Buckley's Chance

by Garry Linnell

36. ‘We can shew a peasantry of heroes …’ The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volumes 1–2. 1837, p.403.

  37. ‘The faces of the bravest often change colour …’ Hughes, Ben. Conquer or Die!: Wellington’s Veterans and the Liberation of the New World. Osprey Publishing. 2010.

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  38. Good looking man this Collins … Descriptions of David Collins from Currey, John. David Collins, a Colonial Life. The Miegunyah Press, 2000.

  39. The wife of a convict, fair to the eye … Ibid; Tipping.

  40. ‘I have always thought that nature designed me …’ Letter to his father, 12 September 1791. Collins papers. Vol. 1.

  41. ‘I have just had two letters from my father …’ 8 June 1775. Ibid.

  42. The Queen had been married off to her first cousin … Ward, Adolphus William. Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1890. Vol. 9.

  43. It had been a 16-year-old David Collins … Currey.

  44. ‘… a collection of old, worn out, useless men …’ Collins letter to Lord Hobart, 4 March 1804. Historical Records of Australia, Series III, Vol. 1.

  45. ‘I think and hope that my evil genius …’ Collins letter to his mother, 23 December 1802.

  46. Collins has his looks and standing … Shortly before the departure of the Calcutta, Collins filled out his final will leaving his sparse assets and funds to his wife, Maria. His appointment as Lieutenant Governor of the Port Phillip venture followed years of behind the scenes manoeuvring. Patronage was instrumental to promotion within the British government at this time and Collins had been corresponding for years with the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, who constantly hinted that Collins was on the cusp of receiving an important role. But nothing ever materialised and when Lord Sydney died unexpectedly, Collins turned, among others, to Sir Joseph Banks. In a letter to Banks he wrote: ‘I have at all times considered your protection, had not the unexpected death of my patron, Lord Sydney, at a moment when his influence was about to be extended in my favour, compelled me to throw myself on you, Sir, for the patronage I have so untimely lost in his Lordship.’ Banks, who was known to have the ear of King George III, replied, ‘… I have my doubts of being able to effectually serve you when a man of Lord Sydney’s interest has so long solicited your cause in vain.’ Letter to Banks, 8 July 1800. State Library of NSW. Series 72.017. Banks reply to Collins, 8 July.

  47. Have you seen that small boy … Tipping; Anderson, Hugh. Out of the Shadow: the Career of John Pascoe Fawkner; Billot, C. P. The Life and Times of John Pascoe Fawkner; Fawkner, John Pascoe. Melbourne’s Missing Chronicle: Being the Journal of Preparation for Departure to and Proceeding to Port Phillip.

  48. Desperate to stay out of the prison rooms below … Tipping.

  49. ‘A woman whom I did not know …’ Langhorne, George. Reminiscenses of James [sic] Buckley …

  50. Compared to Captain Mazot’s troubles … Accounts of the trial of William Buckley and William Marmon taken from the Sussex Weekly Advertiser, issues 2 August 1802 and 9 August 1802, and Tipping, Marjorie.

  51. Hanging is not the swift form of execution … Public hangings did not stop in Britain until 1868. At the time of Buckley’s trial, there were few standard procedures in place for executions. Variously sized ropes and knots were employed by executioners and full and partial decapitations were not unusual. A standardised method of estimating the drop required – based on the weight of the victim’s body – was not introduced until late in the second half of the 19th century.

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  52. ‘… asking for additional, often-used letters …’ Currey.

  53. ‘Nancy must mind her spelling …’ Collins letter to Henrietta, 11 November 1776. Collins Papers. Vol. 1.

  54. ‘Duncan Campbell had been up to his usual tricks …’ Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. Campbell had been a merchant seaman and ship owner who earned five pounds for each convict he took to America and on the return leg imported large amounts of tobacco. His niece was married to Captain William Bligh, who at one stage worked for Campbell. After the War of Independence Campbell managed England’s prison hulks for 25 years. Campbell, Charles. The Intolerable Hulks: British Shipboard Confinement, 1776–1857.

  55. The sheep had only been slaughtered the night before … Hughes.

  56. … the ship’s skipper, Daniel Woodriff … This was Woodriff’s second journey to Australia, the first in 1782 on the Kitty. He joined the Navy at the age of six as a servant to his uncle, a master gunner on the HMS Ludlow Castle. Australian Dictionary of Biography.

