The Writing on the Wall

When little Weesy Coppin's ghost was called upon by Anne and her surviving siblings to show the fate of Sir John Franklin, the vision she gave was of a sort which was likely familiar to all the children and their parents: an enigmatic message, the 'writing on the wall' from the feast of Belshazzar in the book of Daniel:

In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. And then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.  The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers. And the king spake, and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing, and shew me the interpretation thereof, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom. And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

Quite probably the scene had been related in a sermon or Bible reading in the family, and even if it had not, the same scene had been the subject of a number of moving panoramas -- one of them displayed in 1833 alongside Sir John Ross's Arctic paintings -- as well as cartoons in Punch; the phrase "writing on the wall" was already proverbial.

And writing on walls seems always to be enigmatic; the Hebrew words on Balshazzar's can be literally translated as mina, mina, shekel, half-mina, with both mina and shekel being common coins.  The prophet Daniel, summoned to interpret them, decreed their significance to be "Mina, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; shekel, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; half-mina, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians."  This was not what Balshazzar wanted to hear, no doubt, but since he was killed later the same night, he had little time to ponder it; in the proverbial sense, "writing on the wall" comes too late to be a warning, and is more of a sentence of fate.

We also learn in reviewing Skewes's account of the vision, along with what survives of correspondence about it, that at least one of the Coppin children had the 'gift of tongues.'  This supposed gift has to do with that given to the Apostles in the Book of Acts to speak in the tongues of many nations -- but in practice, it too means that one person speaks in "tongues" -- usually inscrutable in terms of earthly languages -- and another has the gift of interpreting these arcane utterances.

So it is little surprise that we have again an enigmatic text: B.S. = P.R.I. = N.F. = S.J.F. = B.V.F.R.G.R.L.S.P.F.M.F.M., with Victory and Victoria also "frequently written." The first few clusters immediately suggest a polar voyage, with Barrow Straits, Prince Regent Inlet, and "Sir John Franklin" -- N.F. eludes me -- and as to the remaining letters, the possibilities are too numerous to count.  On a later occasion, the child's ghost, asked for clarification, came forth with fuller phrases: "Erebus and Terror, Sir John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Point Victory, Victoria Channel." This seems a good deal more straightforward, and does indeed suggest a definite polar itinerary, as well as implying a passage from Prince Regent Inlet -- the Bellot Strait -- which was not yet discovered. It also, however, is problematic, as there was no "Victoria Channel" in 1849, this not having been given its name -- derived from Victory Point -- until Captain Collinson did so in 1852.

This last point is certainly evidence that the 'revelation' as such was augmented and altered over time, though perhaps unintentionally.  It is also, in any case, flawed in two other regards: Franklin does not appear to have ventured Prince Regent Inlet or traversed Bellot Strait -- the latter of which would have been quite tricky for ships with the draught and beam of "Erebus" and "Terror" -- and, although Weesy showed him waving his hat, he had already in fact been dead for some months.  Never the less, the fact that these revelations not only played a role in Arctic discovery, but also in at least some of their particulars proved uncannily accurate, cannot be disputed.

The Londonderry Vision, Redux

I have posted before on the "Londonderry Vision" and Captain Coppin, but new interest in the subject -- along with some thought-provoking research by the indefatigable Ralph Lloyd-Jones, makes it worth a second go.  We are also fortunate in that both the first and second editions of the Rev. J. Henry Skewes's Revelation are now available online at archive.org for anyone to download or read (the book is exceedingly scarce -- only a handful of copies are in libraries, and it rarely comes up for sale). All this makes a fresh look at the story worthwhile, and opens it up the historical evidence to scrutiny by the wisdom of crowds.

