Hell's Gates

by Paul Collins

  As far as the legal authorities were concerned, an important part of the process was a public confession in which the malefactor admitted his crimes openly, so that the judicial system could be seen to have acted correctly and justly.The dignity of the law had to be upheld. In all of this Conolly was successful with Pearce. It was the chaplain’s job to offer the quid pro quo of eternal salvation to the malefactor who confessed his guilt. Ironically, in a way, this was theologically more in tune with the more tactile and realistic Catholic sacramental system than with the Protestant emphasis on abstract notions of repentance, conversion and faith. While the modern secular mind might have difficulty accepting the sincerity of a conversion induced by the immediate prospect of execution, this was not such a problem for unsophisticated people of the early nineteenth century. For them, last-minute conversions were not unusual. As long as there was life, there was hope of God’s mercy, and they depended on this. While this might have what we would call a kind of ‘magical’ element in it, they were more convinced of God’s direct intervention in human affairs than we are, and the division between good and evil was much more tangible for them.

  Pearce’s execution almost did not happen that Monday morning. On the day before the hanging the Acting Sheriff, John Beaumont, was unsure that he had the proper authority to proceed. Possibly the problem had something to do with the fact that Pearce was the first man executed under the authority of the newly set up Supreme Court. Before Beaumont could go ahead he felt he needed the authority of the Lieutenant-Governor. He was reassured by Arthur’s secretary, John Montagu. Whatever the legal problem, it was quickly sorted out and Beaumont, his scruples allayed, went back to preparing for the hanging.

  On the day of the execution, Monday, 19 July 1824, Pearce was woken very early, if he had slept at all. His fetters knocked off, he went to confession again and was given sacramental absolution and Holy Communion by Conolly. Following more prayers, he sat down to a good breakfast. Some time after 8 a.m. the cell door was opened onto the jail-yard. The Acting Sheriff, the Deputy Sheriff, jail-keeper Bisdee and a group of convict constables marched into the yard. Pearce was led out of the cell and toward the scaffold by Conolly. When they arrived, Conolly addressed the crowd of convicts and men from the chain gangs who were forced to be present, as well as onlookers. He took his theme from the Book of Genesis (9:6): ‘Whoever sheds the blood of Man, by Man shall his blood be shed’. No doubt he felt it was a good opportunity to use Pearce as an example to all sinners and malefactors present.

  Some days before, Conolly had written out a long confession dictated by Pearce, but presumably with lots of additions and embellishments by the priest. There is some evidence that it was originally written in Irish, although, of course, it was delivered in English! Long, drawn-out confessions were not unusual at executions in the early nineteenth century. Addressing the crowd, Conolly said that since Pearce was ‘standing on the awful entrance into eternity . . . [he] was desirous to make the most public acknowledgement of his guilt, in order to humble himself, as much as possible in the sight of God and Man’. Pearce had admitted that he had murdered Cox, and the confession went on to tell the story of the first escape. However, compared to the other versions, this was a rather sanitised account of events. Perhaps Conolly was unconsciously willing to a certain extent to collude in Pearce’s exculpation because they were both from the same county. Whatever the reason, Conolly concluded by stating that ‘the unfortunate Pearce was more willing to die than to live . . . [and he entreated] . . . all persons present to offer up their prayers, and beg of the Almighty to have mercy upon him’.

  Thomas Bock, Alexander Pearce executed for murder, 19 July 1824. Crayon on paper. (Courtesy Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales.)

  An intriguing incident was recorded about the confession some seventy years later by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, then Archbishop of Sydney. Moran says that in preparation for the execution Conolly wrote down Pearce’s confession in Irish and that when he delivered the speech at the scaffold on behalf of the man-eater, he freely translated it as he went along. Later Lieutenant-Governor Arthur sent for a copy and, unthinkingly, Conolly gave the orderly the Irish version he had in his pocket. When it was delivered to Government House everyone thought it was written in Hebrew! Conolly had to be summoned to translate it for them. Moran does not say where he got this story.

  Thomas Bock, Alexander Pearce executed for murder, 19 July 1824. Crayon on paper. (Courtesy Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales.)

  Perhaps this also explains the delay in getting a copy of the confession speech into the Hobart Town Gazette. It did not appear there until six weeks after the execution.

  The speech concluded, Pearce stepped onto the trapdoor (the ‘drop’, as it was called), and the white cap was placed over his head. The noose was adjusted around his neck by the executioner, who made sure that the thick knot was placed at the side of Pearce’s head so that it would be jerked sideways as the rope suddenly took the full weight of the body. The executioner’s aim was to break or at least fracture the first three cervical vertebrae with the knot to damage the spinal cord and bring about immediate loss of consciousness. Pearce was given a couple more minutes of private prayer with Conolly, who then stood back and nodded to the executioner. He reached over and released the trap. Pearce’s body dropped out of sight of the spectators. It was 9 a.m. Death occurred, either immediately or slowly, by strangulation and asphyxiation.

