Six Wild Geese from Australia

By Brian Igoe

This book is written as a novel. It is based on the life of John Boyle O'Reilly, not perhaps as well known as it deserves to be, in Ireland at any rate. He was born in 1844 in Drogheda, and died in Hull, Massachusetts USA in 1890, of an accidental overdose of his wife's sleeping pills. He was a writer, poet, journalist, and above all an Irish Nationalist, like so many other young men of his times who were born Catholics in Ireland.
I have stuck to his real life story as closely as I could, but have diverted from it in detail where I felt it was appropriate for dramatic impact, committing sins of omission and commission along the way!. The title is based on history - the Irish have been leaving Ireland to serve in foreign armies for centuries, and these people were always called in Ireland Na Géanna Fiáine which in English means The Wild Geese, the allusion being to the birds' migratory habits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Igoe
• Release date: Jan 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370809394

Brian Igoe

You don’t need to know much about me because I never even considered writing BOOKS until I was in my sixties. I am a retired businessman and have written more business related documents than I care to remember, so the trick for me is to try and avoid writing like that in these books…. Relevant, I suppose, is that I am Irish by birth but left Ireland when I was 35 after ten years working in Waterford. We settled in Zimbabwe and stayed there until I retired, and that gave me loads of material for books which I will try and use sometime. So far I have only written one book on Africa, “The Road to Zimbabwe”, a light hearted look at the country’s history. And there’s also a small book about adventures flying light aircraft in Africa. And now I am starting on ancient Rome, the first book being about Julius Caesar, Marcus Cato, the Conquest of Gaul, (Caesar and Cato, the Road to Empire) and the Civil War. But for most of my books so far I have gone back to my roots and written about Irish history, trying to do so as a lively, living subject rather than a recitation of battles, wars and dates. My book on O’Connell, for example, looks more at his love affair with his lovely wife Mary, for it was a most successful marriage and he never really recovered from her death; and at the part he played in the British Great Reform Bill of 1832, which more than anyone he, an Irish icon, Out of Ireland, my book on Zimbabwe starts with a 13th century Chief fighting slavers and follows a 15th century Portuguese scribe from Lisbon to Harare, going on to travel with the Pioneer Column to Fort Salisbury, and to dine with me and Mugabe and Muzenda. And nearer our own day my Flying book tells of lesser known aspects of World War 2 in which my father was Senior Controller at RAF Biggin Hill, like the story of the break out of the Scharnhorst and Gneisau, or capturing three Focke Wulfs with a searchlight. And now for my latest effort I have gone back to my education (historical and legal, with a major Roman element) and that has involved going back in more ways than one, for the research included a great deal of reading, from Caesar to Plutarch and from Adrian Goldsworthy to Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni.

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Six Wild Geese from Australia

Copyright © 2018

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Contents

INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER 1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND THE FAMINE.

CHAPTER 2. THE BEGINNING. 1844

CHAPTER 3. JOHN BOY O'REILLY.

CHAPTER 4. THE HOUGOUMONT. 1867

CHAPTER 5. AUSTRALIA. 1868.

CHAPTER 6. MY ESCAPE 1869

CHAPTER 7. THE AMBER WHALE – A POEM

CHAPTER 8. THE FENIANS

CHAPTER 9. 1872. MARRIAGE, AND THE GREAT FIRE.

CHAPTER 10. THE CATALPA RESCUE 1873

POSTSCRIPT. 20 YEARS LATER - 1897.

CHAPTER 11. THE END, 1890

APPENDIX. LETTER FROM J. O'REILLY

END NOTES

Introduction.

Readers who are familiar with some of my other work will already know that I write mainly about old Ireland and ancient Rome, and that I usually do so in novel form. What I write is always based on history, real history, but I try to write my stories as novels. With one exception (so far!). That exception is my only magnum opus, 'The Story of Ireland'. That approach seems to work.

This book tells the story of the Escape of six Irishmen from the notorious Convict Establishment in Fremantle, Western Australia in 1873. The escape was masterminded by one John Boyle O'Reilly and my book is written as a novel based on his life, perhaps not as well known as it deserves to be, in Ireland at any rate. He was born in 1844 in Drogheda, County Louth in Ireland, and died in Hull, Massachusetts USA in 1890. He was a writer, poet, journalist, and above all an Irish Nationalist, like so many other young men of his times who were born Catholics in Ireland.

I have stuck to his real life story as closely as I could, but have diverted from it in detail where I felt it was appropriate for dramatic impact, committing sins of omission and commission along the way. The title is based on history – the Irish have been leaving Ireland to serve in foreign armies for centuries, and these people were always called in Ireland Na Géanna Fiáine which in English means The Wild Geese, the allusion being to those birds' migratory habits.

I have enjoyed writing the book, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

And the hypocorism, 'John Boy', definitely a Sin of Commission, is my own invention!

Chapter 1. Historical Background and The Famine.

If you know the history of Ireland around the time of the Great Famine, you may wish to skip this chapter – which is unashamedly didactic! It is mostly extracted from my booklet The Great Famine. (See Endnote 2.)

It is sometimes forgotten that the conquest of Ireland from 1166 onwards by the Normans (Strongbow and all that, see Endnote 1) was just one part of the Norman Conquest. England, Scotland and Wales were also subjugated by the Normans. By 1844 most Land in Ireland was largely held by landlords, landlords who were still mostly of Norman descent, and farmed by tenants. Less known perhaps is that this was the case in Wales and Scotland and England too. The history of conquest and plantations made this inevitable.

