October 17, 1830 – the Death of Captain Logan.
In another age, when news travelled very slowly, a newspaper editor in Sydney was vigorously libeling a man he looked forward to meeting in Court shortly. It was October 1830, and Edward Smith Hall of the Monitor was busily publishing articles on the cruelty of Captain Patrick Logan at Moreton Bay convict settlement, with no way of knowing that his nemesis was dead.
The news of Logan’s death did not reach Sydney until November 16, 1830. A month prior, Logan, who was about to be relieved of his command and travel to India with his regiment, was on a surveying trip to the area that is now known as Mount Beppo, Queensland. He separated from other members of his party, and did not return at the appointed time. Days later, search parties located his body, and brought it back to the settlement.
Images from the Mount Beppo area, from Just 1 More Photography, and Airbnb.
We know when his remains arrived at Brisbane Town, because poor Mrs Logan was prescribed an opiate to calm her profound distress at the fate of her husband. However harsh Logan’s command of the settlement may have been, the Logans were a devoted couple with young children.
Patrick Logan had been dead for a fortnight before his body arrived at the Settlement, and it would be another three weeks before his remains arrived in Sydney on board the colonial schooner Isabella.
The announcement was made in the Sydney Gazette on 18 November 1830:
Captain Logan was given a full regalia funeral in Sydney, and was interred at the Protestant burial ground at Surrey Hills. His widow spent many years desperately petitioning for a pension. The machinery of government got back into gear with almost indecent haste, as various functionaries worked out how to get the salary expended for Logan to be transferred to Clunie before the former’s body had even been laid to rest.
Edward Smith Hall missed out on the opportunity he’d longed for so dearly – to depose the hated Captain Logan in open Court. Logan was preparing to sue Hall for libel, and Hall’s moment in the sun had arrived. Or so he thought. It was the same misguided confidence in the correctness of his beliefs that had led to Hall’s imprisonment for libel. The fact that Logan had the resources of the colonial government and the British Army at his disposal troubled Hall not one whit. Or that the prisoner, whose murder Hall believed Logan had personally committed, had died, uncomfortably no doubt but not suspiciously, of dysentery some years before.
Edward Smith Hall, left. Captain Patrick Logan, right.
Moreton Bay and More 