murders? Here at the harbour they were treated as government chattels and most of them felt that it was every man for himself. At least Pearce showed what could be achieved by a strong man with a determination to gain his freedom.
The prisoners also soon heard that there were stories circulating among the soldiers and officers that Pearce was a ‘maneater’ and that you needed to be very careful of him. As a punishment and warning to others who might be contemplating escape, Cuthbertson ordered that Pearce be given a period in solitary, and that he then work in the penal settlement’s logging operations in heavy leg irons. He hoped that this would serve as an example to the others and that it would make it much more difficult for him to abscond a second time.
Among the many ‘new chums’ that Pearce met on his return to Sarah Island was the young, Shropshire-born Thomas Cox, who had been sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land for life for robbery. He had been shipped to Hobart Town with 369 other English male convicts on the Royal Navy ship Dromedary, arriving on 10 January 1820.The convict conduct register, appropriately called the ‘Black Book’, shows that Cox had kept out of trouble for two years after arrival, until a minor misdemeanour concerning leave passes landed him in the public stocks in Hobart Town for three hours, to be humiliated and jeered at by the passers-by. A month later he was back in court because he tried to pass himself off as a free man and assaulted the constable who challenged him, for which he received twenty-five lashes. Three months after that he got twenty-five more from the Hobart Town magistrates for attempting to escape from lawful custody. Finally, in late August 1823, he absconded from the Hobart Town prisoners’ barracks, headed 200 kilometres (125 miles) north to the settlement at Launceston, was rearrested, and then escaped again from the local jail with another convict named Abner Smith. They were quickly recaptured. By this time the magistrates of Van Diemen’s Land had had enough of Thomas Cox, so he was given fifty lashes and sentenced to be transported to Sarah Island.
Cox worked in the same logging gang as Pearce, and he ‘constantly entreated’ the Irishman to escape with him, but initially Pearce was having none of it. He had seen too much of the wilderness to want to try his luck again. However, when Cox secretly ‘procured fishhooks, a knife, and some burnt rag for tinder’, the basic wherewithal for an escape, Pearce began to be persuaded that they might have a chance if they headed north together up the coast toward the settlement at Port Dalrymple. Both men were impulsive, and Cox was inexperienced and immature. The clincher for Pearce came when another convict stole his shirt. Although it was not his fault, he knew he would get a Botany Bay dozen (twenty-five lashes) from Cuthbertson for the loss of any item of slops. Pearce was not prepared to cop twenty-five for something he had not done, so he eventually agreed to attempt the escape with the enthusiastic Cox, who had probably only been at Sarah Island for a couple of months.
Having heavy chains and irons attached to both legs made it difficult for the men to run, but given the darkness of the rainforests in which the logging gangs worked around the shores of Kelly’s Basin, escape was not impossible, even for a man in chains. Both the rainforest and the nature of the logging operations made it very difficult for any overseer to keep check on where each of the eight men in the work-gang was at any given time, especially when the overseer was as careless as Constable Logan, to whom Pearce had again been assigned. So Cox and Pearce were able to exploit his negligence, and the two men quietly slipped away into the dense forest. As soon as they were out of Logan’s earshot, Cox used his axe carefully to ‘oval’ the Irishman’s ankle-fetter (‘to oval’ was convict slang meaning to bend the round ring) and draw Pearce’s foot through it, heel first. It was a delicate and perilous operation using the blunt end of the axe as a hammer, but eventually he was successful.
Once free, it took Pearce several hours to be able to walk normally. Because he had dragged around such a heavy weight for months, he had to remember to control his legs’ tendency to over-compensation; otherwise they shot up in the air in a kind of goose-step.
A couple of hours elapsed before their disappearance was noticed and communicated to Sarah Island, and two or three soldiers and some trusted convicts were dispatched to the eastern shore to search for them. But by then they were well away into the forest, which Pearce had come to know fairly well. In his later confession the Irishman says that ‘for the first and second day they strayed through the forest’ and ‘on the third made the beach [on Macquarie Harbour] and travelled . . . until the fifth, when they arrived at King’s River’. They remained near the river for three or four days, hiding ‘in an adjoining wood to avoid soldiers who were in pursuit of them’. They robbed some hunters on the seventh day, and by day nine they were satisfied that the authorities had given up looking for them, and that it would be safe to emerge from the depressing wetness of the thick rainforest around the banks of the King River near where it flowed into the harbour.
They talked a lot in the course of their time together. Cox was eager to hear all the details of Pearce’s escape. He asked what Dalton’s flesh tas
ted like and Pearce said that it was like pork. For the first seven nights they had not lit a fire, and the couple of fish they had caught were eaten raw. They were too close to Sarah Island and were never sure if there were soldiers still lurking around who would spot the fire in the dark. Even though it was early summer the nights were cold, and they slept huddled together to try to keep warm.
On two of the nights Pearce had groped the younger Cox and then buggerised him. Although this had happened quite often to Cox since he had entered the prison system and he was getting used to it, he did not enjoy rough sex with a man, especially because he was always used as a passive partner. He had never approached another man himself, although on one occasion when he could pay he had been with a female whore in Hobart Town. What he particularly resented was being treated like a ‘punk’ and a ‘molly’. He had been shocked when it first happened to him on the ship out to Van Diemen’s Land. Other stronger men had grabbed and penetrated him in the Hobart Town convict barracks, and later at Sarah Island. Afterwards Cox always felt humiliated and powerless, especially because he knew it showed where he belonged in the pecking order.
He resented Pearce doing it to him because originally he had felt safe with him, having heard that the Irish were hardly ever involved in buggery, and so he had assumed that Pearce was not a ‘shirt-lifter’. But the instinctively intelligent Cox soon realised that Pearce was an old hand who had adopted convict ways. He also knew that he would have to put up with it because the Irishman was much stronger than he was, and he had much more experience of the bush.