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Stephen Martin 1746-1829 First Fleeter on
Alexander
On 31st May 1780, in the busy port city of Bristol, John
Sartain James made a sworn statement alleging that
Stephen Martin and his brother William had stolen two
chests of tea, valued at £60, from their employer
William James, the informant’s father. The statement
gives a detailed account of how the brothers, who had
been hired as porters only the week before and were
about to terminate their employment, removed the tea
chests from William James’s warehouse in Jacob Street
and took them to another warehouse where they disguised
and covered the tea. They then took the tea to a
carrier, with directions for it to be forwarded to the
Coach and Horses at Meecham (sic) near Newbury,
Berkshire. (The Coach and Horses near Newbury is
actually in Midgham and is still an operating pub.)
The naming of the brothers provides a valuable filter
for searching Stephen Martin’s birth details. According
to his death record, First Fleeter Stephen Martin was
born around 1748. A search of English baptism records
for that period yields brothers Stephen and William
Martin baptised on 19th March 1746 and 6th August 1749,
respectively, in the parish of St Enoder, Cornwall, sons
of William and Elizabeth Martin.
At the Bristol Assizes of September 1780 the brothers
were convicted of grand larceny for the theft of the
tea. They were each sentenced to one year’s
imprisonment in Newgate Gaol and fined one shilling.
William died in Newgate of smallpox.
In 1783 Stephen reoffended. Several witnesses claimed
that Stephen stole a pair of boots and spurs, belonging
to yeoman Henry Payne and valued at 10 shillings, from
the Queen’s Head Inn in Bristol. Stephen attempted to
sell the boots in the Pithay, Bristol’s street of
pawnbrokers, and was caught with the steel spurs in his
pocket. At around the same time he was charged with
stealing from Elizabeth Yandell goods to the value of 40
shillings, reported in a contemporary journal to be a
cane.
Stephen was tried and found guilty of these offences
before a jury at the Bristol Easter Quarter Sessions,
and was sentenced on 28th April 1783 “to be transported
to America for seven years”. The courts persisted with
this form of sentencing despite the effective cessation
of transportation to America in 1776.
In response to the overcrowding in English prisons, the
Hulks Act of 1776 had established the legal basis
for incarcerating convicts on vessels in the Thames and
other navigable rivers. Stephen spent time in Newgate
Gaol after his conviction in 1783 before being received
on the Censor hulk in the Thames at some time in
the following two years. His time on the Censor
was spent in brutal and degrading conditions, labouring
during daylight hours on dredging and dock building at
Woolwich.
Following Cabinet’s decision in August 1786 to resume
transportation and send convicts to New South Wales, a
series of Orders in Council changed to New South Wales
the destination of over 700 convicts previously
sentenced to “America”, “Africa” or “Parts Beyond the
Seas”. It is not known how the convicts on these lists
were selected. Stephen was one of 184 convicts
transferred from the Thames hulks to the convict ship
Alexander on 6th January 1787. The Alexander
was the unhealthiest of the 11 ships comprising the
First Fleet, with 16 dying of disease before the ship
had even left Portsmouth and a further 15 dying on the
eight month journey to Botany Bay.
The Supply was the first ship of the fleet to
reach Botany Bay, arriving on 18th January 1788,
followed by the Alexander, Scarborough and
Friendship the day after. The rest of the fleet
arrived on 20th. Finding Botany Bay inadequate as a
site for settlement, Commander Phillip set off on 21st
January with a small party in longboats to assess Port
Jackson to the north, returning on 23rd. His resulting
decision to take the fleet to Port Jackson was given
added impetus by the appearance at Botany Bay on 24th
January of two French ships, the Boussole and the
Astrolabe, under the command of the Comte de La
Pérouse. All 11 ships of Phillip’s fleet were anchored
at Sydney Cove in Port Jackson by sunset on 26th January
1788.
Stephen spent just over two years at the struggling
settlement of Port Jackson working as a farm labourer,
first at Sydney Cove and then at Rose Hill (later
renamed Parramatta). He was flogged on two occasions
during this period: in February 1789 Captain David
Collins ordered 25 lashes for “neglect of his work”, and
in November of the same year he received 50 lashes for
the theft of shoes, buckles, bread and beef. For this
crime he was also required to pay two pounds of flour.
