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Settlers and seditionists: the people of the convict ship Surprize 1794
Product Description
Book
1793 was an annul horribilis for King George III...
His French counterpart lost his head at the guillotine, while millions in Britain were reading Thomas Paine's "seditious" Rights of Man as issues of republicanism, parliamentary and constitutional reform, American democracy and French liberty were widely discussed. In a crackdown on dissent the British Government prosecuted a group of reformers for sedition in Scotland.
Four of the seditionists, known as the "Scottish Martyrs", were transported to New South Wales on the convict ship Surprize, arriving in October 1794. Among them were the Rev. Thomas Fyshe Palmer, educated at Eton and Cambridge, a Fellow of Queens College who had dined with Boswell and Dr Johnson, Maurice Margarot, of French-Italian origin, President of the London Corresponding Society, and the moody, passionate young Glasgow lawyer Thomas Muir who staged a daring escape from the colony via Canada, California, Mexico, Cuba and Spain, reaching Paris where he was feted as a revolutionary hero, but died in 1799 aged 33.
Michael Flynn, whose acclaimed work The Second Fleet: Britain's Grim Convict Armada of 1 790 was published in 1993, sets the story of the Scottish Martyrs against the turbulent background of politics in the early 1790s, giving a lively and colourful account of the extraordinary voyage of the Surprize and including a biography of each of the free settlers (including an early French immigrant), soldiers of the NSW Corps and the mostly female convicts who sailed with the ship, giving fascinating details of their crimes, their appearance, their voices as heard at their trials.
