The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  Another day broke with a heavy mist, visibility limited. Meagher saw something emerge on the strait and built his signal fire. But it was not a full-sailed ship that took shape, not a mighty trading vessel. It was an eight-oared boat, low to the water, moving at a strong clip from the mainland to Meagher’s island hideaway. This could not be good. Meagher entertained a dread thought: “The police must have seen the fire.”

  For all the talk about the code of honor among prisoners in Australia, the Irish convicts always felt they had a higher obligation: to escape. The British Empire showed no honor in the forced removal of families from their homes—children taken for stealing bread, noblemen banished for speaking out, mothers plucked from their hearths after stealing some cloth to weave into a quilt. From the arrival of the first political prisoners, transported following the failed rebellion of 1798, to the present year of 1852, when nearly a thousand Irish were freshly deposited in Van Diemen’s Land, the true badge of distinction belonged to the person who could break from Britain’s hold. Only a few ever made it. And fewer still among Meagher’s class, for the political prisoners were the rarest of escapees.

  Early on, all getaway attempts were futile; the bush was too harsh, the sea too forbidding, the distance from safety too far. But the land down under bred ingenuity in many ways, especially among the convict class. One man disguised himself as a kangaroo—hopping about in skins—to get away from awful Port Arthur. He looked so convincing that a guard mistook him for the real thing and shot him for sport. Mary Bryant, sentenced to seven years for stealing a silk bonnet, escaped from the mainland in the six-oared cutter of the provincial governor, with her children and roustabout husband aboard. She knew nothing of the sea. But after packing rice, dried meat, charts and a compass, and returning to shore several times for fish, turtles and crab, the family navigated through the Great Barrier Reef and made it, over 3,000 miles, to Dutch Timor. Upon landing, they announced themselves as castaways, a ruse that lasted until the husband, on a drunken binge, spilled the true tale of their identity and spectacular escape. The family was promptly shipped back to England and a new prison. Alexander Pearce, banished for stealing six pairs of shoes, also made his getaway by stolen boat. But he and four companions were not mariners. They washed ashore back on Tasmania and were soon starving. After drawing lots, they cannibalized the loser. Pearce, the lone survivor, was caught and hanged.

  By the time Meagher found himself a wanted man, the penal system, driven by newfound political freedom in the colony, was nearing its final days. But what truly hastened the closure of the Empire’s largest gulag was gold. In April of 1851 came news of an enormous find of the world’s most valuable commodity beneath the hard-crusted wasteland of New South Wales. As with all such mother lodes that drive people to a frenzy, the stories spread with their stock of superlatives, many of them exaggerated. The goldfield was said to be much larger than what drew the forty-niners to the Sacramento River in California—more than 300 miles long. A single lump of gold weighed seventy-five pounds. With sudden wealth, newly rich men lit their pipes with pound notes. In a half year’s time, horse thieves moved from tented shacks to brick estates. Five months after the discovery in New South Wales, another big strike occurred in the state of Victoria. Now, it was all the colony could do to keep its officers and bureaucrats, its guards and farmers, from dropping everything and rushing off to “the diggings.” In 1852, the year of Meagher’s attempted escape, 100 million tons of gold were exported from Victoria, enough to sink a fleet of the queen’s ships. And in that same year, 300,000 immigrants came to the penal colony—by choice.

  Gold made Australia more profitable as a free man’s destination than a prisoner’s hold. The next year, the last convicts arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, including another thousand Irish. Three years after that, in an effort to shake a half century of notoriety, the island changed its name to Tasmania. Transportation was over for all but the far western coast of Australia, north of Perth. And while the end of the convict ships did not mean that those who were under sentence were paroled or given more liberties, it took away whatever justification remained for the British Empire to discard its undesirables 14,000 miles from home.