A new chapter in Stephen’s hitherto unfortunate life
commenced with his relocation to Norfolk Island on the
Sirius, arriving with 160 other convicts on 13th
March 1790. He would have witnessed the disastrous
wreck of the Sirius on the reef off Sydney Bay
several days later and joined the other convicts in
efforts to retrieve supplies from the wrecked ship. By
this time Stephen was 44 years old and was to spend the
next 18 years of his life on Norfolk Island.
At the time of his relocation Stephen had just about
served his sentence, but the official papers with the
lists of sentences had not been provided to Governor
Phillip when he left Portsmouth, so there was no way of
verifying convicts’ claims of having done their time.
The Norfolk Island victualling records show that in
February 1791 Stephen was subsisting on a Sydney town
lot, sharing a government-provided sow with Richard
Slaney and Elizabeth Baker, both Second Fleet convicts
who had been transferred to Norfolk Island in 1790.
This arrangement of organising convicts into groups of
three with a sow had been implemented for a period
across the Norfolk Island convict population by
Commandant Major Ross as a means of improving
self-sufficiency and reducing the drain on government
stores.
Another Second Fleet convict to arrive in Norfolk Island
in 1790 was Hannah Pealing who had been transported to
Port Jackson with about 230 other female convicts on the
Lady Juliana, famously dubbed the “floating
brothel”. Hannah had been tried for theft at the age of
15 or 16 in December 1787 at the Old Bailey, receiving a
sentence of transportation for seven years. She was one
of the many Lady Juliana convicts dispatched to
Norfolk Island very soon after their arrival in Port
Jackson.
Norfolk Island had no resident clergyman. On a busy
three-day visit to Norfolk Island in November 1791 the
Reverend Richard Johnson, the First Fleet chaplain,
formally married approximately 100 couples, including
Stephen and Hannah. Stephen was 45 years old and Hannah
around 20.
At about this time a number of time-expired convicts,
including Stephen, were allowed to take up land on
Norfolk Island. In December 1791 Stephen was settled on
a 12 acre lease (Lot 21) at Grenville Vale, east of
Middlegate Road, and by 1793 he had cultivated nine
acres and was selling grain to the government store.
The land is less than a kilometre from present-day Burnt
Pine, Norfolk Island’s commercial district. The land
slopes down from Middlegate Road to a creek and enjoys
pleasant ocean views. Stephen’s two neighbours on Lots
20 and 22 were both fellow First Fleeters with seven
year terms - William Blunt, who had been transported on
the Scarborough, and Edward Risby who had been on
the Alexander with Stephen.
On 12th November 1793 a daughter, Mary Ann, was born to
Stephen and Hannah.
At some time after 1791 Stephen became a free man
following the arrival of the sentencing records at Port
Jackson and official confirmation that his seven year
sentence had expired. As a free man he eventually
received the Middlegate Rd allotment as a grant. In
1794 he was one of 26 farmers on Norfolk Island, and for
a period of six months he employed William Clark,
another First Fleeter (Scarborough) and former
fellow prisoner on the Censor hulk.
By 1796 Stephen owned a house or hut valued at £15 and
had acquired an additional 60 acres of land on Cascade
stream from Thomas Chipp, a First Fleet marine (Friendship)
who returned to Port Jackson in 1794. It is not clear
whether Stephen cultivated any of this land.
In October 1796 Hannah returned to Sydney on the
schooner Francis. The reasons for Hannah’s
departure, when her daughter was not yet three years
old, are unknown and sad to contemplate, but she was one
of a significant number of Norfolk Island convicts in
the late 1790s who chose to leave the island when their
terms expired. She died in Sydney on 17th August 1799 -
before reaching the age of 30. Stephen stayed on with
his daughter until their evacuation in 1808, so it seems
he was satisfied with the modest but productive farming
life he had established. By 1807 he held 15 acres, nine
in maize and six in pasture, owned three hogs and held
80 bushels of maize in hand.
When Governor Bligh received instructions in 1806 to
close down the Norfolk Island settlement, most residents
were reluctant to leave. They were given a choice
between Port Dalrymple (north of Launceston) and Hobart
Town, the settlement recently established on the Derwent
in Van Diemen’s Land. Stephen departed Norfolk Island
as a third class settler with his daughter Mary Ann and
60 other residents aboard the Estramina on 15th
May 1808, arriving in the Derwent on 7th June. The
Estramina was the fourth embarkation of the 554
Norfolk Island residents transferred to Hobart Town.
