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

by Thomas Keneally

  Before the year of his rescue was out, Robert Cranston, the 36-year-old ex-prisoner who had begun the escape process that Easter Monday morning by telling warders tales of potato-digging and furniture-moving, would marry and become a staunch worker for the radical O’Donovan Rossa. Martin Hogan settled in Chicago and was active in Fenian affairs. The others led relatively obscure American lives. By 1896, only three of them were still alive to be honoured as guests at a huge Clan na Gael escape twentieth anniversary, held in Rising Sun Park in Philadelphia. But in 1920, forty-four years after rescue, when Eamon de Valera—president of the unofficial Irish Republic—toured the States, 82-year-old James Wilson, sufferer aboard Catalpa of a suspect heart, was in New York to meet him.

  As for Breslin, he went apparently unmarried, and became a trustee of O’Donovan Rossa’s famous Skirmishing Fund. A disapproving Devoy liked him, and employed him at his Irish Nation Weekly. But besides Fremantle, the other great Fenian mission of Breslin’s life was to do with the development of a submarine. In 1876 he met a former Clare schoolmaster named Stephen Holland, once dismissed from the Christian Brothers for frail health. He had robust plans, though, for a viable ‘Fenian ram,’ a vessel which could travel underwater in British ports and sink warships. Holland developed petrol engines to drive his submarine on the surface, and electrical engines to drive it underwater. He offered his invention to the Clan, while Rossa was still part of the organisation, in the early 1870s. Some $60,000, first from the Clan and then from Rossa’s Skirmishing Fund, was spent between 1876 and 1881 in building three separate submarines at the Delamater Ironworks on West 13th Street, New York, with Holland as inventor and engineer-in-chief, and Breslin as project manager. The first prototype, Holland I, was a failure—improper riveting let water in, creating clouds of chlorine from the batteries. The second failed because of weight distribution. The third vessel was stored, ready for deployment, in the yard of James Reynolds, Catalpa Jim, in New Haven. In the end, the American government encouraged Holland to launch a version of this third ‘Holland’ in 1897, armed with a ‘dynamite gun’ and a torpedo tube, at the Crescent Shipyard in New Jersey, and ordered six more. The submarine, launched the year after Breslin’s death in 1896, went into service as the USS Holland, with a crew of seven. The Holland, decommissioned by the navy in 1910, would be exhibited in Madison Square Gardens to raise money for the victims of the 1916 Easter Rising.

  Anthony lived until 1913, and in 1920 Eamon de Valera placed on his grave in New Bedford the colours of the proposed Irish Republic—the same colours the youth Tom Meagher brought back from Paris in 1848. As for Devoy, he survived as a force in the politics of Ireland and the diaspora, making many enemies. He jealously refused to countenance any other revolutionary Irish organisation in the United States than Clan na Gael, and into the 1880s it remained the focus of all Irish American effort. But a corrupt political boss from Chicago, Alexander Sullivan, split the Clan into two factions. Sullivan’s group—the Triangle—was much feared and condemned in both the Irish and general community. Like factions in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century, the Triangle authorised its own independent string of dynamite attacks on England, in the course of one of which, in 1884, William Lomasney, former Fenian prisoner, blew himself up while attaching a bomb to a London bridge. These operations were despised and condemned by O’Reilly in the Pilot, and by most of the Clan membership.

  Prior to America’s entry into the First World War, Devoy made approaches to the German ambassador in Washington to induce him to supply arms to the Irish, just as John Mitchel had once approached the Russian ambassador. The arms carried by rebels in the Easter week uprising were purchased with the Clan’s—that is, Devoy’s—subscriptions. Wizened but authoritarian Devoy would die aged eighty-six in Brooklyn in 1928. The Times of London paid him what he would have considered a high compliment: ‘As well as the most dangerous enemy of this country Ireland has produced since Wolfe Tone, for sixty years he was unremittingly engaged in conspiracies.’ His body was taken to Glasnevin, and the remains of the founders of the Irish Free State surround his own.

  The last person associated with Catalpa to die was Mrs Annie Anthony, who at the time of her death in November 1935 was still telling New Bedford the story of how John Boyle O’Reilly had found her taking down the clothes when he came to tell her the news of Catalpa’s success.

