WONDERFUL VOYAGE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 243, 3 June 1932, Page 8

WONDERFUL VOYAGE

N.S.W. CONVICT

TRAYELLED 3000 MILES FROM PORT JACKSON TO TIMOR.

JOURNEY IN OPEN BOAT. .

The hero of the second greatest boat voyage in history — a voyage excelled only by that of Bligh of the Bounty — was William Bryant, a conviee at Port Jackson in His Majesty's Colony of New South Wales. While Bligh's fieat has been related in hook after hook, Bryant's adventure, little inferior, has remained unnoticed and practically unknown for 140 years. Now. unfortunately, it has been given its due prominence by Dunhabin in his fascinating volume of sea stories of old Sydney and the Pacific, "Sailing the World's Edge." Bryant, a West Country fisherman, had been transported for having interrupted Revenue officers in the exrcution of their duty,.and reached Port Jackson in the first fieet in 1788. With him in the new colony were his_! wife, whose sentence of death for stealing a cloak, had been commuted to seven years' transportation, and their two babies, Emmanuel and Charlotte. The first colonists at Port Jackson convicts and guards alike, had a hard row to hoe, and their scanty supplies of salt pork, bread and a few vegetables, were largely eked out with fish. Bryant was put in charge of one of the small fishing boats. Soon after arrival he was claiming, unsuccessfully, that his sentence had expired, and apparently, he was watching for a chance to escape. Got His Chance. He got it. On December 17, 1790, tliere sailed into Port Jackson, the Dutch scow Waaksaamheid, Detmen Smit xnaster. Bryant contrived to get in touch with Smit and in return for Government fish and anything else that Bryant and seven convicts whom he had taken into confidence could lay hands on, Smit gave them a compass, a quadrant and a chart. Bryant decided to make for Koepang, in Timor. "It is was a desperate and amazing adventure, A fisherman, assisted by a man with an elementary knowledge of navigation, was in command of a fishing boat manned by seven men and carrying also a woman and two tiny children. With the roughest of charts, a compass and a quadrant, and a very meagre supply of provisions they set out on a voyage of 3000 miles. In their open boat they had to work their way right up the east coast of Australia, through the tangle of islands and reefs in Torres Straits, across the Gulf of Carpentaria and th'en across over 40 miles of open sea to Timor." The man with an "elementary knowledge of navigation" 'was George William Morton, who had been sent out for seven years. The ot'her six convicts who joined the hazardous enterprise were servlng sentences ranging from seven years to life for trivial thefts. Slipped Away. On the night of March 28, 1791. this queerly assorted company slipped away. No serious attempt was made to pursue them, as no one dreamed that they would come to anything but disaster. There had been escapes before and in almost every one the sea or savage natives had brought death to the runaways. iryant and his companions had better luck— -for a time. They ran the gauntlet of the treacherous coral reefs, -escaped from prowling proas, and on June 4, after a voyage of 68 days, reached Koepang. There they passed themselves off as castaways from an English ship which had found'ered on the way to India. "There were too many of them, however, to keep the secret Some of the men, when debauched in liquor, gave away the fact that they were escaped convicts." Then, by a curious twist of fortune, their fate became involvad with the one boat voyage which excelied their own. Not quite two years before Captain William Bligh, commander of H.M.S. Bounty and later Governor of New South Wales, had reached Koepang after a voyage of 3600 miles Erom near the Friendly Islands. The crew of the Bounty had mutinied — due, it is said, to Bligh's overbearing conduct — and had set the commander and 18 others a&rift. Bligh, by superb seamanship, brought the little boat to Timor, while most of the mutineers went on to found the isolated, half-caste colony on Pitcairn Island. Wrecked in Straits. When Bligh reached England Captain Edward Edwards was sent out in the Pandora to search for the mutineers. He found a.few at Tahiti and Set sail for England, but was wrecked in Torres Straits. On September 19, 1791, he brought the survivors into Koepang in the Pandora's boats. A coupl'3 of weeks later the Governor handed over to him Bryant and his companions. Edwards took them to Batavia, where Bryant and his son Emmanuel died. The rest were shipped to Cape Town in the Dutch ship Hornway. One man fell overboard and was lost and Morton and another man died aboard. At Cape Town the six survivors were transferred to H.M.S. Gorgon. The baby girl, Charlotte Bryant, died at sea; the others duly appeared at Bow Street and were recommitted to Port Jackson. Mary Bryant, whose plight roused the sympathy of a high Army officer, was subsequently pardoned. The fate of one man is uncertain; another, a pig-stealer, bluffed the authorities so successfully that he went back to the penal settlement not as a prisoner, but as a private in the New South Wales Corps, and an expert on pigbreeding. The r'emaining two returned as convicts to the country from which they had once made so marvellous an escape.