Abstract

This study evaluates a transported convict, Robert Stewart, and his serial-invented identities. They culminated in him creating much sympathetic support among Calcutta’s white residents, as the honorable, romantic, and well-connected natural son of an aristocratic admiral. While not denying that he had escaped from Sydney by participating in the spectacular piratical seizure of the brig Harrington, he deluded his Calcutta supporters that his transportation offence was no mean felony but a crime of honour. Stewart’s “identity frauds” destabilized the (often fragile) claims to gentlemanly status of colonial elites. The Harrington affair plus his two, or possibly three, prior attempts to escape from transportation by piracy open up a wider issue, little considered hitherto in the academic literature on early colonial Australia. In brief, piratical seizures in Australian havens are revealed as a major escape practice among Australia’s transported convicts, contributing alongside stowing away and illicitly engaging as merchant seamen, to an escaped convict presence scattered across many maritime locations from Cape Town to Chile. These included Calcutta, which supplied many of the consumption needs and desires of early New South Wales and Van-Diemen’s Land—and a considerable sector of these colonies’ shipping resources. Two major archive collections of letters and petitions by Stewart, one from his time in Newgate in 1801–2, the other from his 5 months’ incarceration in Calcutta, are among sources interrogated and deconstructed to reveal a tricky but formidable man. Fittingly, in ex-convict memory in Australia, he long remained a liberational figure.

pdf

Share