Devoy read the letters to the Clan na Gael Conference in Baltimore that July. The convention’s sixty-one delegates, representing 5,000 members, included O’Donovan Rossa, Thomas Clarke Luby, Captain McCafferty himself, William Roantree the filibuster, and Colonel Ricard O’Sullivan Bourke, whose attempted rescue from Clerkenwell prison had become an East End tragedy. All these men had served time in British prisons, and so had a basis of sympathy with Wilson. As a result of lobbying by Devoy, Roantree and others, Clan na Gael’s supreme council of five recommended to the convention that a rescue of the Australian prisoners should be undertaken. It was proposed from the platform that funds be raised for an unspecified rescue project, but before the vote was taken, delegates asked for fuller information. Under conditions of greater confidentiality, Devoy promised, he would give a fuller briefing to individuals.
All the delegates voted in favour. But Devoy wondered if the enterprise was in characteristic Irish peril from secrets shared too widely. For the broadly sketched resolution to authorise a rescue attempt had now to be printed and sent out to the eighty-six existing branches of Clan na Gael. The report would be read by the majority of the 5,000 membership in good standing. Branches which were founded after the authorisation of the rescue, as the membership rose to 7,500 men, increased the possibility that the plan would be given away. Even so, there was not a single immediate dollar available from conventional Clan na Gael funds. In its seven years of existence the Clan had collected $42,000, which according to the Clan’s articles could be devoted only to insurrection in Ireland—not in Canada, and still less in Australia. And some members questioned the authenticity of the Voice from the Tomb letter. Devoy had to present the envelope with its Australian postmark to convince them.
Firebrand John McCafferty had devised a somewhat cheaper but less viable scheme: to kidnap the Prince of Wales, rakish Prince Edward (the future Edward VII), and hold him as a hostage on a sailing vessel until the British Government agreed to release the remaining Fenian prisoners. McCafferty had even drawn up a memorandum on the prince’s favourite amusements, and sought a grant of $5,000 from the Clan. He was told that other actions would be taken.
An Australian Prisoners Rescue Committee was selected, of whom the most effective members included Devoy and James Reynolds, a very successful New Haven glass founder. Another active committeeman was Dr William Carroll, a Philadelphia surgeon, County Donegal born, Presbyterian, who had been a Union army surgeon with the rank of major. An heroic contributor of funds was John C. Talbot, a dry goods merchant in San Francisco, who had employed Kenealy soon after his arrival from Western Australia. Talbot was clearly a devoted organiser, who caught fire at the Baltimore convention, and on his return home informed Devoy, ‘I have not been idle since I left New York.’ He had got off the train in Nevada on the way west, and held a meeting in Virginia City, Nevada, at which he read Wilson’s letter and one of Hogan’s. ‘I spoke manly, yet feelingly, told them that I was there at a great personal loss to my business but that worldly considerations with me were set aside when such a letter was placed in my charge.’
Arrived back in San Francisco, he intended to summon and invigorate Ds, that is club leaders, from the considerable Irish community in Los Angeles, San Jose, Sacramento, Mexico City. ‘John Kenealy,’ wrote Talbot, ‘was elected Treasurer for San Francisco. I insisted that some person should be appointed, so that a check would be placed on me. Business is business now, my dear boy.’ Talbot and his lieutenant Kenealy would prove to be excellent fund raisers in San Francisco’s golden hinterland. John Kenealy had recently married May Dillon, the sister of a co-worker, and was in the process of planning a move from San Francisco by coastal steamer to the small and, but for tremors, delightful town of Los Angeles, population about 8,500. There, as soon as his original 10-year sentence had expired, allowing him to undertake buying trips to England and Ireland, he intended to go into business with his wife’s brother, James Dillon. Kenealy’s value to the enterprise was not only financial; like O’Reilly, he knew the routines of Western Australia. The editors of Devoy’s Post Bag, a compilation of all Devoy’s correspondence, described Kenealy as ‘one of Devoy’s first confidantes in the rescue plans.’ Even after he moved to Los Angeles, Kenealy remained John C. Talbot’s treasurer, and the Californians’ effort would be so large that they would ultimately demand that one of the agents sent ahead by steamer should be nominated by them.
