They changed horses at last at the remote homestead of a settler named Grover, ‘a well-affected Tasmanian native,’ and before dusk that second day of escape, Grover’s son and Mitchel rode into the yard of a large and handsome house which still stands—Westfield, near Westbury. It belonged to an English settler named Field, whom Mitchel would call Wood in his journal. Mitchel stayed a night with Mr Field. Since there was a police post within 100 yards of Field’s gate though, it was decided to move the escaper the following morning to the attic of a farmhouse 6 miles away, belonging to an Irishman named Burke. The attic was reached by a movable wooden ladder which is still displayed on St Patrick’s Day in Westbury. Here, while the police watched every port and patrolled the countryside, he experienced the full flower of colonial hospitality. By day Mitchel read books and went out only at night, armed. For a feverish fellow, he dealt with delay well. But again it seemed nothing would ever proceed with ease for Mitchel, whether it was love, revolution, transportation, or escape. It was the middle of June before news from Nicaragua reached Mitchel at Burke’s farm, the proposal being a dash from Westbury to one of Mr McNamara’s ships, a brigantine named Don Juan. In five days’ time it would put into Emu Bay, 80 miles north-west, and four flooded rivers away from Westbury.
Smyth’s and Mitchel’s Launceston friend (George Deas) sent a coastal smack with a message to Emu Bay, asking Don Juan to come eastwards again, to Badger Head, closer to Mitchel. He would still have to cross a most dangerous river, the Meander, and in the furious weather the ship might not be able to lie off a solitary beach for long. In any case, Mitchel’s undaunted party of settlers started off from Burke’s farm at night in a freezing downpour to make the rendezvous. Barny O’Keefe, ‘an intelligent, well-informed man, who emigrated hither, after Lord Howarden’s great extermination of tenantry in Tipperary,’ was in the escort. So were the Burke brothers, Mr Field and his brother, and two others. Mr Field cheered Mitchel on by telling him that if the ship was missed he could wait the winter out at a very remote station amongst the mountains of north-west Tasmania.
The Mitchel party rode into the dark valley of the Meander, and struggled across to O’Keefe’s farmhouse on the far side. The flood ‘dashed up on our horses’ shoulders.’ They found O’Keefe’s wife and family asleep, but soon a roaring fire blazed and beefsteaks hissed. At O’Keefe’s hearth that night, the Field brothers, native Tasmanians of English stock, sat smoking and fraternally nodding as O’Keefe recounted ‘the black story of the clearing of his village in Tipperary.’ Mounted up in the morning, the party reached the beach at Badger Head by way of innumerable sand marshes. No sail at all was in sight, and by dark Mitchel’s party were out of food and hope. They escorted Mitchel 9 miles along the coast, to the ramshackle house of a lively Cockney ex-convict named Miller, which lay opposite the tiny hamlet of Port Sorell. Miller and his wife, natural rebels against authority, entered with delight into the business of concealing Mitchel. From their residence the next morning, Mitchel could observe by telescope the streets of Port Sorell and the constables, ‘sauntering about with their belts and jingling handcuffs.’ At Miller’s hut Mitchel would see in the month of July, smoking with his host.
It was a relief when on 5 July the Burke brothers appeared amongst the coastal marshlands, come to fetch Mitchel to Launceston. Deas had negotiated a passage to Melbourne on a steamer, and Mitchel said goodbye to the disappointed Millers, who had been busy hatching their own playful plans for getting Mitchel away from Port Sorell. But a wealth of melodramatic miss and near-miss still had to be endured.
The Burkes supplied him with a cassock and large black hat belonging to Father Hogan of Westbury. A foursquare Presbyterian in Papist cloth, he waited in Launceston as the captain of the chosen vessel complained that with the present level of the police scrutiny he could not take Mitchel on his ship near Launceston: it would have to happen well out in the mouth of the Tamar. Utterly exhausted, Mitchel was put in the bottom of the boat that night. For the last section of this long haul, one of the Barretts who had helped Meagher was in charge, and left him ashore opposite Georgetown, at the very mouth of the river, together with a Hobart merchant named Connellan. Barrett then rowed across to the village itself to make the required report of his movements to the police magistrate. He had scarcely set off than Mitchel and Connellan saw the black funnel of the steamer come around a wooded promontory, making for the open sea. Half an hour passed, and Barrett’s boat was now returning from Georgetown, four men rowing with ‘desperate energy.’ Though Mitchel jumped aboard with Connellan, the steamer made smoke, hooted, pulled away and vanished. Rain and gales accompanied Mitchel’s party all the miserable way back to Launceston. Mitchel, wearing the priest’s weeds, was put ashore a mile from town and walked to the house of Father Butler. At a meeting with Connellan and Deas later in the day, it was agreed that the north side of the island of Tasmania had now become ‘too hot to hold me.’ All the riding, counter-riding, drenchings, kindnesses of farmers and grandees, all the chuckling ingenuity of Miller and the muscular oarsmanship of the Barrett boatmen had to be written off.