The basic facts are simple enough: In 1849, Captain William Coppin -- a comfortably well-off shipyard owner in Belfast -- heard from his family of strange visions in which his recently-deceased youngest daughter Louisa -- known to the family as "Weesy" -- appeared to her siblings and offered revelations on various subjects.  The family became convinced of their truth after the child's ghost predicted the death of the family banker, and the children -- as the mystery of Sir John Franklin's fate was much in the air -- asked their spiritual sibling whether she had any intelligence as to his whereabouts. "Weesy" readily replied with a vision of his ships in icy waters, along with a map and some letters upon the wall.  When Mrs. Coppin, on one of her husband's apparently infrequent visits to the family home, related this story to him, he decided -- after some delay -- that he should inform Lady Franklin of the particulars, and bring her a chart drawn by Weesy's sister Anne from the one which had appeared on the wall. They corresponded, met, and it appears that Jane may well have passed on some of the advice apparently contained in these revelations to officers then preparing to leave for the Arctic to search for her husband.

It is at this point that we enter into uncertainty, as most of the claims that the Reverend Skewes published in 1889 in his book about the affair cannot now be independently substantiated.  The first suspicion that we might have, sensibly enough, would be that Skewes altered or fabricated evidence to make the Coppin story more accurate than in fact it was.  Such a possibility can't be entirely ruled out, absent any letters from the period, or the chart itself -- but as Lloyd-Jones observes in his recent article on the subject in the Polar Record, there is good reason to believe that the reason these materials are missing is that Sophia Cracroft retained, and probably destroyed them.

The evidence for this is in the second edition of the book, where the good Reverend took it upon himself to reply to an indignant public reprimand by Sir Leopold McClintock.  McClintock had gone to pains to stress that his search was not conducted under any supernatural direction, and denied that he or Lady Franklin would ever have credited such evidence if that had received it.  Skewes, warming to the battle, quoted in his rebuttal an 1859 letter of Lady Franklin's to Captain Coppin in which she very explicitly thanks him for his daughter's revelation, and reassures him that the chart and letters were in her safekeeping:

"I have received your letter of yesterday, requesting you to tell me how far the 'mysterious revelations' of your child, in 1850, respecting the expedition of my late husband, correspond with the facts recently ascertained by Captain McClintock's researches. In reply, I have no hesitation in telling you that your child's drawn by herself, without as you assure me having seen an Arctic chart before, represented the ships as being in a channel which we believed at that time to be inaccessible, but which has since been found ... I have carefully preserved your letter and the child's drawing and you may be assured they are in safety."

There is, I think, no reason to doubt the authenticity of this letter, and it suggests not only that Lady Franklin took an interest in the original revelation, but eagerly noted that the subsequent discovery of the Bellot Strait -- via which McClintock had reached King William Island -- was exactly in correspondence with the map (she did not, it should be observed, note the map's error, in showing the Gulf of Boothia connecting with the waters south of King William Island -- an error which it shared with Arrowsmith's charts of 1844, which Franklin would have relied on).

As Lloyd-Jones has it, her Ladyship's willingness to try any and all means -- psychics included -- was nothing but admirable, though it certainly went against the religious feeling of many, and was a departure from the previous views of herself as well as Sophia.  By 1889, after Jane's death, Sophia and Sir Leopold doubtless felt that the whole thing might reflect poorly on Jane's posthumous reputation, and were willing to deny a story that -- so far as they thought -- was only known within private circles.  They had not, alas, reckoned on the limitless haughty enthusiasm of Skewes.

But what of the revelation itself?  There's a second post to be had on that (which will follow soon enough), but for now suffice it to say that, if the child's chart is somewhat cryptic, the "writing on the wall" -- a series of initialisms open to the possibility of standing for any number of things -- is another story altogether.

Amelia Earhart's Freckle Cream?

The recent conference, held under the auspices of TIGHAR, on new evidence as to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, was packed with fascinating material, particularly on the last few possible wireless signals from her aircraft.  Yet the thing that most caught my eye -- and perhaps, thanks to my fascination with Sir John Franklin, I am simply "relic crazy" -- was this broken glass jar, which has been tentatively identified as having contained anti-freckle cream.  As those at the conference noted, Earhart was self-conscious about her freckles, and might well have used such a product; researchers using the glass container's distinctive shape have linked it to Dr. Berry's Freckle Ointment, a long-gone cosmetic product sold in a similarly-shaped jar.  It's not an exact match -- the jar of this product is of milk-glass, not clear -- but it certainly is striking, the more so as one of the fragments of this glass shows signs of having been used as a tool.

