by Jim Haynes
The ship headed for the Atlantic whaling grounds and then sailed on to the Azores to unload 200 barrels of whale oil. Most of the crew deserted the ship there and Anthony recruited a new crew and headed for Australia. A savage storm delayed the ship and severely damaged her foremast, but she arrived off Bunbury, south of Perth, on 27 March 1876.
The misfortune Anthony experienced in losing the crew and having the ship damaged in the storm was offset by a stroke of amazing good luck.
Catalpa met the trader Ocean Beauty in the Indian Ocean and her captain happened to be the former master of the Hougoumont, which had carried the Fenians into captivity at Fremantle. Captain Anthony told him they were headed for the whaling grounds off Western Australia and he happily provided them with navigation charts of the Western Australian coastline.
Meanwhile, in late 1875, two Fenian spies, John Breslin and Thomas Desmond, had travelled to Perth from the US to organise the local side of the rescue operation. Desmond set himself up as a carriage builder in Perth, while Breslin posed as a wealthy American businessman, James Collins, in Fremantle.
The plot worked so well that Breslin, now known as Collins, was able to befriend the assistant superintendent of Fremantle Prison and be taken on a tour of the establishment. He managed to make contact with six of the twelve remaining Fenian convicts, either personally or through local Irish residents, and explain the plot to them.
Of the other six Fenians, one was in a high-security section of the prison, two were assigned to work out of the district and could not be contacted, and another two had tickets-of-leave and could not be found either. The twelfth was considered unreliable and a security risk.
When the Catalpa berthed at Bunbury on 29 March, Breslin met the ship and he and Anthony took passage to Perth on the steamer Georgette, which would have a further role to play in the drama later on. There they met Desmond and other sympathisers to make their final plans.
The escape was originally planned for April 6th, but the arrival of several British warships in Fremantle Harbour led to a postponement.
The escape was rescheduled for the 17th, Easter Monday, when the British ships had departed and the Royal Perth Yacht Club Regatta would be a good distraction. Thomas Desmond was to provide transport and arrange for sympathisers to cut the telegraph lines connecting the colony to the rest of Australia; the Catalpa would be waiting offshore from Rockingham Bay, south of Perth, in international waters between Rottnest and Garden Islands, having sent a whaleboat ashore to collect the escaped prisoners.
The plan almost came unstuck yet again when Captain Anthony went to send the crucial coded telegram at Bunbury and discovered the telegraph office was closed for Good Friday. Somehow he was able to locate the telegraph operator and get the message sent to Fremantle telegraph office, which was open for business.
Before sunrise on Monday the 17th, James Wilson, Robert Cranston and Michael Harrington, who were working outside the prison, slipped away and made their rendezvous with a carriage provided by Desmond. Around the same time, James Donagh, Thomas Hassett and Martin Hogan escaped from the prison’s minimum-security section and were picked up by another carriage provided by Desmond.
The two carriages raced to Rockingham, where the whaleboat was waiting, but no sooner had they shoved off than a local resident— a timber-cutter named Bell, who had spoken to the men and thought their abandoning carriages and horses on the beach very suspicious—mounted up and headed for Perth. He arrived at 1 p.m. and informed the police that he had seen an American whaleboat, manned by sailors armed with rifles, take nine men— some in prison clothes—from the beach at Rockingham.
The police only had a small vessel, a single-masted cutter, which put to sea as soon as possible. Within several hours they had also commandeered, by authority of the colonial governor, Sir William Robinson, the schooner-rigged coastal steamer Georgette, which headed out to sea with a hastily assembled group of volunteers from the quaintly named ‘Enrolled Pensioner Force’.
Meanwhile, out at sea, the whaleboat came within sight of the Catalpa just on sunset, but a sudden fierce squall hit and they lost sight of her and spent the night battling the storm.
Next morning the group in the whaleboat relocated the Catalpa, but saw the Georgette heading towards it and stayed away, lying down in the whaleboat to avoid being seen.