Dean Butler hid a saddened but jovial Mitchel in the belfry of the church in Launceston, while Connellan booked two places in the mail coach to Hobart for the following night. At the right time, Father Butler helped a hopeful, wry Mitchel dress again as a priest, supposedly a Father Blake, and rode with him out of Launceston to wait for the coach at Franklin village. On the way they approached a turnpike gate. ‘Here,’ said Father Butler, ‘you can test your disguise.’ Clergymen were privileged to pass the toll-gates free. The keeper opened the gate without question.
As soon as the coach arrived in Franklin’s one street, Mitchel climbed in. Besides the already seated Connellan, there were two other passengers, one an acquaintance of Mitchel’s ‘who would certainly have known me, had I been less effectually disguised.’ He was Mr MacDowell, formerly Attorney-General. MacDowell tried to draw Mitchel into conversation on church matters, but Father Blake was shy. In the small hours, the coach changed horses at Green Ponds, where two policemen inspected the passengers. Under his cassock, Mitchel kept hold of a pistol supplied him by Smyth.
On a clear morning at Bridgewater, north of Hobart, the angular Father Blake dismounted the coach and went into the hotel. MacDowell remarked, ‘Your Reverend friend, Connellan, does not carry any luggage.’ Mitchel did not rest but spent the day hiking unmolested along the Derwent in his priest’s cassock, and then caught the evening coach into Hobart as it came by. Six miles short of Hobart Town, ‘Kevin O’Doherty climbed into the coach, and sat down directly in front of me, looking straight in my face.’ Apparently Saint Kevin did not recognise him. Indeed when Mitchel turned up at Connellan’s house in Collins Street, and the door was opened by Pat Smyth, Mitchel introduced himself as Father Blake and walked through into the parlour before breaking down in laughter: ‘I saw now that my disguise might carry me through a birthday ball at Government House.’ Nicaragua and Mitchel left Connellan’s house at separate times and walked by different routes to the house of Mr Manning, McNamara’s shipping agent in Hobart Town.
Manning suggested the one option left: Mitchel should simply depart on the Emma, the regular passenger brig running to Melbourne. Nicaragua would return to Bothwell, to assist in the winding-up of Mitchel’s affairs at Nant Cottage, the sale of stock, etc., so that Jenny Mitchel and her family could sail on the Emma also. The Mitchel family would be able to board Emma legally at the wharf, while Mitchel himself was to board 3 or 4 miles downriver, after the ship had been searched by the police. Once on board, he was to preserve a disguise and avoid Jenny and the children. On the night itself, 18 July, in boarding the Emma without any trouble at all downriver, Mitchel took on the persona of a Mr Wright. Receiving him on board, the captain observed, ‘You’re almost too late, Mr Wright,’ and then brought him down to the cabin and introduced him to all the other passengers, including Mr Pat Smyth of New York. On deck Mr Wright could see handso
me Jenny Mitchel sitting on the poop deck with the children in the moonlight, nursing the youngest girl, Isabelle. When young Willie followed him about the deck, Mitchel barked, ‘Aren’t you Mrs Mitchel’s little boy?’ Willie fled.
By the evening of the next day, Mitchel saw the peaks of the Bay of Fires vanish down the horizon: ‘adieu, then, beauteous island, full of sorrow and gnashing of teeth—Island of fragrant forests, and bright rivers, and fair women! Island of chains and scourges, and blind, brutal rage and passion!’