  57. ‘When any of our comrades died …’ Hughes.

  58. ‘The misery I saw amongst them is indescribable …’ This report was provided by the Reverend Johnson. Historical Records of NSW 1, Part 2, pp.387–8.

  59. ‘I find that I am spending the prime of my life …’ Collins letter. 17 October 1791.

  60. ‘On a cold autumn morning at Sydney Cove …’ Currey.

  61. ‘The treatment I received on the passage …’ Morgan.

  62. There will be some who will become suspicious about Bromley … Tuckey, J. H. An Account of a Voyage to Establish a Colony …

  63. William Appleton is barely four feet tall … Tipping.

  64. Steel was sent down the same day … ibid.

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  65. Another one dead … Knopwood, Robert. Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood, 1803–1838.

  66. ‘Unto Almighty God …’ From the Anglican Book of Modern Prayer, instructions for burial at sea.

  67. ‘… mere disability brought on by seasickness.’ Pateshall, Nicholas. Journal.

  68. … will regard Knopwood as a fraud … Fawkner, John Pascoe. Melbourne’s Missing Chronicle.

  69. Nelson was immediately hit by a musket ball … Hibbert, Christopher. Nelson, a Personal History. 1994.

  70. He’s a tall 27-year-old Irishman clinging to handsomeness. Hingston, Richard. Captain Tuckey of the Congo; Dictionary of Irish Biography.

  71. ‘Among the convicts on board …’ Tuckey.

  72. One estimate puts the numbers of death at sea … Drymon, M. M. Disguised as the Devil: How Lyme Disease Created Witches and Changed History. Whythe Avenue Press. 2008.

  73. A 16-year-old forger from London … Tipping.

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  74. ‘This bay and the harbour in general …’ Historical Records of Port Phillip. General orders of David Collins. 20 October 1803.

  75. After entering the Bay the Calcutta had turned right … Descriptions of the Sullivan Bay settlement taken from Tipping, Currey, Hughes and the journals of Tuckey, Pateshall and Knopwood.

  76. ‘They appeared to have a perfect knowledge of the use of firearms …’ Tuckey.

  77. The feeling appears to be mutual … Ibid.

  78. Within moments … Ibid.

  79. ‘I am sorry to observe that in general …’ quote from Labilliere, Francis Peter. Early History of the Colony of Victoria. 1878.

  80. ‘When I viewed so many of my fellow men …’ Tuckey.

  81. ‘Tis Liberty alone …’ From The Task, Book V. The Winter Morning Walk.

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  82. ‘The attempt was little short of madness …’ Morgan.

  83. ‘On Christmas Eve when revelries were in full swing …’ The exact number of convicts who escaped along with Buckley remains unclear. Only the diary of the Reverend Knopwood includes the names, but his accuracy has always been questionable, along with his spelling and capacity for correctly identifying people. In his journal entry for Sunday 25 December, Knopwood writes: ‘Last night a most daring robbery was committed by some person or persons, in the Commissary’s marque. While he was in bed they stole a gun which was hung up near the side of the bed, and took a pair of boots which were at the bed side. The sentry saw a man come from it, but thought he was his servant. The hospital tent was likewise robbd.’ The following day he notes that at 11 pm, ‘the drum beat to arms by reason of some of the convicts had made their escape.’ His entry for Tuesday 27 December, says tha
t at 9 pm ‘6 convicts endeavourd to make their escape; they were beset by a look-out party and one man shot, very much wounded.’ It seems the most likely date of the escape was the evening of 26 December, not Christmas Day which has been previously widely mentioned. On Saturday 31 December, Knopwood names missing convicts as ‘Mac Allennan, George Pye, Pritchard, M. Warner, Wm. Buckley; Charles Shaw, wounded and brought to the camp; Page, taken same time when Shaw was shot, G. Lee, and Wm. Gibson.’ There was no convict listed on the Calcutta as ‘M Warner’ and it is more than likely Knopwood has confused the name ‘Marmon’. Of the others, Lee and Gibson had escaped on 12 December. Gibson eventually returned to camp and informed Collins of a large river to the north (the Yarra). Buckley himself in Life and Adventures says there were ‘four of us’ who escaped. But in 1837 he told the Reverend George Langhorne that he had made known his plan to escape to ‘two other prisoners.’ He also mentions using a boat during the escape but there is no record of this taking place. With McAllennan and Marmon eventually returning to camp, it would seem that George Pye and James Taylor were the most likely prisoners to have remained with Buckley until they, too, left him and were never seen again.

