By noontime that Easter Monday, Catalpa was sixteen miles offshore on a calm sea, wearing very little sail, and maintaining an intense watch. As the afternoon advanced, though, the wind picked up and white horses appeared, which meant that the whaleboat would be harder to see. As darkness came on, Smith ordered a lookout in each topmast during the night, and lanterns lashed to all the masts as well as at the bows. ‘I want her to look like a floating city,’ he told his men.
After five o’clock in the afternoon, the men in the whaleboat briefly sighted Catalpa four miles away. This glimpse was curtailed by darkness. Throughout a horrible night, heavy seas dumped water on rescuers and rescued, and Hogan and Cranston were kept bailing madly. The hectic exultation of escape was gone and everyone except the oarsmen lay sodden and mute. Perhaps one or another of the escapees longed for his dry cell in Fremantle, especially when, two hours after dark, the mast snapped close to the base and everything—timber, rigging, sail, halyard—was washed overboard and threatened to drag the whaleboat down with it. Third mate Sylva grabbed a hatchet and hacked away at the shrouds and dragged the whole mess back aboard. By ten o’clock in the evening the debris had been reconstructed into a jury mast. But though Anthony told a prisoner he had been in far worse storms, he later confessed to suffering severe doubt. The boat was overloaded with sixteen men, and the gunnels were rarely more than two inches above water level.
Towards Tuesday morning, though the winds moderated, the seas were still high enough to catch Anthony now and then to the level of his armpits as he knelt on the stern sheets, working the rudder. Dawn came up clear on a sea still running strongly. All the men on the whaleboat cheered to see Catalpa at a distance and standing in towards them. But the smoke of the newest ship of the Royal Navy, Georgette, was also visible to the north-east. Georgette was soon close enough to cause Anthony to order the sail taken down, and everyone to lie in the bottom of the whaleboat. Without sighting them on the white capped sea, the steamer passed within half a mile, Anthony plainly seeing an officer on the bridge searching the shore of Garden Island, sure that a whaleboat with so many aboard could not have lasted the night. Georgette, twice the size of the whaling bark, edged up to meet Catalpa, and Anthony feared it would remain close to prevent his whaleboat approaching.
The dialogue between Catalpa and Georgette on their first meeting was well covered by newspapers, Australian and American, and certainly marked by the residual heat of the post-Civil War relationships between Britain and the United States. Upon being hailed, Sam Smith said that Captain Anthony had gone to Fremantle to buy an anchor. Superintendent Stone announced his intention was to come aboard and search for prisoners. In one account, Sam Smith is said to have answered, ‘You try it and you’ll be goddamned good and sorry … What the hell did we lick the pants off you damn Britishers in 1812 about? You don’t own the goddamn ocean!’ According to the Fremantle Herald, Smith’s answer was milder. ‘Don’t know; got no instructions; but guess you better not.’ Governor Robinson, in his ultimate report to Whitehall, declared the request ‘was peremptorily refused by the chief officer.’ Smith was seen taking a harpoon in hand to resist boarding.
Grady informed Stone at this point that Georgette’s coal reserves were about to run out. Confident that winds would keep Catalpa in place all day, Stone agreed to turn back to Fremantle. On the way back in, Georgette met the police cutter and told Coxswain Mills that he was to cut the whaleboat off from Catalpa. It was early afternoon by now, and Georgette swung so close across the stern of the whaleboat that Anthony and Breslin could see the Pensioner Guards on deck. Georgette having passed on, Anthony ordered the oars out again. At first the Catalpa was barely visible, but swung around then and loomed larger. Breslin gave a red whaling flag to Wilson and ordered him to wave it. The bark broke out its topgallant sails and headed down on them all the more strongly. It was Tuesday afternoon, and Sam Smith had at last sighted them. The water police cutter was, however, seen rowing hard from the north towards Catalpa. All the escaped prisoners aboard the whaleboat began reloading their revolvers, replacing the wet cartridges, declaring furiously their intention to fight. Anthony himself, apparently as willing as the others to resist authority, distributed rifles to Breslin and Desmond. But he was reassured to notice that the police cutter needed to luff frequently to spill the wind from her mainsail, and that his whaleboat retained an advantage.