The ageing John Mitchel was asked to give a fund-raising lecture. Rossa organised the event and sent Mitchel a fee of $100, which Mitchel returned. ‘When I was in Australian captivity I never could have dreamed of any possibility of escape, but for the means supplied for that purpose by our good countrymen.’ Copies of Mitchel’s letter were likewise circulated to Clan branches to stimulate funds.
Subscriptions to the rescue effort were slow, and it seemed enough to buy a ship would never come in. The committee discussed that a whaler might be paid to call into Western Australia and take the men on board. O’Reilly and Devoy were in consultation, and O’Reilly suggested Devoy should get advice from Captain Henry C Hathaway of New Bedford, formerly third mate aboard Gazelle, the ship which had rescued John Boyle O’Reilly.
Devoy made his living at that stage as night editor of his paper, and left New York at dawn on 29 January 1875 for Boston to see O’Reilly, and then to go on to New Bedford to meet Hathaway. From the main depot in Boston, Devoy went straight to a meeting of the officers of the Celtic Club, a branch of the local Clan na Gael. The men he met were strongly against any involvement of O’Reilly. They told him that a few years before, at the request of the Archbishop of Boston, many eminent Irish—O’Reilly, Robert Dwyer Joyce, Patrick Collins and John ‘Honey’ Fitzgerald—had all weakened and resigned from the Clan. Devoy found that his maligned friend was working at a savage, self-punishing pace, often sleeping the night on a cot in the office and waking to write copy. Long after, the Wexford People quoted an O’Reilly sentiment when it greeted US President Kennedy to Ireland in 1963: ‘Freedom is more than a resolution—he is not free who is free alone.’ It was an aphorism which grew from his special circumstances as the only life-sentenced soldier Fenian who had got away.
Devoy spent that Monday talking to O’Reilly’s journalist Denis Cashman and making notes on the Fremantle penal establishment. On Tuesday, carrying a letter of introduction written by O’Reilly, he took the train for New Bedford. This coastal town was the great centre of Yankee whaling in the nineteenth century. Amongst its whalers Herman Melville had absorbed the whaling lore he would exploit for Moby Dick. Though the New Bedford hillsides a little further up the river from the whaling port were numerous with textile mills, great employers of Irish and Italian immigrants, New Bedford liked to be regarded as a city of whalers, not of satanic mills. Devoy located Hathaway, now night captain of the New Bedford police, at the courthouse. Hathaway read O’Reilly’s letter, and took Devoy to confer in a vacant room. The former whaler warmly entered into the project. He recommended the buying of a vessel, ‘and gave solid reasons why any other course would not be safe … splendid physique; handsome, honest face; quite English-looking, wears only side whiskers.’ Hathaway suggested that the ship, once bought, should be fitted out as a whaler, and a trustworthy captain found. If the whaling was good, the ship would pay for itself. On the other hand, if they merely paid a captain to attempt the rescue, said Hathaway, the value of two good whales would exceed by far whatever fee the Rescue Committee promised him.
Devoy needed to argue this case with the committee, and began with his reliable ally, the New Haven businessman James Reynolds. On 3 February, he wrote to Reynolds, ‘A ship could be bought and fitted out for $12,000, to go there direct—ostensibly on a whaling voyage—and bring them straight to San Francisco, where she could be sold for $4,000 or $5,000. By doing a little whaling or taking a cargo all the other expenses could be cleared.’ Devoy kept at Reynolds: ‘The more I see of this thing the more clear it appears to me that we can�
��t do it in our time nor safely at any time, unless we buy a ship.’ But he needed to accumulate $15,000 to be safe, and the Clan subscription had so far brought in only $7,000. As well, many branches of the Clan wanted to send their men ahead. O’Reilly thought this crazy. ‘One man is all that is needed to go to Australia: that man should be yourself.’ In the end, though some branches never subscribed, others pledged the requisite funds to buy a whaler. Yet in Devoy’s own branch of the Clan in New York, a trustee held up a disbursement of $2,500. Devoy, with an active but troublesome young committee member named Goff, a future New York Supreme Court judge, arrived in New Bedford on 9 March to make a bid on a ship Hathaway had advised them was available.
Devoy and Goff arrived too late to bid—the ship they wanted went for $6,300. Goff had to go home, but, ‘I will stay here until a ship is bought.’ Hathaway had by now introduced Devoy to John T. Richardson, a New Bedford shipowner, middle-aged and of no notable Irish connection, who in turn pointed Devoy to a suitable bark named Catalpa. Richardson declared it a good buy.
