‘… It’s just fifteen years, shipmates,’ said old Mat, ending his tale;
‘And I often pray that I’ll never see another Amber Whale.’
The Gazelle did not in fact drop O’Reilly in Java. His presence was welcome in the cabin, and the charm and narrative ability which had enchanted Jessie Woodman was at work on those whale hunters.
Ultimately, need of fresh water forced Gazelle into Rodriguez Island, a British possession in the Indian Ocean near Mauritius. Gifford must have thought the risk acceptable. Perhaps he wanted some way to unload Henderson too. Just before sunset on the day of Gazelle’s arrival in the harbour, the resident magistrate of the island and a party of police came aboard. The magistrate asked Hathaway, as officer of the deck, whether, amongst other escapees, including Henderson/Bowman, a man named John Boyle O’Reilly was on board. Hathaway asked for descriptions. Uttering a story he and Gifford had worked on together before putting into harbour, Hathaway said that a man named Brown, survivor of a shipwreck, resembled the description of O’Reilly, but he had died two months before in the Sunda Strait. The magistrate demanded that the crew be lined up on deck, and according to O’Reilly’s biographer Roche, it was during this muster that a young sailor who had been persecuted by Henderson in the foc’sle gave away his tormentor’s identity. O’Reilly himself would never forget including him by name in his later novel, depicting him as ‘satisfied with his own depravity, and convinced that everyone was as vile as he.’
Gifford, ashore at the time, felt threatened by the magistrate’s actions and feared that the British might confiscate Gazelle. Nor did O’Reilly seem to behave with the coolness he’d shown during the magistrate’s visit. He had got hold of a pistol somehow, and told Hathaway that he was determined to shoot it out with the British authorities. In dealings with other humans O’Reilly was a moderate and sympathetic man; but he contemplated only extreme resolutions for himself. A more practical stratagem was devised, said Hathaway, an arrangement to which, apparently, not even Captain Gifford was party. Hathaway would engage the night watch in conversation while O’Reilly walked out across the darker reaches of the deck to the gunnels with a grindstone and his hat, drop both of them overboard, then run down the cabin companionway and hide himself in the small locker behind it. Hathaway had taken care already to tell the watch to look out for O’Reilly, because he had earlier tried to kill himself in Western Australia. The splash of the grindstone coincided with this warning. One of the suggestible young sailors claimed to have glimpsed O’Reilly’s face before it sank beneath the water. The crew searched the harbour for hours, only O’Reilly’s hat being found. Hathaway was still on deck to greet the second mate as he climbed back aboard, and leaned out over the side with tears in his eyes. ‘He’s gone, poor fellow! Here’s his hat.’
O’Reilly remained hidden overnight while his wet hat lay on the hatchway for presentation to the police. In the early morning, the police boat arrived with the magistrate and Henderson, who was now willing to identify O’Reilly in return for a deal. Gifford broke to the magistrate the news of the man lost overboard, and the grief on all faces was no doubt convincing. That evening Gazelle set to sea with official blessing. As the ship cleared the harbour, Hathaway went below and, hauling away the companionway steps which had been pushed up against the locker, found O’Reilly lying in the cramped space in a tortured heap. ‘I can see his face right before me now, white as chalk, eyes as black as night.’ Hathaway helped him extricate himself. ‘Now,’ said Hathaway, ‘Go and shake hands with the captain.’ When O’Reilly came up the companionway, Gifford wasted little time on speculation about phantoms, understanding at once the subterfuge. Hathaway said the skipper ‘burst out crying, just like a baby.’ Frederick Hussey, first mate on the Gazelle, would later express his belief that the magistrate was ‘not so badly fooled as we thought.’ The magistrate’s wife was Irish, and the magistrate himself had advised Captain Gifford not to keep the flag at half-mast, since it would only lead to an insistence by the Rodriguez police authorities that the harbour be dragged.