  As soon as Pearce’s body was cut down by the executioner and laid out on the wooden trolley, Conolly administered conditional extreme unction, the sacrament reserved for the very sick and the dying. In those days recently dead bodies were anointed on the assumption that there still may have been some life remaining. No one knew exactly when the soul left the body. So the priest would not have missed this final opportunity to assist his convert on his ultimate journey to God. After that, all that would be left for Conolly to do would be to bury Pearce’s remains after the dissection.

  However, another man was also waiting in the wings to deal with the body of the man-eater. His name was Thomas Bock and he was to assist in assuring Pearce’s subsequent fame. He had only arrived in Hobart Town seven months previously as a convict, transported from Birmingham for trying to procure an abortion by ‘administering concoctions of certain herbs to Ann Yates, with the intent to cause miscarriage’. Apparently Bock had had sex with the nineteen-year-old Yates and she had become pregnant. Bock was also a talented artist and engraver, and on arrival in Hobart Town he was soon employed in various official capacities. Since Pearce’s body was being handed over for dissection, the Colonial Surgeon, James Scott, whom we have already met as the surgeon on the Castle Forbes, officially requested that Bock do a sketch of Pearce’s head. Nineteenth-century men of science were particularly interested in craniology, the study of the size, shape and type of skulls possessed by different races and different categories of people. Some scientists took this further and were fascinated by the heads of notorious criminals like Pearce. The theory was that the shape of the skull gave a clue to character and mental faculties. This was the so-called ‘science’ of phrenology.

  So it was natural that an amateur phrenologist like Scott would have wanted to study Pearce’s head as closely as possible. A kind of death-mask drawing by a good artist in crayon was the first step in preserving the record of Pearce’s skull and Bock’s drawings are quite remarkable. Bock did not have much time to do his work, and he was surrounded by the noise of the crowd and the distractions of all that was happening in the jail-yard after the execution.

  As soon as Bock had finished, Pearce’s body was wheeled on the trolley down to the hospital for the final disgrace ordered by Chief Justice Pedder – dissection. Scott handed this task over to his assistant, Henry Crockett. Like Wells and other minor officials in the colonial service, Crockett was not above keeping a little souvenir on the side for himself. So he took the liberty of appropriating the skull of th
e man-eater as a keepsake. Perhaps he, too, was a man of science interested in research, like his superior, Colonial Surgeon Scott, or perhaps he just saw an opportunity to make some money by selling the skull to some other phrenologist. Whatever the motive, he took Pearce’s skull home and hung on to it for quite some time.

  The chance eventually came for him to sell it to an agent who collected skulls for American scientists interested in phrenology. William Cobb Hurry, from Calcutta, was collecting skulls for the Philadelphia phrenologist, Dr Samuel George Morton. Morton was the author of Crania Americana, or a comparative view of the skulls of various aboriginal nations of North- and South-America, published in his home city and London in 1839. Pearce’s skull was clearly identified in his collection, and by 1849 Morton was busy embellishing the cannibal story. In his Catalogue of skulls, where Pearce is numbered No. 59, Morton presents the Irish convict as a kind of spider luring victims to his web in the forests: ‘He [Pearce] succeeded repeatedly in persuading his fellow prisoners to escape with him, for the sole purpose of killing them and devouring their flesh. He used to return secretly to the depot and persuade a fresh victim that he had been sent by others who were waiting in the woods’.

  In 1853 Morton handed over his collection of skulls, including that of Pearce, to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and in 1968 they were moved to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where they still reside. In March 2002 the keeper of skeletal collections at the museum, Dr Janet Monge, reported that the skull is perfectly intact and in good condition, but that the mandible (lower jaw) is missing, as are most of the teeth. She reports that virtually none of the skulls in the Morton collection have mandibles.

  Thus, by an extraordinarily roundabout means, Pearce has attained some physical as well as narrative immortality. If he had just been hung but not dissected, we would have no physical remains, as he would have been immediately buried in an anonymous grave.

  At the end of it all what are we to make of Pearce? Is he a serial killer in the tradition of the psychopathic Dr Hannibal Lecter in the Thomas Harris novel The Silence of the Lambs? In this story Lecter is made to appear almost attractive by his intelligence and penetrating psychological insight. He is played in the film dramatisation by the wonderful Anthony Hopkins, who succeeds in eliciting from the viewer both repulsion and fearful horror, while at the same time we are drawn into his world as we watch the almost spider-like web that he weaves around the young female trainee FBI agent, played by Jodie Foster. We can identify with her fear and uncertainty because we feel her attraction to him. Lecter’s cannibalism, while appalling, remains intriguing, because you find yourself asking, ‘How could a man with so much psychological insight and intelligence be so mad and perpetrate such terrible crimes?’

