by Jim Haynes
The Trial we are talking about was seized on 12 September 1816, by a party of thirteen convicts who had escaped from Hyde Park Barracks. They not only seized the ship, they kidnapped the captain, crew and passengers, including a stowaway—an escaped convict named Anne Shortis, who had been smuggled on board by a crew member. It is not even known with accuracy who was on board—the passengers and crew numbered between eight and ten, and there were probably three women and one child.
It was an unlucky Friday 13 for Governor Macquarie, who immediately labelled it an act of piracy and noted in his journal:
Friday 13 Sept. About 12,O’Clock this Day, Capt. Piper the Naval Officer sent me a written Report, stating that in the middle of last Night or early this morning before Daylight, a Banditti of Runaway Convicts went on board of the Brig Trial (belonging to Simeon Lord Esqr.), seized and Piratically carried off from Watson’s Bay near the Heads—where she lay at anchor waiting for a fair Wind, and by Day-break She was out of Sight.
Immediately on receiving this intelligence I directed the Colonial Brig Rosetta to be hired and armed to be sent after the Fugitive Pirates, and She accordingly saild [sic] at 5,O’Clock this Evening, having a Party of Soldiers on board.
Exactly two weeks later the governor noted:
Friday 27 Sept. Evening about 7,O’Clock, the Colonial Brig Rosetta— which had been fitted out and sent in Pursuit of the Brig Carried off in the Night of the 12th. Inst. by a Banditti of Convict Pirates—anchored in Sydney Cove, after cruising for a Fortnight in hopes of seeing and retaking the Trial but without Success. The Rosetta extended her Cruise to the Northward as far as Howe’s Island—and then returned—not having seen or heard any thing of the Trial.
What actually did happen to the Trial was mostly pieced together from conversations with Aborigines, who gave accounts to Captain Thomas Whyte of the government ship Lady Nelson, which sailed from Newcastle in January 1817 to search for the Trial, after reports of a wreck were received from outposts near Port Stephens.
Whyte found remains of the brig and a canvas tent on a beach about 60 miles (100 kilometres) north of Port Stephens, but no trace of any survivors.
Using sign language and drawings in the sand, a story was put together that the Trial came into shore, probably to find water, and was wrecked by the surf after being run aground on a sand bar. After some time ashore, the escaped convicts constructed a boat from the timbers of the wreck and put out to sea. The boat was swamped within sight of the shore, and all aboard her drowned in the surf.
It seems that the passengers and crew, along with several convicts, did not attempt to escape from the beach in the makeshift boat. One group tried to reach Port Stephens, while Anne Shortis and the remaining convicts remained on the beach near the wreck.
It is fairly certain that the men who remained on the beach were killed by the Aborigines, and it seems that Anne Shortis and Emily Bardon, wife of the captain of the Trial, survived for some years, separately, living with the Aborigines.
There were many reports from the area over the ensuing years of a ‘white lubra’. The resulting searches led to the opening up of the area, which had been the far northern limit of the colony when the wreck occurred.
When Port Macquarie was established as a penal colony in 1821, the bay in which the wreck was found was named Trial Bay. A reward offered for knowledge of survivors of the wreck led to a woman, said to be Emily Bardon, being restored to her family in 1831. She was in a ‘wretched and distracted state’ and died shortly afterwards.
The Kempsey area was opened up by cedar-cutters in 1836; the following year, two ‘renegade’ Aborigines were tracked down by police after attacking settlers. One was shot and the other, named Billy Blueshirt, told troopers that his mother was the white woman from the wreck, Anne Shortis.
The amazing Mr Swallow
The runaways who actually did make it to China did so aboard a 110-ton, two-masted brig called the Cyprus.
During August 1829, Cyprus was anchored up in Recherche Bay, on the very southern tip of Van Diemen’s Land, taking shelter from a late winter storm.
About sixty people were crammed on board the 70-foot ship. Thirty-three were convicts being transferred in chains from Hobart to the harsher prison settlement on Sarah Island, at Macquarie Harbour, on the island’s wild west coast.
