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

by Thomas Keneally

  On 12 October, the wind shifted to make departure from Portland possible. The first morning at sea was Sunday and the Fenians were permitted on deck at 6.00 a.m., when a service was conducted without the help of the seasick young chaplain, Father Delany. The officiator was instead the Cork Fenian youngster, John Sarsfield Casey. Casey, whose penetrating eyes shine from his mug shot in a manner which might have confirmed all the bad opinions people had of Fenians, was in fact a noble-hearted, virginal young man. He bore the nickname ‘the Galtee Boy,’ because of his exposure in the Irish People of the landlord of Galtee, County Cork.

  O’Reilly and the sixteen other soldier Fenians had developed a greater edge of despair because they lived on the crowded, brutalising main prison deck. Here sleeping space was limited, and seventy hammocks were needed as well as bunks. But some of the Pensioner Guard had served in the same regiments as the Fenians and treated them gently. O’Reilly, notable in any company, easefully charming, was ultimately allowed to sling his hammock permanently in the area occupied by the civilian Fenians. He rushed to the company of Denis Cashman and another civilian Fenian whose friendship he cherished, John Flood. Flood, now in his early thirties, had been involved in the Chester Castle raid and in the armed affray at Tallaght in March 1867.

  The political prisoners saw themselves as a separate caste. ‘Of course,’ wrote Cashman proudly, ‘we did not associate or scarcely speak to the unfortunates, although I believe a portion of them had been very respectable and well educated.’

  Decades later, Cashman would acknowledge that O’Reilly had plans to take over the ship. ‘A number of us secretly consulted and decided to try the experiment, provided we could get the greater part of our associates to determinedly enter the project.’ Cashman says O’Reilly would have attempted it like ‘a thunder-clap’ and that had the seizure succeeded, Flood was a first-class navigator. The concept was put to the Fenian prisoners, but the men with short sentences and families to return to were dubious. After all, a successful mutiny would not allow a return to Ireland, where their families waited. The Pensioner guards, many of whom had wives and children aboard, as did four assistant warders also bound for Western Australia, would need to be overpowered. There was also the problem of what to do with the 200 criminal convicts. If Hougoumont sailed into New York, would America want to take the non-Fenians?

  Bad weather over, the Fenians organised their concert parties, with Cashman president of the revels. He tried to involve the tormented O’Reilly too, without too much success at first, but concert parties operated as a distraction from O’Reilly’s perilous scheme. The performing Fenians included Cashman and Joseph Noonan (singing duets together), John Flood, and the comic turns of John Sheehan, an older Limerick Fenian, the card of every concert. John Edward Kelly, an Irish American captured at Kilclooney Wood, was popular for his recital of ‘Gertrude of Wyoming.’ Word-weighing John Kenealy stepped forward to recite ‘To Be or Not To Be,’ a Shakespearian soliloquy not irrelevant to O’Reilly, and Davis’s poem about the old Irish Brigade at Fontenoy. Every concert was concluded by the singing of ‘Let Erin Remember.’

  Depressed, O’Reilly did not participate in the first two concerts. He had not yet committed himself to the voyage and the duty of performance poet. But one night he did sign up, reciting one of his own works, ‘The Old School Clock,’ which would become a popular recitative poem, though it was once withdrawn from the copybooks of the Irish National School Board because of its Fenian origins. He also performed ‘Uncle Ned’s Tale,’ a narrative verse about an old dragoon, which O’Reilly would much later publish for the diversion of his audience in the United States.

  A truer, braver soldier ne’er for king and country bled.

  His wanderings are forever o’er. God rest thee, Uncle Ned.

  O’Reilly’s fellow Fenians hooted and applauded, validated by O’Reilly’s easy literary talent. Even ship’s officers came to hear O’Reilly do his own material.

  Towards the end of October the Hougoumont was off Cape Verde Islands. ‘The air was foul smelling and oppressive,’ John Boyle O’Reilly would later write in his novel Moondyne. ‘The deck above them was blazing hot. The pitch dropped from the seams and burned their flesh as it fell.’ Yet Hougoumont did not seem to have been a markedly brutal ship—Surgeon Smith, RN allowed juries of peers to try misdemeanours. Only one Fenian ended up in the punishment cell, and that was the quiet but stubborn William Foley, formerly of the 5th Dragoon Guards, who had concealed a rope. A number of non-political prisoners were also condemned to irons. ‘It was awful to hear the unfortunate with the chains clanking everywhere they went,’ wrote Cashman. Two—neither of them Fenians—were flogged, the first one receiving forty lashes and being cheered by the convicts at the end of his stoically endured punishment. Throughout the ritual Cashman averted his eyes.

  One convict died, a man named Corcoran. Cashman wrote, ‘I saw the poor fellow smoking on a hatch a few days since.’ Corcoran was committed to the sea by Father Delany, and a choir Delany had trained sang the Miserere and a Te Deum. Corcoran had the honour to be the last transportee of all to die aboard ship in this extraordinary phase of British penal transportation to Australia.

  By late November, back in colder air, Cashman saw the wind tear the sails to shreds. It had now been decided by the committee of Fenians that they would produce a hand-written newspaper and literary magazine, and that it would be called the Wild Goose. Father Bernard Delany had agreed to provide the paper. The journal’s title-page was intricately ornamented by Cashman with shamrocks and ivy wreaths, designs which must have taken days to produce and which were therefore welcome therapy. The journal sub-titled itself, in Cashman’s script, A Collection of Ocean Waifs. Flood was editor, John Boyle O’Reilly sub-editor.

  John Edward Kelly, a former Bostonian captured at Kilclooney Wood, contributed to one of the weekly editions of the Wild Goose an ironic piece called Australia:

  This great continent in the south, having been discovered by some Dutch skipper and his crew, somewhere between the 1st and 19th Century of the Christian era, was in consequence taken possession by the Government of Great Britain … That magnanimous government in the kindly exuberance of their feelings, have placed a large portion of that immense tract of country at our disposal, generously defraying all expenses incurred on our way to it.

  The humorous pieces were often Kelly’s, who in a character named ‘Paddy from Cork’ went in for a little of the Irish-mockery to which he himself might have objected had he seen it in the British press. ‘Yez is able to write pothry and purty stories wid anny one—I don’t care who’s his father—this side o’ the Galtees.’

  O’Reilly signed his work ‘Boyne’; Kelly was ‘Kappa’ or ‘Laoi’ (the Irish for K); and Father Delany ‘Beta’ or ‘Delta.’ Thomas Duggan, 45-year-old schoolmaster from Cork, who would live into his nineties in Western Australia, signed himself ‘Mushra,’ and hand-wrote into the Wild Goose, under Cashman’s flourishing title design, a weekly prose serial named ‘Queen Cliodna and the Flower of Erin.’ Flood wrote under the title ‘Binn Eider,’ after his birthplace north of Dublin. Each completed, hand-produced and written edition of the Wild Goose was marked: ‘Printed and published at the office, No. 6 Mess, Intermediate Cabin, Ship Houguement. Ed. John Flood, and J. B. O’Reilly, and J. E. K., registered for transmission abroad.’ O’Reilly consistently misspelled the name of the convict transport in exactly the way he would years later, when writing his novel.

  Seven weekly issues were released on Saturdays throughout the remainder of the voyage, and Captain Cozens and the mates asked for copies of the Christmas special. The entire ship’s log regarding latitude and longitude for the previous week was published in each edition—a result of co-operation between the quarter deck and convict deck. Captain Cozens was tolerant of the satiric nationalism of the Wild Goose, and permitted O’Reilly to move fully out of the main convict section to join his fellow editors in No. 6 Mess. The editors were also given cert
ain extra luxuries, such as a delicious meat loaf, and the privilege to stay on deck till 7.30 p.m. for the duration of the voyage. It was good for the soul to enjoy the deck after it had been cleared for the evening.

  The Wild Goose proved to be O’Reilly’s light in darkness. He would later remember the eagerness with which men waited below for himself or Flood to read the articles to them. ‘Amid the dim glare of the lamp the men, at night, would group strangely on extemporised seats. The yellow light fell down on the dark forms, throwing a ghastly glare on the pale faces of the men, as they listened with blazing eyes to Davis’s Fontenoy or The Clansman’s Wild Address to Shane’s Head.’

  Christmas was marked by a meal of ‘plum-duff and salt horse,’ two glasses of wine for each man, a stroll on the deck, and then the descent below to listen to O’Reilly read the Christmas edition of the Wild Goose. No Mass was celebrated that day, for the ship was too unsteady. But Flood’s farewell editorial was like a secular version of Ite Missa Est, the dismissal at the end of Mass. ‘Hearts are beating for you from which time and space cannot separate you. Prove worthy of their interest in you, and for the rest—Courage, and trust in God. Adieu.’

  Cashman was excited as the Hougoumont neared Western Australia. He believed that his 7-year sentence might yield an early ticket-of-leave, and enable him to bring out ‘my dearest K and dear boys with me, wherever I may pitch my tent, as quickly as I possibly can.’ O’Reilly also found the first sighting of Western Australia’s shore momentous: ‘From morning light they leant on the rail, looking away over the smooth sea to where the land was yellow with heat above the unseen continent … The shore of Western Australia is quite low, and the first sight of land are tall mahogany trees in the bush …’ It had taken Hougoumont eighty-nine days to make the passage.

  At noon they passed within a stone’s throw of Rottnest Island, offshore from the port of Fremantle, where naked black men worked in the sand, the island being a place of punishment for refractory natives. Soon the inshore waters and beaches and the town itself were seen. ‘But there was a stern reminder of reality in the little town of Fremantle that lay between the forest and the sea … in the centre of the houses, spread out like a gigantic starfish, was a vast stone prison.’

  Governor Hampton of Western Australia came aboard with an official party and the water-police. A Fremantle Herald reporter found out from the captain that the Fenians had behaved well during the journey. The town of Fremantle itself was in a state of great excitement, and divided between those who sympathised with the Fenians and those who expected the worst. To ease the perpetually stated fears of coastal Fremantle’s loyalists, Governor Hampton had moved his residence for the time being from the capital Perth, some 10 miles up the broad reaches of the Swan River, to the Fenian-threatened port of Fremantle on the sea. He reported to the Secretary for the Colonies, the Duke of Buckingham: ‘The public anxiety gradually diminished and ultimately almost wholly ceased when it became known on the 9th January that the conduct of the Fenian convicts during the voyage from England had been good in every respect.’

  26

  THE FENIANS OF THE DESERT COAST

  Western Australia is the Cinderella of the South. She had no gold like her sisters. To her was given the servile and unhappy portion. The dreams of British society were poured upon her soul. The robber and the man-slayer were sent thither. Her territory was marked off with a Red Line.

  John Boyle O’Reilly, Moondyne

  Boyle, poor Boyle, cried and cried in desperation for help.

  James Maguire, settler, Western Australia

  The Fenians were landed with the other prisoners by way of barge on the sultry morning of 10 January 1868. Patrick Walle, a Drogheda labourer who wrote stylishly, described the houses of the town of Fremantle as constructed ‘of all white sandstone, nothing is seen but white.’ Marching in early light through this pale-stoned, glittering landscape, on a coastline whose winter rains of less than twenty inches produced huge, hardy native forests but whose hinterland was, simply stated, a million square miles of desert, the prisoners entered through the main gate into an immense, high-walled parade ground, very sandy, and so on in through a farther gate which led to the cells. They were bathed, shaved and their particulars recorded. Clothing was issued—according to Walle: ‘A suit of Drogheda linen, ornamented with a red stripe and black bands, typical of the rank we hold in the colony, to wit—convicts.’

  In most cases, the Fenians had already served in British prisons the first stage of imprisonment—six months solitary confinement. John Kenealy, beginning the third year of his sentence, was relieved to find that the authorities seemed to be aware of these technicalities. The Fenian prisoners were told they would now be admitted to a probationary stage, at the end of which they would be given their tickets-of-leave. Men with 5-year sentences were now within a year of that. Their prospects were so utterly different from those of the soldier Fenians, who might receive a ticket-of-leave but would never be permitted to leave Western Australia.

  The Hougoumont convicts, entering a felon population of 3,000, were given two days rest in prison cells and then put to work stone breaking and making roads on the outskirts of Fremantle. Hampton, despite his inglorious reputation, put the civilian Fenians into their own work parties. ‘As their conduct on board the ship and their demeanour on landing had been so satisfactory, I considered it desirable to order the civilians to be separated from the ordinary criminal class.’ But this degree of indulgence did not apply to the ‘particularly aggravated nature of the treason’ military Fenians had committed.

  Assistant Warder William Howard, an officious and small-minded fellow, and the more lenient Charles McGarry, both of whom had been amongst the new warders shipped along with the Pensioner Guards on Hougoumont, had been given a gang of twenty civilian Fenians each to take into the bush to work. Howard’s group marched south of the little port of Fremantle to a camp on the Clarence Road, four miles outside town. McGarry’s party marched north-east to a road camp at West Guildford, between Perth and Fremantle. Patrick Walle, who lived and worked in the more exacting Howard’s party, described the camp as consisting of ‘four miserable tiny huts and a tent.’ There were constant visitations of bugs and mosquitoes. Though the heat was intense amongst the giant trees of Western Australia, there was the comfort of being near the surf, and swimming at day’s end. Kenealy, prisoner 9795, was fortunate to be in McGarry’s road party, which also included the Galtee Boy, John Sarsfield Casey, and 23-year-old Eugene Geary of Cork, whom Kenealy had known at home. George Connolly, a Dubliner in his early forties, described in a letter to his wife from Warder McGarry’s camp the situation in which he and the others found themselves: ‘To lie upon we have each got a hammock, but neither sheets, beds or pillows, and at night our only visitors are fleas and mosquitoes … Our work here is quarrying and blasting stones under almost a tropical sun.’

  Some military Fenians became labourers in the blinding, sweltering quarries, where local Aborigines sometimes sat to watch the phenomenon of slaving white men. But most of them were dispersed in road gangs, where they had what they considered the indignity of being chained, sometimes by day and night both, to British thieves. Father Lynch, the new Fremantle gaol chaplain, had been persuaded by Father Delany to have the vulnerable O’Reilly assigned to him as an assistant in the library, and six Fenians in all remained at Fremantle prison. As well as O’Reilly, John Flood and Denis Cashman worked as clerks. O’Reilly’s services to Father Lynch were suitably diverse and engaging. He attended to the office work, kept the chapel clean, organised choir practice four times a week, acted as school monitor and helped prisoners write their letters home. His friend Cashman admitted, ‘Prison discipline is by no means as strict as it is in England’; they were adequately fed and issued with pipes and tobacco.

  After four weeks working for Father Lynch in Fremantle, O’Reilly was ordered to report to a vessel in Fremantle Harbour, and ‘deliver the articles named in this bill of landin
g; read it!’ On the way to the pier, O’Reilly read the bill and saw that it called for the delivery in good order and condition of three articles: One convict, Number 9843, one bag, one hammock or bed, down the coast to the port of Bunbury. O’Reilly travelled unchained. Chains were seen here more as a matter of punishment and behaviour-control; generally the penal system in Western Australia operated on the principle that there was nowhere to escape to.

  The officer in charge of the gang to which O’Reilly was assigned by the authorities at the Bunbury depot was a compassionate fellow, a man in his early forties, Deputy Warder Henry Woodman, who employed O’Reilly as a clerk and constable. Constables wore a red stripe on their sleeves as their badge of office. Working on the road gang, O’Reilly was amongst some of the oldest and tallest of forests on the Australian mainland, and therefore on earth. He felt an enthusiasm for the full-blooded yet spiritually unappeasing Australian landscape.

  Here the aisle

  Moonlit and deep of reaching Gothic arms,

  Realm for towering gums, mahogany, and palm,

  And odourless jam and sandal; there the growth

  Of arm-long velvet leaves grown hoar in calm

  —In calm unbroken since their luscious youth.

  How can I show you all the silent birds with

  Strange metallic blinking on the wing?

  Or how tell half their sadness in cold words—

  The poor dumb lutes, the birds that never sing?

  Soon after their arrival in Western Australia, an event occurred on the other side of the continent, in the populous, hopeful and pleasant port city of Sydney, which would bring opprobrium upon the Fenians but also on the Irish throughout the British Empire. The queen’s younger son, Prince Alfred, the first of royal blood ever to visit Australia, had come to greet his mother’s Australian subjects. A royal charity picnic open to the public was arranged, to be held at the pleasure grounds at Clontarf in Sydney Harbour, a place which carried a name resonant in Irish history as the place of Brian Boru’s final victory and death. The picnic was attended by a huge crowd, amongst them a solitary and self-declared Fenian named Henry O’Farrell. He was a ‘ruined seminarian,’ in his mid-thirties, and he harboured equally passionate feelings against the Church, particularly the Archdiocese of Melbourne, as he did against the British Empire. The Archdiocese had employed his brother as their lawyer but left him dangling in a scandal over creditors. O’Farrell himself had recently been released from the nursing home where he underwent treatment for delirium tremens. He carried with him on the harbour ferry to Clontarf on 12 March 1868 two loaded revolvers, a Smith & Wesson and a Colt. Hidden in an enthusiastic crowd, as the prince passed O’Farrell fired point blank, striking him in the back. When a government official stepped between the prince and O’Farrell, the self-appointed assassin hesitated to fire a second time. The delayed shot went wild as he was grabbed from behind. ‘I’m a Fenian—God Save Ireland!’ yelled O’Farrell.