The next landfall for Gazelle would need to be one of the British islands in the mid-Atlantic, St Helena for example. Captain Gifford knew O’Reilly would be at risk from talkativeness amongst his fellow sailors. But off the Cape of Good Hope Gazelle encountered the bark Sapphire of Boston, on its way to Liverpool from Bombay, and commanded by a Captain Seiders. A seaman named John Soule had deserted from Gazelle, and O’Reilly took Soule’s name and papers aboard Sapphire. Seiders, however, having been told O’Reilly’s true name and history, gave him a room in the cabin section, and treated him with every kindness. The escapee carried with him £20 Gifford had advanced him, which would again suggest that the £10 deal he had done with McCabe had not been his chief motivation in aiding the escape. O’Reilly had argued with Gifford, ‘I may never reach America; I may never be able to repay you.’ To which the Yankee whaler stylishly replied, ‘If you never reach America, I shall be very sorry for you; if you are never able to repay me, I shall not be much the poorer.’
Four years later, O’Reilly’s first book of verse would bear a dedication to Captain David Gifford of the whaling bark Gazelle of New Bedford. But just in case Gifford wanted to go whaling again, O’Reilly would maintain the fiction that the Gazelle had stumbled on O’Reilly. ‘It pleased God that my boat was seen from the masthead of the Gazelle, commanded by Captain Gifford, who picked me up and treated me with all kindness during a seven months’ whaling cruise.’
O’Reilly’s transhipping to Sapphire left a sense of vacancy aboard Gazelle, where the escapee had been for five months. Hathaway wrote a touching letter to O’Reilly dated 29 July 1869, the very day O’Reilly left the whaler: ‘Dear old fellow: I am now seated at the old donkey, where we’ve sat side by side for the last five months, more or less, and have been reading over some of your pieces of poetry, and it makes me lonesome.’ As if this voyage were indelibly marked by O’Reilly, Hathaway would eventually give his Gazelle journal to him.
On board Sapphire, O’Reilly made friends with a sympathetic English gentleman named Bailey, who undertook to help him secure passage for America after Sapphire reached Liverpool in October. Landed in the great port he had not seen since his career as a young journalist, O’Reilly lodged in a house organised for him by Captain Seiders. He toyed with the idea of visiting the town of Preston, some thirty miles north, and the aunt with whom he had lived in his adolescence, but decided this was too dangerous. He liked in later days, however, to relate how he and the Englishman Bailey engaged in a long conversation with a Liverpool policeman about directions.
Captain Seiders and Bailey organised passage for O’Reilly aboard the Yankee ship Bombay of Bath, Maine, whose captain lacked a third mate and now made room for O’Reilly to fulfil that role. Two days out of Liverpool on Bombay, O’Reilly saw the Antrim coast passing by beneath dappled clouds. ‘Ireland was there, under the sun; but under the dark cloud also,’ he would later tell an audience in Boston. He would never see that or any other Irish coastline again. On 23 November 1869, a little more than two years from the date of his taking passage on the Hougoumont, he arrived at Philadelphia. Ever the tender of celebratory verses, O’Reilly wrote a poem for Bombay’s captain.
May you bear your master always as through perils past away:
And whatever sea you sail upon—God speed you old Bombay.
Despite the stake Gifford had loaned him, he may have looked ashore at the city’s golden domes with some anxiety. What could be made of this sprawling republic? Would he be lost here, as the Young Ireland escapee McManus had been, finding validation only as a corpse?
In the Atlantic a few days before O’Reilly arrived in Philadelphia, Hathaway had written to him of both friendship and of Yankee attitudes to political prisoners. ‘I hope the time is not far hence when some of your old friends from Australia will be with you, enjoying freedom instead of bondage … God bless them! and may the time soon arrive when they will have a
helping hand to assist them in escaping. There goes eight bells.’ Apparently Hathaway and O’Reilly had daydreamed of a mass escape of Fenians by whaler, an expensive and intricate project which would take six more years and other engaged souls to arrange.
The day after O’Reilly’s arrival, an excited Philadelphia Fenian delegation came on board and took him ashore. When he recounted his adventures, they found them too difficult to credit, which for a moment left him chagrined. O’Reilly insisted on being taken almost at once to the United States District Court to apply for naturalisation. He may have done so on legal advice: citizenship would seal his escape. But neither Meagher nor Mitchel had had at the time of their escapes citizenship immediately available to them, and had not suffered the remotest risk of being returned. Perhaps it was that an instant and ardent commitment to America suited his thorough-going character. Two years later, speaking at an International Music Festival in Boston, he argued that the newcomer owed a duty of citizenship to America. ‘He resigns his prejudices on the threshold of the Temple of Liberty. They are melted down in the great crucible of public opinion.’
