James Porter was tried for burglary, convicted and sentenced to transportation for life at the Kingston-upon-Thames Assizes. He was sent to Van Diemen's Land on the Asia in 1824. Ten years later he was involved in a mutiny at Macquarie Harbour when the brig Frederick was seized by convicts: Porter's description of the incident would inspire the episode of the mutiny on the fictitious Osprey in Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life. Porter, along with three other escapees, was recaptured at Valparaiso, Chile, transported back to Van Diemen's Land on the Sarah and tried at the Hobart Supreme Court in 1837. Porter was found guilty and sentenced to death, but was reprieved and sent to Norfolk Island.
Porter wrote an account of the mutiny which was published in various forms in newspapers in Van Diemen's Land, Scotland, and Canada, and an autobiography written at Norfolk Island in the early 1840s.
