The ’Forty-Eight Men in Exile
ABEL JANZOON TASMAN, the Dutch navigator, discovered the island on December 1st, 1642, but believed it to be part of the mainland of Australia and it was not until more than a hundred and fifty years later that Dr. Bass discovered the dividing strait which bears his name.
A very large island it is, with an area of 26,000 square miles, and with coasts that are mostly bold, rocky and inhospitable. But there are several accessible harbours, fine rivers like the Derwent, and numerous lakes, including the Great Lake in the central plain. The soil is fertile and the climate one of the most salubrious in the world.
A man could be happy there in the middle of the last century—if he had gone as a colonist. Agriculture or stock-raising would give him unlimited opportunities. If he were a prospector, there was an abundance of minerals, and if he were lucky he might even strike gold.
But to the group of Irishmen who went there as “felons” after the ’Forty-Eight Rising neither the beauties of the scenery, the prospect of settling down and making a comfortable living, nor the goodwill of many of the inhabitants could render it anything but a place of enforced exile. Van Diemen’s Land for them was a gigantic prison, and they were never allowed to forget it. John Mitchel, looking at the swift-flowing Derwent, the mighty forests, and the blue mountains, did not doubt their magnificence, but his thoughts were forever turning back to Ireland and “the moonlight shining through the trees at Dromalane.”
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The British authorities, of course, took good care that they would not all reside in the same place. Mitchel, the first to be sentenced, was the last to arrive, for his voyage was by way of Spike Island, Bermuda and the Cape of Good Hope; nearly two years—one of which was spent in the convict hulks at Bermuda—elapsed, in fact, before he reached Van Diemen’s Land. There to his great joy, he was allowed to share a cottage at Bothwell with his friend and brother-in-law to be, John Martin. In an entry in his Jail Journal, dated April 12, 1850, Mitchel records the meeting of the two comrades:
“Sitting on the green grass by the banks of a clear, brawling stream of fresh water. Trees waving overhead, the sunshine streaming through their branches, making a tremulous network of light and shade on the ground. It is Bothwell, forty-six miles from Hobart Town from the Neptune and the sea, and high among the central mountains of Van Diemen’s Land. Opposite sits John Martin, sometime of Loughorne, smoking placidly, and gazing curiously at me with his mild eyes.”
Martin had arrived in company with Kevin Izod O’Doherty, who had christened his Presbyterian friend “John Knox”—a name that stuck. O’Doherty himself, as readers of the Jail Journal will remember, became “Saint Kevin”. Nicknames were popular in Van Diemen’s Land. To “St. Kevin” the authorities assigned the district of Oatlands and there he was permitted to continue his medical studies under a Dr. Hall. He was, to borrow Mitchel’s description of him, “a fine, erect, noble-looking young man”. If, occasionally, he grew moody, there was a reason for it. At home there was a girl, Mary Eva Kelly—“Eva” of the Nation—to whom he was betrothed, and who, after he had been sentenced to ten years’ transportation had said: “Never mind, Kevin: I’ll wait.” But waiting can be a wearisome business when lovers are separated by thousands of miles.
“St. Kevin”, Mitchel wrote in his Journal, “is sometimes gloomy and desponding, and the mood is on him now for a few minutes. There dwells in Ireland—I should have known it well, though he had never told me—a dark-eyed lady, a fair and gentle lady, with hair like the blackest midnight; and in the tangle of those silken tresses she has bound my poor friend’s soul; round the solid hemisphere it has held him and he drags a lengthening chain.”
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Smith O’Brien, Meagher, MacManus and Patrick O’Donohue arrived together in November, ’49, after a four months’ voyage in the incongruously-named steamship, the Swift. In spite of the fact that they were guarded carefully they had no reason to complain of their treatment during the long journey, for, as one of the four wrote afterwards, the ship’s officers were “fine, generous, gallant fellows,” who did all they could for their prisoners. MacManus had a backgammon box which was frequently pressed into service and there was a small library on board which helped to while away the tedious hours at sea. O’Donohue kept a diary in which he recorded occasions when the men read to one another passages from Scripture or from their favourite classics and other occasions when, in a care-free mood, they danced “Irish jigs and Scotch reels”.
Once in the penal settlement the friends were separated and O’Brien, who refused to accept a “ticket-of-leave,” was removed to Maria Island, off the Tasmanian coast. The Governor of Van Diemen’s Land at the time was a Sir William Denison, an over-bearing and tyrannical official, who went out of his way to make things harder for the Irish exiles and whose arbitrary actions were more than once declared illegal by the Supreme Court. He appeared to cherish a particular animus against the aristocratic and sensitive-minded O’Brien.
