Convict's Seaward Escapes

Bolter's and stowaways – the seaward escapes of Sydney convicts.

By Alec Smart

During the early years of the British penal colony experiment in Sydney Cove, only a few convicts escaped custody due to its remote location and inhospitable climate. Among the successful escapees, a few joined Indigenous clans and effectively ‘went native’, whilst those who purloined a boat or joined the crew of a visiting ship had a greater chance of success.

In the early 1800s, Aboriginal trackers in the employment of the police service were frequently utilised to track down runaway convicts that had fled through the bush. Convicts were a vital labour force and therefore State property, and escaped convicts often resorted to banditry and bush ranging, making them a serious threat to new settlers in the expanding colony.

The environment surrounding the Sydney settlement was fraught with threats, from known dangers, such as snakes and sharks, to the unknown, including venomous creatures and poisonous plants not yet recorded by science. 

Several escapees were killed by Aboriginals or just vanished; whilst others perished through starvation. Most of the convicts who escaped the colony’s harsh conditions were recaptured and severely punished. 

Some tried stowing away. At least six convicts were discovered on the First Fleet transport ships Alexander, Friendship, and Prince of Wales as they prepared to depart Sydney return to Britain in mid-1788 after Governor Arthur Phillip ordered a search of all departing vessels

After the Sydney penal colony was founded in January 1788, it was two years and eight months - September 1790 - before the first successful flight to sea in a stolen vessel by escaped convicts John Turwood and his four accomplices (see below). 

Later, when international whaling, sealing and trading ships anchored in coves around Sydney Harbour, including Walsh Bay, Campbells Cove, Moores Wharf (Millers Point) Circular Quay, Watsons Bay and Great Sirius Cove (Mosman Bay), for mooring, repairs, and processing blubber, some were hungry for crew members and often smuggled aboard escaped convicts to supply that demand.

Deterrence

However, by 1803, the problem of runaway convicts hiding aboard ships had become so prevalent that the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser began regularly publishing lists of absconders to alert ship captains and local authorities.

Under the governorship of Lachlan Macquarie (1810–1821) and Ralph Darling (1825–1831), strict regulations were enforced to prevent convicts from escaping the colony as stowaways. Under Governor Darling's 1827 Port Regulations, the masters of departing vessels were required to pay substantial fines - often £500 - if a convict was found to have escaped on their ship.

Masters were often required to lodge a security bond before being granted clearance to leave port, which would be forfeited if they failed to prevent stowaways.

Escaped convicts who were recaptured were locked in solitary confinement cells, made to wear leg-irons, flogged (sometimes with a cat-of-nine-tails’ whip that caused vicious, permanent scars), or banished to Norfolk Island or, from 1803, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). 

The flogging of women was halted under British law in 1791, and although it was phased out for male convicts with the end of transportation in the 1850s, it remained on the statute books in some states for another two centuries.

Ocean escapes

Shortly after convicts were first landed in Australia, two – Ann Smith and Peter Paris ( a Frenchman) – went missing. It was speculated they stowed away on visiting French navigator La Perouse’s two vessels that sailed into Botany Bay a few days after the arrival of the First Fleet.

After six weeks, La Perouse departed Botany Bay in March 1788, but his ships were wrecked on a Vanikoro Island reef in the Solomon Islands and the survivors perished.  

One of the first ‘successful’ nautical escapes from Sydney involved five convicts – highway robber John Turwood and five thieves, John Strutton, George Lee, George Connaway and John Watson –  who, on the night of 26 Sept 1790, stole a small flat-bottomed boat (ie, designed for river use, not the ocean) at Rose Hill. Equipped with a week’s food, some spare clothes, bedding and necessary utensils, they rowed down the Parramatta River and through Sydney Harbour. 

At Watson’s Bay they abandoned the riverboat and, luckily, found a larger, single-masted vessel with a sail, to which they transferred their provisions and headed out through Sydney Heads. Hoping to sail to Tahiti, albeit without any navigational aids  (no compass or sextant), they only made it 150km up the NSW coast and set ashore in Port Stephens.

There they were welcomed into the Worimi Aboriginal clan. Although Strutton died soon afterwards, the others were initiated, learned the language and were taught hunting and fishing techniques. Several married Worimi women and had children.

