On 2 May 1843, at a farmhouse on the road between Avoca and Fingal in Van Diemen’s Land, two armed bushrangers murdered District Constable William Ward in front of his hosts, then coolly asked whether his breath was still there before going through his pockets.¹ Ward left a wife and seven children. Within days the Lieutenant-Governor’s office had names for the men responsible: Riley Jeffs and John Conway, escaped convicts from the Picton Road Party, and, on 10 May, a placard promising:
Text: Trove, Image: ChatGPT
“…should this service be performed by any convict … a Free Pardon … then a Passage from the Colony free of expense.”²
That last part turned out to be doing more work than whoever drafted it probably intended.
A six-man, all-convict posse
Jeffs and Conway spent three weeks evading a police party out of Campbell Town before they were run to ground on 2 June, cornered behind trees near a shepherd’s hut on the South Esk. The constable who caught them, Thomas Cannell, later testified that he and five others: Joseph Massam, Matthew Berry, Edward Quin, Aaron Dresser and Stephen Wright, had been “in pursuit of the bushrangers up to the 2nd of June,” and that it was Berry and Dresser who held the pair at bay while the rest of the party closed in.³
What the placard didn’t advertise, and what the courtroom record makes plain, is that this was a manhunt run almost entirely by convicts. Cannell was serving fourteen years, transported per Recovery. Massam, Berry and Quin already held tickets-of-leave. Dresser and Wright were both still under sentence for life, transported per Buffalo.⁴ Van Diemen’s Land caught its own bushrangers with its own prisoners – a detail the government notice recorded without ever remarking on it.
What “Hundred Sovereigns” turned out to mean
The placard’s wording is genuinely ambiguous: a reward “of One Hundred Sovereigns… for capturing… both or either” reads, on a literal parse, like a flat £100, however many murderers were taken. In practice, the Executive Council’s minute of 16 June records the Chief Police Magistrate recommending £200, “to be divided equally amongst” the captors.⁵ A week later, Government Notice No. 153 confirmed it: not £100 split six ways, and not £200 either, but £33 6s 8d to each of the six men, plus, for every one of them, a Free Pardon.⁶ Whatever “One Hundred Sovereigns” was meant to mean, the men who actually caught Jeffs and Conway ended up splitting exactly £200 – arithmetic that only works if the reward was really £100 per murderer, doubled because the party brought in both.
Two “Canadians” who were mostly American
The Executive Council’s meeting minutes flag a complication before the ink on the Government Notice was even dry: “two of the Men entitled to the Reward are Canadians, ‘per Buffalo’”, and the Chief Police Magistrate needed authority to handle their passage.⁵ They meant Dresser and Wright, except neither man was Canadian. Stephen Wright was a 25-year-old from Lewis County, New York, captured at the Battle of the Windmill near Prescott in November 1838; Aaron Dresser was a carpenter from Jefferson County, New York, taken in the same run of failed cross-border raids known as the Patriot War.⁷ Both had been swept up with the mostly English-speaking rebel force from Upper Canada, tried for “piratical invasion,” sentenced to transportation for life, and shipped out of Quebec on HMS Buffalo in September 1839 alongside dozens of genuine Canadians. This was evidently reason enough for the colonial government to file them under “Canadian prisoners” for the rest of their sentences. An official Gazette notice from February 1842 lists both men by name under exactly that heading.⁸
It wasn’t just careless paperwork. The standard scholarly account of these prisoners, Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s American Citizens, British Slaves, makes the point plainly: “Not being British subjects, their transportation was almost certainly illegal.”⁹ Dresser and Wright’s entire convict status in Van Diemen’s Land – the sentence that put them in that six-man posse in the first place – rested on legal ground the British government itself likely couldn’t have defended.
