At Fenton Forest a strange event occurred, indicative of the sort of society O’Brien lived in. A man in animal skins presented himself at the Fenton house and explained that he was an absconded convict and had lived 8 miles from them in the bush for the past seven years. The man was Philip Markham, a convict whose escape had imposed a form of solitary confinement on him: ‘as long as he was engaged in making improvements his life was tolerable but as soon as he ceased to find employment for himself he became haunted with visions.’
Catherine Meagher was entering her last trimester of pregnancy. Nonetheless, with a young man’s heedlessness, Meagher was bent on escape, and believed Kate would come to term and bring the child to join him after his escape. In this he had her enthusiastic blessing. The Connells of the Sugarloaf had undertaken to provide horses and escorts and to signal readiness by a bonfire.
The signal fire was lit a few days before Christmas. All the gentlemen involved in easing Meagher’s escape had finished their arrangements. Rather than leave the matter entirely to a column of smoke, Connell sent his son to tell Meagher as well. Catherine said goodbye to her husband and went down the mountain to her parents and sisters in New Norfolk, perhaps glad to leave solitude and marital bemusement at the lake. She had faith that soon she would be following Meagher into a larger world. After Christmas, a number of friends from the locality of Ross rode up the hills to join Tom Meagher in his mountain cottage. There, on 3 January 1852, he composed a note to the local police magistrate, who happened to be the same Mr Mason who had been overridden by Denison in the matters of O’Donohoe, O’Doherty and MacManus. The letter gave the magistrate twenty-four hours’ notice that Meagher was withdrawing his parole, and unless apprehended in that time, he would feel free to go his way.
Getting Meagher’s letter by messenger, Mason ordered two officers to Lake Sorell to make the arrest. They rode up the Dog’s Head Peninsula and, according to them, found Meagher’s house empty except for his servant. What happened then is subject to contradictory report. Meagher was on horseback in the thick bush around the promontory and said that he rode up within yards of the officers at the hut, challenged them to arrest him and announced that he intended if possible to escape. The officers made no move.
They would later claim, however, that Meagher did not present himself, nor could he be found around his house. Witnesses support Meagher. An unnamed neighbour and friend of Meagher’s said that he was ‘on a visit to Mr Meagher,’ a formula to avoid accusation of being actively involved, and in the house awaited the arrival of the constables on the afternoon of 3 January. Meagher in the meantime strolled and chatted with his companions in the bush around the house. At 8.00 p.m. a constable called Durieu and one other policeman arrived to take Meagher into custody. ‘Later they went to the stables to attend their horses. While there, Meagher cantered into the yard, an open cleared space ten yards from the stable, and sent one of his servants to tell Durieu he was waiting to speak with him. I myself heard the servant deliver the message.’ Durieu, in this account, moved from the stable, returned to the house, and again visited the stables. ‘All this while Meagher patiently awaited an answer to his message … the constable scrupulously remained in the stable.’ Given the police unwillingness to recognise his presence, Meagher ‘went off amidst the cheers of his party in the full conviction that he had fully discharged every obligation.’
Five years later in New York, another eye-witness told his version in defence of Meagher—how Meagher went up to the police in the company of the writer, a Tipperary man, and three other riders including Keane, who had once been mistakenly arrested in New Norfolk in place of Meagher. ‘Seeing the police coming towards him from the lake, Meagher cried, “I am Meagher. No longer fettered by my parole, I am about to escape if I can—and your duty is to take me into custody if you can, etc.” ’ When there was no response, says this witness, Meagher felt free to go. There would be endless argument about whether he should have.
Meagher rode round the lake northwards, stopping to shave off his moustache at the hut of a man named Old Job Sims. At that same time, in Bothwell, Mitchel had spent a day hunting kangaroos with his sons—before getting in his hay ‘with the aid of two or three horrible convict cutthroats, all from Ireland—and all, by their own account, transported for seizing arms.’ This was a Ribbon crime, and Mitchel confessed only that these chatty, sociable workers, who dossed in his barn at night on possum-skin rugs, ‘were not half so bad as the Queen of England’s Cabinet Councillors.’ Johnny Mitchel had killed a diamond snake, snakes being Jenny’s one phobia. In the ferocious heat the boys bathed daily in the river, but Jenny hesitated for fear of serpents, who were said to be able to swim.