But as an historical researcher, I had questions about this identification right away.  Milk-glass, I knew, was at its peak of popularity in the 1890's and the first decade of the 20th century, well before Earhart's flight.  And, as other bloggers had noted, the form of Dr. Berry's ointment sold in these jars was banned around 1912 due to its high mercury content.  Dr. Berry's apparently reformulated their product, as it continued to be sold for some years thereafter, and would indeed have been available to Earhart in 1937.  However, even in a clear jar, this sort of thing did not look like a 1930's-era product to me.  Fortunately, thanks to the vast digitization project of the Hathi Trust, I was able to find a 1936 Sears Catalog which included Dr. Berry's ointment among its products, and as I had suspected, it was shown in a pillbox-style cylindrical container with far more modern lines.  I suspect it hadn't been sold in the large glass jars for some time, and it's hard to imagine that Earhart, a woman who -- however much she may have disliked her freckles -- was very fashionable and had endorsed many "modern" products, among them a line of luggage (my family still has one of 'her' suitcases) would have deliberately brought along an outdated, heavy glass jar of such cream when a compact modern one was available.

I could be wrong.  It might be that, after the popularity of milk-glass faded, Dr. Berry's continued to sell its product in clear glass jars.  Earhart, perhaps for sentimental reasons, might have brought this sort of jar along.  It may even be possible that, as with other products of this type, some people preferred to have the old jar filled with the new product at their local pharmacy.  But alas, despite the freckled connection, this piece of evidence remains, I think, of uncertain value.

Sir John Franklin, Poet?

The career of Sir John Franklin inspired numerous poems both during and after his lifetime, ranging from the romantic (Swinburne's "The Death of Sir John Franklin") to the modernist (Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Terror and Erebus") to the postmodernist (David Solway's Franklin's Passage cycle) -- but until now, Franklin had never been known as the author of any poetry of note.  The excellent Non Solus blog just put up a scan of the manuscript of Franklin's foray into verse, which was preserved in the pages of a special presentation copy of his Journey to the Polar Sea, which was inscribed to Sir John Richardson's wife.  This copy had been acquired by the University of Illinois library under the auspices of Professor Robert Eugene Johnson, whose biography of Richardson was published in 1976, but although Johnson mentioned the poem in his book, it has not previously been published, so far as the blog's editors (or myself) can tell.

It was certainly not meant for public consumption, and its interest today is more historical than poetical -- although married to the poet Eleanor Ann Porden, Franklin was, to his very soul, a man of prose. The subject of the poem is the pressure Franklin felt on his being expected -- as had been tradition for explorers -- to write up his journey for public consumption, whence it would be brought forth by John Murray, whose arrangement for such things with the Admirality was a long-standing one.  Many biographers have noted the struggles Franklin went through in producing his narrative, and the prose indeed is labored in parts (though not half so much as this poem!).  Never the less, the result was widely read, and secured his reputation as "the Man who ate his boots"; the book has rarely been out of print since.

The poem itself is in a sort of ballad stanza, and is filled with archaisms, forced rhymes, and other such tokens of the light verse it aims at -- the first two stanzas are a fair sample:

Heigho! alack and well a day! 

 Was ever wight like me distressed

What shall I write? What can I say

Will this or that way read the best?

Oh! that my foe a book had written

So spake the wisest of mankind

Alas! his curse my head has smitten

And write I must tho ill enclined.

And it continues in this manner. One might be tempted to rehearse Harry Bailey's rejoinder to Chaucer's "Tale of Syr Thopas" -- but then again, Chaucer's doggerel was meant to be bad.  Still, the poem offers up some insight into Franklin the man; apparently he possessed a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor, a trait not often otherwise noted among his writings -- and for this, we can certainly be grateful.

HMS Breadalbane

The Franklin search ship HMS Breadalbane was caught or "nipped" by pack-ice and sank on Sunday 21 August, 1853; according to one crew member, "it was a very sad and unceremonious way of being turned out of our ship -- from the time the first nip took her, until her disappearance, did not occupy more than fifteen minutes."  Aside from landing some stores at Cape Riley, the Breadalbane had not lasted long enough to make much of a contribution to the search for Sir John, but its history since then has been full of interest and significance.  Until the re-discovery of M'Clure's "Investigator," she was the furthest-north known shipwreck in the world, and the search to find her, recover artifacts, and learn from the wreck site has stretched over nearly forty years, and took an interesting turn last week when divers working as part of the Canadian military's Operation Nunalivut explored the wreck using a submersible ROV, sending color video images to the surface.

