Mary Bryant: The Convict Who Escaped Australia in an Open Boat

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Mary Broad was born in Cornwall around 1765, a farmer's daughter. In 1785 she and two other women robbed Agnes Lakeman on a road near Plymouth, taking goods that included a silk bonnet worth 12 pence. The sentence was death, commuted to seven years of transportation. She waited aboard the prison hulk Dunkirk, gave birth to a daughter named Charlotte, and sailed with the First Fleet in May 1787. In New South Wales she married William Bryant, a fellow convict and mariner put in charge of the starving colony's fishing, and later flogged with 100 lashes for selling part of his catch.

On March 28, 1791, the Bryants, their two small children, and seven other convicts slipped away in a small open boat with a compass, a quadrant, and a chart obtained from a Dutch ship's captain. This episode follows their 69-day, 5,000 kilometer voyage up the Australian coast, through the Great Barrier Reef and the Torres Strait to Kupang on Timor, a feat compared to William Bligh's open boat journey. It also follows the collapse of their cover story and the terrible voyage back to England in chains.

• William's sentence had expired in March 1791, but with no ship home, freedom in the colony meant little more than the right to starve.
• In Kupang the party posed as shipwreck survivors until the Dutch governor learned the truth and jailed them.
• They were handed to Captain Edward Edwards, who had just lost HMS Pandora on the Great Barrier Reef while hunting the Bounty mutineers.
• William and their son Emanuel died in December 1791, and Charlotte died in May 1792 on the last leg home. Of eleven escapees, only Mary and four men reached England.
• James Boswell took up their defense, Mary was pardoned in 1793, and he paid her a pension of 10 pounds a year. After 1794 she disappears from the record.