Archives: Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History
1764: Born to Mutiny: Fletcher Christian, the Man Who Cast Captain Bligh Adrift
Fletcher Christian was born on 25 September 1764 in Cumberland, England, decades before he would become one of history’s most infamous mutineers. In April 1789, as master’s mate aboard HMS Bounty, he led a revolt against Captain William Bligh, seizing the ship in the South Pacific after months of tension during the vessel’s breadfruit-collecting voyage.
Rather than kill Bligh, Christian set him adrift in a small open boat with eighteen loyal crew members and minimal supplies. Bligh went on to complete an extraordinary 3,618-mile voyage to safety in Timor, a feat of navigation still studied today.
Christian and his fellow mutineers eventually settled on remote Pitcairn Island with a group of Tahitian men and women, burning the Bounty to avoid detection. The fate of the settlement descended into violence within years, and the exact circumstances of Christian’s own death remain disputed, with some accounts claiming he was killed by fellow settlers and others suggesting he secretly returned to England.
Portrait of Friday Fletcher October Christian son of Bounty mutineer Christian Fletcher 1814 by John Shillibeer
1983: The Great Escape: 38 IRA Prisoners Break Out of the Maze in Britain’s Largest Prison Breakout
On 25 September 1983, 38 IRA prisoners staged a mass breakout from the Maze Prison in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, the largest prison escape in British history. The men overpowered guards inside H-Block 7, some using smuggled handguns, and seized control of the wing before storming the front gate disguised in stolen prison officer uniforms.
In the chaos one prison officer was stabbed to death and twenty others were injured during the breakout. Several escapees hijacked a delivery lorry to get beyond the perimeter fences, and while a number were recaptured within days, others evaded capture for years, some fleeing abroad before eventually being caught or negotiating their return.
The escape became known among Irish republicans as the Great Escape, a name that stuck for decades and turned the breakout into one of the defining episodes of the Troubles.
1860: Flogged as a Soldier, Broken on Norfolk Island, Hanged at Hobart: the Ruin of a Convict
Moments after the bolt was drawn at the Campbell Street Gaol in Hobart, the chaplain stepped forward and read aloud a letter the dead man had written the day before in the condemned cell. It was addressed “To all men at Port Arthur”, and Martin Lydon had begged that it be made public.
It was the story of a ruined life in a few lines. Disobedient at ten, a soldier at 16, Lydon struck an officer of his company in a moment of anger and was flogged: “this ruined me”. He came to hate the army and took to drink, and further violence saw him transported. “The vileness of Norfolk Island turned me into an animal,” he wrote. Only three weeks earlier, in H division, he had boasted that he did not care about being hanged. Now he called that his “wicked flashiness”: “Every man about to die must fear the judgment of God.”
Lydon had been capitally convicted in the Supreme Court of a felonious assault at Port Cygnet, south of Hobart, committed while drunk, a crime that then carried the death penalty. Lydon disputed part of the evidence given at his trial, but he did not dispute the sentence: what he had done in his drunkenness, he wrote, deserved death. “May the drunkenness that brought on me this misery be a warning to all of you.”
Norfolk Island settlement, 1838. Ink and wash drawing, artist unknown. State Library of New South Wales, SV8/Norf I/5.
1854: Anxious to Get Home for Their Dinner: the Killer Who Taunted His Jury, Hanged at Melbourne Gaol
John Hughes told the jurors who convicted him that they were “shopkeepers tired of waiting, and anxious to get home for their dinner”. They had taken ten minutes. Days later he was hanged behind Melbourne Gaol for the murder of Abraham Marcus, a traveller whose only mistake was chasing the men who stole his best horse.
In December 1852 Marcus was bound for the Ovens goldfields with his wife and nine-year-old son when their dray broke down at Yackandandah Creek. Four horsemen stopped, accepted a meal and even helped with the repairs. Hughes turned down four pounds for his tired horse and saddle, remarking that he would not go much further before he had another. When the riders had gone, so had the best of the Marcus horses, with the worn-out mount left in its place.
Marcus rode after them and seized the bridle. The gang kept him talking until a passing bullock dray was out of sight, then drew pistols, marched him into the bush and tied him to a tree, where he was later found dead. His whole party recognised the rope: it had hung around the neck of the horse Hughes rode. That same evening, by his own later account, the gang robbed a young Sydney man named Stone on his way home from the diggings; he broke free, was run down and killed, and his body was sunk in a creek, weighted with stones and a saddle.
A reward of 200 pounds was offered, but it was 1854 before the widow picked Hughes out of a line of 21 identically dressed prisoners in the yard of Darlinghurst Gaol. He made a long confession naming three accomplices, then asked to be sent to Melbourne quickly, since enough had been proved to hang him. At trial he called the jurors “new chums”, to laughter from the gallery. The judge replied that an innocent man would never have dared to browbeat a jury so, and that the clear evidence of the dead man’s young son had settled the matter.
From the dock Hughes withdrew his confession as false and swore the men he had named were innocent too: “I now say, and will on the day of my death, that I am an innocent man.” He went to the scaffold pale but composed, and made no further revelations.