But still it was not over. When Emma entered Sydney Harbour and while the police were still aboard, the captain provided his own cutter to take Mr Wright ashore and directly to McNamara’s house, where the son of the McNamara family was in residence. There Mr Wright took a further identity, Mr Warren. Warren ‘drove out this evening in his [McNamara’s] carriage … assuredly, Warren has never seen so lovely a bay as this of Sydney, except Lough Swilley, in Donegal.’
Mitchel had leisure now to marvel at all the men who had assisted him. He wrote to Mrs Williams, the young widow of Ratho, ‘My list of efficient assistants in the business includes Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen, and a man from Berwick-upon-Tweed.’ It was agreed that Mitchel would go ahead on an English bark, Orkney Lass, bound for Honolulu with only one vacant berth. The family could come on with Nicaragua in the ship Julia Ann, due from Melbourne. When in late July Mr Warren boarded the Orkney Lass, the captain was lamenting that his sailors had deserted to dig gold. Waiting for the crew to be re-gathered, Warren had time to visit Mrs Jenny Mitchel and her six children in Woolloomooloo, a demi-respectable harbourside suburb where she had taken rooms. At last on 2 August, its crew all back, Orkney Lass endured a last search of the ship at the heads, where the surging Pacific entered Port Jackson, and sailed out of Sydney Harbour on the morning of 2 August.
Orkney Lass’s first call was to be Tahiti, and when after nearly a month the splendid mountains of Tahiti and Moorea were sighted, liberated Mr Warren luxuriated in the splendour of the place and in the beauty of the men and women. But Mitchel was disappointed that just as Orkney Lass was ready to depart for Hawaii on 12 September, a dead calm settled in. Off the reef the next day the American bark Julia Ann appeared, the vessel Smyth, Jenny and her family had planned to take. Her railings were crowded with passengers, and one of her boats was lowered and entered Papeete. ‘And while it was still a mile off I recognised one of my own boys sitting in the bow, and Nicaragua beside him. They have come for me.’ By seven o’clock that evening he had set foot on the deck of an American ship ‘and took off my hat in homage to the Stars and Stripes. Here, then, Mr Blake … Mr Wright, and Mr Warren, have all become once more plain John Mitchel … my “Jail Journal” ends, and “Out-of-Jail Journal” begins.’
16
THE SKELETON AT THE FEAST
I mean to make use of the freedom granted to me as a citizen of America to help and to stimulate the movement of European Democracy, and especially of Irish Independence.
John Mitchel,
New York, 1853
Sir William Denison was unwilling to move with severity on the three remaining Young Irelanders, for Mitchel’s escape had again concentrated the renewed attention of the world upon him. John Martin, a sad relict of Mitchel’s great escapade, had lost a great deal—companionship, a household, genial employment. For the sake of liquidity, he took employment working as a tutor to the children of a family called the Jacksons at Ross. Though he wrote to O’Doherty that he had begun ‘to convince myself that it is pride that irritated and almost disgusted me at first,’ he had the same problem with tutoring the rough companionable Jacksons as O’Brien had had with the Brock boys. O’Doherty had at last left Hobart and was serving as surgeon in the little community of Port Cygnet (population 100) south of Hobart. He survived off grudging bank drafts from his brothers in Ireland, who were still holding tight to his inheritance. At Elwin’s, a restive O’Brien tried to entertain himself by drafting a possible Tasmanian constitution. It was a wise document, suggesting an elected governorship and a Senate and House of Assembly, but it retained allegiance to the monarchy while limiting the vote to occupants of buildings worth £5 per annum, or a rural freehold or leasehold worth £100. Serving convicts (among whom Martin, O’Doherty and O’Brien himself were numbered) were not eligible!
Late in 1853, O’Brien heard from Edward himself that he wished to attend an English university. ‘This is the first time I have asked you to consider my choice in any matter,’ the young man wrote pointedly. O’Brien was enraged. To ensure his family remained an Irish family he had denied himself the company of his wife and of his beloved heir in Van Diemen’s Land. But now the plan seemed to be to make the boy a second-class Englishman. O’Brien told Lucy that if Edward went to an English university it would be ‘Against my wishes, not under sanction of my conscience.’ His battle to ensure his eldest son grew up with an Irish mind was interrupted by unaffected letters from the younger children for whom politics and culture were not yet an issue. Charles Murrough, the youngest, wrote, ‘I am growing rather tall from the hugging I get every morning when I go into Mumma’s bed … I hope the Queen will let you go because I want to see you and I want to tell you many things.’
