A popular maritime story from the Australian archives:

In 1791 a group of convicts, including Mary and William Bryant and seven others, escaped from the Port Jackson colony in one of the governor's cutters. They sailed up the eastern seaboard, through the Torres Strait, across the Arafura Sea to Koepeng in Timor, some 5,237 kilometers in 69 days. On arrival, the party posed as shipwrecked castaways to the Dutch authorities but were eventually found out. A few weeks later, Captain Edward Edwards arrived on the island – a genuine castaway after the wreck of his frigate, the HMS Pandora, on the Great Barrier Reef. The Pandora had been sent from England to locate the mutineers of the Bounty, and when Edwards arrived in Timor he had 10 of the mutineers in tow. Another four had died with 31 of the crew when the Pandora was wrecked. Edwards took the masquerading castaways to Batavia with him when he left the island.

This well-known Australian story combines elements of extraordinary maritime achievement, though by convicts rather than naval officers. It records an inspiring bid for freedom, which was how it was popularly viewed. It combines confusion across colonial territories and the deployment of readymade aliases as castaways from the burgeoning annals of maritime misadventure. The arrival of Captain Edwards further extends the spectrum of castaway identities, as he was truly shipwrecked on the voyage home from capturing the Bounty mutineers. His crew included Thomas Hayward, who had been a midshipman on the Bounty, so this voyage was Hayward's second experience as the castaway of an open boat in treacherous seas. The captured mutineers represent another type of castaway, the willing lotus-eating dreamers of tropical fantasy, which they had achieved by making castaways of Bligh and his supporters.