“Instant deportation,” wrote O’Brien, “was to be the penalty awarded to anyone who should address a word to me. An amiable Catholic clergyman inhabits the adjoining cottage, and though his garden is only separated by a small fence, he is not allowed to interchange a syllable with me. I was strictly limited to an assigned ration and prohibited from purchasing any articles necessary to my comfort.” So great were the hardships he had to endure that in spite of an illness which had wrecked his physique he made a desperate but unsuccessful attempt to escape in a small boat. In the end he was persuaded by his friends to accept ticket-of-leave conditions and he was transferred, sadly impaired in health, to the district of New Norfolk.
Two others of the exiles who became victims of Denison’s ill-will were O’Donoghue and O’Doherty. O’Donohue, a man whose courage and honesty were never in question, was determined to take no favours from anybody, either friends or officials. His place of residence was Hobart town, where he tried to eke out a meagre living by his pen and where he very imprudently, founded a weekly paper called The Irish Exile. The local Bishop offered him the hospitality of his house, but O’Donohue, whilst thanking him, declared that “he could not accept charity.” For a minor breach of the police regulations he was sentenced to labour in a road-gang with the lowest type of criminals.
O’Doherty, for the offence of having made a call on O’Brien at New Norfolk, was sentenced to three months’ hard labour on the bleak and barren Tasman’s Peninsula. “You will,” he said in a smuggled letter to Meagher, “have heard that I am in the ‘royal greys’ and wear the ‘commissary helmet.’ But all this is a trifle; I am treated as a common convict, obliged to sleep with every species of scoundrel, and forced to work in a gang from six in the morning till six in the evening—being all the while next to starved, as I find it wholly impossible to touch their abominable ‘skilly’, which is the breakfast and supper offered me… I bear it all with what patience there is in my nature, thanks to my good friend Thomas à Kempis.”
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Meagher, probably the most buoyant spirit of them all, was also the luckiest. To him was assigned the district of Campbelltown, and there he took up his abode “in a little apology of a town” as he called it, named Ross. He has left a description of his landlady and her husband in a passage shot through with characteristic humour:
“My landlady is a devout Wesleyan, an amiable female of stupendous proportions and proportionate loquacity. Her husband is a Wesleyan, too, a shoemaker by trade and a spectre in appearance; so much so, indeed, that the wife may be styled, with the strictest geometrical propriety, his ‘better half and three-quarters.’ Upon coming to terms with them an agreeable dialogue took place:
‘Sir,’ said Mrs. Anderson, sticking a pin into the sleeve of her gown and spreading her apron before her.
‘Well, ma’am,’ said I.
‘Why, sir,’ says she. ‘You see how it is, me and my husband be Wesleyans and we don’t like a-cooking on Sundays, and so if it don’t matter to you, sir, we’d a soon not dress you any meat on that day, for we’re commanded to rest and do no work upon the Sabbath.’
‘As to that,’ I replied, ‘I don’t much mind having a cold dinner upon Sundays; but then, there are the potatoes! Potatoes, you know, Mrs. Anderson, are very insipid when cold.’
This was a difficulty of great magnitude. Mrs. Anderson paused and swelled up immensely. She cast an inquiring glance upon her husband as if to implore him for a text, a note or a comment to help her out of a difficulty, in which, like a sudden deluge, the conflicting ideas of a boiled potato and the Day of Rest had involved her.
Mr. Anderson took off his spectacles, held them with crossed hands reverently before him, threw back his head, threw up his eyes, and fixing them upon a remarkable constellation of flies close to a bacon hook above him, seemed to inquire from it, in the absence of the stars, a solution of the difficulty.
A moment’s consultation sufficed. A new light descended upon Mr. Anderson and, yielding to the inspiration of the moment, he pronounced it to be his opinion that a boiled potato would not break the Sabbath, and ‘in that, or any other way, he’d be happy to serve the gentleman.’ ”
Meagher, it is evident, could make himself at home even in a convict settlement. He rode, hunted, boated, fished and swam; and in one of his rambles, when he met Catharine Bennett, daughter of a settler who was to become a hospitable host to the exiles, romance came his way. Catharine was beautiful; Meagher was gay, dashing and handsome. A whirlwind courtship followed and in February 1851, the young couple were wedded by Dr. Willson, first Catholic Bishop of Hobart.
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In spite of surveillance and police regulations the ’Forty-eight men managed to meet regularly, usually on Mondays. From their scattered residences they would ride distances varying from twenty to twenty-five miles through the bush, converging on a creek connecting Lake Crescent and Lake Sorell. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1851, Mitchel writes:
“You have heard, I am sure, of our way of life here… Yet here’s one tableau for you. Imagine Martin and me, after a glorious ride of twenty miles through noble old woods, lying on the bank of a fine lake, deep in the central mountains. It is noon-day, and so calm, the water is hardly rippling on the pebbles; and the wooded banks and promontories, and the endless wilderness of bush stretching away through the smoky district to the blue peaks of the north-west, are all sleeping in the sun, bathed and beaming in an atmosphere of gold and purple.
