The trouble began with cooking pots. When the commandant of the Norfolk Island penal settlement ordered all private kettles and saucepans confiscated in June 1846, tightening an already brutal regime, convicts erupted in fury the next morning. A mob armed with axes and wooden billets killed a convict constable at the lumber-yard gate, beat an overseer to death with a carving fork and billets, then struck down two more sleeping constables before soldiers finally restored order.
Fourteen men were tried months later before a military jury; twelve were convicted and hanged in two batches of six on the same morning in October 1846, their bodies buried outside consecrated ground in a spot still known as Murderers’ Mound. A thirteenth man was hanged six days after for the same overseer’s killing.
Before his execution, the ringleader declared that four of the twelve condemned men were innocent, insisting he had not even spoken to one of them on the morning of the riot and that the others had played no part in the killings, but it was to no avail.
