The Fremantle Herald had itself stimulated the souls of the Fenians in their scattered work gangs by publishing a letter about possible free pardons for thirty-nine of them. There was a basis for the rumour in the Liberal Gladstone’s victory over Disraeli’s Tories in the elections of December 1868. Gladstone had declared his mandate was to bring peace to Ireland by making concessions.
Down the coast, at a place called Koagulup in the bush near Bunbury, O’Reilly was attached still to the work gang of Warder Henry Woodman. He had by Christmas heard the rumours of pardons, but knew that he and other soldier Fenians were unlikely to be included. His life sentence, in the light of possible release of others, sang to his nihilism. So did the hopelessness of a new affection. His round of visits on Woodman’s behalf in Bunbury each week had included the taking of messages from the encampment to the Woodman house. There he very early met and was kindly treated by Mrs Woodman and Jessie, the warder’s daughter. O’Reilly’s biographer friend Roche, out of sensitivity to O’Reilly’s later American family, claimed that the good-looking Fenian passively ‘attracted the ardent attention of a young girl, daughter of a warder.’ A small vellum-bound notebook found in 1989 in Western Australia, bearing O’Reilly’s name, and manuscript copies of some of his poems, include piquant little notes in his own peculiar shorthand on this romance. ‘I wish she was not so fond of kissing,’ reads one notation, but then, ‘I am in love up to my ears … it would take a saint to give her up.’ In his novel Moondyne, O’Reilly would depict secret meetings in the bush between a noble character named Alice Walmsley and a young man named Will Sheridan. ‘Their sympathy was so deep and unutterable that it verged on the bounds of pain.’ But the love between O’Reilly and Jessie was hopeless, since they could not marry until O’Reilly got his ticket-of-leave, and that was still eight years in the future.
The counsellor to whom he now turned was a priest. The Reverend Patrick McCabe, an Irishman then in his thirties, rode from one convict camp to another, and one evening lay down in a blanket under the trees near the Koagulup camp of Woodman’s gang. O’Reilly approached McCabe and confessed his schemes for escape. McCabe said, ‘It is an excellent way to commit suicide.’ McCabe knew that escape was nearly always destructive in one way or another; a choice between dying of exposure or thirst in the interior, or of trying to get away on the heavily policed shipping of the Western Australian coast. The only convicts who had managed to escape the colony had been ticket-of-leave holders who had been able to earn money to pay bribes. So certain were the authorities of recovering convicts that they had abandoned the practice of running up a red flag on the mast at Fremantle gaol and firing an alarm cannon whenever a prisoner escaped.
McCabe could tell that the balance of O’Reilly’s unusually febrile mind was at stake, and that some stratagem of relief had to be found. He said, ‘Don’t think of that again. Let me think out a plan for you. You’ll hear from me before long.’ It appears though that two days later, O’Reilly attempted suicide. Sub-Inspector William Timperley of Bunbury police records in his interview diary for 27 December 1868 that he had while leaving town overtaken a surgeon, Dr Lovegrove, ‘accompanied as far as Woodman’s camp where the probation constable named Riley, one of the late head centres of Fenianism, had attempted suicide by cutting the veins of his left arm.’ He had been found by a fellow prisoner, ‘when in a faint from loss of blood.’ This was clearly O’Reilly he wrote of, since the only other Fenian of that name, James Reilly, was 100 and more miles to the north in Fremantle.
There were rumours Jessie was pregnant by O’Reilly, and that O’Reilly’s moral despair and the impossibility of marriage had driven him to the act. But no inquiry was made into O’Reilly’s suicide attempt. If there had been one, it might have raised the issue of O’Reilly’s association with Jessie, an outcome Jessie’s father, Woodman, would not have wanted. As for O’Reilly’s attack on himself, intense shame, remorse and helplessness must have worked on him to drive him to an option which, in his theology, committed him to hellfire.
Is Moondyne the key to what happened to O’Reilly’s and Jessie’s child? The hero is guilt-stricken when the heroine Alice gives birth to the stillborn child. ‘And Allie’s white face will haunt him, even in sleep, with her dead child in her arms. Oh God help poor Allie tonight! God comfort the poor little lassie!’ This stillborn and unbaptised child might itself have been the trigger for O’Reilly’s damning himself by picking up a knife.
