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

by Thomas Keneally

  O’Donohoe’s prospectus, republished in the first edition, was conciliatory both to government and to the Irish community. O’Donohoe did, however, exhibit a traditional Irish willingness to adopt firm views on local politics within a short time of arrival. ‘The political aspect of Van Diemen’s Land has now assumed that conspicuous character, which requires a far different view to be entertained concerning its destinies.’ He thanked his clients: ‘Irish, English, Scot and Native, have vied with each other, in rendering us their aid, and calling out, “Fair play, a free stage, and no favor.” ’ As expected, he expressed editorial mistrust of the high tone of the anti-transportationists, Mr William Carter, merchant, and John Compton Gregson, barrister. ‘We have no sympathy with those Colonial Pharisees who are so often to be heard proclaiming the moral depravity of the convict population, by way of proclaiming their own moral purity.’

  In its early months, the Irish Exile and Freedom’s Advocate provided O’Donohoe with a living and congenial engagement with Hobart people, something denied the other prisoners. But it exposed him to greater peril. The matter which caused the most trouble between the Exile and the Denisons was the case of Smith O’Brien. On 2 February 1850, O’Donohoe reported, ‘We have learned with inexpressible anguish, that owing to the severity of treatment inflicted on this virtuous and noble hearted Patriot, his health is rapidly declining.’ In the next edition, O’Donohoe admitted he had received threats from Denison to leave the subject alone. ‘Innumerable communications have reached me respecting this great and good man’s health. I am not at liberty to insert any of them, or to make note, or comment on any act whatever connected with the Government.’ Gagged, he fell back on simpler causes: that of a freed prisoner of political background named Patrick McDonnell. McDonnell had sent for his wife and children to join him, but while they were at sea, had been crushed to death by a tree. ‘The widow of McDonnell is now alone, unprotected, unprovided—she and her orphans are wanderers in this land of strangers.’

  He also recorded straightforwardly the mania with gold strikes in the American West. And despite the ban on publishing anything directly on Smith O’Brien, he did quote from local and home newspapers on the matter.

  At the anniversary dinner of the Limerick Literary Institute … it was announced by the Secretary, Mr Potter … that he had strong hopes that, before twelve months passed away, the company would have the pleasure of BEHOLDING MR SMITH O’BRIEN ONCE MORE AMONGST THEM.

  By early new year, Lapham, to whom O’Brien would always owe a debt, adjusted Hampton’s regulations and seemed gradually to permit officers and members of their families to talk to O’Brien. Both sides of the arrangement benefited. He was able also to roam widely again: ‘if Maria Island were placed near the west coast of Ireland I should be quite contented to make it my abode for a long time—provided I was surrounded by my children.’ He was getting some of his spirit back.

  ‘Numquam mihi gratia,’ he felt expansive enough to write educatively to his eldest son Edward, ‘fuit memoria officiorium ab amicis perfunctorum quam nunc huic solitudine relegato.’ (‘Never will the memory of the kind offices performed by my friends bring me more gratification than it does now that I am relegated to this solitude.’) And he needed also the energy to deal with occasional business letters from the Ireland of estates and tenancies. One, from Lady O’Brien, who gave advice to Robert O’Brien now managing Cahirmoyle, concerned rent abatement on a property called Cappaculhane. The farmer at that place was ready now to pay off his rent in the form of butter and milk. Would O’Brien approve of the man’s having his two cows back? O’Brien assented to this arrangement. In a postscript of a letter to the Reverend Gabbett, Lucy’s brother, he asked that an enclosed, banal but, in the circumstances, touching poem might be passed on to his wife.

  For as from thee I farther go

  Me thinks ’twill cheer thy heart to know

  That dearer far to me than life

  Is my incomparable wife.

  Lucy herself was not above smuggling letters to her husband through Dr Nixon, Anglican bishop of Van Diemen’s Land, a friend of Lady O’Brien’s. Lucy senior went for solitary walks around the estate, and cherished ‘a secret tree and valley.’ He found it sweet consolation too that his birthday had been celebrated at Dromoland the previous October, and a delightful letter written that day by his daughter Lucy confessed all the fragmented enthusiasms of childhood. ‘Baby is a very nice little fellow he is always laughing when he is with Mamma. I am reading the history of Egypt in Rollins ancient history … The thrush that we got at Richmond is at Limerick, it was become very impudent and runs after us pecking at our clothes.’