Lieutenant Carew, a native of Cork and newly arrived from Britain, was in charge of the transfer. Also on board were Captain Harrison and his crew; Dr Wilson, who was in charge of the prisoners’ welfare; twelve soldiers of the 63rd Regiment; Carew’s young wife and two children; and the wife and child of one of the soldiers. In her hold, the Cyprus carried three months supply of food and other goods for the convict settlement at Macquarie Harbour.
While the vessel sheltered in the safe waters of the bay, Lieutenant Carew, in command of the guard but not the ship, allowed the convicts to exercise on deck five at a time without their chains. He also allowed several of them, who were experienced sailors, to work as part of the crew.
Two of those he allowed to work as crewmen became the main players in what occurred next.
Cockney John Pobjoy was aged 29—the same age as Carew— when the Cyprus was seized. At seventeen, he was sentenced to death, commuted to fourteen years transportation, for stealing a horse worth five pounds. In Sydney he was accused of robbery, for which he received 200 lashes and was sent to Van Diemen’s Land.
William Walker—alias Swallow; alias Brown; alias Shields; alias Captain Waldron—was a 40-year-old seaman from North Shields, near Sunderland, who was married with two children. The year before, as William Swallow, he was convicted of house-breaking in Surrey and sentenced to transportation for life to Van Diemen’s Land on the Georgiana. He was actually William Walker, a convict who had escaped from the same colony six years earlier.
William Walker/Swallow/Brown/Shields had a remarkable life. Born in 1792, he worked on coal boats from the age of fifteen and was press-ganged into the navy at eighteen. He served two years and then fell victim to the depression and unemployment that followed the Napoleonic Wars. In 1820 he was sentenced at Durham Assizes to seven years transportation for stealing a quilt and goods valued at eight pence.
On the way to London to be put aboard the hulks, he evidently convinced another prisoner to jump overboard. The poor fellow did so and drowned, while Walker used the diversion to slip over the other side himself and stay afloat using some cork he had found on board. He was picked up by a passing ship and put ashore in London, claiming he was a sailor who had fallen from the rigging.
After earning some money as a rigger he grew a beard, called himself Brown and returned to Sunderland as a crewman on a collier. He was recognised and arrested, convicted of absconding, sent to the hulks and transported to Van Diemen’s Land on the Malabar in 1821.
In early 1822 Walker and several other convicts stole a schooner, belonging to influential grazier and merchant Anthony Kemp, from the Derwent River and escaped. Walker was found living in Sydney as John Shields, posing as a seaman apprenticed to a merchant ship.
For attempting to escape he was sentenced to 150 lashes and transportation to the more brutal Tasmanian penal settlement of Sarah Island. He was placed on board a ship called the Deveron, which was almost wrecked in a huge storm on the way back to Hobart. Walker saved the day by climbing the mast in mountainous seas to cut away the top-mast, which was broken and fouling the rigging of the ship. No doubt due to his heroism on the Deveron, his transfer to Sarah Island was cancelled.
In 1823, Walker somehow stowed away on the Deveron and escaped again, eventually returning to England via Rio de Janeiro. He lived with his wife and two children for six years—until his arrest for house-breaking led to his life sentence and return, as William Swallow, on the Georgiana.
William Swallow was put to work on boats for a month, and was then part of the crew loading the Georgiana, which had been chartered to take wheat, onions and potatoes to Sydney after unloading the convicts.
He was found hiding among the cargo after the ship’s departure was delayed, and sentenced to 50 lashes and transportation to Sarah Island, yet again, for ‘absconding from the public works with the intention of escaping’.
Walker was flogged, but again escaped being sent to Macquarie Harbour by claiming he fell asleep in the hold. His luck was about to run out, however, as about this time someone realised who he was, and he and another convict were locked in the cells for ‘being runaways and returned under second sentence of transportation’.
William Walker/Swallow should have been hanged; it was the mandatory sentence for the crime. Instead he was put aboard the brig Cyprus to be sent to Sarah Island, Macquarie Harbour. But it would be two years before he arrived there.
