Cutting Out and Taking Liberties: Australia's Convict Pirates, 1790–1829

Abstract

The 104 identified piratical incidents in Australian waters between 1790 and 1829 indicate a neglected but substantial and historically significant resistance practice, not a scattering of unrelated spontaneous bolts by ships of fools. The pirates’ ideologies, cultural baggage, techniques, and motivations are identified, interrogated, and interpreted. So are the connections between convict piracy and bushranging; how piracy affected colonial state power and private interests; and piracy's relationship to “age of revolution” ultra-radicalism elsewhere.

HIDDEN HISTORY

Transported convicts piratically seized at least eighty-two ships, vessels, and boats in Australian waters between 1790 and 1829. Unsuccessful piratical ventures involved at least twenty-two more. Somewhat more episodes occurred from 1830 to 1859,¹ but until the 2000s this extensive phenomenon remained unrecognized among academic Australianists² and maritime historians globally. Freelance Australianists’ lively narratives lack convincing interpretation and fail to grasp the sheer extent of convict piracy.³

Thus, Robert Hughes's bestseller The Fatal Shore mentions fewer than twenty incidents, collectively represented as random frantic bolting from Britain's horrendous gulag but never as a fraction of something far larger.⁴ To me, Hughes's pain-reflex piracies⁵ resemble “running amok” on the supposed Malay model. Convict pirates, however, were not “running amok”, and this point is not ethnological. Within colonialist culture, that phrase denied rational meaning to Malay peoples’ sudden uprisings in colonial south-east Asia. Hughes imposes much the same on convict piracy. In the present volume, Matthias van Rossum historicizes and deconstructs notions of amok as a ferociously irrational Malay psychological trait. Rather, his 1782 mutiny of Balinese slave marines aboard the Mercuur, and similar contemporary events, were “collective and rational” acts.⁶ I interpret Australia's convict piracies similarly.

It seems probable that convicts’ old-world cultural baggage influenced their piracies. These did not simply mimic Kidd- and Blackbeard-era piracy, as represented in British popular culture. The convict pirates lacked Jolly Rogers, but aboard a newly pirated vessel they enacted liberty by literally and symbolically deciding their course and destination. That, plus collectively devising shipboard regulations and electing leaders, capsized their penal bondage. Similar acts also occurred during the “Golden Age of Piracy”⁷ and aboard ships seized by mutineers elsewhere in the age of revolution.⁸ Escape from transportation was a capital offence. Escape by piracy – also a capital offence – inherently proclaimed “liberty or death”, a widespread age of revolution slogan.

Here, a convict ballad (sometimes attributed to Francis MacNamara),⁹ on the 1829 seizure of the Cyprus, is illustrative. The ballad's opening¹⁰ rallies convict audiences to liberty's cause: “Come all you sons of Freedom, a chorus join with me,/I'll sing a song of heroes and glorious liberty.” This suggests not mere flight but “liberty or death” confrontation with tyranny: “By tyranny we've been oppressed, by your Colonial laws,/But we'll bid adieu to slavery, or die in freedom's cause.” The collective selects an appropriate commander: “We elected William Swallow, and obey'd our Captain's word […]. For navigating smartly Bill Swallow was the man.” The ballad is neither strictly factual nor sheer fiction but a manifesto created and circulated within convict society, expressing “a whole epistemological ‘otherness’ – ways of knowing set implacably against authority and empire”.¹¹ It extols the piracy as anti-tyranny and pro an egalitarian and libertarian order, with its own “outlaw heroes” (here, Swallow),¹² and concludes with defiant celebration:

Then sound your golden trumpets boys, play on your tuneful notes,

The Cyprus Brig is sailing, how proudly now she floats.

May fortune help th’ Noble lads, and keep them ever free

From Gags, and Cats, and Chains, and Traps, and Cruel Tyranny.

The eminent historian Alan Atkinson wrongly asserted that European pirates never troubled early colonial Australia, but he admits their presence in disembarking convicts’ mental cultural baggage.¹³ Pirates strongly featured in Britain's Georgian print culture. Ballads were transmitted orally and through print. Illiterates accessed print media through vocal readings by literate kinsfolk, neighbours, or workmates. Piracy also provided a popular theme for Georgian popular theatre. A notable example was John Gay's operetta Polly (1729). It was immediately banned from performance, Gay's preceding smash hit The Beggars’ Opera having satirically subverted Walpole's corrupt Whig government. However, Polly proved a lucrative multi-edition publication. Once unbanned in 1772, Polly flourished long-term in Britain's theatrical repertoire.¹⁴ Such works delighted plebeian theatregoers, including thieves, fraudsters, prostitutes, and pickpockets.¹⁵ Unfortunately, British popular representations of pirates cannot be linked directly with specific piracies in Australia.

James C. Scott's “hidden transcripts” concept helps here. Historically, Scott argues, clandestine subversive cultural forms were crucial to underlings’ “arts of resistance”, providing a template, under favourable circumstances, for overt challenges to existing power relations. Sudden militant confrontation by hitherto docile-seeming subalterns baffled dominant circles that were unaware of “hidden transcripts”.¹⁶ In Australia, officialdom regularly denounced piratical escapes as witless folly, inviting shipwreck, drowning, or murder by “savages”.¹⁷ This line absolved government from admitting – even perceiving – the pirates’ rationality. Piracies sometimes precipitated tighter port security measures intended to prevent their recurrence.

