Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The Many Histories of Charlotte Badger

First published 2022

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

www.aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz

© Jennifer Ashton, 2022

ebook ISBN 978 1 77671 0829

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Design by Carolyn Lewis

Cover art by Xoë Hall, 2021

Map design by Tim Nolan/Blackant Mapping Solutions

For

J & G

Contents

Introduction

The Accused

The Convict

The Pirate

The Beach Crosser

The Army Wife

The Histories of Charlotte Badger

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Introduction

This is a story of doubt. It is a story of people who left little trace and whose lives are subject to speculation and doubt. There are no writings to pore over; no monuments to gaze at; no perfectly preserved homes to visit. We will never see their faces; we cannot hear the sound of their voices. In other words, they were like most of those who inhabit the past. We catch glimpses of people like them as names in documents recording the major events of their lives. If they lived at a time and in a place where the state was actively engaged in data collection, we might find them coming into contact with the courts, crossing a national border, boarding a ship, or listed as members of a household in a census. But the details of their daily lives remain out of reach. They are the people from whom most of us descend, but for the most part they are mysteries to us.

The woman at the heart of this story, Charlotte Badger, was one such person. Her life, which began at the bottom end of eighteenth-century English society, in many ways remains a mystery, or a series of gaps to be filled in. But she differs from the vast majority of history’s inhabitants because her obscurity has not prevented her from playing a role in a nation’s history.

Our awareness of Badger owes much to her status as one of the first Pākehā women thought to have resided in New Zealand. Some of New Zealand’s best-known history books, including Michael King’s The Penguin History of New Zealand, James Belich’s Making Peoples, Anne Salmond’s Between Worlds and Barbara Brookes’s A History of New Zealand Women, have introduced readers to the story of her transportation as a convict to New South Wales and her subsequent escape to the Bay of Islands in 1806. In most of these accounts, though, she is an interesting but unknowable shadowy figure who fleetingly appears before vanishing again. She is a bit of added colour before the story moves on to the main events of (mostly male) missionaries and Pākehā traders and their interaction with Māori in the pre-colonial period.

The regular addition of Badger to the nation’s story followed her appearance in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB) in the 1990s. Thanks to the internet, the online DNZB has become a leading means for New Zealanders to learn about her, and her inclusion in recent publications owes much to her entry in the Dictionary. The DNZB tells us that she was baptised at St John’s Church, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1778, the daughter of Thomas and Ann Badger. In 1796 she was convicted of housebreaking at Worcester summer Assizes, and transported to New South Wales four years later, arriving in Sydney on board the convict ship Earl Cornwallis in 1801 to serve a seven-year sentence. The entry then says, ‘In 1806 she had two years of her sentence to serve, and was an inmate at the old Parramatta Female Factory, where she gave birth to a child. In April she and her friend, Catherine Hagerty, were assigned as servants to a settler in Hobart. In late April 1806 they sailed from Port Jackson on the Venus with the child and a group of male convicts.’¹ The Venus then became the target of an act of piracy, as members of the crew, abetted by some of the passengers, took the vessel when the master was onshore at Port Dalrymple, now Georgetown, Tasmania. The Venus then arrived at the Bay of Islands and dropped off the two women, as well as first mate Benjamin Kelly and another convict named John Lancashire. Within a year Hagerty was dead and Kelly and Lancashire were gone, leaving Badger as the sole remaining survivor, completely dependent on local Māori. Months later, Badger was offered passage back to Sydney but refused, preferring to stay on and take her chances in her new home. The Dictionary entry concludes by saying that Badger’s fate is unknown but quoting one story saying that she might have passed through Tonga a few years later and possibly then gone to America.

The doubt that surrounded her life made her a problematic figure for a publication dedicated to telling the nation’s history, but it did not stop her entry in the Dictionary from giving her a new breath of historical life. Nonetheless, historians have been reluctant to take Badger’s story much further, and it isn’t hard to understand why. We know just enough about her story for it to be enticing but not enough to flesh her out and turn her into a clearly defined historical character. The absence of her own account of her life makes her a difficult figure to get to grips with, and the lack of clarity about her fate leaves an unsatisfying taste in the mouth of biographers looking to write her life story. So, she has remained an ephemeral, fleeting player in the story of modern New Zealand.