  In the cove where Meagher had made his camp, the swift-moving rowboat came ashore. Several men charged from the vessel and came face-to-face with the sun-ravaged Irishman. One man had lost half his nose. Another had lost an ear. A third looked at Meagher through a single eye, the other closed and scarred. A fourth man was missing half his fingers. And the fifth man had but a single front tooth; he smiled at Meagher. They did not look like representatives of the long arm of the Crown: they were scruffy, unshaven, their clothes soiled, foulmouthed and foul-smelling. But then, Meagher didn’t look like a Waterford gentleman. He too was scruffy, unshaven, his clothes soiled. And hungry—he’d been kept alive by a diet of fern roots, small fish and eggs from the cliff nests. The escapee explained that he was a gold prospector. A prospector? Well, who wasn’t? All of Australia was fortune ground, after all, needing only to be scratched. Meagher’s cover story defied credulity; it was preposterous to think that gold could come out of the wind-tousled sand-cake of Waterhouse Island. He said no more.

  The strangers set up a large tent of their own, picked away at the shipwreck and by nightfall had a roaring fire. They hauled out food, enough provisions to tide them over for weeks—crab, onions, dried lamb meat, biscuits—as well as alcohol and tobacco. A seafood stew was concocted over the fire in a large pot. The exile was invited to join them. Ravenous, he fell on the feast. The men told their story: they were convicts, just escaped from Hobart, stealing a boat and racing up the eastern shore of the island to get to Bass Strait—a trip of nearly 500 miles. Hurrah! And they too were prospectors of a sort, crossing Bass Strait on the way to Port Phillip in Victoria, on the southern coast of Australia, where another big gold strike had just been announced. In the ground-scraping rush for nuggets, no man had a past; all were equal in the chase.

  Meagher considered these escapees “pirates,” as he called them, and found their company delightful—not only for the food and conversation, but for the sprightly optimism of the newly sprung. In his first days of freedom, Meagher had felt the same way. The pirates stayed on the island for several days. Meagher promised to repay them for all they had given him. “I had the best and most of everything,” Meagher wrote, “the snuggest corner of the tent, the rarest morsels of the daily stew, the choicest pipe full of tobacco.” What he couldn’t hide were his true intentions, for no prospector spent the day staring at the sea. Meagher told the truth: yes, he was looking for something other than gold—a way out of England’s human dump. It solidified their bond. All had done a bolt.

  After ten days on Waterhouse Island, Meagher spied yet another object floating on the blue horizon, though it was somewhat difficult to make it out in the usual morning mist. This one did get closer and bigger, and assumed the shape he’d been longing for: a large sailing ship. It got near enough to shore that Meagher could discern a flag fluttering from the mizzen: the stars of the Australian League. From the deck, a signal gun was fired, startling Meagher, followed by a second blast, then a third. A man could be seen waving a white flag on board. The Elizabeth Thompson had arrived. Meagher jumped up and down, yelled with joy, rolled up his bundle of filthy possessions and waited for his deliverance. But with the wind and current, the seas were unstable and white-capped; the ship, even after shortening her sails, could come no closer. Meagher would swim if he had to. The pirates offered to row him out to his liberators through the high, rough chop. They rode the waves, rolling and dipping, out to greet the big vessel, swamped several times, sharks starting to circle. As they tied up to the Thompson, Meagher turned to his fellow escapees. “I emptied my pocket of all the money in it and handing it down to the leader of the gang, bade them farewell forever.”

  On the quarterdeck, Meagher met Captain Betts, a short, well-fed, convivial man with enough wit and a stockpile of stories t
o match Meagher’s tales. They were carrying wool from down under to England by way of South America. The crew seemed more than happy to have a lively new passenger. Meagher kept his identity secret. To everyone but the captain, he was not a political prisoner on the run but a paying traveler with an unusual way of embarking. He could not risk a leak. The Thompson may have been sailing under the Australian League flag, but she had to follow the Empire’s rules. To his delight, he found that Captain Betts could quote poetry at length—Byron in particular. The ship sailed northeast, through Bass Strait into the Tasman Sea, out to the open Pacific to cross the earth in the Southern Hemisphere.

