Maria massacre

Maria was a brigantine of 136 tons, built in Dublin, Ireland, and launched in 1823 as a passenger ship.
On 26 June 1840 she sailed from Port Adelaide under orders for Hobart. Maria was commanded by William Ettrick Smith. With Smith sailed a mate, a crew of eight men and boys, and 16 passengers: four men, six women, five children, and a baby in arms. She wrecked on the Margaret Brock Reef, near Cape Jaffa in the colony of South Australia, somewhere south-west of the current site of the town of Kingston SE, South Australia, two days later. The wreck has never been located.
Aboriginal people on the Coorong murdered some or all of the survivors of the wreck as they journeyed to Adelaide, an event known as the Maria massacre. There were no eyewitness accounts of the killings, and accounts vary as to whether there were 25 or 26 victims; either way, it was the largest massacre of colonists by Aboriginal people in Australia. A punitive expedition, setting out from Adelaide and acting under instructions from Governor Gawler, detained the men believed to be responsible and summarily hanged two presumed culprits. This caused considerable controversy within Australia and back in Britain, as Aboriginal South Australians had been declared to be British subjects with colonisation of South Australia in 1836, and under this assumption were protected under British law.

The ship

Background

Maria was launched from Grand Canal Docks, Dublin, in 1823. The data below are from Lloyd's Register.

Year	Master	Owner	Voyage	Source & notes
1825	W.Lawson	J.Gray	Dublin–Barbados	LR
1830	J.Brooks D.Levey	Martin	Liverpool–Gibraltar	LR; repairs in 1827 and 1828
1833	McCormack	Foster & Co	London–Gambia	LR; large repairs 1832

Maria no longer appears in LR in 1834 or subsequently.

Final voyage

Maria left Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land, on 24 May 1840 and arrived at Port Adelaide harbour on Sunday 7 June 1840, under Captain W. Smith, carrying three passengers and a large amount of cargo, mostly food.
Maria left Port Adelaide on 26 June 1840 for Hobart Town, with 25 persons on board, including the captain, William Ettrick Smith, and his wife. Passengers included Samuel Denham and Mrs Denham and their five children ; the recently widowed Mrs York, and her infant; James Strutt ; George Young Green and Mrs Green - possibly James Greenshields; Thomas Daniel and Mrs Daniel; and Mr. Murray. The ship's mate and crew were John Tegg, John Griffiths, John Deggan/Durgan/Dengan, James Biggins, John Cowley, Thomas Rea, George Leigh/Lee, and James Parsons.
On 28 June 1840, Maria foundered on the Margaret Brock Reef, which lies west of Cape Jaffa on the south-east coast of South Australia.

The wreck

Maria's hull was never found, though pieces of wreckage washed ashore at Lacepede Bay. In 1972 a diver recovered a rubber gudgeon which may have come from either the Maria or the Margaret Brock. There have been rumours of gold sovereigns aboard the ship, but records have not confirmed this. There were stories of coins being passed around the Ngarrandjeri people, which may have been traded by survivors before the massacre. It was reported a few years after the wreck that Dr Richard Penney had found 11 gold sovereigns on the beach, and a whaler named Tom Clarke obtained more from the local Aboriginal people.
It is hoped that the wreck may one day be located, using advanced remote sensing technology. This would be of great historical value. Senior maritime heritage officer Amer Khan of the Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources State Heritage Unit, said that such a discovery could help to reveal the chain of events which led up to the tragedy. Khan suspects the wreck lies somewhere near Cape Jaffa, where the treacherous Margaret Brock reef is located.
A cannon reported to have belonged to the Maria and which "was probably carried for the look of the thing or for signalling" was purchased from the Lee family of Middleton by D. H. Cudmore around 1914 as a garden feature for his home "Adare" in Victor Harbor, South Australia, then as a family tradition fired to welcome each New Year.
A bell, claimed to have belonged to the ship, was acquired by Nuriootpa High School in 1942.

