The Immortal Irishman by Timothy Egan
O’Doherty missed his lover, Eva Anne Kelly, a black-haired poet in the cause of free Ireland and the other voice in the one-two female punch at the Nation. The couple had planned to marry before the Crown’s prosecution broke it off. Still, he was faithful to her—one of the reasons why he was nicknamed Saint Kevin. Not so some of the other Young Irelanders. They were men of deep-felt political convictions, but men all the same. Meagher’s sickly shipmate on the Swift, the excitable Patrick O’Donoghue, had written his wife about the “vice of all kinds, in its most hideous and exaggerated form, openly practiced by all sexes and classes” on the island. He then practiced some of it himself, though he did not share this with his wife. At a picnic he “got lost in the bush,” as the story was relayed in a letter between Irish prisoners, “and by remarkable coincidence, the hostess of the party got lost too.” On the island, O’Donoghue didn’t try to keep this tryst a secret—the woman was very pretty, he bragged. Smith O’Brien, father of seven, his features as chiseled as those of a statesman posing for currency, soon had a young companion for his walks on Maria Island—one of the teenage daughters of the doctor who’d been treating him. On a seat in the garden, the girl was seen reaching into the open fly of Ireland’s forty-seven-year-old political exile—giving him an “old fashioned,” as the Victorians called the stroke of a hand. Two of the constables who kept an eye on Smith O’Brien had witnessed the act through a telescope and reported it to their superiors. When confronted, the convict was noncommittal, but he made a reference to “a kindly desire to mitigate the loneliness of my solitude.”
For his part, Meagher put his energies into his new home, a cottage on Dog’s Head Peninsula at Lake Sorell. He’d been given land by a sympathetic settler in the higher reaches of the island. A large skiff was hauled up by oxen, outfitted with sails, topped with an American flag and tied to a primitive pier in front of his cabin. Meagher had told his friends he was done with romance. He intended to live solo and celibate. But in naming his boat, he showed that he had not completely forgotten about a woman who had been dazzled by him in Ireland. This Speranza gave Thomas Meagher days of lonely pleasure on the open water of the lake, gliding from imaginary Ross Castle to the island holding Innisfallen. Back in Dublin, the inspiration for the boat’s name, the poet Jane Elgee, had married Sir William Wilde, onetime oculist to Queen Victoria. They kept a strain of Irish nationalism alive, though contained within the parlor of their sumptuous home. Jane also gave birth to a boy who would become a brilliant dramatist, and be jailed for another Victorian crime: the love of another man. He was Oscar Wilde, but was better known to the Irish worldwide as the son of Speranza.
Through the Tasmanian winter, word passed of plans for an escape. What was once considered impossible had grown in schemes hatched on three continents. Several of the leaders of the failed uprising of 1848 had made it to America, and there they joined the extensive network of powerful Irish New Yorkers. A thousand people met in Manhattan’s Tammany Hall, protesting the treatment of the exiles, cheered on by Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune. Money that had been raised for guns in Ireland now went to springing political prisoners from the penal colony. The cause was not dead yet. If one could be liberated, he might start something fresh. Meagher’s boyhood chum Patrick Smyth plotted from New York to get his friend off the island. It was more important, Meagher insisted through letters to third parties, to free Smith O’Brien. Meagher was also concerned that the older man would not live long in solitary confinement. But also, given his status, a liberated Smith O’Brien would be a greater coup.
At the same time, Irish in the United States, England and Canada, and settlers in Australia, pressured the Crown to pardon the prisoners. American officials, meeting the prime minister in London, repeatedly brought up names that the British thought had disappeared from their shores, never to be heard from again. A measure was introduced in the U.S. Senate calling for their immediate release. Even the new president, Millard Fillmore, who took office in the summer of 1850 after the death of Zachary Taylor, appealed to England to release the Irish political prisoners. Should they escape, he assured the fastest-growing voter bloc in America, they would find “safe asylum and full protection” in the U.S.A. And every time a letter made it out from one of the Tasmanian exiles, it found its way into publication in a prominent newspaper. In London, public opinion was turning against transporting convicts altogether. The time was right to bring Smith O’Brien out from confinement on Maria Island. Meagher pledged to pay for most of it, using a loan from his father. A ship was selected, the Victoria, piloted by a paroled pirate from Hobart, Captain Ellis.
For two days in August 1850, Smith O’Brien walked the cliffs of Maria Island, scanning the sea. He had never been so low. “I suffer from depression,” he wrote his brother Robert. “I find the long evenings desolate. It is dark at four o’clock and I do not go to bed until ten.” It would have been far better, he said, to be executed in Ireland. His guards had agreed to give him leisure every now and then to walk alone. Just now, he saw something on the horizon, and waved a white cloth. It was a small boat, with two men paddling and one steering—a craft to take him away to the Victoria and then to the French territory of Tahiti. That was the plan, everything in place. When the little craft stopped moving, Smith O’Brien dove into cold winter water and swam furiously toward it, a sick man, frail and desperate. But as he neared the skiff, it remained stalled in place. At the boat’s edge, he cried out, extending a hand; no one attempted to reach back. He splashed around, spitting water, before turning back toward the beach. On shore, a dripping, gasping, freezing Smith O’Brien made a dash for the bush, but was picked up by constables who had been watching the entire time.
