The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  When the Swift sailed up the Tasman Sea and anchored at last in Hobart Town on October 29, 1849, the prisoners from Ireland braced themselves for home in a hellhole. This island off the southern shore of the mainland, Van Diemen’s Land, had been stocked with convicts—more than 30,000 of the 65,000 inhabitants had the stain. At midcentury, the rest of Australia was trying to phase out its prisons, its torture dens, its manacled work crews, and to become a functioning civilization with a decent reputation. Not so with Tasmania, as the most far-flung colony in the British Empire would soon be called. The worst of the woebegone men and women in the system were now concentrated in the very place where Thomas Meagher had been sentenced to spend the rest of his life.

  In 1849, the island held “a larger portion of the most depraved and unprincipled people than anywhere in the Universe,” in the estimation of a former governor, William Sorell. Many had been “assigned” to farmers. In a system where banishment was called transportation, “assignment” was the Empire’s euphemism for slave labor. These serfs moved about among the free settlers, those who had come to Van Die-men’s Land to make a go of it—living in a half-dozen or more small towns, tending sheep, working as merchants, traders or government officials. Other convicts were latched together on labor crews, working twelve-hour days on a diet of wretched gruel, building roads, bridges and water systems, or planting crops, cutting trees.

  The hardened and most hopeless among the criminals were housed in caged compounds patrolled by guards, former convicts themselves. In those cells, it was rare to find a prisoner whose back was not a map of lacerations from cat-o’-nine-tails. One Irish felon had endured 2,000 lashes from the flesh-ripping cat, some inflicted for singing “treasonous songs,” others for “being cheeky,” as his record indicated. Another Irish prisoner, Francis MacNamara, took 650 hits from the whip; sentenced to seven years for stealing a piece of cloth, Frankie-the-Poet was famously flogged for his verse, which made fun of his jailors. Still another class in the penal colony, white bushrangers were runaway convicts who robbed, raided and plundered while living off the land, in caves and makeshift shelters. They were much feared. The lowest Tasmanian caste was the natives, reduced by 1849 from a population of perhaps 4,000 people on the island to a spectral few. The Aborigines were almost completely wiped out—by Old World diseases, hunger and settlers who killed them for sport. After a half century or so under the flag of Great Britain, the colony in the way down under, as one early historian summarized it, was now known as “that den of thieves, that cave of robbers, that cage of unclean birds, that isthmus between earth and hell.”

  Just before nightfall, the Swift dropped anchor. October was springtime, the air fresh, the land sprightly and green with follicles of new growth. What greeted the prisoners was stunning: cliffs that seemed sculpted by artists rising on one side of the Derwent River, the otherworldly carvings on the flanks of the Tasman Peninsula in a different direction. In broad view from the ship’s deck, rising from Hobart’s harbor, was the snowy-headed eminence of Mount Wellington, 4,170 feet. Perhaps hell would not be so bad after all. “Nothing I have seen in other countries—not even my own—equals the beauty, the glory of the scenery through which we glided up from Tasman’s Head to Hobart Town,” Meagher wrote of his first impressions. “The fresh, rich fragrance of flowers” and orchards temporarily lifted his spirits. “Gazing at them, we lost sight of our misfortunes, and the dull, cold destiny which at that moment, like the deepening twilight, fell upon our path.”

  More surprises were in store. The secretary of state for the colonies, Earl Grey, had decided in London that the Young Ireland felons would not be locked away in a cell or assigned to a work crew but given a fair degree of freedom. The island’s governor, the dyspeptic Sir William Denison, disagreed. Why should these poets, journalists, orators and barristers be treated any different from the shoeless, illiterate scum held in the confined holds of Van Diemen’s Land? They were traitors! But Lord Grey, under pressure from progressives at home and influential Irish abroad, wanted to show the world how benevolent Her Majesty could be with the cream of Ireland’s political crop. Better not to make martyrs of these men a second time over. Ireland, still ravaged by the Great Hunger, might have another uprising in it.

