Bryant, Mary (1765–?)

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Bryant, Mary (1765–?)

English highway robber and one of only a handful of convicts to escape from the notorious penal colony at Botany Bay. Name variations: Mary Bryant of Fowey; Mary Braund or Broad. Born Mary Broad in Cornwall, England, and baptized on May 1, 1765 (birth date unknown); death date unknown; daughter of William (a mariner) and Grace Broad; married Will Bryant; children: Charlotte Spence (b. September 8, 1787); Emmanuel (b. March 1790).

In 1776, while the British navy was occupied on the other side of the Atlantic in a war against American colonists, the Spanish and French fleets sided with the Americans and preyed on British merchant mariners. As a result, Cornish fishermen were kept from leaving port, and a poor diet killed many in the area of Cornwall. By 1785, Britain had lost the war, mad George III was king, and taxes to pay for the failed conflict rose 20% in five years. There was a land tax, a candle tax, a salt tax (in an area where salt was used to cure fish), even a tax on each window in a household. Thus, citizens were not only starving but living in the dark, having blocked out half the windows in their homes. Employing legal chicanery, landowners grabbed up land, driving out small farmers. Villages were deserted, miners laid off. The disparity between poor and rich grew, with its inevitable creation of a large underclass. Writes Judith Cook in To Brave Every Danger: "The dispossessed young, with no work, no prospects and no homes, turned not surprisingly to crime."

Mary Bryant, born Mary Broad, grew up in the coastal town of Fowey, near Cornwall, where her mariner father taught her to navigate a small sailing boat with skill. She had an older sister Dolly and a younger brother; two other siblings died in infancy. Except for skeletal facts from the parish register, Bryant's life does not emerge for the historian until age 20 when she and two accomplices were apprehended for highway robbery.

In the tumultuous days of 18th-century England, highway robbery and smuggling were two of Cornwall's major occupations. Smugglers were known as free traders. As the government cracked down, more and more crimes, nearly 200, became capital offenses punishable by hanging; these included highway robbery, sodomy, criminal bankruptcy, forgery, armed smuggling, sacrilege, picking pockets for anything more than a shilling, shoplifting for anything valued over five shillings, cutting down a landowner's tree, and escaping from transportation. Citizens avidly read of each day's hangings. On October 9, 1782, the London Evening Post reported:

Yesterday morning about 9 o'clock the following malefactors were brought out of Newgate and carried to Tyburn in three carts where they were executed according to their sentences, viz: Henry Berthand, for feloniously impersonating one, Michael Groves; … Charles Woolett, for robbing Bernard Cheale on the highway of a metal watch; … Charlotte Goodall and John Edmonds, for stealing from the house of Mrs Fortescue at Tottenham where Goodall lived as a servant, a quantity of linen. … They all behaved very penitent.

At 20, Mary Bryant was 5′4″, slim with long dark hair, grey eyes, a good complexion, who had offered "forest dweller" as place of origin, or so it said on her dossier. During the month of January 1786, Mary and two accomplices, Catherine Fryer and Mary Haydon (alias Mary Shepherd), held up one Agnes Lakeman who was walking on the main road to Plymouth. It is thought that Lakeman must have resisted because Bryant attacked the woman before absconding with a silk bonnet and valuables worth nearly £12. All three were caught, jailed, and brought before the Exeter Lent Assizes (a court session). On March 20 or 21, Bryant was sentenced to be hanged.

It was tradition at the end of the Exeter Assizes for judges to review the cases and arbitrarily reprieve some of those condemned. Mary Bryant and her accomplices were spared in this fashion; instead, all were given seven-years transport. "While there was no sentiment over hanging women, unless they were pregnant and could 'plead their bellies,'" writes Cook, "it is certain that in some cases women had their death sentences commuted to transportation for a very basic reason: they could service the male convicts and so keep them quiet. From young teenagers without any sexual experience to middle-aged women, all were classed as whores once they became convicted felons."

