On board Catalpa, Captain Anthony, exhilarated by his first mate’s fraternal support, expected to see the 12,000 feet high peak of Tenerife’s volcano straight ahead, but was appalled to find himself sixty miles off course. The new chronometer was as faulty as the old. Once in Tenerife, Anthony employed the help of the US Consul so that as new crew members recruited in Fayal turned up by passenger ship and came aboard, he obligingly issued them passports.
Anthony spent nearly three days aboard a nearby American schooner doing comparative navigational tests. He also spent $300 in buying timber, and as it was loaded, told the crew it was to serve as spares for the boats. Catalpa sailed from Tenerife on 25 November, its papers saying that it was cleared for ‘River Laplatte and other places.’ In December, three small whales were taken in the mid-Atlantic, and then towards midnight on Christmas night the Catalpa crossed the equator in longitude 27. Here it would suffer two months of light breezes, which destroyed hopes of a quick transit around the Cape of Good Hope.
Mr Collins suspected there might be a potential line of contact with the prisoners through Father McCabe of Fremantle, whose Sunday Mass he had attended, the congregation half made up of convicts in yellow prison clothing. One version of how Collins met the priest was that, seeing the thin chasuble McCabe was wearing, he offered to donate a new set of altar vestments. However it was done, on O’Reilly’s advice Breslin confessed his purpose to the priest.
Patrick McCabe later said that he was delighted to meet Mr Collins and to discover him to be the John Breslin who had liberated Stephens. The priest agreed to carry messages to men, and in making that offer was moving out of the limits considered appropriate for clergy by the Irish-dominated hierarchy of Australia. Western Australia, however, did not yet run to a bishop—the area was administrated from the distant archdiocese of Adelaide nearly 2,000 miles east. Uninhibited by church authority therefore, McCabe told Breslin that the best contact with the prisoners was Will Foley, a former soldier who had received his ticket-of-leave. A tall man—nearly six feet—Foley had a ‘weak heart,’ apparently a congestive condition. But he was a joker, favourite of the guards and warders, and so even after his release had the run of the prison. Meeting up with Foley, Breslin immediately liked him and wrote a note for him to take to James Wilson, the author of the Voice from the Tomb letter.
Most of the prisoners Breslin wanted to liberate had trusty jobs, Foley told him. Hogan was a painter, Cranston was working in the storehouse. Red-haired Darragh worked as clerk and attendant to the Church of England chaplain, Hassett was a gardener in the Superintendent’s garden. Harrington, the oldest, now forty-eight, normally worked on the docks, and Wilson had been recently given the job—as an ex-cavalry man—of looking after His Excellency the Governor’s horses for a forthcoming visit from Governor Robinson. There was another soldier Fenian, James Keilley, who also had a trusty job but who lay under a cloud with his colleagues, and we do not know if he was mentioned at this stage as potential escapee or problem. The turbulent and alcoholic Thomas Delaney of the 5th Dragoon Guards had a ticket-of-leave but was temporarily in prison for unruly behaviour, and Collins was warned for security reasons, and because Delaney’s time was nearly up, against including him.
In any case, Will Foley took Breslin’s letter to the stables and put it in Wilson’s hand. It read: ‘To James Wilson and all the rest, Greetings. Those who have not forgotten are close by … Destroy this for the sake of old Erin.’ The tomb door was ajar.
Mr Collins himself was in the meantime given a tour of the prison by an Irish friend of the hotelier Maloney’s, melancholic Superintendent Joe Doonan. Breslin’s plans would destroy Doonan’s career, but Doonan suspected nothing. Soon Foley was able to pass another message to Wilson which indicated that the prison had been reconnoitred. And not only the prison. As Christmas neared, the new governor, Sir William Cleaver Robinson, invited Collins to a Christmas Party at Government House, Perth. Robinson was a youngish man, fourth son of a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry, born in Westmeath, and member of that corps of regularly re-posted colonial administrators. His orders in the case of Western Australia were to delay the colonists’ demands for self-government. He had already served as governor of Prince Edward Island, an experience which would prove crucial for all parties in weeks to come. Governor Robinson’s guests at Government House admired his capacities as a musician—in the end he composed a comic opera which would be performed in Melbourne. Songs he was writing at this time—‘Remember Me No More,’ ‘Imperfectus,’ ‘Severed’—would become commercially successful later in the century, and were probably heard in early draft by Mr Collins.