When the Georgette reached Fremantle late that afternoon, Walsh, McCarthy and Father McCabe, from their separate vantage points, were delighted to see it did not have the escaped prisoners on board. Local sympathisers were rejoicing on the pier and singing God Save Ireland. The Fremantle Herald surmised the rejoicing ‘arose chiefly out of the popular impression that Fenian convicts are political prisoners, convicted and punished for offences against a Government, not against society.’ Governor Robinson, also on the pier, was less than enthused to see the empty Georgette, but he did not doubt Stone’s wisdom in returning to Fremantle for coal, for ‘had the Georgette been caught in a gale of wind and under canvas the chances are she would have been lost.’
At sea that afternoon, Coxswain Mills tried all seamanship to catch Anthony’s whaleboat before it reached Catalpa. But to help Anthony’s crew, Smith took Catalpa between the cutter and the whaleboat. From the whaleboat, Anthony was yelling, ‘Hoist the ensign!’ The American flag was raised to the peak where it had last been during the earlier conversation between Catalpa and Georgette. Smith also ordered his deckhands to display muskets and lances. Mills dauntlessly increased sail and put three or four men on the sweep to hasten the cutter’s progress. He got close enough to hear Smith yelling threats to sink him.
Anthony’s whaleboat slammed alongside its mother ship at about 2.30 on that Tuesday afternoon. As the whaleboat was raised to its station amidships, Anthony found that he was now the only man still aboard. The prisoners and their associates were already climbing fixedly on deck, rifles and revolvers still in their hands. The boat was hoisted on the davits, and the police cutter swept across the bows of Catalpa to a new barrage of threats from the deck. The final distance between the two was later claimed by Smith and Anthony to have been only a hundred yards—in such an immense sea a small space indeed. This, in the spirit of the overladen melodrama of events, may have been a downwards estimation: members of Coxswain Mills’s crew told newspapermen they had been four hundred yards too late. But that Mills was close emerges from Governor Robinson’s report to London. Reasons Her Majesty’s government, said Robinson, was entitled to ask the American government to take action on this matter were: ‘1. The Water Police saw the absconders get on board from the whale boat to the Catalpa. 2. The master of the Catalpa with his speaking trumpet in his hand, on the deck of the Catalpa, was recognised to be the man in charge of the whaleboat which left Rockingham … 3. The Coxswain of the Water Police boat saw and recognised two of the Absconders in the forepart of the Catalpa.’ Seeing aboard the police cutter various officers they knew, the prisoners indiscreetly crowded up to the rail, waved their rifles and shouted ‘salutations and farewells.’ Coxswain Mills knew he could not board Catalpa, gave the military salute and called, ‘Good morning!’ to Anthony.
Breslin was impressed with Smith’s handling of Catalpa before and after the pick-up. It took Sam Smith only two minutes to hoist the whaleboat, raise the ensign, change sail to take best advantage of the slight winds, and work Catalpa out to sea. Anthony embraced and complimented Smith, then called for the ship’s steward and told him to put on the best dinner the ship could afford.
As the escapees feasted on canned chicken and lobster, boiled potatoes, canned fruit, tea and coffee—a meal of joy and innocence—beneath a westering Indian Ocean sun, in Fremantle work parties of Pensioner Guards, were filling the Georgette’s bunkers with thirty tons of coal. Dark fell before the process was completed, and Sir William Robinson set off by carriage for his residence in Perth about 9.30 that night, having been assured the Georgette would be ready to go to
sea by eleven o’clock. At 10.00 p.m., however, Coxswain Mills brought his cutter into Fremantle and reported having seen the convicts embark on the Catalpa. On Comptroller General Fauntleroy’s word Georgette was returned to the chase. As Robinson said, ‘had I been at Fremantle when the Water Police boat returned I should not have allowed the steamer to go to sea again.’ All Georgette could hope for was to provoke Catalpa into firing on the British flag.
