The Catalpa Affair by Tarquin O’Flaherty. Part 2
Two Newspaper Men
Herein lies a tale of two 19th Cent. (1870’s) American newspaper editors who, to say the least, had colourful histories. The one, John Devoy, of the New York Herald, was Irish and had been granted amnesty by the British providing he lived outside the British Isles. Devoy had been a member of a subversive organisation called The Irish Republican Brotherhood, whose whole aim was to rid Ireland of the English. Devoy was a Fenian. ‘Fenian’ (pronounced feen-yen) at that time had all of the pejorative connotations nowadays associated with ‘International terrorism’, El Qaida and the IRA.
John Boyle O’Reilly, editor of the ‘Boston Pilot’, (1870’s) had a lot in common with Devoy. Born north of Dublin he too was a Fenian and, sentenced to twenty years ‘penal servitude’, was transported, along with 60 or seventy other ‘Fenians’, to Fremantle, in WA. He arrived in January, 1868, but by February 1869 was an escaped prisoner, on board ship and bound for America where, within a very short space of time, he became editor of the ‘Boston Pilot’.
Irish people in America were delighted to receive these men, symbols that the fight against the the British Empire was alive and well. Since the deliberately induced genocide of the Great Hunger, twenty years earlier, the population of Ireland had fallen from about six to less than two million. A million people starved to death whilst the remainder had emigrated, many of them on what were referred to as ‘coffin ships’ unseaworthy vessels, ill provisioned, overcrowded, but provided in great numbers by that level of society who are quick to exploit human misery. Many of these ships perished, simply never arrived at US ports, and those that did were often riddled with disease, with up to 80 per cent of their passengers dead and dumped into the sea.
Not surprisingly,‘Clan na Gael’ was established in America to provide aid and to plan armed insurrection against the Crown forces in Ireland. Roughly speaking the name translates as ‘The Clan of the Gael’, the ‘Gael’ being the Irish.
While all this was going on, in 1869 and again in 1871, pardons were granted to many of the Irish political prisoners held at Australia’s Fremantle Prison. Only six or seven of the original group remained locked up. One of these prisoners, James Wilson, managed to smuggle a letter to the US, asking of Devoy and O’Reilly that they be rescued. The two editors put their heads together…
Devoy addressed the Clan na Gael New York convention of 1874 and gained backing for a daring plan to purchase a ship, sail to Western Australia and rescue O’Reilly’s fellow Irish prisoners. It was decided that, rather than a military style operation, which some of the more hot-headed favoured, a more covert arrangement would attract less attention and would be far more likely to succeed.
Accordingly, a three masted barque, the whaling ship ‘Catalpa’ was purchased, provisioned and prepared. With Captain George Smith Anthony, a twenty two man crew, and about two hundred barrels of sperm whale oil for delivery in the Azores, the barque set sail from New Bedford, Massachusetts, on the 29th April, 1875.