Even before the “age of revolution”, miniature “worlds turned upside down” existed aboard Atlantic pirate ships.¹⁸ From the late seventeenth century Atlantic seamen faced increasingly severe shipboard discipline, intensification of the arbitrary authority of officers – especially captains – and deteriorating employment terms. In riposte, many seamen turned pirate.¹⁹ Convicts transported to Australia experienced a similar jeopardy. There, arbitrary magistrates’ courts could severely punish breaches of convict regulations as well as crimes by floggings, hard labour in irons, extensions of existing sentences of up to three years, and relocation to remote, harsh-regime penal stations.²⁰

Can Australia's convict pirates be directly linked to age of revolution politics? Until their prosopography is better known, that remains problematic – excepting United Irishmen connections. Originally the United Irishmen were a Protestant middle-class constitutional movement seeking Ireland's autonomy, albeit under the British Crown, and an end to the Anglican-ascendancy monopoly of Ireland's electoral franchise, elected public posts, and remunerated Crown offices. Catholics especially, but also Presbyterians and Dissenters, were excluded from full civil and political rights. The French Revolution's republican turn inspired the United Irishmen, especially when persecuted following France's 1793 declaration of war on Britain, to become pro-French, secular republican revolutionaries. Prospective French military intervention, though never effectively realized, panicked Ireland's established order into extreme repression. Through the 1790s, the United Irishmen infiltrated their ideology and practices into hitherto localized Catholic agrarian “Defender” secret societies, thus gaining nearly 300,000 sworn members by 1797. They provided a rank and file for armed uprisings in 1798 and 1803–1804.²¹

Irish political radicals transported in the 1790s and early 1800s proved dangerous ship's cargo. In 1793 mutiny scares occurred on the Sugar Cane and Boddington convict transports from Ireland. At Sydney, some Boddington convicts declared they had intended killing every officer on taking the ship, except the first mate and agent. They were to die after navigating the mutineers close to their chosen destination. In 1796, Irish prisoners aboard the Marquis Cornwallis (allegedly plus the boatswain's mate and some soldiers) plotted to kill the officers, and then sail to the USA.²² On 29 December 1801, thirteen prisoners on the Hercules were killed before a mutiny was suppressed.²³

The United Irishmen's engagement with revolutionary republicanism internationalized their outlook and connections.²⁴ Considerable education and an enlightenment outlook gave some United Irishmen the confidence to seek escape from Australia by piracy. In February 1800, around forty United Irishmen, from a much larger group recently arrived in Sydney on the Minerva, conspired to take the Minerva by night and compel officers and crew to take the ship out to sea. Informers, however, secured the conspirators’ last-minute arrest. Nevertheless, officials were horrified: controlling shipping was crucial to convict transportation. Soon after, multiple Sydney Harbour shipping seizures were allegedly intrinsic to an Irish plot to overthrow the colonial government.²⁵

As a coda to these troubles, on 1 April 1804 seven Irish convict fugitives from the recently crushed Castle Hill Rebellion were captured on the Hawkesbury River. Allegedly, they had planned “to seize upon the first boat to present itself, and […] commit themselves to the peril of the sea”.²⁶ Many Castle Hill rebels had participated in Ireland's 1798 and 1803 risings.²⁷ After 1804, while Irish convicts participated in piracies alongside others,²⁸ their motivation was not perceived as revolutionary republicanism.

Figure 1 New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, with the principal locations of convict piratical seizures, 1790–1829. The author acknowledges Hamish Maxwell-Stewart for the draft of this map.

COLONIAL NEWSPAPERS AND CONVICT PIRACY

In June 1826 a Sydney Monitor correspondent recalled a recent sea passage from Sydney to Newcastle, New South Wales: “This is a pleasant packet, and the Captain a very pleasant gentlemanly fellow. The cabin is […] ornamented with muskets, pistols and cutlasses, in case of pirates – there are also two cannon […] on deck.”²⁹ Insouciance notwithstanding, convict piracy evidently threatened shipping that connected the coastal settlements where most colonists, convict or free, dwelt.

Transportation to Australia did not automatically entail incarceration. On arrival, most convicts were assigned to free private employers, a minority being retained for government work. Especially in Sydney and Hobart, convicts could access newspapers in free time permitted, or when illicitly at large after hours – for example in taverns and sly-grog shops – and so read, or hear read, reports of local and world-wide piracies.³⁰ In the period addressed here, all Australian newspapers were published in port towns, where overseas newspapers too were landed. Shipping arrivals guaranteed repeated inflows of oral sea gossip. Sydney's Hyde Park Barracks, completed in 1819, provided accommodation for male convicts in government employ, hitherto privately lodged about the town. Mostly these men were set to public works outside the barracks. Sydney's assigned convicts continued to live at employers’ premises or to find private lodgings.³¹ In Hobart, where the Convict Barracks was incomplete until 1821, similar arrangements occurred. As in Sydney, convicts had access to printed and oral news stories, but anti-piracy sentiments and measures featured in the colonial press had little if any effect.