Meagher’s escape, when the Mitchels and John Martin heard about it a few days later, seemed of a questionable nature to them. Jenny wrote, ‘We do not like the way the thing was done.’ She related to Miss Thompson the story of one constable who had refused Mason’s order to go to arrest Meagher, had been fined £10 and dismissed, and so had simply gone to the Port Phillip diggings. ‘I wish I were a man,’ said Jenny, ‘to go and dig.’
John Martin mentioned ‘serious embarrassments’ which had oppressed Meagher. Martin had earlier reported to O’Doherty that Dr and Mrs Hall objected to Meagher’s treatment of Catherine. ‘The best consideration is that his wife is quite on his side. But I am vexed beyond expression at the vile entanglements he gets himself into—he has hardly any common sense in some respects.’ We can only speculate whether some of these ‘vile entanglements’ meant that Meagher was seeking out women in Ross and Campbell Town. Martin also reported, ‘We knew that for several weeks he had been suffering from serious embarrassments and we had vague fears of some horrid crisis or other.’ The seemingly frail Martin was worried enough after the escape to ride up to Cooper’s hut, the site of that first Australian reunion of Meagher, Mitchel, Martin, and O’Doherty. Cooper related how he had seen a large party of horsemen, Meagher in their midst, pass through by moonlight. ‘The sad truth is that … though O’Meagher … sent a message by his servant to Durieu to the effect that he wanted that officer and was waiting for him, and that, after waiting 8 or 10 minutes (near the tree where “Ross” is generally chained), he called out, “Good bye” so loud as to be heard by Keane who was outside the house, yet O’Meagher was not actually in the presence of Durieu.’ Had Meagher ‘staid in his own house awaiting the constables, and received them there, and been arrested there, and been rescued either there or down near the tier … and then dashed away to the sea-coast … what a consolation at least for him and us there would be in the welcome of the Yankees and the baffled spite of the English.’ Martin’s impression of two of Meagher’s abettors was that ‘both regard the transaction much as Mitchel and myself’
On 19 January, two weeks after the escape, Mitchel asked Smith O’Brien whether they should all publish an appeal to Meagher, asking him to return. ‘This seems romantic and absurd: yet I do believe if your judgement on the whole matter coincides with ours, and he be made aware of that, he will come.’ O’Brien, though not entirely easy, did not think such a step necessary.
If he recaptured Meagher, Sir William Denison said, ‘I will send him to Port Arthur and make him “bottom sawyer” under a very good “top one.” ’ Unaware of the debate, Meagher was sheltered in houses around Westbury, a town north-west of Lake Sorell. Here solid English and Scottish citizens willingly offered him rest, and he responded with his disarming charm. But Westbury was also useful to him as a region thick with Irish-speaking settlers. There was no shortage of volunteers to ride with him down to the estuary of the Tamar River, where he was put in the care of the Barrett brothers, who fished Bass Strait in a boat of their own construction. They were to take him to a rendezvous with a ship, the same Elizabeth Thompson MacManus had escaped on, in Bass Strait.
Meagher’s later published account of his escape was graphic and, some say, exaggerated, and no one would be surprised if Meagher’s taste for high-
coloured narrative caused him to gild events. The Barretts beached after four hours in a quiet cove on Waterhouse Island, 40 miles or more along the coast, ate smoked herring, ship’s-biscuit and cheese, and drank sherry. They found the figurehead of a wrecked ship and encountered a Newfoundland terrier, probably a survivor. ‘Made a fire on beach of pieces of the wreck, made a tent of oars, mast and sail and lay on an opossum skin rug for mattress and another above for blankets.’ The wild dog rested near their fire.
The Barretts had brought provisions for two days, and on the morning of the third day, with no sail in sight, they needed to return to the mainland. So that they would not be suspected of cowardice or foul play, Meagher wrote a note ‘for the gentleman who had engaged the boat and under whose patronage the expedition had set out.’ (This was the same good-hearted merchant, George Deas, who had helped MacManus.) For writing materials, he knocked the bottom out of a tin pannikin, wrenched off the handle and, flattening out the remaining metal, blackened it over the smoke of the fire. Then he wrote his letter on it with the point of a penknife. ‘In three quarters of an hour I was alone on that morose island.’
