The Botany Bay Medallion

‘It is true our surgeons had brought out variolous matter in bottles’. Marine Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. F.L. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961

Smallpox inoculation, using either vesicle pus or dried scab-matter was widespread in the British armed forces from the mid 1760s. It served a dual purpose; to infect and protect and to infect and destroy.

In July 1776 during America’s Revolutionary War of Independence (1775-1783), Admiral Richard Howe RN commander of the Royal Navy’s ‘North American Station’  based, ‘the largest fleet in British naval history’, just on four hundred (400) vessels, at Staten Island.

Brazil: In August – September 1787 the ‘First Fleet’ an amphibious expeditionary force of eleven (11) vessels bound for Botany Bay, put into Rio de Janeiro for supplies.

Joseph Jefferies, a North American Indian born on New York’s Staten Island, joined the crew of the ‘First Fleet’s HMS Supply. He was with his ship on Norfolk Island when, in April 1789 ‘a smallpox epidemic struck the Aboriginal population around Sydney’. 

Norfolk Island: Earlier, on the 14th of February 1788, to prevent the French from occupying the island, Phillip took the extraordinary decision to send Lieutenant Phillip Gidley King RN to establish a satellite settlement on the island.

1789 – April, Sydney: ‘A smallpox epidemic struck the Aboriginal population around Sydney. Inexplicably the epidemic did not affect the Europeans, but [Governor] Phillip estimated that it resulted in the death of 50% of the local Aboriginal community’. People of Australia, Macquarie Series, Ed. Bryce Fraser, 1998.

On Jefferies return to Sydney the young adventurer contracted smallpox and died on or about the 10th of May 1789.

1789 – Sydney, April: ‘Not one case of the disorder [smallpox] occurred among the white people either afloat or on shore although there were several children in the settlement; but a North American Indian…took the disease and died’. Samuel Bennett, Australian Discovery and Colonisation, Vol. 1 to 1800, Facsimile edition, 1981

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‘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…)

‘Transportation marked a profound transition in the history of British criminal justice’. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to America 1718-1775, Clarendon Paperbacks, 1990

1603 – England: Following the death of childless Elizabeth Tudor in 1603 her second cousin, King James VI of Scotland, inherited the English Crown and reigned as James I of England and Scotland from 1603 to 1625.

‘Slavery as punishment…a king or magistrate could mercifully spare and enslave a man whose crime had forfeited his right to life’. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black, 1550-1812, Pelican Books 1969  

James the First deemed transportation ‘out of the realm’ for those reprieved death as ‘tempering justice with mercy’. 

‘The strict legality of these measures may be questioned as Blackstone plainly states that no power on earth, except the authority of Parliament, could lawfully send a criminal out of England against his will’. Blackstone Commentaries; adapted by Kerr, 1862, cited in Wilfrid Oldham, Britain’s Convicts to the Colonies, Library of Australian History, 1990

Nevertheless under the auspices of James I an already existing irregular trade transporting convicts to America as slave labour flourished.

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