But O’Brien foresaw only the remotest chance of his being able to take Charles Murrough on his knee and answer those questions.
The Mitchels’ ship, Julia Ann, entered the ‘Gate of Gold,’ San Francisco, on 3 October 1853. Enjoying the compliment of a dinner attended by Governor Downey, an Irishman, and by the mayor of San Francisco, Mitchel declared: ‘I have commenced in your state my novitiate in order to become an American citizen.’ But New York was Mitchel’s objective. His mother, his brother and sisters were in Brooklyn. New York lay on the same ocean as Ireland, and Mitchel had not given up hope of some intrusion into Ireland. But, ‘I must tell you we were nearly tempted to remain there,’ adaptable Jenny confessed.
They spent a week with an apparently happy MacManus at San José, where he was ranching, and penetrated the forested Santa Cruz Gap on horseback. For the first time since his imprisonment, Mitchel experienced the scent of pine trees. He left no comment on any problems 30-year-old MacManus might have been facing with business, with liquor and loneliness. After nearly a month in California, Pat Smyth, Mitchel, Jenny and the children boarded the steamship Cortez to start their journey to New York by the trans-Nicaragua route. ‘The papers will have told you of the magnificent reception he met with here,’ wrote a former surgeon from Van Diemen’s Land to the young widow of Ratho, Mrs Williams. ‘… The German residents serenaded him the night before he left, and every man’s heart beats stronger and all felt happy to find that another “true man” had escaped from the clutches of the English Government and that miserable devil Sir William Denison.’ Jenny had been sad to leave San Fastopolis, and Dr Nuttall had seen her on the deck of Cortez with tears coursing down her cheeks.
The Mitchels and Pat Smyth disembarked on the Nicaragua/Costa Rica coast and boarded mules to massive Lake Nicaragua, which they crossed by steamer. The baby Isabelle became very ill and Jenny feared losing her, but the fever abated. Mitchel and his sons walking enthusiastically through brilliant forests around the rapids, they travelled on down the San Juan River by boat, and on the Atlantic side took another steamer north to Greytown or San Juan del Norte on the Mosquito Coast, and then yet another on to Cuba. From Havana, where Nicaragua Smyth took the Mitchel boys to the theatre, they sailed on the appositely named Prometheus and, in the last days of November, entered the outer harbour of New York through the Verazzano Narrows. Mitchel was impressed by the bulk of New York, but also by Brooklyn, and the way Jersey City on one shore echoed Williamsburg on the other. ‘A constellation of cities!—a ganglion of human life!’
Mitchel’s younger brother William and Thomas Francis Meagher were first aboard the Prometheus, and the excitement at Mitchel’s arrival managed if anything to outrival that which had attended Meagher’s. The New York Times
announced it with a total of five front-page headlines: ‘ARRIVAL OF JOHN MITCHEL—HIS ENTHUSIASTIC RECEPTION—MITCHEL’S SOJOURN IN BROOKLYN—SALVOS OF ARTILLERY—SERENADE IN BROOKLYN.’ The Mitchels were conveyed by ferry and carriage to the corner of Hicks and Degraw Streets, the Brooklyn house rented by Mrs Mitchel senior, where, in the afternoon, John Blake Dillon, Michael Doheny and other Young Irelanders came visiting. From Brooklyn Heights, the Napper Tandy Light Artillery discharged thirty-one guns across the East River, a salute reserved for heads of state. This was designed to confirm Mitchel as president of the unachieved Irish republic, the status that the Irish diaspora had given him as Young Ireland’s militant and first transported victim. As the salvoes died, an approaching band playing ‘Garryowen’ was heard. The Irish militias of New York and New Jersey had mustered on the corner of Chrystie and Delancy Streets, Manhattan, and were invading Brooklyn. Amongst them were the Mitchel Guards of the 9th New York, the Meagher Cadets, Jackson Guards, Emmet Guards, Sarsfield Guards, Irish Rifles, Irish Fusiliers, Meagher Republican Grenadiers and the Mitchel Guards of Jersey City. ‘Union Street is quickly filled up with ranked men, glittering bayonets and waving banners.’ Mitchel went to the windows, and that was the start of five hours’ civic mayhem as he received deputations, made speeches, reviewed military companies ‘defiling through the hall.’ The Mitchel boys loved it all.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 39