Dan Herbert’s self-portrait is staring steadfastly downstream from the seventh stone. His wavy hair and beard frame his face as he gazes thoughtfully from his height, looking southwards away from home, against the flow of the river. His eyes are deeply set under thick eyebrows; the skin of his cheeks is smooth and he is not frowning unless time has worn his furrows away. He appears to be a handsome man but his straight lower lip betrays a pout, sullen or determined. Into his beard he has carved a mason’s square upside down, opposite to its orientation in the freemason’s emblem, a rejection of the brotherhood that rejected him.

Why else would you do that, Dan Herbert? In anger or in resignation? I understand that no matter how much masonic intelligence you could absorb from John Lee Archer and, perhaps, other convicts who had been members of lodges before their decline, you could never aspire to membership of the brotherhood owing to your lawbreaking. Did that inflame a sore point scratched into your skin by a freemason recently or back in Yorkshire? No doubt, you found the basic principles that imbued masonic concepts thought-provoking because of your upbringing amongst Christians of inquiring minds. I think they were of Reverend Clowes congregation in Manchester, he, who since 1773, had espoused the beliefs of Emanuel Swedenborg in his sermons at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Eccles where the Rogers, your mother’s family lived.

Are my conjectures so far-fetched?

I wonder whether you attended William Cowherd’s Bible Christian Chapel, school and science academy after 1809, having been to Reverend Clowes Sunday School as a smaller child? Were you permitted to use Cowherd’s library? I ponder these things because your mother, the widow Mary Herbert and her second husband, Thomas Bulmer, were buried in the graveyard of the Bible Christian Chapel in Salford and a connection is a fair assumption. I realise that Cowherd had declared it an open cemetery available to any of the poor but by the time of the Bulmers’ deaths Cowherd’s acolyte, the Reverend James Scholefield, had opened his own Christ Church Chapel in Every Street beside which he had prepared a large burial ground not far from their home in Pollard Street, Ancoats. Therefore. I suspect, they had continued as followers of Joseph Brotherton, Cowherd’s successor in Salford after the latter’s death in 1816. You were only fourteen years old then, fifteen when your mother remarried after Bulmer was released from gaol for a misdemeanour probably related to his insolvency … is that so? What was he like? Did he have a full beard like the man on the other side of your arch on the bridge? Was he a benevolent man in the way of the Bible Christians providing for the poor or did he impose upon you a strict and corporal discipline as the Reverend Clowes had done at school? DId you feel you had been usurped? Were you already apprenticed, perhaps to John Rogers of Coates Street, Ancoats … was he a relative of your mother? Did James Scholefield monitor you at Cowherd’s academy? Did he coerce you into believing that you, Dan, could become ‘fully spirit’ and thus be granted a life with the angels which Swedenborg had experienced in his visions?

You would have learned from Scholefield that the truth of the Bible could be maintained without embracing absurdities like the age of the earth being six thousand years old or that all the human race had descended from a single pair! Do you know whether it was he who wrote the preface for Cowherd’s book: Facts Authentic in Science and Religion published posthumously in 1818? You would have been there, living with your mother and step-father, while they were reading this remarkable tract. You would have been exhorted to ‘attend to the evidence’ in the sacred scriptures and heed the ‘dictates of reason’. Any young lad would have rebelled.

“It is the reasoning without evidence or on false evidence that is the cause of all the error in the world; it is the narrowing of our sphere of usefulness that is the cause of all the evil, as when a man pursues the present good of his body to the debasement of his mind, his individual good to the injury of his family … “

Scholefield could have been addressing you, Dan. What irrationality caused you to err?

By the time he had set up his chapel in Ancoats, you were in a hulk on the Thames; and before that you had been in gaol at Leeds. In fact, Dan, did you ever use your talent as a stonemason before you committed your first crime in the winter of 1819? It was soon after the disastrous reformists’ meeting at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester known as Peterloo. Scholefield was on the side of the organisers, a radical Huntite, it was said. And the good Joseph Brotherton campaigned afterwards for an investigation into the massacre. All around you were inspiring people and yet you robbed John Stanfield of Shudehill of nothing of value. Why did you do that? Was he on the side of the merchants and magistrates, opposing the meeting? But then you robbed again, as soon as you were released after two years; Mrs. Benson of a blanket. And then, as soon as you returned from the hulk where you were sent for that crime, you went about acting as a thug on the byways around Saddleworth. Four times you bashed up travelling men for their money - there was nothing romantic or altruistic in your highway robbery because you spent some of the money on your way home at wayside inns on gin. What possessed you to harbour such a death wish?

Baron Hullock, the judge who sentenced you to death at the York Assizes in April 1827, saw fit to commute the sentence to transportation for life. You could say that after a year or two, you grabbed the opportunity the colony offered. Could it have been John Lee Archer who turned around your attitude? He was the architect who shared your talent for drawing; a freemason who became the Worshipful Master of the Tasmanian Lodge 313 in 1836 when you were in Ross. He had recommended you as an intelligent and talented stonemason who would do well as overseer of the men in the bridge gang. Clearly he was not willing to relinquish you till then, seven years after he had selected you for the public works on your arrival. Did he stand beside you when you were carving the tulip decorations for St. John’s Church in Newtown and encourage you to reflect upon your soul in its fleshly mantle? That is not so different from the ideas conveyed by Scholefield: the good of body and the debasement of mind.

Legend has it that you were the artist of the bridge which means the vision was yours; the intent within each work was yours. Therefore, the many layers of meaning in each carving must have been yours, too. I imagine that comes from the central feature of the Swedenborgian influence: that all things have an outward and an inward form, and the former is the reflection or parable of the latter; hence your use of symbols which is also a very masonic thing to do. I imagine you found in freemasonry, an optimism that had a religious counterpart in your education at Salford. You would have heard the message before: it was up to you to realise the divine within yourself; you would be redeemed by spiritual and moral renewal and plain hard work. But your cynicism for the military regime in the colony, for the monarchy, for the politics remained to be revealed as a subversive element in the works.

Did other people draw with you? DId they carve to your instruction while you watched? I suppose you and James did not come to blows over your interpretations of the Bible, he having been raised a Methodist. Did you talk long into the evenings about homosexuality because it had pained you both? It seems to me the construction and decoration of the bridge was the culmination of a profound collaboration. According to a letter to the Colonial Secretary from Captain William Turner, dated September 10th 1835, Colbeck was the chief mason in the actual construction; he does not mention you. But a year after bridge was finished and he had been deployed in Launceston, you offered to make a sketch of the bridge for him. He was grateful and sent to you precious paper and drawing instruments. You must have been good companions during the fifteen months you worked together at Ross, for he expressed a genuine respect.

Daniel Herbert, Launceston July 27th 1837

I received your letter a few posts ago and feel much obliged for the information therein contained and also for your intention of sending me a drawing of the New Bridge at Ross, therefore to enable your success in your undertaking in the drawing of so handsome a structure, I forward to you by the next coach from this, two large sheets of drawing paper. The best I can procure in Launceston and also a case of drawing instruments which I beg your acceptance of as a token of my regard for your exemplary conduct during the time you were carrying out the Public Works at Ross as an overseer under my superintendence.

I hope that Mrs. Herbert and your family are well

Wm Turner

Major, 50th Queens Own