In the Indian Ocean that night after Catalpa’s shaking off of Georgette, the wind blew to a gale. By midnight on Friday the whaler was 400 miles to the south-west from the scene of its extraordinary Fremantle enterprise. As the storm ended, Captain Anthony ordered two barrels of naval clothing hauled on deck. ‘Take all you care for,’ he told the prisoners and their rescuers. Below decks, where new tiers of berths were built for them, they were assigned a steward.
Breslin spent those first two days of hectic travelling in writing a celebratory verse, copies of which were handed out to the prisoners.
Rolling home! Rolling home! Rolling home across the seas;
Rolling home to bright Columbia; home to friends and liberty.
Ashore, the governor had now ordered the immediate detention of the few non-life-serving Fenians who were on ticket-of-leave in the colony, even though their record was clear.
Walsh and McCarthy were taken to the police station and heavily questioned by Detective Sergeant Thomas Rowe. Experienced in this sort of pressure they were ultimately released for lack of evidence. They had, Rowe noted, grown ‘stout’ (McCarthy) and ‘very stout’ (Walsh) during their weeks of waiting. At last, without anything happening, the authorities were pleased when a Fenian schoolmaster, O’Callaghan, escorted them to the Georgette at Fremantle jetty, where a large party of Irish saw them off, amidst much joking about police panic.
Evil days lay ahead for Walsh, the elder of the two. He would later be a founding member of the extreme group named the Invincibles, of whom McCafferty was also a leading figure, and whose most notorious exploit would be the murder with long knives of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Frederick Cavendish, in Phoenix Park, Dublin in 1882. Later in the 1880s, Walsh died in poverty in New York. The somewhat younger McCarthy, also an Invincible, was still living in Chicago in 1904.
Maloney of the Emerald Isle Hotel was also questioned heavily by the police, but he was helped by having been a former member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Detective Sergeant Rowe later made a report, perhaps reliable, and certainly fascinating: ‘Mary Tonduit’ (in reality Tondut), ‘a Roman Catholic of this Colony, late servant at the Emerald Isle Hotel, where Collins was lodged, was seduced by Collins and is now enceinte. She left this colony in the schooner Northern Light. Her expenses were paid by Collins through Maloney. She is to be accouched at Sydney where further arrangements are promised to be made to take her to Collins.’
Miss Tondut did travel to Sydney later in the year and gave birth to a child named John Joseph in December 1876. John Joseph were Breslin’s first names. But perhaps she did not want to be the wife of a political activist. Or perhaps there was some salient truth Breslin had kept from her. For whatever reason, she would never go to America, though Breslin left Maloney the funds to enable her. She worked as a servant until 1880, when she married a Sydney watchmaker named Thomas.
This was Australian convictism’s final escape, and it demonstrated in full the neuroses, rivalries and scapegoating which characterised officials in enclosed and remote penal colonies.
Joseph Doonan’s report to Fauntleroy pointed the finger at Warder Lindsey, who had, contrary to orders, passed Cranston and Hassett through the prison gate. As to Booler, the socialist warder on the pier, ‘I think him very culpable.’ The board of inquiry directed Fauntleroy to remove Warders Lindsey and Booler from the service. Booler, married to an Irish nationalist named Honora Glynn, left the colony, apparently with a £200 subsidy said to have been paid out of Fenian funds by Patrick Maloney at the Emerald Isle Hotel, but Warder Lindsey was in the end reinstated.
Doonan, suspended, saw himself as the final Irish martyr of the Fenian escape and suffered a nervous breakdown. Invalided out of the service in September, his appeals to the Home Office and the Colonial Secretary did not save him. Acting Comptroller Fauntleroy, for general incompetence, went too in the end, dismissed on a pension. It would be December 1876 before the Home Office reported to Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary, on ‘the question raised by the Governor whether he was right in giving orders that the American Ship Catalpa was not to be attacked.’ According to the Home Office, he was.
