The junior counsel O’Farrell, who knew ‘the head of the Prison Department,’ rode with him to the harbour, and was allowed to travel in the same boat as Meagher and the captain of the Swift. Once all the prisoners were aboard Swift, Smith O’Brien handed O’Farrell a 5-word message for Lucy. A number of supporters who had set off in boats parallel to the course of the ship’s boats were at first headed off by naval cutters, and spectators ashore were ordered not to wave handkerchiefs and hats. Ultimately though, the navy could not hold back a flotilla of well-wishers, and O’Brien ‘was surprised and delighted to find my sister Grace and my brother Henry,’ whom Captain Aldham had permitted briefly aboard.
After these brief farewells the officers ushered the State prisoners to their cabins aft, to the space which was to be their mess, and they were not permitted on deck again until the boat was towed clear of the lighthouses of North Bull and Poolbeg by the Trident steamer. The banishment of O’Brien and the others now left Ireland a kingdom fit for a royal visit.
Smith O’Brien derided the man-of-war Swift as being ‘greatly in want of paint’ and more ‘like a collier than a man-of-war.’ The positive-minded Meagher, however, saw Swift as ‘a spritely, handsome little brig.’ Whatever the ship’s condition, on the late afternoon of 9 July, when Swift had left port, the young and splendidly named Captain W. Cornwallis Aldham acquainted the State prisoners in their mess with the regulations for their management. They were to live as gentlemen under guard, though only two were to be on deck at the one time. They could use their saloon or mess at will. Baths would be restricted to salt-water bathing with buckets of water, but during calms they could take the option of being lowered overboard on the end of a rope.
Three of the State prisoners were accommodated on the starboard side in small cabins with high bunks beneath which were three drawers. The bunks were reached by a step—‘that he can sit on,’ as O’Brien would say in a diagram he would draw for his children. Smith O’Brien, Meagher and MacManus were in these three cabins, and Patrick O’Donohoe had a small cabin on the port side attached to the officer’s quarters. The prisoners shared a chamber, near the officer’s quarters, which O’Brien would in his drawing label the State Prisoners’ Mess.
Some miles down the Irish coast, Smith O’Brien was allowed on deck again, and saw with some nostalgia ‘the beautiful vale which lies between Killiney and Bray,’ where Lucy and he had the year before spent a delightful two weeks. He had already began his journal for Lucy. ‘Today,’ he boasted in it the next morning, ‘I made my bed for the first time in my life and I am resolved to continue the practice throughout the voyage.’ By evening that second day, the Irish coast, pleasant in its summer light, was fading away, and the regrets normal in a failed revolutionary rose in him—‘had we been contented to allow ourselves to be carried to prison under the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, instead of making an appeal to the country for which it was not prepared, we should probably have been at this moment masters of the public opinion of Ireland.’ But there was an extent to which in any case they were masters of opinion.
At first the prisoners were given two thirds of the officers’ ration, but O’Brien and charming Meagher made representations on the matter, and Captain Aldham made an adjustment. Dinner, served at an ungodly 5.00 p.m., was 2 pounds of hard beef divided between all four men, some biscuits, a jug of water and two glasses of wine each. O’Brien approached this harsh food as an experiment—to test whether he could ignore its scantiness. To Meagher, it provided a source of jokes. But Meagher was not restricted to comedy. Throughout the usual spate of seasickness in the North Atlantic, he was particularly kind to O’Donohoe, drawing the venetian blinds over the portholes to exclude light from his fellow convict’s aching eyes. On 11 July, O’Donohoe noted, ‘After dinner, whilst I lay sick, Mr Meagher read to me Digby’s Compendium.’ As the weather settled, while ‘Meagher read a portion of the Scriptures from the Catholic Douai Bible,’ O’Brien ‘read simultaneously the same chapter in my German Protestant Bible. I hope thus to continue my German biblical studies which were commenced in Richmond Prison.’ Recovered, O’Donohoe was cheered up to find the identity of a youth aboard. ‘A young gentleman, a midshipman, about thirteen years of age, named Lord Ockham, mounted the rigging for the first time today. He is a grandson of Lord Byron.’ O’Donohoe, an enthusiast for Byron, had found that the poet referred to Midshipman Ockham’s mother as, ‘Fair child, Ada! Soul daughter of his home and heart.’ O’Donohoe apologised for the shaky hand with which he wrote all this for his wife’s information, and advised, ‘You may tell Bessy I have thrown away the dirty old wig.’
