Tales from the Quarterdeck

Tag: cutter

  • The Life and Loss of HMSC MERMAID

    HMSC Mermaid off Cape Banks, Dec. 4, 1820, by Conrad Martens. Image Courtesy National Library of Australia.

       Between 1818 and 1820, the small survey cutter HMSC Mermaid played an important role in charting Australia’s vast coastline. So, it is perhaps ironic that her last voyage should have been cut short on an uncharted reef off the north Queensland coast.

       The Mermaid was an 84-ton cutter launched in Calcutta in 1816. She arrived in New South Wales the following year and was soon purchased by the Government to undertake survey work requested by the British Admiralty.

       Lieutenant Phillip Parker King was dispatched to Australia to carry out a detailed survey of the Australian coastline, particularly those areas bypassed by Matthew Flinders. The son of former NSW Governor Phillip Gidley King, he had been born on Norfolk Island in 1791. On the family’s return to England and completion of his schooling, the young King joined the Royal Navy. He was given command of the Mermaid and got to work.

    Lt Phillip Parker King. Unknown artist. Courtesy State Library of NSW,

       HMSC Mermaid made three extensive voyages under King. They sailed from Sydney on 22 Dec 1817, bound for Australia’s northern and northwest coasts via Bass Strait and Cape Leeuwin. The crew included two sailing masters, 12 seamen and two boys. On board were also the botanist Allan Cunningham and Bungaree, a Kuring-gai man from Broken Bay who had also circumnavigated the continent with Matthew Flinders on the Investigator.

       At Northwest Cape, King surveyed and named Exmouth Gulf before continuing north along the coast until they reached Van Diemen’s Gulf and Cobourg Peninsula. From there, they sailed to Kupang on Timor Island to resupply, where they remained for two weeks. King then set sail for Sydney, returning down the West Australian coast. The return trip was marred by rough weather and a shortage of manpower. Several of the crew had become seriously ill shortly after leaving Timor, and one of them subsequently died. Despite the hardships, the Mermaid arrived back in Sydney on 29 July 1818 after an absence of seven months and seven days.

       Between December 1818 and January 1819, King sailed to Van Diemen’s Land and undertook a survey of Macquarie Harbour, which would soon become the site of one of the convict era’s most brutal places of punishment. Their work done there, the Mermaid was back in Sydney in late February, and in May she was off again.

    Lt King’s survey cutter ‘Mermaid’ Photo courtesy State Library of Queensland.

       The third voyage, and King’s last in the Mermaid, saw them sail up the east coast of Australia on a circumnavigation of the continent. On 20 July, while sheltering in a bay he named Port Bowen at latitude 22.5 S (not to be confused with the present-day township of Bowen), the Mermaid ran aground and became stuck. It was only after considerable effort that the crew were able to warp the vessel into deep water, but she sustained serious hull damage in the process. The full extent of the injury would only become apparent months later.

       The Mermaid continued north, passed through Torres Strait and King again started making a detailed survey of the north-west coast. However, the cutter had been taking on water ever since its beaching at Port Bowen. By September, she was leaking so badly that King was compelled to careen the vessel and attend to the leaking hull. With repairs completed as best they could, he then cut short his survey and ran down the west coast, across the Great Australian Bight, returning to Sydney in December. However, the Mermaid was very nearly wrecked within sight of her home port.

       As they passed Jervis Bay, the wind was blowing strongly from the east-south-east and visibility was much reduced by heavy rain. Lt King steered a course that he thought would find them off Sydney Heads the following morning. But at 2 o’clock in the morning, King, thinking they were still 30 km from land, was surprised when a bolt of lightning revealed they were sailing directly towards Botany Bay’s south head. The Mermaid only just cleared that hazard but lodged on a rock off the north head before being lifted off by a large wave. She ploughed through breakers within metres of the rocky promontory with the sea surging and foaming around them. It was a very close call, but they were soon safely inside Sydney Harbour without further incident.

       Lt King made his fourth and final survey in the Bathurst while the Mermaid underwent much-needed repairs.   But that was not the end of the little cutter’s adventures.   She was decommissioned from the Royal Navy and taken over by the NSW colonial government, where she continued to serve with distinction.

