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

by Thomas Keneally

  By then a further Eva poem had been published in the revived Nation and sent to cheer O’Doherty.

  Come, wild deer of the mountainside! Come, sweet bird of the plain! To cheer the cold and trembling heart that beats for thee in vain! Oh! Come, from woe, and cold, and gloom, to her who’s warm and true, And has no hope or throb for aught within this world but you.

  As O’Brien lamented the second anniversary of his capture, 6 August, Queen Victoria gave royal assent to a Bill allowing representative government in South Australia, Victoria and Van Diemen’s Land. O’Brien reflected that these were benefits long denied to Ireland but granted readily to remoter British possessions. The new Act meant that anti-transportationists like Mr William Carter could rise to power in the Legislative Council of Van Diemen’s Land, there to battle Denison.

  But O’Brien looked to possible rescue. Already, an Irish physician, Dr J. C. McCarthy of Hobart Town, had had a meeting with Meagher at which Meagher insisted that O’Brien’s life might well be ended by some random act of oppression. Whereas, if O’Brien escaped, he would resurrect the validity of the rebellion itself, the Irish would be consoled and emboldened, and the claim of treason reduced to a mockery. Meagher showed McCarthy an unsigned letter that he had received from New York, from the Irish Directory, a secret organisation of which Michael Doheny was a member. The letter implied ‘that there would be no hesitation in America to honour any demands’ for organising O’Brien’s escape. If necessary, Meagher could depend on his father as well. McCarthy agreed therefore to outlay in the short term the large amount required to finance a rescue of O’Brien.

  Patrick O’Donohoe was told to make contact with Captain William Ellis, rakish master of Victoria, a small vessel which sometimes supplied Maria Island. Father Woolfrey was contacted on a visit to Hobart and was given the job of asking O’Brien whether he favoured escape. It was ascertained that O’Brien did, but he wanted it clear as a matter of personal pride that his family could not be expected to carry the expense. In the near term it would need to be borne by others, and then O’Brien himself could recompense them after escape.

  The prisoner received a message to be ready on or about 10 August, and to keep watch when out on his daily walks. On 10 August, no ship appeared during O’Brien’s exercise, and likewise there was nothing on 11 August. But the next day, as he set out southwards with his unwitting daily companion, Convict Constable Miller, ‘between 1 and 2 o’clock p.m., I observed a vessel in the distance bearing towards the point of the shore on which I was walking.’ He had also spotted Constable Hamerton in the trees on the steep slope above, ‘but did not perceive that he was armed with a gun.’

  He sat down to eat his lunch of biscuit and beef, took out his book ‘and continued to read to my keeper as had been my usual practice in our rambles.’ Despite a shower of rain, O’Brien—by occasional standing and shifting of position—made sure he was visible to the oncoming vessel, which was soon within half a mile of the shore, and which sent out a boat towards the beach. O’Brien read on until ‘when the boat was within fifty yards of the shore I dashed into the sea.’ He was soon out of his depth, but he could swim, and expected to be dragged aboard by the men in the boat at any time. In fact, an armed constable, probably Hamerton, emerged from the bush and covered the men in the boat with his gun. Weighed down by garments and books and other items he carried in his pocket, O’Brien had to be dragged ashore on an oar.

  As the boat was beached, Smith O’Brien jumped into it and refused to move. The constable with the gun punched a hole in the timbers. But O’Brien would not walk back to the station. William Denison reported to his mother: ‘the three men who had come to rescue him were made to carry him. Was not this a most absurd termination?’ But O’Brien yielded, ‘Not wishing to annoy men who had already exposed themselves to some risk on my account.’ He walked very slowly, however, perhaps to allow another boat from the ship to intervene. By the time he reached Darlington he was appalled to find that the government boat was towing the Victoria into Darlington Probation Station.

  It was later widely believed that Captain Ellis had betrayed the escape plans. A ticket-of-leave man, having earlier been sentenced to fourteen years for piracy, he seemed to have made a deal with Hampton for absolute pardon. Yet it was obvious from Sir William Denison’s letters and his wife’s journal that the escape attempt came as an utter surprise at Government House. Ellis and his first mate Hunt stood trial and were fined £60 each, which the supporters of the escape attempt, not yet suspecting Ellis’s treachery, felt bound to pay. Dr McCarthy was by now severely out of pocket. But things were to get worse—on the night following their fine, Ellis, Hunt and their crew stole Victoria and took to the open sea. Perhaps permission to do so was part of the contract with Hampton. But the owners held McCarthy responsible, and in time O’Brien would need to help Meagher and McCarthy in paying for Victoria.

