It ended in failure — death for some, imprisonment for others and, for the one woman involved, a curious kind of immortality — but remains one of the most enthralling escape stories ever told.
On the night of March 28, 1791, James Martin and eight fellow convicts transported to Australia escaped from Botany Bay and began an epic two-month adventure in which they endured a journey of more than 3,000 miles in an open boat, surviving storms and encounters with Aboriginal peoples only to be captured and sent back to England to serve out their sentence in Newgate Prison.
During their time on the run, they came close to starvation, were forced to throw all their clothes overboard to stop the boat from sinking and