The Girl From Botany Bay

On a moonless night in the early 1790s, prisoner Mary Bryant, her husband William, her two small children, and seven other convicts stole a twenty-foot longboat and slipped noiselessly out of Sydney Cove, Australia, eluding their captors. 

They sailed north, all the way to Indonesia, traveling some thirty-six hundred treacherous miles in ten weeks--an incredible feat of seamanship. In time, Mary's fateful journey would win her tremendous admiration. A woman once reviled as a criminal would become a London celebrity, ultimately finding forgiveness and freedom.

In The Girl from Botany Bay, distinguished historian and biographer Carolly Erickson tells Mary Bryant's remarkable story at full length for the first time--the story of a woman whose impoverished Cornwall childhood led to a life of outlaw daring and thievery, then to harsh imprisonment and exile. Erickson recounts Mary's bold ventures from her point of view, beginning with her conviction and death sentence for highway robbery. Reprieved, she was sent to New South Wales to serve out her time, one of dozens of female convicts chosen as sexual companions for the hundreds of male convicts destined for settlement in the remote continent of Australia. 

From Mary's perilous sea journey to Botany Bay and Sydney Cove, to the inhuman conditions at the penal colony, to the risky escape to the Indonesian island of Timor and the hoors of the sail back to England--during which Mary's husband and two children died of disease--the story is harrowing yet heroic. All the dangers of seafaring adventure are here: violent storms, near drownings, severe hunger and thirst, and the perils of relentless exposure to sun, wind, and salt spray that left the convicts with their skin scraped raw and their strength leached away. With the dramatic narrative skill for which she is acclaimed, Erickson brings Mary and her companions to life in compelling detail.