In the withering heat of New Year, Father McCabe had begun to use a trap to travel round the various convict stations and depots, and persuaded Doonan to give him Wilson as a driver; and thus a meeting between Breslin/Collins and James Wilson, 38-year-old veteran of the Bombay artillery and the 5th Dragoon Guards, took place four miles south of Fremantle. In thick coastal bush, Breslin met the lean, sun-burned convict and told him that the plan was to get the prisoners off in the way John Boyle O’Reilly had escaped. Wilson wondered aloud how Breslin could bribe a sea captain to take half a dozen. Breslin reassured him, telling him that the Clan had bought an American whaler. Wilson could barely believe it. Breslin emphasised that everyone must be on good behaviour and have work as trusties or convict constables outside the prison walls.
Breslin had promised the fatally ill go-between, Will Foley, that he would advance the passage money for a transit home to Ireland, but asked only that Foley did not move until he was no longer required. By mid-January, with Breslin’s blessing, Foley set off for Ireland and the United States. After saying goodbye to his relatives in Ireland, he would arrive in New York in mid-July that year, and the heart disease he had contracted in prison would kill him soon thereafter in St Vincent’s, Staten Island.
Late in that January of 1876, Lord Carnarvon at the Colonial Office sent a warning to Governor Robinson of Western Australia about the possibility of a Fenian rescue: ‘money has been collected in this country and Ireland and a scheme set on foot for the purpose of assisting the escape from Western Australia of certain Fenians (I believe Military) now in the colony.’ Those ‘charged with carrying out this attempt have either lately sailed for Western Australia or may do so by the mail steamer which brings this dispatch.’ Lord Carnarvon, however, forbade Robinson from warning the gaol and police authorities of the colony. Robinson was to take measures, but to keep the strictest secrecy, confiding only in one or two faithful and intelligent officials.
Robinson consulted his superintendent of police, Captain Smith, and the Acting Comptroller-General, William Fauntleroy. Smith took responsibility for the two Fenians presently on ticket-of-leave in Champion Bay, and Fauntleroy for the eight Fenian convicts in Fremantle prison. Robinson assured Carnarvon, ‘The eight who are in prison will be carefully watched by the Comptroller-General and I think I may assure your Lordship that any scheme of the nature referred to which may possibly be set on foot, will end in total failure.’ Fauntleroy in turn advised Robinson that during daily work details, the Fenians would be kept scattered in various parties around the prison. To lock them up would merely prove that official suspicion existed, and this would run counter to Lord Carnarvon’s command.
Carnarvon was in fact warning Western Australia about a separate Fenian rescue attempt from that involving Breslin; an attempt to be conducted by two Irish members of the IRB. Had Breslin, or even Devoy in New York, known of it, it would have filled them with fear that soon Fremantle would have an embarrassment of conspirators.
Catalpa eked its way southwards in the Atlantic, looking for the same Roaring Forties which the convict ships had always sought. When it reached a little over 41 degrees south, a gale hit from the south-south-west. As the storm abated and the sun came out, Anthony saw a little copper-bottomed bark and could not avoid speaking to her without creating suspicion on both ships. The bark was Platina, co
mmanded by an old friend of Anthony’s, Captain Walker Howland, a relative of the shipwright who had restored the Catalpa. Four months out from home, Platina had a mere fifty barrels of oil, and Howland had decided to try the Seychelles and the Mozambique Channel. On deck, the whaleboat crew chatted with the crew of Platina, and found out clearly for the first time that they were not anywhere near the River Plate in South America, but nearer the Cape of Good Hope. One of the Portuguese sailors from Catalpa was, however, able to offer a reasonable explanation—they were probably bound for New Zealand, whose whaling grounds had a high repute.
