Frederick escape

Among them was Londoner James Porter, a former whaler who had previously lived in Chile and left a wife and child there, before returning to England and then being transported to Australia for the theft of silks.

They scuttled the Frederick off-shore, travelled the remaining miles in the ship's tender, and passed themselves off in Valdivia as survivors of a shipwreck.

[4][5] The governor of Valdivia was suspicious of the convicts' claims, and intended to have them executed as pirates before changing his heart after an impassioned speech by Porter—though both Robert Hughes and Richard Davey cast doubt on this event, noting that Porter's account is the only record of it.

[15] The convicts were imprisoned for two years in a Hobart jail, then transported to the notorious Norfolk Island penal colony, where Porter wrote his memoirs under the governorship of the prison reformer Alexander Maconochie.

The Frederick escape is the subject of The Ship That Never Was, Australia's longest-running play, a pantomime performed every evening by the Round Earth Theatre Company in Strahan, Tasmania.