The Girl From Botany Bay

On a moonless night in the early 1790s, prisoner Mary Bryant, her husband William, her two small children, and seven other convicts stole a twenty-foot longboat and slipped noiselessly out of Sydney Cove, Australia, eluding their captors.

They sailed north, all the way to Indonesia, traveling some thirty-six hundred treacherous miles in ten weeks—an incredible feat of seamanship. For a time, Mary and her companions were able to convince the local Dutch colonial authorities that they were sur...