The crew of Catalpa was consoled off South Africa by the capture in late December of four small whales. By now some of the whalemen were complaining that they should make for Ascension Island in mid-Atlantic, to re-victual, for the chief diet of Catalpa had become ‘simp,’ pounded hardtack mixed with molasses. But such hardships were routine, and no crewman dared challenge Anthony. Eighteen seventy-six came in, and the whaler was still tacking in the South Atlantic.
Then, in mid-February, a hundred or more miles south of present day Port Elizabeth, South Africa, a most extraordinary chance meeting occurred. A vessel named Ocean Beauty bore down upon Catalpa, and Anthony went on board. He found the captain to be a very large genial Englishman named Cozens, bound from Liverpool to New Zealand. During his conversations, Captain Cozens mentioned that he had once captained a convict ship to Western Australia—in 1868 in fact. It had been named Hougoumont. Anthony asked about the re-fitting facilities of Fremantle, and Captain Cozens spoke warmly of Bunbury, produced from his chart locker a map he had used aboard Hougoumont and gave it to Anthony.
The excitement of having such a fine chart did not however do much for Catalpa’s progress. It was 4,700 miles from Capetown to Cape Naturaliste, south of Bunbury, Western Australia. During eleven days in February and March, Catalpa made only sixty miles south and 120 miles east. Then on 10 March, the wind turned round behind them, and after five heady days the whaler raised the French isle of Saint-Paul, roughly halfway between South Africa and Western Australia. Whalers always liked to stay at this unpopulated and dramatic island, to enter its bay which was the partially submerged crater of a dead volcano. Catalpa paused to fish but not to land. Anthony and Smith had Bunbury on their minds.
Under some lights it might seem strange that as Wilson and the other Fenian prisoners waited tremulously in Western Australia for a whisper of deliverance, two of the strongest voices of Young Ireland were by choice living on the far more politically advanced east coast of Australia. Eva Kelly, the former girl muse of the Nation, lived still as a doctor’s apparently unremarkable wife in Brisbane. Few seemed to know that she had written occasional verse for the Fenian Irish People in Dublin. The money the former prisoner Michael Cody collected in Brisbane and on the Queensland gold-fields may have included a contribution from the O’Dohertys, but Kevin O’Doherty had largely kept apart from the Fenian enthusiasm. While Eva intermittently and calmly stated her radicalism on Ireland, St Kevin had become an Old Ireland-style improver. He had stood again for the Queensland Parliament in 1868, and yet again in 1870, and had been returned for North Brisbane as an independent ‘Town Liberal,’ arguing for public health—considered an eccentric concept by some—and the clipping of the exorbitant power of the large pastoralists or squatters in the hinterland. O’Doherty disliked them on a number of grounds: for their locking-up of the rich sub-tropic coastal strip and the great black soil plains inland, an inhibitor on immigration; and for their misuse of labour, including indentured labourers from the Melanesian islands of the South Pacific.
In the Queensland parliament, which no longer met like a half-baked colonial council in the old convict barracks but in a new legislature building, O’Doherty had in 1866 supported the youngish Charles Lilley, a newspaperman and former soldier from Northumberland who had once served a month’s confinement in a British military prison for fraternising with strikers. But O’Doherty’s disenchantment with the promising Lilley set in almost immediately, when Lilley appointed two squatters to his cabinet. Lilley fell from power, and O’Doherty’s part in his downfall in 1870 was approved of by the people of North Brisbane, who returned him again. St Kevin also took time to maintain the status of distinguished practitioner, and Governor Denison of Van Diemen’s Land, who having governed Madras was now living out his last year in Surrey, would have been astonished to hear that O’Doherty was called in to treat the fatally ill governor of Queensland, Samuel Blackall.
Eva and St Kevin were people who took their own marital blessedness for granted, but much had intruded between the two: verse, as much a divide as a link; imprisonment, transportation, surgical studies, colonial busy-ness. Part of that busy-ness from the start of his political career was his campaign against the great Queensland shame of ‘blackbirding,’ the capture of Melanesians, particularly from the New Hebrides, and their use as indentured labour in the cotton and cane sugar plantations of Queensland. The ‘recruitment’ of South Sea Islanders as ‘blackbirds’ was carried out with all the cunning and brutality which had earlier marked the recruitment of African slaves for the Americas. During Lilley’s brief premiership, the Polynesian Labourers’ Act was passed under the influence not only of some reformers but also of landowners who knew they could not get away with an unregulated flesh trade any more. O’Doherty disliked the act because it legitimised the practice.