As Catalpa was making its escape across the Indian Ocean, the Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company told the British Foreign Minister Lord Derby that the telegraph cable had been cut on 24 April about forty-five miles from Darwin. Catalpa was nearly 2,000 miles removed from this area, but even Clan na Gael, when they heard of the break, considered quite wrongly that this was due to co-ordinated action by their agents. The cut cable meant that news of the Catalpa rescue did not reach London until 6 June by a ship-borne dispatch from Melbourne. In May, a debate on amnesty for the remaining Fenian prisoners came on in the House of Commons. Prime Minister Disraeli opposed any further release of military Fenians, and the London correspondent of the Irish World complained that his expression in so doing ‘was one of royal contempt towards the Irish nation, its martyrs and its advocates.’
As a cable from London announcing the escape came in on the wire at the Pilot office in Boston, O’Reilly felt a pulse both of delight and moral relief. He sent a telegram to John Devoy: ‘Grand glory and complete success. Ireland triumphs. London despatch admits all our men safe aboard Catalpa. Watch your cables from abroad for more details. Erin go bragh.’ O’Reilly wrote the rescue story for the Pilot and took the proofs in his coat pocket to New Bedford. He found Annie Anthony in the back of her house, taking in clothing from the line, with Anthony’s daughter Sophie walking around her, dropping pegs in a wicker basket. The news and O’Reilly’s proofs created a tremor of joy not only in Mrs Anthony but throughout America. O’Donovan Rossa, fund-raising in Omaha, saw people dancing in the streets. The other Boston newspapers stormed O’Reilly’s office. Amongst them was a journalist from The Times of London, so O’Reilly did not give the ship’s name. Somehow, the New Bedford papers concluded from their study of the shipping news that the whaler involved was Catalpa. One Boston paper copied this, but O’Reilly was able to persuade the others not to. He also may have been responsible for spreading the news that the ship was making across the Pacific for San Francisco, instead of via the Atlantic for the already-planned landfall of Fernandina, Florida. Fernandina, a flat coastal spit in the north of the state, had been nominated as Catalpa’s American landfall because it was home to an Irish-born Clan na Gael member, US Senator Conover, who had helped Devoy and planned a welcome for rescuers and rescued there.
Most of the New York newspapers praised the enterprise, even the generally hostile New York Times. ‘The affair will bring little credit to Mr Disraeli, who so easily refused to remit the penalties of these men.’ When the news reached Dublin, 500 torchbearers led a procession of thousands to Grattan Bridge over the Liffey, where Disraeli and the Duke of Cambridge were burned in effigy.
As Catalpa rounded Africa and entered the Atlantic, sperm whales were occasionally seen and boats were lowered. Captain Anthony had proposed to Breslin that the vessel should hunt for whales for a time, for this was again the whaling season in the Western Grounds off North Africa. The released prisoners accordingly noticed that the ship was heading northerly instead of crossing the Atlantic diagonally. In their quarters forward, Brennan had told them that the purpose of the journey was to get them ashore as soon as possible.
Encouraged by Brennan, the men decided to protest at the idea that they should now endure a conventional whaling expedition. Breslin would discover that long imprisonment, frequent despair, delayed rescue, fraught and arduous escape, and, above all, new freedom, tended to encourage petulance rather than grandeur of spirit. The escapees’ uneasiness grew also from a genuine but unrealistic fear, stoked perhaps by Brennan, of being re-taken at sea by a British warship. Between then and July, the Catalpa, which should have been—in tune with Irish sentiment everywhere—a triumphant whaler, was beset by a strange atmosphere of letdown and rankling anxiety.
On 10 July, when Catalpa crossed the equator into
the North Atlantic, Anthony told the absconders, ‘You’re almost American citizens now.’ The truth was, they wanted to be Americans as immediately as possible. At one time they told him that they had been better treated aboard the convict ship, where they got a glass of wine for scurvy every day. James Wilson—the man whose letter had initiated the rescue—argued that because of his heart condition he would die if he were not put ashore soon. He probably believed himself near death, and perhaps it should not have surprised Breslin and Anthony that men whose ability to express even minor annoyance had been suppressed for ten years, should now break out in complaint. Sergeant Darragh was the only one of the six whom Breslin exempted from the charges of poor behaviour.
