by Timothy Egan
Early one morning, a gust of jailers came through and rushed the four prisoners out of their cells. They were shaken awake, chained, then led to a coach, which conveyed them to Dublin under the escort of British soldiers. After getting word of a plot to rescue the prisoners, the Castle had decided to ferry them out of Clonmel. Distance from the executioner’s hurdle lightened the spirits of the state prisoners. Smith O’Brien got to see his mother and his wife, Lucy, at Christmas. They brought along a surprise—a newborn child, his seventh. As at Clonmel, Meagher was the most upbeat. To his journalist friend Blake Dillon he wrote that England would never be able to kill the spirit of the people. “Beyond these shores, whenever two or more Irishmen are gathered together, everything almost can be done.” The convicts’ lives were on hold while a legal review worked its way through Westminster.
In the late spring of 1849 came word that the judicial process had gone full circle: their appeal was denied. But in a concession to world pressure, the Crown decided to show some mercy. It was announced that Her Majesty Queen Victoria had been advised by the government to commute the sentence of death, and the gracious sovereign had consented. The decision, as it was widely interpreted at the time, had everything do with a plan by the queen to visit Ireland later that year.
The young rebels would live another day. But they would live as prisoners in Australia, specifically the island of Tasmania, Britain’s most distant penal colony—then called Van Diemen’s Land. The royal clemency was transportation for life, which meant that four men who had been willing to die for Ireland would never see it again. They were crushed by the new sentence: they had expected execution or a pardon, but not purgatory at the other end of the world. They would depart within days. What had been a leisurely nine months to say goodbye now became a hasty exit. Meagher stuffed his trunks with books and writing materials, the nutrients of his life. On July 9, he penned his last letter from Ireland, to a friend, John Leonard. It was a requiem for a battered country.
The next census would show that the nation’s population had fallen by nearly two million—one in four people had died or emigrated. Even Lord Lieutenant Clarendon felt England had committed something close to mass murder in the Ireland he oversaw. No other nation in Europe, Clarendon wrote to Prime Minister Russell in 1849, would “coldly persist in a policy of extermination.” The Irish left their homes unwillingly, as convicts or rejects to Australia, men to build roads in the Antipodes, orphan girls to become house servants. And they left willingly, forming the scattered parts of the global Irish diaspora—the Lennons from County Down to Liverpool, eventually to produce John of the Beatles; the Kennedys from County Wexford to Boston, eventually to produce another John, the first Irish Catholic president of the United States; and the Kearneys from County Offaly to New York, to produce a second American president, Barack Obama.
Nations do not die in a day [Meagher wrote his friend]. Their lives are reckoned by generations, and they encompass centuries. Their vitality is inextinguishable . . . Forget my privations, forget all the happiness I have sacrificed, and change what would otherwise be a weary bondage into a tranquil, happy dream. Besides, I feel I have simply done nothing else but my plain duty, and hence I cannot be otherwise proud and happy at this moment. My heart, indeed, was never so firm . . . Orders have come,
Yours devotedly,
Thomas Francis Meagher
That morning, Meagher, Smith O’Brien, MacManus and O’Dono- ghue were loaded into a carriage under escort of fifty mounted police armed with pistols and carbines. Weeping and farewells, as family pressed for a last touch. After saying goodbye to his wife and seven children, Smith O’Brien couldn’t contain himself. He’d been unflinching for a year. As the finality of the sentence sank in—banishment for life—he broke down, tears smearing his face. Meagher tried to comfort him, but it wasn’t easy. For men of their class, manners were a buffer.
