This is a different account of events.
Given the extraordinary nature of Pearce's tale, it is surprising it has taken so long for filmmakers to bring Pearce himself to our screens. The wait is over, with The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce, a "factual drama", showing on ABC1 television on Sunday night.
Co-written by Michael James Rowland (Lucky Miles), who is also the director, and Nial Fulton (Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers), the producer, the 60-minute film tells Pearce's story in a dramatised but largely unembellished fashion. Pearce got off to a bad start in VDL. After a series of further misdemeanours on arrival in the colony, resulting in an astounding 200 floggings in just six months, he was dispatched to Macquarie Harbour's Sarah Island penal station. The treatment of convicts there was particularly harsh. Hard labour - principally the felling of Huon pines - pushed men to their limits.
On September 20, 1822, Pearce and seven other convicts sent to cut logs attempted to escape, the plan being to steal a whale boat. Things did not go to plan and they fled instead into thick forest. Thus began a nine-week odyssey as the men trekked through a vast, unexplored wilderness in a quest for freedom. With few provisions they struggled to fill their bellies and after eight days were so starved they contemplated the unthinkable: that one of them might need to die to save the others.
According to Pearce's later confessions, they chose Alexander Dalton as their dinner because he had served as a flogger for their British jailers.
Dalton's throat was cut by Robert Greenhill, a sailer and the group's navigator, while a butcher among their number, Matthew Travers, decapitated the unlucky sacrifice with an axe. Two men, perhaps fearing they might be next on the menu, fled the following day, returning to Sarah Island, only to die of exhaustion. The remainder trudged on through forest and over mountain, the weakest being killed and eaten at intervals until only Pearce and Greenhill were left. (A tip for the nutritionally minded: human flesh is high in protein but without the accompaniment of carbohydrates will not sustain humans for long; hence the outlaws' need to keep killing for energy.)
The film captures the deadly tension between the last two survivors, who dared not sleep or stumble for fear the other would take to them with the axe. After eight days, Pearce gained the advantage and murdered Greenhill as he slept. By the time Pearce finally reached the outskirts of civilisation, he had travelled a vast distance - 225km according to one estimate - through some of the toughest country on earth. It was a remarkable achievement, even if made possible by murder and cannibalism.