Information gleaned by port town convicts circulated further afield, becoming part of convict society's autonomous collective knowledge. My electronic scan of the Sydney Gazette from 1 January 1815 to 31 December 1817 reveals frequent local and global piracy reports.³² The Principal Superintendent of Convicts’ press notices of absentees included escapees by piracy. Fellow convicts could therefore track outcomes. Those who pirated the Speedwell from Newcastle on 7 April 1814 were gazetted in most subsequent Sydney Gazettes to December 1817.³³ As no report of their death or recapture appeared, fellow convicts could celebrate an apparently successful collective self-liberation. On 14, 21, and 28 September 1816, extensive identifying information was published about the men who had recently pirated the Trial from off Sydney Harbour's South Head.³⁴ From 5 October 1816 to beyond 1817, these men were gazetted alongside the Speedwell pirates in a section of the Principal Superintendent of Convicts’ absentee lists, sub-headed “Pirates”.³⁵ On 29 November 1817 those who had seized the William Cossar from Sydney Cove were featured beyond 1817. The last 1817 absentee list added five new pirates.³⁶

From the 1803 debut of Australia's first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette, convict piracies were much reported. Thirteen ironed-gang convicts loading the Eclipse cutter at Newcastle on 11 May 1825 suddenly shed their irons – evidently tampered with in preparation – seized the Eclipse, and sailed seawards. Five Sydney press reports ensued, two in Hobart.³⁷ On 25 November 1825, five convicts seized the Maria, carrying provisions for the Maria Island Penal Station, Van Diemen's Land. Two of these pirates, Henry Leonard and John Bogle, were convict crewmen. Three more lay concealed aboard till called to action. Two press reports ensued.³⁸ Reporting such events could only, if unintentionally, encourage convict piracy. Employing convict seamen cut shipowners’ labour costs but was officially forbidden and inherently unsafe.

Until the 1820s, the only newspapers published in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land were government organs – the Sydney and Hobart Gazettes. Naturally, they routinely condemned convict piracy as wicked folly – the official line. For instance, in 1807 the Sydney Gazette ridiculed six convicts who escaped in a stolen boat as “miserably provided for carrying such a determination into effect with any other prospect than […] perishing”.³⁹ Certain early recapture was regularly incanted, as when the Hobart Town Gazette reported the midnight seizure of the Blue-Eyed Maid by Matthew Brady and his bushranger gang on 3 December 1825.⁴⁰ As so often, Brady's gang made a mockery of cocksure recapture predictions. Indeed, the Gazettes often slid into sheer absurdity. The Sydney Gazette wrote of the Speedwell pirates: “they have no boat with them, and consequently can procure no supply of necessaries without the utmost risque [sic] to the vessel and their own lives”. Lack of a ship's boat was disadvantageous, but it hardly presaged disaster. Such common exaggerations could only be counterproductive.

Even for the Gazettes, let alone competing private-enterprise newspapers emerging from the 1820s, piracies provided irresistible opportunities for colourful copy. That was fine when events delivered the “right” message, as when on 19 June 1818 a pirate boat was repelled in Sydney Cove by a brig's alert armed watch.⁴¹ Altogether different impressions transpired when reports implied pirates had shown skill, resolution, and daring while, in contrast, port security regulations had been neglected and pursuit was tardy, bumbling, and fruitless. An instance is the Sydney Gazette's original reporting of the seizure and ensuing pursuit of the Harrington brig in May 1808.⁴² A clumsy subsequent attempt to remedy matters by drumming up these pirates’ impending nasty fate probably aroused convict derision.⁴³

Reporting of successful foreign piracies and mutinies may also have stimulated convict piracy. Though outside the formal chronological limits of this study, it is notable that the Atlantic slave mutinies aboard the Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841) were reported in Australia at a time when convict piracy was still endemic.⁴⁴ These reports (especially those concerning the Creole) sympathized with the slaves. Presumably convicts felt their own piratical escapes were equally justified and their superiors were humbugs to maintain otherwise. Convict culture held that convicts were treated as Hebrew slaves were by the pharaoh, while some prominent officials thought that, properly, convicts were virtually slaves.⁴⁵

On occasion, the independent newspapers that appeared in the 1820s were more sympathetic to convict piracy than was possible in the Gazettes. Edward Smith Hall, a free immigrant and the Sydney Monitor's radical editor-proprietor, sometimes argued that escape from transportation exhibited an essentially English manly love of liberty.⁴⁶ His ideal manly Englishman was elastic. Thus, he praised the “frank, open, mild, but enterprising bold vivacious countenance” and “martial spirit” of the Isle-of-Wight born African diaspora convict, John Goff. This was during Goff's self-defence at his 1827 Sydney trial, for murder while leading an 1826 uprising on Norfolk Island. The Sydney Gazette's Goff was a savage monster.⁴⁷

TWO MODES OF CONVICT PIRACY

Scant evidence suggests that plunder motivated convict pirates who voyaged afar to gain freedom. Others, however, navigated Australia's coasts, sometimes raiding isolated coastal settlements. Two broad modes of convict piracy thus emerge. Both prioritized taking “liberties” – afloat at sea, then at a distant friendly port, or by establishing master-less “rough crew” enclaves beyond government reach. Unauthorized masculine-libertarian settlements spread from the Bass Strait Islands to the Swan River in Western Australia.⁴⁸

Unlike some eighteenth-century pirate settlements,⁴⁹ there is no case that these were utopian. Commonly, coerced Aboriginal women provided sexual, domestic, and general labour for a melange of pirates, other convict runaways, freelance sealers, ships’ deserters, and castaways. Such autonomous, fluid, armed, and mobile combinations jangled official nerves.⁵⁰ However, coercive exploitation of Aborigines was not invariable. Five convicts escaped from Sydney on 26 September 1790 in a small stolen boat. The authorities deemed them foolish ignoramuses, throwing their lives away. In 1795 four survivors were found living, tranquilly assimilated, among Aboriginals at Port Stephens (180 kilometres from European settlements). They were “rescued”, that is removed from Aboriginal wives and society and returned to Sydney.⁵¹