Massacre

The passengers and crew safely reached land. There were no survivors to tell the tale, but accounts suggest that the passengers commenced trekking on the land side of the Coorong coast towards the lakes, with the sailors heading inland at some point.
According to a later account, around from the wreck, in company with some friendly Aboriginal people, they came across a track and at once had a dispute as to whether or not to follow it, and decided to split up: Captain Smith and the crew took to the track and most of the passengers continued along the shoreline. Two days later some of this latter group split from the party in the hope of rejoining the captain. Around this time they were attacked and killed by a group of the Milmenrura, stripped of their possessions, clubbed to death, decapitated and buried in the sand or stuffed into wombat burrows.
After word of the murders of multiple white people by "natives" reached Adelaide in late July, a group headed by William Pullen, with Dr Richard Penney, five sailors, one police trooper, and three Aboriginal interpreters, set out to investigate on 28 July. On 30 July they reached a massacre site, where they found body parts strewn around, comprising the naked bodies of two men, three women, a 10-year-old-girl, two boys, and a baby girl. All had facial bruising. The party buried the bodies and recovered two wedding rings from the women's fingers. The group reported finding "legs, arms and parts of bodies partially covered with sand and strewn in all directions", and a trail of footprints leading from the area. On 1 August, they encountered a group of Aboriginal people in possession of blankets and clothing, with one wearing a sailor's jacket, and were told about the deaths of two further survivors. Pullen questioned the group who had led him to the bodies; many remained silent, but Pullen described two of the men as "the most villainous looking characters I ever saw", and assumed their guilt. Pullen's group returned to Adelaide with the rings, which were identified as belonging to Mrs York and Mrs Denham.
Such detail of how the Maria survivors came to be widely separated into three groups can only be supposition, as none lived to tell the tale. The body of the captain was found far removed from the others, and no trace of the crew members was ever found, so it is not known whether they suffered the same fate as the passengers. One contemporary noted that survivors of the schooner Fanny, wrecked in the same area two years earlier, were given every assistance by, presumably, men from the same tribe. Aboriginal people reported that the survivors of the shipwreck were guided down the Coorong as far as a point opposite Lake Albert, where they were persuaded to separate before all being murdered.
It was also alleged that after the hanging, police killed a larger group of Milmenrura people.

Retribution

After reading Pullen's report, Governor Gawler commissioned Major O'Halloran to investigate further and his party left Adelaide on 15 August 1840. Reinforcements were called for and on 22 August, O'Halloran left Goolwa with a mounted troop, including Alexander Tolmer, Captain Henry Nixon, Charles Bonney, and Pullen. The party consisted of 12 police, 11 sailors and three Aboriginal people from Encounter Bay. Gawler's instructions were "...when to your conviction you have identified any number, not exceeding three, of the actual murderers...you will there explain to the blacks the nature of your conduct... and you will deliberately and formally cause sentence of death to be executed by shooting or hanging". They followed the coast, while boats sailed parallel. On 23 August the force ran into a number of Aboriginal people and rounded up 13 men, two boys, and 50 women and children, a total of 65. O'Halloran shackled the men and set the others free, though they remained nearby voluntarily. In the course of rounding them up, three Aboriginal men were killed, while an unrecorded number were wounded when attempting to flee. Maria's log-book was recovered in one of their wurleys, as were numerous articles of clothing, some blood-stained, and other incriminating evidence, including some silver spoons. On 24 August, Two Aboriginal men who were identified as being complicit in the killings tried to escape by swimming and were shot and wounded.
In his report, O'Halloran stated that his captives yielded up the man who had killed a whaler named Roach some two years previously, and also pointed out the location where one of the Maria murderers could be found. Two of the natives then volunteered to collect the man and, according to O'Halloran's report, all the natives shouted with joy when the man appeared. O'Halloran pronounced a death sentence on him.
It was judged by the party that there was sufficient evidence of guilt, and the men unanimously pronounced a guilty verdict against them. O'Halloran summarily sentenced two Aboriginal men, Mongarawata and Pilgarie, to death. A gallows was built from sheoak and the men were hanged immediately, at 3.00pm on 25 August, with their bodies left to hang and rot near the graves.
In the main, the account given by the Aboriginal people of the massacre was similar to what the colonists reported, with a couple of discrepancies:

The report says that four people were executed, the Aboriginal account reporting six.
The report states that 26 shipwreck survivors were killed, while Aboriginal people said that 25 were killed, as one woman managed to escape across the mouth of the Murray.

Either way, it was and remains the largest massacre of colonists by Aboriginal people in Australia.
Later, it was reported that there had been a legend among the Lower Murray tribes about "a white
woman with red hair living her life with the blacks".