Since Father McCabe had not seen anyone make good a convict escape, he was now engaged in planning a unique and perilous event. An impetuous plan would ruin his own position in Western Australia but would destroy what was left of Boyle O’Reilly. James Maguire, a young Irish settler to whom McCabe turned for help, would remember later that, ‘Boyle, poor Boyle, cried and cried in desperation for help.’ Maguire was a farmer from a place named Dardanup, inland from Bunbury. Thirty-four years old, he was a justice of the peace and chairman of the Dardanup Road Board. His brother was the Dardanup postmaster.
As O’Reilly, on an errand to Bunbury in the new year of 1869, crossed the Bunbury racecourse, he heard a coo-ee! from the edge of the bush, and saw a sturdy man, axe on shoulder, emerge from scrub. It was Maguire, who had been given a contract to clear some land. He said to O’Reilly, ‘I’m a friend of Father Mac’s,’ and as proof of bona fides, he handed over a card with the handwriting of McCabe. It was expected, Maguire said, that a number of American whalers would touch at Bunbury in February. Maguire pledged, ‘You’ll be a free man in February, as sure as my name is Maguire.’ But O’Reilly was suspicious of such bluster.
In the ferocious Western Australian summer, O’Reilly dealt badly with the anguish of delay. But while the prince was visiting Perth and Fremantle in February 1869, a woodcutter friend of Maguire’s met O’Reilly on the edge of the convict camp and casually stated that three American whaling barks had arrived at Bunbury. For O’Reilly, amongst huge forests of gum and jarrah, native mahogany trees, and beneath that massive, blazing sky, the anticipation of any resolution to his suffering, welcome escape or welcome death, was an itch in the blood. At Spencer’s Hotel in Bunbury, Father McCabe had met, and for a small sum, made an agreement with Captain Anthony Baker, commander of the Yankee barque Vigilant. Baker would take O’Reilly aboard if O’Reilly met up with the ship outside Australian waters. The captain Baker would cruise Vigilant up and down the coast north of Bunbury for three days and keep a lookout for the escapee. At the Koagulup camp, on the appointed night for Maguire to aid O’Reilly’s escape, 18 February 1869, the prisoner wrote a letter to his father, telling him that he had hopes now of a getaway to the United States. The eve-of-escape letter must have been given to Jessie or Maguire for posting, for it was published two months later in Irish newspapers.
At seven o’clock that evening Woodman made his rounds and looked in at all the convicts in their slab timber huts. He would declare that he saw O’Reilly sitting in his bark hovel. Soon after Woodman passed, a convict visited O’Reilly to borrow some tobacco, and remained chatting a little while. Alone again, at eight o’clock, O’Reilly changed into the clothes and boots a supporter—apparently Jessie—had got for him, put out his light, and headed off for the rendezvous in the bush. He had a great advantage in his civilian-style footwear, since convict boots had a broad-arrow pattern of nails in the sole to make it easy for trackers to find any absconder. A few hundred yards into the bush he found he was being followed by a convict sawyer. Whoever it was, he acted with nobility. ‘Are you off?’ the man asked. ‘I knew you meant it. I saw you talking to Maguire a month ago, and I knew it all.’ O’Reilly was expecting to be urged or threatened to let the sawyer join in, but instead the man held out his hand and said, ‘God speed you. I’ll put them on the wrong scent tomorrow.’
Near an abandoned convict station on the Vasse Road, O’Reilly was to lie in the bush until he heard someone approach whistling the first bars of ‘Patrick’s Day.’ Half an hour passed before Maguire and tw
o friends rode up, leading a horse for O’Reilly. The party was made up of Maguire’s cousin and a man O’Reilly later called M———. This discretion was from regard for the man’s situation in Western Australia. After some hours ride north-east, they reached the Collie River and a long inlet, the Leschenault Estuary, stretching north, protected from the Indian Ocean by a long, low coastal strip of land where M———worked. John Boyle O’Reilly and his party met up with three more friends waiting near Bunbury. These new men were ‘Mickie Mackie,’ a shoemaker from Bunbury, and Mark Lyons, both Irishmen. The third was an English ticket-of-leave man and former burglar named Joseph Buswell, whose fishing boat would now be used. The old British lag Buswell had in his day been one of those demons of the convict deck to whom the Fenians had felt superior. The party dragged the boat through the mud to reach the water, but M———refused to get aboard—he had promised his wife not to go in the boat. Maguire’s cousin yelled, ‘All right, go home to your wife!,’ which O’Reilly thought rather harsh treatment for a man who had already taken risks for the sake of someone he did not know.
