Some Light on the Hidden Years of James Mario Matra

James Mario Matra is in general of little concern to anyone except Australian historians, who know him best either for his misbehaviour aboard James Cook's Endeavour in 1769-1770 where he was wrongly suspected of snipping of the earlobes of Cook's drunken and alcoholic clerk after stripping him naked while he was drunk, or for his recommendation that Britain should send American Loyalists and/or convicts to settle at Botany Bay in New South Wales. He pushed the latter plan partly because he had aspirations to become the first Governor of the new penal colony. Those aspirations were not shared by anybody in authority. [Alan Frost, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 5, 120]
Matra changed his name from Magra to Matra near the end of 1775. His biographer, Alan Frost, in 1995, noted that silence covered 'Matra's activities until March 1777', when he applied for leave from his post as consul at Teneriffe in the Canary Islands to deal with family matters in British occupied New York. He would later claim he had gone to New York 'to try if I could there be of any use to Government' [Frost, op. cit., p.84]; in fact he assiduously avoided volunteering for any Loyalist regiments that might be sent to fight the British.
Recent work by Wendy Moore on the life of Mary Eleanor Bowes has thrown some light on Matra's life from 1776 to 1777. With his brother, Perkins Magra, he seems to have been involved in the social set surrounding Britain's richest heiress, the 27 year old Mary Eleanor Bowes, the widowed Countess of Strathmore. [Wendy Moore, Wedlock. How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match, London, 2009, p. 193.] Perkins would inherit most of the small family fortune that James would travel to New York to save in 1777/8. [Frost, op.cit., p. 84.] In 1776, however, James Matra and his brother appear to have been involved in a sordid confidence trick to trick the extremely wealthy Mary Bowes into marrying a penniless Irish ensign, Andrew Robinson Stoney. Stoney would succeed in entrapping Mary Bowes into a cruel and brutal marriage for eight years by pretending he was dying from a mortal wound as a result of a duel he had fought to protect Mary Bowes's honour. Perkins was supposed to have been Stoney's second in the duel, or so Mary Bowes believed, but he was nowhere to be seen when the duel allegedly took place. Matra had been part of an elaborate charade whereby Mary Bowes had been convinced to go to a well-known fortune teller, who would predict her marriage to Stoney. [Moore, op. cit., pp. 1-18; 145-6.]
Years later, Stoney would force Mary to describe Matra and his brother as 'people of such execrable and infamous principles' [Ibid., p. 193.], which was probably true. They did not compare, however, to Andrew Stoney, who within hours of his marriage to Mary turned into a violent controlling brute, adept at manipulative humiliation. Mary Bowes would eventually get redress from Stoney, and regain both her freedom and her fortune. Stoney himself would be perpetuated in the English language with the phrase 'stoney broke'. And Matra would languish in obscurity as consul at Tangier, Morocco, till his death in 1806, blind and toothless. He died before knowing the Pitt Government had awarded him a pension for having 'fill'd [his] situation for nearly thirty years [since 1787] with integrity and zeal.' [Frost, op. cit., p. 138.]
Ultimately, Matra's greatest claims to fame would be a maverick account of James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific, and his suggestions that the colony of New South Wales claimed by Cook for England should become a refuge for American Loyalists and British convicts.