William Buchanan: Slave, Convict, Bushranger
Read the full story at the Sydney Living Museum site,
this is merely an abridged reproduction
The story of a Jamaican rebel who escaped from the Hyde Park Barracks.
Arriving in Sydney in 1836 with a life sentence, Jamaican-born William Buchanan was one of at least 34 convicts from the West Indies who passed through the Hyde Park Barracks.
William Buchanan was born into slavery in the early 1800s. When his slave owner was killed in 1823, William and his mother stood trial “for compassing and imagining the death of a white person, and for being accessories to the murder”.
William was found not guilty, but the sentence of death was passed upon his mother and she was hung.
In December 1831, a slave rebellion erupted in Jamaica. When control was reinstated, the authorities wanted retribution. Many rebels stood trial, and many were sentenced to death – among them was William Buchanan, found guilty of mutiny in May 1833.
But instead of being hanged immediately, he was detained for 2 years, during which time the abolition of slavery had become law. But as a convicted criminal, Buchanan was not entitled to freedom, and was sent to England.
For three months Buchanan was confined in the hulk Justitia on the River Thames at Woolwich in England, before being transferred to the Moffatt, which set sail for New South Wales, Australia on 5 May 1836.
William is described in convict indents as a “man of colour”, with a missing front upper tooth, a scar on the left side of his upper lip, and a long scar on the back of his left thumb. He was 5 feet 6 inches tall; his complexion was ‘copper’, his hair ‘black woolly’, eyes ‘dark chestnut’, and his trade given as “In-door servant & mason”.
Absconders from the Barracks
Buchanan was housed at the Hyde Park Barracks, but within weeks he escaped with a fellow Jamaican convict, James Smith, and a French convict, Lazarus Bara. They then made it to the North side of Sydney Harbour and “found their way to Pitt Water [north of Broken Bay], the neighbour-hood of which they have been keeping in a state of alarm” for several weeks, hiding out in a cave in “country … of an excessively impassable character”.
In a dawn raid by police on 8 January 1837, Bara was captured, but the two ‘revolted Jamaican negroes’ escaped unscathed.
The intrepid pair remained on the loose for several months, committing “a variety of depredations” and “acts of outrage” on the NSW Central Coast. The two men, described as “Maroon negroes”, were eventually caught and court proceedings commenced on 2 May 1837.
At the sentencing in August, it was determined that:
As the prisoners had committed no marked violence, but had been merely wandering about the country perpetrating several petty depredations, the Court was anxious to give them an opportunity to redeem their past error, by passing upon them a lenient sentence. The prisoners were then sentenced to be worked in irons on the public roads of the Colony for three years each.
Conditional pardon for William Buchanan: Convicts Index [4/10586] William Buchanan, CP 51/40 p79. NSW State Archives
Finding freedom
Information about the next phase of Buchanan’s colonial life is elusive, but by 1845 he was in the district of Goulburn, where he received a ticket of leave, and in February 1851 he was granted a conditional pardon. Aged 49, the man born into slavery in Jamaica finally found his freedom in colonial Australia.
William Buchanan’s story has been brought to life by Sienna Brown in the award-winning novel Master of my fate (Vintage Australia, 2019).