  But Pearce has nothing like that going for him. He has none of Lecter’s intelligence and insight. He killed and ate his companions out of necessity. He showed no sadistic tendencies whatsoever; if anything, he suffered from a poverty of emotion. He was not clever. But he was manipulative, and seemed to lack any emotional response to other people. As a rural labourer in northern Ireland he probably lived a nomadic life, moving from community to community, never forming lasting links with others, let alone any real friendships. He was probably promiscuous, sexually aggressive and untrusting, quickly abandoning relationships that demanded any commitment. While he was emotionally stunted, he did his best to seem normal, and he probably formed superficial relationships easily, but there was no sense of lasting commitment to anyone. While there is something almost humdrum about him, we have seen that remorse was not something he allowed himself to feel very often, if at all. His attack on Cox shows that he had great difficulty controlling his anger and that he did not deal at all well with frustration of any sort. While there is evidence that he understood the difference between right and wrong, he seemed to have a chilling capacity to shut off his conscience and do whatever he needed to do in order to survive.

  Pearce was a classic psychopath. Nowadays, when we like to categorise forms of aberrant behaviour, we have a psychiatric category in which to fit him: he is someone suffering from what psychologists would describe as ‘Dissocial, or Anti-Social Personality Disorder’ (ASPD). In ordinary speech we generally call such people ‘psychopaths’ or ‘sociopaths’. The symptoms of ASPD are a very low tolerance of frustration and being thwarted, which quickly and often suddenly leads to responses of aggression, anger, fighting or violence. People with ASPD are impulsive and cannot maintain a steady job or consistently honour personal or financial obligations. They have a callous lack of concern for other people; while able to form human relationships, they are unable to maintain them. They disregard their own safety and that of others, and lack respect for societal rules and obligations as well as the law.They have no sense of guilt and seem unable to learn from experience and especially from arrest or punishment. They blame others for their own faults. Generally, if a person has three or more of these symptoms to an abnormal and marked degree, they can be diagnosed as ASPD.

  Yet while it is easy to talk about him as a ‘psychological type’, and while we have a good idea of what he looked like physically, it is still very hard to come to grips with him personally. What was he like? Would the real, living Alexander Pearce stand up? Who was he? It is difficult to answer these questions. The problem is not just paucity of historical sources. In fact, historically we know more about Pearce than we do about the vast majority of other convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land. But even allowing for the fact that he is mediated to us through the opinions and views of other people, it is still hard to get a firm sense of his personality. Perhaps this is where we run up against the essential problem of anyone suffering from ASPD. There are no firm delineations of who they are as people; they are chimeras who give expression to their ‘personality’ essentially through violence, instability, impulsiveness, deception and manipulation. As those who deal with psychopaths report, when you look into their eyes you discover the awful reality that there is virtually nothing there. They are essentially empty; there is no one at home. Sadly, this is the truth about Alexander Pearce.

  Psychiatrists involved in the study of psychopathy, as the study of ASPD is called these days, point out that much in modern culture encourages psychopaths. They are often quite successful in corporate structures, especially where there is an ethical and moral vacuum, and the ethos of ‘eat or be eaten’ rules supreme. Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho describes this world to a T. A lack of moral and emotional effect is dominant in vast swathes of culture today. There is a sense in which Pearce’s personality has oddly modern resonances, and if he had lived today he might well have inhabited the lower levels of the corporate or business world, or perhaps more likely, the borderline between legal business and shonky dealing. His stunted emotionality and superficial social skills would have remained hidden behind a mask of normalcy, although he would have probably eventually ended up in prison. If he had not been transported, there is every chance Pearce would have settled down in Ireland stealing the odd sheep or personal item, but never getting caught; an unattractive person but not a monster. So we have to ask what the effects of transportation, especially his stints at Macquarie Harbour, had on him. Did the system that was supposed to ‘reform’ him actually make him worse? The answer is probably yes.

  Back in the mid- to late-1820s Pearce himself was dead, but his example of escape and survival was not forgotten by other convicts at Macquarie Harbour, just as Commandant Cuthbertson had feared. From the beginning of 1823 until early February 1827, we know that ninety convicts bolted from Macquarie Harbour. Of these, perhaps twenty-four escapees may have survived and reached the settled districts. Fourteen of them, under the leadership of the charismatic Irishman Matthew Brady, were in one group. They seized a whaleboat on 7 June 1824 on Macquarie Harbour and made it to the Derwent River, south of Hobart Town. From here they turned to bushranging. For two years they made f
ools of the military sent in pursuit of them. Brady himself gained a reputation for courtesy to women and was only violent when necessary. Eventually the gang was recaptured, tried and executed, but not before they had won enormous popularity among the lower orders. In response to Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s offer of a reward for their capture, Brady insolently issued a ‘proclamation’ offering twenty gallons of rum for the capture and incarceration of ‘a person known as Colonel George Arthur’! Such impertinence would not have gone down well with His Honor.

  About seventy-six escapees from Macquarie Harbour are supposed to have ‘perished in the woods’ or died ‘on their way across the interior’, and for some of those who are thought to have made it to the settled districts there is no clear confirmation. A few managed to retain their sense of humour.Timothy Crawley, Richard Morris and John Newton seized a boat at the lime-kilns (the lime was used for building at the settlement) up the Gordon River. While they probably perished trying to cross the inaccessible country we have already traversed with Pearce, according to the official report ‘the boat was afterwards found moored to a stump about twelve miles above the Lime Burners and written upon her stern, with chalk, was “To be sold”’!