Superintendent Stone of the Water Police, aboard the Georgette, hailed the Catalpa and requested to be allowed on board to search for escaped convicts. The request was denied, although the fugitives were not yet on board, and the Georgette followed the Catalpa for several hours until it was forced to return to Fremantle to refuel.
As the Georgette disappeared towards Fremantle, the police cutter appeared on the horizon and the men in the whaleboat rowed hard and boarded the Catalpa as the police approached. The cutter also lingered within sight of the Catalpa for some time before heading back to shore.
The Governor was now determined to recapture the convicts and had the Georgette fitted with a 12-pound howitzer field gun overnight.
Both the police cutter and the Georgette set out to find the Catalpa the following day, Tuesday, 18 April. On board the Georgette were the Pensioner Guards, all eager and armed, along with the howitzer.
The Catalpa was spotted on the horizon that afternoon, but it wasn’t until 8 a.m. the following day that the Georgette overhauled the whaler and fired shots across its stern and bow. Captain Anthony hove-to and parlayed with Superintendant Stone.
Stone demanded to be allowed to board the Catalpa, but Captain Anthony refused the request.
Stone had right on his side, according to British law, and the Georgette also had might on her side—a cannon, and thirty or more eager armed militiamen.
Captain Anthony bluffed it out with style. He reminded Stone that they were in international waters; then he pointed to the Stars and Stripes at the masthead and challenged Stone to create a diplomatic incident.
The taunt was intended to remind Stone that several years earlier, the US had sued Britain over a maritime breach of neutrality in the American Civil War. The case had been settled in Geneva on 14 September 1872, with the British government paying £3 million in damages to the US in compensation for building the Confederate commerce-raider Alabama, which sank much Union shipping.
Firing on, or attempting to board the Catalpa without permission, Anthony declared, would be nothing short of an act of war against the US.
The Catalpa then made sail and proceeded westward.
The Georgette followed until it was low on fuel, and then turned back to Fremantle as the Catalpa disappeared into the vastness of the Indian Ocean. The complex rescue plan, over two years in the making, had worked.
With the successful cutting of the telegraph wires by Thomas Desmond’s two recruits, John Durham and Denis McCarthy, it was June before news of the bold escape reached London.
The Catalpa managed to avoid British ships and make its way back to the US. Captain Anthony even chased a few whales on the way home, but the Catalpa proved to be better at catching escaped convicts than whales—no kills were made.
John Boyle O’Reilly finally learned of the escape in early June and publicised the event to the world, provoking anger in Britain, jubilation in Ireland and the US, and mixed sentiments in the various colonies of Australia.
The Catalpa arrived in New York Harbour on 19 August 1876 and was given to Captain Anthony, with shares going to his two chief officers, as a reward for their part in the adventure.
In the colony of Western Australia there was embarrassment and paranoia about a Fenian invasion. The assistant warden who had shown Breslin through Fremantle Prison unsuccessfully attempted suicide and then resigned. The prison controller and several other officials were sacked, and all tickets-of-leave for Fenians were revoked. Nevertheless, all the Fenians were freed by 1878.
The two other ships in the Catalpa drama had interesting histories.
The Hougoumont was a blackwall frigate bui
lt in 1852 by the Dunbar Line Shipping Company in Burma. She was named after the estate and chateau where the Battle of Waterloo was fought. When she was chartered by the French to carry troops to the Crimean War in 1854, she was temporarily renamed Baraguay d’Hilliers after a French general, lest her original name offend the French. She was the last ship to carry convicts to Australia and little is known of her after 1870. All existing drawings and photos of the Hougoumont are not the 1852 ship at all, but a later and much larger ship of the same name.
The SS Georgette was built in Scotland in 1872. She was a small 211-ton iron screw-driven steamship, 46 metres long by 7 metres wide. Designed as a collier, she could carry 460 tons, although her two engines produced only 48 horsepower.