The detachment of water police and Finnerty’s reinforced Pensioner Guards marched on board again by ten o’clock that night. In the breasts of some of the Pensioner Guards there may have been less than a willingness to perish boarding a Yankee vessel against its will to retrieve prisoners some of them knew from the days aboard Hougoumont. A 9-pounder field piece (Anthony says 12-pounder) was dragged aboard and lashed in the gangway. It was meant to have been taken on Georgette’s earlier expedition, but Grady had feared that in the rougher weather it would have de-stabilised the steamer. Powder, round shot and canister were stored beside the cannon, visible means to destroy Catalpa. The escapees’ supporters, said the Fremantle Herald, observed the steamer’s departure with foreboding. Those ‘who were not acquainted with international law or aware of His Excellency’s instructions,’ were justified in thinking a sea battle lay ahead.
Aboard the good republican Catalpa certain distinctions of status, likely in time to irk men still edgy from the release of tension, were established that evening. Breslin, Desmond and King dined with the captain, while Brennan and the rescued men ate in the crews’ mess with the Fenian carpenter Duggan. Anthony gave Breslin his own cabin to rest in, lying down himself on a little four-foot lounge, and telling Sam Smith to work offshore if the wind permitted it. Exhausted, he knew he would have to be available to stand by the helmsman a good part of that night.
The prisoners and their rescuers took willingly to their bunks, but then awoke to feel the sea tranquil and the wind slack. They seemed magnetised to Western Australia. The ship did not, as Anthony put it, move her own length during the entire night. The irony was that they needed the turbulent sort of weather which had characterised the night before. Wakeful and back on deck, dizzy with fatigue, Anthony asked one of the crew to rub his back with aromatic ointment. Then, at first light, he climbed into the main topmast with his telescope and spotted the mast of newly coaled-up Georgette. The steamer, approaching Catalpa, flew a man-of-war and vice-admiral’s flag, the flag the governor was entitled to fly. Anthony, not easily awed, nonetheless saw a serious intent behind those pennants. A south-easter had come up but was too slight to give Catalpa much help in terms of escaping the coast. Georgette overhauled the whaler with ease.
The prisoners were warned over their breakfast that Georgette was on its way. Sad-eyed Michael Harrington, oldest of the prisoners, looked down on the remnants of perhaps his last meal. Anthony allowed the Fenian soldiers to stay armed but they were to keep utterly out of sight. According to what Anthony later told his memoirist, Pease, Sam Smith was raging up and down the companionways and across the decks in a condition of utter defiance. ‘Damn him, let him sink us … I’ll never start sheet or tack for him.’ Anthony walked the deck telling his crew that they would be thrown into the same prison from which the men on board had been freed. Some of his whalers he armed with harpoon lances, others with cutting spades normally used for slicing whale blubber. Sam Smith supervised the bringing up of grindstones from below, and spare spars, all of which could be dropped on any boat which tried to near Catalpa. As the light strengthened, Smith ordered a harpoon gun mounted amidships, and brass explosive cartridges stacked. More a rhetorical than a genuine riposte to Georgette’s cannon, it at least bespoke a determination not to be boarded.
Breslin, King and Desmond had come on deck and crouched under the gunwales, each with a rifle. Everyone seemed to be weirdly elated by the closeness of a resolution, of any resolution. Breslin had confidence in Anthony. But Georgette was 400 tons, and what passed for a small forest of bayonets could be seen on its deck. The Pensioners were in the bows, the Water Police in the stern prepared to board. Captain Grady waved his hat to Captain Anthony, whom he had once entertained on the bridge of Georgette. Grady was concerned about the freshening wind and the sudden advantage it might bring Catalpa. He quickly ran up the signal instructing Catalpa to heave to and shorten sail. Of course Anthony did neither.
Hence Stone ordered a shot fired across Catalpa’s stern. The air above the Indian Ocean seemed for an instant to crack open, and Anthony said later the water from the ball flew as high as the whaler’s masthead. The startled Fenians sheltering in their mess expected a shattering barrage. But none came. The resultant dialogue between ships is variously reported, but no version departs drastically from that recorded in the Fremantle Herald.
