Far from Botany Bay.

Alicia Kerfoot is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

In this fictional account of the real-life Mary Broad—a young woman from 18th-century Cornwall who was transported to Botany Bay and escaped with a number of male convicts—Rosa Jordan compellingly brings her character to life. Although Jordan’s version of Mary’s story is one of struggle, starvation, rape, and loss, it is also a hopeful tale of perseverance and determination in the face of these hardships. Jordan eloquently captures the inner voice of this lower-class English subject who seeks a freedom of identity that many modern readers take for granted.

The tale begins in Cornwall, where Mary grows up on and in the shadow of ships. Jordan emphasizes Mary’s fateful identity from the beginning of the novel, which she uses to explain not only her naval knowledge but also her independent spirit. These details are necessary because Jordan rewrites the well-known escape from Botany Bay to feature Mary, rather than her husband, as the driving force behind it. Mary’s loving family tempers her early experience of poverty in England, which also sets her apart from others: “In time Mary came to understand that because Grace was different from other mothers, her life was different from that of other poor children, who were little more than small bodies in bondage to the family’s struggle for survival.” The reader sees Mary’s struggle to regain her childhood self-sufficiency almost immediately, as her circumstances become increasingly repressive as the narrative moves from her father’s troubles to her mother’s sickness, Mary’s conviction for stealing, her transportation, her miserable existence at Botany Bay, the escape, and her return to England.

Filled with both endearing and infuriating characters, Jordan’s imagination of Mary Broad’s journey is intense and suspenseful; she captures an individual story of selfhood, while simultaneously filling in the details of a colonial struggle for survival, desperate prison conditions, and the lives of England’s working poor. Mary Broad overcomes all of these social circumstances in order to achieve independence, and Jordan’s re-imagination of how she does so is a worthwhile and entertaining read.