Atkinson's dismissal of convict piracy predated revisionist revelations.⁵² Such mitigation is unavailable to Ian Hoskins's Sydney Harbour (2009). It mentions only the (discursively) hackneyed Mary Bryant episode of 1791 – worth briefly reprising here as the first convict piratical seizure motivated by dreams of faraway liberty. Bryant, her children, husband, and seven other male convicts departed Sydney Harbour in Governor Phillip's little cutter, eventually reaching Dutch Timor, where, briefly, they passed as shipwreck survivors.⁵³ Mary Bryant subsequently survived, became celebrated, and received a pardon. Colonial contemporaries, however, noticed better-founded long-distance piratical escapes from Sydney Harbour (see Tables 1–3). After dark, on 16 May 1808, 30 to 50 armed convicts stealthily boarded the 13-gun, 182-ton Harrington from stolen boats. This and the Harrington's cutting out were undertaken with naval efficiency. The Harrington's disappearance remained undetected till after sunrise. The pirates sailed 5,000 kilometres to Manila Bay, flying United States colours, and carrying forged ship's papers. When seized, the Harrington was moored in Farm Cove, not Sydney Cove, and lacked a night watch – both against port regulations. Everything needful for a long trading voyage to Fiji was aboard.⁵⁴ Selecting such inviting prey implies these pirates operated effective prior surveillance and planning.

Table 1 Vessels and ships seized by convict pirates, 1790–1829.

NSW = New South Wales; VDL = Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania).

Sources: Too numerous to list here, but especially HRA and contemporaneous colonial newspapers.

Table 2 Vessels and ships unsuccessfully targeted by convict pirates, 1790–1829.

NSW = New South Wales; VDL = Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania)

(a) Now D'Entrecasteaux Channel.

(b) SG, 7 June 1817, p. 3b.

Sources: Too numerous to list here, but especially HRA and contemporaneous colonial newspapers.

Table 3 Seizures and attempted seizures of boats by convicts, 1790–1829.

VDL = Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania); NSW = New South Wales; PS = Penal Station

Sources: Too numerous to list here, but especially HRA and contemporaneous colonial newspapers.

Van Diemen's Land experienced many boat seizures, and often its bushrangers were also boat and small vessel pirates. On 10 June 1817, bushrangers looted George Town's commissary store, escaping in two stolen boats with five convict recruits.⁵⁵ Around midnight on 3 December 1825, Matthew Brady and thirteen of his gang seized Maria Island's ferryboat, Blue-Eyed Maid.⁵⁶ Later that day, Brady and his men used this boat to take a sloop off nearby Schouten Island. Rising winds persuaded them to return, sink the sloop, and head for the Van Diemen's Land's interior.⁵⁷ The Brady Gang had commenced bushranging with a boat escape from the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station.⁵⁸ They and others became as much sea rangers as bushrangers. Bushrangers stole boats to access remote coastal and insular hideaways and to raid isolated coastal settlements, destabilizing existing power relations. Lieutenant-Governor Arthur – who rarely admitted failures – conceded “the skill and conduct of this extraordinary Man [Brady] […] baffled the united efforts of the Civil and Military power”.⁵⁹

Three spectacular Tasman Sea incidents occurred between 1826 and 1827. On 25 September 1826, fifty-seven convicts fled in seized government boats from the Norfolk Island Penal Station, a general uprising having failed. John Goff led the evacuation under fire from troops. Often flogged, condemned at differing times to every other contemporaneous penal station, he escaped from them all. At Pieman's River, Van Diemen's Land, and on the Hastings River, New South Wales, he had stood alongside fellow runaways in firefights with troops.⁶⁰ After landing at nearby Philip Island, the 1826 Norfolk Island escapers contested the landing of a military pursuit party that took some captives and the runaways’ boats. Subsequent seaborne infantry sorties recaptured piecemeal the marooned remnant, including Goff. He and two comrades were hanged in 1827 after a Sydney Supreme Court show trial.⁶¹

On 21 December 1826, over forty out of sixty-six convicts bound from Sydney to Norfolk Island seized the government brig Wellington. The pirates chose an ex-army officer, John Walton, to command and (like “Golden Age” pirates) elected a council. A log was kept, offenders against collectively agreed articles were disciplined, and imprisoned opponents treated decently. Advised by the Wellington's lawful commander, they called at New Zealand's Bay of Islands for water, preparatory to sailing for South America. Two British whaler captains, encouraged by the Revd Henry Williams, a resident Bay of Islands missionary and former naval officer, became suspicious. After a cannonade from the whalers, Walton surrendered, never having returned fire.⁶² Nevertheless, similar ventures recurred. On 4 August 1827, eighteen out of twenty-one convicts bound from Hobart to Macquarie Harbour seized the Cyprus when it was storm-bound in Recherche Bay. Their elected commander, William Swallow, navigated the Cyprus via Japan to near Canton. Then, they scuttled the Cyprus and tried – but failed – to pass as castaways, recalling the Bryant episode. Two of them became the last pirates hanged at Wapping's Execution Dock.⁶³

Figure 2 Item 3 from Panorama of Hobart, 1825, watercolour, by Augustus Earle. The Van Diemen's Land government brig Cyprus, piratically seized by convicts in 1829, is the two-masted vessel second from the left. Dixson Gallery, State Library of New South Wales. Used with permission.

VICTIMS, LOSSES, LASCARS, AND THE COLONIAL STATE'S INCAPACITY

Given the many convict piracies and the analytical deficit in popular studies of them, it is necessary to identify and interrogate salient themes from my reading of the sources that constitute my convict pirate archive. The generic “who whom” problematics of archives preclude regarding this archive as a neutral objective record. Therefore, I interrogate it to unpackage state incapacity to curb convict piracy, reveal the range and identify the victims of material losses inflicted, and air an unresolved puzzle concerning alleged lascar connections.

Official reactions calibrate the piracies’ effects, as do losses inflicted. Both piratical incidents and fears about consequent convict responses intensified endemic official and free settler anxieties about imagined insurrectionary conspiracies.⁶⁴ Free colonists sometimes requested countermeasures. At Windsor, New South Wales, a November 1824 Grand Jury fruitlessly requested a police boat based at the Hawkesbury River's mouth “to prevent piratical seizures”.⁶⁵ Even Sydney Harbour had only a regular Row Guard from 5 February 1820. Two masters, two boatswains, and six sailors were to provide two crews, one for day and one for night service.⁶⁶ Convicts served in this Lilliputian outfit, as in the police ashore. Foreseeable problems ensued. For example, on 2 September 1820 convict Row Guard sailor William Jones absconded. Coxswain Bernard Williams reputedly flourished by smuggling spirits.⁶⁷ The original Row Guard supposedly policed Sydney Harbour's labyrinthine waterways, with their 317 kilometres of shoreline. Unsurprisingly, the authorities had to expand the force rapidly, despite cost implications, to 36 boats and 140 men by 1822.⁶⁸

That had limited effects. There were only four Sydney Harbour/Parramatta River incidents from 1821 to 1829. The small vessel Mary (1828) and two boats (1827 and 1829) were taken. The 1827 attempt on the schooner Liberty failed, but without Row Guard intervention.⁶⁹ However, this paucity of Sydney Harbour incidents during that period may indicate Row Guard deterrence. This is offset by the fact that most New South Wales convict piracies between 1821 and 1829 were at smaller ports or (once) on the high seas. There were seven such incidents, only one unsuccessful, involving vessels or ships and three, all successful, involving boats (see the data in Tables 1–3).

In June 1826, the Hobart Town Gazette bewailed Hobart's lack of “a well regulated excise or guard” for twenty-four-hour harbour and Derwent Estuary surveillance.⁷⁰ Eight months on, this official medium requested “a small Colonial armed vessel” to prevent piracy and smuggling in the Derwent and “round the coast”. It added: “The Guard Boat, a most necessary establishment which rows round the vessels in the Harbour at night”, should be of “the lightest and swiftest construction” and employ only “upright characters”.⁷¹ Implicitly, one lumbering guard boat and nefarious crew now existed, but only undertaking night duty in Sullivan Cove, Hobart's harbour. However, when a boat approached the cutter Emma Kemp, moored in the Derwent, at night on 28 June 1827, escaped prisoners replied “guard-boat” when challenged by the cutter's watch but sheered off when further questioned.⁷² Port regulations threatened stiff fines on shipping without armed night watches, but, this incident notwithstanding, compliance remained patchy.

British naval units only intermittently visited New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, while each operated just a few small, lightly armed government vessels. In May 1827, three small brigs comprised Sydney-based New South Wales sea power. A schooner was “permanently attached” to Melville Island and another designated for Port Essington,⁷³ outposts vastly nearer Timor than Sydney. In 1825, Governor Brisbane implored London to provide two modest-sized armed schooners for Sydney and a smaller one for Hobart, with costs falling on Britain's Treasury. A caustic refusal ensued.⁷⁴ In similar stingy vein, the New South Wales Police Fund – a multi-purpose government cash tank – swallowed two-thirds of the revenue raised by selling Sydney Row Guard prizes. The remainder was distributed among Guard personnel: predominantly to masters, secondarily to boatswains, the residuum to sailors.⁷⁵ As seen, armed shipboard night watches could deter pirates. When a pirate boat attempted night seizure of the Sophia in Sydney Cove on 19 June 1818, James Kelly, the brig's master, led the vessel's armed watch in driving the pirates away with musketry.⁷⁶ Despite Kelly's resultant acclaim, port security regulation observance remained lax and pirates confident. Soon after, convicts seized several boats around Sydney Harbour – in order, officials worried, to seize a seagoing vessel.

A fourteen-strong escaped convict gang triggered the request for a Hawkesbury police boat. Led by William Skivener, on 30 October 1824 the gang seized the sloop Angelina in the Hawkesbury, after taking a boat carrying “wine, porter, sugar, tea, etc.”, thus enhancing stolen basic provisions already cached at their Mullet Island rendezvous. The gang also possessed stolen charts, a sextant, quadrants, a compass, and a gold–cased chronometer – all useful for navigating a blue-water getaway. Among the gang were men with navigation skills. Skivener – no navigator but elected commander for his leadership talents – and five others embarked on the Angelina. Their comrades confidently expected “to take another vessel”.⁷⁷ Small farmers (often time-served convicts) dominated Hawkesbury settler demography. The pirates’ loot, if modest compared to that of contemporaneous Sulu and South China Sea pirates,⁷⁸ would have hurt many Hawkesbury households. Humbler members of colonial society, not just substantial merchants and ship-owners, suffered losses from convict piracy.

On the Hawkesbury Estuary and its Broken Bay extension, piracy began early. On 5 September 1797 fifteen convicts (some crewmen, some boarding from a boat) seized the government schooner Cumberland, laden with stores for the new Hawkesbury settlements. The pirates included the 1790 piratical escapers, George Lee and John Turwood.⁷⁹ The Cumberland, according to Governor Hunter, was the best vessel in the colony and sorely missed.⁸⁰ A replacement Cumberland, for pursuing absconded convicts “who were […] in the practice of carrying off boats” was nearing launch in July 1800.⁸¹ That month, the government sloop Norfolk, laden with wheat for Sydney, was taken in the Hawkesbury and then shipwrecked.⁸² Such events taxed the infant colony's fiscal resources.