In Ireland, the great landlords, like Castlereagh and Palmerston, were generally an enlightened class. They improved their lands. They built decent houses for their tenants and workers. They constructed lime kilns for mortar and crops. They built roads. They farmed scientifically. Castlereagh, let me say in passing, has been much misunderstood, largely because of Percy Bysshe Shelley who wrote ‘I met murder on the way ‒ He had a face like Castlereagh’, which is about all most people seem to know of him. Those that have heard of him. The poem was in fact written in the heat of the reaction to the so-called 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in England, but that is another story. Castlereagh in my view was a great European who arguably constructed 100 years of peace. He hated violence, death and war with every fibre of his being. And in Ireland he was a very good landlord.

They made good profits, the better landlords. But they were a rarity in the countryside. There was a huge class of poorer landlords, many of them descendants of the planters or grantees of the previous centuries, often ignorant and uneducated and living little better than their tenants. And, of course, there were the ‘Bad Landlords’, educated and wealthy but venal and stupid and often absent.

In Ireland, unlike the rest of the British Isles as they were then, the tenants’ leasehold properties themselves had become subdivided and subdivided again. This was because one of the Penal laws had made it compulsory for Catholics to leave everything to all their sons equally. In Ireland as in most communities in Europe at the time and in many worldwide today, families were large. Even the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel had seven children. But among the poor in Ireland, large families were common because children provided for their parents when they grew up, so the more you had the more secure you would hopefully be. And of course with poor sanitation and negligible medical care the rate of infant mortality was high, so you had to provide for that probability as well. So it was that a 30 acre farm shrank to as little as one acre almost overnight. Most of these now shrinking farms were wholly uneconomic.

There were over eight million people in Ireland in 1845, twice the present population.

The west of Ireland was always the poorest region, with the poorest soil.

In a word, 5.2 million people in agriculture was too many people, trying to eke a living out of too little land, and with too few resources. And that was before the Blight.

The Blight and its impact.

Potato blight (Phytophthora infestans) is a serious disease of the potato plant – it spreads rapidly, is not easily detected in its early stages, and renders the potato inedible. The origin of Phytophthora infestans has been traced to a valley in the highlands of central Mexico. The first recorded instances of the disease elsewhere were in the United States, in Philadelphia and New York City, in early 1843. Winds then spread the spores, and in 1845 it was found from Illinois to Nova Scotia, and from Virginia to Ontario. The fungus crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1845 with a shipment of seed potatoes destined for Belgian farmers. It had been bought, ironically, in an attempt to improve their own stock, for the potato originated in America.

In less than nine months it had arrived in the west of Ireland, and had totally ruined the entire European potato crop on the way. But in Europe, potatoes were still a novelty. In Ireland, much of the population actually subsisted on potatoes, especially in the far west where little else would grow ‒ and nothing else would feed a family on an acre. So with no potatoes, many starved.

This didn’t happen immediately, of course. The outbreaks were at first patchy, and for the many farmers who grew grains and potatoes their impact was masked by their grain receipts. By the middle of 1846 there were still contradictory reports coming in from all over the country. But then there were three more crop failures, in each of the succeeding three years. The resultant famine was very real.

Evictions. Worst of all, perhaps, were the evictions of those who could no longer pay their rent, the mindless, useless, evil evictions by landlords often living in England who seemed to think less of their Irish tenants than they did of their dogs. Lord Brougham, Free Market supporter, in the British House of Lords in March 1846 commented that ‘undoubtedly it was the landlord's right to do as he pleased.....the tenants must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they had no power to oppose or resist.....property would be valueless and capital would no longer be invested....if it were not acknowledged that it was the landlord's undoubted, indefeasible and most sacred right to deal with his property as he list’.

Even more to be decried were evictions made on simple economic grounds, to turn the land from something fast becoming unprofitable to something profitable. One such eviction is described in the Illustrated London News of December 16th 1848:

‘The eviction described below took place at Baltinglass, County Galway. The homes of 300 people, who had their rent money available, and who were not in arrears, were demolished in order to turn the land over to grazing. The people slept in the ruins that night. Next day, they were driven out. Neighbours were forbidden, on pain of their own eviction, to take them in. They dug 'scalps' - holes in the ground, covered with sticks and turves, or burrowed into ditches, but were driven even from these. The landlord's name was Gerrard. There were probably an average of 5 people in each family. That makes 345,000 people. Tens of thousands more families ‘voluntarily’ left their homes, either through assisted emigration or by being promised a place in a workhouse. (Based on ‘The Great Hunger’ by Cecil Woodham-Smith and Cormac Ó Gráda’s ‘The Great Irish Famine (New Studies in Economic and Social History.)

It’s amazing, but we still sing about the Famine in Ireland, although I wonder how many people who cheerfully sing The Fields of Athenry to encourage their team at a football match realise what they are singing about? It’s about a man named Michael from near Athenry in County Galway who has been sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay, Australia, for stealing food for his starving family. It goes:

By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling

'Michael, they have taken you away,

For you stole Trevelyan's corn,

So the young might see the morn.

Now a prison ship lies waiting