This is the very same book shop!
The Charlotte
This story is a gem,its really well told in the book of the same name by Geoffrey Rawson,the copies I own must be sixty years old or so,I was in a second hand book shop in Long Street,Cape Town,I purchased a few books,noted the book The Strange Case of Mary Bryant but never bought it.When I got backhome I saw that the Mary Bryant book was writen by the same author as one of those I had just purchased,so I returned to the book shop and bought the one and only copy they had,I have since bought a second copy in better condition on Ebay,it was in Canada,took ages to arrive but its a great find.
Note,there are now a number of books on sale about the same case,I have read only the one by Geoffrey Rawson,I doubt you will find a better told story,read the book before you view the movie!
The story is an easy read,shocking yes,we have no real understanding what those who went out in what was later called The First Fleet to settle Austrailia,went through,one convict,for thats what they all were,was imprisoned three years in a hulk ship,prior to starting his seven year sentence!
Mary Bryant "the Girl from Botany Bay,"
The sea route produced one epic escape in the early I790’s whose notoriety blossomed in London, reached back to Botany Bay and gave heart to would-be absconders for years to come. It was led by a woman, Mary Bryant (b. I765), "the Girl from Botany Bay," as the English press later dubbed her.
With her two small children, her husband William Bryant, and seven other convicts, she managed to sail a stolen boat all the way north from Sydney to Timor, a distance of 3,250 miles in just under ten weeks.
As a nautical achievement, this compared with William Bligh's six-week voyage in a longboat from Tahiti to Timor with the "loyalists" of the Bounty in I789. No one since James Cook in the Endeavour, twenty-one years before, had sailed all the way up the eastern coast of Australia, through the treacherous Barrier Reef, and lived to tell about it.
Mary Bryant, nee Broad, was a sailor's daughter from the little port of Fowey, in Cornwall. She had been transported for seven years for stealing a cloak. She came with the First Fleet, on the transport Charlotte. Before the fleet reached Cape Town, Mary Bryant gave birth to a girl and named her Charlotte, after the ship.
Soon after the fleet reached Port Jackson, Mary Broad married one of the male convicts, who fathered her second child, Emanuel, born in April 1790.
He, too, was Cornish and had come out on Charlotte. He was a thirty-one-year-old fisherman named William Bryant. Like many another Cornishman who kept a boat on that wild and indented coast, Bryant was a smuggler as well as a sailor, and in 1784 he had been convicted of resisting arrest at the hands of excise officers. He had already spent three years in the hulks when the First Fleet sailed, and his full seven-year sentence still loomed before him.
email me if you want an abridged version of what happens next?
roy@ckdboats.com
What of the ship the Charlotte?
Being 335 tons, 105 ft long and 28 ft at the beam, The Charlotte held 88 male and 20 female convicts. Built in 1784 and Skippered by Master Thomas Gilbert, her return to England saw her doing the London - Jamacia run until she was sold to a Quebec merchant in 1818 and was then lost off the coast of Newfoundland that very same year
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