And so John Devoy had news for Reynolds. ‘We have bought a vessel and she must be paid for Saturday. The amount is $5,250, and there are some fees, pilotage to this port, ballast, etc., to be paid besides, and some of the outfit and stores already bought.’ All he had in hand however was $4,900. Richardson proved altogether very accommodating—he advanced his own money to buy Catalpa and transferred the ownership to James Reynolds of the committee, on condition that Reynolds sent personal surety for repaying Richardson his advance within a month. Indeed, incoming Clan na Gael funds did redeem the note within thirty days.
After the ice thawed in the estuary of the Acushnet River, Catalpa was taken north along the river to a dock where she could be fitted out. To the modern eye, the ship’s dimensions were modest: a mere 202 tons, 90 feet in length, 25 feet broad, with a depth of 12 feet. On her last journey she had carried a cargo of logwood from the West Indies. The centre house, where coxswain, carpenter and other leading hands bunked, and the galley, stood on a little island above the open hold. Now the decking had to be extended, and a fo’c’sle built for the crew. It was discovered too that the keelson, the beam in the keel against which the main mast rested, had rotted. It was deftly replaced by a New Bedford shipwright.
Hathaway helped Devoy with expenses by indicating items normally taken aboard a whaler which might safely be dispensed with. By mid-April, J. T. Richardson was indicating to Devoy that the vessel fit out might well bring the total costs to $17,000. Devoy needed to meet bills as they were presented. ‘I hope you will be punctual in forwarding more money as soon as possible,’ he begged the Rescue Committee.
Richardson was so emotionally engaged by now that he supplied a captain too: his own son-in-law, a handsome, stocky whaler of twenty-nine years, George B. Anthony—like Richardson, of absolutely no Irish background. He was married to Richardson’s daughter Annie, who expected him to take a safe land job, for they had an infant named Sophie. Anthony, an excellent navigator and a natural commander, had recently come home from the sea, and himself represented the changes overtaking the whaling industry. In Pennsylvania in 1859, petroleum oil had been discovered and was replacing whale oil. It had been a good era for Anthony to tell his young, pregnant wife that he would take the offer of a suitable supervisory job in the mills. But he was anxious for a last chance to command a whaler, take a final run. Thus Richardson conspired against his own daughter, having probably felt himself an occasional impulse to give up the fragmentary, fretful life ashore for a last dose of the clarity and pure terms of whale chasing. When Devoy briefed Anthony on the scope of what the whaler was to do, Anthony became excited. There was glory and profit in it, an extra bonus, said Devoy, on top of the normal whaling profit. The Catalpa project was designed to be a man’s last, wonderfully managed ploy, one calculated to cement in New Bedford whaling myth the title ‘Captain’ inseparably to Anthony’s name. The young Mrs Anthony was somehow reconciled to this final voyage. The captain’s share of a whaling expedition, along with the good mill wages, would ensure the Anthony family a decent affluence.
Writing to Devoy, Captain Hathaway was also excited by the inherent mischief of the enterprise, and referred to the ship as ‘the Horse,’ and to New Bedford as ‘Charleston.’ ‘He will more than pay for himself this coming season on the track … I hope you will be punctual in sending us the fodder, as grain is on the rise here.’ On 22 April, Hathaway told Reynolds that the vessel was expected to go to sea the following Thursday morning. But Mr Richardson ‘wishes me to state that the amount that will be required for ship and outfits will be about $18,000.’ Hathaway was apologetic that this much money was involved, but, ‘we have been as prudent as possible and bought everything at the lowest market price, and bought nothing but what is actually required for the voyage. Mr Devoy will be here in time to see her go, for I want him to see her as she is fitted for sea. You have a good ship.’
The large items of Catalpa’s cost, which in the end totalled $19,010, was the ship itself, $5,250; carpentry, $1,500; coppering, $1,600; beef and pork, $1,150; casks for whale oil, $1,550. On top of that there were the costs of pilotage, sail making and cordage.
As Devoy planned his Yankee raid on Western Australia, John Mitchel was considering his own climactic invasion of Ireland. When last seen in 1867, indomitable Mitchel, repenting of Fenianism, had returned to New York and become a grandfather. He still seemed to many, even with his Confederate sins and Union chastisements counted in, an incarnation of Irish republicanism. Yet he was somehow amused that his old friend, fellow prisoner and brother-in-law, John Martin, had renounced revolution and, in 1871, had gone to the extreme of being elected member for Meath in the House of Commons. Here Martin aligned himself with Isaac Butt’s Home Rule movement. Mitchel forgave such silliness in few, but he did in Martin.
