25
FENIANS TRANSPORTED
Now, sir, perhaps no one in this Colony knows better than I do the daring audacity—disregard of life (own or of others) of American ruffians. I had experience of them previous to my leaving Peru … Two or three of them as leaders could, before the Hougoumont discharged her surplus stores, have full possession of her, and sail away with such of our wives and daughters that they are pleased to select.
Captain Charles Manning,
Western Australian Volunteers,
December 1867
For the Fenians imprisoned in Britain, 1867 had been a long wait. In July 1866, James Stephens had told audiences in the United States that an army would be fighting on Irish soil before the new year. Stephens had replaced O’Mahony as chief executive of the US Fenian Brotherhood with just that result in mind, yet he grasped at excuses for delay. Attacked by the American Fenians, he hysterically offered to go back to Ireland immediately to ‘get hanged’ and prove he was no coward. But he would not go back to Ireland, as it turned out, for another thirty years.
After seven months as chief of what used to be called the O’Mahony wing, when the new year of 1867 arrived, he declared the uprising impossible. He was deposed and replaced as chief executive of the Irish Republic by Colonel Tom Kelly, an officer determined to make things happen. Kelly’s colonelcy was of the Fenian variety, but he had fought with the 10th Ohio during the Civil War and achieved the rank of captain. He crossed to Ireland as soon as the Civil War ended and had been one of the organisers of the Captain’s escape. Escaping back to New York, in January 1867 Kelly volunteered with other former Union officers to cross the Atlantic yet again and initiate the rebellion. Kelly, the renowned Confederate raider McCafferty and Captain Ricard O’Sullivan Burke, formerly of the 15th New York, travelled to England, which they saw as one of their theatres of war. Kelly appointed to overall military command of the Fenians a French soldier he had known and admired as a brevet brigadier-general in the Union army, Gustave Paul Cluseret. Cluseret’s command would be called—to utter a name which would ultimately mean many things to many people—the Irish Republican Army.
The first sign of apparent hope for Fenian prisoners came in February 1867, when McCafferty decided, without discussion with Cluseret or Kelly, to attack Chester Castle, an arms depot in the north of England. Numerous Fenians from Ireland and from the British north participated. The munitions were to be rushed to Holyhead and so to Dublin on the mail boat. When they arrived, the entire Fenian movement in Ireland was to rise!
A little after one o’clock on the day of the proposed raid, 11 February, McCafferty learned that the authorities had been alerted. Chester Castle had been fortified and Guards detachments were on their way from London. McCafferty managed to call off the escapade in time to save some arrests, but throughout the next day many young Fenians were detained as they landed at Dundalk and Dublin.
Though an American officer, after inspecting Fenian preparations in Ireland, advised Kelly and Cluseret in their lodgings in London that there was not the least chance of Fenians holding the field for a day, Kelly was determined to strike on 5 March. He believed there were 14,000 men ready in Dublin and 20,000 in Cork. The Fenian ‘General’ Godfrey Massey, a former corporal in the British Army, was sent to Ireland by Kelly to inform the Irish Fenians of the date for the uprising. With him travelled a former member of the Irish Brigade, now turned British informer, a man named Corydon. Massey was arrested on Limerick railway station as he arrived to lead the Limerick Fenians. Nonetheless, in early March, Fenians in Dublin, Drogheda, Cork, Tipperary, Clare and Limerick assembled in locations on the edge of cities and marched against the institutions of government, particularly against police barracks.
