When Captain George Browning sailed the small schooner Caledonia from Sydney in December 1831, he intended to follow the coast north as far as the Tropic of Capricorn. There he was to collect salvage from a ship that had been wrecked in the Bunker Islands and return it to Sydney to be sold. But onContinue reading “No Charts, No Worries”
Category Archives: Convict History
The Caledonia’s perilous last voyage
On a stormy December night in 1831, eleven desperate convicts seized a small ship at Moreton Bay and forced its captain to take them to a South Pacific Island. But as the prisoners turned pirates climbed aboard the vessel, little could they have imagined that most of them were escaping one reign of terror forContinue reading “The Caledonia’s perilous last voyage”
HMS Guardian: All Hands to the Pumps
In September 1789 H.M.S. Guardian sailed from Portsmouth, England with much needed supplies for the newly established penal settlement in New South Wales. But its voyage was cut short when it struck an iceberg in the Southern Ocean and began filling with water. After an uneventful passage south, the Guardian had stopped at Table BayContinue reading “HMS Guardian: All Hands to the Pumps”
Thomas Pamphlett and the Remarkable Castaways of Moreton Bay
Most Queensland school children are taught that the first non-Aboriginal people to settle in their state were convicts and their gaolers who arrived in September 1824. But actually the first white-skinned people to live in what would become Queensland were three castaway ex-convicts who came ashore 18 months earlier. In 1823 Governor Brisbane sent theContinue reading “Thomas Pamphlett and the Remarkable Castaways of Moreton Bay”
Tales from the Quarterdeck 