Meagher spent ten days there, waiting for his overdue ship. He saw a number of passing vessels, lit signal fires and waved his coat. One misty morning an eight-oared boat arrived from the direction of the mainland. ‘Thought it was all up—the police must have seen the fire.’ The oarsmen were civilians though. He informed them for cover’s sake that he was there prospecting for gold. They winked at one another, pitched a large tent, lit a huge fire. Over the flames they swung an immense black pot into which they poured crabs and shellfish they found along the beach, some mutton, onions and potatoes. They were escaped convicts from Hobart, on their way to the gold rush in Port Phillip. ‘I had the best and the most of everything going, the snuggest corner of the tent—the rarest morsels of the daily stew—the choicest pipe full of tobacco—the last drop of Holland’s in the locker.’
After some thought, Meagher confided his problem to the escapees. ‘The third morning after the arrival of the pirates I was as usual on the lookout when through the blinding mist I spied a sail … The ship was standing in close to the island and shortening sail. The stars of the Australian League were gleaming at the mizzen peak.’ From the deck a signal gun was fired, then a second gun and a third. His friends the gold-seekers manned the boat and pulled him out through a furious sea. ‘I leapt … from the stern sheets of the boat and was on the quarterdeck a second after. I had promised the gallant fellows who had brought me from the island to have their stores replenished but there was no time for it. The wind was fierce, the sea too rough, the ship too near the breakers … I emptied my pocket of all the money in it and handing it down to the leader of the gang, bade them farewell forever.’
At her father’s farm, Stonefield near New Norfolk, under the care of her parents, Catherine ‘O’Meagher’ wrote to a friend, ‘I got … just a few pencilled notes the moment before he stepped into the boat which was waiting for him … I have great hopes that he is far on the sea before this … our days of separation, I earnestly hope, will not be long.’ The Elizabeth Thompson was carrying fine wool to England, which meant that Meagher would need at some stage to transfer to a ship of different destination. Captain Betts, ‘small, chubby, round-faced, cozy, active, convivial, humorous,’ commanded a very mixed crew. Many competent sailors had deserted ships and headed for the goldfields, and men who were eccentrically immune to that lure, or who could not afford to remain in Australia, made up the crew. They were six weeks crossing the Pacific, rounding the Horn and reaching Pernambuco in Brazil. Meagher landed in Recife without taking from it any Mitchel-like lessons on slavery, and booked aboard the American ship Acorn for New York.
In February, Catherine was delivered of her child at New Norfolk—a boy whom she named, according to Meagher’s instructions, Henry Emmet Fitzgerald Meagher, baptising him thus by the name Henry into the Church about whose senior clergy her husband had doubts, and by the names Emmet and Fitzgerald into the Irish struggle.
15
LOCKED WITHIN THE PYRAMID
Here’s the clime that suits your bosoms
Here awhile you may repose
Till you rise to free old Erin
From her tyrants and her woes.
Irish American, welcoming Meagher,
30 October 1853
Making for New York aboard the ship Acorn, Thomas Francis Meagher was approaching a land which was not indifferent to his fate. In 1851, the US Senate had heard a motion read by Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi which called on England to free O’Brien, Meagher and their immediate associates, and offered the prisoners ‘sanctuary on American shores.’ Even President Millard Fillmore, a Whig, suspicious of the Irish, who acceded to the presidency after the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850, had asked his Secretary of State Daniel Webster to exert pressure for Young Ireland’s release. He had stated too that America would offer the Irish exiles ‘safe asylum and full protection.’ The day after Christmas 1851, while Meagher was still on the shores of Lake Sorell, Webster advised US Ambassador Lawrence in London that he should make discreet representations on the matter with the British government, always taking account of ‘the many natives of Ireland now in this country, and the influence, more or less, which they exercise over the policy of the Government.’
A new surge of diplomatic activity had begun in February 1852, while Meagher was at sea, when Lord John Russell’s ministry, the government under which the Young Irelanders had been sentenced, fell from power. On 7 February, Senator James Shields, Irish-born Democrat, detailed in the Senate the sufferings the State prisoners had endured, and Senator William H. Seward of New York declared on the same floor that ‘Ireland was guilty of one crime … and that was the crime of proximity to England.’
On 15 May, the Pilot in Boston announced that Thomas Francis Meagher had escaped from Van Diemen’s Land and was expected on the Atlantic coastline. ‘In him,’ said the Pilot, ‘the Irish in America will find a chief to unite and guide them.’ Knowing nothing of his being awaited, Meagher sailed up the long approaches into New York and landed at the depot at Castle Garden, in the Hudson off Lower Manhattan, on 27 May, like any other foreign arrival. Looking up a city directory in one of the emigrant aid offices, he sought mention of his friends from Young Ireland—lawyer Michael Doheny with whom he had once led masses of men up Slievenamon; journalist and Clongowes schoolmate Pat Smyth, who had escaped from Galway on the same ship as John Blake Dillon; and Dillon himself, his companion in the search for O’Brien in 1848. Dillon was listed as living in Houston Street, but walking with anonymous delight uptown, Meagher discovered his friend had moved to Brooklyn. And so he booked a room at the United States Hotel, and was not noticed until he set out next morning for the law firm of Dillon & O’Gorman at 39 William Street, the latter partner being Richard O’Gorman who had led the rebels in Limerick.
In the William Street law offices, placed between the trade of Fulton Street and the capital of Wall Street, ‘A distinguished looking stranger, with a bronzed and ruddy countenance, having all the appearance, in his dress and movements, of a US Naval officer, presented himself in the corridor and was heard enquiring for his friends.’ There was an immediate eruption of enthusiasm. By nine o’clock that evening, the entire Irish population of New York were in the know, and some companies of the 69th Regiment, New York State Militia, mustered and marched to Richard O’Gorman’s house in Lower Manhattan, where Meagher was dining. Accompanied by the Brooklyn Cornet Band, the 69th serenaded the escaper, as a crowd of 7,000 gathered to cheer him. When invited to step out and speak, he said that he could not do justice to his feelings, for he was exhausted by the long journey. ‘He could not account for their enthusiasm,’ he was reported as saying in the New York Herald, ‘as he had been in no battles in Ireland … he was grateful beyond expression for the honour of their welcome, while he confessed, his heart was filled with sorrow to think that he was there alone to
receive it. O’Brien, and Mitchel, and O’Doherty, were still in fetters.’ The Irish American reported that an Englishman who lived nearby threw up his window and played ‘God Save the Queen’ ‘on, we suppose, a very cheap piano.’ To escape the frenzy, Meagher stayed that night in Dillon’s house in Dean Street, Brooklyn.
As days passed, interest grew. The New York Times, usually cautious about Anglo-American relationships, declared significantly that Meagher’s arrival ‘has created universal satisfaction here.’ The Democratic New York Herald spoke of his youth, his military appearance, his slight stoutness of build, his good looks, ‘always a favorite with the ladies.’ According to the Herald, he was a better orator than Kossuth, the stellar Hungarian patriot who was visiting the United States seeking recognition for an independent Hungary! The paper even went so far as to give instructions on how to pronounce his name, and said that the normal American pronunciation, Meagre, was wrong; Mah-er was correct.
It was clear at once to Meagher, liberated again to enthusiasm, that the Irish in America, despite their uncertain status, had achieved exceptional leverage. This was in part because of weight of numbers. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, there were each year more than three Irish immigrants to every English immigrant. In 1850, out of a total population of twenty-four million, the United States had four million citizens of Irish birth or parentage. They did not necessarily possess economic power; many of them lived downtown in unspeakable fire-trap tenements either side of Broadway. Cartage and labouring were the usual occupations for males, domestic service and garment-making for females. The sons and daughters of Innisfail could also be found above 59th Street, living with their domestic pigs on irregular streets in wooden huts under conditions hardly advanced on what they had known in Ireland. They were enthusiasts, however, in a way not possible at home. They were both exploited and given hope by the powerful party machinery of the Democrats. An Irish political brio, suppressed in Ireland, was let loose in America.