There were successful attacks on two police barracks near Dublin, Stepaside and Glencullen. But an armed force of police opened fire on the Fenians who assembled at Tallaght, south of Dublin. Similarly forty police equipped with Lee Enfield rifles dispersed a barely armed body of perhaps 1,000 Fenians in the Potato Market in Drogheda. In Limerick the police at Kilmallock held off a determined Fenian attack led by a man in a green uniform and green slouch hat. In Cork 2,000 men led by the former Union captain of infantry Michael O’Brien captured the police barracks at Ballyknockane, tore up the Great Southern and Great Western railway lines, and cut the telegraph. Another group raided the coastguard station at Knockadoon. But without an Irish headquarters through which Cluseret’s concerted orders could be conveyed, there was no chance of any further coherent action. Soon flying columns of troops and police were scouring the south-west and west of Ireland breaking up parties of Fenians on whom snow was now falling. The last, sharp action was fought in Kilclooney Wood in Tipperary, where the Fenians were surrounded. From Dublin on 12 March, Colonel Thomas Kelly wrote bitterly to America, “Little Baldy” [Stephens] has finally given up the ghost and acknowledged that if he came to Ireland the people would be certain to make short work of him. The rascal is in Paris, taking his ease with his wife, while the destiny of Ireland is in the balance … We now begin to realise fully the madness of McCafferty’s attack at Chester.’ Now, ‘It is war to the knife. Only send us the knife.’
In fact a Fenian privateer was on its way, the Erin’s Hope, a brigantine of 138 tons which had been confiscated by New York Customs and which somehow the O’Mahony wing acquired. When it sailed from New York that month, it carried in the hold approximately 5,000 modern breech-loading and repeating rifles and 1,500,000 rounds of ammunition. But in June, off Waterford, twenty-eight Irish Fenians landed from the Erin’s Hope and were all arrested within a day. All of this must have been grievous intelligence for Fenians in prisons across the south of England.
On Dartmoor in the spring of 1867, John Boyle O’Reilly—having heard distant rumours of Fenian disaster—waited for a day when the prison gun which signalled incoming fog would be fired. When it happened the warders hastily gathered the men, since fog gave opportunities for escape. As prisoners were assembled, O’Reilly remained huddled against the wall of a deep drain. Climbing out at night, he walked towards the sea with a plan to reach Dartmouth or some other port and escape by ship. He found it appalling out on the moor, and after a second drenched night, was very nearly pleased to be tracked down by warders and bloodhounds.
More depressing Fenian news would reach him. On 11 September 1867, Colonel Kelly was arrested in a doorway in Manchester, in company with a Captain Deasy, who had fought in the Cork uprising the previous March. A week later a prison van taking Kelly and Deasy from the police court to prison passed under a Manchester railway arch, where it was ambushed by thirty Fenians. Inside the van with the two Fenian prisoners and other non-political criminals was a police sergeant, Brett, who refused to surrender. A Fenian fired his revolver through a ventilator and the bullet fatally wounded Sergeant Brett. A female prisoner in the van took the keys from the dying sergeant and passed them through the ventilator to the Fenians outside. Kelly and Deasy were taken out, led over a wall and across the railway line. They were never to be recaptured and would reach America.
But five young Irishmen—none of them the man who had fired on Brett—were arrested and charged with murder. One, an Irish soldier serving in the Royal Marines, was obviously falsely arrested, and though sentenced to death—a result which said little for the objectivity of the court—was pardoned. Another condemned man, an American named Condon, would ultimately be saved at the insistence of Secretary of State Seward. American Captain Michael O’Brien, lately an officer of the Union army, had been sentenced to death along with William Allen and Philip Larkin. All three made the eloquent statements before sentencing which in this century of revolutionary failure came to stand as a kind of victory in themselves. On a foggy day in November, O’Brien, Larkin and Allen were executed, the first two suffering greatly through the incompetence of the executioner. The three became at once the Manchester Martyrs, revered and made the subject of monuments from Canada to New Zealand.
Friedrich Engels seemed to understand the distinction better than the Fenians. His mistress was an Irish-woman and his home in Manchester a centre of Fenian activity, and even decorated in Fenian colors of green and black. Though he was critical of the activities of the IRB, speaking of their ‘braggart, aimless propaganda through action,’ he and Marx both had resolutions of support for the Manchester Martyrs passed in the International Working Man’s Association and the more middle-class Reform League. Marx wrote, ‘I sought in every way to provoke this manifestation of the English workers in support of Fenianism.’ But in the end he decided it was hopeless: ‘England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians, and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor.’