  84. ‘Pity the delusion which some of the prisoners …’ General Orders, David Collins, Sullivan Bay. 31 December 1803.

  85. ‘It is by far the most brutal punishment handed out …’ Currey. The two Marines flogged were James Reay and Robert Andrews.

  86. ‘How is it possible that strong hardy men …’ General orders. David Collins, Sullivan Bay. 20 January 1804.

  87. ‘Some of the most wounding will come from the acid pen …’ William Bligh sailed with Captain James Cook on the Resolution. In 1789 he was captain of the Bounty when crew members mutinied; Bligh and 18 loyalists were placed in a 23-foot boat and spent 47 days sailing to Timor, 6700 kilometres away. Bligh arrived in New South Wales as its fourth governor and left in 1809 following the Rum Rebellion – the only armed takeover of an Australian government. He arrived in Hobart seeking support from Collins. But the pair did not get along and Bligh wrote damaging letters to England about Collins and his conduct. Another high-profile critic of Collins was Joseph Foveaux, who told authorities in London that in Hobart ‘a system of the most unexampled profusion, waste and fraud, with respect to money, and stores, had been carried on, almost without the affectation of concealment and sense of shame’.

  88. Two years later, recovering from a cold … Death of Collins, his burial and disinterment from Currey, John. David Collins: A Colonial Life.

  PART II

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  89. ‘The whole affair was, in fact, a species …’ Life and Adventures.

  90. Your companions, starving and bitter … Both were never heard from again, although Buckley said he learned years later that one of them had been murdered by an Aboriginal tribe after mistreating one of their women. According to Life and Adventures, his two companions left him after watching the Ocean preparing to leave for Van Diemen’s Land. But Buckley told the Reverend Langhorne that one of his fellow escapers parted from him when they reached the Yarra River, while another came to live with him about six months after he began living with the Wadawurrung. But the man’s ‘faithless conduct to the Blacks and dissolute behaviour towards their women’ forced him to part ways once more with his fellow convict. ‘He left and I never heard of him more except by a vague report that he had been killed by the Blacks.’

  91. ‘I turned a deaf ear …’ Narrative of events following Buckley’s escape drawn from Life and Adventures and Reminiscenses of James Buckley with the Reverend George Langhorne.

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  92. The voices belong to three Aboriginal men … Life and Adventures.

  93. There was a stubborn bastard on the Calcutta with you … An excellent description of the biology of the shipworm Teredo navalis and the havoc it wreaked on ocean vessels can be found in an article by Sarah Gillman of Hakai magazine. ‘How a ship-sinking clam conquered the ocean’ has been reproduced online in www.smithsonianmag.com, 5 December 2016. Wikipedia also contains a concise description of its abilities.

  94. The master of the Cinque Ports is Alexander Selkirk … The Cinque Ports was an English galley. It sank a month after Selkirk warned Stradling that it was infested with worms. It had been used by Sir William Dampier as part of an expedition in 1701.

  95. … Stradling has had enough of Selkirk’s complaints … In one version of events Selkirk told Stradling he would rather be on that island than on a leaking boat, a wish Stradling immediately granted. In 2005 an archaeological expedition to the Juan Fernandez Islands discovered a fragment of a nautical instrument researchers believe belonged to Selkirk. Their findings were published as ‘Excavation at Aguas Buenas, Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile, of a gunpowder magazine and the supposed campsite of Alexander Selkirk, together with an account of early navigational dividers.’ Takahasi, D. and others, Post Medieval Archeology Journal. Vol. 41. 2007.

  96. When Selkirk is rescued almost four and a half years … Selcraig, Bruce. Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005.

  97. The skipper of the Duke, Woodes Rogers … Rogers, Woodes. A Cruising Voyage round the World (1712). Reprinted in the The Seafarer’s Library, 1928.