My own interest in Badger began with this story that has been told about her. I came across her while researching early contact between Māori and Pākehā in Northland, and specifically a nineteenth-century trader named John Webster in Hokianga. Badger’s experience struck me as an early example of the type of cultural interaction that happened in the north of New Zealand in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the challenges inherent in reconstructing such a sketchy life were enticing. While Webster left behind a wealth of first-hand accounts of his life and other useful documents, Badger, who was illiterate, left behind nothing of herself. I began to ask myself, how might such a life be reconstructed?

What’s more, when I looked at what I thought I knew of her, she seemed a fascinating figure, and not just because of what she might be able to tell us about the experiences of the shadowy convict runaways who made up a portion of New Zealand’s earliest European visitors. Hers was a life lived on a truly global scale. It seemed that examining Badger’s movement through time and space could give us a way of understanding what her life, her travels and experience tell us about New Zealand’s early relationship with Sydney, the trading nexus between Sydney, New Zealand and Norfolk Island, and the routes across the globe that linked New Zealand to faraway places from the earliest days of Pākehā contact. The pathways of Badger’s life could tell us about the Pacific’s and, in particular, New Zealand’s maritime and trade connections to the rest of the world in the period before permanent Pākehā settlement began in the north in 1814.

As I began searching for Badger in earnest, I was struck by the extent to which she had entered wider culture. The retelling of Badger’s story wasn’t limited to history books; she turned up in novels, plays, songs, paintings and exhibitions. There was even a restaurant named after her.² In most of these versions of her life she was an active player in the taking of the Venus, a daring convict pirate on the run from the authorities. In one song, the vocalist takes on the voice of Badger and defiantly proclaims, ‘I am not a good person’; in another she and Catherine (Kitty) Hagerty ‘stole the Venus from under their noses and swore we’d be convicts no more’.³ In a picture by Lester Hall, she is a dark-haired, thin-waisted, tattooed beauty, the sword behind her back and the skull and cross-bones over her shoulder clearly marking her out as a pirate.⁴ Lorae Parry’s play Vagabonds takes Badger’s rambunctiousness to new levels, while also taking a leap of imagination and placing Badger in the middle of the New Zealand Wars of 1863, where she must contend with a group of actors trying to make their way from Waikato back to Auckland.⁵ Lisa Reihana, meanwhile, uses Badger’s experience in New Zealand as the basis of an exhibition that ‘explore[s] the social tension between cultural leadership, spiritual custom and egotistical desire in the face of foreign political challenge in 1800’s New Zealand’.⁶ Angela Badger’s 2002 book Charlotte Badger: Buccaneer sticks more closely to the version of Badger’s life found in the Dictionary and attempts to put flesh on the bare bones.⁷ Written with Charlotte as the first-person narrator, it follows her life from the struggles of childhood and the shock of transportation through to her eventual escape from New Zealand to Tonga.

It would be easy to see Angela Badger’s novel, in particular, as simply a way of bridging the gaps of our knowledge of Badger’s life, as fiction doing the job that history cannot, and of dramatising the most thrilling episode in Badger’s life for its sheer entertainment value. But this proposition does not take into account the other complexities surrounding Badger’s story, because once we pick away at even the most basic elements of what we think we know about her, such as her stay in the Female Factory, let alone the more speculative aspects such as the escape to Tonga, we find that at least some of them have been borrowed from fictionalised accounts that filled in the spaces in between sparse evidence and were then repeated as if they were the evidence itself. In the telling and retelling of Badger’s story, fiction has become history and history has become fiction, and the result has been the creation of a number of different histories of the same person.

If we look closely at Badger’s story, we see that the narratives that have been told about her, and what has come to be seen as her history, have a history of their own. In the almost two hundred years since she was alive, she has appeared and disappeared, been rediscovered and reinterpreted multiple times and in multiple ways, and those reinterpretations have sometimes been the result of feats of imagination. This aggregation, the mixture of fact and fiction, has been happening since at least the late nineteenth century, particularly in relation to the taking of the Venus. While the earliest accounts of the piracy barely mention Badger, by the end of the century she was a major protagonist instead of a largely passive observer of events. In the process she has found life after life and has become a person of obscure birth about whom songs have been written and who has featured in historical works, including this one.