They had been at sea ten days when in the mess Meagher announced to his fellow prisoners that henceforth, and until and unless he was liberated, he was to be addressed as O’Meagher. It was the eve of the anniversary of Ballingarry, and Swift was becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Edging across the Equator in early August, they watched the initiation of officers and crew who had not previously crossed. But the winds were so low that, searching for them, Swift was at one time little more than 200 miles from Brazil, in fretful air which caused O’Brien to admit, ‘I am by no means so indifferent as I believed myself to the luxuries of the table.’ He had already made a resolve to touch no alcohol until Ireland was free, and had to mix lemon acid and raspberry vinegar with the nearly undrinkable water. And his bête noire was Marine Sergeant Perry, who insisted on turning out the prisoners’ lights—as per regulation—at a preposterously early hour. O’Brien wrote with a dryness lacking from his serious verse:
Fat Sergeant Perry comes at nine
And robs us of our light.
Swift arrived off Cape Town on 12 September that year. Captain Aldham and the officers, permitted to land, were told that the Neptune, with Mitchel aboard, was so long overdue that it might have been lost at sea. Despite his political differences with the man, O’Brien was saddened at the possibility and wrote in his journal, ‘Poor Mitchel! What a fate! Poor Mrs Mitchel!’
They were all drawing personal hope, however, from news that the colonists of Cape Town were opposed to receiving transportees. And if the citizens of Hobart, like those of Cape Town, opposed the landing of prisoners, the authorities might have no practical choice but to grant an early pardon. Wary Cape Town settlers agreed to re-victual Swift only on condition that Captain Aldham sailed the next day. While the Swift was moored in the harbour overnight, a settler who had been a childhood friend of O’Brien’s rowed out to try to see him exercising on deck, and wrote to Ireland to spread the news that he appeared well. There was no time for a follow-up reconnaissance. At one o’clock in the afternoon of 13 September, the Swift weighed anchor and left Africa behind.
During the voyage, O’Brien wrote a considerable quantity of awkward verse, which he then showed to Meagher, receiving a deal of applause in return.
I have sinned oh my Country! But not against thee
Proud England I have sinned, but my conscience is free.
I have sinned against thy Laws, I have sinn’d against thy might,
But no sin have I sinn’d against Justice and Right.
Lying on a plank one day, oppressed by his lengthening distance from Lucy, he felt his head gently raised to allow a sailor’s coat to be slid beneath it as pillow: ‘a tear started in my eye … I turned around and perceived that I owed it to an Irish sailor … May his head never want a pillow, may his heart never want rest.’
On the arrival of the Mount Stewart Elphinstone with O’Doherty and Martin in Sydney in early October, after ninety-seven days at sea, the Irish community of the city called a meeting at the Lighthouse Hotel on the corner of Sussex and Bathurst Streets at which it was agreed that the un-landed Irish politicals were national heroes and not criminals. It was further resolved that a committee of citizens should now be formed to supervise the treatment of all State prisoners by the colonial authorities.
Members of this committee sought to board the Elphinstone, talk to O’Doherty and M
artin, and give them a collected sum of £94. But on 20 October, both men were transferred directly across the harbour of Sydney to the brig Emma for Hobart. After a lively passage down the east coasts of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, they sailed up the ample estuary of the Derwent to Hobart. They were astonished to find that the Swift, with their fellow rebels aboard, had arrived the day before.