Some 100 miles off the West Indies, Duggan, Brennan and Desmond requested a private talk with Breslin in the cabin aft. Brennan demanded that they be put ashore at Fernandina or some other port without delay. With perhaps more percipience than Breslin, Brennan said that until they were landed on American soil, the men would not feel gratitude. And it would give the organisation greater benefit for the whaler to put in at once than to remain out longer on the off-chance of taking $14,000 worth of oil. Breslin, profoundly hurt, challenged the delegation to name where they had not been treated as passengers should be. He had eaten the same rations as they. To get aboard in Fremantle, they would all have been willing to face much harsher conditions.
Tom Desmond was caught in the middle in this debate. Bunking forward with them, he could understand the prisoners’ anxieties. That evening, Breslin received a note signed by all the prisoners as well as by John King, Brennan, Duggan and Desmond, requesting on a number of grounds that Catalpa go into port. ‘The innutricious quality of the food’ was mentioned, as was the ill health of some of the ex-prisoners, all of whom repeated that they would not believe themselves free until they stood on American soil.
Breslin read each paragraph back to the signatories, and then took the document to Anthony, pointing out Brennan’s argument that he, not Breslin, represented the desires of the owners. The captain and John Breslin drafted a tough and unconditional document for the prisoners and the others to sign. It stipulated for a start that the food on Catalpa was sound ship’s food; ‘the water is good and in sufficient quantity. The ex-prisoners are in as good a state of health today as when they came on board.’ But, ‘The ex-prisoners are anxious to get on shore.’ So they were to take ‘responsibility of all loss to the owners incurred by my compliance with their request to go into port.’ As Anthony and Breslin intended, this gave the men pause. But Brennan passionately assured the escapees that the Clan would never think of seeking recompense from them. So they all signed it. It was endorsed too by Tom Desmond and John King. On seeing this, Anthony suggested that since landfall was to be achieved as fast as possible, New York was much closer than Fernandina, Florida, the Catalpa’s scheduled American landfall.
Breslin’s report, praising Darragh for showing ‘common sense and common decency,’ casting doubt on Harrington’s complaint about dysentery and Wilson’s claim of a heart problem, would be endorsed utterly by Clan na Gael. Clan na Gael’s committee to review the escape censured Brennan and Duggan, but trod warily in judging the former prisoners. After their years of imprisonment they had had no way of knowing the relative merits of what Brennan asserted as against what Breslin said.
When the New York pilot came on board to bring Catalpa into harbour, he expressed surprise that a whaler would enter that port of commercial and passenger traffic. But Catalpa moored in the small hours on 18 August, the last entry in the log at 1.30 on Saturday morning reading: ‘Went to city wharf. Made her fast. So ends this day a pleasant voyage for J. T. Richardson.’ The men who looked out incredulously at the great city had given their youth to the principles for which this grand republic and its large Irish community stood. Like earlier escapees, they had been long incarcerated and must now deal with the complex freedoms of urban America. Was Michael Harrington, just under fifty years of age, too old to make the transition from Western Australian felon to shining American? What about Darragh, at forty-three years? They had little time to contemplate their dilemma. For the last time in this account, the journalists and Irish leaders of New York had been on their eager way through the streets of Lower Manhattan to find boatmen and intercept the ship before it even dropped anchor.
Clan na Gael had initiated an escapees’ fund, but everything was still totally unprepared when John Breslin, hurrying from the ship, walked into O’Donovan Rossa’s hotel in Chatham Square, New York. Rossa himself was away in San Francisco. But his son and the former convict William Foley—Breslin’s hulking, ailing ticket-of-leave contact in the Fremantle days—were there. Foley, very ill, was so overcome with emotion on hearing the news that Catalpa had put in that he fainted. John Devoy lay a-bed with flu in Dr Carroll’s house in Philadelphia when he got a telegram from Dennis Rossa telling him the Catalpa was in New York. O’Reilly was also informed by telegram.
Early on the Saturday morning, the rescued men landed and were taken to Rossa’s hotel, where the green flag was run up. The Irish World said that a stream of visitors poured in, ‘and the Catalpan Six would have been quickly tired out but that the satisfaction of being free men and compatriots did not allow any other feeling to affect them.’
