1790: He Survived One of Australia’s Deadliest Convict Voyages, Then Was Hanged Four Months After Landing
Edward Wildblood sailed to New South Wales on the Second Fleet ship Surprize, a voyage so brutal that dozens of convicts died before it even reached Sydney in June 1790. He was one of the lucky ones, stumbling ashore half starved after months chained below deck, only to find the colony offered little mercy either.
Within three months he and fellow convict William Harris had taken to the bush around Rose Hill, the settlement that would become Parramatta, robbing huts and killing a settler’s goat. Caught and sent back to labour in irons on bread and water, the pair slipped away again during their overseer’s absence, broke into a hut and beat its lone occupant, a sick settler, before making off with beef, flour, a frock and a book. Tried and convicted on 28 October 1790, Wildblood and Harris were hanged that same day at Rose Hill, their bodies left swinging near the very hut they had robbed, one of the earliest executions carried out in the colony.
In a remarkable twist of fate, both men were recorded as having been born on the same day, 1 January 1764, only to die together on the same day, aged just 26, at the end of a hangman’s rope.
