Alan Villiers went to sea at 15, and became one of the last captains of a commercial square-rigged sailing ship. Vanished Fleets gathers his stories of Van Diemen's Land's maritime history — pirates, whalemen, escaped convicts, adventurers and pioneers.
On 14 January 1834, the last ship built at the closing Macquarie Harbour penal station on Sarah Island — the brig Frederick — was seized by ten convicts led by James Porter, a former sailor with previous experience in Chile. Using only dead reckoning, with no charts or chronometer, they sailed the untested vessel roughly 13,000 km across the Pacific to Chile, before scuttling her off the coast and reaching Valdivia, where they lived under assumed identities as shipwrecked sailors for two years.