The guards led them to the harbor, where a brig, the Swift, lay at anchor. Up to the deck, leg irons dragging. On board, the captain read them the rules. In bed by 9 p.m. No talking to any of the ship’s officers or deck hands. Two meals a day. The ship eased its way out of Kingstown Harbor, turned south in the Irish Sea, west into St. George’s Channel, down the coast, the outline of the Wicklow Mountains coming into view. At dusk, dinner of sea biscuits, a jug of colored water, dried beef. The next morning, with clear skies, the Swift sailed along the broken coastal edge of County Waterford. The last look tugged at Meagher’s heart. “I pass by,” he wrote, as mournful as he ever sounded, “and my own people know nothing of it.” Ireland shrank on the horizon, smaller, smaller, smaller, and then disappeared altogether. The brig aimed for the open Atlantic, upon the seas, beyond the seas, as British courts intoned in the formal sentencing to the penal colony, from an island home to an island more strange than any in the Western imagination, where a man of twenty-five could not possibly picture himself growing old—a captive, a convict, an exile for the remainder of his days.
PART II
* * *
TO BE IRISH IN THE PENAL COLONY
6
* * *
Island of the Damned
So long as the ocean had no end, life had no starting point. For 112 days, Thomas Meagher’s world was a brig barely thirty yards in length, stem to stern, floating from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, past two continents to get to a third—the world’s largest prison. The convicts slept in bunks belowdecks, their door locked and lanterns extinguished at night by a seaman they were prohibited from speaking to. The wooden belly of the Swift, in the last days before the Empire’s fleet started its transition from timber and sail to iron and steam, groaned through a 14,000-mile course, a distance more than half the circumference of the earth at the equator. A cabin the size of a closet in the Meagher family home held some of the most loquacious, best-educated, daring young men in Great Britain, on their way to a dumping ground for robbers and pickpockets, forgers and whores. “Brave men,” John Mitchel said of his coconspirators, “who fought for an honorable chance of throwing their lives away.”
By 1849, the Crown had sent almost 40,000 Irish to the penal colony of Australia, a fourth of them women. Only about 1 percent were political prisoners. The rest were transported for stealing bread or shoes, dodging rent, cutting down a tree, housing a fugitive or other petty crimes. Given their status, and the attention of the press in the United States and Europe on these well-known and well-connected rebels, the Young Ireland leaders on the Swift were not mistreated. They were free of leg irons, had the liberty to stretch and walk on deck several times a day. At a regular evening meal of dried peas, salted beef and hardtack, they were allowed a bottle of porter. They bathed in seawater brought aboard or, when the brig squatted in a calm, were dipped into the ocean for a brisker full-body cleaning.
Their leader, the aristocrat, the member of Parliament, Smith O’Brien the stoic became the sad man of the sea. He wept, again, for the hole in his life without wife and children, for the birthdays he would never attend, weddings he would not see, the home fire that would not warm him. Meagher had no one. He’d left a lover in Ireland, he told those closest to him, keeping the details vague. Best not to look back at what could never be. To rebuff the grief of forced removal, the prisoners came up with all kinds of diversions. Backgammon, from a little box brought aboard by the merchant MacManus. Fishing, also with MacManus’s string and hook. Rope-splicing, hammock-scrubbing, singing, dancing, debating the great issues. Reading the classics, contemporary tracts, books in Latin and Greek, much poetry, including the epics of Ossian in Gaelic. Next to Smith O’Brien, Meagher’s library was his closest friend. The banished national orator read aloud to the law clerk, Patrick O’Donoghue, a poor man among Young Ireland’s prisoners of means, often sick and ill-tempered, his eyes troubled. And not a day passed without writing, of verse that spoke of loss, and letters to people who might not open them for almost a year. One poem penned by Meagher found him still defiant, still upbeat.
>
I would not die! I would not die!
In Youth’s bright hour of pleasure;
I would not leave without a sigh,
The dreams, the hopes, I treasure.
It was no good to be sentimental, but Meagher had his weak times. Sitting on the deck, “on my way to world’s end,” his mind replayed moments in Waterford, the capsules of happiness. “I travelled back through the waves and seabirds and the clouds, through boisterous and dismal scenes of all sorts to that big weather-slated house,” he wrote Duffy, in a long letter that was published in the Nation, reborn after a jury failed yet again to convict its editor. Meagher came to admire the Swift, taking the trade winds in her sails, “a sprightly, handsome, little brig—as steady as a rock, but as graceful as a swan,” he noted. “I wish you could have seen her in a storm: at no other time did she look to such advantage. With a broken, scowling sky above her, and a broken, scowling sea beneath, she gallantly dashed on.”
