The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  A large scar on Hugh’s inner ankle was reported by a ship’s surgeon at the end of this journey. But any pain from the wound merely put a further edge on inner uncertainty.

  At last the party of convicts were in Cork’s large county, and crossed the Blackwater at the fashionable spa town of Mallow, favoured by Ireland’s wilder young gentry. Then their way took them down pleasant country lanes, by the distant ruins of Blarney, into wonderful Cork city, probably the biggest town Hugh had seen, and so to the port of Cobh. Within sight of the waterfront and steep-hilled town of Cobh itself, the broad reaches of the harbour stretched out, protected from the sea by the bulk of Great Island, within which sat Spike Island, a low fortified rock; prisoners awaiting ships to Australia were housed either in its barracks-like prison, older and darker than Galway gaol, or in an old hulk, a retired British naval ship, anchored offshore. On the prison deck of this old vessel, men were chained ankle-to-ankle. Wood rot and unpumped bilge water added their sourness to the air. Years later John Mitchel confessed that beneath the impressive walls of Spike Island, he was first overwhelmed by feelings of a hopelessness ‘language was never made to describe … I will forget what the fair, outer world is like.’ Here Larkin and the others gave up their civilian clothes, carrying at least in their fibres the peaty smell of home, and put on Spike Island’s brownish, inadequate canvas prison clothes. The prison diet—‘non-stimulating and anti-scorbutic,’ as the authorities said—consisted of small measures of milk, bread and oatmeal, with a too occasional dose of fresh meat or vegetables. Scurvy and dysentery were both common in the island and its hulk.

  2

  THE SHIPPING OF IRELAND, AND THE EXILE OF CHAINS

  Between decks a strong grated barricade, spiked with iron, is built across the ship at the steerage bulkhead. This gives the officers a free view of all that goes on amongst the prisoners. Bunks for sleeping are placed on each side all the way to the bows … There is no outlet but through a door in the steerage bulkhead, and this is always guarded by a sentry.

  Commodore Charles Wilkes, USN,

  after visiting a convict ship, Sydney, 1839

  By October 1833, the barque Parmelia, 443 tons, had arrived in Cobh from Gravesend, England, its convict decks empty. The captain, or master, of Parmelia was James Gilbert. The commander of the guard of the soldiers who had boarded was a Major Joseph Anderson of the 50th Regiment of Foot, a 53-year-old Scot, who had survived the Spanish Peninsular campaign against Napoleon’s armies twenty years past, carried a Napoleonic wound, and had now been posted by the War Office to the undramatic duty of guarding felons for the duration of the journey, and of then swelling the garrison of New South Wales. Mrs Anderson was also adventurously on board, accompanied by four of the Andersons’ near-grown children. An ensign was the only other officer aboard, and there were twenty-nine other ranks. Eight soldiers’ wives were to travel too, and fifteen soldiers’ children. Major Anderson now observed the detachments of convicts come aboard in Cobh, amongst them Larkin. Mustered on deck and quick-stepped below, these men experienced for the first time perhaps the suck of the tide aboard a vessel big enough by the standards of the time, yet also in its way a fragile, shifting world.

  Gilbert was no virgin captain in conveying such people as these to the nether world. We know little enough of him—which is in a sense one way of saying his voyages were efficiently managed and therefore attracted little official scrutiny from either the governor of New South Wales or the Navy or Transport Board of Great Britain. His first journey to Australia had been as master of the female convict transport Edward from Cork in 1829. In 1831, in the same vessel, Gilbert brought 153 male convicts from Cork to Sydney, losing 5. The prisoners below were to a certain extent the fall-out from the discontents of the hungry summer and the rent strife of the early autumn, when evictions were high. Many were in a weakened condition from their confinement on Spike Island, but the loss of life on both voyages of the Edward was considered fairly standard. James Gilbert had then commanded the first journey of the much younger, A1 Lloyds-registered, Quebec-built Parmelia, on its first excursion from Sheerness with 200 English prisoners, of whom 4 died of cholera. And now it was returning to Australia a second time, with Hugh and around 200 other Irish males.

