The Jail-Breaker Who Made It to America

High in the hills behind you, on the ridge between Mount Bradley and the Remarkable Dykes, sits a stone hut you can still book a bunk in. Down in the Kaituna Valley below it runs the Packhorse track, and in the bush beside that track, hidden from the search parties, stood the supplejack cabin of a man the whole of Canterbury was hunting.

Jonathan Roberts never wanted to be a criminal. He was born in Cornwall in 1861, the son of a gentleman farmer, and at seventeen he went to work as a bank clerk. For eight years he moved from Temuka to Timaru to Christchurch to Akaroa to Wellington, clean shirts, neat handwriting, steady money. That handwriting would be his undoing twice over.

By late 1886 he was back in Christchurch, between jobs, and he forged a Ballantyne and Co. cheque for seventy-six pounds, seventeen and sixpence. He pleaded guilty without a fuss and got twelve months' hard labour. Few believed him guilty outright, his brother James would later get four years for forging cheques himself, and some said Jonathan took the fall. In January 1888, back in Timaru, he was sentenced to five years for stealing a horse. The evidence was a forged ownership letter that matched his writing. He swore he was innocent, and the town seems to have believed him.

Roberts gave them reason to cheer in 1888. Days into his sentence he walked out of Timaru jail and no one stopped him. For a month the police north and south chased a man they kept glimpsing, working at a threshing mill near Waimate, spending his savings in shops, given shelter by a Temuka doctor. It was reported that the women of Timaru prayed every night for his escape. When he was finally caught at Killinchy, working a farm labourer's job for a Mrs Crowe, they sent him to the fortress off Lyttelton: Rīpapa Island.

Rīpapa was not any jail. Once a Ngāi Tahu pā, then a quarantine station, it had been turned into a prison for the Māori men taken prisoner after Parihaka. Those "war prisoners" were building Fort Jervois there when Roberts arrived. Two days after his sentencing, while the other inmates were loudly eating lunch, he broke through a tin wall, waded the channel at high tide, climbed the Purau valley, crossed the ridge, and came down into the Kaituna Valley, where he built this cabin out of supplejack and hid for months. The Tui Glen farm family slipped him food.

The colony loved it. The government offered fifty pounds for him, and the newspapers ran the story as farce rather than crime: a sixpenny pamphlet of "The Adventures of Jonathan Roberts", photograph keepsakes for sale, even a theatre company performing a farce of his escape to great applause. By late August 1888 he was gone, slipped aboard a ship at Lyttelton, bound for Chile, or North America, or Victoria, no one could agree.

Then in August 1924 the paper NZ Truth printed an interview with the jail-breaker himself. Jonathan Roberts, sixty-three, was living on his own farm in Virginia, in what the reporter solemnly called "domestic bliss," a free man who had lived without crime thanks to strangers who kept his secret. The charming felon who broke out twice, who the women prayed for and the drunks cheered, had walked out of the colony's tallest prison and never gone back.

So if you climb from this valley to that stone hut, know what the track once held: a man hiding in a supplejack shelter, waiting on the kindness of the valley, until Canterbury simply gave up.