Out of Ireland have we come,
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb A fanatic heart.

W.B. Yeats

Hurrah for Old Ireland:
The Catalpa rescue

JIM HAYNES

THE IRISH REPUBLICAN BROTHERHOOD was formed in 1858 by James Stephens, who had led an ill-fated uprising against British rule in 1848 and then fled to Paris, returning to Ireland in 1856 to start the Irish People newspaper, which first rolled off the presses in 1863.

His partner in planning the 1848 uprising was John O’Mahony, who fled to the US and started the Fenian Brotherhood there.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood grew in Ireland during the 1860s. Money was sent from the US and the movement had a cache of weapons and 50,000 willing recruits.

A planned uprising in 1865 was called off, while another insurrection in 1867 was poorly organised and ended in a series of skirmishes. In September 1865, the Irish People was shut down by the government and Stephens and others were arrested and sent to prison. Stephens subsequently escaped and fled to the US.

Anyone suspected of being involved with the Brotherhood was arrested and some units of the British Army based in Ireland, believed to be sympathetic to the cause, were moved out of Ireland.

In 1866 the British government suspended habeas corpus in Ireland. This meant prisoners could be held without being brought to trial and hundreds of men were arrested. Civilians were treated as political prisoners, and men from the army were treated as traitors. The letter ‘D’, for deserter, was branded on their chests.

These ‘traitors’, or ‘Irish patriots’, became known as ‘Fenians’ and the British government transported most of them to Australia. The Perth settlement was the last in Australia to receive convicts, having asked for them to be sent when the colony was struggling for manpower in the late 1840s.

There were 62 Irish political prisoners among the 280 convicts on board the last convict ship to ever sail to Australia, the Hougoumont. Also on board, acting as an assistant warder of convicts, was Scotland Yard detective and British spy Thomas Rowe.

Many of the Irish political prisoners were well educated; some were schoolteachers and journalists. John Boyle O’Reilly was born in 1844, in the great potato famine. He was the son of a schoolteacher and began work on the local paper at age fourteen. He moved to Lancashire and worked on the local newspaper in Preston and joined the Lancashire militia and the 11th Lancashire Volunteer Rifles. He then returned to Dublin and joined the 10th Hussars in 1863. Sometime in 1864 or 1865 he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

O’Reilly was arrested in 1866 for recruiting fellow soldiers to join the Fenians. He was court-martialled and sentenced to hang, but the death sentence was commuted to 20 years transportation to Fremantle.

O’Reilly sailed on the Hougoumont, and he and another convict even produced a weekly shipboard newspaper on the voyage called The Wild Goose: A Collection of Ocean Waifs.

The Hougoumont arrived in Western Australia in January 1868 and O’Reilly was sent with a convict work party to Bunbury.

He spent the year at Bunbury planning his escape, with the help of local Irishmen and a priest, Father McCabe. In February 1869 O’Reilly escaped in a rowboat and rowed 12 miles up the coast to wait for an American whaling ship, the Vigilant, which Father McCabe had arranged to pick him up. All went well until the ship failed to pick him up after he had been rowed out to meet it. He spent days hiding in sand dunes being hunted by police and Aboriginal trackers, until a second whaling ship, the Gazelle, was organised to collect him.

The plot thickened when a convict named James Bowman got wind of the plan and blackmailed the conspirators into allowing him to join O’Reilly on the Gazelle.

Father McCabe had arranged for the Gazelle to take O’Reilly to Java, but bad weather forced the ship to Mauritius, which was a British colony in 1869. Police boarded the Gazelle and a magistrate demanded that the escaped convict be handed over. The captain hid O’Reilly and instead gave them Bowman, the other escaped convict on board.

Realising that O’Reilly was in danger of being captured at the next port of call, St Helena, the Gazelle’s captain arranged to transfer him onto the American cargo ship Sapphire. The transfer was carried out at sea and O’Reilly sailed to Liverpool, where he was secretly transferred to another American ship, the Bombay. On 23 November 1869, O’Reilly landed at Philadelphia and was warmly greeted by members of the Irish community there.

O’Reilly settled in Boston, where he worked on The Pilot, a newspaper aimed at the Irish-born population. He made lecture tours, wrote poetry and a novel, married a journalist named Mary Murphy and set about planning the escape of his fellow Fenians still in Fremantle Prison.

British policy had softened by 1869, and most of the Irish civilian political prisoners at Fremantle had been freed. This reprieve did not apply, however, to military prisoners.

In 1875, John Devoy came to O’Reilly with a plan to storm Fremantle Prison and rescue the remaining Fenians by force. Devoy had orchestrated the recruitment of Irish soldiers in British army units for James Stephens back in the 1860s, and been imprisoned and then exiled to the US.

One of the Fremantle exiles, James Wilson, had written to John Devoy, in June 1874:

. . . this is a voice from the tomb . . . we have been nearly nine years in this living tomb since our first arrest . . . it is impossible for mind or body to withstand the continual strain that is upon them. One or the other must give way.