  A second ship arrived a day after the Swift, carrying a few more of Erin’s illustrious class of convicts. The most notable was Kevin O’Doherty, a bright medical student and close friend of Meagher’s. O’Doherty had been moved to action after treating famine victims in Dublin, appalled by the Empire’s indifference to the starving. He saw the dead “piled in on one another,” he wrote. “The cold and hungry in every tenement with nothing to cover them.” He could never look at England in the same way, feeling conscience-bound to do something—in his case, lending his voice and pen to Young Ireland. He had been a few examinations short of full certification to practice medicine when he was transported to the penal colony for a term of fourteen years.

  Governor Denison was instructed to offer O’Doherty and the other prominent prisoners a choice: they could be held under guard, or they could be free to build a life on the island so long as they gave their word as gentlemen never to escape. The latter was known as a ticket-of-leave, and usually reserved for a prisoner who had served most of his time honorably. To Meagher, the limited freedom seemed a sensible choice. An escape, he reasoned, “was out of the question,” not because it would be difficult to slip away, but because the odds of surviving as a fugitive in the wilds of the island were considerable. It was snake-infested, cold at night, without obvious food sources. Escapees had starved and drowned, died of exposure, poisoning and accidents, been killed by unmoored bushrangers, been forced to eat each other. The island itself was a bit larger than Ireland. If one could make it to water’s edge, then what? How to get 14,000 miles back home, where, of course, you would be jailed as a fugitive? The west coast of North America was 7,500 miles away. In “a choice between two evils,” as Meagher called it, everyone but Smith O’Brien took the ticket-of-leave. It came with some conditions: each man would be confined to a district and could not visit any of the others. They must report regularly to the authorities and never be outdoors past sunset. Smith O’Brien thought it dishonorable to make such a deal. As the only member of Parliament ever to be transported, it was beneath him, he said, to give his word that he would never attempt an escape. He was promptly shipped away to a smudge of rock in the Tasman Sea—Maria Island, where he was held in solitary confinement in a cabin.

  Meagher set off to explore his prison without walls. On land, wobbly-legged after nearly four months aboard the Swift, he was put in a carriage at 3 a.m. for a ride of almost a hundred miles, to the uplands. In the first blush of light, he saw rows of corn and blue smoke rising from clusters of homes along the Derwent River. He passed blackened tree stumps and land carved fresh for roads and footings for houses—the birthing of a society. The morning unspooled slowly, in Meagher’s glimpses, with scenes of horse carts and cows, shepherds with kangaroo-skin knapsacks tending thickets of sheep, green parrots in the trees. “I almost forgot that I was hurrying away still further from my own poor country, and journeying amid the scenes of a land which I could take no interest in.”

  When he arrived at Campbell Town, the largest hamlet in his assigned district in the middle north of the island, his heart sank. “A glance,” he noted, “was sufficient to inform me that this celebrated town consisted of one main street, with two or three dusty branches.” As he walked past a handful of shops to a lodging house, people stared at him—Meagher of the Sword, is it! “To bed, then, I went and dreamed all night of Eden.” But it was the Eden of the Charles Dickens novel of shysters and malaria, Martin Chuzzlewit, he said. After three days, Meagher decided to move on. The next settlement in his district was Ross, “a little apology of a town.” Still, it was preferable to the first place—“a vulgar, upstart village with too much glare, dust and gossip, where it would be hard to do anything else than yawn, catch flies an
d star-gaze.”

  The way to get by in this Tasmanian limbo was to keep an active imagination. Meagher was twenty-six years old, still in “the morning of my life,” as he observed. He had money from his tolerant father; he could afford to start something as an exile in his assigned rectangle of Tasmania. But what? A soft-handed man who spoke five languages, who lived for the thrust and parry of ideas, who had studied law but was never more at ease than when reaching for oratorical high notes in a packed hall or bringing home the punch line of a ribald tale, found himself completely alone and adrift. There was no one to speak with aside from a few settlers who exchanged perfunctory words with him, no epic struggles aside from his own fight with a Goliath of boredom. His life had no purpose.

  “Existence, thus harassed, deadened, drained, ceases to be a blessing—it becomes a penalty,” he wrote Smith O’Brien. When darkness came at day’s end, it was the slam of a heavy door closing. Women were scarce, the young even more so, though he was tempted by the married ones. Nearby was a prison stocked with impoverished single mothers and pregnant girls from Britain’s back alleys, called “the female factory,” another tier of hell for those rotting in the Southern Hemisphere. Good God.

