at Suffolk Summer Assizes. According to DAB1949 she pleaded guilty at her trial, and after evidence regarding her previous good character had been given, was asked if she had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon her. She spoke with firmness, regretting her fault but not praying for mercy. Even when the death sentence was pronounced she remained composed until she saw her old father crying in the court. Her sentence was commuted to transportation for seven years and she was detained in Ipswich Gaol. After three years she escaped by using a clothesline to scale the 22-foot (6.7 m) wall. Margaret was recaptured on a Suffolk beach and sentenced to death, later reduced to transportation for seven years. She arrived in Sydney on the Nile on 15 December 1801. Australia Margaret Catchpole's life in Australia was relatively uneventful. She was assigned as a servant to John Palmer who had arrived with the First Fleet as purser on and was now a prosperous man. After the death of her lover, Margaret had resolved never to marry and in Sydney she refused the addresses of George Caley. Later she was employed as the overseer of a farm, and while in the country became a midwife, and also kept a small farm of her own. She was happy and respected, and in a letter written to England in about 1807 she says with pardonable pride "all my quantances are my betters"—she had little education and her spelling was always her own. She was pardoned on 31 January 1814 but did not return to England. Little is known about the last 10 years of her life, but she continued her nursing, died on 13 May 1819 after catching influenza from a shepherd she was nursing. She was buried in the graveyard of St Peter's church at Richmond, New South Wales. Legacy Catchpole's letters of 8 October 1806 and 8 October 1809 are the only known eyewitness accounts of the Hawkesbury River floods of those years. She described in graphic detail the countryside, the Aboriginals, and the wildlife; she wrote of the first convict coalminers at Coal River (Newcastle) and of the savagery and immorality of the inhabitants of the colony at the time; her writings added greatly to Australia's early history. The Margaret Catchpole Public House is situated on Cliff Lane close the site of the Cobbold Brewery