Breaksea - Home to Slaves, Refugees, Convicts and Warriors

This year, and the next, and the one after that, I'm writing the story of the sealing gangs who lived on Breaksea Island, near Albany, in 1826.

Right now I'm at the stage of researching the Aboriginals, African Americans and Maoris who worked and travelled as part of the crew. It never ceases to blow me out that before 1826, when most think the only people around Kinjarling (or King George Sound) were the Menang Nyungar, there was a strange convergence here of refugees fleeing injustice from all over the world.

Breaksea islander Richard Simmons possibly had a personal history as a slave in the Massachusetts area and escaped to a little, grassy island offshore from New Bedford that was called Nantucket. (I say 'possibly' because I'm speculating given a lack of evidence but I'm willing to wager this one. It's good odds.) Here, the anti-slavery Quakers protected him and sent him to sea as a 'greenhorn' whaler. Many African Americans thrived in this community and set up their own boat building, caulking or chandler businesses. Others used this safe base to argue and promote the abolitionist cause. Nantucket and New Bedford were often a station platform on the Underground Railroad.

As the age-old story goes, men got better and better at whaling; the whales got fewer and fewer, and the whalers went further and further afield. So, just like the Japanese Institute for Cetacean Research of today, the whalers of Nantucket ended up in our Australian waters hunting their prey. Somehow, Richard Simmons and another 'black man' who told d'Urville of the Astrolabe that he was from Canada and spoke French, arrived in King George Sound, to camp on Breaksea Island.

With them lived the men who'd felt the lash against the cold stone of Port Arthur, having been transported from their native Britain for some paltry crime. Inside that story is the emergence of a police department in Britain, combined with the return of masses of men after The Wars, desperate and destitute. The other residents on Breaksea were some Pallawah women of Van Diemen's Land, refugees from the excoriating war between black and white that became a crucible of violence and horror.

... and William Hook, the Maori. While he lived on Breaksea Island, Te Rauparaha and his Ngati Toa roared across  the South Island, leaving his family's Ngai Tahu heads on sticks, a nightmarish vision/reality. Hook was probably sent by his chief father on a sealing expedition to gather experience of the world, seeds, agricultural knowledge and guns, but while he was gone, his people were slaughtered. And he would have heard about it because sealing and whaling ships moved between New Zealand and Western Australia regularly.

In mid 1826, it began to dawn on the sealers of Breaksea Island that they'd been abandoned by their schooners. They'd been here with only small boats and few provisions for eighteen months. One of the schooners was in Timor, presumably pirated, and another was offered for sale in Mauritius by the owner who'd been scammed and gone broke.

It was at about this time that the sealers of Breaksea Island destroyed the trust and friendship of the local Menang people, with whom they had hung out and fished for a year or more, and begun to rape and kidnap and kill.