People Australia

Joseph Gerrald, painted by C. Smith; engraved by S.W. Reynolds, 1795

National Library of Australia, 9547885

Joseph Gerrald (1763-1796)  lawyer, political activist and convict 

Birth: 9 February 1763 in the island of St Kitts, West Indies, only child of Joseph Gerrald (d.1775) an Irish planter, and his second wife Ann, née Rogers (d.c.1767). Marriage: about 1782 in the West Indies, to a woman named Brothers. They had a son and a daughter, before his wife died. Death: 16 March 1796 at Sydney, New South Wales. 

• In 1765 the family moved to London. His mother died soon after arrival and his father returned to the West Indies. Joseph was educated at a boarding school in Hammersmith until the age of 11.
• Orphaned, aged 12, when his father died in 1775, Joseph was placed in guardianship and attended Stanmore school under Dr Samuel Parr where he performed well. Though he was close to Parr, he was expelled for “extreme indiscretion” and in 1780 returned to the West Indies.
• Finding the family estate reduced, and with two children to support, in about 1785, he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, and worked as a lawyer.
• He returned to England in 1788 and became prominent in the London Corresponding Society or the ‘Workers Party’ as a “powerful speaker”. Reputedly, “His eloquence had equally the power to charm and astonish. The brilliancy of his imagination was not inferior to the power of his invective”.
• Arrested for advocating ‘sedition’, in 1794 he was sentenced at Edinburgh, Scotland, to fourteen years transportation to Botany Bay by a biased judge who instructed the jury in a partisan fashion. He was the only convict to be transported on the store-ship Sovereign, which departed England on 25 May 1795 and reached Sydney on 5 November that year.
• Finding Gerrald in poor health upon his arrival in New South Wales, Governor Hunter permitted him to purchase “a small house and garden” at Farm Cove, Sydney. But in early 1796, in poor health, he moved to Thomas Palmer’s house.
• Gerrald was one of the “Scottish Martyrs” group in Botany Bay — Palmer, Maurice Margarot, Thomas Muir and William Skirving — for whom Americans purportedly plotted release by sending the Otter, which reached Sydney in early 1796. Gerrald was ill, and on 17 February only Muir managed board the vessel.
• Already sickly (tuberculosis) and after rough treatment — working in a convict chain gang — Gerrald died in Palmer’s house of consumption, three weeks after the departure of the Otter.
• His tombstone, said to have been in the lower government garden, in Farm Cove, bore the inscription, ‘He died a martyr to the liberties of his country’. 

Sources
Tocsin (Melbourne), 3 April 1902; Frank Clune, The Scottish Martyrs: their trials and transportation to Botany Bay (Sydney, 1969); George Rude, Protest and punishment: the story of the social and political protestors transported to Australia, 1788-1868 (Melbourne, 1978); Michael T. Davis, Joseph Gerrald, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).