Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife by Jennifer Ashton

Author:Jennifer Ashton [Ashton, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781776710829
Publisher: Auckland UP
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Army Wife

On 12 June 1807 a rowboat made its way across the water towards the HMS Porpoise, moored off the coast of Norfolk Island. On board was Charlotte Badger, on the final leg of a trip that had taken her on the triangular route to Van Diemen’s Land, the Bay of Islands and now Norfolk. She had been on the island for several months after arriving on board the Indispensible, living on government stores. Now the government was sending her on the final leg of her journey, back to Sydney. After several weeks on a rough sea, she arrived back in Port Jackson to begin her old life anew.

Thanks to the bureaucratic requirements imposed on colonial officials, we know how the government viewed Badger. The Porpoise’s passenger list, which described her as ‘one of the women on the Venus schooner when run away with from P. Dalrymple’, strongly implies that officials saw her as a passive actor in the piracy of the Venus, as a woman caught up in events beyond her control instead of a transgressor in her own right.1 The fact that the government did not take any action against her once she was back in Sydney seems to confirm this view. Instead of being prosecuted as a runaway, she was allowed to merge back into Sydney society and resume her life.

The lack of interest in her return is notable in another way, too. She was a woman who, as far as the government was concerned, had been taken by pirates and who had spent months living among strange people in a strange land, and yet the local press paid her no attention. This apparent indifference was in stark contrast to the way they had treated the tale of Elizabeth Morey when she was brought to Sydney in 1804 following her escape from Tongatapu. Morey had become a focus of press coverage when she retold her story as part of an investigation into the attacks on the Portland and the Union, the ship that had brought her to the Pacific and the vessel that had transported her to Sydney. Badger’s arrival back as a sole emissary and the lack of any public enquiry allowed her to slip quietly into obscurity and her fate to go unnoticed by the public.

What’s more, at the time of her return the colony had other things on its mind. Badger had been brought back to Sydney by Lieutenant John Putland, a navy man who had served under Horatio Nelson before coming to New South Wales in early August 1806 in the company of the colony’s new governor, his father-in-law William Bligh. Putland had travelled on board the Porpoise under the command of Joseph Short, but Bligh put him in charge of the vessel once it reached Port Jackson owing to ongoing tension between Short and the new man in charge. By the beginning of 1808 Putland was dead from tuberculosis, which at least spared him the pain of watching what came next, as Bligh’s governorship came to a crashing, humiliating end.

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