Hell’s gates: the terrible journey of Alexander Pearce Van Diemen’s land cannibal. Paul Collins. 2002.

Alexander Pearce and his seven convict mates escaped from Gail in Sarah Island, Van Diemen’s Land, in 1822 and set out on a terrible journey that led to starvation and ultimately, cannibalism. 

The irony is sublime: in one of the most unique and beautiful places on earth was ‘a place of secondary punishment’ where the most hardened criminals were transported. Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour was a place of alienation and punishment where these men were cut off from everything that sustained their inner lives; for some of them death was preferable, and many committed murder in order to escape.

Hell’s Gates tells the story of the men’s escapes - an amazing story of survival and navigational skills in some of the most difficult wilderness terrain in the world - and the collection of failednnobodies who ran this penal settlement in a faraway British colony.