  31

  REPUBLICAN CHRIST

  The vulgar show of the pompous feast

  Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest;

  The organised charity, scrimped and iced,

  In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ …

  In Bohemia,

  John Boyle O’Reilly, 1885

  If we look at O’Reilly in the fourteen years after Catalpa, we see a man who in a different sense from Mitchel was a lightning rod for every significant Irish and American question. One of the influences on him was a fellow former Dartmoor inmate, Michael Davitt, now, like O’Reilly, in his early thirties. Davitt’s liberation was a much less spectacular but ultimately more significant liberation than the Catalpa escape. A former weapons purchaser for the Fenians, one-armed as a result of an accident suffered as a child in the Lancashire cotton mills, he was released from Dartmoor in late 1877. A complex young man, he had spent time in his cell contemplating the debacle of Fenianism, and had returned to the principles of Young Ireland’s late Fintan Lalor: land lay at the bottom of all Irish questions. The prime objective should be the destruction of Irish landlordism, ‘first, as the system which was responsible for the poverty and periodic famines which have decimated Ireland’; and secondly, but only secondly, ‘because landlordism was a garrison which barred the way to national independence.’

  When he travelled to the United States in 1878 to visit his mother and raise funds, Davitt carried the idea for a land reform effort, a land league, and discussed it when he met with O’Reilly in Boston. It was his strategy to drag in the old Fenians, and to get support from Irish America, he believed that he needed the backing of O’Donovan Rossa. O’Reilly warned him that Rossa could not serve as a figurehead for the non-violent land agitation which Davitt wanted.

  When they had finished arguing in O’Reilly’s copy-cluttered office, they discussed Tom Chambers and Charles McCarthy, O’Reilly’s former prison mates, who were still in British prisons. O’Reilly published in the Pilot Davitt’s account of their mistreatment. Chambers could receive and write no letters, and, ‘Dozens of times these officers have stripped him naked in the presence of thieves, and subjected him to insults too disgusting to describe.’ In 1877, when Chambers was moved to Woking Prison, John Boyle O’Reilly had written to him, urging him to hope: ‘When ten more years have passed we shall both look back with pleasure—yes, as sure as you live, old friend—at the dark shadow.’ It happened that a few months after Davitt and O’Reilly discussed these half-forgotten men, both Chambers and McCarthy were set at liberty.

  O’Reilly’s literary repute had been augmented, despite some subsequent poor reviews, by his novel of Western Australia, Moondyne Joe. It was first published in weekly instalments in the Pilot beginning on 30 November 1878, and the following year appeared in book form as Moondyne—A Story from the Underworld, ‘dedicated to all who are in prison.’ ‘Moondyne’ was said to be a manufactured name ‘from a vague Australian native cry or sound.’ The book had an agenda of penal reform to it, and urged the value of compassion towards prisoners at a time when the Pentonville System—segregation of prisoners from each other, monastic silence, and tedious labour—was still the fashion even in America.

  The Moondyne Joe of the novel is a mythic convict who has absconded into the bush for an entire three years. One would need, said the narrator, to see and experience Western Australia in summer to know how harsh such a wilful absence from the settled regions would be. During his life at large, Moondyne encounters the so-called ‘king of the Vasse,’ a sort of Aboriginal Prester John.

  Meanwhile, a young ma
n named Sheraton has gone home from Western Australia to find his beloved, Alice Walmsley, and has discovered to his horror that she is in prison serving a life sentence. Sheraton takes his plea for her release to Sir Joshua Hobb, administrator of Britain’s penal system. ‘A tall, gaunt man of fifty with an offensive hauteur … His face said plainly: I know all—these gentlemen know nothing … I am the convict system.’ O’Reilly satirises Hobb as having no thought on what the dark stream of criminality arose from, or where it was going. ‘He is merely ‘a dried mudbank’ to keep it within bounds a little while. In his efforts to release his beloved Alice, Sheraton enjoys a number of conversations with English gentlemen technocrats concerning various forms of penitentiary. One tells Sheraton, for example, that the Separate System has increased insanity from twelve to thirty-one per thousand prisoners, and is therefore being replaced by the Public Works System. A gobble-de-gook-prone disciple of Sir Joshua’s speaks of the mask, an eyelet-holed skullcap, designed by Sir Joshua, which comes down over the face and is designed to promote a salutary shame in the prisoners. ‘He was made a Knight Commander of the Bath for that wonderful invention.’

