Hell's Gates: the Terrible Journey of Alexander Pearce Van Diemen's Land Cannibal by Paul Collins
South Yarra Vic.: Hardie Grant Books, 2002 ISBN 1740640837
I've been trying to remember the first time I heard about Alexander Pearce. Certainly it wasn't in my schooldays, when Australia's convict past was glossed over quite quickly in our history classes. I think it was probably when I got to university, where one of my new friends introduced me to the music of Weddings Parties Anything and specifically their song A Tale They Won't Believe, which deals with this macabre and tragic snippet of Australian history (and is well worth listening to).
In my reading life since then I have come across mentions of Pearce's exploits from time-to-time, but this is the first book I have read that specifically deals with Pearce. Written by someone with an interest in Tasmanian history, Collins (who is also a Roman Catholic priest) was initially drawn to this story through the landscape of South West Tasmania. What he and many other people see these days as a beautiful wilderness, the original white settlers and convicts saw as a harsh and dangerous landscape that should be tamed as much as possible. The very country that Collins and his friends traversed with joy led Pearce and his fellow escapees to murder and cannibalism. The moral revulsion that Collins and others feel about such acts was also something that he wanted to explore... what drove these convicts to this ultimate end?
Drawing on much contemporary material (there is a good bibliographic essay at the end of the book, but unfortunately no index), Collins describes Pearce's journey from Ireland to Australia, and the conditions for convicts in Tasmania on his arrival. While most people might think that convicts spent their time in leg-irons, working on chain-gangs and spending each night in a cell, for many life could be very different. Pearce was assigned to a free settler north of Hobart, where he worked for a time as a shepherd. Many other convicts undertook similar roles, helping to build the colony: if their behaviour was acceptable they could hope to earn a ticket-of-leave before the end of their sentence and start to begin life as a free person.
Unfortunately for Pearce his behaviour was far from acceptable: originally transported for theft, his nefarious deeds continued in Tasmania, absconding from service and forging documents leading him to receive a sentence of lashes and an order to be sent to a "place of secondary punishment".
When your whole colony is effectively a prison, what do you do with those prisoners that will not or cannot toe the line? You could build some kind of "supermax" prison, but that costs a lot of money, something His Majesty's Government was not prepared to do. Lieutenant Governor Sorrell came with an ingenious solution: send the recalcitrant prisoners to Macquarie Harbour in the South West of Tasmania, where they could be employed cutting down the great stands of Huon Pine, an excellent shipbuilding timber. It was a harsh and brutal experience; escape was deemed impossible, with hundreds of kilometres of trackless wilderness between the convict barracks on Sarah Island and the settled parts of the colony.
Collins makes clear that Pearce was not only a criminal, but impulsive and violent at times. It was certainly an impulsive act to join the escape led by Robert Greenhill. With no planning and only the small amount of food they had on them at the time, they proceeded into the rainforest that surrounded the penal settlement with only a vague idea of where they were headed. The going was extremely hard, the escapees had little food, and after months of harsh conditions at Macquarie Harbour they were not in peak physical condition to start with.
Greenhill, the de-facto leader of the group (as an ex-sailor he was the only one with navigation skills, and he took control of the one axe they had) broached the subject of killing and eating one of the party, mentioning the custom of shipwrecked sailors as a precedent. Dalton was the first to be killed, and the group then spent the next weeks in a hell of starvation, physical distress and paranoia. Two members of the group decided to turn back and surrender (they did make it back, but died of exhaustion soon after) and slowly the others were killed and devoured, until only Greenhill and Pearce remained. Pearce killed Greenhill before eventually reaching the fringe of the settled area, where he took up with some other convicts before he was captured soon after. He told his tale to his captors, who didn't believe him: they thought he was creating a cover story for his fellow escapees so that the authorities wouldn't search for them. Pearce was sent back to Macquarie Harbour.
While there are a few versions of Pearce's tale extant, it is well to remember that they all come from Pearce himself, and he was always careful to exclude himself from any acts of killing (apart from Greenhill, which he claimed was an act of self-defence). We will never know what truly went on between those men during their time in the bush, and how much Pearce was involved in the decisions to kill and cannibalize the others.
What is known is that not long after his return to Macquarie Harbour he absconded again with a young convict Cox, whom he killed in a fit of rage after learning that Cox couldn't swim, dismembering and eating part of him before continuing his escape with the remainder of Cox's body as provision. For some reason his courage failed him and he returned and got himself apprehended. His previous exploits were well-known on Sarah Island, and having been found with a piece of Cox's flesh in his pocket, this time his story was believed. He was hanged in Hobart several months later (pedant alert - another quibble with Collins - he continually uses the term hung to describe hangings - animals are hung, people are hanged).
Collins has written a comprehensive account - some may think too comprehensive. The final twenty-six page chapter is a "Personal Postscript" which discusses the destruction of Lake Pedder, the tragic history of the Tasmanian Aborigines and Collins' speculation on whether it was the tribulation of his escape that drove Pearce to madness, or whether it was the privations of life as a convict, or whether it was his upbringing in Ireland that was to blame.
I imagine it was probably a combination of factors that led Pearce to his tragic end, and to being one small piece in the unbelievable story of Australian history. This book is not a bad way to find out more about him.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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