Timor was then under the control of the Dutch. The Bryants and their crew claimed to be shipwreck survivors. They were later discovered to be British convicts, apparently after William became drunk and confessed in the process of bragging. To avoid an international incident they were sent back to Britain to stand trial, travelling first on a Dutch ship (the "Rembang") to Batavia in the company of survivors of , a British ship sent to capture the Bounty mutineers, thereafter travelling from Batavia to Cape Town on the three Dutch VOC ships "Vredenburg", "Hoornwey" and "Horssen" (carrying Mary Bryant and her daughter Charlotte), arriving there on 19 March 1792, and later from Cape Town in the company of Royal Marines returning from Sydney on the HMS "Gorgon". During the voyage back, William and both of Mary's children perished of fever; Emanuel and William dying at Batavia on the 1st and 22 December 1791, whilst Charlotte died on the last leg of the voyage on 6 May 1792. Bryant and the other survivors - Allen, Broom alias John Butcher, Lillie, and Martin - arrived back in England on 18 June 1792. The punishment for escaping from transportation was generally death, but when they were brought before the Old Bailey on 7 July, they were all ordered to 'remain on their former sentence, until they should be discharged by course of law'. Their case was taken up by the biographer and lawyer, James Boswell. On 2 May 1793, Bryant was released from Newgate prison with a free pardon, her sentence having expired, while Allen, Broom alias Butcher, Lillie, and Martin had to wait until 2 November 1793 to be released by proclamation. Bryant is believed to have returned to her family in Cornwall, and Boswell provided her with a pension of £10 until his death in 1795. 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.