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You’d think after surviving a ship ride from hell, building a colony from scratch, and dodging starvation, James Davey might finally get a breather. Yeah… not so much.
At some point — and it’s still a bit of a mystery why — James packed up and left Hobart Town for Norfolk Island, a convict settlement that was, quite frankly, already circling the drain. Officials had started planning its shutdown, but somehow James ended up farming five acres there and raising six pigs, according to the 1811 convict muster.
Not bad for a guy who once got busted for stealing sacks.
When Norfolk Island officially hit the “closing down” phase, James was one of the last to leave. On January 20, 1813, he sailed on the Lady Nelson to Port Dalrymple (modern-day northern Tasmania).
Interesting twist: unlike most on board, James was listed as “free” — a big deal back then. Most of his shipmates were still convicts or their dependents, and quite a few were old-timers from the First Fleet days.
Three days later, another ship, the Minstrel, set sail with more evacuees — including one very important passenger: Catherine Jordan, James’ future wife.
Life back in Van Diemen’s Land came with incentives — free land, supplies, and the promise of convict labor. Whether those promises held up depended on your luck. Some settlers got decent deals. Others, well, let’s just say colonial promises weren’t worth much more than the paper they were scribbled on.
James scored 40 acres at Norfolk Plains. Fast-forward a few years, and he was supplying meat and wheat to government stores — the ultimate “how it started vs. how it’s going” flex for a former convict.
By 1816, James was living with Catherine Jordan — who, if you’ve been paying attention, was the daughter of Mary Butler, one of the hardy Second Fleet convicts mentioned earlier. Catherine’s father, James Jordan, was an Irish convict himself.
Life hadn’t been kind to Catherine either. Her mother, Mary, died on Norfolk Island when Catherine was just twelve or thirteen years old — only months before the entire settlement was evacuated. That kind of loss would’ve toughened anyone up fast, and Catherine clearly inherited some of her parents’ grit.
The couple had their first son, Robert, in 1816, and another son, James, in 1818. They made it official at St John’s in Launceston with a marriage and a double baptism for the boys on the same day. Very efficient.
By 1829, James had stacked up quite a bit:
He even applied for a convict servant to help with the housework — probably because running a mini-empire while raising six children (and losing two sons) wasn’t exactly a one-man job.
Over the years, the family kept growing: Cecilia, Richard, Anne, and a few others popped onto the scene. James even dabbled in horse breeding, advertising his stallions Pomegranate and Plough-boy as “sure foal getters” in the local papers. Gotta love the hustle.
He also wasn’t shy about flexing his property rights. In 1836, he put out a legal notice warning off trespassers — calling out one Thomas Parker Junior by name. Petty? Maybe. Effective? Probably.
In 1838 and 1839, life looked pretty good. Two of James and Catherine’s oldest children married, and their first grandchild was born.
Then, heartbreak.
In December 1839, Catherine died during childbirth, her sixteenth child. (And yep, the records are messy — there’s evidence for only eleven kids, but mortality rates back then were brutal.) Catherine was just 39 years old. Her funeral saw twenty couples of friends and family following her coffin to Longford Cemetery.
James must have been gutted. After surviving exile, hunger, and colonial chaos, losing the person who’d built a life alongside him had to be devastating.
A few years later, James remarried. His second wife, Elizabeth Livermore (formerly Elizabeth Dewsnap), had a backstory straight out of a grimy Victorian novel:
It’s unclear how happy their marriage was, but by 1854 James publicly disowned Elizabeth in the Cornwall Chronicle, warning everyone not to “trust or harbor” her after she bailed on him. Pretty brutal — and very public.
James lived until June 26, 1865, dying of “extreme age” at 88 (a few years older than the paperwork suggests). At his death, he left behind substantial properties:
From petty thief to landowner, James Davey pulled off the ultimate convict success story. He survived exile, built a life from dirt, faced endless hardships, and still ended up relatively prosperous — buried beside his first love, Catherine, far from the little English village where he was once sentenced for stealing sacks.
Picture: Life was harsh. James and Catherine had a son James Davey die in 1820 (13 months old). They had another James Davey who died in 1824 (7 weeks old).