As an indication of the value of small colonial craft, in March 1824 the new 33-ton schooner Governor Sorell was auctioned at Hobart for £380. Its small boat fetched £10.⁸³ A loss of around £10 would hurt petty proprietors; £380 might bankrupt modestly prosperous ones. In 1828 a man in a boat raided Johnson's Bay, on the Parramatta River, stealing a mast and sails belonging to Dr Laurence Hynes Halloran, a prominent but hard-up emancipist. After vigorous pursuit, Halloran and two of his sons recovered their property, the thief's boat, and a boat in tow. Both boats proved stolen.⁸⁴ Halloran was targeted again on the night of 16 August 1829: his 3.25-ton boat, used for commercial wood carrying, was taken. A handsome $20 reward (probably 20 Spanish dollars, then worth £4) was offered for its return.⁸⁵ Halloran declared the boat “the principal support of a large Family”.⁸⁶ Though proliferating boat thefts were hard on victims, they could not unite the colonial poor, a fluctuating, heterogeneous element, in self-defence. Boat ownership offered small proprietors a chance to better themselves materially as self-employed watermen, but other poorer Sydneysiders were constantly making off with boats, to grab a free harbour crossing, escape justice, or undertake criminal enterprises.⁸⁷

Concerning larger losses, information collected by J.T. Bigge, ahead of his Parliamentary Reports on New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, is revealing. Robert Campbell, formerly Sydney's leading merchant, wrote to Bigge on 30 June 1820 fretting that the pirating of his brig the Venus in 1806, when under government hire, remained uncompensated. He estimated his loss at a painful £3,200.⁸⁸ What further galled him was that London had ordered large grants of New South Wales land and government livestock to William Campbell. In effect, if not formally, that settled his £4,000 1812 claim for compensation for the Harrington piracy.⁸⁹ Yet, when seized, the Harrington was not chartered to the government and was breaching port regulations. When, occasionally, compensation was awarded, patronage rather than merit seemingly triumphed.

Bigge's antidote to disorder in Sydney, Hobart, and other coastal settlements – move all convicts well inland – was unworkable. Large piracy losses continued after his reports. The 1825 Eclipse piracy lost the owners £1,000.⁹⁰ Bigge commented tartly on “the frequency of piratical seizures […] by the convicts of Sydney Cove” during Macquarie's governorship.⁹¹ At least sixteen Sydney Harbour craft were targeted in that period, the pirates succeeding on eleven occasions (see Tables 1–3). However, only two successful incidents involved ships or vessels, against four failures (see Tables 1–2).

In Van Diemen's Land, Bigge's key informant was James Kelly,⁹² a Derwent pilot and from 1819 Hobart's Harbour Master.⁹³ Following his Sophia triumph, Kelly had twice pursued Derwent pirates – unsuccessfully.⁹⁴ Oddly, Kelly informed Bigge, “Vessels that are most in danger are the Brigs from India manned by Lascars”.⁹⁵ Frustratingly, this alleged “lascar connection” to convict piracy remains enigmatic, for lascars in early colonial Australia await serious scholarly attention and no “lascar connection” emerges from this study's many other sources. Kelly's own narrow escape from Otago Harbour in 1818, when Maori killed some of his crew, perhaps prejudiced his mind. He believed a Maori- and English-speaking lascar resident there, who managed the relevant Otago ruler's dealings with foreigners, had ensnared the Sophia's shore party.⁹⁶ Bigge learned from Kelly about several Derwent piracies: Unity (23 April 1814); Argo (12 June 1814); an odd bushranger-built craft (11 April 1818); and Young Lachlan (27 February 1819).⁹⁷ The Calcutta-owned Argo presumably had lascar crew, but no known evidence suggests they abetted piracy.

The Young Lachlan seizure further illustrates the perils of neglecting port security regulations. Moored at owner Captain Howard's desire off his Macquarie Point store, when regulations stipulated Sullivan Cove, Young Lachlan's sails, rudder, and the rudder's securing bolt remained on deck too. Regulations required their lock-up ashore. Some of the sails were already bent. These infractions facilitated a quick departure. There was neither night watch kept nor ammunition on board. The master having departed up-country, the four seamen on the Young Lachlan neglected all duty.⁹⁸ These unconcealed follies invited piracy. To cap it all, Lieutenant-Governor Sorell had condoned the Young Lachlan's irregular mooring – though not the other security breaches.⁹⁹

Because taken on a dark night, the Young Lachlan sailed invisible to Hobart's gunners at The Battery.¹⁰⁰ Sorell was informed of the seizure just after 5 a.m. on 28 February 1819. Beyond oared boats, only Thomas Birch's Sophia brig and twenty-ton sailing boat were in harbour.¹⁰¹ The pirates’ course at sea was sheer guesswork to their pursuers. Kelly accepted command of Birch's sailing boat. It was unready to sail till noon. Soldiers plus sea captains Howard and Bunster accompanied Kelly – two captains too many for one command? The pursuit merely rescued Young Lachlan's crew, dumped by the pirates on Bruny Island. Nevertheless, Birch would have been recompensed. For a previous similar service, he was exempt customs duty on a substantial quantity of imported spirits.¹⁰² Whenever a private craft was hired to pursue convict pirates, the owners were paid regardless of the outcome, making dead loss for some good business for others.

