Convict Snapshot: John McDowall
New York, 1771
John McDowall was born in New York in North America in 1771, a subject of the English Crown, like all New Yorkers at the time. As a little boy, he could explore the countryside and farmland of Manhattan, at least until the Revolutionary War and pre-war skirmishes made such excursions too dangerous.
John McDowall was born a British subject, and grew up to become a seaman, and was also skilled as a cook/servant. A useful man, usually able to find work, and by virtue of his career, able to travel freely. He didn’t anticipate just how far he would travel. He would find himself in a country that didn’t exist officially when he was born.
London, 1813
In 1813, Napoleon was making life a misery on the Continent, and John McDowall was in London and on his uppers. He was forty-two, and couldn’t find a job or accommodation. He couldn’t even fill his stomach.
An unlocked room beckoned in the Old Hummins in Covent Garden, a private hotel run by a formidable widow. McDowall was inside, and had been searching through the belongings of the room’s occupant for some minutes when the man came at him in the dark, grabbed him and caught him thieving.
McDowall found himself at the Old Bailey, condemned to death for the robbery. He could only tell the judge that he was hungry and desperate. The jury recommended McDowall to mercy, on the basis that as a seaman, he could still be useful to his country. The Home Office agreed, and commuted death to transportation for life.
John McDowall quietly thanked his lucky stars that he was born an Englishman in New York, and accepted transportation to a country that hadn’t existed when he was born. In fact, Australia (or New Holland, people weren’t sure of the exact name) was still being ‘discovered’ by Europeans in 1771.
Sydney Town
As the Surry made its way to Port Jackson, and the boats came out to get the convicts, John McDowall took stock of a scene something like this.
It wasn’t the long-settled, Dutch and English inflected Manhattan, or teeming London. It was a township struggling its way from being largely composed of garrisons and gaols.
McDowall was assigned to the then distant, tiny Newcastle, and later to Sydney Town. In 1826, he was working as a government servant to Mrs Onslow when he nicked some valuables. He left them with a friend in George Street, he said. To pawn, he didn’t say.
The Sydney Bench sentenced him to transportation for three years. Not this time to Newcastle, but to some place called Moreton Bay. Would the English Government never stop coming up with new places to send him?
Moreton Bay
Moreton Bay turned out to be a tropical encampment tucked in a riverbend, lacking even the basic structure of Newcastle or the growing Sydney Town. McDowall, then in his mid-fifties, was one of the men who helped create the settlement as Captain Logan established buildings, crops and cleared grazing land. He had always been a useful man.
In 1829, McDowall was able to bid farewell to the isolated settlement, and return to Sydney Town, where he lived out his days, passing away in hospital on 06 July 1835.
SOURCES:
Moreton Bay and More 