  The Lapham family residence lay perhaps 45 yards diagonally across the square from O’Brien’s little cottage. (Both buildings still stand.) Clearly, exchanges were not only likely but nearly unavoidable. O’Brien wrote a poem in acknowledgement of a rosebud presented to him by the superintendent’s younger daughter, Susan Lapham, whom he thought a splendid, lively, generous girl. Even with his keeper, Miller, he had discourse. On their strolls, Miller related entertaining military anecdotes, and in return O’Brien might sit with Miller on the huge fossil limestone cliffs just around the northern end of the island and read aloud from Schiller, Byron, or Carlyle. But the relaxed conditions prevailed only on Maria, and it did not take long for a further grievance against the Convict Department to arise. £50 had been sent to O’Brien care of the Bank of Australasia. O’Brien was notified: ‘Will be delivered W S O’Brien when he is eligible by law to hold property.’ O’Brien wrote to Grace, ‘Though I profess no admiration for Lord Clarendon and his Government, I yet cannot believe that he would condescend to encourage my wife in a season of great pecuniary difficulty to procure for me a little money in order that it might be subsequently kidnapped in transitu by an official in VD Land.’

  Everyone had by now discovered that Mitchel’s ship had not been wrecked on the passage from Bermuda to Africa, merely blown about the Atlantic and delayed by perverse calms. In September the year before, after the Swift had departed South Africa, Neptune at last arrived in Simon’s Bay off Cape Town.

  In the Atlantic’s slack airs, a sergeant’s wife, a Mrs Nolan of Clare, chatted with Mitchel every day on the poop deck. She told him there were nearly 200 Irish prisoners on the prison deck, many of whom spoke not a word of English. ‘I seldom hear their voices,’ wrote Mitchel, ‘except when they sing at night on deck.’ They were ‘the famine-struck Irish of the Special Commission.’

  Ashore, as the British authorities and the locals waited for each other to give in on the matter of landing of convicts, Neptune was left swinging at anchor. Mitchel again became very ill with asthma in December 1849 and January 1850. When Earl Grey’s dispatches arrived at last to tell the captain of Neptune what to do with his cargo, ‘the men poured aft as far as the gangway in gloomy masses; and when Captain Bance unfolded his papers the burliest burglar held his breath for a time.’ The ship was to go immediately to Van Diemen’s Land, and all convicts aboard, in compensation for the hardships of their long passage, were to receive conditional pardons, except ‘the prisoner Mitchel.’

  Neptune slipped away from Cape Town on 19 February, and Mitchel wrote that for more than a month thereafter, in the squally southern latitudes, as he looked down from the poop on his walks, ‘the convicts look at me with a sort of respectful pity; and doubtless think my crimes must have been enormously villainous indeed to merit the distinguished consideration of being singly excepted from their universal emancipation.’ He had been nearly a year aboard Neptune when in early April the ship lay off Bruny Island, Van Diemen’s Land, in calm water, waiting for the Hobart pilot to come aboard. On 6 April, the Hobart Town Courier announced Neptune’s arrival, though the editors were more concerned with its hundreds of felons than with Mitchel. ‘New South Wales rejected them, New Zealand rejected them, South Australia rejected them, Port Phillip rejected them—and therefore Van Diemen’s Land, which has long suffer
ed under an accumulated load of evil, must bear the penalty.’

  He found he was to be permitted to reside at large in any one of the police districts he might select, subject to the normal parole and ticket-of-leave terms which would allow him to live within an assigned district. He was troubled: he had heard a rumour that the others were discussing the possibility of surrendering their paroles. Dr Gibson, the surgeon of Neptune, saved Mitchel from his absolutist tendencies by telling him frankly to take the offered ticket-of-leave, since confinement on Maria Island or any other penal station would finish him. Mitchel wrote a letter to the Comptroller-General accepting comparative liberty. Waiting for an answer he heard from Patrick O’Donohoe, ‘informing me that he has established a newspaper called the Irish Exile, enclosing me a copy of the last number, and proposing that I should join him in the concern … The thing is a hideous absurdity altogether.’