With the jails crammed, criminals were transported to penal colonies outside the country, and England was desperately casting about for a new place to offload its malefactors. Previously, felons had been sent to America or Nova Scotia, but most of them had joined the insurrecting colonists. The climate of Africa had proved prohibitory, with convicts dying by the gross as soon as they were put ashore. As options dimmed, it was recommended that felons be kept along England's shore, anchored in obsolete warships, so that convicts could then be used constructively. Shackled waist to ankle, they were brought ashore under an overseer to work on roads and quays (stone wharves), or as pile drivers. Soon, the warships too would be filled to bursting. Mary Bryant was assigned to the first prison ship to take women, the Dunkirk, which was anchored off the coast of Devenport. Writes Cook:

In no time male and female prisoners were separated and then hustled below to their quarters, the hulk "stink" hitting them in the face like a physical blow, the stench made up of closely packed, unwashed bodies, rotting food, stagnant bilge-water and "the necessaries," the buckets in which they had to urinate and defecate which were only emptied once a day. … The headroom was hardly enough to allow a moderately sized person to stand upright.

Soon aware that sexual favor would earn her favors in return—a wash, a comfortable bunk, decent food—Bryant became the mistress of one of the officers.

The off-shore prisons became floating breeders for infectious diseases. With Members of Parliament beginning to fear possible epidemics on shore, Sir Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain James Cook's voyage, advocated the foundation of a penal settlement in Australia. It was decided that a colony be established at Botany Bay, on the coast of New South Wales, and Lord Thomas Sydney, the home secretary, chose Arthur Phillip as the colony's first governor. After receiving his appointment on October 12, 1786, Phillip immediately organized the expedition. Mary Bryant was newly pregnant when she was put on board the Charlotte of the First Fleet on January 7, 1787. Also aboard was a professional fisherman named Will Bryant, who had been sentenced two years previously to seven-years transport for smuggling, and Watkin Tench, a captain-lieutenant in the British marines and a liberal advocate of the teachings of Rousseau and Voltaire. Tench, assigned as a prison guard, was not only solicitous of the convicts but would keep a journal. He wrote that the pregnant Cornish girl was intelligent, mysterious, and decidedly independent.

On another of the ships, the Lady Penrhyn, which carried only female prisoners, a large portion of the women on board were servants who had stolen from their mistresses. One had taken two flat irons, two forks, and two spoons. Another had taken some cheese, bacon, butter, raisins and some flour. Dorothy Handland , age 82, was being transported for perjury. On arrival to Botany Bay, she would hang herself, the first recorded suicide in Australian history. Elizabeth Beckford , 70, had also snatched cheese from the pantry of her mistress. Elizabeth Hayward , 13, had stolen a gown, bonnet and cloak from the wife of her master to whom she had been apprenticed.

For four more months the ships sat in port while the convicts lay in constant motion below decks, nauseated by the swaying and the stench, not allowed up for fresh air and daylight. There were food and clothing shortages, scarcity of tools, no medical supplies, and no funds available for purchases and payrolls for the marine guards. Arthur Phillip, realizing that his superiors were more interested in the removal of the convicts than their health or safety, engaged in many bureaucratic confrontations. On April 25, 1787, the situation improved when the government issued Phillip his formal commission and instructions.

On Sunday, May 13, his fleet of 11 ships sailed from Portsmouth harbor. The convicts and their supplies were carried in the Charlotte, Lady Penrhyn, Alexander, Scarborough, Friendship, Prince of Wales and the storeships Fishburn, Borrowdale, and Golden Grove. The admiralty had also commissioned the H.M. Sirius, Phillip's flagship, and its tender-ship Supply to convoy the transport fleet. The number of convicts on the First Fleet varies in numerous records, but approximately 729 set sail. This number included about 565 men, 153 women and 11 children. The marine detachment included 19 officers, 192 enlisted men, 30 wives and 12 children. Once en route, Phillip allowed those who behaved to be relieved of their shackles and given some fresh air on deck at regular intervals. The convicts, including Mary and Will, became acquainted. Tench continued to be impressed by Mary, noting in his journal that she was sensible and practical.

Phillip plotted an indirect route that included supply stops in the Canary Islands, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town. On September 8, 1787, the fleet's medical records noted: "Mary Broad, a convict, was delivered of a fine girl." When the fleet reached Cape Town in October, the baby was christened Charlotte Spence on the 28th by a minister on board; since Mary would not offer the father's name, the baby was listed as a bastard. The last leg of the trip was plagued by gales. After eight months, 15,000 miles away from home, shore was sighted on January 19, 1788. En route, 56 had died.

Botany Bay proved anything but hospitable. The original Australians—the Aborigines—whose land it was, greeted the ships' arrival with an instinctive "Warra!" (go away). It was summer and incredibly hot. Devoid of protection from the rough seas, vegetation consisted of eucalyptus trees, cabbage palms, and stubby bushes. There was no grassland, no building materials, poor soil for farming, and no edible fruit.

