The Girl From Botany Bay

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:36:52 -0500)

A remarkable story of resilience, heartbreak, and ultimately triumph follows a young woman's international travels after she is deported to Botany Bay in Australia for stealing a woman's bonnet and manages to find her way home again after a long ordeal. On a moonless night in the early 1790s, prisoner Mary Bryant, her husband William, her two small children, and seven other convicts stole a twenty-foot longboat and slipped noiselessly out of Sydney Cove, Australia, eluding their captors. They sailed north, all the way to Indonesia, traveling some thirty-six hundred treacherous miles in ten weeks-- an incredible feat of seamanship. For a time, Mary and her companions were able to convince the local Dutch colonial authorities that they were survivors of a shipwreck, but eventually the truth emerged and they found themselves back in captivity, in irons, on their way to England for execution. In time, Mary's fateful journey would win her tremendous admiration. A woman once reviled as a criminal would become a London celebrity, ultimately finding forgiveness and freedom.… (more)