The arrival of these relocated Norfolk Islanders
effectively doubled the population of the fledgling
settlement to over 1,000. A memorial in St David’s Park
in Hobart lists all of the Norfolk Island residents
relocated to the Derwent in 1807 and 1808, with
asterisks next to the names of the 69 First Fleeters.
In preparation for the closure of the Norfolk Island
settlement, Commandant Joseph Foveaux had devised a
three-tier classification system in 1803 setting out the
entitlements of relocated settlers. As a third class
settler Stephen was entitled to be victualled and
clothed from the public stores for 12 months and to be
allowed the labour of two convicts for 12 months. He
was also entitled to farming implements equivalent to
those he had owned on Norfolk Island.
In 1811 Governor Lachlan Macquarie visited Hobart to
identify suitable areas of land and establish
arrangements for compensating Norfolk Island land
holders who had, in the main, been relocated against
their will. On 20th September 1813 Stephen was granted
33 acres in the parish of Melville, with the grant
document signed by Lachlan Macquarie. The land, with an
annual “quit rent” of one shilling, was bounded on the
south by the Derwent River and was located between the
present-day towns of Bridgewater and New Norfolk near
Dromedary.
By the time Stephen was granted his 33 acres he was 67
years old, possibly too old to feel an appetite for
establishing a new farm, and little is known about his
life in Van Diemen’s Land. He became a grandfather when
Mary Ann had four children with William Coventry, also a
former convict (Hercules 1802) and resident of
Norfolk Island. Mary Ann’s first child was Margaret
Coventry who married another convict, John Baker (Maria1
1820). With the birth in 1825 of Mary Ann Baker,
Stephen became a great-grandfather. (Mary Ann Baker is
my great-great-great grandmother.)
Stephen died at Green Ponds near New Norfolk, his
occupation recorded as farmer and his age as 81, which
puts him among the oldest First Fleeters at the time of
death. He was buried at St Matthew’s Church, New
Norfolk, on 29th October 1829 by the Reverend Hugh
Robinson. The church is Tasmania’s oldest and Reverend
Robinson was its first rector from 1826 to 1832.
The burial ground of St Matthew’s has become separated
from the church precinct and is now a historic cemetery
in nearby Stephen Street. During the 1990s the site was
cleared of rubble and broken headstones, and it is now a
pleasant grassed area with a single shady tree. In the
middle of the site there is a large memorial to a local
family and a set of bronze plaques listing in
alphabetical order the people buried at St Matthew’s
from 1823 to 1883. Stephen’s burial was among the
earliest - the 27th in the parish.
Stephen Martin’s burial in this tranquil New Norfolk
cemetery was the end of his eventful journey from felon
to farmer, a journey that had taken him over four
decades and 11,000 miles from the Queen’s Head in
Bristol where he stole boots and spurs.
#8920 Kathleen Rutherford
Bibliography
Charles Campbell, Intolerable Hulks: British
Shipboard Confinement 1776-1857, Heritage Books 2001
John Cobley, Sydney Cove 1788-1800, Vol.2, Sydney
1986
James Hugh Donohue, Norfolk Island 1788-1813: The
People and their Families, Third Revised Edition,
Sydney 2011
Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A
Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet, Library
of Australian History, Sydney 1989
David Hill, 1788: The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet,
Heinemann, Sydney, 2009
Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania:
Creating an Antipodean England, Cambridge University
Press, 1992
Rob Mundle, The First Fleet, Harper Collins,
Sydney, 2014
Ray Nobbs, Norfolk Island and its First
Settlement1788-1814, Sydney 1988
Reg Wright, The Forgotten Generation of Norfolk
Island and Van Diemen’s Land, Library of Australian
History, Sydney 1986
Bonner and Middleton’s
Bristol Journal
1782-83 Vol ix, No. 456, 3rd May 1783
Bristol Archives Search Service Report, 2019
Dan Byrnes, 'Emptying the Hulks’, The Push from the
Bush: A Bulletin of Social History, No.24, Armidale,
April 1987
Cathy Dunn, ‘Marriages November 1791 Norfolk Island’,
Australian History Research
Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area Research &
Interpretation Centre, Norfolk Island, Report on
Victualling and Land records, 2019
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