    Mermaid being repaired during King’s voyage. Engraving by John Murray 1825. Image courtesy National Library of Australia.

       In 1828, the Mermaid received a major overhaul, including re-planking, new copper sheathing, and, most importantly, being re-rigged as a two-masted schooner. Then, in early 1829, she was tasked with helping dismantle the failed settlement at Raffles Bay on the Cobourg Peninsula. Once done there, they were to make for the remote settlement of King George Sound (present-day Albany) to deliver stores and dispatches. Under the command of Captain Nolbrow, the Mermaid departed Sydney on 16 May and headed north, keeping to the inner passage inside the Great Barrier Reef.

       Tragedy struck at 6 o’clock in the morning on 13 June when, about 35 km south of present-day Cairns, the Mermaid ran grounded on a reef not recorded on King’s recently published naval chart. At 8 p.m., Captain Nolbrow and his crew, 13 men in all, took to the lifeboat with the hold bilged and water already over the cabin deck.

       Twelve days later, as they continued north towards Torres Strait, the castaways were picked up by the Admiral Gifford. The Admiral Gifford was a 34-ton schooner on a speculative voyage through Australia’s northern waters and was ill-equipped to carry so many additional passengers. On 3 July, Nolbrow and his crew were transferred to the much larger Swiftsure, possibly in the vicinity of Pipon Island. Unfortunately, the Swiftsure was wrecked two days later near Cape Sidmouth and her crew, along with the Mermaid’s, were rescued by the Brig Resource.

       Captain Nolbrow and his men eventually made it back to Sydney via the Swan River settlement (present-day Perth) in November 1829. The remains of the Mermaid were discovered on Flora Reef in 2009.

     © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2023.

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  • William Bryant’s Great Escape – 1791

    1930s era illustration of the 1791 convict escape led by William Bryant. Source: The World’s News 9 Sep 1931 Page 9.

       It is an odd piece of Australian history that some of the first people to repeat Captain Cook’s voyage up Australia’s east coast were not other intrepid navigators or explorers, but a motley band of prisoners bent on escape.

       In March 1791, nine convicts stole Governor Phillips’ six-oared whaleboat and made their way out through Sydney Heads. That was the start of a 5000 km voyage that would take them up Australia’s east coast, around the tip of Cape York and across the Arafura Sea. On 5 June, after 69 days at sea, they sailed into the Dutch settlement of Kupang on Timor Island. It was a remarkable achievement then, and remains so to this day.   

    Their leader was a 34-year-old fisherman from Cornwall called William Bryant. He had been sent to New South Wales for impersonating Royal Navy sailors so as to collect their wages. That was back in December 1783. Bryant had been sentenced to transportation for seven years, and by the end of 1790, he had technically completed his sentence and should have been released. However, no one had thought to send the appropriate documentation out with the convicts on the First Fleet, so he had no way to prove his claim. What’s more, the colony was still struggling to feed itself, and Bryant was a valuable man to Governor Phillip and his administration. Bryant kept the colony supplied with fish, even when other sources of sustenance failed.

    Map showing their approximate route from Sydney to Timor. Source: Google Maps.

       It seems likely that Bryant had started planning his escape shortly after the seven-year anniversary of his sentence. Even had he been allowed to leave, he probably could not have done so. His wife, Mary, still had a couple of years to serve, and there were two young children to consider. He shared his plans with seven trusted mates, and they began preparations to escape. Those seven were all members of the colony’s fishing fleet, and all had years of maritime experience to draw on.

       In the weeks and months leading to their departure, they began stashing away provisions for the long journey. That must have been no easy task, for flour, rice, salted pork, and other staples were all in limited supply. Sydney was starving, and all food was closely monitored and carefully rationed out. However, Bryant was known to have skimmed fish from the catch before handing it over to the Government store. Perhaps he used some of that to trade for the supplies he needed. He also purchased a couple of muskets, a compass, a quadrant and a chart from the captain of a Dutch ship which had recently delivered supplies to Sydney. He likely also paid for these by selling or trading fish on the black market.