  It was an irony of civilisation that the despised, the ejected Ribbonman travelled in better-found and regulated ships than most emigrants sailed in to Canada, New York, Boston or Baltimore. The convict transports were required to meet a standard. Eight-year-old Parmelia’s present classification of AE1 meant that it was still considered a first-class ship but was not quite sufficiently refurbished to maintain an A1 certificate. A certain lack of recaulking could be painful for Larkin and his fellows, for in the tropics the exposed tar often melted in the seams and dropped from overhead. There would, however, be much worse ships than Parmelia in the Atlantic. Below A lay E, I, and the barely seaworthy O.

  Anthony Donoghoe, the surgeon-superintendent for this new voyage of Parmelia to Australia, was on his first trip and would later make something of a career out of the convict run. He was a strong soul, which was not a bad thing. For it was upon him that the survival of the prisoners depended.

  Before being inspected by the surgeons of convict ships, the prisoners were often warned by their gaolers to look smart and cheerful, an injunction prisoners heard with irony and muttered curses. In preparation Hugh and the other Galway Ribbonmen and thieves were given a communal bath and dressed in fresh clothing. Many prisoners did their best to simulate good health, though many others pretended to illnesses as a means of staying in Ireland. The medical examination often occurred on the deck of the convict ship, from which the prison surgeon frequently absented himself so that the surgeon-superintendent was not able to question him about the marginally healthy.

  Despite the chain-induced ankle injury, Larkin was passed by Donoghoe for the voyage. He was allotted a ship number, 35—the Galway men had numbers ranging from 27 to 44—which indicated that he and his fellow Galway boys were loaded aboard fairly early. There was a strong tendency in Irish prisoners to divide themselves into regional groups, such as ‘Cork boys’ and ‘North boys.’ Larkin’s Galway group were now able to choose where to establish themselves as a rowdy bloc on the as yet uncrowded deck, perhaps, away from the taint of the privies or heads.

  Ordered and urged down the companionway, and entering the prison deck by its barred bulkhead, Hugh observed two rows of 6-feet-square sleeping benches running down the port and starboard lengthwise, each bench, as an observer said, ‘calculated to hold four convicts, everyone thus possessing eighteen inch of width to sleep in … The hospital was in the fore part of the ship, with a bulkhead across, separating it from the prison.’ Claustrophobia was relieved by the sight of scuttles—portholes—above the benches. They could be opened but only in the stillest weather.

  Even if lost to all other counties, the prisoners were not yet lost to Cork. Major Anderson was touched to see convicts’ relatives brought out daily to the ship by local boatmen. They called up to their lost ones exercising on deck, or at the portholes. Such tortured, delicious, futile conversations went on for hours, and Hugh must have looked at the wives and families standing in the boats, laughing, weeping, and both envied and pitied the Cork men. The sound of solders’ children from the upper deck was also likely to fill him with complicated longing and disabling regret.

  Fortunately for the survival of desolated Hugh and his brethren, by the 1830s, under the influence of Quaker prison reformers and of British progressives generally, the Transport Board put considerable responsibility on Captain Gilbert and on Surgeon Donoghoe. The contractors had to place a bond of £1,000, to be withheld until the governor of the penal colony had issued ‘certificates of the true and just delivery of all the provisions … and of the proper conduct of the Masters and Surgeons.’

  All requests the master received from the surgeon regarding the convicts were to be entered in the logs, as was the daily expenditure of rat
ions and water. One log-book was to be handed to the governor of New South Wales or the lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land on arrival in either of those places, and the second copy was to go to the Transport Board office on the ship’s return to Great Britain. The contractors fitted out the ship with everything from galley fires enclosed in brick to an Osbridge machine, a series of colanders for filtering and sweetening water. The charter also required masters to travel to the penal station as quickly as they could, touching in at intervening ports only as necessary.

  Larkin wore the clothing of a transportee. He had been issued three shirts, flannel or cotton, two pairs of duck trousers, and a novel item: a pair of shoes. He had a Guernsey smock, a woollen cap and neckerchiefs. There was an official prejudice against woollen clothing, because of the risk of lice, and so the damp of the convict deck often brought on colds and catarrh and respiratory illness. It seems though that Larkin, inured to cold both by rustic and penal experience, did not need attention from the surgeon. Hugh’s name would not occur in Donoghoe’s log as seeking medical treatment for any serious complaint.