It was another five years before they returned to Sydney in Aug 1795, and that was through the chance arrival of a British warship, HMS Providence, sheltering from a storm. The captain persuaded the four Britons to return to Sydney, where they were received and excused punishment by acting Lieutenant Governor Captain William Paterson.

Two years later, in September 1797, Turner and Lee escaped custody again with 13 runaway convicts, seizing a cutter ship, the Cumberland, near the mouth of the Hawkesbury River. They forced the captain and crew to disembark – a very unwise move given their lack of maritime navigational skills - then headed out into the Pacific Ocean and vanished forever, probably drowned.

Another remarkable sea escape took place in 1791. On 28 March, Cornish fisherman William Bryant and his wife Mary, seven other convicts and the Bryant’s two children, stole Governor Philip’s cutter and set off for the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Although they were properly stocked with food and navigational aids, it took a month to sail 1000km, and they encountered storms at sea and Aboriginals on shore – some hostile, some welcoming. 

On 5 June, after 69 days and 5,000km, they landed at Kupang, Timor, and were initially accepted as survivors of a shipwreck. However, when the truth came out that they were escaped convicts, they were imprisoned, where Bryant and his son died. 

The remainder were deported to England, with four more dying on the voyage, among them the Bryant’s daughter. Mary and the remaining three convicts were put on trial, but public sympathy spared her deportation back to Australia. In November 1793, the surviving quartet were issued pardons and were freed from custody.

To deter the theft of water craft by convicts, British authorities limited the number of vessels allowed to operate in Sydney and only one shipyard - the King’s Dockyard, established on the Western Shore of Sydney Cove in 1800 – was permitted to build new boats.

Although a number of vessels were constructed at the turn of the century, both in the dockyard and by independent boatbuilders, it wasn’t until 1855 that Australia’s first privately-run dry dock was opened, in Mort Bay, Balmain. 

Convicts

During the convict era (1788–1868), approximately 165,000 convicts were transported to Australia, with about 80% of them convicted of theft, often for minor offences driven by poverty. Petty theft was the most common reason for transportation, with sentences often lasting seven or 14 years for offences involving small, low-value items. 

Many of these offences were committed out of survival-driven poverty in overcrowded, industrialising cities. While these crimes seem minor today, they were treated harshly under the 18th and 19th-century British legal system, which heavily protected property, especially of the affluent. Although termed "minor," many convicts had prior convictions - about 60% of men - or committed these crimes in a way that the legal system determined warranted a severe punishment: 7-years, 14-years, or a life sentence.

Such long sentences that took them away from family and friends inevitably brutalised the convicts and made them more determined to escape.

There were 11 ships in the First Fleet that arrived from Britain when Sydney was founded as a penal colony in January 1788, six of them convict transports containing 775 prisoners (504 men, 192 women, and 13 children) guarded by approximately 247 armed marines.

The Second Fleet in 1790 was notorious for the cruelty inflicted upon the 1006 prisoners – at least two captains of the six vessels had previously transported African slaves across the Atlantic.

Of the 1,038 convicts embarked, 273 died during the voyage (26%) and 486 (47% of those embarked) arrived sick and were hospitalised. Within six months of their arrival, 40% of the convicts were dead.

The Third Fleet of 11 ships that arrived between February and April 1791, including the Mary Ann with its all-female cargo, fared better, and brought over 2,000 convicts. 

For the convicts, many of whom were serving long, harsh sentences for crimes that today would be considered misdemeanours, an opportunity to escape was capitalised upon.

Whaling 

Whaling and sealing companies began regularly operating from Sydney in the 1790s, capitalising on the annual whale migration along the East Coast of Australia between May and November every year.

Captain Cook’s journals from when he visited New Zealand and Botany Bay in 1769-70 noted that whales and seals were plentiful in the southern seas. This prompted entrepreneurs, such as the Enderbvs, to lobby British maritime authorities for access to the South Pacific, until then monopolised by the East India Company.

Whaling ships first arrived in Sydney in 1791. Five of the 11 vessels of the Third Fleet – Active, Britannia, Mary Ann, Matilda and William & Ann, all owned by the merchant Enderby family - began whaling in the South Pacific soon after disembarking their human cargo. 

The Britannia was the first European ship to catch and kill a whale off the Australian coast on 10 November 1791.

