page_title: Mary Bryant
section_title: James Boswell
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Bryant / James Boswell
caption_attribution_description: English: Leaves of Smilax glyciphylla from Botany Bay used as tea by escaped convict Mary Bryant
context_page_description: Mary Bryant was a Cornish convict sent to Australia. She became one of the first successful escapees from the fledgling Australian penal colony.
context_section_description: Boswell had a reputation for amorous dalliances with lower class women and his friends took to imagining or joking that Botany Bay had provided him a new mistress. His friend William Parsons wrote a scurrilous poem in which they're imagined hanged together on the gallows at Tyburn in a final union.  Yet despite this "elegantly turned prurience" (as Robert Hughes put it), it seems Boswell was motivated only by sympathy and that all he received from the convicts was a packet of "Botany Bay tea leaves".  The tea was found with papers at Boswell's Malahide Estate in Ireland in 1930.  It and the papers are today at Yale University. In 1956 two of the leaves were presented to the Mitchell Library in New South Wales by Yale University Library, in honour of the Hon. Douglas M. Moffat, United States Ambassador and Yale Alumnus. The leaves were identified as coming from the plant Smilax glyciphylla, commonly known as "wild sarsaparilla", a small vine found mainly on the east coast of Australia.
caption: Leaves from Botany Bay used as tea, 1791
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