  Linked below now with a chain which ran from one convict ankle to another via ringbolts on the sleeping platforms, Larkin must have privately felt that he had been buried amongst unnameable perils. It was partially true. Until 1835, tonnage laws taxed ships on the basis that the depth was equal to half the beam. So slim-beamed, tall vessels were in favour, and Parmelia had to carry a large quantity of ballast to sit right in the water. Hugh, who had not seen the open ocean before, would be required, on the basis of a tax anomaly, to face the world’s worst seas in a ship less than well designed for the purpose.

  In the period spent waiting for the prison deck to be filled and the winds to come right, Donoghoe had more leisure to make notes on the ship’s muster beside the name and number of each prisoner. He did not yet, in case death rendered the task irrelevant, fill in with ink all the details. But when Larkin was marched into the hospital for assessment, O’Donoghoe saw before him a fairly typical husky peasant, a good height, with the dark brown hair and blue eyes beloved of Esther, and a ‘ruddy and much freckled’ complexion. Donoghoe also listed: ‘A scar on back of right hand. Wart on inside middle and fourth fingers of left hand. Scar on back of fourth finger of left hand. Large scar over inner ankle of right leg.’

  Hugh’s age at sentencing was noted as twenty-four years, and he was credited with possessing reading but not writing. His writing would nonetheless appear on a number of later documents. The young Larkin had been taught a certain amount then in some so-called ‘hedge school,’ classes taught in the open, often by a hedge in summer, or in a barn or a loaned cottage in winter, by volunteer, itinerant schoolteachers. Peasants sent their children, paying the schoolmaster with small amounts of cash or food, to ensure that they learned something of the Sassenach language—English—which would give them some leverage in dealing with the establishment. The hedge schools also taught Irish and mathematics and even a smattering of Latin, history, geography—the Liberator himself had attended one before going to the Continent to study. Hedge schools were clearly a brave reaction to the Penal Laws that excluded the native Irish from education, and would not be transplanted until a National School system was established following Emancipation. The masters laboured under an acute shortage of books, and standard reading texts included Irish Rogues and Rapparees, A History of Witches and Apparitions and the biography of Freney the Highwayman, a literary diet which commentators believed contributed to Irish lawlessness. But the hedge schools had their impact in the summer of Rs (Reading) and Ws (Writing) which Donoghoe would place beside the names of Parmelia convicts.

  Donoghoe listed Hugh’s fellow Ribbonman John Hessian as twenty-one years of age, farm labourer, single, no prior convictions, and was 5 feet 3¾ inches, ruddy and freckled. The Strahane boys were dark, sandy-headed, muscular, average in height. Cusack, the 14-year-old, was 5 feet 1, and he carried three scars which might have derived from either horseshoeing or imprisonment. Donoghoe’s notations of heights and scars and colours of eyes would, if any of these prisoners escaped captivity in New South Wales, be used to track them down.

  As soon as he took them aboard, the surgeon was required to exercise the prisoners in small numbers in a barricaded exercise pen on deck. Prisoners could savour the autumn air, see the sky and—by craning over the high walls—the shore, and envy birds, but rifle loops were cut through the wood, to enable the soldiers of the 50th to fire into the crowd of exercising felons if there was a riot. A few sheep and goats—to provide goat’s milk for the soldiers’ children—were brought aboard and confined in their own pens on open deck, near the exercise area. Men with pastoral backgrounds like Hugh’s were given the pleasant task of feeding and tending them.

  As the Parmelia filled up, Donoghoe exercised the pragmatic wisdom built up by previous surgeon-superintendents. He had the prisoners choose their own mess captains, responsible for drawing the rations and keeping their section of the prison deck clean. Donoghoe also appointed convicts to act as deck captains, rather like prefects in a schoolyard, and selected hospital attendants, cooks, water-closet attendants and barbers. There had to be barbers: short hair promoted health.