Once out of the lagoon, creeping past Bunbury through the relatively narrow heads of the port into the Indian Ocean, they bent vigorously to the oars in open sea. At sunrise only the tops of the sandhills of Mowenup could be seen. By early afternoon, Vigilant had not appeared, and did not seem to be putting out at all that day. Ravenous and extremely thirsty, O’Reilly’s party ran the boat ashore through strong surf, pulling it up high on an enormous length of beach.
Maguire, O’Reilly and the others wandered for hours through the dry swamps searching for water, even films of moisture beneath the bark of paperbark trees. Mark Lyons eventually located a slab hut where his brother-in-law, Jackson, lived remotely, overseeing a herd of water buffalo. Maguire thought it too dangerous to take O’Reilly to Jackson’s, so the party left him in a screen of paperbarks, where he dealt with his thirst by eating a raw possum he dragged from a hollow tree. He made a bed for himself in the sand dunes out of the boughs of the snake, ant, and centipede repelling peppermint tree. Next morning his party of abettors was back, and at about one o’clock, one of them who had been in the dunes on lookout with a telescope came running down the beach with news of having sighted Vigilant. The Buswell fishing boat was run out immediately through the surf, and O’Reilly and the party rowed to intercept the whaler. Maguire fixed a white shirt on top of the oar, and the entire party, O’Reilly included, roared and shouted. But the Vigilant, though obviously on search, passed them by, disappearing into haze.
O’Reilly’s disappointment as they landed him that night was of course savage, but Maguire decided to introduce the charming escapee to Mr and Mrs Jackson. Before Maguire left, he took trouble to reassure devastated O’Reilly that missing Vigilant was not the end. He guaranteed to be back within a week with new arrangements. This seemed to constitute a promise in which O’Reilly put childlike trust. The escapee’s three Irish companions and the Englishman Buswell now put out in the surf again and rowed back to Bunbury, leaving O’Reilly in the limbo of the dunes.
As Maguire found out back in Bunbury, the reason for Vigilant’s being a day late in coming up the coast had been that a convict named Thompson absconded from Bunbury the same night as O’Reilly’s escape, and Vigilant was searched. Thompson was not discovered aboard, but, as Sub-Inspector Timperley returned to his office, ‘I received a report that No 9843 John O’Reilly had absconded from the Vasse road party … I may also state that this same prisoner attempted suicide on the 27th of December last by cutting the veins in his arm.’ By then Vigilant was clearing the harbour under full sail, and Woodrow and Timperley believed O’Reilly to be aboard.
When next day Timperley interviewed Woodman, O’Reilly’s warder at Koagulup, Woodman said he had spoken to O’Reilly at ten thirty or so, warning him as night watchman to keep a lookout on a bushfire that was burning close to the camp. In saying so, Woodman was either lying or mistaken. And if lying, was he doing it to save O’Reilly or to be quit of his potentially tragic love for Jessie? In any case, Timperley reasoned that if Woodman was right, O’Reilly would have been unable to get to Vigilant before it sailed. He had the sand dunes around Bunbury searched, and found not O’Reilly but Thompson. He also boarded two other Yankee whalers in port, Gazelle and Classic, to offer them each £5 in reward for catching O’Reilly on board. As for local people, ‘I am … certain,’ he warned, ‘that many would assist a Fenian who would not stir hand or foot for an ordinary prisoner of the Crown.’ Superintendent Hare of Perth, a Galway Orangeman enraged at Fenian escape, would become dissatisfied with Timperley’s contradictory bulletins to headquarters, particularly a new one suggesting that O’Reilly must have got away on the Vigilant, and asked petulantly, ‘Is any horse missing in the neighbourhood, for O’Reilly was a cavalry soldier?’ Perhaps, pleaded Timperley, O’Reilly was boarded on Vigilant after the whaler left by one Buswell who had been under suspicion of similar attempts in the past. All this argument and multiplicity of searches helped O’Reilly.
O’Reilly, tormented by the possibility that the Vigilant might still be making inshore searches, had, about 21 February, found an old dory half buried in sand. He dug it free, re-floated it, and rowed out at dusk to try to encounter the whaler. Seeing nothing, he returned to shore, killed some possums and kangaroo rats in the dunes and skinned them, and in early light took again to sea with the meat wrapped in a cloth and towed behind him in the water. All day he searched, hoping the northerly current would sweep him within view of the lingering whale ship. He suffered a great deal from the sun, and the possum and kangaroo rat meat was taken by sharks. In the afternoon he did sight a ship, almost certainly Vigilant, but again it tacked away. Later, in America, O’Reilly accepted Captain Baker’s explanation that neither Buswell’s larger fishing boat nor the dory had been seen by lookouts.
