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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY
Irish History belongs to England — How she tells it! — Another Version — Ireland finally subdued five times — The Penal Laws — Irish Industry, how fostered — Agriculture — Our Forefathers’ Famines — Berkeley — Swift’s “Proposal” for a Relief Measure — Eighteen years — Ireland unprotected and unameliorated — The Volunteers — Project of the Union — Union carried — Famines in 1817 and ’22 — The O’Connell Agitations — “Emancipation” — Extermination — Devon Commission — Campaign against the Celts — Slaughter — The Last Famine — British Law helps the Famine — The Famine helps British Law — Utter Desolation — Project for Resistance at last — Clubs — Pikes — United Irishman — Lord Clarendon — Birch, Privy Counsellor to the Viceroy — Treason Felony — O’Brien and Meagher — Trial by one’s Country — British Providence works out His wise Dispensations [xxvii]
CHAPTER I: Newgate — Travelling Toilet — Drive to the North Wall — “No Disturbance” — Hospitalities of the Shearwater — Capt. Hall of the Dragon — Not Basil Hall — Self-Interrogation — My Fellow-Felons — Spike Island — Edward Walsh — Order for removal to Bermuda — The Scourge War Steamer — At Sea [1]
CHAPTER II: Yachting in the Scourge — “Two Years before the Mast” — Review of an Edinburgh Reviewer — The Nineteenth Century — Bombarding the Moon’ — Macaulay on Bacon — The New Philosophy — Chasing our own Shadows— Good Night, Nineteenth Century! — Bermuda — “Ireland Island” [19]
CHAPTER III: An English Steamer — The Morning Post — Edmund Burke Roche — The “Irish Felon” — Handed over to a Man in Blue — Receipt taken — Hospitalities of the Dromedary — Genesis and Growth of the Bermudas — Description of my cell — Precautions against Mutiny — Removed to an Hospital-ship for ten days — Back again — The Devil’s Acre, or Cemetery of Cut-throats — Sympathy in New York — Precautions at Bermuda against an American Squadron — Prison Biography — Suicide, pro and contra — The 42nd Highlanders — Discipline — Letter from Ireland [36]
CHAPTER IV: Precautions against my Receipt of News from Ireland — “The last Planks of the Constitution” — Contraband Intelligence — English Chartists Imprisoned — Meagher Arrested — Martin, Williams and O’Doherty committed “for Felony” — Warrant out against
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O’Brien — “Government” will have to pack Juries — Duties of Juries in Ireland — Method of Rigmarole — “Books” — Feeding like the Laplanders or the Ducks of Pontus — Necessity of Work — Autobiographies — Gifford Elwood and Crichton — Gibbon, Evelyn, and Rosseau — SulKy Prisoners — Cut-throats attending Divine Service — More Contraband Intelligence — John Martin transported — Habeas Corpus Act suspended — Gaols full — Dumas — Attempted Insurrection in Tipperary — Failure — Flight — Famine — Clonmel Juries [55]
CHAPTER V: London paper falls from Heaven — O’Brien, Meagher, MacManus, O’Donoghue, Sentenced to Death — Kindness of the Spirit of the Age — General Estimate of the Results of this Irish Movement — O’Connell’s Son and the Catholics — Letter from New York — The French Republic and the Carthaginian Newspapers — Herr Doppelganger Expostulates with the Ego — Republicanism in the Abstract — In the Concrete — France marches in the Van — Doppelganger severely handled in Argument — Doppelganger stands out — The Credit-funds, Peace and Progress — Courage, Jacobins! — The Ego leaves Herr Doppelganger not a leg to stand upon — “Arterial Drainage” [74]
CHAPTER VI: Escape of Three Cut-throats — Hot pursuit — Capture — Solemn mangling of the Cut-throats — Six Months in Bermuda — Sickness — More Bad Books — Life of Walter Scott — of Cowper — Fall back on Rabelais — Shakespeare for ever! — Sir Alexander Burnes — His Journey up the Indus — Takes Soundings for British War Steamers — Surveys Hyderabad with a View to British Burglary — Examines the Capacities of Lahore for British Cotton and Christianity — Takes the Measure of the Koh-i-noor in the interests of Civilisation — Band of the 42nd — Captain Alexander’s Book — Sickness — Medical Superintendent tells me I am going to die soon — Note to the Governor of Bermuda [94]