O’Reilly suggested a less drastic plan, similar to the one that had worked for him. However, instead of relying on the goodwill and honesty of ships’ captains, his idea was to raise funds and buy a ship for the sole purpose of rescuing the prisoners. That way they could choose a captain who could be trusted and the ship could easily pose as a legitimate vessel. A whaling ship was the obvious choice.

Devoy and O’Reilly formed a committee to plan the whole venture and set about raising funds with the help of the American Irish Republican Brotherhood, Clan na Gael. There was no shortage of donations, which was just as well, as the plan required a large amount of money and manpower.

Devoy knew a shipping agent, John Richardson, who helped them purchase a three-masted barque, the whaling ship Catalpa, at a cost of $5,200. The ship was bought in the name of one of the committee, James Reynolds. Richardson also put the committee in touch with his son-in-law, a whaling captain sympathetic to the Irish cause, named George Smith Anthony.

The Catalpa was set up as an operational whaler and merchant ship and departed from New Bedford, near Boston, at the end of April 1875. Only Captain Anthony and one of the committee— Dennis Duggan, who was on board as the ship’s carpenter—knew the real purpose of the voyage.

The ship headed for the Atlantic whaling grounds and then sailed on to the Azores to unload 200 barrels of whale oil. Most of the crew deserted the ship there and Anthony recruited a new crew and headed for Australia. A savage storm delayed the ship and severely damaged her foremast, but she arrived off Bunbury, south of Perth, on 27 March 1876.

The misfortune Anthony experienced in losing the crew and having the ship damaged in the storm was offset by a stroke of amazing good luck.

Catalpa met the trader Ocean Beauty in the Indian Ocean and her captain happened to be the former master of the Hougoumont, which had carried the Fenians into captivity at Fremantle. Captain Anthony told him they were headed for the whaling grounds off Western Australia and he happily provided them with navigation charts of the Western Australian coastline.

Meanwhile, in late 1875, two Fenian spies, John Breslin and Thomas Desmond, had travelled to Perth from the US to organise the local side of the rescue operation. Desmond set himself up as a carriage builder in Perth, while Breslin posed as a wealthy American businessman, James Collins, in Fremantle.

The plot worked so well that Breslin, now known as Collins, was able to befriend the assistant superintendent of Fremantle Prison and be taken on a tour of the establishment. He managed to make contact with six of the twelve remaining Fenian convicts, either personally or through local Irish residents, and explain the plot to them.

Of the other six Fenians, one was in a high-security section of the prison, two were assigned to work out of the district and could not be contacted, and another two had tickets-of-leave and could not be found either. The twelfth was considered unreliable and a security risk.

When the Catalpa berthed at Bunbury on 29 March, Breslin met the ship and he and Anthony took passage to Perth on the steamer Georgette, which would have a further role to play in the drama later on. There they met Desmond and other sympathisers to make their final plans.

The escape was originally planned for April 6th, but the arrival of several British warships in Fremantle Harbour led to a postponement.

The escape was rescheduled for the 17th, Easter Monday, when the British ships had departed and the Royal Perth Yacht Club Regatta would be a good distraction. Thomas Desmond was to provide transport and arrange for sympathisers to cut the telegraph lines connecting the colony to the rest of Australia; the Catalpa would be waiting offshore from Rockingham Bay, south of Perth, in international waters between Rottnest and Garden Islands, having sent a whaleboat ashore to collect the escaped prisoners.

The plan almost came unstuck yet again when Captain Anthony went to send the crucial coded telegram at Bunbury and discovered the telegraph office was closed for Good Friday. Somehow he was able to locate the telegraph operator and get the message sent to Fremantle telegraph office, which was open for business.

Before sunrise on Monday the 17th, James Wilson, Robert Cranston and Michael Harrington, who were working outside the prison, slipped away and made their rendezvous with a carriage provided by Desmond. Around the same time, James Donagh, Thomas Hassett and Martin Hogan escaped from the prison’s minimum-security section and were picked up by another carriage provided by Desmond.

The two carriages raced to Rockingham, where the whaleboat was waiting, but no sooner had they shoved off than a local resident— a timber-cutter named Bell, who had spoken to the men and thought their abandoning carriages and horses on the beach very suspicious—mounted up and headed for Perth. He arrived at 1 p.m. and informed the police that he had seen an American whaleboat, manned by sailors armed with rifles, take nine men— some in prison clothes—from the beach at Rockingham.

The police only had a small vessel, a single-masted cutter, which put to sea as soon as possible. Within several hours they had also commandeered, by authority of the colonial governor, Sir William Robinson, the schooner-rigged coastal steamer Georgette, which headed out to sea with a hastily assembled group of volunteers from the quaintly named ‘Enrolled Pensioner Force’.

Meanwhile, out at sea, the whaleboat came within sight of the Catalpa just on sunset, but a sudden fierce squall hit and they lost sight of her and spent the night battling the storm.

Next morning the group in the whaleboat relocated the Catalpa, but saw the Georgette heading towards it and stayed away, lying down in the whaleboat to avoid being seen.