  In the midst of Sheraton’s efforts to achieve Alice’s release, a penal informer named Wyville arrives in England with the King of the Vasse, the Aboriginal Neggra-jil. Wyville is the escapee Moondyne Joe under an assumed identity. He appals the bureaucrats by comparing society to the tree of evil in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, whose roots ‘are born of aristocracy. They spring from the rotting luxuries that fall from the tables of kings and earls and hereditary gentry.’

  By a variety of stratagems, Sheraton and Wyville manage to arrange for Alice Walmsley’s release from prison on condition she accompanies a Sister of Mercy on a convict ship for males and females to Western Australia. So a version of the Hougoumont begins its journey, but with scenes of such vividness that one feels they must represent the real ship. Arrived in Western Australia, which O’Reilly depicts with the same ambiguous love found in his poetry, Sheraton and Alice marry, and Wyville ascends to superintendence of Fremantle prison, confusing the bullies with well-managed compassion. Moondyne Joe, despised convict, has shown the colony how to be civilised.

  The novel was attacked as anti-Christian, most noticeably by J. A. McMaster, editor of New York’s Freeman’s Journal, the same McMaster who had once fired on Thomas Francis Meagher. ‘It is worse than pagan … it breathes out principles that are not un-Christian only, but anti-Christian … Away with law! … Yes, mankind is older than the birth of Jesus Christ! If Jesus Christ will become a republican, we will adopt him! If not—’

  The critic in the Atlantic Monthly judged the book on purely literary grounds. O’Reilly’s literary strength, he said, lay in the presentation of the dramatic, done ‘with a sombre power which equals Blackmore and recalls Browning.’ But ‘his animated narrative is incessantly interrupted and marred by asides wonderful for weak sentiment and bad writing.’ The Boston Daily Advertiser, however, compared Moondyne to Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo.

  About the time Moondyne appeared, a set of new alliances were created on the Irish front. In 1878, John Devoy sent a cable from New York to the Fenian journalist Charles Kickham, the Paris-exiled president of the supreme council of the residual IRB, the Irish branch of Fenianism. Devoy proposed a deal between the Clan na Gael in America, the IRB, and the new leader of the Irish Party in the House of Commons, Charles Stewart Parnell. The Clan and old Fenians such as Kickham should offer to support Parnell if he stopped promoting Home Rule as a mere demand for Ireland to be a self-governing province within the United Kingdom, and substituted a clearer declaration in favour of full Irish self-government. Parnell should also agree to pursue Davitt’s agenda: agitation by the people to bring about peasant ownership of Irish land. Devoy hoped for a pact between himself, the celibate New Yorker, the deaf and exiled Fenian Kickham, the one-armed land reformer Davitt, and the benign but remote sphinx of a Wicklow landlord, Parnell.

  This attempt at Irish unity became known as the New Departure, and the text of Devoy’s offer was published prematurely in the New York Herald on 26 October 1878, before Davitt had even heard of it. ‘It was a most imprudent proceeding,’ he thought, ‘amounting as it did to an open proposal through the public press, for an alliance between men avowedly revolutionist and the leaders of the constitutional party in the British House of Commons.’ There was now a crucial meeting with Devoy and his friend Dr Joyce at which O’Reilly managed to persuade Devoy to forget the matter of self-government, and concentrate on the overthrow of landlordism. On the cable at the Pilot office in Franklin Street, O’Reilly was receiving reports that, particularly in the west, the Irish were suffering now perhaps more than at any other time since the Famine. Rain and cold weather had diminished the grain crop, produced a shortage of food for cattle and pigs, and encouraged again that old black rot of potatoes which the aged had not seen since the catastrophe of thirty years past. In Davitt’s Mayo, where a cholera epidemic struck the chickens, and the blight the potatoes, the twin terrors of famine and eviction hung over people, some of whom in resisting eviction fought armed police with stones. The weather had been so torrential as to prevent the drying of turf to keep the families of the west warm. But now these despised would have a cause, O’Reilly argued, the land reform and peasant proprietary which were much closer to their hearts than was the dream of republicanism. The propaganda for the new land movement was carried on in Boston by the Pilot and in New York by Patrick Ford’s Irish World. Of the two, the Pilot was perhaps more welcome ideologically to Davitt and to Parnell, for Davitt had already spoken to Ford, the World’s editor, about the distractions of explosives, their irrelevance to the present struggle. ‘I believe I can lay claim to having induced Mr Ford to abandon for good his propaganda of dynamite,’ Davitt assured O’Reilly.