As it turned out, the bid for freedom was doomed from the start: the Irishman had been betrayed. British authorities knew everything. Within days, Smith O’Brien was removed from Maria Island and hauled off to the convict station at Port Arthur, on Van Diemen’s Land—“as near a realization of a Hell upon earth as can be found in any part of the British dominions,” he wrote. Finally, he was a broken man, he admitted, his will to resist gone—“thoroughly beaten by English power.” Governor Denison used the episode to argue for harsher treatment of the other Irish political prisoners. He suggested to his superiors in London that these men belonged in chains breaking rocks, or maybe in long-term residency inside the blood-stained cells at notorious Port Arthur, the last home for many a convict who died young of abuse. Smith O’Brien’s ordeal was a warning of things to come. Let this be an example, the overlord of the Tasmanian penal colony proclaimed, for anyone else considering a similar move. Escape was futile. The Irish were stuck on this island of the damned for life.
7
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The Traitor of Tasmania
A most curious man arrived at the southern end of Van Diemen’s Land in the fall of 1850 and began hacking a settlement out of the woods near a small stream, with forty or more convicts at his service. Bewhiskered, red-nosed and belligerent, the tall stranger had money and a cache of letters of introduction bearing all the seals of authority the Empire could bestow on a civilian traveler. One note was from the highest colonial official, Earl Grey himself. Another was from the Crown’s ruler in Ireland, Lord Clarendon, who had called him “a treasure.” These documents were his secrets—he would not show the letters unless his hand was forced. The well-connected pioneer was an Irishman, but what Irishman came to the penal colony with such authoritative backing? None other than John Donnellan Balfe, known to Thomas Meagher as a fast friend and fellow graduate of Clongowes, last seen cheering on the rebels of 1848. Amid all the chaos of the uprising’s collapse, during the state trials, the convictions, the rot in jail, Balfe had disappeared. Of course, if you knew where to look, you could find him in Dublin Castle, where he’d fed the English a steady diet of insider information on his countrymen. Three years after Balfe had started down the road as a traitor, two years after he’d fingered Smith
Up in the hills, in the center of the island, Meagher continued to craft his own small world in the wild, trying to make a life at Lake Sorell. His cottage had a room for his books and a writing desk, a room for his bed, a small kitchen, a porch on which he could sit and watch Speranza bob in the lake and muse on what could have been. He bought another horse and some sheep, and hired an ex-convict, Tom Egan, to help him become a farmer. He fished for black trout and silver eels, hunted duck, snipe and quail. Four hours a day were devoted to reading or writing, but “without purpose,” he confided in one letter, “for the future is an utter blank to me—it’s a dull, dead sky without one faint streak of light.”
He was sustained, still, by family money, though his father had reprimanded him for spending a small fortune on the failed escape attempt of Smith O’Brien. “The adventure in which you risked so much had been excessively improvident and fruitless,” the elder Meagher wrote.
The mountain lake was big, seven miles by eight, and empty; the only person Thomas spied was the occasional shepherd, mumbling to himself along a rock path. Meagher and Egan sailed to an island midlake, where they cleared the land and planted oats, turnips, carrots, onions, cabbage and other crops. Egan was a paroled criminal from County Kildare, transported for theft in the famine years. He was a faithful companion to the Young Tribune, but no match in intellect, wit or conversation. Meagher resumed his long hikes with his dog, alone with his troubled thoughts about an Ireland still bleeding people, still in triage.
Walking along a muddy and pockmarked road one day, Meagher came upon a disabled carriage stuck in a ditch. He removed his coat, rolled up his sleeves and went to work righting the wheels. The owner, Dr. Edward Hall, was with two of his six children and their governess, an eighteen-year-old beauty named Catherine Bennett. They lived in Ross—the “little apology of a town” dismissed earlier by Meagher. Desperate for fresh company, Meagher opened the faucet of his charm. The doctor was impressed when he realized the identity of the well-spoken Samaritan.
“The celebrated Thomas Francis Meagher? The Exile of Erin?”
“Indeed.” He corrected him—it was O’Meagher for now.
Meagher’s cottage at Lake Sorell in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, drawn by fellow exile John Mitchel. Lonely, adrift, feeling that life had passed him by, Meagher spent long hours in solitude in the upper reaches of Tasmania.
