Mary Bryant: She Escaped the Australian Penal Colony

Born Mary Broad in Cornwall, England, the daughter of a fisherman. Mary was convicted of highway robbery for the theft of a woman's bonnet and transported to Australia on the First Fleet.

Initially, Mary was sentenced to hang on 20 March 1786, but her sentence was commuted to seven years' transportation by the Judge.

Taken from Exeter jail to the hulk, Dunkirk off Plymouth, to alleviate the overcrowded jail, Mary lived with other convicted women in appalling and unhealthy conditions. These hulks were run by private individuals as floating prisons.

Conditions on the Dunkirk were so bad that the officer in charge complained: "many of the prisoners are nearly if not quite naked." The women prisoners held on board were brutalised by the marines supposed to be guarding them. (1.)

A hulk at Portsmouth In which convicts wcro housed pending deportation.

Mary was transported aboard the ship Charlotte and gave birth on the journey to a baby. However, after arriving in Australia, she married a fellow convict, William Bryant, and they had a child together. 

William was put in charge of fishing to provide food for the colony. But he was caught selling fish on the side, and received a 100 lashes. He made a plan to escape by boat.

Bryant obtained a chart, compass, quadrant, two muskets, ammunition and food from a Dutch mariner. And on a moonless night, William, Mary and the children, along with seven convicts, escaped in the governor's cutter.

After a hazardous voyage of sixty-nine days, the group reached Kupang, on the island of Timor, and posed as survivors from a shipwreck.

The truth soon came out that Mary, William and the others were escaped convicts, and they imprisoned by the Dutch governor. 

The fugitives were sent back to Britain to stand trial, but Mary lost William and both of her children on this journey. Of the group, only Mary Bryant, Allen, Broom alias John Butcher, Lillie, and Martin arrived back in England on 18 June 1792.

Escaping the expected death sentence, the escapees were ordered "to remain on their former sentences until they should be discharged by due course of law".

James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck, a Scottish biographer, diarist, and lawyer, took up Mary's case and lobbied the Home Secretary for royal pardons for her and the four Botany Bay escapees.

On 2 May 1793, Mary Bryant was pardoned and she was released from Newgate prison. Mary returned to her family in Cornwall, and Boswell provided her with £10 a year until his death in 1795.

This view of Newgate Prison when it was inside the old city gate, shows 'Dr Hales' machine for the ventilation of prison apartments above the battlements.

However, Allen, Broom alias Butcher, Lillie, and Martin had to wait until 2 November 1793 to be released by proclamation.