The Catalpa Affair by Tarquin O’Flaherty Part 4
Betrayal?

In February, 1876, the Catalpa, in international waters, meets the ‘Ocean Beauty’, a ship bound for Liverpool and out of New Zealand.  Astonishingly it’s captain turns out to be the former captain of the Hueguemont, the last convict ship into Fremantle, the ship which carried O’Brien and his fellow Fenians!  Anthony is invited aboard and receives an unexpected and priceless gift:  invaluable navigation charts of the Fremantle coastline.

What begins to emerge here is a pace of life which we no longer understand.  By the time the Catalpa meets the Ocean Beauty, she has already been away from New Bedford, Massachusetts for nearly a year.  The real purpose of her voyage is still oceans away!  Oh, and she is still required to do a bit of convincing whaling, not just for appearances sake, but to repay some of the refit bills and to establish and maintain contact with the land based part of the rescue effort at Fremantle.

In the 1870’s, Western Australia is desperate to rid itself of it’s image as a place of swamps and fever and penal establishments.  It wants, instead, to attract investment.  Any likely prospect who turns up with a few quid in this god-forsaken spot is made very welcome.

A Mr Collins, a newly arrived potential investor from America is feted by the Governor of Western Australia, Sir William Cleaver Robinson, and is given the Grand Tour.  In reality, Collins is John Breslin, who, together with his fellow Fenian, Tom Desmond, have been in Australia since the previous September and are already being supported by local IRB cells.  Desmond, by working as a wheelwright amongst local ‘ticket of leave’ Irish settlers has arranged, as the rescue takes place, for the telegraph lines to be cut.  Breslin, the rich investor, without arousing suspicion, will organise carriages and horses, swift transport to cover the 50k distance to Rockingham, where Captain Smith Anthony will meet them with a whale boat.  John King, of the Sydney IRB, as ‘George Jones’ will assist the escape.

The Royal Perth Yacht Club’s annual Regatta was held on the 17^th April 1876, with most of the garrison attending.  Early that day, in international waters, Captain George Smith Anthony quietly dropped anchor off Rockingham.  Anthony, we are told, unwilling to put his crew at risk, took the whale boat with six men to the shore himself.  Equally it’s highly possible that he wasn’t prepared to run the risk of betrayal or indeed, another spate of desertion.

Shortly after eight in the morning, six of the eight remaining Fenians absconded from their work gangs.  Of the remaining two, one had been locked up for insubordination, and the other was viewed as an informer.  The six were met by the land rescue group of Breslin, King, and Desmond, piled into the carriages and driven helter-skelter to the Rockingham meeting place.  Ten days before, with a rescue about to happen, Royal Navy ships with customs officers aboard had turned up unexpectedly.  They had soon departed again but the coincidence left the fear that the rescue had been betrayed and that the Navy ships might reappear and catch them redhanded.  Quickly the whale boat was launched and everyone scrambled aboard, the six crew, the six escapees, the three rescuers and Anthony himself at the rudder.

The whale boat, heavily overloaded and dangerously low in the water, made its slow way toward the open sea, and began the long, three mile pull to the Catalpa.  The boat’s absolute maximum carrying capacity is ten men. There are sixteen men on board!

Read ‘He who is not busy being born is busy dying’ – Bob Dylan
by Paddy 0′Cearmada  21 August 2013 in the Election 2013 tab

The Catalpa Affair by Tarquin O’Flaherty. Part 3
A Plot

‘Come all you screw warders and jailers,
Remember Perth Regatta Day,
Take care of the rest of your Fenians,
Or the Yankees will steal them away…’

By the 1860’s, 22,000  Irish soldiers in the British Army are sworn members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. (IRB) Romantically, they called themselves ‘Fenians’, after the ‘Fianna’, an army of legendary warriors in Irish mythology.  Their avowed aim was the overthrow of British Rule in Ireland. Very quickly, on British lips, the term ‘Fenian’ became perjorative, and has remained so.

At the same time, in America, hundreds of thousands, the massed and huddled survivors, not only of the Great Famine, but of a murderous sea crossing, joined the Union Army in droves.  The British had always supported the South, the Confederacy, and the Catholic Irish wanted no part of it.  Instead, they formed ‘Clann na Gael’ in most major US cities, to raise funds to support the IRB in Ireland.

John Boyle O’Reilly, NCO in the Prince of Wales 10^th Dublin Hussars was, in a mass roundup of betrayed IRB members, transported to Australia’s Fremantle Prison, having had his hanging commuted to life in prison.  To be a member of Her Majesty’s Forces, and to plot at the same time Her Majesty’s overthrow was treason of the highest order.  Many non-military men were also transported at the time for the same crime but were eventually pardoned on condition they did not return to Ireland.  The eight who remained ‘at Her Majesty’s Pleasure’ in Fremantle Prison, were all, like O’Reilly, ‘military Fenians’.  Chaps who, having betrayed the regiment, hadn’t had the decency to do the decent thing; to retire into the library and follow the only course still open to a disgraced gentleman.

