Charlotte Badger

Charlotte Badger (1778 to after 1843) was a former convict who was on board the Venus during a mutiny in Tasmania in 1806. Taken to New Zealand, she was rescued by Captain Turnbull of the Indispensable, and eventually she returned to Sydney. In the intervening centuries, a number of writers have contributed to the fiction that she took an active role in the mutiny and she became known – erroneously – as Australia's first female pirate.

Badger was born in 1778, the daughter of Thomas and Ann Badger. She was baptised on 31 July 1778. In June 1796, she was convicted at the Worcester Assizes of breaking into a house and stealing four guineas and a Queen Anne's half-crown. It was a capital offence but Badger was later reprieved and sentenced instead to transportation to New South Wales for seven years. She spent four years of her sentence in prison in England before she was boarded onto a ship.

Badger arrived on the Earl Cornwallis in 1801. By August 1803 she had served her sentence and was a free woman in the colony. By April 1806 Badger had an infant child. That month, she travelled with her child aboard the Venus to Van Diemen's Land. There was another woman on the vessel, Catharine Hegarty, who shared the quarters of the first mate, Benjamin Burnet Kelly.

The Venus was a vessel chartered by the colonial government to carry supplies of salted pork and other food to Port Dalrymple in Van Diemen's Land. The Venus reached the port in the Tamar River on 16 June, on the northern coast of Tasmania. Soon after arriving, while its captain, Samuel Chace, was away from the vessel delivering some despatches, the first mate Kelly, the ship's pilot David Evans, and an army corporal Richard Thompson seized the ship and took it back out to sea.

A public notice in the Sydney Gazette on 20 July 1806 incorrectly described the two women, Badger and Hegarty, as convicts (they were both emancipated) and implied they were among the mutineers. Charlotte Badger was described as "a convict, very corpulent, with full face, thick lips, and light hair, has an infant child".

The mutineers sailed the Venus across the Tasman Sea and reached the Bay of Islands in New Zealand a few weeks later.

In December 1806, the Elizabeth captained by Captain Eber Bunker communicated with Captain Turnbull of the Indispensible when their ships were off the north coast of New Zealand. Turnbull reported to Bunker that the Venus had recently left the Bay of Islands, that two women and two children (one was likely a ship's boy) had been put ashore, along with first mate Kelly and a convict named John Lancashire who had been aboard the Venus. He also reported that one of the women (Catharine Hegarty) had died shortly afterwards. Captain Turnbull took Charlotte Badger and her child on board his ship. While it is not known exactly when the Indispensible was in the Bay of Islands, Badger had spent less than five months in New Zealand before she was rescued. Captain Bunker offered to take her and her child on board the Elizabeth, but Badger declined, and she was taken to Norfolk Island in the Indispensible. It was later reported that when Badger and Hegarty had been landed from the Venus in the Bay of Islands, the two women had been kept in their own quarters and the local Māori chiefs had declared them strongly tapu.

Charlotte Badger arrived back in Sydney on the Porpoise on 13 July 1807 from Norfolk Island. A note in the passenger list remarked: "Brought from New Zealand in the Indispensible and is one of the women who was in the Venus Schooner when ran away with from P. Dalrymple". There was no mention of her child and no further record of the infant has been found in New South Wales.