Devoy arrived during the day, still coughing. When he got a chance to take them into one of the vacant reception rooms to speak to them, he was startled to hear a barrage of complaints against Breslin. Devoy spoke frankly to them, telling them that Breslin was the undoubted leader of the enterprise and that Brennan had been misleading them. But in his Recollections he would remark that he ‘never succeeded in removing the feeling of positive hatred, not to speak of ingratitude, which they entertained for Breslin.’ Only here at the core of the triumph was there rancour. As the former prisoners delivered themselves of complaints, in the public rooms of the hotel and in the street and the square outside, unambiguously joyous people cheered continually. Other crowds rode out into the harbour to visit the whaler and cheer its captain, something which the prisoners had not done.
Anthony had altered greatly. When he left New Bedford he had weighed 160 pounds and his hair had been jet black. He now weighed 123 pounds and there was grey in his hair. He chiefly wanted to get home and unload his whale oil.
Predictable celebrations continued throughout America. John Kenealy, back from a buying trip for his three storey Los Angeles dry-goods business, the People’s Store, called in to a mass Clan celebration organised by Talbot in San Francisco, then jubilantly took the new Southern Pacific railway home. The Robert Emmet Association of Troy, New York, fired a salute, and more artillery salutes were fired at Woonsocket and in dozens of other Irish communities. In New York City, Captain Anthony presented the flag of Catalpa to Clan na Gael, and the Philadelphia Clan held a great fête in Rising Sun Park to honour the whaling captain. Meanwhile the rescued men, in parties of two or three, were sent to speak at celebrations. $15,000 was collected around the country, and divided amongst them.
Catalpa docked in New Bedford on the following Thursday, and Anthony was surprised to see a huge crowd covering the New Bedford wharves, and to hear an artillery salute of seventy-one cannon, one gun for every state of the Union and for every county in Ireland, pounding out across the river. The following evening, a delighted John Boyle O’Reilly made a speech to acclaim Anthony at Liberty Hall, New Bedford. Anthony’s self-sacrifice and fidelity as he ‘took his life in his hands and beached his whaleboat on the penal colony defying its fearful law, defying the gallows and the chain gang, in order to keep faith with the men who had placed their trust in him—this is almost beyond belief in our selfish and commonplace time.’ The legend of New Bedford men circling the earth to deliver liberty to those they did not know entered the port’s mythology and receives today considerable emphasis in a town whose mills are closed and whose whaling past has become a resource.
A Clan committee for the dispersal of funds from
the whaling enterprise began its work. They took the Whaleman’s Shipping List as their guide, averaged out catches taken by other whalers, and oil prices. The lay of each crew-member of Catalpa was calculated and paid out in this manner. The ship was then valued at $6,000 and made over to Richardson, Anthony and Hathaway. Devoy was not himself sure that the committee adequately rewarded Anthony, but the captain’s total return, including the Catalpa committee’s ex gratia payment of $1,000, came to just over $4,000. The total cost of the voyage would turn out to be nearly $26,000.
British efforts to retrieve the Fenians were futile on a number of grounds. The day after the escape, Matthew Skinner-Smith, Chief Superintendent of Police in Western Australia, had addressed a communication to the police chief in Catalpa’s home port, New Bedford:
Officer in charge of Police Department, New Bedford.
Sir, I beg to inform you that on the 17th inst. the imperial convicts named in the margin absconded from the convict settlement at Fremantle in this colony in the American whaling bark Catalpa, G. Anthony, Master … I attach a description of each of the absconders, and have to request that you will be good enough to furnish me with any particulars you may be able to gather concerning them.
The officer onto whose desk the letter was delivered happened to be Henry Hathaway.
Anthony took his management job in the mills. In 1886 he received a letter of appointment from President Cleveland’s administration as a customs officer, and the text referred admiringly to his part in the Catalpa rescue. That admirable vessel Catalpa was gone by then. After three more whaling voyages, it was sold to Central American owners in 1884, and ended as a coal barge, ultimately condemned and burned on the beach at Belize, British Honduras.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 82