[The following is in regards to perhaps the most notorious escape attempt from the notorious Macquarie Harbour Penal Station. A little more context of the penal colony, courtesy of Wikipedia: “The Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, a former British colonial penal settlement, established on Sarah Island, Macquarie Harbour, in the former colony of Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, operated between 1822 and 1833. The settlement housed mainly male convicts, with a small number of women. During its 11 years of operation, the penal colony achieved a reputation as one of the harshest penal settlements in the Australian colonies.”]
The most notorious of these failures [of escape] was a man called Pierce. He and seven others fled the prison at Macquarie and attempted to head east through the dense bush for the settlements on the Derwent. Gradually, however, their food supplies, including their own kangaroo-hide jackets, were exhausted and in the absence of other fare the group started to eat each other. Having once crossed this moral threshold, these desperadoes pursued the relentless and gruesome logic of their cannibalism until just one man, Pierce, was left alive. He managed to reach the Derwent and join up with a band of bushrangers, only to suffer the humiliation of recapture within a matter of days.
On return to Macquarie, Pierce demonstrated that his desire for liberty had not been quenched by this setback, and with just a single companion called Cox he escaped again. However, equally undiminished, it seems, was his appetite for human flesh. Pierce is alleged to have eaten Cox in preference to his supplies of bread, pork and fish, and then on his second recapture to have sung the praises of his erstwhile colleague for the excellence of his flavor. Pierce finally succeeded in escaping the horrors of Macquarie when he was transported to the jail in Hobart Town and hanged for murder in 1822.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “The Black War.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 146-47. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Travers, The Tasmanians, pp. 112-16.
Turnball, Black War, p. 27.
Further Reading:
Macquarie Harbour Penal Station
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