The Philadelphia Irish then put him on the train up to New York to face a full reception and to give his first American lecture, the mechanism by which Australian escapees had traditionally stood up for Ireland and themselves in that great city of the Americas. Accommodated in a hotel on Broadway, he had a sense of Fenian factions competing for his blessing and for ownership. Given the way Irish prisoners had been kept waiting for the uprising as factions formed, money had been squandered and Canada invaded, he was angered.
It became apparent that everyone expected him to settle in New York, as had Thomas Francis Meagher and other Young Ireland escapees. Horace Greeley, who had published The Amber Whale, offered him a job on the Tribune. But there were pressing invitations to Boston. Dr Robert Joyce, a Boston literary man and physician, took a warm interest in O’Reilly as a poet. After the escapee arrived in Boston on reconnaissance, Patrick A. Collins, son of impoverished immigrants, now a 24-year-old State Congressman with a law degree from Harvard, quickly became a friend of O’Reilly’s. Thomas Manning, wealthy Irish Bostonian, gave him lodging, and Collins and Joyce set out to get O’Reilly a job with the British-based Inman Steamship Company. Sadly, the Irishman who ran the Boston office received orders that O’Reilly be sacked. An eminent Irishman, Patrick Donahoe, forty years a Boston newspaperman, offered him the job of reporter at the Pilot, the journal of the Boston Irish community.
O’Reilly adjusted to the life of an asylum-seeking political prisoner with great ease and much more civic grace than John Mitchel. Few other than the most factional Irish were unimpressed by O’Reilly, and he began making friends amongst Old Boston as well as amongst the Irish of the North and South End. In January 1870 he gave a public lecture, ‘England’s Political Prisoners,’ in the Boston Music Hall, the first of a number of pleas for his fellow prisoners in Australia. Hathaway and Gifford, having brought the Gazelle safely and profitably to port, sat on the stage and heard him praise them. According to witnesses, people delighted in the nobility of O’Reilly’s face and expression, the brightness of his eye, and his rich, browned complexion. He was asked to repeat the lecture in Salem, Lawrence, Providence and elsewhere.
The Boston Irish were grateful to him for his sufferings; that Ireland would be delivered by Christ-like suffering as much as by battles won being the concept the Irish took for granted. As Irish hero, he had the right gestures of nobility. A Ladies’ Committee in Ireland, where his escape had been well-chronicled, sent him £10 to help him set up. O’Reilly returned it with a letter. ‘There are many in Ireland—many who suffered from the loss of their bread-winners in the old cause—they want it; let them have it.’ Leaving Mr Thomas Manning’s house, he took good lodgings in Staniford Street, Charlestown, and wrote to his aunt in Preston that he worked for magazines, reported for the Pilot, drilled the Irish Legion, and gave lectures. He was ecstatic to be so busy.
27
FENIANS AT LARGE
And what have the liberated Fenians done to deserve an ovation where Royal blood was so recently spilt?
Sydney Morning Herald,
16 October 1869
In the second week of May 1869 a dispatch from Gladstone’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, Earl Granville, arrived on Governor Bruce’s desk in Perth. It granted ‘a Remission to Thomas Cullinane or Bowler and the other prisoners named in the accompanying Warrant under the Royal Sign Manual.’ Significantly, recognising their political status, Earl Granville said the pardoned prisoners did not belong ‘to the Criminal Class,’ had no opportunity in Western Australia to repeat political offences of which they have been guilty, and would be less of a peril to public order ‘than any ordinary offender who receives a pardon.’
