The Best Australian Sea Stories

by Jim Haynes

  From the truculent attitude of the first mate, Benjamin Kelly (like himself, an American), and the defiant behaviour of others on board he feared for his life, and was thankful to have made the port without a mutiny. The arrival of the pilot boat guaranteed his and the ship’s safety. The brig, 45 tons burthen, and built and registered at Calcutta, was owned by Campbell & Co.; she was unarmed and mounted no guns. She carried three convict passengers banished to Hobart—John Lancashire, a painter, and two women: Catherine Hagerty and Charlotte Badger, with an infant child.

  William House, the superintendent of shipping, came aboard with a military escort—Corporal Thompson, of the New South Wales Corps—and a pilot, ready to guide the Venus to her moorings at York Town, ten miles off. On hearing the captain’s account, however, he and Chace decided to return at once in the boat with official dispatches for the lieutenant governor, Lieutenant Colonel Paterson; Thompson and the pilot Evans (a convict) were left to guard the brig and her cargo.

  Previously Governor Philip King’s deputy in Sydney, William Paterson had been sent to Port Dalrymple late in 1804, with some 48 soldiers, 50 free men and convicts, and 36 children to establish a colony in the wilderness. Eighteen months later, ground had been cleared for the settlement and many buildings erected, but it retained the appearance of a military camp.

  Rations were short, troops, settlers and prisoners alike living off kangaroo and emu meat, fresh fish, and victuals from the depleted government store. The military were mostly disgruntled if not openly insubordinate, and the convicts ill-clad, sullen and workshy. Paterson himself, writes the historian Manning Clark, ‘was so racked by gout that he could hardly withstand a breeze of wind’.

  Worried by rumours of heavy drinking, vandalism, and ill-discipline aboard the Venus, Paterson pressed the captain on whether the scuttlebutt was true. Chace reluctantly admitted that many of the crew had been disorderly and had pilfered the stores, while Kelly, formerly mate on an American whaler, was too familiar with the men and had broached and shared a cask of spirits with them.

  Catherine Hagerty not only shared Kelly’s cabin during the voyage, but had thrown overboard a box containing papers belonging to Captain Kemp (Paterson’s deputy). Chace planned to dismiss Kelly on the ship’s arrival at Store Point, the settlement’s wharf.

  Paterson, incredulous that Chace had come ashore leaving Kelly nominally in command, and fearing for the cargo’s safety, ordered him to return with House to the ship directly. House was to take another soldier with him, ‘and upon no account whatever to quit the vessel until he brought her to Store Point’. Instead, the two men—most likely fearing a rough reception by the crew—chose to spend the night aboard the Governor Hunter, a Port Jackson schooner that had sailed with the Venus, and had arrived two days before her.

  Rowing down the harbour next morning to board his ship, Chace and House were dismayed to see the Venus under way and heading out to sea. In Outer Cove they found five members of the crew, forcibly turned off the vessel by Kelly and his chief accomplices, Evans the pilot and Corporal Thompson. Kelly, they said, had knocked down and confined the second mate, Richard Edwards; the rest of the crew, with the three convicts, had freely joined the mutineers.1

  The two women under transfer to Hobart Town had been assigned as domestic servants. Catherine Hagerty was described as ‘middle size, light hair, fresh complexion, much inclined to smile, and hoarse voice’. Catherine had an unusual history, though at the time it went unnoticed and has only now come to light.

  Then aged nineteen, she was one of fourteen Dublin women transported in the Kitty, arriving in Sydney in December 1792; next year she became housekeeper for the colony’s acting Judge Advocate, Richard Atkins. (The judge was in dire need of a housekeeper, Catherine’s predecessor having died while giving birth to their daughter Penelope in February 1793.) Catherine herself was pregnant to a convict from the Kitty, and she gave birth to a son, Henry, in November, whom Atkins seems to have adopted. Two years later she bore Atkins a daughter, Teresa, the three children being raised together in the judge’s household.

  In February 1800 Catherine received an absolute pardon from Governor John Hunter, and with her son Henry sailed for England in HMS Reliance. Such a favour could only have been obtained with Atkins’ influence—after the governor, he was the colony’s most senior civil officer; he also paid for her passage home. Possibly she found her way to Dublin and confronted Mrs Atkins, who was separated from her husband.