The wreck was not far off Beechey Island, and its general location fairly readily ascertained. The first definite evidence of the wreck was located by diver Joe MacInnis in 1975; based on his evidence and subsequent searches, a Canadian Coast Guard vessel discovered the wreck using side-scan sonar in 1980. Remarkably, her hull was largely intact, and two of her masts will still standing, one of which still seemed to be carrying some portion of canvas.  MacInnis later led several dives to the wreck, and retrieved the ship's wheel.  This and his earlier searches were described by him in his book The Breadalbane Adventure, which featured an introduction by Walter Cronkite.

MacInnis later hit on the idea of setting up a seasonal camp on the ice, and taking aquatic tourists down to the wreck at thousands of dollars a pop.  To that end, he purchased a number of large mobile dwellings, had them shipped to Resolute, and fixed to skids so they could be towed out onto the ice by tractor.  The hoped-for number of tourists never materialized, and when I was at Resolute in 2004 the mobile units could still be seen, abandoned, a few hundred yards from the main port.

You might think that all the archaeological knowledge possible had already been retrieved from the Breadalbane, but this didn't stop Canadian Forces divers from searching the wreck again this April.  The annual northern military exercise in Nunavut, though it mostly involves staged search-and-rescue operations, is also geared toward strengthening Canada's claim to its northernmost territories, and apparently nothing spells "sovereignty" quite so well as a sunken Franklin-era vessel.  Nothing new was discovered, so far as I know, though the online video shows some intriguing images.  There's also a fairly detailed account of the dive on the Canadian Forces' own website here.

Petition for Ancanthe

IN the spirit of Lady Franklin's Appeal to Lord Palmerston, I've just done something I've never tried before -- launch a petition.

The background is this: Near Hobart in Tasmania, the original Greek-style temple dedicated by Lady Franklin as the centerpiece of botanical garden and museum she named Ancanthe still stands.  Not surprisingly, there has been a fair amount of incursion over the years, with some of the original land now occupied by homes.  Recently, there was a proposal brought to Hobart City Council for a new subdivision which would much further encroach upon the area, and destroy much of its character,  A group of citizens fought back, and are making a counter-proposal that Hobart acquire much of this same area as public lands, and establish there a) A botanical garden, a project not quite realized in Lady Franklin's time, and neglected since; b) A restored museum and grounds, with a "Franklin trail"; and c) an 'international centre of excellence.'

The city council may be persuaded to back the plan, but first they are asking for evidence that the site is one of internationally-recognized historical and cultural significance.  This is something beyond the quick reach of the citizens of Hobart who support this plan, so I've volunteered to enlist all the "Franklinites" I know in its support.

You can read more about the situation on the Saving Ancanthe Facebook page here.

And, if you choose to sign the petition, it's here.

Lastly, if you know of others, whose names I have perhaps neglected to include here, who could lend their heft to the affair, I'd be grateful if you could forward this request.

I hope you'll decide to join me in this effort to preserve a small patch of Franklin history in Tasmania.

Only Known Photo of Lady Jane Franklin

A few years ago -- in May of 2008, to be precise -- I was in Philadelphia along with many Arctic historians and writers for the "North by Degree" conference hosted by the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. By good fortune, I found myself at the same bed-and-breakfast as my good friends Huw Lewis-Jones and Kari Herbert, and so we had ample time before and after each batch of conference sessions to talk about our shared passion for all things Polar.  Kari was there to give a talk about some of the remarkable parallels between her mother Lady Marie Herbert's experiences and those of Josephine Peary, and after the conference was off on a research trip to see some Peary materials in Maine. This was all in preparation for her work, Polar Wives, which has now come to fruition, and which traces the careers of many of the women who supported their husbands' Arctic and Antarctic endeavors, whether from home or from a tent pitched in the midst of a howling gale on a rocky beach in Greenland.

