A BOSWELL LETTER
AN AUTOGRAPH letter of James Boswell’s, presented to the Library by Mr. David Strang of Auckland, has particular interest for Australasia. It was purchased by Mr. Strang at an auction sale in Wellington of material from the library of Mr. Johannes C. Andersen. Its earlier history is not recorded. It is expressed to be written from Great Portland Street on 10th August, 1792, and is addressed to Sir Evan Nepean, at that time a Commissioner of the Privy Seal.
The circumstances under which it was written commence with the conviction in 1787 of one Mary Braund for assisting her future husband to escape from gaol. She was sentenced to transportation, and transported to Botany Bay. Thence she, her convict husband William Bryant they were married immediately on landing), their two children, and six other convicts.
escaped in an open boat, and managed to reach the island of Timor, where they posed as survivors of a shipwreck and received assistance accordingly. One of their number, however, revealed the true story in his cups, and the Governor sent them in a Netherlands ship to England, where the survivors (Bryant and one child had died in Batavia, and the other child en route to England) were confined in Newgate prison.
The case having come under Boswell’s notice, he in the first place interceded on behalf of Mary, who received a free pardon, and subsequently lived with her parents. Boswell continued to interest himself in her, and gave her monetary assistance until his death.
He then took up the cause of the rest of the party, and it was in their interest that this letter was written. The letter says: —“. . . I request to see you only for five minutes, to mention the case of the five persons who made a wonderful escape from New South Wales, and are now in Newgate. I now know a great deal about them, and have been with Mr. Justice Bond, who is favourably disposed to them, and thought that my applying to you might be of essential service. I have no doubt of your humanity; ...”
In this case also Boswell’s efforts, or those of others, were successful, and some, but not all, of the convicts received free pardons. (See Geoffrey Rawson, The Strange Case of Mary Bryant (1938), where, however, there is no mention of Boswell.)
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Turnbull Library Record, Volume IX, 1 September 1952, Page 9
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391A BOSWELL LETTER Turnbull Library Record, Volume IX, 1 September 1952, Page 9
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The majority of this journal is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. The exceptions to this, as of June 2018, are the following three articles, which are believed to be out of copyright in New Zealand.
• David Blackwood Paul, “The Second Walpole Memorial Lecture”. Turnbull Library Record 12: (September 1954) pp.3-20
• Eric Ramsden, “The Journal of John B. Williams”. Turnbull Library Record 11: (November 1953), pp.3-7
• Arnold Wall, “Sir Hugh Walpole and his writings”. Turnbull Library Record 6: (1946), pp.1-12
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