  In 1803 Governor King was officially notified that Henry Atkins was returning to his father ( judge Richard Atkins) from London. Catherine’s own return to the colony is not documented, and there is no record of her conviction for a further offence. Her transfer to Van Diemen’s Land in 1806 may have been orchestrated by Mrs Atkins, who after ten years separation arrived in the colony unexpectedly in 1802.

  Finding her husband living with yet another convict housekeeper, Mary Beckwith, Mrs Atkins retained Mary as her maidservant, and took charge of the children (two of them fathered by the judge). Perhaps the presence of Catherine herself in Sydney proved one humiliation too many.

  The second female convict was Charlotte Badger, described as ‘very corpulent, with full face, thick lips, and light hair; has an infant child’. Charlotte was sentenced for house-breaking when aged eighteen and arrived in Port Jackson on the transport Earl Cornwallis in 1801. During the voyage, while Catherine Hagerty shared Kelly’s cabin, Badger cohabited with Lancashire; one report has Captain Chace coming on deck to find the two women dancing lewdly to the applause of the drunken crew.

  Devastated by the loss of the Venus to brazen mutineers, Paterson held Chace and House responsible. The loss of food—including some two and a half tons of flour and five tons of salted pork—and other supplies intended for the settlements at Port Dalrymple and Hobart condemned both settlements to more months of misery and semi-starvation.

  Chace and his men returned to Port Jackson in the Governor Hunter, sent by Paterson with news of the brig’s seizure and an urgent request for fresh supplies. The captain provided descriptions of the mutineers to the authorities, and was also to be disciplined for his own failure. House was relieved of his port duties; some months later he was despatched with four men in a longboat to Sydney to obtain provisions; they never arrived, the boat and its crew presumably lost at sea.

  Chace was more fortunate. Reaching Sydney shortly before the arrival of the new governor, Captain William Bligh, he escaped formal charges for dereliction of duty.

  In almost his last act as governor, King circulated a description of the brig and her captors under a public notice which stated that the mutiny was carried out ‘by force of arms violently and piratically’.

  The notice went on, ‘so that whatsoever port or ports the Venus may be taken into, or met with at sea, it will ensure against any frauds or deceptions that may be put into practice by the pirates; and that they will be taken into custody and delivered to some British authority [and] brought to condign punishment’ (Sydney Gazette, 13 July 1806).

  For nine months the Sydney authorities heard nothing more of the Venus or her ill-assorted crew; then in April 1807 the sealing brig Commerce, commanded by Captain Birnie, returning from New Zealand with 39,000 skins, brought news that the mutineers had called at the Bay of Islands months before. According to Birnie, Kelly and Lancashire had remained behind when the ship sailed, and lived ashore in huts they built themselves. Both had been taken prisoner, Kelly by the master of the Britannia and Lancashire by the master of the Brothers, and were now on their way to England in irons. The Venus was reportedly cruising off the North Island, with no-one on board who understood navigation; a mulatto seaman ( Joseph Redmonds) was said to be in charge.

  Eber Bunker—Kelly’s former captain in the Albion, now master of the whaler Elizabeth—entered Port Jackson the same day and supported Birnie’s account. Meeting the whaler Indispensable off New Zealand, he was told the two women aboard the Venus had joined Kelly and Lancas
hire on shore at the Bay of Islands; one had fallen sick and died, while the other, claimed Bunker, declined his offer to take her and her child away, saying she wanted a passage to America.

  Years later a son of the Maori chief Te Pahi added to the record, stating he had seen six people and plentiful stores landed from the Venus—two men, two women, and two children. These presumably were Kelly and Lancashire; Hagerty and Badger; and the two cabin boys (or perhaps two infant children). According to the chief’s son the men had built a hut for the women and the stores; following Maori custom the chiefs decreed the two women should live apart in their own hut, which were declared ‘tapu-tapu’ (off-limits to men).

  The contemporary accounts broadly agree that, following the mutiny, the Venus under Kelly’s command crossed the Tasman Sea, rounded North Cape, and came to anchor in the Bay of Islands. By now Richard Edwards may well have been disposed of by his shipmates— either cast overboard or abandoned at some landing point.