Superintendent Stone of the Water Police, aboard the Georgette, hailed the Catalpa and requested to be allowed on board to search for escaped convicts. The request was denied, although the fugitives were not yet on board, and the Georgette followed the Catalpa for several hours until it was forced to return to Fremantle to refuel.

As the Georgette disappeared towards Fremantle, the police cutter appeared on the horizon and the men in the whaleboat rowed hard and boarded the Catalpa as the police approached. The cutter also lingered within sight of the Catalpa for some time before heading back to shore.

The Governor was now determined to recapture the convicts and had the Georgette fitted with a 12-pound howitzer field gun overnight.

Both the police cutter and the Georgette set out to find the Catalpa the following day, Tuesday, 18 April. On board the Georgette were the Pensioner Guards, all eager and armed, along with the howitzer.

The Catalpa was spotted on the horizon that afternoon, but it wasn’t until 8 a.m. the following day that the Georgette overhauled the whaler and fired shots across its stern and bow. Captain Anthony hove-to and parlayed with Superintendant Stone.

Stone demanded to be allowed to board the Catalpa, but Captain Anthony refused the request.

Stone had right on his side, according to British law, and the Georgette also had might on her side—a cannon, and thirty or more eager armed militiamen.

Captain Anthony bluffed it out with style. He reminded Stone that they were in international waters; then he pointed to the Stars and Stripes at the masthead and challenged Stone to create a diplomatic incident.

The taunt was intended to remind Stone that several years earlier, the US had sued Britain over a maritime breach of neutrality in the American Civil War. The case had been settled in Geneva on 14 September 1872, with the British government paying £3 million in damages to the US in compensation for building the Confederate commerce-raider Alabama, which sank much Union shipping.

Firing on, or attempting to board the Catalpa without permission, Anthony declared, would be nothing short of an act of war against the US.

The Catalpa then made sail and proceeded westward.

The Georgette followed until it was low on fuel, and then turned back to Fremantle as the Catalpa disappeared into the vastness of the Indian Ocean. The complex rescue plan, over two years in the making, had worked.

With the successful cutting of the telegraph wires by Thomas Desmond’s two recruits, John Durham and Denis McCarthy, it was June before news of the bold escape reached London.

The Catalpa managed to avoid British ships and make its way back to the US. Captain Anthony even chased a few whales on the way home, but the Catalpa proved to be better at catching escaped convicts than whales—no kills were made.

John Boyle O’Reilly finally learned of the escape in early June and publicised the event to the world, provoking anger in Britain, jubilation in Ireland and the US, and mixed sentiments in the various colonies of Australia.

The Catalpa arrived in New York Harbour on 19 August 1876 and was given to Captain Anthony, with shares going to his two chief officers, as a reward for their part in the adventure.

In the colony of Western Australia there was embarrassment and paranoia about a Fenian invasion. The assistant warden who had shown Breslin through Fremantle Prison unsuccessfully attempted suicide and then resigned. The prison controller and several other officials were sacked, and all tickets-of-leave for Fenians were revoked. Nevertheless, all the Fenians were freed by 1878.

The two other ships in the Catalpa drama had interesting histories.

The Hougoumont was a blackwall frigate built in 1852 by the Dunbar Line Shipping Company in Burma. She was named after the estate and chateau where the Battle of Waterloo was fought. When she was chartered by the French to carry troops to the Crimean War in 1854, she was temporarily renamed Baraguay d’Hilliers after a French general, lest her original name offend the French. She was the last ship to carry convicts to Australia and little is known of her after 1870. All existing drawings and photos of the Hougoumont are not the 1852 ship at all, but a later and much larger ship of the same name.

The SS Georgette was built in Scotland in 1872. She was a small 211-ton iron screw-driven steamship, 46 metres long by 7 metres wide. Designed as a collier, she could carry 460 tons, although her two engines produced only 48 horsepower.

Based at Fremantle, Georgette was the local coastal trading ship for southwest Western Australia in an era when virtually everything and everybody was moved by coastal shipping. She had a brief life and was not a lucky ship.

Apart from the ignominy of failing to prevent the Fenians escaping, she also was wrecked twice. In 1874 she ran onto a reef and had to be sent to Adelaide for repairs. In November 1876—the same year the Fenians escaped in the Catalpa—she developed a leak so bad that water extinguished the fires in her boilers and she drifted into massive surf and was grounded in Calgardup Bay, near modern-day Busselton. An Aboriginal stockman from the local property, Sam Isaacs, raised the alarm. As all the other men were away from the homestead, he and the property owner’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Grace Bussell, famously rode their horses into the surf again and again and saved many lives.

Twelve people perished and the wreck of the Georgette is still there, now protected under the Historic Shipwrecks Act.

And the Catalpa? Well, although George Smith Anthony’s ability to sail the high seas was rather restricted as he was a wanted man by the British, he did undertake some whaling expeditions before the Catalpa was sold. She finished her life as a coal barge in the port of modern-day Belize—which was, ironically, then known as British Honduras.

This was a sad end for the ship whose name became a rallying call for the Irish cause, embarrassing the great naval power of Britain so much that a song about the incident was banned in the colony of Western Australia.