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SYDNEY - A written confession to one of the most gruesome crimes in Australia's colonial history goes on display for the first time today.
The parchment document is the story of the "convict cannibal" Alexander Pearce, who broke out of a remote penal hellhole and ate his fellow escapees one by one.
When Pearce was captured the colonial authorities refused to believe his story. He escaped a second time and again resorted to cannibalism.
The signed confession will go on display at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, with two pencil sketches of his head after he was hanged for murder in 1824.
Pearce, an Irishman, was transported to Australia for seven years after being convicted of stealing six pairs of shoes.
He then forged a money order and was sent to one of the British Empire's most savage penal colonies, Macquarie Harbour, on the west coast of Tasmania.
In 1822 Pearce escaped with seven other convicts, planning to trek across Tasmania and commandeer a boat to a Pacific island or China.
After 15 days they were on the brink of starvation. Two died of exhaustion. "They quickly ran out of provisions. So they began eating each other," Warwick Hirst, the curator of On the Run: Daring Convict Escapes, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
The first man to be murdered, Thomas Bodenham, was felled with an axe, his body cut up, roasted and "devoured greedily", Pearce recounted in his confession.
Within nine weeks, he was the last man standing. He made his way to the Derwent River and joined a band of bushrangers.
When Pearce was recaptured he confessed to cannibalism but the story was considered far-fetched. Magistrates thought he concocted the account to cover for his companions, believed to be still at large. He was sent back to Macquarie Harbour.
In 1823 he escaped again, taking with him a young prisoner called Thomas Cox. When he was recaptured 11 days later he was carrying an old flour bag containing the half-eaten remains of his mate.
"You can't help but feel that he took the other convict with him as a ready store of meat," said Mr Hirst.
In a contemporary report a horrified official wrote that the body was "cut right through the middle, the head off, the privates torn off, all the flesh off the calves and the legs, which the inhuman wretch declared was the most delicious food".
Pearce, 34, was "laden with the weight of human blood, and believed to have banqueted on human flesh", the Hobart Town Gazette reported at his trial.
So abhorrent did the colonial authorities view his crimes that after he was hanged his body was cut into pieces and his skull boiled clean to be kept as a trophy.
Pearce's confession has been in the museum's possession since 1917.