Phillip looked further, arriving in a cove called Port Jackson, which he renamed Sydney Cove. While the women remained on board for another two weeks, the male convicts came ashore on January 26 to clear the land, pitch tents, and offload supplies. Will Bryant was given fish hooks, a net, and the small boats available, and asked to start the colony's fishing industry. About to wed Mary and take on responsibility for her child, he agreed to his assignment on condition that he be given a hut for his family rather than be quartered with other convicts. He also mentioned to others that he did not deem such a marriage binding back in England once his sentence was up, though Mary was unaware of this.

Arthur Phillip was concerned about putting the women ashore, and his fears were tragically well-founded. He had been warned that there were not enough women convicts to service the sexual needs of the marines, sailors, and male convicts. The women disembarked on February 6. Writes Cook:

[I]t was a night of almost unimaginable horror. Young virgin girls in their mid-teens, old women long past childbearing age, all were fair game. Men queued up to gang rape victims held down for them by their roaring, laughing friends. With every realization of the strength of sexual appetites which had been denied any real relief, it is still chilling to read the justification for what happened (that is, if it was thought worthy of mention at all) in the books of the predominantly male historians. What happened was "only natural," "only to be expected," even some of the more liberal-minded concluded it was probably for the best. Thwarted, the men might well have taken their frustration out on the guards. … Morning dawned on a desolate scene. The ground of Sydney Cove was nothing but a morass of red mud. Bruised, battered women, covered in mud and blood, sat shivering in the cold, some moaning, some weeping, some hardly able to walk.

Incensed, Phillip called the prisoners together and warned them that stealing food would bring mandatory death and any man who forced himself on a woman would be shot on sight.

Those women who had previously paired up with men and had posted banns for marriage were more fortunate. Mary, now thin and reserved, though she spoke in the vernacular of the felons, married Will Bryant on Sunday, February 10. Unable to write, she signed her name on the church register with a cross.

As hunger became the constant companion of both convicts and officers, scurvy, cholera, dysentery, and influenza ran rampant, spreading to the Aborigines. Phillip appealed to Britain for additional supplies and for free farmers to settle and teach agricultural methods to the convicts. During the wait for London's response, he established a vigorous system of rationing. He dispatched the Sirius to South Africa for food, moved many of the convicts to a second farm at Rose Hill and, pursuant to his orders, sent some convicts to establish a colony on the reputed fertile soil of Norfolk Island.

Though constantly hungry and concerned with feeding her small child, Mary lived a better life than most, thanks to her industry and that of her husband. They subsisted on a diet of fish until February 1789 when, with colony stores further depleted, Will lost the privilege of keeping a small portion of his catch. Where the couple had previously been mindful of authority, now Will secretly held back some fish for eating and barter. As the Bryants had been the subject of envy for other convicts, someone informed the judge-advocate and embellished the criminal details. Will was sentenced to "receive 100 Lashes; to be deprived of the Direction of the Fish and the Boat; and to be turned out of the Hut he is now in alone with his family." Mary and her daughter were moved to the huts of the other women. She would later report that she endured only with the knowledge that she would attempt an escape.

Though the colony had momentary relief when the ship Sirius arrived with fresh stores, Phillip was soon desperately in need of fish; he returned the Bryants to their hut, and Will was allowed to take Phillip's boat, a cutter with three sets of oars and a sail, and push further and further out to sea for greater catches. Around March 31, 1790, Mary gave birth to a son, called Emmanuel.

Though Will's sentence was up in March 1791 and Mary's in March 1793, the two began to plan their escape when they received news of an impending Third Fleet with 1,000 more convicts and scant supplies. England had made no provision for bringing transports back home, and the Bryants knew that, unless they acted, they would be in New South Wales for life. They needed a boat to get them to the nearest landfall, the Dutch East Indies, 3,000 miles away in unchartered waters. Mary urged Will to take Phillip's boat. It is supposed they had outside help from the Aborigines, whom they had befriended, most especially the colony's interpreter Bennelong, whose children played with little Charlotte Bryant, and whose wife and sister visited Mary. Soon Will was taking Bennelong and his family on fishing trips, possibly learning more about the currents and reefs along the Eastern coast. Then the Bryants chose seven other men to join them in the escape.

