A prominent brewery tycoon in Lincolnshire has a beautiful 16-year-old daughter, Baroness Penola Bloomfield, who goes to a fortuneteller because she admires the young officer who has moved into the estate next to her father's. The gypsy warns her there is trouble ahead due to an indiscretion.
Penola is sent to the Colony of Australia as a convict, incurring extreme hardship during a very slow voyage: rape, pregnancy, starvation and eventually shipwreck before giving birth to a son while unconscious on the beach.
A whaling ship takes her to Hobart. A judge who wants to marry her has her released into his custody. The judge's sister wants a baby from the relationship but his brother does not want a child from a convict girl in the family. The brother wants to kill her but plans rape by a native African, at gunpoint.
Penola excapes, meets Captain Bligh who gets her out of trouble, she then continues to Sydney on a well-known whaling ship. She has massive drama in Sydney: murder, marriage, court case, and then finds her shipwrecked child...that's only the half of it, now read the book.
