//Ed. Note: TNT has come upon a very good book: 'The Fatal
Shore', by Robert Hughes, about the 'transportation' of the
English and Irish 'criminal classes' to Australia that began in
1788.
Herewith the fantastic voyage of James Porter, who absconded
from the penal colony at Macquarie Harbor on the west coast
of today's Tasmania (then Van Diemen's Land) in 1833 (pp 216-
218 in the book).//
"James Porter, a twenty-six-year-old Londoner helped his convict
companions, ex-sailors among them, to hijack the brig
Frederick
from the slipway where they had built her for the government at
Macquarie Harbor in 1833, just as the settlement was being
abandoned. This caused much embarrassment, not least because
the vessel had been named after one of Lieutenant-Governor
Arthur's seven sons.
Penal colony at Macquarie Harbor, circa 1830.
They cast the guards and crew ashore (all survived) and with
remarkable skill and courage sailed clear across the Pacific to the
coast of Chile, where they abandoned her to sink and took to the
longboat. Reaching Valdivia, they came before its Chilean governor,
who assumed that they were pirates, not innocent shipwrecked sailors,
and promised to shoot them. Porter saved their skins with a stirring
speech (as recorded years later by himself):
'Avast there! We as sailors shipwrecked and in distress expected
when we made thisport to have been treated in a Christian-like
manner, not as though we were dogs!Is this the way you would
have treated us in 1818 when the British Tars were fighting for
your independence, and bleeding in your cause against the old
Spaniards? If we were pirates do you suppose we should be so
weak as to cringe to your tyranny? Never! I also wish you to
understand that if we are shot England will know of it and will
be revenged...Should you put your threat into execution we will
teach you Patriots how to die.'
The distance between Australia and Chile is about 7,000 miles.
Impressed by this magnificent bluff, the governor let them stay
unmolested and asked his superiors in Santiago to issue them
with residence permits. Porter and his companions now settled
down to a picaresque life among the ladies and knife-wielders
in Chile.
But the governor was replaced soon afterward, and his successor-
suspicious that Porter and his shipmates were, in fact, escaped
convicts - alerted a passing British frigate, HMS Blond. Thus
they were taken again, first back to England, and then on a second
transport ship to Van Diemen's Land. On the weary voyage
south, Porter was falsely denounced as a mutineer by two of
his former shipmates, Charles Lyon and William Cheshire, who
hoped to curry favor with the captain and escape hanging for
piracy when, as seemed inevitable, they were recognized in
Hobart:
'Knowing my innocence I stood nearly petrified. I was seized
by the soldiers and seamen, lashed to a grating (and to that
degree until the blood oozed from the parts where the lashings
went round different parts of my person) and a lump of a black
fellow flogged me across the lines and every other part of my
body until my head sank on my breast. As for the quantity of
the lashes I cannot say, for I would not give them the satisfaction
ot scringe to it, until nature gave way through exhaustion.'
The 'lash' being administered.
Then he and his mate William Shires were chained below, bleeding
and infected, hands manacled behind their backs, in a steaming
rat's-hole and were given no more than quarter-rations of water
and food for three weeks, until they presented "the appearance of
anatomies (i.e. skeletons) more than living beings."
Macquarie Harbor is the large inlet in the middle
of the map at left, on Van Diemen's Land/Tasmania's
west coast.
Somehow Porter survived the voyage and landed in Hobart in
March 1837, where he was instantly recognized as one of the
pirates of the Frederick. He was tried and convicted of piracy,
despite his ingenious argument in defense: As the vessel had not
been formally commissioned by the government - 'it was canvas,
rope, boarding and trenails, put together shipwise -" yet it was
not a legal ship so the seizure might be theft, but not piracy.'
Luckily for Porter, 'the bloodthirsty former governor Arthur
had left Van Diemen's Land five months earlier' and had not
the colony been under the Government of the humane Sir
John Franklin, I should not now have been alive to have given
this small narrative.' So Porter and Shires did not hang. They
ended up on Norfolk Island, where Porter was able to write
his memoirs under the kindly eye of Captain Alexander
Maconochie."
Norfolk Island is 1,000 miles east of mainland Australia.
//Ed. Note: Porter appeared again in Hughes's book, on
page 504. Under Captain Maconachie's relatively liberal
administration of the Norfolk Island penal colony, Porter
sang 'The Light Irishman' during celebrations for Queen
Victoria's birthday, 25 May 1840.//