Based at Fremantle, Georgette was the local coastal trading ship for southwest Western Australia in an era when virtually everything and everybody was moved by coastal shipping. She had a brief life and was not a lucky ship.
Apart from the ignominy of failing to prevent the Fenians escaping, she also was wrecked twice. In 1874 she ran onto a reef and had to be sent to Adelaide for repairs. In November 1876—the same year the Fenians escaped in the Catalpa—she developed a leak so bad that water extinguished the fires in her boilers and she drifted into massive surf and was grounded in Calgardup Bay, near modern-day Busselton. An Aboriginal stockman from the local property, Sam Isaacs, raised the alarm. As all the other men were away from the homestead, he and the property owner’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Grace Bussell, famously rode their horses into the surf again and again and saved many lives.
Twelve people perished and the wreck of the Georgette is still there, now protected under the Historic Shipwrecks Act.
And the Catalpa? Well, although George Smith Anthony’s ability to sail the high seas was rather restricted as he was a wanted man by the British, he did undertake some whaling expeditions before the Catalpa was sold. She finished her life as a coal barge in the port of modern-day Belize—which was, ironically, then known as British Honduras.
This was a sad end for the ship whose name became a rallying call for the Irish cause, embarrassing the great naval power of Britain so much that a song about the incident was banned in the colony of Western Australia.
‘The Catalpa’
Traditional
(This song was banned in the colony of Western Australia)
A noble whale ship and commander,
Called the Catalpa, they say,
Sailed out to Western Australia
And took six bold Fenians away.
Many long years they had served there
And many more years had to stay,
For defending their country, Old Ireland,
For that they were banished away.
You kept them in Western Australia
Till their hair it began to turn grey,
Then a Yank from the States of Americay
Came out here and stole them away.
Chorus:
Come all you screw-warders and gaolers
Remember Perth Regatta Day.
Take care of the rest of your Fenians,
Or Yankees will steal them away.
The Georgette, all armed with bold warriors,
Went out the brave Yank to arrest,
But she hoisted the star-spangled banner
Saying ‘Now you’ll not board me, I guess.’
They landed them safe in Americay
And there they were able to cry,
‘Hoist up the green flag and the shamrock,
Hurrah, for Old Ireland we’ll die!’
So remember those Fenians colonial
And sing out these verses with me,
And remember the Yankee that took them
To the home of the brave and the free.
Chorus:
Come all you screw-warders and gaolers
Remember Perth Regatta Day.
Take care of the rest of your Fenians,
Or Yankees will steal them away.
They that go down to the sea in ships,
And occupy their business in great waters;
These men see the works of the Lord,
And his wonders of the deep.
Psalm 107, verse 23
A day on a lugger
BANJO PATERSON
In this story Paterson refers to himself as ‘the stranger’ as he enters the world of the pearling industry. He was fond of latin terms, which he used commonly as a solicitor—et praeterea nihil means ‘and apart from that, nothing’.The story was written for the Sydney Mail newspaper in 1902.
The schooner Tarawa is lying at anchor in Endeavour Straits, just opposite the place where Captain Cook landed. Around her, like chickens round a hen, are anchored her fleet of a dozen pearling luggers. The sea is as smooth as glass, and there is a constant clatter of rowlocks and splash of paddles as the native boys row the little dinghies from lugger to lugger, laughing and chattering with their countrymen; ‘go walkabout’ they call it.
The sun strikes down dazzlingly on the white sand of Possession Island, and the hills of the Australian mainland are wrapped in a blue haze; on the beach a crowd of black men are disporting themselves, swimming and racing and shouting with laughter. On the luggers the Japanese divers, serious little men, are overhauling their gear, and round the schooner there is a cluster of small boats, because it is refitting season, and every lugger wants something, either a new diver’s dress, or a new sail, or a new anchor, or a new meat cask, or some other item. The clerk of the stores on the schooner consults with the captain as each demand is made, but no reasonable thing is ever refused, because a diver will not work with bad gear: so that to be sparing of stores is false economy.