Ricard O’Sullivan Burke could do little more than hide until arrested in London in December 1867. He was put in Clerkenwell prison in east London, where other Fenians including Mayo’s Michael Davitt were being held. Now Clerkenwell became a malign location for the relationship between Britons and Irish; a group of Fenians anxious to release Captain Burke set a barrel of gunpowder alight against the wall of the prison. In the surrounding working-class suburb the result was tragic. At the church of St James, Clerkenwell, can be found the memorial plaque to the ‘victims of the terrible outrage which occurred in this parish on Friday, December 13 1867. Perpetrated by certain misguided and wicked persons, who, being members of the so-called FENIAN CONSPIRACY … placed a barrel of powder against the northern wall of the prison and, firing the same, suddenly rendered the immediate locality a mass of ruins.’ Fifteen people of the neighbourhood including two children were killed instantly or died of their injuries.
Though the main, failed purpose was to rescue a Fenian leader, Clerkenwell set the pattern of Irish terror in London, and of a wilful English judicial incompetence. Michael Barrett, a young Ulster Fenian who had actually been in Glasgow at the time of Clerkenwell, served as a target of convenience, and like the Manchester three was found guilty on the most shaky evidence. On 26 May 1868, he was the last man to be publicly executed in England. Nearly 2,000 local people collected outside Newgate at 11.00 p.m. for the execution, singing ‘Rule Britannia,’ ‘Champagne Charlie,’ and ‘Oh, my, I’ve Got to Die.’ As if to imply that Manchester, Clerkenwell and Barrett had established the nature of the discourse between Ireland and England, more than a century later, in 1973, a car bomb exploded beside the Old Bailey on the spot where Michael Barrett had died.
In Millbank prison, O’Donovan Rossa, who had spent much time on punishment, sometimes in the ‘black cell,’ from which all light was excluded, sometimes with his hands manacled for weeks so that he had to eat his skilly by lowering his head to the bowl, was visited by the governor. ‘I’ve come to learn if you’ll volunteer to go to the penal settlements of Western Australia.’
Rossa replied, ‘But I’ll do no volunteering.’
‘The government won’t send you otherwise.’
‘Then I’ll remain. I prefer to receive their tortures here than in the wilds of Western Australia.’
Ultimately Rossa would be sent to the military prison at Chatham, where many of the American officers were kept. Here, their excessive punishments would help produce the committee of inquiry known as the Devon Commission.
But the Fenians in Dartmoor were to be shipped, willy-nilly. Including the much-reduced John Boyle O’Reilly, they were marched out of that awful door and had their last dim glimpse of the Farm, the huge, foul drainage system below the prison. They were chained together for their journey with a ‘bright, strong chain,’ and rode to the railway station. Reaching Portland by rail late at night, they moved through a near-empty world to the prison. Here by lamplight they surrendered their Dartmoor clothes and stood about naked for some hours. ‘To the prison officials this seemed highly amusing,’ said O’Reilly, ‘but to me … the point of the joke was rather obscure.’
Re-clothed and sent out to exercise next day, they found themselves with a party of twenty other Fenians. Many were surprised to see how the Dartmoor regime had weakened athletic O’Reilly. All were aware by now that a ship named Hougoumont already stood off Portland with London prisoners in its hold, and some friends from the London prisons were aboard. Now, on 6 October, chained at wrist, ankle and to each other, twenty men to each gang, the Fenians being kept separate from other prisoners, they were marched a short distance to the little harbour steamer which was meant to take them out to the transport. On the wharf waited a young woman who threw herself weeping against the shoulder of the Dublin Fenian Patrick Dunne. Before the ‘merciless officials’ removed her, O’Reilly saw Dunne, whose hands were tethered, lower his head to kiss the woman, his sister. The 22-year-old Dunne had been given a sentence of twenty years, which his sister must have thought the equivalent of life.
