In July 1785, Mary Broad was committed to prison by the Mayor of Plymouth, England, where her sister Elizabeth was living, to await trial for highway robbery.
Bryant, who had been convicted for impersonating a seaman to receive some of the other man's wages, was also on the Dunkirk prison hulk and Charlotte with Mary and they later had a son, Emanuel, born on 6 May 1790.
This voyage has often been compared with William Bligh's similar journey in an open boat only two years earlier, after the mutiny on the Bounty.
They were sent back to Britain to stand trial, travelling first on a Dutch ship (the Rembang) to Batavia in the company of survivors of HMS Pandora, a British ship sent to capture the Bounty mutineers, thereafter travelling from Batavia to Cape Town on the three Dutch VOC ships[6] Vredenburg, Hoornwey and Horssen (carrying Mary Bryant and her daughter Charlotte[7]), arriving there on 19 March 1792, and later from Cape Town in the company of Royal Marines returning from Sydney on HMS Gorgon.
[3] Mary Bryant, Allen, Broom alias John Butcher, Lillie, and Martin arrived back in England on 18 June 1792.
The punishment for escaping from transportation was generally death, but following court hearings in London, they were all ordered to 'remain on their former sentence, until they should be discharged by course of law'.
Both centre on the first Australian settlers' decision to stage a performance of The Recruiting Officer, and the action ends just at the point of Bryant's escape.
The story was fictionalised by Rosa Jordan in her novel Far From Botany Bay,[9] by Lesley Pearse in the novel Remember Me,[10] and by Meg Keneally in Fled.
[11][12] The first chapter of the graphic novel Terra Doloris (978-2-344-00787-1, 2018) by Laurent-Frédéric Bollée and Philippe Nicloux is about Mary Bryant and her family.
[13] Paul Marsh (of the Canberra Australia group "Coolibah Coolective") composed "Sixty Six Days in an Open Boat" to tell the story of Mary and her family's journey.