William Harris had only just walked free from a Birmingham gaol, a three month sentence for robbing an outhouse behind him, when he broke into another house in the same street that same night. Caught in the act, he was convicted of burglary and condemned to death, later reprieved to transportation for life. He survived the notorious Second Fleet voyage aboard the Neptune, one of the deadliest convict crossings in Australia’s history, in which scores of prisoners perished before the ship ever reached Sydney.
In the young colony, Harris fell in with fellow convict Edward Wildblood, and the pair spent weeks pilfering from other convicts’ huts before fleeing into the bush. Recaptured and chained together on bread and water, they escaped again within weeks and broke into a hut, beating a sick settler and stealing beef, flour, a frock and a book. Tried for the break-in, the two men were hanged together on this day in 1790, among the first executions carried out in the young colony, with settlers gathered to watch them die from a tree.
In an extraordinary coincidence, Harris and Wildblood were both recorded as having been born on 1 January 1764. Their lives would ultimately end together, on the same day and at the same gallows, aged just 26.
