Far From Botany Bay

by Rosa Jordan

  “Not as far as I know,” White replied, and looked at James, who shook his head.

  Mrs. Parker held a handkerchief to her nose to ward off the smell of Mary’s unwashed body. “Despite her class, I had hoped to see something of consequence in the poor creature’s character.”

  “It is difficult to judge character in one drained by grief,” White snapped.

  The captain’s wife, perhaps offended by White’s abrupt manner, lifted her chin. “Many of our seamen’s wives have lost children on this voyage, and do grieve, I assure you, Doctor. But never have I seen one sink so low. What excuse can there be for such behaviour?”

  White stood for a moment glowering down at Mary, as if infuriated by the sight of her. But the doctor was only considering the question. At last he said, “It seems to me that women bear suffering like beasts of burden. Some take load after load until they are broken. Others are like the Spanish ass. When the weight is more than they can carry, they simply lie down, and nothing on earth can induce them to move until the load is lightened.”

  “Indeed!” Mrs. Parker seemed intrigued by the comparison. “And which manner of woman is this?”

  “Madam, I do not know.” With that White turned and limped away on feet that always pained him.

  Mrs. Parker, still staring at Mary, murmured, “What a shame she does not pray.”

  She started to follow Dr. White, then turned back and asked James, “Is there a particular reason why, after being supplied with a perfectly decent gown, she persists in going naked but for that rag knotted about her waist?”

  James stood slowly and with a correct and courteous bow, replied, “I understand how Mrs. Bryant’s manner of dress must offend you, Madam, and all the ladies on the ship. She did wear the gown for a time, but removed it in the heat of the hold when her child was dying and grief overcame her sense of propriety. We men who are confined with her have too much respect to lay hands on her in the intimate way that would be required to dress or bathe her.”

  He hesitated and added, “We do pray daily, as you yourself suggested, that she might soon recover enough to do for herself.”

  Mrs. Parker’s eyes opened wide, no doubt surprised that a man she had taken to be a rough criminal should be so well-spoken. “Then I shall pray for her as well,” she said, and moved away to rejoin Dr. White.

  Soon after this conversation, the Gorgon reached England, and anchored at Portsmouth.

  “Five years we have been gone,” James whispered to Mary as they lay in their separate hammocks that night. “We have sailed clear to the other side of the world and back again.”

  Mary did not respond. She was not merely in a separate hammock, she was in a separate world—a world in which there existed nothing but a blackness of rage. When James came to feed her of a morning, sometimes he found her clutching the wooden comb in her hand, but did not understand why this would be so, for she had not combed her hair

  since Charlotte’s death. He had, several times, tried to take the comb from her to do the combing and braiding himself, but she had clutched it tightly, and would not give it up. At length it would find its way back into the waistband of her sarong.

  Not until they learned from Mr. Tench that on the morrow they would be taken from the ship to stand before a magistrate did James enlist the other men to help him do what he had told Mrs. Parker they would not do. They forcibly washed Mary as well as they could and dressed her in the gown given her by Mrs. Parker. Although it was far from fresh, it was not as filthy as her remaining scrap of sarong. Nor would it have her attracting stares on the streets of London as if she were a witch.

  Difficult though it was to wash and dress her, it was more difficult still to persuade her to give up the comb. Finally she drew in on herself so completely that she did not seem to notice when James took it, and did not struggle during the hours it took to untangle her long hair and re-weave it into a braid down her back.

  When James had finished that task, he put the comb back in her hand, closed her fingers around it, and slipped hand and comb into a pocket of the gown. It was all Mary had in the world to call her own, and he wanted to make sure she knew where it was. If indeed she knew anything at all.

  It was in this condition that Mary, along with the other prisoners, was taken from the ship. As they were about to be placed in a police van for conveyance to court to appear before a magistrate, Mary suddenly lifted her head. Looking about at the gathered crowd, she spoke her first word since Charlotte’s funeral. “England.”

  “Yes, Mary,” James said, joy leaping in his eyes. “England.”