By degrees some of the luggers are fully fitted out ready for work, and they are ordered to go out and fish until the rest of the fleet are ready, when they will all move off together to the pearling grounds out by Radhu Island or down the coast. A slight breeze springs up, and at once there is a clinking of pawls, a rattle of chain, and the creaking of blocks as the anchors are got up and the sails set in the luggers that are ready for sea, and away the little white-sailed vessels go, each with its crew of happy black faces forward and its serious little Japanese diver at the helm.
The diver is always the captain of the lugger, and there are matters of etiquette in connection with pearl diving which the outsider finds it hard to grasp. The diver, for instance, never rows a dinghy. If he wishes to visit the schooner or another lugger, one of the crew has to pull the dinghy for him; also the diver and ‘tender’ sleep aft in a tiny little cabin the size of a dog kennel, while the crew live forward under the half deck. Among the luggers ready for sea is the Pearl, commanded by Billy Makeela, a South Sea islander who has been diving for 25 years, and on this lugger the stranger is sent out to see how the pearl oyster is obtained.
On coming aboard he finds the lugger to be a 10-ton vessel of beautiful yacht-like lines, and, indeed, some of these luggers are designed by the best designers in Australia. The sails are white and the gear in good order. Billy Makeela makes us welcome in a stately way. He is very black, and his only clothing is a dirty loincloth, but that is his service equipment. When he goes ashore in parade order he is majestic, and Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like Billy Makeela. As this is only a short trip to kill time till the other luggers are ready, Billy has taken with him his wife, Balu, a native of the Torres Straits. Balu is about 30 years younger than Billy, and is clothed in a white print dress which she got at the mission station. She can read or write English, but the unaccustomed surroundings make her shy, and as the lugger moves off and Billy squats down by the helm she crouches submissively behind him, holding on to his shoulders, with her nose buried in the small of his back, and all that one can see of her is the back of a round, woolly head.
The lugger bends over to the breeze till her lee rail is under water and the spray comes flying aboard. The crew forward consists of four Torres Straits Islanders; they are born natu
ral boatmen and are as much at home in the water as the dugong which they occasionally hunt. As soon as the lugger is fairly under way they go below and begin to play cards. Two of them are brothers of Balu, so that it is quite a family party. They are dressed in cheap pyjama trousers, et praeterea nihil.
Aft with Billy and his wife sits Joe, the Portuguese tender, who has to attend to Billy’s lifeline. Joe has been a steward on various vessels, and has been in more parts of the world than the Wandering Jew. He confides to us that ‘dis Billy ’e altogether good diver. ’E get shell on de reef. Dese Japanese dey walk over it; dey do not see it.’ As a matter of fact, the Malays and islanders have more natural hunter craft than the Japanese, and they can find shell in the reefs and under rocky ledges; but the Japanese will outwork them on open bottoms.
We thresh our way to the ‘old ground’, a large area of open sea about eight fathoms deep, and here Billy studies his landmarks by the neighbouring islands and studies the look of the water. At last he orders, ‘“Stan” by foresail. Down foresail. Down mainsail. Down jib. Let go,’ and the anchor goes over with a couple of turns of chain round the fluke, so that it will allow the lugger to drift.
Billy dresses rapidly with the assistance of Joe, the tender. The dress is canvas and india rubber, with great heavy lead-soled boots, a corslet of great weight, gun metal helmet and two lead weights to hang over the shoulders. A man can only just move with this gear on him. Billy stands on the ladder, half in the water, two of the black boys set to work at the pump, and the plumb line is thrown over. This is sent down so that the diver may keep hold of it and see what sort of bottom he is coming to. If he chanced to find that he was descending just over a big valley in the bottom of the sea, or among jagged rocks likely to foul his line, he could hold on to the plumb line and reconnoitre the bottom before finally descending.