  With Kelly, Lancashire, both women and the two boys ashore, Redmonds was left with only Richard Thompson, Evans and the Malay cook to crew the vessel—too few to sail her. Possibly he recruited volunteers from the few whites living among the local tribes—runaways and sailors left by a whaler—and even one or two adventure-seeking young Maori.

  The next phase of the Venus’ odyssey remains etched in Maori memory. Redmonds and his motley crew, not daring to lose sight of land, cruised southward down the east coast. She now carried two kidnapped passengers—a young Maori woman abducted from the Bay of Islands, and another from Whangarei Harbour, some 50 miles south. Unknown to the mutineers, the girls were related to two powerful chiefs, Te Morenga and Hongi Hika.

  Following the coast south, Redmonds took the Venus into Hauraki Gulf and anchored in the Firth of Thames (named by Cook in 1769). Here chief Te Haupa, with his warriors and his daughter, came out in his canoe to greet the visitors, as was customary. Climbing aboard, the chief—a powerfully built man who towered over the crew—and his daughter were ushered into the cabin. Noticing the filling sails and the vessel getting under way, he thrust his would-be captors aside, jumped overboard and swam to his canoe, his warriors paddling furiously in the ship’s wake.

  His daughter, less fortunate, joined her compatriots as sex slaves for the crew; later the three women were traded with other tribes, to meet slavery and death at their hands—leading years later to a series of deadly Maori wars along the east coast as the chiefs sought revenge. ‘Such,’ commented the Reverend Samuel Marsden, hearing the story from Te Haupa on his first evangelising mission to New Zealand in 1814, ‘are the horrid crimes which Europeans, who bear the Christian name, commit upon the savage nations!’

  Te Haupa’s account was the last confirmed sighting of the Venus in New Zealand waters. Reports later reached Port Jackson that the brig had been seized by Maori somewhere on the east coast, hauled up on a beach, and the hull burnt for her iron fittings; the crew had been massacred and roasted.

  One hundred and fifty years later the remains of a burnt wooden ship, found at Kennedy Bay, Coromandel Peninsula, were believed to be those of the Venus. Inland, a mulatto living in the Waikato Valley in the early years claimed to be the first ‘white man’ to settle in the district—some say it was Redmonds, perhaps spared by the Maori for the colour of his skin.

  Former Governor King provided a variant account. Writing to Sir Joseph Banks in November 1807, after his return to England, he reported that the master of a British whaler had delivered up six of the mutineers to an east coast chief: ‘ . . . as this piratical attempt was regarded by his majesty in a very different point of view to the crime of stealing a piece of pork, he hung the whole Six, and desired the Captain of the whaler to tell King George & Governor King what he had done—& was sure they would approve of it’.

  Challenges to this accepted view of the fate of the Venus mutineers emerged in the 1950s. A Chilean historian, Professor E.P. Salas of Santiago, discovered in the State Archives a report of the arrival of a small brig, the Venus, captain Benjamin Kelly, flying American colours, in the port of Concepcion in January 1807.2

  Questioned by the Spanish authorities, Kelly claimed to have come from the British colony of New South Wales, where he and a Captain Richardson had purchased the vessel from ‘an English gentleman’; off New Zealand, his crew had been pressed aboard a British warship, leaving him with just two Maori men and seven women to sail the vessel.

  Kelly then headed across the South Pacific for the island of Mas Afuera, where he claimed Richardson had earlier left a sealing gang; the two male Maori now disappeared from his account, to be replaced by seven white sailors (perhaps recruited from runaways on some remote island, or members of the supposed sealing gang). The women, however, remained with the ship.

  Despite the blatant gaps and general implausibility of his story, the Chileans chose to accept it and allowed Kelly to sell the vessel; with the proceeds he returned to the United States. His crew was imprisoned, then released the following year under a general amnesty; whether any of the mutineers were among them is unknown, as is the fate of the Maori women.

  Professor Salas’ discovery gave rise to a re-examination of the mutiny’s aftermath. Clearly neither Kelly nor the Venus had met their end in 1806—but what of the remaining mutineers? A New Zealand journalist and narrative historian, C.W. Vennell, has framed a plausible hypothesis. It seems likely that, after leaving the Firth of Thames, Redmonds returned to the Bay of Islands, selling his Maori captives to local chiefs on the way, and handed the captaincy back to Kelly. There he may have decided to leave the brig and stay with the Maori. With Catherine dead, Kelly had no reason to stay within reach of Port Jackson justice and risked all by making for Chile.