CHAPTER VII: The “First Mate” — Goethe never in the Galleys — Prospect of a Ship for the Cape of Good Hope — “Trial” and Doom of O’Doherty — The Catholic Clergy — Christmas on board the Dromedary — News of Election of Louis Napoleon for President — Deadly Sickness, and Living against Time — Literary Deposit, in Six Strata — Uses of Bad Books — Metaphysics — Bermuda a School of Reformation — Irish Prisoners graduate for the Gallows — Criminal Jurisprudence — A Plea for the Drop — Prayer for the Soul of Walter Scott — Order to despatch me to the Cape — A “Spirit of Disaffection” in Ireland still — Sad! [113]
CHAPTER VIII: Ten Months’ Bondage — Arrival of the Neptune, Bound for the Cape — Perils of British Rule in Ireland — Trial of the Editor of the Nation — Editor a Recreant — Removal to the Hospital Ship again — Reflections unusually Pious — News from Europe and
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Asia — Lord Gough in the Punjab — Imaginary Programme of European Movements — Preparing for Voyage to Africa — Phenomena of Memory — Innocence of Childhood — The Pen of Rigmarole — The Scourge again — British Public Opinion — Parliamentary Falsehoods by Admiral Dundas and Lord Lansdowne — At Sea once more — Bright Prospects — O’Connell, a Portrait — Conversation with “Surgeon-Superintendent” [128]
CHAPTER IX: An American Brig — Stray copy of the Daily News — Memorial on behalf of Mr. Duffy — The Failure at Ballingarry — Arms Bills — Use of Riots — French Army besieging Rome — “Order” — Hungary holds her Ground — Review of my Shipmates — Becalmed for many Weeks — Sickness — -Short of Water — The Dead to the Sharks — Tropic Seas — Danger of Mutiny — The Parson Frightened — Pernambuco — Oranges — Slaves — No “Facts” in my Journal — Humboldt’s Howling Monkeys — Cyanometer — English Papers at Pernambuco — Six Irish Rebels on their Way to Van Diemen’s Land — Two American Skippers — Prince Louis Napoleon on this Coast — Home Secretary thinks me Dead — Brazilians “Lazy Foreign Lubbers” [144]
CHAPTER X: Slaves and Slave-trade in Brazil — Benevolent Pirates — Elections in Brazil — Vanish South America — Ocean Visions — Lessons from Sea-Pigeons — British Convict System — The Railway Swindler — The Railway King — Habits of British Soldiers — Promotion to the Hulks — Night at Sea — The Irish Prisoners — Dismal Songs — The Cape of Good Hope — Africa Beware! — Africa brings forth Aliquid Novi [159]
CHAPTER XI: Ferment at the Cape — British Governor under Duress — “Anti-Convict Association” — News of O’Brien and the “Traitors” — Neptune at Anchor — Simon’s Bay — Cape Heaths and Geranium — Anti-Convict Council of War — Simultaneous Meetings — Note from the Governor — Anti-Convict Pledge — Starvation — Dr. Dees falls Sick — Excitement Increases — Cape Newspapers — The Bandieten — The 18th of August in Zwartland — The Boers — Starvation — Fishing to support Existence — Non-intercourse — Steward of the Neptune — Our Skipper Ashore — People will hold no Intercourse — Indignation of the Men-of War’s Men — Commodore rides on a Foray [175]
CHAPTER XII: “Committee of Vigilance” — Business at a stand in Capetown — The Moderates and Immoderates — Dr. Dees Dead — A Rebel Bishop — Violent Ferment in the Interior — -Advantage of Inhabiting a Sphæroid — Rage of the Colonists — Resolution to shut Shops — Mr. Ebden — Fairbairn, able Editor — Mynheer Smuts — Chances of a Revolt — Cape Wines — raitors Excommunicated — Benjamin Norden — Captain Stanford feeds Sir Harry — The Neptune “Instructor” would a-shopping go — No Intercourse — Solemn Fast — Secretary Montague — The Coolies now Hungry — Mobs — Suggestion for Sir Harry — Wives or reputed Wives [188]