When taken, the Young Lachlan carried no water and few water casks, allowing assertions that it could not sail far. New standing orders obliged Hobart's gunners to keep their artillery loaded and “fire upon any Vessel […] moving out of the Port past the Point, or down the River, during the night”. It was reiterated that colonial and small vessels must moor close in at Sullivan Cove. Delinquents whose rudders and sails were not “landed and lodged in a Place of Security” faced embargo from trading till they complied.¹⁰³ Such papery severity lacked deterrent force, while the Young Lachlan's pirates certainly obtained water somewhere, for they reached Java.¹⁰⁴ Self-interest ensured neglect of port regulations when conducting legitimate trade, let alone smuggling (then rife). In 1817, Sorell fruitlessly requested Macquarie's permission to construct a government cutter, to prevent “improper proceedings” in the Derwent.¹⁰⁵ However, on 1 December 1818 Macquarie undertook to send Sorell the 92-ton brig Prince Leopold – purchased in Sydney for £1,200. That plus £167 18s towards refitting was charged to the Van Diemen's Land's Police Fund. The New South Wales government itself spent £562 2s 8d on refitting.¹⁰⁶ In Van Diemen's Land service, the Prince Leopold flopped – its draught was too deep for some Van Diemen's Land ports.¹⁰⁷ Meagre colonial fiscal resources had been wasted. The period 1820 to 1825 brought at least fourteen more Van Diemen's Land piratical incidents, and 1826 saw an attempt on the Prince Leopold itself.

THE GROUNDS OF PIRATE SUCCESS OR FAILURE

What constituted “successful” seizure? Here, success is not understood in absolute terms but as taking a prize and escaping – at least for a while. Successful seizures predominated. That required trustworthy, motivated confederates who would not blab indiscreetly or inform for reward. Also needed were: relevant skills among the gang; good intelligence gathering; acquisition of necessary implements (weapons, for example); and well-planned and executed tactics. Often, convict pirates stole a boat or boats for approaching, boarding, and cutting out a moored target – operations requiring skill and resolution.

An instance is the Speedwell piracy, committed by four runaways from the Newcastle Penal Station. John Pearce, Edward Scarr, and Herbert Stiles were capital respites on life sentences; Joseph Burridge was serving a fourteen-year sentence.¹⁰⁸ Such sentences served at a harsh penal station provided obvious motives for escape. Stiles had been convicted of piracy and sentenced at Calcutta, 4 December 1809.¹⁰⁹ After arrival at Sydney in 1811, he was forwarded to Newcastle and soon rumoured to be planning a piratical escape.¹¹⁰ In April 1813 he escaped into the bush, but returned, injured by Aboriginals.¹¹¹ His subsequent gang boarded the Speedwell in rain at night on 7 April 1814, from a boat stolen from a government schooner aground nearby. Aboard the Speedwell, in the name of Newcastle's Commandant, they successfully requested the loan of a grapnel. With it, they promptly felled the Speedwell's master, secured his wife and a seaman (the only others present), and sailed off.¹¹²

The Sydney Gazette stated that with scant water and provisions and no boat to put ashore for water, the seizure was doomed. Gazetting these pirates ceased after eleven months – tacit acknowledgement of a sustained escape. In fact, when seized the Speedwell carried one month's provisions and 60 gallons of water:¹¹³ sufficient to reach New Zealand. A makeshift raft would assist conveying fresh water and food from landfalls. If necessary, drag anchors could be devised from rocks and cables. Island-hopping enabled a small vessel to cross the South Pacific. In 1806–1807, the pirated 45-ton brig Venus island hopped from New Zealand to Chile.¹¹⁴ From 1790 to 1829, out of 60 identified boat incidents only 5 failed (see Tables 6 and 7). Seizing a vessel or ship was trickier: of 44 known incidents 17 failed.

Tables 4 and 5 show an inverse ratio between the size of ships and vessels and success. As much as 63 per cent of successes involved vessels of 50 tons or less. No attempt on craft of 200 tons or more succeeded (see Tables 4 and 5). Larger craft, like the 578-ton Minerva and the 459-ton Castle Forbes, were targeted by larger escape parties – potentially less cohesive than smaller parties. Colonial police shone at recruiting informers – this secured the Castle Forbes ¹¹⁵ and the Minerva from seizure. The known seizures and attempts from 1790 to 1829 directly involved around 900 men¹¹⁶ and 8 women. Of all known ship or vessel incidents, 61.4% were successful, as were 91.7% of boat incidents (see Tables 6 and 7). Hughesian bolting or sheer luck could hardly achieve those success rates; rather, a predominance of well-planned and executed incidents is implied.

Table 4 Tonnage, 27 ships and vessels seized by transported convicts, 1790–1829.

Sources: Too numerous to list here, but especially HRA and contemporaneous colonial newspapers.

Table 5 Tonnage, 17 failed ships and vessel seizures by transported convicts, 1790–1829.

Sources: Too numerous to list here, but especially HRA and contemporaneous colonial newspapers.

Table 6 Successful transported convict piratical seizures, 1790–1829.

82 craft seized: 55 boats; 27 ships or vessels

Sources: Too numerous to list here, but especially HRA and contemporaneous colonial newspapers.

Table 7 Failed transported convict piratical seizures, 1790–1829.

22 craft, seizure failed: 5 boats; 17 ships or vessels

Sources: Too numerous to list here, but especially HRA and contemporaneous colonial newspapers.