  He must have believed, just then, that she was to recover her senses as quickly as she had lost them. But this was not to be.

  England

  When the five from Botany Bay appeared before the magistrate, Mary stood with lowered head, refusing to communicate with the court or with those around her by so much as a glance. Her behaviour might have been deemed a form of insanity, and perhaps it was. But James, recalling Dr. White’s words about how some women were like those beasts of burden that simply laid down and refused to move when their burden grew too great, clung to the notion that this was what had driven Mary to close her senses to what was going on around her, and that once that burden lightened, she would return to normal.

  Standing before the magistrate, he pleaded Mary’s cause, which she was neither willing nor able to do for herself. “She is not insane,” James assured the judge, “but lost in grief, by reason of both her children dying in the past six months, the last barely five weeks ago.”

  “Such love as she had for her babies you can’t imagine,” Pip put in. “Sure and it was for their sake that she made a bid for freedom, for she oft said they was innocent and didn’t deserve to grow up away from their native land.”

  “She fussed over them regular-like,” Scrapper put in. “Don’t I wish my mum had set such store by me.”

  “Her original offence had no violence in it,” Luke offered. “A gentle lass she is, by her very nature.”

  Mary remained slumped and silent, in a posture which might have suggested shame or bereavement. In truth, it was fury. For a full year she had struggled to keep it in check, but with the death of Charlotte it had come to dominate her soul. Although she had been willing to hope as long as there was hope, now that there was none, why should she not draw strength from her rage and use it for a final act of defiance? Thus the determination to never again look up to men who were looking down on her. Judge her they would; that she could not prevent. But her participation was hers to decide, and her absolute intent was that there would be none.

  The magistrate was favourably impressed by the fact that Mary’s companions, rather than pleading their own cause, had spoken up on her behalf. Having no notion that the bowed head was intended as an act of defiance, he felt enormous sympathy for the starvation-thin woman standing before him. After sending the lot of them to Newgate to await trial, he told the press, “Never have I experienced so disagreeable a task as being obliged to commit this poor soul to prison.”

  One week later, the five of them were brought to stand trial at the Old Bailey. By this time the men were aware of the publicity surrounding their case. In addition to press accounts, there were pickets in support of them in the street outside the courtroom. They learned that, even before their arrival back in England, the tabloids had made of Mary a celebrity, first as “The Girl from Botany Bay Who Got Away,” and later as, “The Girl from Botany Bay Who Almost Got Away”. Now, in part because she was silent, everyone felt at liberty to project onto her whatever they liked. Most saw the great sailing adventure as a heroic act undertaken for her children’s sake, one which demonstrated the courage and character of a true Englishwoman. Despite flourishes added to the story by newspapers that did not feel wholly bound by the facts, this was not far from the truth.

 
The Crown Prosecutor may have felt some sympathy as well, or else he was influenced by the press’s expressions of sympathy, for he did not call for the bolters to be hanged. Outright leniency, though, was out of the question. As he explained, if the Government went so far as to “do a kind thing,” that would give encouragement to other prisoners to try to escape. With these considerations in mind, the penalty imposed was for all five to, “remain on their former sentences until they should be discharged by due course of law.”

  Given conditions inside Newgate Prison, such an indeterminate sentence certainly met the Crown’s criteria of not being a kind thing. Survival depended entirely upon the treatment received in lockup—and on whether one succumbed, as most did, to gaol fever.

  As they left the courtroom, Mary to be taken to a ward in Newgate apart from James, Luke, Pip, and Scrapper, only the men said goodbye. Mary did not speak, nor lift her head, nor even move unless someone took her by the arm and drew her along. Was she sad? Was she sorry? Was she sane? As long as she showed no awareness of what was going on around her, and neither her face nor her eyes revealed what was going on in her head, how could anyone know?

