Thomas Pamphlett
Castaway and serial offender Thomas Pamphlett (1788?–1838, a.k.a. James Groom) was marooned with Richard Parsons and John Finnegan on Moreton Island until John Oxley rescued them at the end of 1823. They were the first Europeans known to have lived in the area, and informed Oxley of a nearby river, which Oxley investigated and recommended as the long-term location of the new Moreton Bay penal settlement.
Pamphlett subsequently re-offended and was sentenced to seven years at the new settlement.
Pamphlett's original conviction in Manchester, where he worked as a brickmaker, came in 1810. He was charged with stealing a horse and five pieces of cloth and was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation to New South Wales.
In Sydney, he lived at The Rocks and worked at Brickfield Hill. At the end of May 1814, he and two others were charged with stealing the windows from the only building on the Balmain Peninsula. After receiving one hundred lashes, Pamphlett spent six months in double irons but managed to abscond twice.
As a result, on 29 March 1815, Pamphlett was sent to Newcastle but disappeared again within a few weeks. Absenting from government labour resulted in another fifty lashes after he was recaptured. Neglect of government work resulted in fifty more in October.
After a successful application for a commutation of his sentence and a conditional pardon, Pamphlett returned to the Hawkesbury area with a wife and three children. He worked on the river until early 1822 when he was sentenced to seven years at Port Macquarie for theft. He avoided that spell of penal servitude due to an unsound mind. He was reputedly occasionally insane.
In March 1823, William Cox hired Pamphlett, fellow ticket of leave men Richard Parsons and John Thompson and convict John Finnegan to fetch cedar from the Five Islands in the Illawarra District, eighty kilometres south of Sydney. The quartet set out in a nine-metre open boat on 21 March 1823 with pork, flour, five gallons of rum to pay the timber getters for the cedar, and four gallons of water.
Near their destination, a strong breeze blew them away from the coast. They were blown further out to sea when the wind intensified, and the prevailing winds and currents may have taken them most of the way across the Tasman Sea.
After twenty-six days at sea and three weeks without water, Pamphlett, Finnegan and Parsons were wrecked on Moreton Island on 16 April, under the impression that the storm had blown them as far as Bass Strait or the coast of Van Diemen's Land, the trio crossed to the mainland and started travelling north. When they encountered a river too wide to cross in its lower reaches, they spent a month following it upstream. They eventually found an Aboriginal canoe and used it to cross the stream.
Travelling on without finding indications of settlement, Pamphlett turned back around the Mooloolah River; Finnegan and Parsons carried on until they quarrelled on reaching the Noosa River. Finnegan turned back and found Pamphlett. The pair lived with Aboriginal people until Oxley rescued them at the end of the year.
Oxley took Pamphlett and Finnegan back to Sydney. A year and a half later, working as a labourer west of Sydney, Pamphlett stole two bags of flour and was sentenced to seven years' transportation to the new penal colony at Moreton Bay. While the stories of his earlier exploits encouraged others to escape, Pamphlett's behaviour was largely exemplary, apart from a day's absence shortly before his departure.
He left Moreton Bay in April 1833 and lived uneventfully around Penrith until his death in December 1838.