By the summer of 1872, Mitchel was forced by ill health to give up editorship of his latter-day Irish Citizen—he was easily exhausted now, his eyesight was poor, and though writers then thought it bad form to give a medical name to the illnesses of great men, he was likely to have suffered from the normal cardio-vascular problems of what would later be called an A-Type personality. His old friend Father Kenyon had died that year, and evil luck continued for the Mitchels. Colonel James Mitchel lost both his wife and daughter to the same fever in a week, leaving James and his young son, John Purroy Mitchel, to mourn. Admirers raised a testimonial of $10,000 to support Mitchel in his grief and old age. But in self-reliance he undertook a lecture tour in the Midwest. The lecture platform, once a stimulus, drained him. He considered the map of Ireland in his study in Brooklyn, and yearned to go back home. In the summer of 1874 he decided to go and be damned. Surely a British government would not arrest him now, twenty years after his escape, with his sentence of fourteen years long expired. He was accompanied by his daughter Isabelle, and Dr Carroll, the Clan leader and Catalpa committeeman from Philadelphia.
Landed at Queenstown, and on Irish soil for the first time in twenty-six years, he urged Cork people who rushed to meet him that no one should light bonfires, and that there should be no speeches. The authorities did not arrest him. They did not want a furore, and neither, for once, did he. He journeyed up to the small family house, Dromalane near Newry, the house of his childhood. Then he visited his sister Matilda near Dromore, and so, still tired, went up to Belfast to visit old friends, and next to Dublin. He was avoiding those campaigning for Home Rule, which he called ‘that helpless, driftless concern.’ Home Rulers were milksops to want such a tiny objective. In Dublin, he and Isabelle stayed two weeks in lodgings, declining invitations, ‘especially a most pressing invitation from A. M. Sullivan to stay at his home. I will be the guest of no Home-Ruler in Dublin, not even with John Martin.’
In Dublin he had the great joy of going to dinner at the Wildes’ house, with Lady Wilde—deathless Speranza—and her husband, the renowned surgeon and author of Aural Surgery and Epidemic Ophthalmia, Sir Willi
am Wilde. ‘The Giantess and the Dwarf,’ as this odd and brilliant couple were called, had been married in 1851, after a courtship which began with Speranza’s favourable review of Sir William’s The Beauties of the Boyne. In middle life, Speranza dressed and behaved with an increasing flamboyance, and even went to Castle balls in what correct Dublin considered exorbitant and garish layers of fabric. She had passed on the tendency for idiosyncratic dress to her son Oscar, who was a twenty-year-old undergraduate at Oxford at the time Mitchel visited. The Speranza Mitchel dined with was formidable and renowned, the high priestess of literary salons in London and Dublin, certain of her bardic immortality. Neither Speranza nor Sir William saw much hope any more in Fenianism, though Speranza had contributed verse to the Irish People.
In Cork, Mitchel embarked for New York on the Idaho. As on the convict ship years before, he suffered severe asthma. Most significantly, he had been persuaded to leave behind an election address to be published if a county seat became vacant. He wanted to stand, it seemed, mainly to ridicule the system. Back in Brooklyn, he experienced a sudden and perhaps phantom increase of energy when a House of Commons vacancy occurred in Tipperary. He wrapped himself in scarves and overcoats and sailed for Cork again on 6 February 1875. His remaining son, James, travelled with him—worried about Jenny’s health, Mitchel asked her to stay by the fire in Brooklyn. He would never return to America. As he panted his way up and down an icy deck, helped along by James, he was now aided in his campaign for Tipperary by a letter John Martin wrote for publication. Martin admitted that Mitchel looked on the Home Rule party ‘in a spirit which seems to be neither impartial nor friendly.’ Nevertheless, Martin hoped his friend would be elected for Tipperary. ‘No living Irishman better deserves the highest political honour his country can bestow.’ Mitchel’s own, already published, election statement called for ‘the sovereign independence of Ireland,’ the total disestablishment of the Established Church, and amnesty for remaining Fenian prisoners. Mitchel proved to be the only candidate to nominate for the seat, and he was resoundingly endorsed at the polls.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 76