People Australia

Margaret Hall (c.1763-1807?) was found guilty on 4 December 1782 at the Old Bailey, London, of stealing a box of valuables from a man she had slept with. Her death sentence was commuted to 7 years transportation to America. She was among the prisoners who mutinied on the convict transport Mercury in April 1784. Recaptured, she was sent to the Dunkirk hulk in June 1784. She was discharged to the Friendship in March 1787 and then transferred to the Prince of Wales at the Cape of Good Hope in October 1787. She arrived in Sydney in January 1788 as part of the First Fleet.

Hall married Peter Williams (as Peter Creamer) on 13 February 1788 at St Philip's Church, Sydney. They were sent to Norfolk Island on the Supply in January 1790. They had separated by February 1791 when Margaret was sharing a government-provided sow with Thomas Watson and Sarah Acton. Both she and Williams left Norfolk Island for Port Jackson on the Atlantic in September 1792.

Margaret was living with Nathaniel Fowler, a soldier, in 1806; she had no children. As she does not appear in later registers she was probably the Margaret Hall whose burial was registered at St Philip's Church, Sydney, on 9 December 1807. 

* information from Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (1989), p 156