Will also made friends with Detmer Smith, captain of the Dutch vessel Waaksamheyd (The Good Lookout), who put into port at Sydney harbor and was shunned because he had negotiated a hard bargain to use his ship as charter to help the ailing colony. Mary offered to do the captain's laundry, invited him to dinner in their hut, and was seen in Smith's company quite often. By February, Smith was listening to their escape plans with sympathy. Mary negotiated for a navigational quadrant and a compass, while Will bartered for rice, saltpork and flour. Smith threw in two old muskets and some ammunition, a 10-gallon barrel of water, and a chart. The Bryants told the others to horde their rations, and Will built a secret cache in their hut under a false floor. They would have to leave by the end of March before the seasonal gales began.

On the eve of March 28, 1791, Mary—with her daughter Charlotte, now three and a half, and Emmanuel, still at her breast—snuck down to the cove with Will and their entourage. It is said that Bennelong swam out and cut the cutter off its mooring in deep water and brought it closer to shore. Provisions were stowed, children were put on board, and, at midnight, they silently glided out of the harbor with the tide. When they rounded the point, they hoisted sail, leaving behind no vessel in the colony large enough to pursue them.

Two journals would recount the Bryant voyage, one left behind by Will and one by James Martin, another escapee. Martin's manuscript was found in the 1940s in a collection of papers belonging to Jeremy Bentham. In his travels, William Bligh came upon Will Bryant's journal in October 1792 and commissioned a scribe to copy it; all that remains of Will's account is the quarter that the scribe managed to copy.

From all reports, once the convicts left the land, Mary's courage sustained them. Though they owed their survival to Will's seamanship, he would often be discouraged, while Mary never lost heart. Will and Mary shared the navigation with two others, sailing for miles along the length of the eastern coast of Australia, navigating between the Great Barrier Reef and shore, through the Torres Strait, then turning west toward the uncharted Arafura Sea. Because it sat so low with passengers, the cutter leaked continually and took in water in a high wind. Every two days, they put ashore for two days—where they located fresh supplies and often recaulked the cutter with rosin and beeswax.

At one landing, they were attacked by Aborigines and had to leave without fresh water or food. When they finally landed again, having run out of rosin, they caulked with soap. Twenty miles later, a monsoon hit. As the rain and high waves deluged the boat, the escapees heaved all possessions overboard to stay buoyant. The men despaired of living, but Mary snatched one of their hats and began bailing, shaming them to fight for their lives. After organizing the bailing effort, she took the tiller and fought the seas; she and her children, said Mary, had no intention of drowning. Between the shore and the Great Barrier Reef, the seas calmed. They put to shore on an islet, dining on turtle and resting for six days. Ahead, however, lay the open Arafura Sea where they would no longer be able to hug the coast. As they passed into the Gulf of Carpenteria, dotted with islands containing unfriendly natives, two enormous war canoes charged out to sea, carrying 30 to 40 warriors. They changed course and headed directly for Timor across the Gulf some 500 miles away.

On June 5, 1791, 69 days out, the convicts sighted land. They had sailed 3,254 miles, 1,200 of which in uncharted ocean waters, in an open boat. Will Bryant's journal said that his wife and two children "bore their suffering with more fortitude than any among them." Their navigation proved superb; that evening, the boat tied up at the wharf in Kupang, island of Timor, in the Dutch East Indies, an exact landfall.

Will told the Dutch that he was a British merchant mariner whose ship had sunk off the Great Barrier Reef. Unfortunately, he added that other members of the crew might be alive and still show up. This would be a fatal embellishment. The Dutch governor allowed the group to replenish their stores under the assumption that he could send the bills to England. Making use of Mary's maiden name, Will signed the bills William Broad. When the Dutch heard of Mary's part in their survival, her fame spread throughout Kupang; indeed, she is still a national heroine in Holland. But her luck would run out in two months' time.

Long before the Bryants' arrival, Captain William Bligh had landed in Kupang after the mutiny on his ship the Bounty. When Bligh landed in London in March 1790 and told his story, the British navy sent out the notorious Captain Edward Edwards on the 74-gun warship HMS Pandora to find the Bounty mutineers. On August 28, 1791, two months after the Bryants pulled into Kupang, Edwards smashed his ship on the Great Barrier Reef; four boats, bearing 89 crew members, came ashore at Kupang harbor on September 15. Edwards was greeted with the news that part of his crew had already arrived.