STONE: I demand six escaped prisoners now on board this ship—in the name of the Governor of Western Australia … I know the men I want are on board, for the police saw them go on board yesterday.
ANTHONY: I have no prisoners on board.
STONE: You have, and I see three of them.
ANTHONY: I have no prisoners here: All are seamen belonging to the ship.
The wind was now threatening to produce a collision, so Georgette was compelled to move away from the whaler. Stone: ‘I will give you fifteen minutes to consider what you do.’
Georgette hung off a little and everyone waited, looking at watches. Amongst Wilson, Darragh, Hogan and the others below, the wait cannot have been beneficial, for they were not as aware as Stone of maritime law. At the end of the wait, Georgette again went alongside and Stone again demanded the prisoners.
ANTHONY: I have none on board.
STONE: If you don’t give them up, I will fire into you and sink you or disable you.
ANTHONY: I don’t care what you do, I’m on the high seas, and that flag protects me.
But if there were escaped convicts on board, said Stone, ‘your flag won’t protect you in that.’
ANTHONY: Yes it will, or in felony either.
STONE: Will you let me board your ship and see for myself?
ANTHONY: You shan’t board my vessel.
STONE: Then your Government will be communicated with, and you must take the consequences.
Anthony said, ‘All right.’ Then in silence the ships manoeuvred. Fifteen minutes further grace expired. According to Anthony, someone called out that he had a telegram from the American government authorising the seizure of Catalpa. Anthony was to heave to, ‘I’ll blow your masts out unless you do so.’ Behind the gunnels, Breslin expected a raking shot to land amongst the masts. But again it failed to come. The vessels were now 18 miles offshore, with Anthony running Catalpa inshore to catch the wind but trying to avoid straying into Australian waters. When Catalpa’s crew, to quote Pease, ‘hauled up the clews on the mainsail, hauled down the head of the spanker, and let the gaff topsail run down,’ the officers on Georgette thought Catalpa was coming to a stop, and the steamer hove to as well. But Captain Anthony put the wheel up and the vessel swung off quickly and headed straight for the Georgette, causing Captain Grady to believe Anthony was trying to run Georgette down with his bows, which were reinforced with metal sheets for ice-cutting. Though Anthony had no such intention, as the Catalpa swung by, her jibboom was said to have just cleared the steamer’s rigging, adding to the subsequent legend.
Catalpa’s sails now filled, and she headed offshore. Georgette, under steam and sail, followed Catalpa for an hour. Discipline on neither ship broke. The wind grew fresher and constantly increased, and the good news was taken down to the prisoners below as Catalpa began to draw ahead. Anthony could still see the military and police officers aboard Georgette in an animated huddle. But as Catalpa gained distance, Anthony brought the rescued prisoners on deck. ‘Boys, take a good look at her, probably you’ll never see her again.’ Georgette peeled away about 9.30 a.m. Within his instructions, Stone could do nothing more.
John McCarthy, the IRB man, looking from the verandah o
f the Port Hotel where he and Walsh had been keeping quiet these past three days, was astonished to see Georgette returning to Fremantle. If she had stuck with Catalpa, he thought, nothing could have saved the whaler. But as the Herald said, ‘The Governor … was not to be led into committing a breach of international law, to ratify a feeling of resentment against the cool effrontery of the Yankee …’ In his report, Robinson declared that the escape of the Fenians, anxious as he was to recover them, ‘would not justify me in involving Her Majesty’s Government in an undesirable discussion with the Government of the United States.’ The governor dismissed with thanks the armed parties, and returned Georgette itself to its agents.
Keilley took his bitter heart to his cell that Wednesday night. But he would keep his composure admirably. He received a purely local conditional pardon in 1878 but was never to be reunited with his family. At one stage in his old age he was reduced to living in a tent, until in 1904 a local Irish group took over his care. In 1905 he would be honoured by the visiting Irish politician William Redmond, his minor betrayals, like his friendship with Fauntleroy, forgotten. Here was a likeable, chatty Irishman whose life had been destroyed early by his association with Fenianism. He would die in Western Australia in 1918 at the age of eighty-two.
The Great Shame Page 81