The campaign against blackbirding, rather than Fenianism’s lost hopes, exercised O’Doherty. He drafted a bill of his own to abolish the trade, and was ready to present it to the house by 1871. It was a pragmatic, not an absolutist bill—it left existing arrangements regarding Kanaka labour in place, since a repatriation provision which already existed would soon have the last of the blackbirds back at home in the New Hebrides. O’Doherty invoked as a reason for abolition the moral disrepute the trade brought with it, but also the fact that blackbirding inhibited immigration of free labourers from the British Isles. Being thus in an Australian sense an abolitionist, we can wonder what might have befallen him in America had Meagher’s letter about New York medical practice been more encouraging. His bill failed, but ultimately the institution of blackbirding was abolished.
His position as Honorary Consulting Surgeon to the Hospital for Sick Children convinced him that Queensland needed new and very broad health legislation, and that some of his ideas would be opposed by the anarchic individualists who have always characterised Queensland politics. In 1872, under the spur of the arrival of smallpox-afflicted ships from Melbourne in Moreton Bay, he introduced the first Public Health Act to be passed by the Queensland Parliament. It established practices of quarantine and compulsory reporting of disease. ‘Unrewarded by any higher solace than the confidence and esteem of his constituents,’ said the Courier, O’Doherty declined to re-nominate for parliament in 1873. He had found it exhausting to sustain politics, a medical practice and other duties, such as his committee work on the plan to establish at Brisbane Hospital a preliminary school of medicine for young Queenslanders. He served too as a member of the Medical Board, becoming a severe judge of medical standards, submerging the memory that he had worked as an unregistered physician in Van Diemen’s Land.
Irish issues would ultimately fatally reclaim him, but for the moment his aim was to eradicate colonial bigotries. In the inland town of Warwick, after an Ulster-style riot in which supporters of an Orange candidate attacked an all-too-triumphal procession of the supporters of an Irish Catholic candidate. O’Doherty and two Protestant friends founded the Hibernian Society. A similar organisation had been used in Canada as a front for the Fenians, but in Queensland it served the interests of the sort of tolerance under the Crown which D’Arcy McGee had preached. St Kevin’s opening address as president would indeed have done credit to McGee: ‘We are here, thank God, completely independent of that discord among our countrymen at home. Here the British Constitution is not an empty name.’
Indeed at this stage of his life he seem
ed the blithest of the remaining Young Ireland State prisoners. He delighted in teenage sons, shining colonial boys of handsome parents. They showed sporting ability, and drew the inexhaustible O’Doherty into the committees of rugby football teams and of the Brisbane regatta. William O’Doherty, and a youth appropriately named John Devoy, took first place in a skiff at the Brisbane regatta of 1873. The O’Dohertys’ younger son Kevin would ultimately play rugby for Queensland against New South Wales. Eva’s surviving daughter Gertrude was now about five years of age and the object of her father’s baby-talking infatuation. ‘Dearest Darling Titsum Kitsum, I send you 200000000000 million kisses …’
In 1875, when a few were engaged in the plans for Fremantle, the O’Dohertys were engaged with the world-wide centenary celebrations of the birth of Daniel O’Connell, whom O’Doherty had once defied. St Kevin and Bishop Quinn suggested that the date be celebrated by Queensland as a whole, but this line did not quite wash with the general community, identifying as it did all Irish enthusiasm with Fenianism. Since Protestant clergymen preached against the idea, the celebration of O’Connell’s centenary became a purely Catholic matter. O’Doherty saw that some Australian-born of Irish descent were not willing to participate even in something as innocent as the O’Connell centenary. ‘They are jealous of their Australian dignity,’ wrote O’Doherty, ‘which they consider compromised by celebrations of men and events which have no direct connection with their native land.’
The Great Shame Page 78