A boat nears us slowly, by help of both sail and oars; a sunburnt man in a sailor’s jacket stands in the stern-sheets, holding the tiller; by his side, on crimson cushions, sits a fair and graceful girl. The sunburnt fellow is O’Meagher, and that lady, so fair and graceful, is, who do you think? Why, Mrs. O’Meagher! Martin and I spring into the boat, put the boat’s head about, set the sail—for a breeze has sprung up—and skim along under a tricolour flag (O’Meagher is great on flags), till we open upon a quiet bay, at the head of which, nestling under the shelter of untamable forest, stands a pretty cottage, with a verandah, and a gum-tree jetty stretching into the water. We step ashore, and are welcomed into our friend’s house by his newly-wedded wife. Why, it is almost like living.”
O’Doherty—“that lazy Tribune,” as Meagher called him—sometimes shirked the long ride, and Meagher threatened dire penalties. “If St. Kevin does not report himself to us after a couple more meetings, Martin and I have determined,” he wrote to his friend Father Dunne, “to issue a proclamation for his apprehension and offer a considerable reward to any sheep dog that will hunt him down.”
Rumours of the meetings spread and not only Irish well-wishers, but descendants of English settlers, were glad to be invited to take part in the jollifications, which always included the singing of songs like The Shan Van Vocht or The Wearing of the Green. Officialdom must have known what was happening but for the most part it was content to turn a blind eye on gatherings which could hardly be called “seditious.” Yet, occasionally, there was trouble and MacManus, when he “broke bounds” by riding from Launceston to visit O’Brien at New Norfolk, was informed against, arrested, and sent to Tasman’s Peninsula for three months by the Governor. Whilst he was in his cell awaiting the prison boat a local band played Irish airs outside his cell.
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On the whole, life in Van Diemen’s land, save for those who incurred Sir William Denison’s wrath, was bearable enough and the exiles were, as Mitchel put it, “as nearly content as it was possible for banished men to be.” Priests like Fathers Dunne and Hogan, hospitable Irish families like the Connells, the Mannings, the Murphys and the Cassidys, and colonists of English blood, glad to have in their midst men of culture and distinction, made their lot far less painful than it might have been. Still, for all the kindness and hospitality they received, and for all the scenic and climatic delights with which they were surrounded, they pined for liberty and home. Meagher might laugh and joke and sing The Bells of Shandon, to the delight of the company, in his rich baritone; MacManus might declare, as he sat around the fireside in Bryan Bennett’s home with Meagher and his bride, that in altered circumstances, he might find life there happy enough; Martin might write, in a farewell note to his friend, Mrs. Connell, of his joy in finding in a forest in the Antipodes, “the warm Irish feelings and the grace and intelligence natural to the Irish character”; but to one and all, Van Diemen’s Land still remained a convict settlement.
In the end, none of them remained there for the full term of their sentences. Meagher, daring and enterprising as always, having surrendered his parole, gave the armed police a chance to seize him, plunged into the bush and found a vessel that bore him to America and freedom. O’Donohue, who had suffered more than any of the others, made an equally daring escape in 1852 and stowed away on the Yarra Yarra, bound for San Francisco; MacManus, after an ordeal, which writing to Gavan Duffy, he described as “little short of what you can imagine in hell’s flames,” outwitted the vigilance of the authorities and landed on American soil; O’Brien, Martin and O’Doherty received a “pardon” in 1854. Of Mitchel’s rescue by P. J. Smyth—that romantic and Byronic figure—it is unnecessary to speak, for it has been told in imperishable prose in the Jail Journal. The light was fading over the seas on July 20, 1854, when Mitchel went down to his cabin and wrote:
“This evening we are fast shutting down the coast of Van Diemen’s Land below the red horizon and about to stretch across the stormy Bass’s Straits. The last of my island prison visible to me is a broken line of blue peaks over the Bay of Fires. Adieu, then, beauteous island, island of fragrant forests, bright rivers, and fair women. Behind those far blue peaks, in many a green valley known to me, dwell some of the best and warmest-hearted of all God’s creatures; and the cheerful talk of their genial firesides will blend forever in my memory with the eloquent song of the dashing Derwent and deep-eddying Shannon.” And he added: “Whether I was ever truly in Australia at all, or whether in the body or out of the body—I cannot tell: but I have had bad dreams.”