Lady Jane Franklin was to be, and is, one of the subjects of Kari's book, and one afternoon in Philadelphia, she mused aloud that there must be, somewhere in some archive, a photograph of her -- why had none ever come to light?  I took this as a personal challenge, and set myself to find one; it was only many months later, by the good chance of putting the right keywords into the right database, that I found just such a photograph at George Eastman House, which has one of the best collections of nineteenth-century (and later) photos of any institution in the world.  It was, like the famous "purloined letter" in the Poe story, hidden in plain sight -- in the center of the frame in one of the stereoviews of Yosemite taken by Carleton E. Watkins, and commercially reproduced by him and succeeding stereoview publishers.  Doubtless there are hundreds of copies -- one of them has recently been scanned and uploaded to the Wikipedia -- but no one had really realized the rarity of the image itself. George Eastman house, happily, has Watkins's original glass plate negatives for his Yosemite views, which can be enlarged much more than the printed cards, and here we can finally see Lady Franklin -- and Sophia Cracroft -- in a camera's eye.

Lady Franklin has a most curious expression -- she seems to be positively beaming good cheer -- but is wearing some sort of Victorian-era hood or wimple that -- for me at least -- brings to mind Sally Field as the Flying Nun.  Traveling costumes for women from this period were odd affairs, to be sure, but Lady F. seems to be sporting one of the odder ones.  Between Jane and Sophia there is the somewhat blurred or  obscured visage of one of their guides, and then we see Sophia's face, everything that Jane's is not -- sober, severe almost, looking directly into the camera.  A few feet further we see two more guides, one of whom is apparently picking his teeth with a twig -- seated at the foot of a tree, the bark of which has been cut with an axe, possibly as a sort of blaze for the trail.  Yosemite, in the 1860's, was a fairly rugged destination, and for Jane and Sophia -- who rarely traveled without some sort of entourage -- this was roughing it.

The larger frame shows two other figures, a man who is seeking to blow a fire aflame at left, and at right, a jaunty figure sporting a cap with a bill and peak, a pair of braces, and writing or drawing on what looks like an oversize sketchpad.

The visit by these two women to the site seems to have had a lasting impression on the nomenclature of the place; though credited in the photo as "Moss Rock" this almost surely the same as the modern "Lady Franklin Rock," though exactly when, and by whom, the change was made is unclear.  It has for a long time been a favored place to take a photo of the Vernal Falls from -- though much less often photographed itself.  The identities of the guides here are unknown to me; I would certainly be interested to hear from anyone who can tell me more about them, and about this visit.  All I have is this note from a modern guidebook, which says of Lady Franklin Rock: "So named because that distinguished lady visited the Yosemite in 1859, and being very feeble at the time, was carried up to this rock by the guides on a chair, and from here she viewed the fall."

PHOTO CREDIT: George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography

The Earhart Project

Thinking about all the mysteries which surround the fate of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition, it's hard not to reflect on the intense human passion to seek to better understand -- even if we cannot "solve" -- the greatest mysteries of human history, particularly those that involve the loss of some great spirit of exploration, whose life lies unresolved at the shores of some unknown atoll. And this aptly describes both Sir John Franklin and Amelia Erahart, whose lost aircraft has been the cause of many searches and speculation in the more than seventy years since her disappearance. So it was with great interest today that I listened to a story on NPR's All Things Considered about an historic photograph which possibly -- just possibly -- shows the partly submerged landing gear of a Lockheed Elektra -- just the plane Ms. Earhart was flying -- on a remote atoll then known as Gardner Island (and here one thinks of King William Island, a place common enough in the parlance of Franklinites that we usually just call it KWI).

Gardner Island is now known as Nikumaroro, one of the Phoenix Islands of the western Pacific. Ric Gillespie and his group believe that this photo -- of which they have not yet been able to get a high-resolution copy -- may be the clue that finally leads to the solution of Earhart's disappearance. To that end, they have sought to publicize their cause, and raise funds for a new expedition to search the coral reef at this location for the wreckage of Earhart's plane. Just today, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton endorsed their cause -- funded entirely from donations, I would emphasize -- and it seems to me that those fascinated by the fate of Franklin would be likely to be interested in, and wish to support, this similar effort. You can find out more information about Gillespie's project, and donate to it here -- and let us hope that, perhaps, the excitement raised by this effort will prove contagious, and finally launch some kind of similar independent effort in the search for Franklin. As Secretary Clinton very eloquently said, "Even if you do not find what you seek, there is great honor and possibility in the search itself."

