The Catalpa Affair by Tarquin O’Flaherty.  Part 1
John Boyle O’Reilly

Can you imagine it?  The most astonishing life imaginable; already, by his twenties, a well regarded journalist, comfortable, educated and successful.  Transported to Australia for political misdeeds he escapes to America, and becomes a hugely successful newspaper proprietor.  Whilst all this is going on, he is also organising, from the US, the daring rescue of other Irish political prisoners from Fremantle, in Western Australia.  He marries in the US, has kids, has a statue erected in his honour, and is stone dead by the age of forty six.

A man, patently with little time to waste…

Born in Ireland in 1844 John Boyle OReilly grew up in a destroyed country.  Potato blight and evictions meant people either died of exposure or starvation.  This was looked upon by the British Government as fortuitous and no Famine relief was attempted until a public outcry forced their hand.  It is estimated that within three or four years, the British Government, through a deliberate policy of extermination, allowed as much as a million people to die of hunger.

Against this background, O’Reilly, a cadet journalist (aged fifteen) in Lancashire, England, joined the 11^th Lancs. Volunteers, and, on his return to Ireland, the 10^th Hussars in Dublin.  Finally, having had sufficient military training, he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, (The Fenians) a proscribed organisation whose goal was independence from England.  Eventually (1865) he was caught and sentenced to 20 years transportation to a penal colony in WA.  At this point, OReilly is 21 years old.

He spends two years in English jails before sailing for WA on the ‘Hougoumont’, the last convict transport ship to arrive in Fremantle (1868).

Now this is where it becomes interesting, O’Reilly is very soon moved, being young and able bodied, to a gang of road builders near Bunbury, south of Perth.  As the road advances, it leaves Bunbury behind, so communication with the Bunbury authorities, (not to mention the warder’s families and friends) becomes more difficult.  The principle warder is a Henry Woodman and the warder is naturally, in need of an assistant.  This assistant would be required to keep books well enough to satisfy the bureaucracy as well as being a trusted messenger between the road gang and all other necessary bodies.  O’Reilly, who has already established cordial relations with Henry Woodman, becomes assistant to the warder.  He also becomes a welcome visitor at the Woodman home in Bunbury.

Unfortunately due perhaps to a failed romantic attachment with Woodman’s daughter, Jesse, John Boyle O’Reilly, at the age of twenty four, attempts suicide.  His life is saved by a fellow prisoner.

In 1869 a sympathetic Catholic priest, Father Patrick McCabe, arranges for O’Reilly’s escape.  The priest has arranged for the prisoner to be picked up by the American whaler ‘Vigilant’.  Reilly absconds, is taken by Irish sympathisers to a boat on the Collie river and then rowed northwards for about 20 kilometres in the open sea.  When the Vigilant does show up it ignores them and sails off out of sight!  It’s captain has changed his mind or been warned off.  O’Reilly’s helpers have to bolt back for shore and hide him away for two weeks before another ship can be found.

By the time this has been arranged another prisoner has joined them, a James Bowman.  Bowman has threatened to expose the escape attempt to the authorities if they don’t include him.  He is included and they row out three miles (5 kilometres) to join the American whaler ‘Gazelle’, bound for Java.  Nothing is simple and the weather insists they make for the port of Rodriguez, Mauritius, (at the time a British colony) instead.  In port they are immediately boarded by magistrates demanding they give up the escaped prisoner.  The captain gives up Bowman and the magistrates leave.  As soon as possible, the Gazelle departs for St Helena which is yet another British possession.  O’Reilly is advised by the captain that it would be best if he change ships.

In July, 1869, on the high seas, he transfers to the American cargo ship ‘The Sapphire’, bound for Liverpool in England!  Finally, and without incident at Liverpool, he is transferred to yet another American ship, ‘The Bombay’ which docks in Philadelphia on the 23^rd November, 1869.

O’Reilly has been a journalist, a soldier, a known member of a ‘terrorist organisation’, a ‘Prisoner of Mother England’, has escaped both his captors and his confinement and has been at sea, as a fugitive, for most of 1869.  This remarkable man is just 25 years old and has already lived a lifetime.  Another distinguished career now beckons in America.