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CHAPTER XIII: News from Europe — Hungary still holds her Ground — “Opinion stronger than Arms” — Dublin Nation, New Series — Queen in Ireland — Tim O’Brien — Young Ireland nowhere — Her Majesty in a “green silk visite” — Does not visit Skibbereen — Thomas Carlyle in Ireland — Despatch from England — Hungary is down — Kossuth and Bem — Hungary Immortal — England in Asia — England in Europe — The “Future of America” — Dublin Nation again — The Irishman — Government Massacre in Ireland — A Slave-ship — The Southern Hemisphere — Confusion of Feasts and Fasts — The Anti-Convict Association — Letter of W. P. Laubscher — Letter of Hendrick Morkel [201]
CHAPTER XIV: No Despatch — “Wearing the Ring of our Anchor” — An Alarm — Victor of Aliwal shall not have a Statue — Curious Law-suit — Plaintiffs and Defendants Repudiate the Judges — News of the “Felons” in Van Diemen’s Land — Despatch at Last — Conditional Pardon to all on Board — “Except Prisoner Mitchel” — Pleasing Anticipations — English Newspapers — Ireland Tranquil — Neptune gets ready for Sea — Rejoicings — Illuminations — Good-night to Africa — Van Diemen’s Land Appears — D’Entrecasteaux’ Channel — Hobart Town — Official Documents — Ticket-of-Leave — Parole — The Irish Exile, Newspaper — A Smoke with John Martin [214]
CHAPTER XV: Valley of Bothwell — The Gum-trees — Balsam in the Forest — Rendezvous at Lake Sorel — Snow-Storm in the Woods — Lake Crescent — Cooper’s Hut — Meeting with Meagher and O’Doherty — Evil Plight of Smith O’Brien — The “Dog’s Head” — Ride to Bothwell [229]
CHAPTER XVI: Tasmanian Hills — A Scottish Glen in Van Diemen’s Land — Letter from Smith O’Brien — Generosity of the “British Public” — Colonists at Home — Irish Newspapers — Conciliation Hall — Irish Factions in New York — Rebels at Church — Rebels at the Lakes — “Reformatory Discipline” — Write for my Family — Visit from MacManus — The Lakes again — The River Shannon — A Rhapsody of Rivers — Clarence Mangan — Sample of Tasmanian Population — Hiatus in the Journal — Go to Hobart Town to receive my Wife . [239]
CHAPTER XVII: Ride to Brown’s River — Gardens — Flowers of Van Diemen’s Land — Kindly Climate — Breeds of Dogs and Horses — Men and Women — A Beauty — St. Kevin — Romantic residence for Burglars — My Wife arrives at Adelaide — Expected at Launceston — I go to Launceston — Imprisonment there for 24 hours — Mr. Gunn — Letter to the Colonial Times — Arrival of my Wife in Hobart Town — Meeting at Greenponds — Back to Bothwell [251]
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CHAPTER XVIII: Nant Cottage — Ride to Avoca — Visit to Mr. O’Brien — Vigour of Sir W. Denison — “Clemency” of Government — Van Diemen’s Land Stage-coaches — Tasmania a Bastard England — Van Diemen’s Land Election — Anti-Transportation — The Australasian League — Balfe — Policy of the Gaoler Party — Valley of Avoca — Meeting with O’Brien — A Day spent with Him — The Priests of Tipperary — His Attempt to Escape from Maria Island — Return to Bothwell [260]
CHAPTER XIX: A Family of Irish Colonists — Mrs. Connell and the Bushrangers — Ride up the Mountains — Meagher and His Dog — Lake Sorel on the Mountain-top — Visit to Meagher’s Cottage — Meagher aids the “League” — Loveliness of Lake Sorel — Tricolour and Fleur-de-lis — Ride to Nant Cottage — Young Kangaroo — Hiatus in the Journal — New Year’s Day, 1853 — Stupor and Torpor of our Life — No Thunder and Lightning — Kossuth In America — Meagher in America [271]
CHAPTER XX: A Kangaroo-hunt — Dean and Dart — Incredible Sagacity — Three Kangaroos killed — Philosophic Reflections — My Convict Haymakers — Descent into Hell — Letter from Devin Reilly — Reilly on the Republicans — His interview with Kossuth — An Intellectual Kalmuck — The Celt Lectures the Kalmuck — Reilly and the Democratic Review — His Sorrows — His Wife — Senator Douglas, “Spicy to the Core” [282]
CHAPTER XXI: Reilly’s Letter — Failure of The People — The Whig Review — A Gascon Irishman — A Scarlet Democrat, Piratic and Honest — Mr. Corry — Irish Affairs — The Priests and Holy Wells — Destiny of Reilly . — Haymaker goes to the Diggings — A Stranger Appears amongst us — P. J. Smyth — Meeting with O’Doherty and O’Brien — Smyth in Hobart Town — We visit O’Brien at New Norfolk — Consultations about Escape — To Bothwell — Smyth Reconnoitres the Police Office — His Life in America — Daylight begins to dawn [294]
