Angela Badger: Charlotte Badger Buccaneer

By MARGIE THOMSON

Four guineas was all it took, slipped inside her bodice while their rightful owner looked elsewhere. Charlotte Badger, like many of those convicted of such crimes in late 18th-century England, needed the money to feed her desperate family, but justice was blind, and she was transported to the penal colony in Sydney around 1800.

Then, in 1806 she, her baby Anny and a small group of convicts, including her great friend Kitty Hagerty, were shifted again, to the newer colony at Tasmania, aboard the merchant vessel Venus.

The captain was cruel and flogged Charlotte and Kitty, thus sparking a mutiny. While the captain went ashore, the crew and convicts commandeered the ship and took off across the sea to New Zealand.

This book is their based-on-fact story, told in fictionalised form by a descendant of Charlotte, the historical documents extracted at the beginning of each chapter hinting at the research our modern-day Badger undertook in the course of discovering her ancestor.

It's an exciting, action-packed history, told with gusto, sensitivity and imagination, despite the difficulty of it being in the voice of Charlotte, an uneducated country girl. Angela Badger has resisted the temptation of imposing a 21st-century sensibility on Charlotte, and so the novel has at times an unmitigated non-PC flavour.

We experience, unfiltered, Charlotte's horror and fear as Maori war canoes bear belligerently down upon the Venus on the west coast of the North Island: "There must have been at least 60 shrieking men in that boat. As if the sight of their tattooed faces and great red tongues sticking out in derision was not enough, the spectacle of the vessel was such as to strike fear into the bravest heart ... From her prow a fearsome creature leered at any poor enemy in her path ... "

There's a love story, although not for poor, kind, lonely Charlotte (described in an 1806 Proclamation of Piracy as "very corpulent, full face, thick lips, infant child").

It is Kitty who falls in love with the first mate of the Venus, and the leader of the mutiny, Benjamin Kelly, and Charlotte observes with an increasing sense of isolation their closeness and hopes for a future together.

Blame for the mutineers' likely fate on the gallows she lays at the feet of love itself: "Love stepped into our bleak lives and started the chain of events which caused all the trouble. And as always happens with love - it turned our world upside down."

It's an intriguing, compelling tale, spoilt only by periodic clumsy editing and disconcerting punctuation, and a frustrating sense of not knowing where facts end and speculation begins.

We know a happy ending is impossible, and Badger does an excellent job of portraying the horror of the convicts' lot, the desperation of life in the 19th century, and the cruelty of the social and political system in which they were enmeshed.

The warlike Maori, among whom the mutineers live for several months, are dramatically brought to life; so are the Tongans, with whom Charlotte later spent several years.

Charlotte has an open mind. When she's shocked by Pacific customs (cannibalism, for instance) she reflects on the way European culture treats people - the shackles and stench of English jails, the floggings, the child slavery of the poorhouses.

Charlotte and Kitty were the first white women to live in New Zealand, and Charlotte in turn was the first white woman to land in Tonga. Their experiences at the hands of almost everyone they meet are terrifying and extraordinary.

Although their crimes were minor and born of extreme need, they became outlaws wherever they went. It's a great story.

Indra

$29.95