The promise, and what actually happened next
The reward mechanics moved fast, at least locally. Dresser’s conduct record shows his ticket-of-leave was “sanctioned… on the express condition that they shall reside in the following districts only,” and explicitly credits it to “his involvement in the capture of bushrangers & murderers Jeffs & Conway,” dated 22 June 1843 — the same week as the Government Notice.¹⁰ Wright’s record shows a “Free pardon as per Gazette” dated 23 June, one day later.¹¹ The Franklin administration then made good on the placard’s promise of free passage, putting both men aboard the brigantine Areta bound for London. On reaching England, the American Minister, Edward Everett, arranged their onward passage to New York aboard the Quebec.¹² Dresser and Wright’s own account of their captivity ran in the New York Tribune on 20 February 1844; the New York Herald had already reported their return a week earlier. By May, Wright had a ghost-written memoir on sale in Manhattan bookshops.¹²
Here is the detail that makes the placard’s fine print worth revisiting: the Colonial Secretary’s Office in Hobart didn’t publish until 9 May 1844 a notice confirming that the Crown itself, “Her Majesty’s gracious allowance,” had ratified Dresser’s and Wright’s free pardons.¹³ By then the two men had been back in the United States for the better part of three months, giving newspaper interviews about a captivity that a colonial pardon hadn’t yet, on paper, actually ended. Van Diemen’s Land had promised them freedom, money, and a ticket home in June 1843, and made good on all three well before London’s own machinery caught up. Had anything gone wrong with the Areta, or with Everett’s arrangements in London, or had the Crown simply declined to ratify what Hobart had already announced, two men who’d risked being shot capturing an armed murderer for the Van Diemen’s Land government would have found themselves free in fact but not yet in law, on the wrong side of the world from either.
What became of the men they caught
Jeffs and Conway were convicted of Ward’s murder in the first days of July 1843 and sentenced to death on 10 July. When the Chief Justice’s report came before the Executive Council a week later, the Council declined to recommend mercy for either man: “under the existing circumstances in which the Colony is placed with respect to Bushrangers an example is absolutely required,” despite the jury’s own recommendation of mercy for Jeffs. Both men were hanged at Launceston on 26 July 1843, within weeks of the six men who caught them collecting their reward money. The same Council session voted Ward’s widow with their numerous children a pension of £30 a year for life, a sum the Lieutenant-Governor apologised for even as he proposed it, regretting only “that the funds of the Colony are not now such as to admit of a more liberal provision being made for her.”¹⁴
Three outcomes, from one placard: two men hanged on schedule, a widow pensioned at a rate her benefactor called for regretting, and two convict-constables shipped home so promptly that the paperwork proving them legally free didn’t exist yet when they got there.
Notes
1. Trial testimony reported in “SUPREME COURT — CRIMINAL SITTINGS,” Launceston Advertiser, 6 July 1843, p. 2.
2. Reward placard of 10 May 1843, reproduced from Courier, 12 May 1843, page 2
3. Testimony of Thomas Cannell and Matthew Berry, Launceston Advertiser, 6 July 1843, p. 2.
4. Government Notice No. 153, Colonial Secretary’s Office, 22 June 1843, published in the Courier, 30 June 1843, p. 4; conduct records CON31-1-12 and CON31-1-48, Tasmanian Archives.
5. Executive Council of Van Diemen’s Land, Minute No. 982, 16 June 1843, “Executive Council VDL minutes – NI Convicts – 27 Dec 1842 – 17 July 1843,” scanned p. [21], 22a.
6. Government Notice No. 153, Colonial Secretary’s Office, 22 June 1843, published in the Courier (Hobart), 30 June 1843, p. 4.
7. John C. Carter, “Remembrances of Rebellion: The Odyssey of Stephen S. Wright,” Thousand Islands Life Magazine, March 2023, https://thousandislandslife.com/remembrances-of-rebellion-the-odyssey-of-stephen-s-wright/; conduct record CON31-1-12, Aaron Dresser, Tasmanian Archives,
8. “GAZETTE. GOVERNMENT NOTICE No. 47,” Colonial Secretary’s Office, 10 February 1842, published in the Courier, 11 February 1842
9. Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony, 1839–1850 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002)
10. Conduct record CON31-1-12, Aaron Dresser, Tasmanian Archives
11. Conduct record CON31-1-48, Stephen S. Wright, Tasmanian Archives
12. Carter, “Remembrances of Rebellion: The Odyssey of Stephen S. Wright.”
13. “GOVERNMENT NOTICE,” Colonial Secretary’s Office, 9 May 1844, Colonial Times, 14 May 1844
14. Executive Council of Van Diemen’s Land, Minute No. 5, 17 July 1843, Executive Council VDL minutes 27 Dec 1842 – 17 July 1843, pp245-246