  Mitchel was in fact permitted to join his schoolfriend, Martin, and four days after landing, relished sitting ‘on the green grass by the bank of the clear, brawling stream of fresh water. It is Bothwell, forty-six miles from Hobart Town, from the Neptune and the sea, and high among the central mountains of Van Diemen’s Land. Opposite sits John Martin, sometimes of Loughorne, smoking placidly, and gazing furiously on me with his mild eyes.’ According to Martin, Mitchel reached Van Dieman’s land ‘a wretched-looking asthmatic … And now he can ride his forty or fifty miles a day, or walk a score with perfect ease and pleasure.’

  The two old friends shared rented rooms in Bothwell, and their attentive landlady lost no opportunity to say that she ‘came out free,’ which Mitchel says ‘is the patent of nobility in Van Diemen’s Land.’ In physical terms the town, a thousand feet above sea level, was delightful. The fragrance of the gum trees filled the air, which was ‘illuminated by the flight of parrots of most glowing and radiant plumage, that go flashing through the arches of the forest like winged gems.’ The settlement contained some seventy houses, a church where clergymen of the Churches of England and of Scotland performed services by turns, four large public-houses, ‘much better supported than the church.’ There was also a police barracks, headquarters of the police magistrate, whom Mitchel would get to know well. Below Bothwell the Clyde River surged over a waterfall to the settlement of Hamilton, which Mitchel was pleased to find was settled chiefly by Scots immigrants.

  Meagher quickly tired of his quarter of the bush. No elections to fight, no speeches to give, no rallies to galvanise. He early complained to O’Brien, ‘Between a prison and a district, I have discovered there exists just about the same difference as one may observe between a stable and a paddock.’ Ross had thirty or forty houses, and a military barracks ‘before the door of which two soldiers yawn and smoke all day.’ Here there were ‘more indications of Morpheus than of Mars or Bellona.’ He relieved his ennui by riding and hunting. ‘Dashing through woods, clambering up hills, clearing fences; and with a smart rifle cracking at everything that comes across you, is a great relief from the stagnation of a miserable little village.’

  He had retained his normal taste for mischief. He went to discuss the boundary of his territory with his magistrate, and was told that it was Blackman’s River between Ross and Oatlands. So the Young Tribune satirised this official arrangement by inviting Kevin O’Doherty to meet him at the stone bridge over that river, on the edge of a village and convict station called Tunbridge. On four or five successive Mondays an impudent meeting between Meagher and O’Doherty occurred here. A table from a local public house was placed at mid-bridge and, each prisoner sitting at his appropriate side, they were served lunch by an Irish publican from O’Doherty’s side of the river, watched by amused locals. ‘To be sure,’ wrote baroquely ironic Meagher, ‘the passage through the air, for upwards of five hundred yards or so, condensed the steam of the potatoes and solidified the gravy somewhat; but the old salmon-coloured inn was not to blame for that. In all these cases, the Home Office spoiled the cooking.’

  Tiring of that stunt, Meagher ordered a skiff from Hobart, and it was brought up by bullock team, O’Doherty legally escorting it through his territory, along a rough path through the Western Tiers towards Lake Sorell, a high mountain tarn, 3,000 feet up, where most of the State prisoners’ districts converged. There Meagher planned to launch it on St Patrick’s Day, 1850, naming it Speranza in honour of the Nation’s famed woman versifier. A number of supporters and friends from various towns were invited to attend the launch and to fire a volley into the air to mark the occasion. Such exorbitant festivals would always be Meagher’s style. On the day, O’Doherty did not turn up, and Martin, who was illicitly present, was anxious that something had befallen him. ‘I am afraid you are sick or suffering from some accident.’ O’Doherty was indeed suffering in Elm Cottage, Oatlands, from lassitude and dejection. Eva, now a 19-year-old bard, was publishing in the pages of the revivified Nation a string of verses designed to rally Ireland and to express her yearning for O’Doherty, and she would temporarily cheer O’Doherty when the verses at last reached him.

  Yes, pale one in thy sorrow—yes, wrong’d one in thy pain,

  This heart has still a beat for thee—this trembling hand a strain.

  But Eva’s beloved had not received them yet, and he found the interruption to normal courtship tormenting. He remained a loyal celibate devoted to an ethereal Eva, and being so famously betrothed, he did not have the liberties of flirtation, the wooing or even seduction of colonial women which Meagher did. He was also concerned about shortage of money, though he earned a tiny stipend as assistant surgeon to the Irishman Doctor Hall, the government surgeon in Oatlands, a good and generous mentor.