In 1792, the Brittania and William & Ann became the first European whaling and sealing boats to operate commercially in New Zealand waters.

Whaling in Tasmania followed and began almost immediately after European settlement in 1803. The first whaling station, Trywork Point (Droughty Point), was established in 1805 on the Derwent estuary.

Whaling became vital to the developing colony, with whale products among Australia’s primary exports prior to the discovery of gold and coal.  

Walsh Bay, on the Dawes Point peninsula in Sydney Harbour, became the busiest port in the South Pacific, processing and exporting a range of whale products. 

This included blubber for lubricants, oil for lanterns and candles; baleen (fine teeth from filter-feeding whales) for umbrella spines, brushes and women’s corsets; meat and organs, often dried and used for pet food; and bones and teeth, carved into figurines, knife handles and decorative items. 

Convicts and whalers

The whaling industry, which required a crew of up to 40 for the larger ships and barks, and around 20 for the smaller brigs and schooners, often recruited escaped convicts as cabin crew. 

The whaling vessels spent long months at sea, and until whales were sighted, the journeys could be monotonous, with the on-board hierarchy very rigid. The pursuit and capture of whales was extremely dangerous, involving six-man crews launched in rowing boats (four oarsmen, a boat-header who steered and commanded, and a harpoon thrower). They manoeuvred alongside the moving leviathan and thrust harpoons attached to ropes into its exposed flank.

The crew’s wages were dependent on the sale of the numerous parts that the whale was dissected or rendered down into. After the ship owner paid expenses and took his commission, there mightn’t be much left of the sale proceeds to distribute among the ship hands. Often sailors were paid in advance and remained indebted to the company if the season’s catch was poor. 

This meant it was a very unattractive option for professional sailors, but acceptable work for escaped convicts and other miscreants evading authorities, especially those with maritime skills.

American whalers began anchoring in Chowder Bay below Middle Head from the late 1820s. The first dedicated whaling station on the Australian mainland (previously the sea mammals were dismembered on board the ships or towed to beaches) opened at Twofold Bay (near Eden) in 1828. 

Mosman became renowned as a centre for whaling after the opening of Sydney’s first commercial whaling station in Mosman Bay (then Great Sirius Cove) by Archibald Mosman and John Bell in 1833. By 1837, there were 42 whaling ships based in Sydney, employing around 1300 crew.

It soon became known that American whalers and merchant trading ships had enabled the disappearance of fleeing convicts. 

For example, in 1796, Thomas Muir, a Scottish political reformer and lawyer sentenced to 14 years transportation to Australia for sedition, escaped Sydney on board the American fur trading ship Otter, bound for Vancouver.

As late as 1840, Charles Dolphus, an English convict, stowed away aboard an American whaling ship and disembarked in Fiji after breaking off his leg irons. He eventually made his way back to Britain, was arrested and jailed for four years, but later wrote a popular biography of his experiences.

The frequency of convicts escaping on American ships created diplomatic tensions between the British and American authorities. This threat to maritime trade prompted the United States to appoint a consul to Sydney, James Hartwell Williams, in 1836, who was specifically tasked with controlling renegade seafarers. A consulate office opened in Sydney in 1839, ensuring American ships did not disrupt local colonial laws by harbouring runaway convicts.

Decline of transportation

In the early 1800s, New Zealand was also a magnet for escaped convicts because it was not yet colonised by a European nation. Most of the escapees worked in maritime trade, especially the seal and whaling industry. Many worked for Sydney merchants who dropped gangs on islands to harvest seal skins and oil for export to China and England. 

The Sydney Herald estimated in 1837 that there were between 200 and 300 former convicts residing in New Zealand, a large proportion of them ‘bolters’.

The last convict ship to Sydney, the General Palmer, arrived in 1850 (although transportation officially ended in 1868 in Fremantle, Western Australia). By then the whaling and sealing industry had declined due to over-production and a severe reduction in wildlife from unsustainable mass slaughter. 

The Great Sirius Cove whaling station in Sydney Harbour had already closed following the bankruptcy of Archibald Mosman and his business partners in 1844.

In 1851, discovery of gold in Ophir, near Bathurst, triggered a major ‘gold rush’ with the arrival of thousands of immigrant speculators, and Australia’s economy transitioned from marine to agricultural and forever changed.