But the Tory prime minister, Disraeli, moved a resolution in the Commons that a warrant for a new writ of election be issued—Mitchel was an undischarged felon and not entitled to take his seat. A writ declaring the election invalid appeared on 20 February 1875, and 11 March was picked for the new election. From his retreat in a hotel at Sunday’s Well in Cork, an exhausted Mitchel travelled by train to Tipperary with a number of the old Young Irelanders, including George Barry and Nicaragua Smyth, now a Member of Parliament himself, and Mitchel’s sister Mrs Henty Martin. At Tipperary Town he made his last full-scale public speech. ‘There is a man over there in London who writes novels [laughter], and he is of the opinion that he knows better who Tipperary should elect than you do.’
Returned to Cork, Mitchel could utter only a few brief sentences at the Theatre Royal. On 9 March, he began travelling home to County Down by way of Dublin with his sister Henty, his son, James, having had by now to return to New York. Mitchel was observed by detectives as he stayed after all at the Home Ruler A. M. Sullivan’s house in Dublin. He spent polling day in bed at Dromalane House, watched by Henty, his other sister Matilda, and his brother William. Though there was now a Liberal candidate against him, he won the election, receiving more than three quarters of the vote. This time the Commons decided to let the matter be settled by the courts. After several days in bed, on St Patrick’s Day Mitchel wrote a final statement: all that was possible for the Tipperary franchise or Tipperary freeholders to accomplish had been done, he said. ‘Am I dying, William?’ he asked his brother. ‘For that would be a serious business for me.’ He tried to rise up from his bed on 20 March, but fell into a coma. He died within a few minutes without pain or struggle. After all his frenetic travel and coruscating enthusiasms, he expired within feet of the room in which he had spent his boyhood. A witness said, ‘His face lost the worn look it had in late years, and I thought it beautiful.’ The news was telegraphed to Mrs Mitchel in America, as Mitchel was buried in the Unitarian Cemetery, High Street, Newry, outside whose gate there now stands a statue of the man, a statement of his evangelical republicanism. On the day of the funeral a gale blew, but Martin insisted on attending, was soaked and developed pneumonia. Henty put him to bed in Dromalane House. In what seemed a brand of loyal obedience to his chief, Martin himself died within the week. His death, like his transportation and noble character, was overshadowed by that of his friend, for Martin could not compete with the prophetic lightnings which had broken in life about Mitchel’s head.
Jenny, still as passionate a lover of Mitchel as when he had left Dromalane House to elope with her, was soothed by many tributes. Charles Dana, newspaperman, wrote accurately in the New York Times that, ‘He not only spoke the truth at all times, but he spoke the whole truth by a kind of moral necessity. He knew no reserve and no disguise, and, we may even say, no prudence in this regard … his sincerity was perfect and his courage fearless.’ Ex-president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, sent a telegram from Tennessee: ‘Together we struggled for states rights, for the supremacy of the Constitution, for community independence, and, after defeat, we are imprisoned together.’
Jenny herself would live until the last day of 1899, and her grave in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, in which her son, James Mitchel, would ultimately join her, is surmounted by a Celtic Cross.
29
THE FENIAN WHALER
About thirty men … went out in a yacht, got on board and remained there until she was well out, giving three hearty cheers with the usual tiger for the barque and her crew. Not a man but ourselves had the least suspicion of her mission.
Devoy to Reynolds,
29 April 1875
In the stern of crowded Catalpa, the first mate Smith had a cabin on the port side to himself. Two rooms on the starboard side were knocked into one for use by Captain George B. Anthony. Further accommodations would need to be added for the escapees, but Anthony and Devoy knew that to build additions on deck now would have created speculation. Anthony’s under-informed crew was made up of one or two Yankees, a Cape Verdean Islander, three natives of St Helena, four Malays, a number of African Americans, and finally, after much quarrel between committee members, Dennis Duggan, carpenter and Fenian representative. Duggan had attended a Dublin model school as a classmate of Devoy’s, had been one of Stephen’s bodyguards on the night of his escape from Richmond Prison, and was a veteran of the Fenian uprising of 1867.