Seated in chains on the steamer, they were taken out to board the Hougoumont, and climbed up a stairway to a deck lined with what O’Reilly called soldiers, but what were probably the 50 veterans of the Pensioner Guard, recruited for service in Western Australia with the offer of free passage and promise of land. Chains were now knocked off convicts’ ankles and wrists, and the Dartmoor and Portland Fenians were ordered below into the dim Hades of the convict deck. As they descended into a space whose sides were entirely made up of massive iron bars, ‘the prisoners within clutched the bars and looked eagerly through, hoping, perhaps, to see a familiar face … As we stood thus, a tall gaunt man pushed his way through the criminal crowd to the door.’ It was O’Reilly’s friend, Patrick Keating, a man of nearly forty years, a soldier from the 5th Dragoon Guards. As they were admitted to the teeming, rowdy prison deck, Keating led them aft, ‘to a door leading amidships from the criminal part of the ship.’ That door was unlocked by someone. And, ‘we were with our friends—our brothers. Great God!’
Denis Cashman of Waterford, a 25-year-old married clerk of genteel manners, had been sentenced to seven years as a Fenian. While picking coir fibres in Millbank prison in London, he had heard that he was to be transported to Australia, and so separated from his young wife Kate and his two children. He had been delighted that on the little steamer which took him up the Thames the silent system by which he had lived in prison for the past nine months was over. His meeting with O’Reilly on Hougoumont now was the beginning of a kindly lifetime association on two continents. Cashman had moral strength and would play an almost immediate role in soothing O’Reilly’s desperation.
The ship Hougoumont was 875 tons, less than 60 yards in length, only 34 feet broad at main deck level; and into that cramped equation the master William Cozens would need to fit and maintain 280 male convicts, amongst them 63 Fenians. Hougoumont’s passage would end the transportation to Australia of British convicts which had begun with the little ships of Captain Phillip’s First Fleet in 1788. Perhaps there was an inherent neatness in the fact that Irish politicals, present on so many of the convict ships, should be represented so emphatically upon Hougoumont.
As the ship loaded its last felons at Portland, not everyone in the geographically huge, sparsely populated colony of Western Australia was delighted to be receiving these newcomers. There was fear the Americans would raid Western Australia. ‘They had attempted to rescue Smith O’Brien from Van Diemen’s Land and they would surely attempt to rescue those men by bombarding Fremantle, knocking down the prison walls and letting six thousand ruffians loose.’
The governor of Western Australia was the same Dr John Stephen Hampton who had tussled with O�
��Brien in Van Diemen’s Land. Hampton had suffered since those days: in 1857 a court of inquiry found he had engaged in corrupt practices in running the Van Diemen’s Land convict department—he had gone off to Canada on half-pay, and under a shadow, and many considered he had been lucky to be offered the governorship of Western Australia in 1862. To his administration of Western Australia he brought the same toughness as he had shown in Van Diemen’s Land, interfering very much in convict matters. Now Hampton received from Downing Street, in a dispatch dated 17 October 1867, the official yet offhand news that Fenians were aboard Hougoumont: ‘Some of the Fenian prisoners to the number of ——— should be included.’ The Whitehall clerks did not get around to inking in what number Hampton should expect. But Hampton was an enemy of colonial panic. His own Crown Solicitor, George Leake, warned citizens about Fenian privateers. ‘A vessel merely armed with one long 18 pounder might with shells lay Fremantle in ashes in a few hours.’ The commander of the Fremantle company of the Western Australian Volunteers, Captain Charles Manning, warned Hampton that Western Australia was ‘a community where the Irish element largely prevails, and where about three fifths of the military at my disposal are Irishmen.’ Just before Christmas 1867, with Hougoumont still at sea, Commodore Lambert of the British naval station in Sydney told Hampton he would send him HMS Brisk, a corvette of sixteen guns, to protect Fremantle. Two companies of the 14th Regiment were being sent from Tasmania, though the troops from Tasmania would quickly be withdrawn again. And HMS Brisk, despite its promising name, failed to reach Fremantle before the Fenians did.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 67