‘I say, old chap, steady on, here’s a frightful howja-do! ‘
‘Indeed it is, but what can you expect? They’re only damned Fenians, after all…’

Oh dear,where’s Rudyard Kipling when we need him?

The Catalpa, a former whaler, now a three-masted cargo vessel,is bought in Boston, moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts and fitted out once more for whaling.  This move is precautionary.  The refit might attract too much unwelcome attention from prying eyes in a big port like Boston.  Her real purpose is to sail to Fremantle and rescue the remaining Fenians.  British spies might also be less common in New Bedford.  She is to be skippered by retired whale ship’s captain George Smith Anthony, who is a full blown Yankee, a Protestant, some say a Quaker, and has had no previous connection whatever with Irish affairs.  He takes on the captaincy because, as he is recorded as saying, he believes it is the proper thing to do.  He is also to be paid sufficiently well to tempt him out of his retirement.

Catalpa, now at sea and on legitimate whaling business, goes about its business with sufficient gusto to provide the ship with a respectable cargo to offload at the island of Faial in the Azores.  There they deliver 210 barrels of whale oil, and effect repairs to the ship’s navigational equipment.  As was common at the time, and perhaps prompted by rumours of the real purpose of the voyage, most of the crew desert the ship.  A new crew is hired and Anthony sails for Freemantle.

“You don’t have to believe everything you think” was the car bumper sticker that summed up much of the complexity that is the US of A, where Cockburn and poole are continuing their research.  The wrap is a little late this week as we have been in the serene wilderness of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, where we were wonderfully looked after by this crowd.  Quentin is en route back to Australia whilst Cecil continues with the arduous task of understanding Americans.

STOP PRESS:  the writings of renown political commentator Paddy 0′Cearmada are now appearing intermmitantly throughout this Australian Election period.  His pieces can be accessed through the Election 2013 tab.  Each new posting will be linked back to the main blog.  His pieces to date include “Suppository of Wisdom” and “Performance Enhancement”.

Cecil wrote a nice little piece (even if I do say so myself) on mislaying a Credit Card.  Enjoy it here

Quentin followed up with a two part description of “Biking to Devizes” along a canal from Bath, UK.  Read them here and here

The Solitary Wind Turbine spoke of the dilemmas faced with environmental protection, increasing consumption and ‘democratic’ politics.  By Q. Cockburn.

The third part of our Musical Dispatch from the Front (originally of 13 June 2013) uncovers some dirty digging by multinational miners Xstrata and Glencore.  For some of the dirt and much music click here

The Cry of the Dreamer John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-1890) is our poem this week.  (Could this have influenced Henry Lawson as he wrote “Faces in the Street”?)
NOTE O’Reilly features in this weeks blog, a story of Irish Political prisoners of the mid nineteenth century and their rescue by Yankees, in a five part series titled “The Catalpa Affair”, written by Tarquin O’Flaherty

Regards

Cecil and Quentin
Somewhere on the Mississippi

Read Computer says no by Paddy 0′Cearmada  19 August 2013 here

The Catalpa Affair by Tarquin O’Flaherty.  Part 2
Two Newspaper Men

Herein lies a tale of two 19^th 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 29^th April, 1875.

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.   

The Cry of the Dreamer John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-1890)

I am tired of planning and toiling
In the crowded hives of men;
Heart-weary of building and spoiling,
And spoiling and building again.
And I long for the dear old river,
Where I dreamed my youth away;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a toiler dies in a day.

I am sick of the showy seeming
Of a life that is half a lie;
Of the faces lined with scheming
In the throng that hurries by.
From the sleepless thoughts’ endeavor,
I would go where the children play;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a thinker dies in a day.

I can feel no pride, but pity
For the burdens the rich endure;
There is nothing sweet in the city
But the patient lives of the poor.
Oh, the little hands too skillful,
And the child-mind choked with weeds!
The daughter’s heart grown willful,
And the father’s heart that bleeds!

No, no! from the street’s rude bustle,
From the trophies of mart and stage,
I would fly to the woods’ low rustle
And the meadows’ kindly page.
Let me dream as of old by the river,
And be loved for the dream alway;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a toiler dies in a day.

Notes
river: the Boyne, on whose south bank stands Dowth Castle, Drogheda, where O’Reilly was born.

meadow: Boyne Meadow, between the Boyne and Dowth Castle. page: paging, calling.

Continuing our Dispatch from the last two weeks with this the third and final extract.  First published 10 June 2013.