In late Georgian Britain, many people, though not oceanic seafarers, were “accustomed to the sea”. Naval manning during the 1793–1815 wars against France required massive resort to the press gang, leading to high desertion rates. After 1815, there were probably more transported convicts “accustomed to the sea”, or who concealed wartime naval service because of desertion, than the authorities reckoned. For self-advantage, in Australia the convict pirates Robert Stewart and John William Lancashire concealed wartime naval desertions.¹¹⁷ Among convict pirates a minority had significant seafaring skills. William Wales, a fine mathematician and notable scientific and practical navigator, taught Stewart astral navigation at the Royal Institute of Mathematics, London. In the navy, Stewart rose to sailing master's mate. Sailing masters were warrant officers in charge of the practical sailing of a warship. Necessarily, they and their mates understood astral navigation. Stewart certainly could have navigated the Harrington.

The twelve absconders from Hobart Prisoners’ Barracks who seized the cutter Ellen off Cape Pilar on 16 January 1827 further reveal how and why convicts came together to seize a vessel. Among them, Alexander Stirling was a former collier's mate, John Clarke a mariner, and James Nelson a seaman. James Thompson (tried at Aberdeen, on the same date as Stirling)¹¹⁸ was a rope maker, Henry Alderson a cooper, and William Ironmonger a carpenter – useful skills at sea. Five Ellen pirates arrived in Australia on the Medway 2, two on the Medina. Convict transport shipmates often sustained ongoing mutual loyalties. Alderson, Thompson, and Stirling were Medway 2 men. Stirling's sea officer experience probably swayed his fellow pirates to elect him their commander.¹¹⁹ Remember here that Herbert Stiles, leader of the Speedwell pirates, had prior sea experience as a pirate, a circumstance paralleled in Clare Anderson's study in the present volume.¹²⁰

Few convict pirates underwent Supreme Court trials. Some were charged with other offences promising easier convictions. Magistrates summarily convicted and sentenced many pirates. Almost all penal stations had maritime locations necessitating boat and shipping services – and inviting inmate piracy. In the period 1806–1829 at least seven boats and four vessels were seized from penal stations, and two vessels were seized when bound for penal stations (see Tables 1 and 3).

Many more convict men and women escaped by stowing away on departing shipping or striking deals with short-handed ships’ masters than by piracy, despite official countermeasures. The colonial authorities particularly hated United States ships’ captains cutting deals with convict escapers, perhaps because their defiance of British authority revived painful memories of the American Revolution. However, some British captains behaved similarly, including a naval commander.¹²¹ Other convicts achieved sea escape through shady deals with free settlers. In 1814 the Calcutta-owned Argo left the Derwent without clearance – a serious breach of port regulations. The Argo's master Captain Dixon, apparently in league with two Hobart merchants, Loane and Carr, received piratical assistance from twelve convict escapers.¹²² This looks like a deal between big smugglers and their convict agents. Governor Macquarie wanted Dixon tried for piracy if caught, and regretted that inadequate evidence precluded Loane's or Carr's prosecution.¹²³ Dixon had been heavily fined on 15 May 1814 for assaulting and slandering Hobart's Naval Officer, James Gordon.¹²⁴ Collecting customs revenues and preventing smuggling were prominent among Gordon's duties. Convicts, it seems, might sometimes consort with their “betters” in smuggling and piracy.

An 1818 episode connected stowing away and piratical escape. Voyaging from Sydney via Cape Town to London in 1818, the 450-ton merchantman Harriet called unscheduled at Hobart for repairs and to land several convict stowaways.¹²⁵ Nevertheless, twenty-one convicts – fifteen men, five women, and one boy – left Hobart secreted on board the Harriet. An informer betrayed them before the Harriet reached Cape Town, alleging these stowaways, crewmen, and unspecified others planned “to take the vessel, after the cargo had been received on board at the Cape, and carry her into South America”. Officers, passengers, and a military contingent (mostly invalids) kept constant guard till the vessel had anchored in Table Bay.¹²⁶ The male stowaways were returned to Sydney,¹²⁷ but not the women. Possibly the Cape Town authorities found their disposal too problematic for decisive action. Historically, many “successful” pirates eventually suffered sticky ends. Once taken by the Dutch, the Young Lachlan's pirates mostly died in Batavia's noisome gaol. Five were repatriated to Hobart. Malcolm Campbell, the youngest, saved himself and ensured his comrades’ execution by turning approver.¹²⁸

CONCLUSION: CONVICT PIRACIES AND GEOGRAPHIES OF DISCONTENT

That convict pirates confidently put to sea hints at significant geographical knowledge among them. However, landfall experiences varied. In a Dutch colony, incarceration in a pestilential gaol, with survivors eventually deported to British territory and the gallows, could ensue. Maori rulers sometimes conferred protection and other benefits. King Kamehameha I of Hawaii conscripted escaped convicts, castaways, and ship's deserters to crew his new navy and valued them.¹²⁹ Does the Indian and Pacific Ocean diaspora of convict sea-escapers slot these people into the ranks of those elite elements in the British Empire who wielded to their profit what Alan Lester has called the “new geographies of connection”?¹³⁰

Australia's convict pirates fit awkwardly among Lester's colonial officials, officers, merchants, entrepreneurial missionaries, and commercial landowners, etc. The convicts utilized geographies of disconnection from such superiors. Kerry Ward has shown that forced migrants in the Dutch East India Company's empire – exiles, convicts, and slaves – remained autonomous historical actors.¹³¹ Likewise, historians have recently explored subaltern networks in the Indian Ocean region, through life stories of “soldiers, slaves, convicts, pirates, rebels, traders and travelers”.¹³² For Ward, imperial “geographies of connection” faced challenges from subversive counterparts. Convict pirates too were not mere historical flotsam and jetsam but were articulated in surprising if (often) indirect ways to the complex maritime struggles of the age of revolution. Colonial Australia began as a project of the new geographies of connection. How fitting, then, that it should generate a convict piracy antithesis.