The other William Brunt

The mystery surrounding my ancestor William Brunt has deepened -- or, perhaps I should say doubled -- for another William Brunt, also a convicted thief, also transported to Van Diemen's land in 1841, and also given his freedom in time to have emigrated to Canada and established a family in Ontario, has come to light. He was far less savory-sounding than the other -- but matches a key detail, that in my family I'd always heard it said he'd been a horse thief, not a housebreaker, and this William Brunt not only stole horses, he was proud of it. His initial report goes as follows:

"Sent aboard the Lady Raffles. Transported for Horse stealing -- Gaol Reports 5 previous convictions, one of the Pottery Gang … Stated his preference for Horse Stealing. W. Brinsley my Master. One time acquitted for a Coat once 6 months for receiving once 2 mos. neglect of Family, 7 days for abuse. Married wife, Maybe 2 children. Surgeon's Report: Gaol conduct good."

Now I have no idea who the "Pottery Gang" were -- apparently, a bad lot -- and a number of other convicts were listed as having fallen in with them. His having been jailed for "neglect of family" and "abuse"-- as well as his not knowing how many children he had -- are far more unsettling. His physical description ran thus:

Face: Fresh, polished. Height: 5 / 9 1/2 Age: 36 Complex. Fair. Hair: to red. Whiskers: to red. Eyebrows: Brown. Eyes: Blue. Nose: Sharp. Mouth: Small. Chin: cleft. Native Place: Stoke-on-Trent. Remarks: WB inside of arm, star between chink of fingers left hand, left arm much diseased.

Interestingly, Stoke-on-Trent was listed as his place of residence or possibly birth when he was convicted in 1839 at the Staffordshire Quarter Sessions; if he was indeed from Ireland, as my family has always held, then he'd stopped off for a while on his way. His later record while in Van Diemen's Land is not untypical: "Period of Probation: Fifteen Mos. Station of Gang: PB (Prisoner Barracks) 25/1/41 BR (Brown's River?) 17/6/41 AN 15/9/42 BW (Bridgewater) 11/11/42 P.B. (Prisoner Barracks)" -- notes at the side seem to indicate that, at some point, he had gotten his Ticket of Leave and obtained a job as a constable in Hobart Town, where there is a further charge of "Drunk & neglect of duty" for which he served seven days in solitary confinement. He received his certificate as a free man in 1850.

The only inconsistent feature would be his age -- 36 in 1841 -- which would mean he was born around 1805, and would have been quite old -- at least 50 -- when he emigrated to Canada, and 60 when Mary, my great-grandmother, was born. It's not impossible, just seems a bit old for the period.

Bill Brunt Was a Thief ...

As readers of this blog may well imagine, it didn't take me long to plunge into further research on my ancestor, William Henry Brunt, and his time in Van Diemen's Land. The Tasmanian Archives turned out to be a wonderful -- and free -- resource, and I was fairly quickly able to locate his official conduct record. His voyage aboard the aptly-named "Tortoise" seems to have taken nearly seven months; judging from the ledger of convicts it seems that it also stopped in Halifax to take on prisoners -- one wonders whether Bill Brunt's first sight of North America whetted his appetite for his later return.

After the particulars of the voyage, the ledger gives his name and crime -- housebreaking and larceny, 10 years. Interestingly, he seems to have objected to the charges, stating that it was his sister's house into which he had gone with the intention of retrieving his sister's things. He admitted to taking a pair of Trousers and handkerchiefs, however, yet curiously declared "he was never in the House of Correction," although his report from there stated his conduct was good. He was also described as "Protestant -- can read and write," which corresponds, I think, with his family's origins near Banbridge in County Down, Ireland, where his surname was spelled variously "Brunt," "Brunty," and "Brontë."

