The philosophy behind Australia as a penal colony was very much ‘out of sight, out of mind’, writes James Morton. If the convicts did escape they were not likely to make it back to England. Probably only one escapee managed it. A petty thief at the age of 18, Charles Adolphus King was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation at the Manchester New Bailey in December 1835 for burglary.

Five years later he told the judge at the Liverpool General Quarter Sessions how he had arrived in Australia in 1836 and worked as a gentleman’s servant. When his master left the colony King was returned to the convict barracks. He worked on the roads and then as a shepherd, but in 1838 he helped a bushranger and for this was sentenced to 12 months on a chain gang. Sent to a new master when that man left for Perth, King was returned to barracks. He escaped and was caught in Sydney, given a modest 50 lashes, and sent to an up-country station.

Four months later he and a John Carney escaped. They returned to Botany Bay, stowing away in a ship’s hold, before jumping ship near one of the Fijian Islands. There they were attacked by local people and Carney was killed, but King was saved by the daughter of a chief. He had been in Fiji four months when he and the girl got away on a French whaler. They landed in New Zealand and, fearing he would be arrested, King shipped to London, deserting the chief’s daughter, but only after a missionary promised to return her to her people.

He made his way to Salford where, in 1840, he was grassed up. In a long speech to the judge he begged to be hanged rather than sent to dreadfully brutal Norfolk Island, but he was sentenced to transportation for life, the first 10 years to be in chains.

King was fortunate. Public opinion was with him and his sentence was commuted to five years’ penal servitude in Millbank. How much of King’s story was true is another matter. It all smacks of the traditional chapbook of convict memoirs – the brutality, the escape, the romance, the penitence. Indeed, his story appeared in print in 1840. After his release King seems to have made a living lecturing on his experiences. It is possible that Charles Dickens took something of him for the convict Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations, the first instalment of which was published in December 1860.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor