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

by Thomas Keneally

  The home government now abolished transportation to VDL, though transports already loaded were permitted to leave Britain, and the multitude of prisoners still serving sentences were left to complete them. The last ship of all to arrive in Van Diemen’s Land was the St Vincent from Spithead in May 1853. Gold, as a Home Office official wrote to Denison, had ensured that ‘transportation would soon be shorn of its terrors.’ But Western Australia, great in mass, small in population, some 2,000 miles removed from the gold enthusiasm, had since 1850 accepted convicts and meant to continue.

  At the end of April, in Tahiti, O’Donohoe was able to board the American ship Otranto for San Francisco. When on 23 June the Otranto entered the Golden Gate, the exile was enthusiastically greeted, and a group of Irishmen, flush from gold and trade, presented the captain with a bonus of $1,000. O’Donohoe was in good health and better spirits from the sea journey. But despite the presence of MacManus, now considering a move from shipping agentry to ranching, he intended to travel on to New York, where it would be easier for his wife to join him from Ireland. Departing California, and crossing Central America, he arrived in New York at the height of the New York summer.

  Irish-American support would ensure that he would never suffer extreme want, but people would find him too awkward an object for the brand of adulation which came Meagher’s way. And there was inevitable concern over his parole. The New York Irish lined up to give him the worst kind of tribute they could have offered, drinks in the saloons of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. What damage Denison had not done him, Irish kindness was finishing. As winter came on and year’s end approached, he took up residence in Hamilton Street, Brooklyn.

  So three Young Irelanders—MacManus, Meagher, O’Donohoe—had now vanished from VDL, and there were plans there should be more. In mid-January 1853, Mitchel visited Hobart Town and went first to St Mary’s Hospital, ‘where I found St Kevin in his laboratory.’ O’Doherty drew Mitchel into a private room, asking him to guess who had come to Van Diemen’s Land. It was Meagher’s boyhood friend, Pat Smyth. Mitchel asked had Smyth been caught and transported? ‘No, my boy: commissioned by the Irish Directory in New York to procure the escape of one or more of us.’ This was the secret body that had already tried to free O’Brien. Smyth, posing as a correspondent of the New York Tribune, was on his way south on a day coach from Launceston. He was to meet O’Brien and O’Doherty at Bridgewater, ten miles outside Hobart, that evening.

  Since the 1848 uprising, Pat ‘Nicaragua’ Smyth had made a living editing a paper in Pittsburgh and agitating in the New York Sun for an American railroad to span Nicaragua, from which he took his American nickname. Meagher had been privy to the Irish Directory’s decision to finance him. Indeed, the previous September Meagher had written to the Launceston merchant George Deas, telling him that Smyth was ‘one of the dearest, oldest and most intimate and trusted friends I have had.’

  Now Mitchel and O’Doherty, illicitly in O’Doherty’s case, travelled up to Bridgewater and met O’Brien. When the Launceston coach was delayed they spent their time discussing surrender of parole. Given that O’Brien’s sentence was for life, Mitchel ‘earnestly pressed on him that he should first avail himself of Smyth’s services.’ O’Brien cited a number of arguments why he would not escape. He had had his chance at Maria Island. He hoped that without making any submission he might yet be set free, and then return to Ireland, which, should he escape, would be closed to him for ever. Mitchel argued they should all escape together and proposed a plan, ‘by which we should get ourselves placed under arrest in one spot, and in circumstances that would make a rescue easy.’

  The hour got so late that O’Brien and O’Doherty had to return to their registered lodgings. Mitchel was at liberty to remain, and half an hour after the others had left, Smyth’s coach arrived. Mitchel had not had a lot to do with Smyth in Dublin and did not at first recognise the tall man in boots and an American-style cape. ‘Is your name Smyth?’ Mitchel asked at last. Smyth thought him a detective. ‘I hastened to undeceive him, for he looked strongly tempted to shoot me, and bolt.’ Their conversation began in earnest once they had moved to a private room. They resolved to see O’Brien the following day at Elwin’s Hotel.

  Arriving the next day in New Norfolk, they found O’Brien engaged in his correspondence. The personable and amusing Smyth tried to talk O’Brien around, but without success. So Smyth rode on to Bothwell with Mitchel to survey that region and its police strength. Mitchel wrote, ‘He walked coolly into the police office, and into the magistrate’s room, surveyed that gentleman a moment, and his police clerk sitting at his desk—then crossed the hall, strolled into the Chief Constable’s office; made reconnaissance of its exact situation, of the muskets ranged in their rack, of the handcuffs.’ Smyth came to a very American conclusion: ‘three or four men, or at least half a dozen, with Colt revolvers, might sack the township, and carry off the police magistrate. A great man is Mr Colt—one of the greatest minds in our country.’

  This settled, Nicaragua Smyth went off to Melbourne to negotiate for a ship. At this stage, John Martin intended to avail himself of the same escape, since Mitchel and he lived in the same district. Jenny declared herself willing to follow on to San Francisco: ‘my wife does not shrink from all this risk and inconvenience.’ It was an awful time for Jenny, however. She gave birth to a daughter, and was seriously ill for a month. As for the child, ‘Her papa won’t have her baptised till she reaches Christendom,’ Jenny explained. It was probably a relief to her that by February nothing had been heard from Smyth. Mitchel still made plans.

  While Mitchel awaited his day of escape, the noble-browed Yankee President-elect General Franklin Pierce sent his Irish orderly from the Mexican War, Sergeant O’Neill, down to Boston to invite the young orator Meagher to visit Pierce’s house in Concord, New Hampshire. When Meagher did so, the President-elect asked him to attend the inauguration. And further glory was almost tediously available. Arriving by steamboat to lecture in the mill town of Fall River, Massachusetts, Meagher was greeted by a 32-gun salute and cheered by thousands from the shore, many of them Irish factory hands. Turning southwards, he was welcomed in Philadelphia and in Washington with similar fervour, augmented by the news that he had generously left behind $100 for two French political exiles. In Philadelphia, he was greeted by a militia unit named the Meagher Guard, who sported dark, loose pantaloons with a stripe of gold lace. Meagher cancelled one of his Philadelphia engagements, however, to attend a secret meeting between President-elect Pierce and John Mitchel’s mother. We do not know if Franklin Pierce—off the record—was let into the news that Pat Smyth was already in Van Diemen’s Land. When Meagher was approached by the press to comment on the meeting, ‘he gallantly told them he would never abuse any intimacy he might enjoy with the President.’

  Meagher—not yet even a citizen—arrived in Washington on 27 February 1853 for the Inauguration due to be held on 4 March, and spent part of the rest of the afternoon with the urbane Franklin Pierce in Willard’s Hotel. The following day he visited the Capitol and both houses of Congress, accompanied by General Shields, an Irish-American phenomenon who was both a Mexican War hero and a Senator first from Minnesota and now Illinois, and young Captain Key, grandson of the author of the American anthem. In the Senate he was introduced to practically every Senator and every significant Congressman. General Lewis Cass, current Senator for Ohio who had served as President Jackson’s Secretary of War and the losing presidential candidate in 1848, the Honorable Pierre Soule, William H. Seward, General Sam Houston, Douglas of Illinois, Mason of Virginia: all lined up for a word. The elderly General Cass was a classic case of the reason Yankee blue-bloods found common cause with an Irish felon. Governor of Michigan territory after the War of 1812, in which he had been ashamed to see his commanding officer surrender Detroit to the British, he had found relations with the Canadian authorities difficult, resenting the Royal Navy’s searches of American vessels on the Great Lakes, and British enlistme
nt of the Black Hawks against the Americans.

  Meagher continued on from Washington to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. He fell from grace again back in New York, this time speaking for the benefit of the New York Volunteers at Metropolitan Hall. ‘Had the Catholic clergy, as a body, taken another course—had they gone out as the Sicilian priests went out … had they lifted up the cross in front of the insurgent ranks, there would have been a different story written.’ Again he was denounced in Catholic papers and from pulpits. The Irish American defended him, but he was damned by the Freeman’s Journal of New York, whose editor James McMaster still considered Meagher one of the chief assassins of O’Connell.

  Out with the Church, he was still fashionable in town, and Miss Ferguson of 42nd Street composed the T. F. Meagher Polka. It was performed for Meagher by the composer at Niblo’s Theater, a renowned New York musichall. Indeed, as he neared his thirtieth birthday, he was being absorbed by American issues, and when the Meagher Club and the Meagher Guards of Boston asked him to come to town in August for his birthday celebrations, he spoke chiefly of what he had learned in the South. With its hearty welcomes, casual grace and capacity to gloss over its sins with stylish, pseudo-rustic irony, the South beguiled and influenced most visitors from the outer world, not least Meagher. He argued that America was, North and South, the same fraternal nation: ‘amongst all who look up with loyalty to that unviolated and inviolable flag—symbol of this confraternity—everywhere I’ve found that freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of discussion are rights solemnly declared in the instruments under which these various states are moulded.’ He had slotted into the characteristic New York Democrat position, which combined repugnance for slavery with the belief that its abolition was not worth breaking the Union over.

  Patrick O’Donohoe was invited up from Brooklyn to take part in the celebrations that night. He insisted, while drunk, on making a speech. He seemed to imply tipsily that he was as worthy of honour as Meagher, had sacrificed all, yet was wilfully ignored. He was silenced by an officer of the Meagher Guards. The Pilot, to punish Meagher for his recent anti-clerical speech, published O’Donohoe’s statements that Meagher was ungrateful and disloyal, and this may have finally destroyed what had once been, in prison and convict ship, a devoted friendship. And the sad truth was that O’Donohoe was beyond employment now. Back in Brooklyn, he was maintained on a sort of alcoholic’s pension, awaiting the accumulation of funds to bring his family to New York.

  Not until February 1853 did Catherine Meagher set out to travel to Ireland from Hobart in the Wellington. Arrived in Waterford in the company of her father-in-law in late June, she was astonished to be greeted on the pier by a crowd of 20,000 people as well as the incumbent mayor and corporation. The mayor acclaimed her sharing ‘the happiness of the Exile’s home.’ But Catherine was the exile now. She made an unaffected response. ‘I can only claim the merit of that affection with which I was contented to be the companion of his solitude, whilst I aspired to join in the happier life which he now enjoys.’

  In July Catherine was brought to the United States by the elder Meagher, whom Meagher himself had not seen since 1848. In humid Manhattan, Thomas Francis faced the challenge of adapting his marriage to this version of the new world under his father’s gentle but exacting eye. The couple who had lived in a shack at Lake Sorell lived now in the Metropolitan Hotel, a shining venue for what the Irish world considered joyous reunion. But Lucy wrote to Smith O’Brien after Catherine had been in New York a little, ‘It is said they do not suit. His fault, I am told.’

  In Van Diemen’s Land, Mitchel did not hear from Smyth again until the day after St Patrick’s Day, mid-March 1853. In code, Smyth’s letter declared that he had made up his party for the diggings, and all was going well. He further said that he would meet the rest of his party of diggers at the Bendigo Creek—Bendigo being here a codeword for Lake Sorell. Martin and Mitchel rode up to the lake a week later and found Nicaragua Smyth in the company of young John Connell. The brigantine Waterlily, owned by Mr McNamara of Sydney—the same McNamara who had helped smuggle O’Donohoe out—was to come to Hobart, and on its return voyage would collect them from Spring Bay on Tasmania’s east coast. Mitchel and Martin prepared to say goodbye to Jenny and the children. As Mitchel wrote on 9 April, ‘Knox and I … are to present ourselves on Monday, in the police station, withdraw our parole [their promise not to attempt escape], and offer ourselves to be taken into custody. Nicaragua brings with him five friends, all armed, as good lookers-on.’ Nicaragua had also delivered a relay of fresh horses for them to the halfway point, and they were to be on the beach at Spring Bay ready to embark by dawn.

  But the next journal entry some days later declared ‘our plot blown to the moon!’ Smyth heard from a source that the entire scheme was known to the governor—the ship involved, the place of embarkation, the signal which was to be used. Suspiciously, the Waterlily had been allowed out of Hobart Town without the normal examination, and simultaneously police reinforcements had arrived in Bothwell. The Martin-Mitchel rescue party dispersed—Smyth and young Connell started for Spring Bay to warn off the ship.

  On 12 April, Mitchel received a further message at Nant Cottage: Smyth had been arrested under suspicion of being Mitchel. He was put into the watch-house at Spring Bay, and claimed that from the windows he could see Waterlily in the bay with the signal light shining at her masthead. Fortunately the Chief Constable at Richmond certified he was not Mitchel. But he had caught a bad chill and now lay very ill in the house of a friend in Hobart. Mitchel rode down to Hobart to see how Nicaragua was, and found him ill but convalescent, and engaged in a sickbed flirtation with an Irish businessman’s daughter named Jenny O’Regan.

  It was not until early June that Smyth was able to ride up again to Nant Cottage, and by then Martin had decided that it was too difficult to get two men away. A ship was leaving Hobart on the night of 8 June, and if Mitchel could withdraw his parole and he and Smyth reach the Derwent estuary after dark, the agents had agreed to place Mitchel on board. To help their chances of getting out of the police station in Bothwell on the day, Nicaragua began ‘judiciously bribing’ local police. On the morning of the planned day of parole-surrender, 8 June, the town was still full of police—some camped opposite the police barracks. Young James Mitchel rode off to Hobart to ask the shipping agents if they could hold the ship a further day, for Smyth and Mitchel would have to wait to visit Magistrate Davis the next day. Smyth spent the extra time in a room in an inn, meeting with and bribing further police to ensure that there would not be more than an ordinary guard on the town.

  The account of Mitchel’s dash on 9 June was written by the man himself for a world audience with a taste for stylishly managed escapades. That morning, Martin and Mitchel’s eldest boy, John, began the walk in from Nant Cottage to Bothwell, to be in place to hold the horses at the police office door when Mitchel and Nicaragua were inside. ‘Before we had ridden a quarter of a mile from the house, we met James (boy number two), coming at a gallop from Hobart Town. He handed me a note from the shipping agents. Ship gone.’ But they both wanted to get on with the process and, continuing to town, Mitchel and Smyth overtook a Mr Russell, who chatted to Mitchel about the price ‘for certain grass-fed wethers which I had sold a few days before.’ In the main street, Nicaragua and Mitchel saw that at the police barracks, on a little hill, ten constables were engaged in some sort of drill. Dismounting and giving their horses to young John Mitchel and Martin, Mitchel and Smyth entered the station and found Mr Davis sitting in the courtroom, with the police clerk beside him. ‘Mr Davis,’ I said, ‘here is a copy of a note which I have just despatched to the Governor; I have thought it necessary to give you a copy.’ The note, dated 8 June 1853, told the Lieutenant-Governor that Mitchel hereby resigned the ticket-of-leave and withdrew his parole.

  Davis took the note, and he and his clerk both seemed discomposed. Mitchel repeated: ‘the purport of that note … It resigns the
thing called ticket-of-leave and revokes my promise.’ Despite the presence of police in an adjoining room, Davis still made no move, and did not call the guard from outside the courtroom door. ‘ “Now, good morning, sir,” I said, putting on my hat. The hand of Nicaragua was playing with the handle of the revolver in his coat … The moment I said “Good morning” Mr Davis shouted, “No—no! Stay here! Rainsford! Constables!” ’

  But Smyth and Mitchel were moving. At the little gate leading out of the court into the street they expected to find an armed constable, but he was holding two police horses as they passed him, and they jumped into the saddles of their own horses, still held by Martin and John Mitchel the younger. Mitchel naturally depicted the pursuit as something of a farce. ‘Grinning residents of Bothwell on the pavement … who, being commanded to stop us in the Queen’s name, aggravated the grin into a laugh; some small boys at the corner, staring at our horses as they galloped by, and offering “Three to one on the whiteun.” This was my last impression of Bothwell on the banks of the Tasmanian Clyde.’ Nicaragua himself now separated from Mitchel and rode to Nant Cottage to tell Jenny that all was well thus far. He would then catch the coach to Launceston.

  A mile into the bush, Mitchel met ‘my good friend J——H——, son of a worthy English settler of those parts’ who knew Tasmania very well. J. H. and Mitchel faced an awful 130-mile ride through wild, high country to Westbury, but, ‘with the load of that foul ticket-of-leave fairly shaken off Mitchel was ready to go. Ascending the tiers, Mitchel and J. H. encountered a frozen marsh, the horses skittering over the surface. They heard the barking of the dogs of Meagher’s former neighbour, and so gave the lake a wide berth, passing down its western side, an area rarely travelled even in modern times. That night they camped in a ‘dismal bivouac,’ tied their horses to a honeysuckle tree, ‘picked the least polygonal stones to sit upon,’ and lit their pipes. They slept a few minutes at a time, awoken by the scorching of their knees from the fire, ‘while our spinal marrow was frozen into a solid icicle.’