  Sustained by a residual fume of optimism that his adult life had thus far failed to validate, Meagher took up residence in Ross, in the district he was forbidden from leaving, two rooms in a four-room cottage, seventy-five miles from Hobart. Out back, the landlady—“an amiable female of stupendous proportions”—had planted cabbage, parsley, onions and potatoes. So, he could garden. He could write. He could go for long strolls. And what mysteries appeared in the bush: hundreds of creatures never seen in Ireland. Gum trees were thick with cockatoos, the showy-crested parrots. Dangling from limbs was the occasional koala bear. On the ground appeared freaks of evolution, stuck in transition—graphic fodder for the theory that Charles Darwin was already developing when he visited the island in 1840. Here was the platypus, with the bill of a duck, the tail of a beaver, one of the few mammals to lay eggs. The echidna, a spiny anteater, with a pencil-thin beak and a coat of cream-colored quills, ambled like a pensioner out of a pub after last call. Kangaroos and wallabies were somewhat scarce. Prized for their meat and hide, the great bounding, pocket-pouched marsupials, long of tail and short of upper paws, had been overhunted on the island. The Tasmanian devil, carnivorous with an iron-forced clamp of a jaw, had a reputation that belied its habits. The devil was no bigger than a dog, and did indeed cast a hungry eye on fellow mammals, but mostly small livestock. All of this was dawn-of-Creation new to the son of Waterford.

  But no amount of stimulation from nature, no mental calisthenics, could ease the torture of being alone in this closet of the world. Meagher was not suited to the life of a hermit. One solitary day passed after another, the summer sun pressing down through December and into January of the new year, 1850. “I am as companionless and desolate here as Stylites on the top of his pillar,” he wrote Duffy in February, referring to the Byzantine-era ascetic. “Only one human being, for instance, has passed by my window today; he was a peddler, with fish and vegetables.” He lamented his exile—“so many thousands of miles away from our homes and friends, to this cheerless penal settlement.”

  As a gentleman under the sentence of oblivion, he belonged to the smallest and most select niche in this controlled netherworld—neither hard-core criminal nor free settler. And yet he held no deeper grudge against England than that of a typical Irishman. By the Crown’s laws, he was a traitor. And for all the emotional pain of banishment, he felt he had been treated fairly in Van Diemen’s Land; he’d heard what cruelties were being inflicted on common criminals trapped throughout the penal colony. He did not live in fear of the lash, or starvation. As for his life cause, he would never give up. The failed uprising was just an episode; it did not have to be the end. As long as he drew breath, the fight for a free Ireland would be the animating force of his days, he vowed—even from this far corner of the earth. “I am with her still,” he wrote. “Her memories, her sorrows, her hopes mingle with my own.” But this round was over. “We played for a high stake, the highest that could be played for. We lost the game by a wretched throw, and with a willing heart and ready hand, we ought, like honourable men, to pay the forfeit and say no more about it.”

  He worried about John Mitchel, confined to an offshore ship somewhere on the other side of the world. Ever since being sent out of Ireland in the days before the failed uprising, Mitchel had struggled for breath—gasping in the hold of his vessel or moaning in a hospital in Bermuda. “Asthma! Asthma!” Mitchel wrote in a typical diary entry. “The enemy is upon me.” It got worse with colder weather. “To tell the plain truth, I am very ill,” he said on December 1, 1848. “I am grown ghastly thin and my voice weak. I am like a sparrow alone upon the house-tops.” He wondered if his last days were upon him. “Am I to die groaning in a wooden gaol here in the Atlantic?”

  By the spring, the Crown had decided to remove Mitchel from his confinement in Bermuda’s waters and transport him elsewhere. He sailed on the Neptune, leaving on April 23. To where he did not know. After a slow trip along the South American coast, the ship crossed the Atlantic and arrived at Cape Town on September 19. There, settlers continued to stiffly resist British attempts to plant another penal colony. “No man can guess what our ultimate destination may be, probably Australia,” Mitchel wrote, “and of Australia I have felt the utmost abhorrence.” For the time being, he was stuck, back in the familiar “wooden gaol” at anchor. Through the southern spring and early summer of 1850, the Neptune did not leave the African port, nor did Mitchel come ashore. The last thing Meagher heard of his friend, through the months-old mails, was that Mitchel was adrift at sea.