CHAPTER XXII: Smyth at Lake Sorel — Goes to Melbourne — I buy the Police Magistrate’s Horse — Letter from Nicaragua — The Water lily — Plan of Escape — Plan Discovered — Council of War — Arrest of Nicaragua — I visit Hobart Town — Resolution taken — New Plan of Escape — We ride into Bothwell — I revoke my Parole before the Magistrate — Conversation at Police Office — Offer Myself for Arrest — Adieu to Bothwell — A Day’s Hard Riding — A Winter’s Night in the Forest — Job Sims’ Cottage — The Beard Movement — An English Guide — Meet a new Friend on the Mountains — Ride to Westbury — News of Nicaragua — The Police Force on the alert [294]
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CHAPTER XXIII: Nicaragua in Hobart Town — The Don Juan — Rendezvous at Emu Bay — Winter Floods — Emu Bay inaccessible — Express to the Don Juan — Ride to Port Sorel — Savage Country — Home of an Irish Settler — Irish Customs — A Caoine in the Bush — Crossing a Ravine — Another Night in the Woods — The Sea at Last! — No Don Juan — At Mr. Miller’s. — Miller an Englishman — Retreat within a Mile of a Police-Barrack — Project to Sail as Miller’s Brother — Messengers from Launceston — Severe Riding — Boating patty proposed — Night Expedition down the Tamar [318]
CHAPTER XXIV: Another Disappointment — Flight down the River — Barrett’s Boat- — We Miss the Steamer — Back to Launceston — The Chapel House — Father Blake — Meeting with O’Doherty — Father Blake at Hobart Town — Nicaragua — Mr. Davis unhappy — To Sail by the Emma — Farewell to Van Diemen’s Land — Sydney [330]
CHAPTER XXV: Sydney — My Wife at Wooloomooloo — The Orkney Lass — Take Passage for Honolulu — Dangerous Delays — Sail for the Sandwich Islands — My Fellow-Voyagers — Four Actresses — Tahiti — Papeete — Actresses give a Concert — French Frigate — Le Forte — Ride up the Fowtowa River — Bass’s Pale Ale — Gala at Queen Pomare’s Palace — The Tahitian Girls — The Julia Ann appears — The Stars and Stripes — Off for San Francisco — California — Isthmus of Nicaragua — The San Juan River — Grey town [340]
CHAPTER XXVI: Greytown — The Pampero — Cuba and the Cubans — News from Europe — The Czar is up — Refreshment for the Refugees — Kossuth — Mazzini — -Ireland — Leaving Greytown — -Nicaragua lectures on Central America — Arrive at Cuba — The Moro — Havana — Atares Castle — Cuba and Ireland — Captain-General’s Palace — Dublin Castle — Pass near Bermuda — Doubts — New York at last — Brooklyn [353]
THE CONTINUATION
The New York Reception — Foundation of “The Citizen” — Mitchel and the Russian Minister — The Know-Nothing Agitation — The Release of Smith O’Brien — The Virginian Address — Irish Organisations in America — The Controversy with Archbishop Hughes — At Stonington — “Anglo-Saxonism” in New York — New York and the Irish Political Prisoners — Retirement from “The Citizen” — Miles Byrne — Marshal MacMahon — Mitchel’s Children — Mitchel and Victor Hugo — Mitchel and Fenianism — Mitchel at the Irish College — Napoleon’s Irish Legion — Mitchel’s Final Departure from France [367]
APPENDICES
I. The Famine Year — II. The Mitchel-Duffy Controversy — III. The Cape and Mitchel — IV. The Cuban Filibusters — V. Mitchel County, Iowa [421]
Contemporaries Mentioned in the Jail Journal [433]
Mitchel’s Escape: Letter to Mr, Miller [451]; Index [433]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
John Mitchel - frontispiece
John Mitchel. A sketch in May, 1848
Trial of Mitchel
The Bench at the Opening of the Commission which Convicted Mitchel, May, 1848
Newgate Prison
Mitchel’s Dublin Residence in 1848
Fortifications and Dockyard of Ireland Island, Bermuda, in 1848
View of Ireland Island, Bermuda, 1848, showing Batteries, the Medway, the Coromandel, the Dromedary, Victualling Stores, Keep, and Commissioner’s House
View of Ireland Island, Bermuda, 1848, showing the Naval Hospital, the Tenedos, the Weymouth, the Stone Quarry, Cockburn’s Cut and Bridge
The Convict Garb at Bermuda in 1848
The Mitchel Family Residence, Dromolane House, Newry.
