Mary Watson

Mary Watson (17 January 1860 – 1881), was an Australian folk heroine. She was 21 years old and had been married less than eighteen months when she died of thirst on No. 5 Island in the Howick Group now called Watson’s Island north of Cape Flattery in Far North Queensland, Australia, in 1881. She, with her four-month-old baby, Ferrier, and a wounded Chinese workman, Ah Sam, had drifted for eight days and some forty miles in a cut-down ship's water tank, used for boiling sea slugs, after mainland Aboriginal people had attacked her absent husband's bêche de mer station on Lizard Island. Her diary describing their last days was found with their remains in 1882, and Watson became an emblem of pioneer heroism for many Queenslanders. Early life Mary Watson was born at Fiddler's Green outside St Newlyn East near Truro, Cornwall, England, on 17 January 1860, the daughter of Mary Phillips and Thomas Oxnam, and migrated to Queensland with her family in 1877. Having accepted a position as a governess with an hotelier's family, at eighteen she travelled from Maryborough to the isolated port of Cooktown, where she met and married a bêche de mer fisherman, Captain Robert F. Watson, in May 1880. Lizard Island Robert Watson took her with him to set up a fishing station on Lizard Island, then otherwise uninhabited. In September 1880, he left Watson and their son behind with two Chinese servants known as Ah Sam and Ah Leung, while he and his partner Percy Fuller made an extended fishing trip in their luggers. Attack A few weeks later a party of mainland Aboriginal Guugu Yimithirr people made one of their habitual seasonal trips by canoe to the island, where Robert Watson had set up his household in a stone structure close to a small creek, the island's only supply of fresh water. Watson had probably also inadvertently trespassed on an indigenous ceremonial ground normally taboo to women and children. The Aboriginal people attacked Ah Sam, who suffered seven spear wounds, and Ah Leung was killed in a vegetable garden he was tending. Watson frightened off the group by firing a shotgun and then, with a small supply of food and water, put to sea in the iron sea cucumber tank, hoping to be picked up by a passing vessel. The party drifted from 2 to 7 October, occasionally landing on reefs and islets. Her final diary entry ended 'No water. Near dead with thirst.'