Down the length of the Atlantic they sailed in the summer of 1849, past France, Spain and Portugal, south to the Canary Islands, the African west coast, through the Cape Verdes archipelago, crossing the equator with a ceremony that included an extra ration of grog. On July 20, a year to the day of the failed uprising at Ballingarry, Meagher announced that he was adding a nationalistic flourish to his name—as long as he was a prisoner of the British Empire, he would go by O’Meagher.
After two months, the Swift arrived at Cape Town, the tip of Africa. A political storm rocked the harbor: the colonists were in open rebellion at British plans to build a penal colony there. The Irish prisoners were hailed as victims of a cruel system, and heroes in their own right. Plans to go ashore were quashed, as was a chance to stock up on fresh food. Quickly, the Swift scooted away. From September 12 until October 27, over the most empty part of the Indian Ocean, the prisoners saw no land in a final leg of nearly 6,000 miles. The earth was an infinity of water, the horizon broken only by the occasional iceberg carried by currents from Antarctica.
For all the Irish thrown to sea in that century, Meagher and his mates had to be counted among the more fortunate. The Great Hunger had forced a Great Exodus. About 1.8 million sailed across the Atlantic from 1845 to 1855. Just under 1.5 million of those emigrated to the United States; the rest went to Canada. “In a few years more, a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as the red Indian on the shores of Manhattan,” wrote the London Times. Peasants who had never been more than a few miles from their rural homes found themselves propelled through an ever larger, unfamiliar world: from the doorstep of a hut reclaimed by a landlord, to a fetid workhouse in the city, to the dank, crowded hold of a typhus-infected ship on the high seas. In 1847 alone, 17,000 Irish died in the Atlantic crossing, almost one in fifteen—most from the dreaded “fever” that spread through lice in the coffin ships. Only the slave trade, the Middle Passage shipment of 12.5 million blacks from Africa to the New World, had a higher death rate on the Atlantic. The bodies of the dead were buried at sea. Thus a ship that had departed with intact families would arrive with orphans, widows and broken men. Typically, the vessels were cargo-carrying work ships, hastily outfitted to haul humans instead of goods, and they were filthy. Three hundred people shared two water closets. The ration, for those paying the base fare, was one pound of food a day per adult, and a gallon of water for drinking, washing and cooking. Home at sea for up to two months was an allowance of space, six feet by six feet for four people.
The Irish had no word in Gaelic for “emigrant”; the closest approximation was deorai—exile. The passage in the North Atlantic made many of those exiles feel that the greatest gamble of their young lives was a terrible mistake. Typhus, of course, was much feared. So was the outbreak of fire, from cooking in tight quarters. But what most terrified the uprooted, most of them dirt farmers and laborers unfamiliar with the ocean’s tantrums, were storms. The worst kicked up in the early spring and late fall, when the journey was cheaper but more hazardous. A morning with a sea of glass might snarl into a sudden tempest, waves crashing over the deck, sails fluttering like ravens in a frenzy. During such storms, passengers were locked inside their steerage cloisters, the air thick from lack of ventilation, possessions flying across the cabin. “Every timber writhed,” wrote one passenger. “The smallest nail had a cry of its own.”
But at least the Irish leaving home for North America left of their own free will, and they had some basic rights. Their water ration was quadruple the two pints a day allowed convicts shipped to Australia. The Irish sent to the West Indies were simply human property. Barbados, Jamaica, Bermuda and other isles under a hot sun relied on slave labor, usually African, for the tobacco and sugar trades. These shackled ranks were increased by the conquered of Ireland. In a seven-year span after Cromwell crushed the Irish, more than 50,000 men, women and children were sold into slavery in Barbados and surrounding islands. That was followed by waves of indentured servants, working as field laborers for up to seven years to earn their freedom. Felons, from political prisoners like John Mitchel to poor Irish categorized as “vagabonds and rogues” by the British judicial system, continued to be sent to the Caribbean and to Australia until the 1860s, their conduct shaped by the lash. “On Britain’s convict ships,” Mitchel wrote, “the sun never sets.”