Swift had entered the River Derwent on the afternoon of 27 October, and Meagher was delighted with the scenery, the ‘bold cliffs’ to the left, and to the right ‘the green lowlands of Tasman’s Peninsula, sparkling in the clear, sweet sunshine of that lovely evening. The town swept into view, and behind it massive Mount Wellington with snow on its brow.’ At anchor off Hobart Town, Meagher was cheered to hear Irish voices—‘warm whispers of the old Irish heart’—from passing boats, asking how the gentlemen were. Hungry for sights, the prisoners looked ashore through a glass. ‘And even the poor dog we caught playing amongst the bales and baulks, the casks and spars, upon the wharf in front of us was followed through all his windings, tumblings, twists and twirls, with the keenest curiosity.’
Though O’Donohoe might have been a difficult, fallible man, he did try to look on Van Diemen’s Land, its rugged geography and its complicated society, with some bravery and determination. There was in fact a great deal of sympathy ashore for the exiles. Progressives in the colony resented the Viceroy Denison for delaying the wish for Van Diemen’s Land’s, or, as they preferred to call it, Tasmania’s, sovereignty. To them, O’Brien was a noble soul, and there was no question that he was seen as the moral leader of the group. Even from this deeply placed exile, he realised his demeanour might be reported back to Ireland and have a political impact there. But the Hobart Town Courier advised him before he even landed to refrain from local politics. ‘They (the State prisoners) cannot aspire to the honour of a Washington … If these gentlemen are wise they will study botany, poetry, metaphysics, anything but colonial faction.’
On 29 October, the Assistant Comptroller of Convicts, William E. Nairn, came aboard the Swift at mid-afternoon and met the prisoners in their saloon. With typical piquancy, Meagher described Nairn’s actions: ‘First of all … he disengaged a yard or so of thin red tape from a bundle of large, thick-wove, blue paper; and in so doing exhibited an easy dexterity of finger, and a deep-water placidity of look.’ Nairn presented the prisoners with the conditions of their special paroles or tickets-of-leave. They were to be allotted separate districts, where they could lodge and within which they could have freedom of movement, but from which they were not to roam. They were to report their residence to the police magistrate, and from then on present themselves to the magistrate once a month. They were not to be absent from their residence after nine o’clock at night, nor have any contact with each other, and their districts were to be ‘rural inland districts.’ None of them was to be permitted to live in Hobart Town. To receive this ticket-of-leave, they had merely to give a promise not to escape. O’Brien loyally raised the matter that O’Donohoe was a legal draftsman, needed to make a living, and could not make one in a rural district. Nairn took a note of that.
Smith O’Brien had already decided that he would not accept the terms. ‘I could not make any pledge that I would not attempt to escape.’ O’Brien was refusing to accommodate Earl Grey’s hope that he would disappear into a pleasant, torpid oubliette, a velvet hole in which he would soon be forgotten by Ireland and the world. The woolbroker MacManus decided not to accept the parole conditions either, until he could be told whether he would be put into a district where he could work for a merchant. O’Brien, perhaps knowing he would need some of his group to communicate with the world, urged Meagher to accept his ticket-of-leave, as he did ‘for a limited period—say for three or six months.’ Denison was affronted that Meagher accepted the ticket-of-leave provisionally. Did he want to reserve the right to escape after he had studied local conditions? Wherever Meagher settled, the local police magistrate would be ordered ‘to lay his hand on him as soon as the six months are over; and either make him renew his engagement, or place him under restraint.’ Lady Denison noted that O’Donohoe ‘thankfully accepted the Government terms, and only begged that he be allowed to live in town.’
Throughout the following day, many persons on Swift tried to talk O’Brien into accepting Denison’s terms. Nairn had by now returned to tell them paroles had been granted to O’Donohoe and to Meagher, but O’Brien and MacManus were to be sent to convict probation stations. The letter he bore had the ominous, sparse bureaucratic tone to which O’Brien would become accustomed. ‘The Assistant Comptroller has now to acquaint Mr O’Brien … that the Lieutenant Governor has decided Maria Island should be the place of such confinement.’