The intersection between fiction and history was the subject of the 2017 BBC Reith Lecture series given by novelist Hilary Mantel. In the second lecture in the series, ‘Iron Maiden’, Mantel made the case for the ability of fiction writers to tell the untold tale: ‘They want to give a voice to those who have been silenced. Fiction can do that, because it concentrates on what is not on the record.’ She argued that fiction ‘can sit alongside the work of historians – not offering an alternative truth, or even a supplementary truth – but offering insight’.⁸ She had made this same point in the previous lecture, ‘The Day is for the Living’: ‘I start to practice [sic] my trade at the point where the satisfactions of the official story break down. … The historian and the biographer follow a trail of evidence, usually a paper trail. The novelist does that too, and then performs another act – puts the past back into process, into action – frees the people from the archive and lets them run about, ignorant of their fates, with all the mistakes unmade.’ On that occasion, though, she had also talked about the contingent nature of history and its relationship to fiction, particularly when it came to the stories that nations tell about themselves: ‘[W]e reach into the past for foundation myths of our tribe, our nation, and found them on glory, or found them on grievance, but we seldom found them on cold facts.’ The myth making extends to individuals, too: ‘As soon as we die, we enter into fiction.… Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted.’⁹

These observations have relevance for the study of the life of Charlotte Badger. Her appearance in the Dictionary raised her profile as a character in the story of New Zealand, and yet her own story has been constructed and reconstructed over time, and in the process a myth made up partly of elements of fiction and pure imagination has entered the national narrative. But in addition to that, Mantel’s comment about the recreation of the life stories of the dead gets to the heart of one of the problems of history-writing: we cannot, despite our best efforts, ever ‘know’ the whole story of the past; the person who existed and the person about whom we write are always separated by space and time and by both the partialness and the partiality of the evidence they leave as clues for us to follow. Mantel sums up this conundrum, too, noting that ‘history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.… It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth.’¹⁰ In Badger’s case we barely have the stones, let alone the cloth. And much of what has been left to us comes from record-keeping authorities who encountered her at those points in her life when she transgressed the limits of the law, instead of from her own hand. Yet because of the contacts she made with those authorities we still know enough to judge that she lived an extraordinary life of a truly global reach, even if we cannot see the sweat on her brow or feel the thump of her pulse as she jumped from one obstacle to the next. History cannot deliver her to us whole, but we are not without ways of making sense of her.

To return to the question I first asked myself: how might we go about such a task? To begin with, we can revisit the histories that have been written about her and try to discover where the various building blocks have come from. This approach treats the documented life of Charlotte Badger as a kind of archaeological dig that works away at a pile of layers heaped one on top of the other. This deconstruction risks leaving us with less than we had before, but it can go hand in hand with an act of creation. Once we have identified how her life has been retold over time, we can look at how she helps us understand the historical currents that ran through her life. In doing so, we can expand out the meaning of her life, so that instead of merely being a character in a New Zealand story she becomes a citizen of a wider world. We can take her from the local to the global, from a Worcester courtroom to the outskirts of Sydney, from the English countryside to British imperial trading routes. Then, she ceases just being a minor bit of colour added to the New Zealand story and becomes an active participant in a story that goes beyond New Zealand’s shores, but which recognises its role as a destination on a global maritime highway. By changing the point of view from which we view her we can interpret her all over again.

In this way, this study of Badger adds to the series of histories of her life that have been recounted. It offers an interpretation of Badger and the life she led, doing the best it can to base that interpretation on available evidence while acknowledging that that evidence is partial and that history is not simply what happened in the past, it is also an understanding of what happened that we construct for ourselves; it is ‘something that happens later’.¹¹ For this reason, this study doesn’t just present a new understanding of Badger, it also tries to explain how and why the various interpretations of her developed, and how they reflected the time in which they were written. It also tries to get to grips with why this woman, of all people, has been given the chance to enjoy a kind of life after death, and why her