The Ship That Never Was. The Greatest Escape Story Of Australian Colonial History

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: As New
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: ABC Books/HarperCollins
Publisher Place: Sydney
Publisher Year: 2018
Edition: First Edition

Description: 322 pages. Book appears to have hardly been read and is in As new condition throughout.

Publishers Description: In 1823, cockney sailor and chancer James Porter was convicted of stealing a stack of beaver furs and transported halfway around the world to Van Diemens Land. After several escape attempts from the notorious penal colony, Porter, who told authorities he was a beer-machine maker, was sent to Sarah Island, known in Van Diemens Land as hell on earth. Many had tried to escape Sarah Island; few had succeeded. But when Governor George Arthur announced that the place would be closed and its prisoners moved to the new penal station of Port Arthur, Porter, along with a motley crew of other prisoners, pulled off an audacious escape. Wresting control of the ship theyd been building to transport them to their fresh hell, the escapees instead sailed all the way to Chile. What happened next is stranger than fiction, a fitting outcome for this true-life picaresque tale. The Ship That Never Was is the entertaining and rollicking story of what is surely the greatest escape in Australian colonial history. James Porter, whose memoirs were the inspiration for Marcus Clarkes For the Term of his Natural Life, is an original Australian larrikin whose ingenuity, gift of the gab and refusal to buckle under authority make him an irresistible anti-hero who deserves a place in our history.

ISBN: 9780733338571