William Walker and John Pobjoy were working as part of the crew when the Cyprus was anchored up in Recherche Bay. There are two versions of what happened next.
One version says security was lax and Lieutenant Carew and Dr Williams went fishing in the longboat with Pobjoy, and their negligence allowed the mutiny to unfold.
The other version has it that the fishing trip was a ploy to enable Pobjoy to inform Carew and Williams that a plot was afoot against the ship by Walker and some others.
Nevertheless, while they were in the longboat, the plot was sprung. The guards were overwhelmed by the four unchained convicts, who were exercising on deck. A chicken coop was used to block the hatchway and keep the other soldiers below decks while the prisoners were freed. The soldiers fired up through the decks, but the convicts poured water down on them to make their muskets useless. They secured the ship and told the soldiers they would not be harmed if they surrendered their weapon.
Fearing for his family’s safety, Carew complied with the convicts’ directions. All passengers, crew and convicts unwilling to take part in the plan were conveyed to the shore with a few rations, which took five trips. Last to leave the ship was Pobjoy, who dived overboard as Walker set sail and swam ashore.
Apart from two guards who were knocked on the head at the start, no-one was hurt and the Cyprus sailed off with eighteen men aboard, leaving 44 people marooned on the beach at Recherche Bay.
Some bark shelters were built and two convicts set out to walk back to Hobart along the coast. After swimming the Huon River, they encountered hostile Aborigines and fled without their clothes, swimming back across the river and returning to the others. Another five convicts then set off for Hobart, going inland through the bush.
Meanwhile, a Welsh convict called Morgan constructed a coracle from canvas and wattle, made waterproof with wax and soap brought ashore with personal effects. Morgan and Pobjoy used the flimsy craft to cross the d’Entrecasteaux Channel to Partridge Island, where they found the ship Orelia, which they had attempted to signal days earlier as it passed by.
The Orelia sent a boat to pick up those on the beach. Another boat from Hobart found the other five convicts a few days later.
Lieutenant Carew was court-martialled, found guilty of negligence and cashiered, but then pardoned and allowed to keep his commission. He later served with the regiment in India, fathered three more children and died in Ireland in 1847.
John Pobjoy received a full pardon and returned to London, where he came to the notice of the police when he bashed the father of a woman he was ‘courting’. He was soon in trouble again: arrested and brought before the Thames Street magistrates for house-breaking. In what was to prove a crucial event, he used his patriotic exploits in Tasmania as character references to secure his acquittal.
Meanwhile, the remarkable William Walker/Sparrow sailed the Cyprus to New Zealand, and then past Tahiti to Keppel Island in Tonga, where seven convicts left the ship. One man was lost overboard, and three others went ashore on islands in the China Sea, before the remaining seven finally reached the coast of China.
There the Cyprus was scuttled. The convicts used the longboat to reach shore, where they spun a concocted story that they were survivors of a wrecked ship called the Edward.
Walker, using the alias Captain Waldron, and three others returned to London after signing on as crew on the Charles Grant. The other three sailed to America on a Danish ship and were never heard of again. Meanwhile, the three who left the Cyprus for the islands of the China Sea arrived in Canton and told different versions of the alibi story. Then news arrived from Sydney of the mutiny, and one of the survivors confessed. The Kellie Castle sailed to London, with one of the convicts as a prisoner, and arrived six days before the Charles Grant. Three of those on the Charles Grant were arrested; Swallow escaped, but was later found and stood trial with them.
The case against the four was confused and flimsy until, as luck would have it, they were brought to court at Thames Street, and the clerk of court remembered John Pobjoy’s story and he was called as a witness.
Two of the convicts, Davis and Watt, were hanged at Execution Dock—probably the last men hanged for piracy in Britain.
Swallow somehow convinced the court that he was forced to do as the others ordered and was only an unwilling member of the mutiny. He and the other two were sent back to Hobart and finally arrived at Sarah Island prison in Macquarie Harbour—just as the authorities were closing it down.