  At the end of summer on Maria, a man who had been kindly to O’Brien, Captain Bayly, the 50-year-old visiting magistrate, dropped dead of ‘paroxysms in the heart,’ leaving a widow and four young children. O’Brien joined the straggle of mourners to the grave where Bayly still lies, as Lapham and Dr Smart went on taking risks in being lenient towards their prisoner, lest O’Brien make the same journey as Bayly. They must have known at some level that the hard men ashore might one day judge them for it. In the meantime, they were charmed by O’Brien’s conversation, his tales of great parliamentary figures and his memories of literary men who were to them merely names in late-arriving newspapers. Lapham may have felt O’Brien would win his battle with the administration anyhow. O’Brien had already written to Robert Pitcairn, a Scots lawyer in Hobart, and one of the champions of anti-transportation, asking whether a writ of Habeas Corpus could be obtained which would force Denison and Dr Hampton to show under what statute they kept him in solitary confinement? Pitcairn told O’Brien that he planned to speak to two Hobart barristers, a young man educated at the Middle Temple, Thomas John Knight, and the combative and democratic Geordie lawyer John Compton Gregson.

  Gregson’s ‘Case for Opinion’ was sent to O’Brien, who must have rejoiced in it. ‘My opinion is that Mr O’Brien … might by suing out a writ of Habeas Corpus returnable in the Supreme Court procure such relief as would secure him from close confinement in the future.’ But O’Brien did not immediately act.

  In London, Earl Grey arranged for Chisholm Anstey, O’Brien’s brother Lucius and William Monsell, O’Brien supporters in the House of Commons, to peruse Governor Denison’s dispatches on O’Brien at the Colonial Office in Whitehall, to check that O’Brien was being fairly treated. Sir Lucius may have felt in some ways a sneaking sympathy for Denison, for he knew what an astute and unyielding prisoner his brother was. Anstey was pleased to see that O’Brien was again receiving rations as a hospital patient. But, like Lucius, he wanted O’Brien to take his ticket-of-leave. Anstey’s letter of persuasion is fascinating because he understood O’Brien so well, knowing that because of Ballingarry, not despite it, O’Brien had assumed as a burden the role of Ireland incarnate and exiled. But O’Brien, said Anstey, was not even the author of the insurrection. ‘You only joined it … I say nothing therefore of the morality or prudence
of that Insurrection—that Cause, as we may agree in terming it. I only say that you are not … its representative; that all the world is now aware of that fact.’ Anstey sternly told O’Brien that he had achieved credibility on ‘the one great article of national belief and conduct, Repeal of the Legislative Union between Ireland and Great Britain.’ Many Protestants and even Orangemen had thought more kindly of Repeal, and supported it, because of O’Brien’s example, ‘because they confided in your honour … Let me add that those days are past—those hopes extinguished—and forever. The Rebellion hath done this!’

  In his effort to convince O’Brien to succumb, Anstey threw doubt on the loyalty and judgement of O’Brien’s fellow prisoners and former associates. O’Brien’s lieutenants, said Anstey, had intended to depose him as soon as the rebellion was successful, but since it had failed, left him with ‘the sad an doubtful onus of chiefship.’ Anstey even argued that two of the lieutenants were in favour of ‘putting him to an immediate and violent death.’

  Though there is no evidence that any of the rebels considered shooting O’Brien, O’Brien himself in his little, increasingly cold cottage by the rough parade square of Maria had no resources for checking. We are left to wonder whether he wavered a fraction as Anstey urged him against ‘an useless and a too late persistence in wearing the aspect of chief criminal.’ No wonder that he found the long evenings desolate.

  It is dark at four o’clock and as I do not go to bed till ten o’clock you may conclude I do not enjoy my winter’s evenings as much as Cahirmoyle where a merry little party assembled around the tea table and one of my children claimed the privilege of putting sugar into my tea while another insisted upon the right to add cream to it.

  O’Brien had already heard from John Martin that he had met Meagher illegally at Lake Sorell ‘where his district, O’Doherty’s and mine all touch each other.’ Indeed, at one of the State prisoner meetings on the shore of Lake Sorell, as Meagher would tell the world through a letter sent to the Nation, it was agreed: ‘I should write a respectful remonstrance to Sir William Denison, stating the facts I had heard in regards to O’Brien’s health … In case no alteration took place, it was further agreed upon we should throw up our “tickets of leave.” ’