  A decade later, one Elizabeth Fry would bring about prison reforms which would include sleeping pads, so that inmates were not forced to lie upon the cold stone floor. Rules of decorum would be instituted to prevent the kind of chaos that reigned in the women’s wards during Mary’s incarceration. Although dogs had recently been banned

  from the prison, inmates were still allowed to bring children, poultry, and pigs. All contributed to the noise and filth, and all went unnoticed by Mary. If she recognised this as the place where she had met Florie, Cass, and Colleen six years earlier, she gave no sign of it.

  Mary’s notoriety had preceded her into the ward. Where other vulnerable women might have been abused by fellow inmates, most of the prisoners stood back, a little awed by the tales that had circulated regarding where she had been, what she had done, and what she had endured. The few inclined to molest her, as she curled herself into a ball against one wall, were quickly blocked by others who set themselves up as her defenders. It was an unusual situation, one the jailers admitted to visitors that they themselves had not seen before.

  There were visitors. Some were merely curiosity-seekers come to gawk at the adventuress from Botany Bay, but at least one had a serious interest in seeing justice done. This was the writer James Boswell, a Scottish lawyer, member of London’s literary elite, and old college friend of Henry Dundas, the Secretary of State for Home Affairs. Boswell had a reputation for taking on causes for humanitarian

  reasons, and in particular, ones involving “unfortunate” young women. None of his friends were surprised when he showed a keen interest in the affairs of “the girl from Botany Bay.”

  At least, his interest in her was keen as long as he was merely reading about her in the press. When he actually visited her in Newgate, he was nearly shocked into abandoning her cause. Although she was young—only twenty-six to Boswell’s fifty-two—she was not beautiful. Nor was she, in his opinion, even sane.

  “I’d not go in there if I was ye,” warned the turnkey when Boswell insisted on being permitted to enter the narrow exercise yard where upwards of forty women were engaged in all manner of activities from washing clothes to quarrelling to using chamber pots. “These ‘uns is rough, and could do a man harm.” The turnkey pointed to what appeared to be a heap of rags against a far wall. “Not that one, a’course, yer Mary Bryant. She ain’t moved yet of her own accord.”

  “That’s her?” Boswell started at the body indicated. “Rouse her and bring her to the bars. Tell her a friend wants to speak to her.”

  “Ain’t no rousing her,” the turnkey explained. “I can bring her, forcible-like, because I done it before. But she won’t look at ye nor speak a word, and quick as she’s let, she’ll flat turn away.”

  “Then I will go in,” Boswell decided, for he could not believe that anyone who had done what Mary was reputed to have done could be entirely unreachable.

  The turnkey instructed the prisoner designated as wardswoman to accompany Boswell across the courtyard to where Mary lay. The stench of the area was enough to induce gagging, for, in addition to the filth one might expect in such an overcrowded space, there were, in nearby chambers, the corpses of prisoners whose families had not yet come to claim them. Upon reaching Mary’s side, Boswell spoke her name. She did not move.

  The wardswoman grabbed Mary’s forelock, jerked her head up, and cackled, “You got a gentleman ‘ere to see you, dearie.”

  Although Mary’s blue-grey eyes were open, they stared vacantly, in such a way as to give Boswell the creeps. They were, he recounted later, as empty as those of a dead person.

  But he was not a man easily put off an idea, and so he seated himself uncomfortably on the stone floor next to her and proceeded to talk. Other women collected in a circle around them, some making lewd remarks or calling out answers to questions he put to Mary. Boswell soon concluded that conversation was doomed in such an atmosphere, even if Mary were inclined to respond, which clearly she was not. Deeply disappointed, he said, “I will try to visit again, Mary, but I do not know if I can, for you see, I myself have been sentenced to death.”

  Mary’s body jerked, and she turned her head just slightly to see him out of the corner of one eye, which was bluer than Boswell had first thought. This indication that she was in fact listening, and even comprehending, was there for only an instant, and then was gone.

  Encouraged, he said, “The doctors give me no more than two years to live. Perhaps not even that long. But long enough, I hope, for us to become friends and share our histories. Would you like that?”