  In the days that followed, Governor Denison was removed by his English superiors and sent to a new post. He was bitter to the end at the collapse and liberation of his kingdom of felons. Another 10,000 convicts would be sent to the western shore of Australia—but that was it for the experiment of trying to make a cage of a continent. The last ship of captives from Great Britain arrived in Australia in 1868, just a few years after Abraham Lincoln freed four million slaves in the United States.

  Breezing through the warm waters of the South Pacific, looking back in the direction of Young Ireland’s banishment, Meagher was a prisoner no more. Now he was a fugitive, soon one of the world’s best known. His calling would be to translate a history of famine and oppression, exile and humiliation, into a life of possibility in a country founded on the opposite principles of the penal colony.

  PART III

  * * *

  TO BE IRISH IN AMERICA

  9

  * * *

  Home and Away

  He had seen half the world from a ship’s deck, and yet nothing prepared him for how many of the earth’s uprooted strivers had stuffed themselves into New York City in 1852. Carriages dashed and shifted, horses clopped and whinnied, stevedores grunted and cursed, all in waves—not the music of commerce, but the off-key chorus of chaos. Boatmen, ferrymen, porters, carters, stage drivers, washerwomen, predators of immigrants, domestics walking other people’s children, and teenage girls in face paint handing out fliers for the afternoon melodrama on the Bowery. Was that the Teutonic tongue coming from Kleindeutschland, the third-largest German-speaking community in the world? And Yiddish rising from the cluster of rag merchants a few blocks in the other direction? What hybrid of the Queen’s English was this dialect of free blacks working dockside? Surely, a hint of County Kildare clattered from that street-cleaning crew, and his own Munster brogue rolled out of a basement shebeen. All of this in the kinetic claustrophobia of the Lower East Side, nursery of a nation whose people were looking less like those of the mother country by the day. Around one turn, the smells were unpleasant in the late-spring humidity, sweat twined with horseshit, dogshit and pigshit, the piles to be swept into the river by day’s end—6,000 cartloads a night. A few blocks on, he was hit with a waft from the fresh-cooked offerings of barefoot girls, who enticed customers with this chant: “Hot corn! Here’s your nice hot corn! Smoking hot, smoking hot, just from the pot!”

  The island of Manhattan was smaller than the prison district where Thomas Meagher had been condemned to spend the rest of his life. But it held a world of fellow exiles—from Russia’s pogrom-swept villages, from the Rhine’s ruined farms, from Africa’s plundered hamlets and from ashen-blighted fields abandoned by those strong enough to walk away from the Great Hunger. On May 27, the day Meagher stepped ashore, this New York was home to just under 20,000 Jews, 12,000 African Americans, 60,000 Germans, at least 160,000 Irish. It was the densest concentration of Irish anywhere: more than one in four New Yorkers in a city of nearly 600,000 had been born in Meagher’s homeland.

  He walked by City Hall, where men not long from Limerick or Kilkenny held actual power, up Broadway past the booksellers and portrait studios. Onward, toward Canal Street, then right in the direction of the Bowery. On alternate days, bare-knuckle boxing shared space with Shakespeare plays. A scattering of Irish soon became a thicket. They looked worn down and dirty-faced. Their tenements were awful—wooden gaols that could combust in a poof from an untended cigar. Here, flop joints, groggeries and a row of slouch-roofed boardinghouses anchored a city block. The Bowery itself, once a footpath for the native Lenape, had the distinction of being the only major thoroughfare in New York City never to have a single church built on it. Nearby, a former brewery, converted from making beer to warehousing immigrants, was home to a thousand people, some living in stairwells and doorways. For 37 cents a week, you could sleep in a windowless room on a floor with straw; for 18 cents, just the bare floor, with a bucket for the latrine.

  Then, south to the center of this stew of start-over people—Five Points. He knew this neighborhood, five blocks in the heart of the Sixth Ward, by reputation. Charles Dickens had come through a few years earlier, notebook in hand, two cops by his side. The novelist was stunned to see the mix of races, Irish and blacks drinking together, dancing in the saloons, a born-in-America toe-and-heel tap that was a blend of Gaelic jig and West African step dance. In darkened corners, mixed-race couples kissed and groped. Where Anthony, Orange and Cross Streets came together, Dickens saw a place “loathsome, drooping and decayed.” No part of London could match the wretchedness of the neighborhood. It was without grass or trees, without a sliver of green. Thereafter, tourists paid armed men to guide them through an evening of slumming among the poor Irish—for a chance to be appalled at “shanties in which the pigs and the Patricks lie down together,” as the New York Times informed a readership accustomed to bedding in clean linen.

