Thank you very much Leanne. I am deeply grateful to receive this information. I have searched Tasmania data bases on sealers for Manning but without success. James Manning who made it to Albany, Western Australia, was associated with George Meredith who was notorious for participating in the sealing industry. I have some newspaper references to James Manning and Jane Pike from 1833, when it would appear James fell into bad behaviour of some kind.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2212006
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2212068
In these advertisements James cautions persons against harbouring Jane after she absconded from their home. In the second Jane accuses James of inhuman conduct and advises him to stay well away or she will resort to proceedings which will prove very unpleasant to him. These adverts appeared in May 1833, two years after their marriage and birth of their son. A James Manning of the same approximate age then sets sail for Western Australia from Sydney on a small sealing vessel called Defiance and so commences two years of exceeding difficulty for the young man who found himself in the company of murderers and thieves of the first degree. Manning is et ashore 400 miles from the nearest settlement by the sealer Black Anderson and makes it on foot, barely, in the company of a 16-year-old boy set ashore with him, named Jem Newell. There is a court case in Albany in September 1835 where after James Manning disappears from Western Australia, presumably returning to Sydney, but perhaps spending time in Hobart or Launceston from where he heard of the emerging settlement across the Strait at Port Philip. Anyway, the ten-year hiatus which appears in your James Manning's known life story corresponds with the two years our James Manning spends in and getting to Western Australia.
Best wishes and thanks again,
Ciaran
P.S, I'd like to get a copy of the self published story Currency Lad and Lass, the story of James and Jane as it sounds interesting. . .