The committeeman Goff was angry, his nomination for this post on Catalpa being a man named Tom Brennan. But since a crew man generally died on the way to the Azores, or deserted upon arrival there, Captain Hathaway made the appeasing suggestion that Anthony should let Brennan travel separately and meet up with the ship in those Portuguese islands.
In the Gaelic American on 27 August 1904, Devoy explained why he had not put himself aboard. ‘My disappearance would have at once indicated that I had gone to Australia and the consequent loose talk would almost certainly have ruined the chances of success.’ As it was, despite the numbers of Clan na Gael members who had general knowledge of Devoy’s intentions, British Consul Archibald of New York, a distinguished spy-master, did not receive any but the vaguest tip-offs. In Catalpa’s favour had been the fact that stories of Fenian raiding ships had always figured in reports from some of Archibald’s thirstier informants when they were short of cash, and generally proved untrue.
An illness of Captain Anthony’s mother had delayed sailing. Industrious little Devoy, still night editor of the New York Herald, had a hard time shuttling between New York, Boston and New Bedford to be in place for Catalpa’s putting to sea. But at last, on the night of 29 April, Devoy wrote to Reynolds from New Bedford with rare lyricism. ‘Brennan and I have just returned from seeing the ship forty miles out to sea, eating our dinner of hard tack, salt beef and cheese aboard.’
When, late in the afternoon, the yacht carrying friends back to shore left the Catalpa, Captain Anthony fell into a depression. No one else on board knew what he knew. And navigation was almost instantly a problem. The chronometer, a clock set on Greenwich time and upon whose accuracy depended the measuring of longitude, and computations two days out of New Bedford, showed that the vessel was in inland New York state! Anthony had to reconcile himself never to knowing his exact longitude—a visible sign of his inner uncertainty.
For the moment, Catalpa’s voyage, even without its unstated purpose, was typical of the commercial and physical perils of whaling in an era when no one spoke for the whale. The first small whale was taken in mid-Atlantic on 6 May. It was hauled in to the side of the vessel, and the cutting of its blubbery flesh and the boiling down in vats amidships began. Once the oil was separated out, it was poured into twenty casks which—still hot—were lashed to ledges and rails on the ship’s side. Then, two weeks out, Catalpa reached the famed ‘Western Ground’ off the Azores, and two whales were killed. Here Anthony encountered a brig, the Florence Annapolis of Nova Scotia, forty-nine days out of Liverpool with a cargo of salt, its sails and rigging destroyed in a storm and its crew starving. Anthony supplied provisions, and put his crew, including the carpenter Duggan, to work at rigging two jury masts for the ship. The New Bedford Standard of 15 June 1875 carried a shipping notice which Hathaway sent Devoy in New York for comfort. ‘Brig Florence of Annapolis N.S., with salt, arrived at St Stephen yesterday, 62 days from Liverpool … May 30th, barque Catalpa, Anthony of this port, rendered assistance.’
It was the end of June before another whale was sighted and the boats again lowered from Catalpa. Sam Smith, the mate, whose boat worked up close to the whale, threw a harpoon and was thrown overboard by one of the great beast’s flukes, severely cutting his head on the gunnel. The crew pulled him aboard again and he crawled forward and drove a second lance into the animal, before falling unconscious. By the next day he was still very weak, but Anthony was impressed that he insisted on overseeing the cutting-in process.
Catalpa cruised off the Azores throughout July without a
ny whales being taken, and the scarcity continued into August, when the whaler General Scott appeared. Anthony and others went aboard her to gam, or converse. In midgam, the lookouts on each boat simultaneously spotted a whale. Both of them lowered boats, and the officers agreed that between them the whale would be mated. The first whale would be shared, and if either ship took a further whale before the first had been boiled, this would also be equally shared. From the whale the two ships jointly hunted, 140 barrels of whale oil made up Catalpa’s share. There was more gamming in early September with the barque Draco, a ship Anthony had sailed aboard as a young man. Such was the social solace of a young master under a solitary and exceptional burden.
On Catalpa in July a so-called Kanaka boat steerer had died and been buried at sea. So there was now room for Brennan.
Hardly any of the committee other than Devoy himself knew John J. Breslin, the New York journalist Devoy wanted to send ahead to Australia as agent of Clan na Gael. His chief claim to legitimacy was that, as a young Richmond gaol warder in 1865, he had been a main actor in the escape of Stephens. Breslin was not even a member of the Clan, and he bridled at the idea of being forced to join. He was a reserved and private man, and like many prospective Clan members he disliked the quasi-Masonic rituals associated with initiation. After diplomatic handling by Devoy, he joined the organisation’s Hoboken chapter.