  Marched back to his cottage on Maria, Smith O’Brien mourned for the lost possibility: ‘if the wind had brought the vessel nearer to the shore and if there had been a little more resolution on the part of the boat men and perhaps less promptitude and fidelity on the part of the Constable …’ To compose his mind, he wrote an essay on his escape attempt abstractly considered, drawing upon St Paul’s escape from Damascus by being lowered from a window in a basket. He was concerned by indications that admirable Lapham might be the scapegoat for the attempt. That would be unjust. His prisoner had given no guarantees. Every and any day, O’Brien was entitled to try to get away.

  He was a little surprised to be told that Denison did not ‘propose to take any special notice of his recent attempt to escape from custody. The Assistant Comptroller is to warn the prisoner that any second attempt of the kind will … place him in the position of an ordinary convict working in a gang.’ O’Brien acknowledged this forbearance. But he was certain to be moved from Maria. The Laphams were due to leave also, to take up their new posting at Port Arthur. O’Brien, confined to his house, had been kindly treated by the superintendent; ‘Though in truth I should not have been much surprised if he had displayed some excitement and vexation.’ He began writing letters assuring the authorities that both Lapham and Miller, his keeper, had been utterly ignorant of his proposed escape. By the eve of his departure for Port Arthur at Hampton’s orders, O’Brien was edgy from isolation and anxious to go.

  Before O’Brien left his cottage on Maria Island, his goods were searched by Mr Lapham. The superintendent found £10 12 shillings and, according to regulation, confiscated it.

  14

  YOUNG IRELAND AND THE PROFANE COLONISTS

  But my prayer, my fond entreaty to you … is to keep out of the hands of these men as you would out of the clutches of the very demon himself … I am treated as a common convict, obliged to sleep with every species of scoundrel, and to work in a gang from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock in the evening—being all the while next to starved, as I find it wholly impossible to touch their abominable ‘skilly.’

  O’Donohoe to Meagher,

  January 1851

  I have been told that Port Arthur,’ O’Brien confided in a letter to his sister Anne, ‘is as near a realization of a Hell upon earth as can be found in any part of the British dominions except Norfolk Island.’ The penal establishment of Port Arthur lay in the corner of Van Diemen’s Land, a handsome, well-wooded, well-watered port. If one travelled south-east from Hobart, first a very narrow neck of land connected the bulk of south-eastern Van Diemen’s Land to bulbous Forestier Peninsula, and eventually a further narrow string, Eaglehawk Neck, connected the Forestier to the massive Tasman Peninsula, Port Arthur’s site. Notorious Eaglehawk Neck, the land approach to the Tasman, was some hundreds of yards across and guarded by a line of chained mastiffs, a collective Cerberus barring the gates to hell. Through its flimsy geographic connection to the nether world of Van Diemen’s Land, the Tasman Peninsula with Port Arthur became a yet further nether world.

  O’Brien, unchai
ned, made the journey down the coast from Maria Island to Port Arthur in a 25-ton cutter, on which Lapham and his family travelled too. O’Brien’s relationship with them seemed still cordial, but there was little conversation between them. At midnight they were off Cape Pillar, and ill winds held them back from entering the Port Arthur penal station until dawn. ‘Its appearance is very picturesque as seen from the water. It is surrounded on every side by wooded hills and looks more like a pretty village.’ O’Brien’s new quarters ashore were a small two-room house, free-standing unlike his little Maria Island cottage, furnished with a bookcase, a cupboard, tables, a washstand, and ‘four chairs with very hard seats being such as are used in kitchens in Ireland.’ A garden was behind the house. Nearby stood a majestic stone gaol, three storeys high, a fine chapel, a stone barracks and other well-designed outbuildings, all solid on this last jut of earth before Antarctica. O’Brien was pleased that his garden, full as it was of thistles, was 50 yards long by 30 wide, for he would not be permitted beyond it. An armed soldier of the 99th Regiment was always in the garden. During his one hour of exercise in the morning, his one hour in the afternoon, ‘The sentry constantly paces backwards and forwards within the garden walls … Two powerful lamps throw light round my dwelling at night. At seven o’clock in the morning my door is unlocked by the Acting Superintendent.’