    William Bryant and the convicts in the six oar Governor’s cutter which they sailed from Sydney to Kupang. Source: Smith’s Weekly 23 Oct 1937 Page 18

    On the night of 28 March, they were ready to leave. The Bryants, their two children and the rest of the runaways gathered together everything they had amassed for the voyage and carried it down to Sydney Cove. There, they loaded it into Governor Phillips’ cutter, which happened to be the largest and the sturdiest of the boats in the colony’s small fishing fleet. They then headed across Sydney Harbour and out to sea.

       It is hard to imagine what was passing through their minds as they put Sydney behind them. They must have known that the voyage they were embarking on would be fraught with danger. None of them would have been naïve enough to think it would be smooth sailing. They could only rely on their own resourcefulness and a bit of luck to make it to Kupang. On the one hand, remaining in Sydney was hardly a safe alternative. Conditions had grown dire in the struggling colony. Starvation and disease were constant companions. In the previous year alone, 143 people had perished; all but a handful had been convicts.

       The first place they pulled in to replenish water and look for fresh supplies was the Hunter River. There, they were visited by the local inhabitants, the Awabakal people, and after being given a few gifts, the convicts were left unmolested. However, that would be the only time they received a friendly reception. The next time they pulled in to make repairs to the cutter, they were run off by the local Aborigines. A little while later, they were blown far out to sea, and by the time they had returned to the coast, they found few opportunities to put ashore due to the dangerous surf conditions.

       One month after leaving Sydney, they had travelled about 540 nm (1000 km) or only one-fifth of the way to Kupang. This would have placed them somewhere between the Sunshine Coast and Fraser Island (K’gari), where they were forced to land to make urgent repairs to the cutter. It had been taking on water and needed to be recaulked before they continued on their journey north. They were soon heading into Australia’s tropical waters, where they were caught in an unseasonal storm that lashed them for several days without mercy.  They were kept bailing continuously to keep afloat, but they survived. They were blown far out into the Coral Sea, and it would take them more than one full day’s sailing west until they found a small deserted island. This was likely Lady Elliot or one of the islands in the Bunker Group a little further north.   After weeks of struggle and misfortune, they seized the opportunity to recuperate and escape the cramped conditions on the boat.

       The sailing conditions finally improved, and they made steady progress up the Queensland coast, pushed along by the prevailing southerlies. Shortly after rounding Cape York, they replenished their water and then headed out across the Gulf of Carpentaria. It would take them four and a half days to reach East Arnhem Land. Bryant then followed the coastline for several days, looking for a place to refill their water casks. The search proved fruitless, so he decided to head out to sea and make a direct course for Timor. Thirty-six hours later, they made it to Timor Island. It was now 5 June. They had completed their 5000 km voyage in 69 days with no loss of life. That was no mean feat of seamanship and tenacity. Unfortunately, things would soon turn against the runaways.

       Bryant and the others passed themselves off as shipwrecked sailors to the Dutch authorities, and for a while, they were treated as such. But then it seems someone blabbed about who they really were, and the Governor locked them in gaol. Shortly after Captain Edwards and his crew arrived in the settlement, genuine survivors of HMS Pandora wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. When Edwards left for England, Bryant and the rest of the bolters went with him.

       William Bryant and his son would die in a Batavia gaol. Three other convicts, plus the Bryants’ daughter, perished on the voyage back to England. Mary Bryant and the four remaining prisoners were put on trial, charged with returning from transportation. They could have been sentenced to death or returned to New South Wales for the rest of their lives. Instead, news of the atrocious conditions in Sydney and their ordeal trying to escape them touched a nerve. They were allowed to serve out their original sentences in England, and by November 1793, Mary Bryant and the four other convicts had all been pardoned and allowed to walk free.    A detailed account of the voyage from Sydney to Kupang can be found in “Memorandums” written by James Martin, one of the convicts who made it back to England. 

    The long and perilous voyage remains one of the great feats of seamanship in an open boat. It is told in more detail in Bolters: An Unruly Bunch of Malcontents.

    © Copyright C.J. Ison / Tales from the Quarterdeck, 2022.

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