From his physical description I learned that he was 5 foot, 5 inches, with brown hair, brown eyes, and no whiskers. He was apparently fond of drink, and was also the proud owner of a riotous array of tattoos, which the ledger is at pains to enumerate:

A slightly freckled man. Flag, anchor & mermaid on rt. arm, ring on middle finger right hand, HB. hearts and darts, M & S. flower put on left Arm.

The "HB" might just be his initials, if he used his middle name -- many convicts seem to have gotten their initials tattooed on themselves, probably just to be sure their body could be identified after death. Since no photograph of Bill Brunt survived in my family, this may be the most vivid image I'll ever have. The remainder of the record details his time in Van Diemen's land:

Period of Probation: Eighteen Mos. 11/1/43

Station of Gang: Flinders Bay 12/1/43

Class: 2nd, 1st, pp & 3

Offenses and Sentences: 19 Aug. 1843 Original term of Probation

18 May Discovered willfully breaking two panes of glass in the sky light of his ward, for an improper purpose. Six months hard labor.

8 March 47. Misconduct in lying asleep on his post. Ten days solitary.

9 May 1848 J.L.

Freed Cert. 17 June 1851

His arrival at Flinders Bay in 1843 put him among the first group of transported prisoners to be stationed there for their probation, since it had only been established in 1841. The work was hard, clearing trees and brush, and the prisoner station was not long maintained there, with all the remaining prisoners being transferred to Port Arthur in 1844. Given the term of his sentence, his two infractions -- breaking a glass skylight and falling asleep on his watch -- seem quite minor; the large ledger page allotted each convict was, in his case, less than 1/3 filled, while others spill out into long lists of offenses (and others -- the briefest -- say simply "Died at Sea" or "Died in the Mines"). He earned his freedom in June of 1851, and must have lost little time in finding passage to Canada. Perhaps the rumors of homesteads there made it a more attractive destination for him -- or perhaps it was his earlier glimpse of the land that enticed him.

A Prisoner of Sir John Franklin

As someone who has spent the last 20 years researching the final Arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin, I must admit it came as a bit of a surprise to me to discover that my great-great-grandfather was, in 1841, sentenced to ten years transportation to Van Diemen's Land, becoming (at least in the official sense) a prisoner of Sir John's. I have always read that Franklin was, in every way that he could be, a humane man when dealing with the transported convicts of the territory, indeed perhaps too much so, such that the settlers resented what they saw as favoritism. I will certainly hope that this was true at any rate!

My ancestor, William Henry Brunt, was known to his descendants as "Bill." My grandfather used to recite a rhyme about him, although alas by the time I asked him to repeat it so that I could write it down, all he could remember was this:

Bill Brunt was a thief, and that we all know,

He stole John ... ... ...

But they caught him down below.

But John who? And what? Happily, the Old Bailey project solved the mystery, declaring in a few words that:

WILLIAM HENRY BRUNT was indicted for feloniously breaking and entering the dwelling-house of John Grace, and stealing therein, 1 blanket, value 6s.; 1 pair of trowsen, value 5s.; I frock, value 2s.; 2 handkerchiefs, value 1s.; and 1 knife, value 6d.; the goods of William Henry Stevens; to which he pleaded GUILTY. Aged 21.— Transported for Ten Years.

So the rhyme ought to have gone "he stole John Grace's trousers" or something along those lines. In any case, off he went aboard the "Tortoise," which sailed on the 28th of September 1841 for Van Diemen's land. Of his ten years there I know nothing -- now I'll have to see what I can find out -- but I do know that, once his sentence was up, he emigrated to Canada, where homesteads were being offered for those willing to try a living off the land; his plot was near the town of Durham, Ontario, just south of Georgian Bay. Apparently, it did not turn out to be a profitable endeavor, but during that time he married and started a family, into which my great-grandmother, Mary Ann Brunt, was born on 16 July 1860. The whole family headed west to Vancouver, and from there to the little town of Sedro-Wooley, Washington Territory.

The photo above shows Mary with her son, my grandfather, Ralph Potter, and was probably taken around 1930, when Mary would have been 70 years old, and my grandfather a youthful 35. Mary had married his father, Miles Potter, in 1883, and would live to see my father, Ralph Miles Potter, who was born in 1927.

Who knew!