O’Reilly remained at sea that night, sleeping in the bottom of his dory, and returned exhausted to shore the next day. As a recluse of the dunes and the peppermint groves, he was now underpinned by the tenuous mercy of wild colonials and old lags. But he was cheered by the arrival by boat of Maguire, Mickie Mackie, and the previously much-abused M———. Maguire brought a letter from Father McCabe, whose certitude—McCabe asked O’Reilly to remember him when he was long escaped and safe—revived O’Reilly. McCabe told him that a new arrangement had been made with a Captain David R. Gifford of the bark Gazelle of New Bedford, Massachusetts, due to sail from Bunbury the next day, and willing to take O’Reilly on board. Gifford had agreed to take O’Reilly only as far as Java, and Father McCabe had paid him £10 for that. It would become apparent that the money was not paramount.
By storm lantern in Jackson’s hut, Maguire now broke to O’Reilly the less welcome news. A ‘local ticket-of-leave man,’ Thomas Henderson, alias Martin Bowman, had somehow already heard of the escape attempt. Years later O’Reilly would surmise that the unwitting link who gave Henderson the news was Jackson’s young son, Matthew. Henderson was a volatile quantity, but they had no choice but to take him along, or else risk being exposed.
The next morning, 27 February, O’Reilly said goodbye to the Jacksons, who had kept faith with him through their reflex hatred of authority as it existed in the penal colony. At first light Maguire’s crew of four or five, with O’Reilly and Henderson, rowed out through the surf to intercept the path of Gazelle. O’Reilly must have felt mounting disappointment as afternoon came without a sighting. It was towards evening that they saw the whaler, and this time there were no near misses. Gazelle hailed them, specifically using O’Reilly’s name.
Buswell’s boat pulled alongside Gazelle, and as O’Reilly climbed up onto the outboard shelf where whale oil casks were lashed, he was helped over the gunnels by a young Yankee officer, the third mate, Henry C. Hathaway, who would become a lifelong friend. Now O’Reilly was welcomed aboard by Captain Gifford. He was told he would be given accommodation aft. Henderson/Bowman was given quarters in the foc’sle wi
th the crew. While O’Reilly was still shaking hands with Captain Gifford and the officers of Gazelle, Maguire stood up in his rowboat and called, ‘God bless you; don’t forget us, and don’t mention our names until you know it’s all over.’ Seeing these men distanced now by water, about to row back to their colonial existence, their Australian futures, O’Reilly wept.
Hathaway, the young third mate, became O’Reilly’s closest friend aboard Gazelle. O’Reilly impressed him by not being content to be a mere passenger. When a whale was sighted off the north west coast of Australia, he petitioned Gifford to be allowed to go hunting it in Hathaway’s whaleboat. O’Reilly seemed to cherish the encounter more for its literary potential than its whale oil, as, getting in close, Hathaway himself launched the lance. So recently a felon, O’Reilly was now placing himself at the heart of the quintessential Yankee rite of valour. It was an omen for the sort of American he would become.
The whale dragged Hathaway’s boat and then turned, striking it with its flukes—according to Hathaway, ‘knocking her to atoms.’ Taking oars for buoyancy, the crew jumped into the sea. The whale swam away, dragging its harpoon, its trail of blood and a fragment of the bow of the boat with it. Clustered at the shattered stern, the men sighted O’Reilly floating facedown. Hathaway clung to the stove-in boat’s side with one hand, reached for O’Reilly’s hair with the other and pulled him upright. Froth was running from nostrils and mouth as Hathaway used a form of artificial respiration: ‘punching him to revive him.’ The escapee suffered such severe concussion and head pains that he asked why they had bothered to rescue him. Later in life though, on the sometimes too solid earth, faced with furious Irish factionalism, O’Reilly would write a great deal, including one of his famous recitative poems, The Amber Whale, praised by poets like Whittier and popular arbiters such as Horace Greeley, about this journey of escape, the simple apolitical elements of friendship and physical daring. The poem dealt with a whaling legend heard aboard Gazelle, a tale reminiscent of Melville’s Moby Dick: the accursed, abnormal whale and demented men, tethered together by the rope and the lance, going to hell together.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 70