In a show of solidarity with their fellow indigenous constituents, Malarndirri McCarthy the then member of the NT Legislative Assembly seat of Arafura joined by Karl Hampton and Alison Anderson, famously crossed the floor to vote against the government’s decision to divert the McArthur River to allow more mining developments.  Their efforts came to nought.

The McArthur River diversion near Xstrata’s mine in the Northern Territory

From a 2010 ABC News Report: “The NLC’s chief executive, Kim Hill, says the mine’s previous owner, MRM, said it had begun collecting seed stock for revegetation when the diversion was approved in 2006. But he says there is no sign that work has begun.”

Last week the NT Government announced a major expansion at Glencore Xtrata’s McArthur River mine.  The mine will become the biggest lead-zinc mine  IN THE WORLD.

I googled Glencore Xstrata:
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDmXRAOShwU

One of the founders of Glencore was the aptly named Marc Rich, a U.S.A. tax fugitive until pardoned by President Clinton.

The recently merged Glencore and Xstrata have a long complex history of market manipulation, deceitful negotiations, tax evasion and corporate bullying.

Much human suffering and misery have been occasioned by struggles for control of resources that Glencore and/or Xstrata have been and continue to be implicated in.

For example Glencore acquired copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic (!) Republic of Congo. The acquisitions weren’t exactly kosher.
http://www.globalwitness.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Witness%20Q%26A%20on%20Glencore%20in%20the%20Congo.pdf

Breaking the ‘business model’ of Glencore Xstrata in Australia hasn’t been mentioned by campaigning politicians.

In Warlpiri to call someone a walkanji is an ultimate insult.

It means liar.

Glencore Xstrata are walkanji-nyayini.

From Bob Marley’s Babylon System:

Tell the children the truth!!
Don’t worry be Happy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo4OnQpwjkc

Ngaka na-nyara nyanyi
Jungarrayi

by Quentin Cockburn

They take renewables very seriously here in England.  We’d been chased by renewables ever since we got off the plane on that windy aerodrome at Kirkwall.  Wind turbines blanketed the Orkney hills.   At Stromness, we saw a big construction, the European Marine (Wind and Wave) Energy Centre. (There’s gotta be an acronym for this..”Wind And Natural Kinetic Energy Research’ facility… As distinct from Terrestrial Orbital Systems Sequencing Energy Research Facility.)   The site was borne from a Thunderbirds set.  Renewables with a BIG R, room enough for the whole fleet of Thunderbirds, International rescue and a docking point for Supertankers, oil and gas tenders and the illusive Thunderbird Five.

Over the next few days as we drove down from Peterhead, Scotland (more renewables there), we crossed country, from the Highlands to the Lowlands, whilst the Betty Allan, sailed a more direct route across the North Sea to East Anglia where the first sign of humanity (though not humility) was ranked formations of wind turbines towering up from the sea.

We rendezvoused with the boat at Lowestoft whose windiness has been made famous by generations of maritime artists.  My favourite, being “the Victory at Lowestoft”, mizzen braced, topsails closely reefed as it’s tossed before the teeth of a gale.

For the next few days we explored a hinterland rich in wind derived heritage, the windmills of the broads, immortalised in the vigorous striations of Brangwyns  black inked linocut and woodblock windmills.  The medium best suited to capturing the grandeur and raw phsysicality of the windmill, the noble woodblock. Yup! This is windmill country!

Since the mid noughties once familiar land and seascapes have been “over-run” by turbines, which, if you accept the doctrine “all in a good cause” are to fight carbon, to save the planet.

Within Lowestoft stands a solitary wind turbine.   This tower, perfectly white, with its three sculpted blades, symbol of modernity, of the triumph of technology over nature, hovers over the aging roofscape of Lowestoft.  It doesn’t quite dominate, yet is always there.  This single wind turbine.  We asked ourselves why, after bearing witness to ranks of them along the coast and in the sea, why this one solitary example. 

We performed mental calculations; ‘would one alone power this town’?   Would all English towns of medium density require this ‘Centralised Renewable Sustainable Infill’?

No, this solitary wind turbine is a political statement.

Of What? you may ask. It says we can have our cake and eat it too.  That we can keep our lifestyle as we have come to know it with all its consumptive hubris and not worry about environmental damage, about global warming, because we have clean energy.  And do not worry about the next degrading either, because we can come up with another engineering or scientific fix.  This tower speaks of our right to consume more power, more energy as our entitlement, and of our right to delude ourselves.

This tower seems to say “See what we have here? Yes, we’re doing the right thing by the environment!!.”  It’s a Faustian pact of sorts, provided the planet, (the global elephant in the room) doesn’t notice.

Have we told the planet??…or hasn’t it noticed either?