Breslin became aware as Devoy already was that nearly half of all the money collected for the rescue project was raised by California Clan na Gael. The Californian treasurer of the Clan was John Kenealy of Los Angeles, who nominated as Breslin’s accomplice for the endeavour a Civil War veteran named Captain Tom Desmond. Kenealy sent Desmond, a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles, up to meet Breslin and Talbot in Sacramento, where a warm relationship formed between the New York journalist and the Westerner. Later Breslin would say in his report to the Clan: ‘I now believe that if Desmond alone had been sent, the rescue would have been as successfully accomplished, and at far less cost to the organisation.’
Breslin, supported by a $100 advance from Talbot, was now forced to hang around Sacramento for four weeks waiting for funds already remitted from California to the Rescue Committee to come back from New York. At least he was able to use the time by going down to Los Angeles and quizzing John Kenealy, who liked him because he was no blowhard. Breslin was back in San Francisco by 10 September 1875, and found that the funds had now arrived at the Telegraph Office.
On the morning of 13 September that year, Breslin in the cabin and Desmond in steerage sailed for Australia from San Francisco. Ahead of them was a month’s meander across the Pacific, during which they kept separate from each other.
Catalpa sighted Flores, an island of the Azores, in mid-October, a month after the Clan agents left San Francisco. Captain Anthony landed briefly to trade for potatoes some albacore the crew had caught. At sea again, fierce weather delayed Anthony on his way south-east into the port of Horta on Fayal, the chief island of the Azores, but on arrival the crew began re-casking the whale oil, 210 barrels worth something close to $12,000, for shipment home to New Bedford. Anthony bought a new chronometer from another captain in port for $110. At the shipping agent’s office he found a letter with a photograph of his daughter. What an alluring concept it was simply to whale his way home again.
As frequently happened, a number of sailors including the third mate deserted at Fayal, and three others were sick and had to be sent ashore. Anthony needed to enter into an arrangement with an agent to supply men to fill the gaps. The new men would need to be shipped to the Canaries by another vessel and smuggled aboard there, since they had no passports. But such arrangements were not abnormal ones for anarchic individualists such as whaling masters. As Anthony and Smith were busy contracting new rigging, a telegram arrived from Tom Brennan, Goff’s nominee. He was on his way to Fayal, having only just missed the Catalpa at Flores. Anthony, despite his need for men, still wanted to avoid Brennan, believing him turbulent and likely to gossip. ‘I think we have all the crew we need at present,’ Anthony told his mate Smith, who did not understand the significance of Brennan anyhow. ‘Mr Brennan may get lost.’ The next morning as Catalpa cleared the port of Horta on Fayal, it passed the steamer on which Brennan was travelling into the port. Brennan himself saw the whaler, cursed it, but determined to catch up with it in Tenerife, where, according to the plan, Anthony was to purchase the lumber to build quarters for the escapees.
Long before Catalpa turned south for the Cape of Good Hope and passed into the Indian Ocean, a poorer whaling area, Smith would need to be told the truth. Anthony decided to unburden himself now. If Smith did not approve of the plan, he would be free to leave the ship in the Canaries. The captain related to the chronicler of Catalpa, Pease, the details of his recruiting of Smith in the captain’s cabin one pleasant October evening two days out of Fayal. ‘I want to say to you now,’ Anthony told Smith, ‘before we get to Tenerife, that the Catalpa has done about all the whaling she will do this fall.’ An increasingly surprised Smith heard that they were bound for the west coast of Australia to liberate Fenian prisoners. ‘This ship was bought for that purpose and fitted for that purpose, and you have been utterly deceived in the object of this journey. You have a right to be indignant.’
Anthony, though short in height, seemed an utter whaler, solid-jawed, piratically moustached, hawk-eyed, straight-backed. Smith, by contrast, was a man of chubby face, slightly balding, with a walrus moustache. But he was of rugged material. He asked Anthony a few further questions. They were not really going to the River Plate then, in South America? No, certainly to Australia: ‘God knows I need you, and I give you my word I will stand by you as never one man stood by another.’ According to Anthony, Smith said then, ‘Captain Anthony, I’ll stick by you in this ship if she goes to hell and burns off her jib boom.’
