AustLit

Maria 'Middleton' was a slave in the British settlement on the Bay of Honduras. She was sentenced to death (a conviction later transmuted to life transportation through the intervention of Robert Peel) and arrived in Hobart in 1828. Her convict indent record lists her name simply as 'Maria' although she stated that her father's name was Bryan Middleton.

In 1830, Middleton married a free man, John Murray. Two years later she was charged with theft, but exonerated. For most of the 1830s Middleton and her husband ran a lodging house in Hobart. In 1837, Middleton gave birth to a daughter whom she named Fedicia Exine. In November 1840 a recommendation for conditional pardon was approved for Middleton, but the eventual conclusion of her life remains clouded - a Hobart woman named Maria Murray died in 1939 and no other mention of Maria Middleton or Maria Murray has yet been found in colonial records.

Source: '"Stated This Offence"': High-Density Convict Micro-Narratives' by Ian Duffield in Chain Letters : Narrating Convict Lives, 2001)