In all, thirty-four were conditionally pardoned. But there was inconsistency: James Kearney and George Connolly from McGarry’s party, with unblemished records, both serving 7-year sentences, were not on the list, whereas John Kenealy, far higher in the Fenian organisation, serving a 10-year sentence, was given a free pardon, as also was the Dubliner Hugh Brophy, Warder Howard’s rebellious convict constable. A delighted Denis Cashman was released, but not the editor of the Wild Goose, John Flood, serving fifteen years. The illogicalities of the list were more a matter of clerical incompetence than malice, and to some of the Fenians not named, that must have seemed crueller than design. The pardon in particular tormented the minds of those whom the Duke of Cambridge, commander of the British army, would not permit to be released. These were men such as Hogan, Cranston, Hassett, serving life sentences as former British soldiers.
For the thirty-four pardoned men in Western Australia, freedom descended like a thunderclap. The men were simply brought to Fremantle and allowed to walk out of the convict establishment into the streets. They lacked the finances, however, to do it in any meaningful way. In Dublin and Cork, huge dinners marked the announcement of the amnesty, and money was slated to be sent from Ireland. But on the spot, and at the time, the Western Australian convicts would have welcomed a fragment of what was raised at those events. Two of the pardoned, Hugh Brophy and Joseph Noonan, had been in the construction industry in Ireland, and now applied for and were democratically granted a contract to build a bridge over the Swan River. Noonan and Brophy employed a number of the others on the Swan River project. The pardoned men now decided that Kenealy should go to the eastern colonies of Australia to collect and raise money to help the men move.
Kenealy had personal friends in the dry goods business in Melbourne and the hinterland of Victoria. He also had returned to him on release a family watch which had somehow been shipped from Portland prison aboard Hougoumont, and undertook to sell it to pay his fare to Melbourne. ‘Our circumstances got noised around,’ Kenealy later recounted, ‘and three or four good Irish girls, one of them a cousin of young Allen of the Manchester Martyrs, immediately came to our rescue and insisted that I should keep my watch.’ Patrick Maloney, ‘a good Clare man’ accommodated a number of Fenians free of charge in his Perth pub. He loaned Kenealy £25 for expenses.
Leaving Perth on the mail coach on 25 June 1869, Kenealy travelled down to Albany to meet the mail steamer from England on her way to Melbourne. Somewhere between Perth and Bunbury, he was trying to fall asleep at night on the hard seat of the halted coach when he heard a knock on the door. It was Sergeant Darragh, a Protestant Fenian, formerly of the 2nd Foot and thus still condemned to a life sentence. Kenealy was delighted to be escorted to a warm hammock. In the morning, Darragh served his freed compatriot ‘a prime kangaroo steak.’ Kenealy would never forget that favour [nor Darragh’s predicament].
Kenealy’s Western Australian passport said that he was a liberated convict, and he knew that South Australia and Victoria had legislated prohibiting convicts from any penal settlement from entering until three years after being released. Would he be permitted to land in Melbourne? In Albany, Father Delany, former chaplain of the H
ougoumont, was the pastor, and insisted that Kenealy take £5 from him, and argued emphatically that Kenealy travel first class on the steamer, since that might help him slip past the scrutiny of the Melbourne police. And so Kenealy, having travelled to Western Australia in the convict quarters of a transport, now went east aboard the steamer Geelong in first class, making friends with a genial old Scotsman and his wife who had made their final visit to Scotland and were going home to New South Wales. The old Scot advised that Kenealy—if allowed to land—should stay at the Duke of Rothsay Hotel in Elizabeth Street. It cannot have been unpleasant to have everyone he met urging him towards the best of everything.
When the steamer put into immense Port Phillip Bay, detectives from ashore walked amongst them crying, ‘Anyone from Western Australia?’ Kenealy recognised an Irish accent, so handed this man his pass. The detective argued that he could not land, but seemed reassured when Kenealy said he would stay at the Duke of Rothsay. After landing then at Port Melbourne and booking into his hotel, Kenealy went late at night to the house of James Fearon, who had written to Western Australia offering help, knocked on the door and was admitted by Fearon’s adolescent son. ‘… a middle aged man trying to divest himself of night clothes and get into some others as quickly as possible, came downstairs, pale and trembling with nervous excitement, rushed at me, pulled me into a drawing room or parlour, got everybody, from wife to baby, out of bed, to come and take a look at me.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 71