Starting the year off as I mean to go on with my first post this year. The prompt for the first week of #52ancestors is ‘First’ so I’ve decided to focus this week on the very first ancestor of mine who came to Australia.

My very first ancestor to come to Australia was my 5x great grandfather Samuel Pickett/Piggot, who arrived in Australia on 26 January 1788 on board the ship Charlotte which was a part of the First Fleet. Based on convict records, Samuel was born around 1761 but no place of origin or information about his life before conviction has been found to date. What is known is that on 20 March 1786 Samuel Piggot was tried at the Devon Assizes in Exeter, along with a Samuel Barsby for “feloniously cutting and stealing two pieces of woollen serge, called druggett containing 50 yards, value 40 shillings. The goods of George Hayman in the racks at night” on the 19 December of the previous year (Pickett Lines, p. 4-5). According to wikipedia, drugget was a very cheap thin woollen fabric and was used to protect carpets as a kind of rug.

As the goods were worth such a grand sum, the crime would have been considered as Grand Larceny which held the mandatory death sentence and the pair were initially sentenced to hang. However, they were reprieved by Royal Mercy in 13 April 1786 on the condition of 7 years transportation, and were transferred tp the hulk ‘Dunkirk’ to await transportation to New South Wales. I can’t imagine the relief Samuel would have felt at being spared from death by hanging but at the same time being told that he was being sent to New South Wales for seven year must have been a life changing idea. Seven years was a long time and New South Wales was such a distance away and an unimaginable place to Samuel.

When the First Fleet finally landed in New South Wales and the convicts were disembarked, the sight of the land that would become Sydney Town would have been utterly foreign to Samuel. Not only were there none of the so-called ‘signs of civilisation’ that Samuel would have been accustomed to seeing back in England, the whole landscape would have been completely foreign with new and strange plants and animals. Those early years in New South Wales were harsh, with food supplies soon running out and crops failing resulting in many deaths. Samuel was one of the ones who not only managed to survive, but to thrive in the new colony.

Samuel wasted no time in starting a family with fellow convict Mary Thompson (who arrived on the Second Fleet) and moving to take up land in the Hawkesbury region, where he became a pioneer of the region. After receiving his land grant, Samuel disappears from colonial records until his death in 1817. This leads me to believe that Samuel had put his past offence behind him and managed to become an upstanding citizen of the new colony. I would love to know more about Samuel’s life both in England and in Australia, perhaps that will happen this year.

 

Pickett Lines: descendants of Samuel Piggot/Pickett and Mary Thompson (2005), by Penny Ferguson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drugget

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code