The original design for Australia was not to be a continent for the condemned. Rumors of a large landmass in the Southern Hemisphere had passed among the world’s sailing nations for years. France, Spain, Portugal and England had all sent explorers to the big blank spot on the world map, and their navigators had sighted shards of land without comprehending the size. More often, they missed it entirely. It was the peripatetic, globe-roaming mariner Captain James Cook who finally went ashore and planted a flag. Cook had left England in August of 1768 on the HMS Endeavour, a ship about the same size as the Swift. By April of 1770, after charting the Maori stronghold of New Zealand, he saw a “sandy, scrubby” coastline that “resembled the back of a lean cow,” as one of his officers wrote. By August, two years after leaving Portsmouth, Captain Cook claimed the land for King George III, a monarch soon to wage war on his rebellious American subjects. With a round of musket fire, a newborn colony sixty times larger than England became part of the British Empire. The Crown’s botanists would bring back 1,600 plant species new to science.
Now, to people it. The Aborigines, having lived there for about 30,000 years, were considered a minor nuisance, part of the exotic fauna of the land down under. They were hunters and gatherers, black and naked, dismissed by the English as Stone Age relics. Britain planned a series of settlements on the eastern shore of Australia, as a source of food, fiber and timber, and to ward off the French. But it proved nearly impossible to persuade enough free citizens of London or Manchester to sail more than halfway around the world to start life fresh in the eighteenth-century version of Mars.
The solution was to export the wretched masses of the British underclass. The slums of England had produced a surfeit of petty criminals, Dickens’s characters scheming for shillings and begging for handouts—far too many for the limited jail space. Cheap gin, made of distilled corn, aggravated the problem. At one point, Royal Navy hulks were converted into makeshift prisons on the Thames. Forced exile—er, transportation—would provide a labor force in bondage, and get rid of both the prisoners and the prisons back home, at a fraction of the cost of warehousing the unfortunates in Britain. In London, a burglar was a net drain on the Crown. In Australia, he could be forced to work seven years for nothing. Plus, with the loss of the Empire’s colonies after the American Revolutionary War, England needed a replacement destination for its official rejects. The new penal colony was a splendid idea, the governing elites agreed—“a remedy for the evils likely to result from the late alarming and numerous increase of felons in this country,” as the establishing document for Australia explained. For almost a century, this experiment would become the world’s most far-reaching disposal system for the doomed.
> At the same time, England would encourage free settlement, with land grants and other incentives for those wishing to live without leg irons. The creation of Australia was always an audacious construct: could you produce a civilized society, a bit of Olde England transplanted to a brown and baked land, in the midst of what was an enormous police state? A class system refined to its smallest syllable and nuance of accent, its soup-sipping to choices between bouillon and melon spoon, its racial and ethnic categories delineated by crackpot theorists down to cranial millimeters, would take on grotesque proportions in the Antipodes.
The First Fleet sailed in May of 1787—eleven ships carrying 1,030 people, including 548 male and 188 female convicts. The prisoners were carpenters, factory workers, weavers, field hands, sailors, shoemakers, all gone bad in some trifling way—“a Noah’s Ark of small-time criminality,” as Robert Hughes wrote. Settling around Botany Bay, in what would become Sydney, England’s pioneer contingent nearly starved to death in its first two years, saved only by ships’ rations and the discovery that kangaroo meat was edible and abundant. Other villages and prisons were planted along the eastern coast of Australia and down into Tasmania. Over the next eighty years, Great Britain would force 164,000 people to cross the oceans for penance there. One in four were Irish, the minority within a minority—colonized twice.