As this conversation was taking place off the Canaries, on 15 October that year, Breslin and Desmond entered the heads of Sydney Harbour. In Sydney, their contacts were John Edward Kelly and his former partner in a small newspaper, John Flood. Kelly, having written an unsuccessful book called Illustrious Exiles; or Military Memoirs of the Irish Race Abroad, twenty-two biographies of Irish exiles, intended to depart for the United States soon. He would settle in the city of Boston, where he had spent his boyhood, and though O’Reilly helped him financially, his health had been shattered by imprisonment. It would only be ten years before O’Reilly would deliver an oration at a monument raised in Mount Hope Cemetery, Boston, over Kelly’s grave.
But in Sydney in October 1875, Kelly was an excellent contact, and able to introduce Breslin and Desmond to a number of men in Fenian cells in Sydney. One of these, John King, a Dubliner, a former grocer and goldprospector had begun his own independent fund to finance a rescue of the men in Western Australia. During his seven years on gold-fields in New South Wales and in New Zealand, he had formed a rescue organisation of his own. His plan was to charter a steamer, man her with Fenians, go to Fremantle to rescue the prisoners, and seek asylum in the French settlement of New Caledonia. He was now accumulating into one central fund all that had been contributed by friends in the various Australian colonies and in New Zealand. In the meantime he worked at a quarry run by his Irish friends at Petersham, a middle-class suburb on the railway line west from Sydney. One day as he was returning to Sydney by horse-drawn bus, he noticed John Edward Kelly seated with a stranger on top of the approaching outbound bus. ‘We all left the buses and sat down in the shade of a gum tree by the roadside. Then Kelly introduced me to the stranger and for the first time I had the pleasure of shaking John Breslin by the hand. He was travelling under the name of Collins.’ King decided at once and without factional rancour to place all the funds he held at Breslin’s disposal.
He now telegraphed one of his lieutenants, a former Fenian prisoner, and asked him to come to Sydney from Queensland, detouring to the gold mining centres throughout New Zealand’s South Island, collecting from the IRB groups ther
e. It was particularly in Otago and on the north-west coast of New Zealand’s South Island that the IRB were active, and at the end of this fund-raising between $6,000 or $7,000 in gold had been collected. Tom Desmond left for Albany via Melbourne by steamer. Breslin remained a little longer, but decided to follow Desmond, for John King offered to bring the funds on to Fremantle as soon as they arrived. In Melbourne, both Mr Collins and Mr Johnson, not acknowledging each other, took ship to Albany, and from there boarded the steamer Georgette for the stretch from Albany to Fremantle. They landed in penal Fremantle in mid-November, and wrongly expected that they would not have much more than two months to wait for the whaler.
Desmond travelled to Perth, the inland capital on the Swan River, and got a job in a carriage factory, where the other workers inevitably called him Yankee Johnson. Breslin concluded that coastal Fremantle, where the prison was located, was a better centre for him. He signed in as Mr Collins at the Emerald Isle Hotel, Fremantle, whose proprietor Patrick Maloney was a former Irish policeman, a native of County Clare, who had been generous to the pardoned Fenians in 1869. Breslin/Collins found it worthwhile casually to leave a letter from Judge M. Cooney of the California Supreme Court—an old Fenian and an enthusiastic rescue booster—on his desk for Maloney’s staff to absorb. Cooney’s letter described Mr Collins as a wealthy holder of mines and land in Nevada and elsewhere. A letter signed by one C. Coddington Yardley was also left lying about Breslin’s room. It advised that ‘as of this date, $100,000 has been deposited to your credit in the Hollanders Bank … The other members of the syndicate are agreed that they will allow you to be sole judge, whether to invest the funds in Australian gold shares, timber, farm or grazing land.’ The concept of such an enormous resource of capital being poured into Western Australia, a colony of a mere 50,000 people, generated a great deal of respect for Mr Collins. But despite the pretensions of wealth, frugal Breslin was later proud to relate that the real costs of his stay in Fremantle were less than those of an ordinary commercial traveller.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 77