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Far from Botany Bay
Far from Botany Bay by Rosa Jordan (Oolichan Books, $22.95)
Thelma and Louise have met their match in Mary Bryant, née Broad. Mary is far more interesting, partially because she's not mere fiction. In real life, 1787, she was a Cornish convict, one of the first to be sent to a fledgling prison colony in Australia, and, four years later she was one of the first to lead a successful escape.
Some escape! At sea for sixty-six days and traveling five thousand kilometers, she led eight men, with her 2 babes in arms, as they rowed and sailed a 20' longboat through the infamous Coral Sea, bristling with the reefs that had wrecked many a boat. Her ultimate goal was Kupang, on the island of Timor in Dutch-controlled Indonesia, and armed with compass and chart, she led them right to it. En route they survived starvation, thirst, aggressive natives, a violent storm, alligators and illness. While doing all this, Mary also had to pander to her insecure husband's sulks at not being leader, do the cooking, wash the dishes and put the children to bed. Sound familiar?
The escape is by far the most gripping part of the book, but most of us (read women) will avidly read on, wanting a happy ending for this feisty young woman, who was shipped off to purgatory at 21, raped repeatedly before and during the voyage, and finally married to a drunken lout she didn't love, in order to protect herself.
The escape is surprising enough, engineered as it was by an uneducated young woman with a chart and a compass, but the fact that a group of convicts in those days even allowed her to be 'captain' is just as surprising. This is Chick Lit at its best. We love to read about a female super achiever who, even though she's victimized and battered, rises up again and again.
No wonder, then, that Mary's story has been made into a musical, a successful play in 1989 (Boswell for the Defense), and a 4-hour TV mini series shown in Australia and England in 2005 and 2006.
She's the subject of at least nine books, but according to Far From Botany Bay author Rosa Jordan, it was the presidential address for the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, "Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay,"; that inspired her to write this story. She managed to obtain a copy from the university library, and once inspired, sought out primary sources at the British Museum, including newspaper accounts from 1792.
You may be wondering what the famous journal writer, James Boswell, has to do with all this. He turns out to be the deus ex machina-the badly needed saviour. More I will not say.
Although Jordan has clearly gone the extra fathom in researching facts for her narrative non-fiction, her book appears more heavily weighted toward narrative, especially compared to the other publications. She creates a love interest for Mary, and dreams up friends for this larger-than-life heroine as well -friends like Colleen, and Bados, the flute-playing slave from Barbados. Jordan also fictionalizes a relationship Mary has with a Dutch captain, trading her body for what she needs for her escape.
Jordan has also come up with a far more sympathetic crime for her heroine to have committed. Mary has gone to prison for stealing a cloak so that she can take it to warm her dying mother. In reality, however, Mary was a career thief.
On the non-fiction side, she really did marry Will, a fisher- man and a drinker, and they were both Cornish. The incredibly harsh and frequently unjust punishments meted out are also historically accurate, and the ships involved are all as described. Mary really did have two children called Charlotte and Emanuel, the first by a rapist on the boat, and the second by her husband. What befalls the escapees once they actually complete their amazing journey and reach Indonesia also appears to be factual.
It's a good story, especially for women. How many men, after all, went to see Thelma and Louise without being dragged there?
Jordan, author of Dangerous Places: Travels on the Edge, and Lonely Planet's Cycling Cuba, is clearly an unusual woman herself. She calls herself an internationalist, and in her capacity as social justice programme director for Earthways Foundation, she has helped to develop a jungle cat reserve in Ecuador's Choco rainforest and a food security programme in a war-torn Mayan village in Guatemala. When not traveling, she lives and writes in Rossland.
In addition to presenting us with a strong, Christ-like literary and historical figure, and crafting an un-put-downable plot, Jordan portrays the inhumane way in which prisoners, and especially women, were treated in earlier times. The men we meet are pretty grim, often operating on primeval instincts. It's perhaps to balance this unattractive historical gender portrayal that she introduces Mary's love, John, as an intelligent and gentle Canadian clerk.
Good to know that the male has evolved considerably in the last few hundred years. You've come a long way, baby!