Within days, the convicts were arrested. Edwards, thrilled at the prizes he was about to bring back to England, hired the Dutch Rembang to transport his charges to Batavia (modern-day Djakarta on the island of Java), where they would find a boat back to England. On October 5, Mary and the crew, now fit and healthy after their rest, were turned over to Edwards and confined below on the Rembang. The health of her husband and son quickly deteriorated in the deplorable conditions, and they were thoroughly soaked after a cyclone. Arriving at Batavia, the prisoners, ill with fever, were transferred to a hospital, but Batavia was infamous for its fevers brought about by stagnant water. Emmanuel died in his mother's arms on December 1, 1791. Three weeks later, December 22, Will Bryant died.

Mary and the other convicts were put on three different ships and sent to the Cape of Good Hope, a three-month voyage. Edward's instructions were to keep them below in irons, with one hour release a day. Fever killed more of the convicts, and one of them jumped over-board. When Mary and her daughter Charlotte were taken ill, the Dutch captain took off Mary's irons so she could care for her remaining child. At the Cape of Good Hope, the convicts were transferred to the ship Gorgon, which set sail for England on April 5, 1792, The new captain insisted that Mary have proper accommodations to nurse her obviously dying child. Another passenger's journal reads for May 6: "Last night the child belonging to Mary Broad … died at 4 o'-clock. Committed body to the deep." The only thing Mary Bryant had to look forward to on her arrival in England was a public hanging.

On June 18, the Gorgon anchored off the coast of Portsmouth, disembarked passengers, then journeyed on to London with the convicts. At the time, James Boswell had just published The Life of Samuel Johnson and was enjoying the beginning of fame and a possible fortune. Boswell, who abhorred injustice and executions, saw the newspaper spread that headlined "Escape of Convicts from Botany Bay." The article quoted Mary as saying: "I would sooner suffer death than return to Botany Bay." James Boswell arrived at Newgate Prison where the prisoners were being retained and offered his services. Mary declined, leaving him amazed by her self-possession and dignity.

The convicts were brought up before magistrate Nicholas Bond, who was also impressed with Mary's responses and demeanor. "She answered her questions intelligently and in a clear voice," wrote biographer Cook, "which only faltered slightly when he asked her about the fate of her family." Bond had already been apprised that it was Mary's force of character that had saved the inhabitants of the small boat. Asked if she was repentant of her crime, Mary Bryant answered that indeed she was.

Court observers who were sympathetic to the plight of the convicts took up a collection, and the press too was supportive. Again Boswell offered to help save her from execution, but Mary responded that she had no desire to spend the rest of her life in prison. Then what about a full pardon?, replied Boswell. A determined magpie, he irritated everyone in the Home Office for so long that on May 2, 1793, Mary Bryant was granted a full pardon by Henry Dundas, home secretary.

With the help of charitable friends, Boswell installed Mary in an apartment on Little Titchfield Street and gave her money for clothes. She soon learned that her father had been left a considerable sum of money and that her sister Dolly was a cook in a household in London; the sisters met with great delight. Boswell then put her on a vessel for Cornwall, taught her how to sign her name, and promised her a biyearly annuity—all she need do was acknowledge receipt. For the next 18 months, the written record of Mary Bryant continues as she acknowledges receipt of three payments. Upon Boswell's death in October 1794, his family put an end to the annuities and to any evidence of the further life and last days of Mary Bryant. She retreats again into obscurity at the age of 29, her story to be eclipsed for more than a century.

In the 1930s, The Strange Case of Mary Bryant was penned by a military man named Rawson, but it was mostly fiction of the bodice-ripping class. At the same time, however, two scholarly monographs were also printed, including Professor Frederick Pottle's Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay, contributing to some of the record, enlarging some of the myth. Judith Cook's To Brave Every Danger, published in 1993, uses all available documentation to present the most in-depth and accurate biography of one of the few convicts to escape the notorious penal colony at Botany Bay.

sources:

Anonymous. The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, with an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island. Reprint of 1789 ed. Angus & Robertson, 1970.

Cook, Judith. To Brave Every Danger. London: Macmillan, 1993.

Eldershaw, M. Barnard. Phillip of Australia: An Account of the Settlement at Sydney Cove, 1788–92. Angus & Robertson, 1972.

Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding. Knopf, 1987.

Mackaness, George. Admiral Arthur Phillip, Founder of New South Wales, 1738–1814. Angus & Robertson, 1937.