COURTESY OF THE TASMANIAN ARCHIVE AND HERITAGE OFFICE
Catherine had large dark eyes, skin without blemish, long black hair tied up in the back. She was somewhat tall. Surely the prettiest girl Meagher had seen in the penal colony, “rounded and elegantly formed,” as one acquaintance described her. Meagher detected Ireland in her voice. She was, in fact, the daughter of a felon from County Cavan in Ulster Province, Bryan Bennett. Convicted of robbing a mail coach on the open road—a highwayman, in British criminal parlance—Bennett had been transported to Tasmania more than twenty years earlier. After serving his time, he was given a small plot of land to start fresh. But the stain, the first thing to be detected in the identity-sniff of the Australian class system, remained on the Bennett clan. Meagher rode with the family back to their home in Ross. He stayed a few hours till his curfew at dark, finding much to like in the governess and drawing a few disapproving glances from the doctor and his wife. Was he flirting with the fine-featured help? Well, yes. And who could blame him? Nearly all his friends would, as it turned out. He was a prince of Waterford. She was the daughter of a man who held up the mail coach. As Meagher bid the Halls good night, he promised to call again. By then, his charm had worn off the doctor.
When last heard from, John Mitchel was somewhere in the watery emptiness of the Southern Hemisphere. It had been almost a year since his ship left Bermuda. If not dead, he could be alive in some distant port, or adrift—his journey proof of his adage about the sun never setting on England’s convict ships. As always, Mitchel spoke for himself, to his diary, in educated prose that was never without bile. He noted in early 1850 that a dispatch from Lord Grey had arrived at Cape Town with Mitchel’s fate: he would join the other Young Irelanders in Van Diemen’s Land. There was no other choice; England was down to a single overseas penal colony. “So it runs,” he wrote. “I am to spend certain years, then, among the gum trees in grim solitude.” When he arrived in Hobart, following more than ten months on the Neptune, he had none of Meagher’s enthusiasm for the beauty of the place. He saw only the cesspool of the British Empire. It was “an island of the unblessed,” he wrote, holding “assortments of the choicest and rarest scoundrelism in all creation.” His mood was influenced by his health, for Mitchel’s asthma had left him weak and unable to sleep a long night.
When the authorities examined this pale, wheezing prisoner, they were concerned enough to let him live with a close friend and fellow political exile, John Martin, in the hamlet of Bothwell. Martin was serving a ten-year sentence for writing a single editorial encouraging Irish home rule. A Presbyterian and a scholar, he had joined the rebels after losing his mother, in 1847, to a disease she contracted while helping famine victims at a workhouse. With Mitchel now joining Martin, there were seven well-known Young Ireland convicts on the island.
After a few weeks at his new home, Mitchel’s health improved. His Tasmanian misanthropy did not. “All the shepherds and stock-keepers, without exception, are convicts—many of them thrice-convicted convicts! There is no peasantry. Very few of them have wives; still fewer family: and the fewer, the better. Their wives are always transported women, too: shop-lifters, prostitutes, pickpockets, and other such sweepings of the London pavements. Yet, after all, what a strange animal is man! The best shepherds in Van Diemen’s Land are London thieves.”
After Martin informed him that their district touched that of Meagher and O’Doherty, Mitchel made plans for a reunion. Mitchel was already referring to his friend as the Hermit on the Lake. They had last seen each other two years earlier, when Mitchel was dragged from a Dublin courthouse in leg irons and Meagher had to be subdued while rushing the prisoner’s dock. Mitchel was disgusted with how the 1848 rebellion had turned out, an object of ridicule and scorn, and a further indictment of the Irish character. A spring of so much promise had fizzled into a summer of disaster, “a poor extemporized abortion of a rising,” Mitchel called it in a diary entry.
Riding more than twenty miles to the highlands that held Lake Sorell in a stony embrace, the convicts reached a plateau, with mountains in the distance, on the lakeshore shy of Meagher’s cottage. It rained, lightly at first, then in bullets, followed by snow flurries. The meeting point was the hut of a shepherd named Cooper which touched each of the districts. When Mitchel and Martin arrived, Cooper told them Meagher was not there—he’d gone looking for them. Soaked and shivering, the two visitors went inside to warm themselves by a fire. Cooper made tea. Near dusk, after four hours of waiting, Mitchel heard the clip-clop of approaching horses and then the boisterous laugh of Thomas Meagher, joined by O’Doherty, the medical student. Meagher leapt from his mount, rushed to the hut and fell into the arms of his fellow exile, the man who had been his political and literary soul mate in Dublin.
Lean, his face burnished by sun and wind, Meagher never looked better, Mitchel recalled—“fresh and vigorous.” As for Mitchel, at age thirty-six he was no longer handsome, but frail, with sunken cheeks, bloodshot eyes and a hesitant step. The years in confinement at sea had further squeezed out whatever optimism and openheartedness he had left in him. Still, any animus that remained over
Cooper cooked lamb chops and damper, a kind of flatbread, over the open fire, and they drank tea late into the night. It was hard to hold the food down for the merriment. “I suspect there was something hollow in that laughter, though at the time it was hearty, vociferous and spontaneous,” said Mitchel. “But even in laughter the heart is sad.” They talked of Ireland, mostly—“the golden hopes of our sad, old country,” as Meagher said. They summoned the memory of friends and lovers, martyrs and poets, those taken by starvation, those taken by fever, those who fled to America, those who stayed and mourned, and of course the plume-capped villains who ruled their homeland. On this evening, the future was not dead. They were too young to rot, or settle into domestic peace on an island prison. The slide into gentleman’s oblivion must be resisted.