Kate O'Neal couldn't tear her gaze away from the Merry Mersey, not after Twiggs, the guard in charge of her and the other convicts, pointed it out to them.
She feared the ship, feared what life would hold for her on its voyage to Botany Bay, especially now that she knew why the convicts at Newgate Prison had looked ever so sorry for her. Two of them had said, rather kindly, that they hoped she'd have an easy time on the voyage, serve her seven year sentence and live a happy life.
Now, Kate clung to those gentle words. She would not be food for the fishes. She would survive the voyage, no matter how horrible, serve her sentence with grit and live to be a hundred. Yet her courage began to fail when Twiggs packed her and the other convicts into a rowboat. She flinched when the sailors pulled on their oars and the boat surged forward.
Her journey to the other end of the world had begun.
I've been told, "The opening scene should grab the reader. Forget this, and you risk losing your reader before he's even read two pages into your story."
A UK agent liked my manuscript, but she advised me to dump the five opening chapters, saying they had been done to death already by other authors. I did as she suggested. I thought, since she liked my manuscript already, I had better not fix too many things and accidentally messed up what she liked.
I was wrong. What I had as the opening scene as shown here did not grab her. She said the opening was not "strong enough", and she declined to represent my work.Upon analysis, I think there is too much TELL. "Tell" is where I summarised the backstory.
What else? I'm ready to learn from your comments. 