  The curious didn’t come to see the shoemakers and tailors, the fruit sellers and bricklayers. They came for what the great writer called “a world of vice and misery.” And though Dickens made Five Points famous, the gangs made it notorious. The Plug Uglies fought the Roach Guards; the Bowery Boys warred with the Dead Rabbits. More political than territorial, the Irish gangs were trying to get a piece of New York action before Tammany Hall refined municipal mayhem into a smooth-running graft machine.

  Organized crime, an oxymoron in Five Points, was often overshadowed by those babbling to themselves in the neighborhood’s midst; for the change in worlds broke minds as well as souls. Two thirds of the inmates at the New York City Lunatic Asylum, a gray granite fortress on Blackwell Island in the East River, were Irish. As well, Erin’s castoffs were at the top of all the social pathologies in the city but one—suicide. The Irish killed themselves with liquor, with accidents prompted by drink, with neglect, with disease, with violence, but would never end their lives by their own hands, for that would ensure that misery followed them to eternity.

  For these cobblestone streets of squalor, had families traded clan gatherings in emerald valleys? For the piss-and-brew stench of a tenement, had they swapped sea-scrubbed air? Did a million people flee starvation for a slum with the highest death rate in the new nation? “The first thing a visitor notices is a lamentable want of ventilation,” wrote the New York Tribune in an exposé of the “Dens of Death” in Five Points. “Swarms of children whose appearance is the best argument that can be found in favor of public wash houses,” noted the Tribune, the city’s most influential paper. “Covered in rags, encased in a coat of dirt, their hair matted into one mass with grease and dust, their limbs distorted by disease or bruised and disfigured by accident . . . utterly ignorant of such a place as school.” Not true! There on Mott Street, around the corner from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, were clean-faced urchins attending Public School 5. But that was the exception. The most powerful Catholic in New York, the iron-fisted Archbishop John Hughes, had called the inhabitants “the poorest and most wretched population that can be found in the world.” If it wasn’t obvious to Thomas Meagher in his introductory stroll, the bishop made the point: here was “the scattered debris of the Irish nation.” Little wonder the newspapers drew cartoons of them as filthy apes lacking only a tail, whiskers coated in suds, the women more debauched than the men.

  Never had so many Irish come
ashore than the year leading up to Meagher’s first day in America’s biggest city. They were rural peasants, mostly, without skills or trades, illiterate, swept across an ocean by catastrophe, the first big wave of the largest transfer of people the world had yet experienced in so short a time. They left more than 20,000 tiny villages to press into one large village of wretchedness in lower Manhattan. Between 1847 and 1851, about 1.8 million immigrants landed in New York City, of which 848,000 were Irish. Some dispersed to Boston, Albany, Philadelphia or Baltimore. Some found their way to the Midwest, to farms and fresh air; to the South; or farther west, to new land taken from the Indians or to the gold-littered streams of California. But most settled among the clot of fellow Irish, barely a mile from where their ships had landed, rarely wandering north of 14th Street. A handful tended pigs and lived out of shanties beyond 59th Street, where the city had plans to build a greensward called Central Park.

  The Irish did not know it yet, on this last Thursday in May, that one of the most prominent of their political refugees walked among them—an escapee from Tasmania by way of South America. But he was expected. The Boston Pilot had reported in its May 15 edition that the Young Tribune was free. After changing ships in Brazil, from the Elizabeth Thompson to the American-flagged Acorn, he was due to arrive in the city any day, having been at sea for five months. The paper put the stamp of destiny on Meagher before he even saw New York Harbor. “In him, the Irish will find a chief to unite and guide them.”