A lot of us will be awaiting the chick flick. 9780889822498
--review by by Cherie Thiessen
[BCBW 2008" "Fiction"
Thelma and Louise have met their match in Mary Bryant, née Broad. Mary is far more interesting, partially because she's not mere fiction. In real life, 1787, she was a Cornish convict, one of the first to be sent to a fledgling prison colony in Australia, and, four years later she was one of the first to lead a successful escape.
Some escape! At sea for sixty-six days and traveling five thousand kilometers, she led eight men, with her 2 babes in arms, as they rowed and sailed a 20' longboat through the infamous Coral Sea, bristling with the reefs that had wrecked many a boat. Her ultimate goal was Kupang, on the island of Timor in Dutch-controlled Indonesia, and armed with compass and chart, she led them right to it. En route they survived starvation, thirst, aggressive natives, a violent storm, alligators and illness. While doing all this, Mary also had to pander to her insecure husband's sulks at not being leader, do the cooking, wash the dishes and put the children to bed. Sound familiar?
The escape is by far the most gripping part of the book, but most of us (read women) will avidly read on, wanting a happy ending for this feisty young woman, who was shipped off to purgatory at 21, raped repeatedly before and during the voyage, and finally married to a drunken lout she didn't love, in order to protect herself.
The escape is surprising enough, engineered as it was by an uneducated young woman with a chart and a compass, but the fact that a group of convicts in those days even allowed her to be 'captain' is just as surprising. This is Chick Lit at its best. We love to read about a female super achiever who, even though she's victimized and battered, rises up again and again.
No wonder, then, that Mary's story has been made into a musical, a successful play in 1989 (Boswell for the Defense), and a 4-hour TV mini series shown in Australia and England in 2005 and 2006.
She's the subject of at least nine books, but according to Far From Botany Bay author Rosa Jordan, it was the presidential address for the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, "Boswell and the Girl from Botany Bay,"; that inspired her to write this story. She managed to obtain a copy from the university library, and once inspired, sought out primary sources at the British Museum, including newspaper accounts from 1792.
You may be wondering what the famous journal writer, James Boswell, has to do with all this. He turns out to be the deus ex machina-the badly needed saviour. More I will not say.
Although Jordan has clearly gone the extra fathom in researching facts for her narrative non-fiction, her book appears more heavily weighted toward narrative, especially compared to the other publications. She creates a love interest for Mary, and dreams up friends for this larger-than-life heroine as well -friends like Colleen, and Bados, the flute-playing slave from Barbados. Jordan also fictionalizes a relationship Mary has with a Dutch captain, trading her body for what she needs for her escape.
Jordan has also come up with a far more sympathetic crime for her heroine to have committed. Mary has gone to prison for stealing a cloak so that she can take it to warm her dying mother. In reality, however, Mary was a career thief.
On the non-fiction side, she really did marry Will, a fisher- man and a drinker, and they were both Cornish. The incredibly harsh and frequently unjust punishments meted out are also historically accurate, and the ships involved are all as described. Mary really did have two children called Charlotte and Emanuel, the first by a rapist on the boat, and the second by her husband. What befalls the escapees once they actually complete their amazing journey and reach Indonesia also appears to be factual.
It's a good story, especially for women. How many men, after all, went to see Thelma and Louise without being dragged there?
Jordan, author of Dangerous Places: Travels on the Edge, and Lonely Planet's Cycling Cuba, is clearly an unusual woman herself. She calls herself an internationalist, and in her capacity as social justice programme director for Earthways Foundation, she has helped to develop a jungle cat reserve in Ecuador's Choco rainforest and a food security programme in a war-torn Mayan village in Guatemala. When not traveling, she lives and writes in Rossland.
In addition to presenting us with a strong, Christ-like literary and historical figure, and crafting an un-put-downable plot, Jordan portrays the inhumane way in which prisoners, and especially women, were treated in earlier times. The men we meet are pretty grim, often operating on primeval instincts. It's perhaps to balance this unattractive historical gender portrayal that she introduces Mary's love, John, as an intelligent and gentle Canadian clerk.
Good to know that the male has evolved considerably in the last few hundred years. You've come a long way, baby!
A lot of us will be awaiting the chick flick. 9780889822498
--review by by Cherie Thiessen
[BCBW 2008" "Fiction"
Submitted on September 5, 2008 in By David.