  Meagher also fretted about Smith O’Brien, whose defiance on Maria Island was slowly breaking his will and his body. He suffered frequent chest pains, grew thin and weak. This son of Irish kings, this master of Dromoland Castle, was crushed upon first seeing the two-room cabin on the wind-raked island where he was ordered to spend the remainder of his days. O’Brien had a quartet of guards watching him at all hours. He was allowed to speak to only one other human, a Protestant chaplain. “No person, not even a child, is allowed to approach me except the officer who brings me my meal.” He could not receive simple treats, sugar or raisins, from the outside. Meagher was aghast. He wrote to Governor Denison in his most formal and solicitous tone, his rebel pen fully holstered. “May it please Your Excellency,” he began, and then detailed the contents of recent letters he’d received from Smith O’Brien. “His strength has been greatly weakened, and his health in general very seriously impaired.” Could the gracious, kindhearted, most excellent sir, “influenced by a sense of common justice and humanity,” find it in his knighted heart to look into Smith O’Brien’s condition? A few days later, Meagher opened a short note from the Convict Department acknowledging receipt of the letter, but nothing more. Yet Meagher’s note worked after all. O’Brien was soon in the care of a Maria Island gentleman, a doctor with a passel of pretty daughters.

  In the Australian fall of March and April, the vines of gloom found Meagher. The ragged, gossip-snarled island still held nothing for him—it was “a raw, ill-formed colony . . . teeming with all the vulgarities of English life,” he wrote Duffy. The natural world was inside out. The swans were black with red beaks—the reverse of the white, yellow-beaked whoopers that crowded the Shannon. At dusk, the casuarina trees looked to be bleeding olive green through long droopy needles. The night sky held the Southern Cross, a complete stranger of stars to Meagher. At midday, the sun felt oddly bright and close to the skin. And how absurd was it to apply the societal frosting of Britain—a regatta on the river, Royal Botanical Society meetings over tea—to an island penitentiary. His walks were longer, deeper into the woods, hiking to exhaustion. He bought a horse, got a dog, went for bouncy rides till dusk, chatted endlessly with his mount, a four-legged recipient of the most refined language spoken under the Tasma
nian sun. Exercise was his only escape, “dashing through the woods, clambering up hills, clearing fences.” Deeply tanned, in robust good health, his body was lean and muscled, in contrast to his sagging soul.

  He was becoming a different man—someone he did not recognize and did not like. “I felt, day by day, the impulses which prompted me to act a generous part at home withering and dying fast,” he confided in a letter to a fellow exile. “I felt, with equal pain, despondency and remorse, a spirit of indifference, inertness, and self-abandonment seizing my heart.” Days passed with just “my books, my pen and my horse.” The emptiness, from lack of company, was a sickness in itself, dragging a bright man to his depths. He was sinking with every passing day, he admitted, his innate high spirits drained away, under “the thought that our lives as far as we can see are purposeless.” At times, he convinced himself that he was in Ireland again, and tried to people the penal colony with apparitions. The large body of water in his district became one of the lakes of Killarney, mist shrouding the stone-stacked and chiseled castles of Celtic royalty. The island in its center was not an unpopulated tract of gum trees but the Abbey of Innisfallen, where Brian Boru was said to have received his education. All around him were round towers, cloistered with ale-brewing, manuscript-translating monks. And here—close and real enough to touch—was Ross Castle, once more the ancestral home of perhaps the last fortress to fall to Cromwell. A willful delusion, all of it. But it was a form of madness to keep from going mad.

  It was during one of his endless walks in the highlands that Meagher hit on an idea to relieve his loneliness. His district was thirty miles long by ten miles wide. The neighboring confinement belonged to Kevin O’Doherty, the aspiring doctor who’d arrived on a separate ship. Meagher discovered that a little murmur of a creek touched both of their districts. Mmmm . . . And there was a bridge just across this water. Neither of the convicts, standing on that span, would be in violation of the terms of their ticket-of-leave. But why stand? Meagher arranged for a table, chairs, a linen cloth and a multicourse luncheon, a pub owner bringing plates of mutton, steaming potatoes, gravy, cheese and grog. They sang and laughed and almost fell into the water. After “very copious libation,” they named the bridge the Irish Pier. The felons agreed to meet again. Same time next week, 11 a.m.