  Something like a curtain drew over her eyes, causing them to revert to their original cloudy appearance, more grey than blue. When it became apparent that there would be no connection, verbal or otherwise, Boswell struggled awkwardly to his feet and left the ward.

  Although Mary was not inclined to bestir herself, she had not been unaware of Boswell’s presence nor uncomprehending of his words. She operated more on feeling than thought these days, and her feeling about the man, whose name meant nothing to her, was that he was both kind and lecherous. His comment about being under sentence of death she did not believe. But then, she believed little of what was said to her by anyone, which was why she paid more attention to the squealing of rats scrabbling around the edges of the ward than she did to any words. Still, it was a startling thing for the man to say, which she had not expected.

  Some would say later that it was Boswell’s interest that revived Mary, and perhaps that was a factor. He did leave money with the warden to pay the garnish which would ensure that she received a reasonable ration of food, and had soap and other items for which all prisoners paid or went without. He did the same for Pip, Scrapper, James, and Luke, housed in a men’s ward on the other side of the prison. It was in his mind even then that if he could not get a story from Mary, he might learn details of the trip from them.

  A more likely reason for Mary’s return to something like normal was the simple passage of time. Several weeks after Boswell’s visit, Mary’s fingers touched the comb in her pocket, and she drew it forth. She examined the smooth wood and delicate workmanship, drawing pleasant sensations from the feel of it. It recalled to her Bados’s large hands, not as he was delicately carving this very item, but how they trembled when he held the compass. Another day she examined the teeth of the comb closely, to see if a few strands of Charlotte’s golden hair might yet be caught between them. One morning she remembered the feel of the comb as James had pulled it through her own hair on the last day they had been able to touch one another, as he tried to make her presentable for appearing before the magistrate. She brought her waist-long braid around into her lap and tentatively fumbled the comb through the loose end, below where it was tied.

  This is what she was
doing—this and remembering things that had been shut out of her mind for many months—when a ruckus broke out near the ward entrance. Mary did not look up or pay any attention whatever, but here is what was going on:

  A well-dressed woman, and a well-known one, for she had been the madam of a bawdy house until her arrest following the suspicious death of one of her gentleman clients, had just been admitted. Her expensive clothing was awry and her elegantly-styled hair had come undone. Immediately upon entering she began to put herself right, buttoning this, straightening that, patting something else back into place. Seeing Mary fiddling with the comb, she made straight for her.

  “My dear,” she carolled, “allow me to borrow your comb.”

  Mary responded as she always did, which is to say, she did not respond at all. The newcomer, used to having her way with men and women alike, reached down and snatched the comb from Mary’s hands. She held it up to the light to examine it for lice before putting it to her own head. Mary slowly stood up, with her back to the wall, and reached for the comb.

  “A moment if you please, dear,” the woman said sharply, holding it out of Mary’s reach. “I shan’t be long.”

  The words were hardly out of her mouth before Mary had grabbed her by the hair and flung her to the floor. The comb went flying. Mary turned from the woman at once and picked it up. She had no more than dropped it back in her pocket when the woman grasped her by the arm, and plunged her hand into Mary’s pocket in pursuit of the comb. Without a sound or change of expression, Mary backhanded her in the face, knuckle hard, exactly as Will had hit her on more than one occasion. The stranger screamed and fell back, suddenly occupied with trying to staunch the flow of blood from her nose.

  Women came running from all over the ward as those closest to the altercation began shrieking that the girl from Botany Bay had come alive and was on the verge of murdering a fellow inmate. The wardswoman pushed her way through the crowd just in time to see the new inmate spattered in blood and Mary—Mary had dropped to the floor and curled into a ball. The wardswoman grabbed her arm, intending to jerk her to her feet. Then she let out a piercing scream as Mary sunk her teeth into the woman’s hand. That brought the turnkey, who ordered Mary to get up and gave her a kick in the kidneys to make his point. Still Mary did not rise, so the turnkey lifted her bodily and flung her over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes, which in limpness she much resembled.