Harris, who controlled the greatest number of convicts on earth, was himself a former convict. Several of the early police chiefs were former convicts including George Barrington, renowned as the Crown Prince of Pickpockets. D'arcy Wentworth, another, fled England with warrants out-standing for his arrest on highway robbery. For some years too the courts refused to sit when a reformist Governor Lachlan Macquarie appointed former convicts or emancipists to the bench. Also there were punishments unknown to British law, including the cutting off of ears for perjury, and 1,000 lashes with a cat of nine tails.
Some writers let their imagination run riot.
However I would like to add some of the family stories and maybe answer some of the questions about him. First My Personal Credentials. Family tradition has it that when he was being chased by the police he would go to his sister's property near Ebor, where he was hidden in a hole, covered by a wood box, in the family kitchen. Family stories told how Grandma Sarah would invite the police to sit on the woodbox while she served them a cup of tea, with Thunderbolt lying underneath. However family tradition held that the person killed was his half brother, Harry, who had been previously shot in the back of the knee while escaping from the police.