  Lapham stayed distant, or was ordered to do so. There was not a sight of the Lapham women. At first O’Brien was pleased that the Assistant Superintendent, Irvine, was an Irishman, and the surgeon also, as was the officer in command of troops, Brevet Major Philip Smyly. But these three were too scared to carry on more than basic, administrative conversations. O’Brien’s rations were ‘barely sufficient to satisfy my appetite though compared with the allowance of Indian meal which Lord John Russell said was enough for an Irish peasant they are indeed superlatively rich and abundant.’

  On Sundays only, attending church, he saw other convicts, some 200 Protestants of the station, and, as Mitchel had in his solitariness, made a scholarly assessment of their features. ‘They seemed to be almost all Englishmen of the lowest class … and I cannot but think that a craniologist would find in the study of this collection of heads much to confirm the theories of his science.’ A natural generosity did assert itself: ‘it is possible that this impression may be unfounded.’ In fact it was the moral squalor of officialdom rather than of his fellow prisoners which depressed him. An officer who gave a cook a leek to go with O’Brien’s vegetables was chastised by Irvine. O’Brien was told that instead of his allowance of 1 pound of potatoes he would from now on draw 4 ounces of leeks, since they were what he desired. He sought solace in Tasso, Virgil, and W. B. Stevenson’s A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years Residence in South America.

  Lapham was judged severely by an inquiry into the attempted escape, and was removed from the superintendency at Port Arthur. O’Brien’s sense of debt to this dismissed official, like his debt to those who paid for the failed escape, grew mountainous in his solitary mind. For the first time he began to consider the possibility of accepting a ticket-of-leave, to delight Denison and take the pressure off Lapham. He wrote to Dr Nixon, the Anglican Bishop of Tasmania, declaring a willingness to improve Lapham’s chances by accepting a 1-year parole. Bishop Nixon passed the letter directly to Denison, whose response was hostile. Smith O’Brien would take his ticket-of-leave ‘if the Government will pardon the Superintendent whose negligence allowed him to make the attempt! A modest proposal, is it not?’

  The dismissed Lapham and his family left Port Arthur on 19 September—as it turned out, the O’Briens’ wedding anniversary. William wrote to his brother Lucius, imploring him to intercede on Lapham’s behalf. His utter powerlessness at Port Arthur led him to write directly to Hampton, offering what he had earlier offered through Bishop Nixon. He asked too whether he would be permitted to live in Hobart Town or Launceston for the sake of employment.

  On 2 October, Assistant Comptroller-General Nairn wrote to O’Brien to tell him that he could not be allowed to reside in Hobart Town or Launceston, ‘but that he may reside in any country district not already selected by one of his fellow prisoners.’ There was not a mention of Lapham in this. ‘As I do not propose, except in the event of Mr Lapham’s restoration to the Superintendency of Port Arthur, to accept a ticket-of-leave on these conditions, I must now reconcile myself to a protracted incarceration in my present abode.’ So he celebrated his forty-seventh birthday, in solitary servitude.

  O’Donohoe in Hobart, in the process of moving his newspaper office from Macquarie Street to Collins Street, was gathering a petition calling on O’Brien unconditionally to accept his ticket-of-leave. Simultaneously, MacManus, at work in a warehouse in Launceston, and Mitchel, from Bothwell, urged Smith O’Brien to take the means to liberate himself. Terence MacManus reached back to a classical education for an argument: ‘Cato might do without Rome, but Rome not without Cato.’ Then at the end of October a public meeting was held in Hobart Town in which an address calling on O’Brien to take the ticket-of-leave was signed ‘by upwards of 500 persons.’ The communal desire to free O’Brien was so great that O’Donohoe had to warn his readers in early November against a confidence man, operating under the name of Baron de Bhere, who was visiting supporters, asking for money towards a rescue attempt.

