The Botany Bay Medallion

‘Boswell appeared for the defence, sometimes in well-nigh hopeless cases. He was never deterred, however, either by the poverty of his client, or by the weight of the evidence against him. On the contrary he seems to have been prone to espouse the causes of the more forlorn the more pertinaciously. C.H Currey, The Transportation Escape and Pardoning of Mary Bryant, Angus and Robertson, 1963.

 1792 – July, Old Bailey London: In 1792 James Boswell, prominent diarist and lawyer, appeared for the defence in a most extraordinary case.

His clients five [5] convicts – Mary Bryant, William Allen, James Martin, Nathaniel Lilley and John Butcher known collectively as ‘the Botany Bay escapees’ .

Each was charged, in accordance with Act 4, Geo. I, c. 11 Transportation Act of 1717[18] with ‘return before expiry of sentence…being at large within the kingdom’. If proven ‘return before expiry’ attracted mandatory death.

1792 – 2 July, London: It is not clear how James Boswell came to defend Mary Bryant but as she stood in the dock of the Old Bailey, London’s central Criminal Court, it would be hard to imagine anyone ‘more forlorn’.

1786 – March, London:  Six (6) years earlier –  March 1786 – in the same court Mary Bryant, then Mary Braund (Broad) aged about 18 years stood charged with theft of a silk bonnet. Found guilty and sentenced to death she was reprieved and commuted for transportation ‘beyond the seas’. (more…)

1788 -Sydney Cove, July: ‘Yesterday twenty [20] of the natives came down to the beach, each armed with a number of spears, and seized on a good part of the fish caught in the seine [trawling nets]…several stood at a small distance with their spears poised ready to throw them if any resistance was made’. Governor Arthur Phillip to Under-Secretary Evan Nepean, July 10, 1788, Frank Murcott Bladen, Historical Records of New South Wales

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‘They [Aborigines] are not pleased with our remaining amongst them, as they see we deprive them of fish, which is almost their only support’ . Governor  Philip to Evan  Nepean, September 1788  

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Sydney- 1789, January:  ‘From the intelligence of our friends and connections we had been entirely cut off, no communication whatever having passed with our native country since the 13th of May 1787, the day of our departure from Portsmouth’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961

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 Sydney – 1789, April: ‘An extraordinary calamity was now observed among the natives…pustules similar to those  occasioned by smallpox were thickly spread on the bodies but how a disease, to which our former observations had led us to believe them strangers could have introduced itself, and have spread so widely, seems inexplicable’. Tench. ibid.     

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‘The epidemic not only killed a significant proportion of the indigenous population but also destabilised society…there is no easy answer to the fraught quest of [Aboriginal] clan boundaries in Sydney, particularly because an epidemic in 1789 caused massive disruption of the indigenous peoples in the area‘. Pauline Curby, Randwick [A History], 2010.

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‘It is true our surgeons brought out variolous matter in bottles’. Tench. ibid

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Why did Britain invade New Holland? See: Proximity not Distance drove Britain’s invasion of New Holland.

‘The voyage to and from Chilli and Peru would be Easy and Expeditious for a sailing from Port Jackson…the proximity of a Colony in that Part of the World to the Spanish settlement and the coast of Chile and Peru…makes it an important Post, should it ever be necessary to carry…war into those seas’. Captain John Hunter RN,  Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, 1793, Bibliobaazar ed. 2008

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‘On 17th March 1790, a small paragraph appeared in the Times announcing that William Bligh, fresh from his remarkable voyage across the Pacific, was expected in London later that afternoon. He had arrived in Portsmouth three days earlier’. John Toohey, Captain Bligh’s Portable Nightmare, 1998

1790 –  Portsmouth, March: Eager to give testimony to the Admiralty and put his side of the ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ story Captain William Bligh RN arrived in England on the 14th March 1790.

The small paragraph became a story of blazing headlines. The ‘daffodil effect’  there was much more than Bligh’s side to that story.

1789 – 28 April, mid-ocean: A year earlier, at gun-point in the early hours of the morning, Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, Captain Bligh’s second-in-command on HMS Bounty,forced his commander with eighteen (18) fellow crew off the ship and into a small oared cutter.

Despite having little food and water, scorched by sun and wind, they survived forty-eight (48) days in the open boat.

Bligh made the lives of his fellow castaways a misery as they rowed and nudged their drifting craft towards land.

It must be said however, without Bligh’s excellent celestial navigating skills, none might have survived the 3600 miles (6400km) voyage to Dutch West Timor.

Only one (1) crewman John Norton did not make it to Timor. He was stoned to death when the group landed on Tofra Island to collect water.

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1792 – March, Cape Town: ‘They [Botany Bay escapees] had miscarried in a heroic struggle for liberty after having combated every hardship and conquered every difficulty’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. F.L. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961.

1792 – Cape of Good Hope, March: Captain Tench, aboard HMS Gorgan en-route from Sydney to England with returning ‘First Fleet’ marines  stranded at Sydney Cove since January 1788 was astounded when some of eleven (11) convicts who the previous year (March 1791) had escaped from Sydney, sailed into Table Bay, aboard Hoonwey a Dutch vessel as prisoners of Captain Edward Edwards RN . See: HMS Gorgan and the Botany Bay Escapees

The Admiralty had given Captain Edwards command of HMS Pandora and sent him to Tahiti where the Bounty mutineers had settled. He was to bring them to England to face court-martial. See: Pandora’s Box 

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‘Four [4] companies of Marines landed with the first Europeans to settle in Australia’. Introduction, Dr. Peter Stanley, The Remote Garrison, The British Army in Australia 1788-1870, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1986   

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‘Every morning from daylight until the sun sank did we sweep the horizon  in the hope of seeing a sail’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1961 

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‘Perched precariously on the edge of an impenetrable continent, the threat of starvation constantly present, death was never remote from the tiny colony’. Dr. Bryan Gandevia, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 61 Part 1, 1975

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