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  98. Time you learned something about these people … Descriptions of the origins of Aboriginal Australians drawn from a variety of sources, including Broome, Richard; Frankel, David; Gammage, Bill.

  99. They have hunted diprotodons … Diprotodons were enormous marsupials related to wombats and koalas, believed to have fallen extinct 46,000 years ago. Aboriginal art rock in Queensland is said to depict the creatures and some researchers have suggested the animal may have inspired legends about the mythical Bunyip.

  100. Let’s call them the Very First Fleet … One of the latest studies into the arrival of Aborigines in Australia appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 21 August 2018, by a team of Australian researchers. Another, which studied mitochondrial genomes from historical Aboriginal hair samples, appeared in Nature, March 2017. A summary of some of the work appeared in The Conversation, 7 August 2018.

  101. ‘… explorers will leave behind a scattering of African coins …’ Donnelly, Paul, Silkatcheva, Ana. The Marchinbar Find – Medieval Travels to Australia from Africa? Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 9 July 2014.

  102. ‘… miserablist people in the world …’ Dampier, William. A New Voyage round the World (1697).

  103. For many there is Bunjil … Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Victorians.

  104. ‘I was soon afterwards transferred …’ Morgan.

  105. In Central Victoria the Morpor people … Dawson, James. The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria. Read Books. 2010.

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  106. It’s one of the reasons you will turn to John Morgan … Descriptions of Morgan from Bolger, Peter; Australian Dictionary of Biography.

  107. ‘… slowly pacing along the middle of the road with his eyes vacantly fixed …’ Bonwick, James. The Wild White Man.

  108. Born in Surrey … Featherstone, Guy. James Bonwick entry in Australian Dictionary of Biography.

  109. ‘We saw a party of natives plied with drink …’ Bonwick. The Wild White Man.

  110. ‘In order to exist at all he must have had qualities of shrewdness …’ Tudehope, C.M.

  111. Take the surviving crew members of the Essex … Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851 and based his character Captain Ahab on one of the survivors of the Essex, Owen Chase. In 2000, another retelling of the story, Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex won the National Book Award and was turned into an acclaimed movie.

  112. They had originally planned to make their way to the Derwent … One of the best accounts of the escape from Macquarie Harbour and subsequent cannibalism can be found in Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. Pearce’s adventure
s were fictionalised in Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life and featured in the 2009 movie, Van Diemen’s Land.

  113. … his skull being sent to the prolific American author and scientist … Samuel Morton was a supporter of polygenism, which claimed the Bible proved that each human race had been created separately. He amassed a collection of thousands of human craniums and published claims that the cranial capacity of Caucasians was larger than that of other races. Wade, Nicholas. Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim. The New York Times. 13 June 2011.

  114. ‘… an unending supply of eels (buniya) …’ Wadawurrung words and definitions from the Wadawurrung language app, produced in partnership with the Wathaurung Aboriginal Corporation and the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages.

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  115. The Lady Nelson is an 80-ton brig … from Ida, Lee. The Logbooks of the ‘Lady Nelson’ with the Journal of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant. Grafton and Co. 1915; Shaffer, Irene. A Short History of the Lady Nelson. www.ladynelson.org.au/history/short-history.

  116. Cook is sailing with a set of ‘hints’ … Moore, Peter. Endeavour: the Ship and the Attitude That Changed the World. Vintage. 2018.

  117. This is a time when Europeans … The phrase ‘noble savage’ first appeared in English in The Conquest of Granada, a play in 1672 by the poet John Dryden. It became a regular literary trope throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

  118. ‘He was a shrewd, sensible, ingenious man …’ Beaglehole, J. C. The Life of Captain James Cook. Stanford University Press. 1974.

  119. From the deck of the Endeavour … Banks, Sir Joseph. The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks/April 1770.

  120. Stories are already being passed from clan to clan … Moore.

  121. The Prince of Wales is one of the first to employ it … The phrase ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ was first used in print in 1811. www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/mutton-dressed-as-lamb.html.

  122. ‘The woods are free from underwood …’ Wharton, William James Lloyd. Captain Cook’s journal during his first voyage round the world. Cambridge University Press. 2014.