  In January 1879, Devoy and Davitt went to Paris to meet Kickham, but found he had little tolerance for a policy of co-operation with members of the House of Commons like Parnell. He conceded though that as individuals, Fenians could support land reform meetings. In fact, as individuals, Fenians flocked to these meetings. And so, after hesitation, did parliamentarians.

  So O’Reilly observed with enthusiasm, from the American side of the Atlantic, the Irish Land War, an extraordinary and largely moral struggle, which began with a rally at Irishtown in County Mayo on 20 April 1879. It produced a spate of Sunday rallies which for popular enthusiasm matched the Monster Meetings of O’Connell. Hopeful tenants, men and women both, dressed in their best and marched in military formation behind bands and horsemen bearing pikes. They cheered speakers who condemned landlordism, often in old-fashioned militant imagery of which Mitchel and Meagher would not have been ashamed. They listened as balladeers mounted the platform to turn their grievances into rhyme. Parnell accepted Davitt’s invitation to attend in June a meeting of tenant farmers at Westport, in County Mayo, where Fenians, ex-Fenians, land agitators and politicians were all on the platform, and it was this meeting which helped create a formal structure, the Land League of Mayo, and the Irish National Land League, whose American disciple and servant O’Reilly became.

  O’Reilly compared the movement in Ireland to ‘that wild anti-slavery agitation … the land of Ireland is not held by so good or just a tenure as the slave holders possessed.’ He wanted not revolution but British legislation to compel ‘absentee owners of large estates in Ireland to sell the land to the farmers who till the soil and who pay its produce in rents that are spent out of the country.’ Parnell himself came to Boston to argue the cause in 1880. He was not quite in the mould of Irish heroes. He lacked the flamboyance of O’Connell, was solemn, or at least a little sombre. But he was eagerly greeted. Shortages of food in Ireland turned the focus of his journey through America away from land reform and into famine fund-raising. John Boyle O’Reilly, mere son of a national schoolmaster, served as one of Parnell’s reliable guides. He advised Parnell not to serve on a relief committee put in place
by the New York Herald, for that journal, which had until now been sympathetic to Irish issues, considered the Land League a manifestation of socialism. The Irish did not trust the Herald fund and would not subscribe to it. Wendell Phillips applauded O’Reilly’s counsel to Parnell on the Herald. ‘You may congratulate yourself on the advice you gave him.’

  O’Reilly urged his old friend Devoy to use the Clan and its funds not for armed uprising but to support the Land League. To help a licit, non-violent struggle, said O’Reilly, would be good for the Clan’s repute amongst those Irish-Americans who now despised failed Fenianism, but, because of their childhoods in the Irish countryside, were fierce against landlordism. O’Reilly was ecstatic when his potent Boston friend Patrick Collins, soon bound for Congress, ultimately to be Mayor of Boston, was in 1880 elected President of the Irish Land League of America. Collins had captured the American branch of the Land League for the pragmatists, whom Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell felt most at home with.

  We do not know to what extent O’Reilly talked of these things with his wife, Mary—she, not a political creature, was all the more understandably disengaged from politics, being pregnant with their fourth child. His favourite and most vulnerable daughter, Blanid, would be born in the summer of highest Irish hopes, 1880.

  Throughout the decade, between indulging Blanid, O’Reilly agitated from platforms around the country for the Land League. ‘Throw down the gage of battle to landlordism, as the source of Irish poverty, eviction, and immigration, and a mighty power will be enlisted in the fight against English rule.’ But he was hurt to be accused of charging fees to make speeches. Committees who wanted him to speak for nothing said, ‘Oh, it will do the Pilot good if you come.’ ‘This is bosh,’ commented the Pilot in 1881. ‘The Pilot will be better served by constant attention. O’Reilly has literally raised tens of thousands of dollars for the Irish Fund this winter; and has sacrificed more since October in literary reputation and money, giving up his work, than he could earn by lecturing in seven years.’