Maria Island was a lovely but remote offshore island along the east coast of Van Dieman’s Land, a place beyond the horizon of the world, a sub-Hades. MacManus was slated to go to the Salt Water River penal station on the Tasman Peninsula, an extraordinarily beautiful, forested jut of earth which was connected to the Tasmanian land mass by a series of narrow land bridges. But by now, MacManus, possibly under the persuasion of O’Brien, had decided to accept his ticket-of-leave. Lady Denison wrote, ‘So O’Brien is now the only victim.’ She could still not understand why her husband was subject to such vexation. There was no need for indulgence. ‘It is true that the punishment of transportation would fall more heavily on the gentleman than on one belonging to the lower classes.’
Before the prisoners were disposed of, there were sympathetic visitors to the ship. Father Dunne of Van Diemen’s Land, who would become later a firm friend of O’Brien’s, came aboard. So did a Mr Carter and his son, progressives and merchants who owned stores throughout VDL, as people often called the colony. Carter was in a way a litmus test of VDL attitudes to the State prisoners. He was a visitor to Government House and knew the Denisons, but clearly did not see O’Brien and the others as average transportees.
It was during that same afternoon of arguing with O’Brien that O’Doherty and Martin arrived on the sloop Emma, and looked over to the Swift in the hope of seeing their friends. They did at last spot MacManus ‘strutting about the Swift with a telescope in his hand and sending great demonstrations of friendly salutations across the water.’ Salutations were, however, brief. At three o’clock in the morning on the last day of October, Meagher was rowed ashore in a guard boat with his belongings. His coach for Campbell Town, the chief town of the area to which he had been assigned, 100 miles north of Hobart, left at half past three, and he was compelled to move straight across Hobart’s stone wharfs on uncertain sea legs to board it. But once the sun rose, ‘At last, there was the heart of the country itself, with its beautiful hills, rising in long and shadowy tiers, one above the other, and the brown foliage of its woods, and the blackened stumps of many a tough old tree, and mobs upon mobs of sheep, and the green parrots, and the wattle birds!’ The island he was entering was eerily beautiful, characterised by dramatic and dangerous coastlines, tangled western mountains, great plateaux which the Vandemonian population called tiers, and settlement chiefly spread in the north-south basins of farming land created by the Derwent, on which Hobart Town had been established, and the Tamar, on which the northern town Launceston stood. Van Diemen’s Land was colder than the Australian mainland, since it lay in that great band of westerlies called the Roaring Forties, though sometimes winds from the continent’s hot interior swept down across it. To Meagher and other Irish State prisoners, however, it would seem more temperate than Ireland.
Nairn had now been to the Emma to offer O’Doherty and John Martin the same arrangements offered the day before on Swift. Both prisoners accepted. An Assistant Registrar recorded their appearance; O’Doherty’s, when taken together with his character, made of him a fitting object of devotion for Eva of the Nation—5 feet 11 inches high, complexion fresh, hair and whiskers brown, forehead broad, mouth and nose medium, and chin small. In Ireland in September, the Nation had begun publishin
g again under the editorship of much-tried but now freed Gavan Duffy. Here was the outlet for Eva’s verses, compounding grief for the national loss with grief for loss of the beloved.
How I glory, how I sorrow,
How I love with deathless love—
How I weep before the chilling skies,
And moan to God above!
Meagher found, on dismounting from the coach after an all-day journey, that little Campbell Town had only one street and three side-lanes. But at least in Mrs Kearney’s hotel the main parlour was decorated with pictures of Brian Boru and Daniel O’Connell, and herself was sitting up and honoured to provide him with a dinner. It was proof that if the official British empire could spread its sway over such fantastic distances, so too could the unofficial Irish empire, its icons no more diminished by distance than were the potency of the lion and unicorn above the door of Government House, Hobart. Meagher did not greatly like Campbell Town—it ‘has too much of the vulgar upstart village in it; contains too much glare, dust and gossip.’ Three days later, with the police magistrate’s permission, he was driven by cart a little south to the town of Ross, which he described to O’Brien as an Elysian location. For a while Meagher rented two front rooms from a couple, though he sometimes took residence in Hope’s Hotel. One of his first plans was to hire a horse and explore the limits of his district, 35 miles long and 15 miles wide. He would in the meantime make a drama even out of his negotiations with his landlords, a Wesleyan couple:
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 29