John Knatchbull

Naval captain, robber, murderer, writer

Arrived 1825 on Asia

Armed robbery was a relatively common form of theft for which convicts were transported. Despite being given a 14-year sentence for the crime, John Knatchbull could not resist the urge to reoffend.

John Knatchbull, a Royal Navy captain, was convicted (intriguingly under the alias John Fitch) in Surrey, England, of stealing with ‘force and arms’. He arrived in Sydney on the Asia in 1825. In 1832 he was charged with forging the signature of a judge, and sentenced to seven years on Norfolk Island. On his return to Sydney, where he was housed at the Hyde Park Barracks, Knatchbull pleaded with the Governor for his freedom. Not long after receiving his ticket of leave in 1842, he was charged with the murder of shopkeeper Ellen Jamieson during an attempted robbery. Again he was held at the barracks before being transferred to Darlinghurst Gaol, where he wrote his widely read memoirs. Knatchbull was hanged by executioner Alexander Green on 13 February 1844.

Hoping that another penal settlement would hold him down, the court sentenced Kavanagh to imprisonment at the supposedly escape-proof Port Arthur, but he escaped from there too. During two years on the run in Van Diemen’s Land, Kavanagh earned his reputation as a notorious bushranger, joining with Martin Cash and George Jones to rob coaches, homesteads and inns. Then, after accidentally shooting himself, Kavanagh had to give himself up or bleed to death. The court tried again to control him, and banished him back to Norfolk Island. But the defiant Kavanagh refused to be held down – he joined a group of convicts in a mutiny on the Island in 1846. And for that, the authorities finally had their way and executed him.