Another of the men who left the ship in the Pacific was later found and hanged in Hobart.
Pobjoy was outraged that the leader of the mutiny escaped the noose, and attempted to secure a pension as a reward for his part in the affair. However, Queen Adelaide, Viscount Melbourne, the Duke of Wellington and the Admiralty refused Pobjoy’s requests for some reward. He returned to the sea and died when swept overboard from his ship, returning from a voyage to bring timber from Canada in August 1833. He had married in June 1832, and a daughter was baptised two months after his death.
William Walker spent a year at Sarah Island and was then sent to Port Arthur, where he died of tuberculosis in May 1834. Amazingly, his official convict record noted that he was ‘a very good man’.
Postscript—the Frederick
During the year that William Walker spent at Sarah Island, the noted ship-builder David Hoy supervised the construction of a 20-foot brig, the Frederick, as a project to give skills and trades to the younger convicts. A group of ten felons stayed on after the gaol closed down, to complete the project.
The same group of convicts who helped build the ship commandeered her while she was being trialled in January 1834, put the overseers and prison guards ashore, and sailed 6000 miles (9600 kilometres) in forty days to the coast of Chile, where they used the longboat to get to shore, posing as shipwrecked mariners.
The leader of the escapade, Londoner James Porter, who had spent time at sea and lived in Chile before being transported for life for theft, was hunted down and arrested in 1836. He was sentenced to death for piracy, but the sentence was commuted to life. Porter spent four years on Norfolk Island before returning to Newcastle— only to escape again in 1847, as a stowaway on the brig Sir John Byng. He was never heard of again.
William Walker would have approved.
Even forty years after Governor Phillip’s ban on boat-building, assembling sturdy sea-going vessels was a risky business.
‘The Cyprus Brig’
Frank McNamara (‘Frank the Poet’)
Come all you sons of Freedom, a chorus join with me,
I’ll sing a song of heroes and glorious liberty.
Of lads condemned from England upon Van Diemen’s Shore,
Their Country, friends and parents, to never see them more.
A second sentence being incurred we were ordered for to be
Sent to Macquarie Harbour, that place of tyranny.
The hardships we’d to undergo are matters of record,
But who believes the convict, or who regards his word?
Starved and flogged and punished, deprived of all redress,
The Bush our only refuge, with death to end distress.
Hundreds of us all shot down, for daring to be free,
Nu
mbers caught and banished to life-long slavery.
But Swallow, Watt and Davis, were in our noble band,
Determined at the first chance to quit Van Diemen’s Land.
In heavy chains and guarded, on the Cyprus Brig conveyed
The topsails being hoisted, the anchor being weighed.
The wind it blew Sou’Westerly and on we went straightway,
And found ourselves all wind-bound, in gloomy Recherche Bay.
’Twas August eighteen twenty nine, with convicts all on board,
Lieutenant Carew left the Brig, and soon we passed the word.
The Doctor too was absent, the soldiers off their guard,
A better opportunity could never have occurred.
Confined within a dismal hole, we soon contrived a plan,
To capture now the Cyprus, or perish every man.
We first addressed the soldiers ‘for liberty we crave,
Give up your arms this instant, or the sea will be your grave,
By tyranny we’ve been oppressed, by your Colonial laws,
But we’ll bid adieu to slavery, or die in freedom’s cause.’
While some lads turned faint-hearted and begged to go ashore,
Eighteen boys rushed daring, and took the Brig and store.
We brought the sailors from below, and rowed them to the land
Likewise the wife and children of Carew in command.
Supplies of food and water, we gave the vanquished crew,
Returning good for evil, as we’d been taught to do.
The Morn broke bright the Wind was fair; we headed out to sea
With one more cheer for those on shore and glorious liberty.
For our elected captain, Bill Swallow was the man,
Who laid a course out neatly to take us to Japan.
Then sound your golden trumpets; play on your tuneful notes,
The Cyprus Brig is sailing, how proudly now she floats.
May fortune help the Noble lads, and keep them ever free