  Nothing further is heard of the two boys or the Malay cook— they may have stayed with Redmonds, or rejoined the brig with Kelly. Lancashire, earlier reported a captive on the Brothers, does not appear to have been on board when she docked at Port Jackson; on balance it seems more likely that he boarded the Venus, along with Charlotte Badger and her child. A decade later Charlotte was reportedly found by an American whaler, the Lafayette, at Vavau in the Tonga group, living with the islanders.

  Tonga lay on Kelly’s route across the Pacific, and he may have landed both Lancashire and Charlotte at the island. Evans and Thompson remain unaccounted for—if not dead, they were possibly among the seven unnamed crew members imprisoned at Concepcion.

  1 The male mutineers were:

  • Benjamin Barnet Kelly: ‘first mate; about 5 feet 7 inches tall, pock-marked, thin visage, brown hair, auburn whiskers, and says he is an American’. Kelly had arrived in New South Wales as a mate on the whaler Albion.

  • Richard Edwards: ‘second mate; about 5 feet 5 inches, fair hair, a very remarkable scar or cut in one cheek’.

  • Joseph Redmonds: ‘seaman; mulatto, 5 feet 6 or 7 inches, stout made, broad nose, thick lips, wears his hair tied in pigtails, and with holes in his ears, being accustomed to wear large earrings’.

  • A Malay cook.

  • Thomas Ford and William Evans: boys (one of them Aboriginal).

  • Richard Thompson: ‘soldier; 5 feet 8 inches; about 27 years of age, fair complexion, and light brown hair’.

  • R.T. Evans: ‘convict, pilot; about 5 feet 7 or 8 inches, stout made, brown hair, broad visage’.

  • John William Lancashire: ‘convict; 5 feet 4 inches tall, sallow complexion, brown hair, a little marked with the small-pox, of emaciated appearance, and by trade a painter and draughtsman’. Transported in 1798 to Port Jackson for theft from a London draper’s shop, Lancashire was caught attempting to escape the colony in 1806, sentenced to 100 lashes and three years hard labour, and banished to Van Diemen’s Land.

  2 The Venus of this story has occasionally been confused with George Bass’ brig of the same name, supposed lost at sea in 1803 on his way to South America.

  ‘Unknown Seas’

  George Horton

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  When this light darkens, and a light comes after,

  Who would not fare afar to unknown seas?

  Oh, many a bark, with perfect winds to waft her,

  Flits on and on to strangest destinies.

  And there is heard for aye the wave’s low laughter

  And music dying on each dying breeze.

  Art not a-weary of this sordid scheming

  And of a world whose constant care is gain?

  Lo, merchant sails on all our seas are gleaming

  And all about us clanks the toiler’s chain;

  But in those regions life itself is dreaming.

  And prudent thoughts are held in high disdain.

  A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for.

  William Shedd, theologian

  A harbour full of bodies

  JIM HAYNES

  Sydney was, yesterday, thrown into a state of great anxiety and alarm, by the report that, during the previous night, a large ship, with a considerable number of passengers, had been wrecked outside the South Reef at the Heads.

  On Saturday, 22 August 1857, this was how the Sydney Morning Herald announced to its shocked and disbelieving readers that the worst tragedy in the city’s 80-year history had occurred. It was a tragedy that would eventually bring down the newly created government of the colony of New South Wales and cause a massive modernising of Sydney Harbour’s shipping operations.

  The ship involved was the Dunbar.

  At 1321 tons, the Dunbar was, at the time, the largest vessel ever built in the Sunderland shipyards in the north of England. She took eighteen months to assemble and cost £30,000. Her hull and frames were oak, her decks were teak and she had a British Lion figurehead. On her arrival in Port Jackson, in 1856, the Sydney Morning Herald called her ‘a splendid vessel’. The Dunbar remained in Sydney for three months and then returned to England. At the end of May 1857, she was ready for her ill-fated second voyage to the colony. Many well-to-do Sydneysiders had visited the Old Country on the Dunbar and were on the homeward voyage.