  As Hugh looked from his sleeping berth along the lines of ankle-chained men on port or starboard, he saw some familiar but also some unexpected faces. An Oxford student, Archibald Turnbull, had been reduced to sharing this deck with the spade men, the vagrants, the Irish speakers, by having stolen a horse in Cork. He was the convict deck’s only gentleman. Of the others, more than a quarter came from the west—Clare, Galway, Mayo, Sligo and Leitrim. Only four prisoners were Dublin residents, and the others would have been pleased by this, since Dubliners possessed such a vicious repute that rustic convicts on many ships felt obliged to arm themselves with rocks tucked into the toes of stockings.

  One surgeon of this period noticed that at night, when mustered below deck, the mass of convicts recited the Rosary. It was an act of communal identity from which the fifteen Protestant felons were excluded by choice and conviction.

  A Durham-born soldier stationed in Limerick, Thomas Gibson, sentenced for habitual insubordination and drunkenness, was the last to be assigned a number. Amongst the prisoners were now three English soldiers, one Scottish and two Irish. Two were guilty of desertion, and two more of habitual drunkenness and insubordination. Most Ribbonmen aboard remembered army brutality, and here, in Privates Gibson, King, Grahame, Kelly, Ryan and Warden, was the cut-down-to-size visage of their tormentors.

  By mid-October Parmelia was filled with 220 men, 62 of whom had committed crimes of Ribbonism. They included a father and son, the Brennans, coal-miners who had issued a threatening notice. Apart from the Ribbonmen Strahane there were two other teams of brothers, the McGrath boys of Wexford and the McNallys of Mayo. Grievance inevitably ran in families.

  John McCauliffe, a farm servant, had threatened society in another way—a transient, he had been sentenced to seven years for vagrancy, along with his two sons, John, a Cork errand boy thirteen years of age, and 16-year-old Jeremiah McCauliffe, a shoemaker’s boy. Ten men altogether had been sentenced for vagrancy. Travelling with these least criminal members of the company were eight men guilty of murder, whose sentences had been commuted, again bespeaking deaths resulting from the fury of faction-fighting. So too were the sentences of the twenty-two men aboard found guilty of manslaughter. Twenty-seven had stolen livestock, whereas only eleven had stolen cash, and only one bank-notes. Clothing, hats, caps, a saddle, shoes, a bag of grain, butter, were amongst other items stolen by various of Hugh’s shipmates. Only seventeen were guilty of taking property by force, and only one of being a pickpocket, James McCarden, a sickly 16-year-old errand boy from Waterford who would die in hospital in Sydney within months of his arrival. One of the more interesting crimes might have been that of 27-year-old John Kelly of Roscommon, a tailor who was accused of sacrilege.

  At night the boots of Anderson’s sent
ries beat against the decking like the hammering of a heavy, human clock. As the boatload of felons ached towards departure, there was little chance of an uprising from the hold. Generations of convict ships had made their way to the antipodes without one mutiny succeeding. Any escape by launching oneself into the massive oblivion of the sea was attended by fear of the fire of Hell. Hugh had by now heard that, under some circumstances, wife and children might after many years be shipped to join a convict. So each tale and impulse neutralised the other as Hugh sat below in ferment.

  When the state of the winds and of Parmelia itself permitted Captain Gilbert to consider sailing, he was required to sign the Lord Lieutenant’s warrant, which attested that various persons having been found guilty of crimes against the laws of Ireland, and sentenced to be transported, ‘Service of the convicts is hereby transferred unto the Governor of New South Wales.’ The list of convicts was then signed by Gilbert and Surgeon-Superintendent Donoghoe and the documents sealed in a tin box and dispatched to Dublin Castle. A copy of warrant and list was sealed inside a second tin box for delivery to the governor of New South Wales.

  Hugh and others, though not previously seafarers, could nonetheless make sense of the racket of weighing anchor, the new urgency of orders, the bugle calling the entirety of the guard on deck, the thump of feet and military boots, the crack of canvas, creak of shrouds, howling of timber. Parmelia had intentions for the open ocean. In the echo chamber of the prison deck, the prisoner was overwhelmed, and had the options of shocked silence, praying, curses, tears and full-blown frenzy. The guards at the companionways heard this primal racket within the prison. But to most on deck, where squeezebox and fiddle had now combined with more businesslike yells and riot, the prison deck seemed appropriately voiceless.