The Story of Mary Bryant

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 8

The Story of Mary Bryant

[N the enlightened days of Gibbon and Dr Johnson a Cornish girl was tried -at Exeter for stealing a cloak. The sentence was seven years’ transportation. The terrifying adventures which subsequently befell Mary Bryant of Fowey have been reconstructed in dramatic form by Aileen Mills for the BBC. Her play, Escape from Port Jackson, will be heard from 1XN on Wednesday, October 2, and later from other stations. After her sentence Mary was held with a cargo of other women convicts in a ship which -lay at anchor off the English coast for 10 months. For a further eight months the ship was at sea on its way to what is now Sydney, Australia. Then for four years she and her fellow felons, 600 men and. 200 women, under a guard of marines, struggled to make the fever-ridden shacks of Port Jackson into a habitable home. There she met and married William Bryant, a fellow Cornishman. She: bore him two

children, and then in March, 1791, she, her husband and children and seven other men escaped in the camp fishing boat to Dutch Timor. But the ship from whose wreck they pretended to have escaped. was actually wrecked near by, and its master and survivors landed at the same Dutch settlement. The escapers were recognised and shipped back to England to stand trial once again. Mary’s husband and children died on the way home, with three of the convicts. Mary and the four remaining convicts were sentenced. again to transportation, but this time for life. By chance James Boswell read her story in a newspaper, but it took him almost a year to obtain a pardon. Finally she was released and able to return to her home in Fowey. The part of Mary Saget is. taken by Aileen Mills, William Bryant by Hedley Goodall,.and Captain Arthur Phillip, the Governor, by Dudley Rolph.