  The document with 500 signatures arrived in O’Brien’s little house in Port Arthur on 9 November. ‘It is written in good taste, earnest and simple,’ said O’Brien. He was moved to sit down at once to write to Denison. ‘Sir, I hereby engage not to attempt to escape from this colony during the ensuing six months namely from the 9th Novr, 1850 to the 9th May, 1851.’ He wrote to Lucy, ‘Until now I have never felt myself thoroughly beaten by English power.’ Yet he knew that the purpose of his exercise in endurance had already been achieved. The world had been drawn into the matter of his treatment, had identified him with the ailing man and woman of Hibernia. Governor Denison could embrace his wife in exaltation and clap Hampton on the back. In petty terms, he could be said to have worn O’Brien down. In world terms, the triumph would prove to be O’Brien’s. To the Irish, including those in America, and amongst sympathisers in Van Diemen’s Land, Smith O’Brien emerged not as a man subdued, but as a man who had yielded to the humane concerns of a worldwide multitude of admirers.

  His offer was accepted. Waiting for transport to Hobart, he took hikes, one of them to Point Puer, where child convicts had recently been kept. At six in the morning on 18 November, he left Port Arthur by a railway between the port itself and the north coast of the Tasman Peninsula at Eaglehawk Bay. This line saved ships from Hobart the trouble of rounding the Tasman Peninsula’s complex coast to Port Arthur and shortened the passage to Hobart. The motive power of the little coaches was, however, human. ‘I was then placed in a little waggon and impelled along the railway by four men … the labour of pushing the waggon up the inclined planes is very severe.’

  At the end of the rail, he was put on a steamer, which made calls at a number of penal stations on the way to Hobart. At the Cascades station, he noted, that as a result of public protest the treatment called ‘ring-bolting’ had been suspended: the victim had been hung spreadeagled from four ring-bolts set in a stone wall, while a wooden gag with a breathing hole was strapped in his mouth to prevent screams. ‘The Superintendent was, I believe, reprimanded by the Governor but while Mr Lapham was being dismissed for the exercise of humanity the Superintendent at Cascades has been retained in his situation.’

  From the deck of the steamer approaching the dock at Hobart Town that evening, O’Brien could see some hundreds of people gathered at the wharf. A Mr Reeves, a progressive hatter, entertained him at dinner and accompanied him the next day in a promenade through the town. Dinner the next evening at Mr William Carter’s house at Newtown, 3 miles from Hobart, was the first time for nearly two and a half years that Smith O’Brien had eaten at a family table. But next morning he was required to set out upriv
er for his district, New Norfolk, a pleasant few hours away. As soon as the coach carrying him pulled up in the main street of that town, he was greeted by the former Catholic chaplain on Maria Island, Father Woolfrey.

  O’Brien chose to stay on the far side of the river in the well-provided stone structure named Elwin’s Hotel at a rent of £6 per four weeks. From the front of the hotel, ‘in every direction Highlands covered with forest bound the horizon, but I fear I shall find but little attraction in the scenery of this district as it is wholly destitute of historical associations and is rather monotonous in character.’

  The prosperous settlers of this section of the Derwent were, he wrote to Lucy, ‘plain unpretending men, with neither more nor less polish than belongs to that class of gentleman in England or Ireland.’ Typical of affluent settler families were the Fentons, who occupied a fine house named Fenton Forest. Captain Michael Fenton, Irish-born, had served in India until 1828, and at Fenton Forest, although a temperance man, he was involved in hop-growing. He was also one of the new members of the Tasmanian Legislative Council. His wife, Elizabeth, was handsome but ‘a shocking bigot.’ O’Brien was grateful to the Fentons, however, for their kindnesses and the company of their lively daughters, who entered the gap in his affections left by the departure of the Lapham sisters.

  Early in his life at New Norfolk, MacManus, O’Doherty, Meagher and O’Donohoe all arrived at Elwin’s Hotel to see their captain. These were illegal calls and would have evil results. On his way to Elwin’s from the Launceston coach, MacManus—a resident of New Norfolk for a time—was spotted by a hostile local named Mr Jordan, who challenged his presence. MacManus replied, ‘Do you think we want to steal your sheep and cattle?’ O’Donohoe came from Hobart by coach with his printer and fellow publisher, John Moore. Both of them had drunk their way up the Derwent at inns at each coach stop. Arriving, they began throwing punches at each other over some business matter right in Elwin’s driveway, and were arrested by the constables of New Norfolk who had been trailing them. After a night in cells, O’Donohoe appeared before Magistrate Mason and was fined 10 shillings for being drunk and disorderly. Sobered and in pain, he cursed himself for having offended O’Brien, from whom he had always sought to find favour.