Forging Pikes, 1848
British Military Camp at Tipperary, July, 1848
The Arrest of Smith O’Brien at Thurles Railway Station.
Trial of Smith O’Brien at Clonmel, 1848
Removal of Smith O’Brien to Prison under Sentence of Death
William Smith O’Brien, 1848
John Martin, 1848.
John Martin, about 1865
Father John Kenyon
Thomas Francis Meagher. A sketch in May, 1848
Brig. -Gen. Thomas Francis Meagher
John Blake Dillon
Thomas Devin Reilly.
Michael Doheny
Terence Bellew MacManus
Kevin Izod O’Doherty.
“Eva” of “The Nation,” Mrs. Kevin O’Doherty
Charles Gavan Duffy
John Savage, 1848
D ‘Alton Williams
P. J, Smyth: “Nicaragua”
John Mitchel. Paris, 1861
Facsimile Letter, John Mitchel to John O’Mahony
John Mitchel. The last portrait, 1875.
A Tipperary Eviction in 1848.
After the Eviction
INTRODUCTORY
England has been left in possession not only of the Soil of Ireland, with all that grows and lives thereon, to her own use. but in possession of the world’s ear also. She may pour into, it what tale she will: and all mankind will believe her.
Success confers every right in this Enlightened Age; wherein, for the first time, it has come to be admitted and proclaimed in set terms, that Success is Right and Defeat is Wrong; If I profess myself a disbeliever in that gospel, the Enlightened Age will only smile, and say, “The defeated always are.” Britain being in possession of the floor, any hostile comment upon her way of telling our story is an unmannerly interruption; nay, is nothing short of an Irish howl.
And if Ireland be indeed conquered finally and irredeemably it would be useless to importune the busy public (which has a good heart enough, but really no time to attend to the grievances of mendicants), with any contradiction to the British story. — A touching and sanctimonious tale it is! — barbarian Celtic nature for ever revolting in its senseless, driftless way, against the genius of British civilisation — generous efforts for the amelioration of “that portion of the United Kingdom,” met for ever by brutal turbulence, “crime and outrage,” suspicion, ingratitude — British Benevolence stretching forth its open hand to relieve those same turbulent but now starving wretches, when Heaven smote the land with Famine — the anxieties, the cares, the expenses, that an unthrifty island cost her more prosperous sister, who would not, for ail that, desert her in her extremity, but would ameliorate her to the last.
So it runs; and so it might pass unchallenged for ever, if one could believe that the last conquest of Ireland was indeed the final and crowning conquest. But that Nation has been so often dead and buried, and has so often been born again — one and the same man sometimes both assisting at the rocking of her cradle, and as chief-mourner following her hearse, that there is no trusting to this seeming death. Mountjoy gave Ireland to Elizabeth, “Nothing but carcases and ashes,” dead enough. In half a century, the carcases are armed men, the ashes flaming fire; and an Oliver Cromwell has to come over to smite and to slay again. Ireland was conquered by Cromwell, literally and universally. The cause of Ireland — Ireland as against England — was what all men would call lost: her castles rifted by the
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regicide’s cannon; her fields laid waste, and the inheritance of them given to strangers; her best and bravest in bloody graves, or wasting and weltering in the Western Indies; — at her sister’s feet she lay a corpse. A few years pass; she is not yet cold in her grave — and again all Europe hears the clang of aims in Ireland. Again the cause is Ireland against England, though the flags be the flags of Stuart against Orange-Nassau. Though the war-cry be “Righ Seamus Abu” yet the war means Ireland for the Irish.
And again, a King and Deliverer of England comes over the sea to crush, kill, and trample Ireland — and again Ireland dies: on the Boyne stream her heart’s blood runs to the sea; at the “Break of Aughrim” her neck is broken; and when the Wild Geese fly from Limerick, England feels at last secure: surely this time her sister and mortal enemy is dead past all resurrection.
Not yet! Another gloomy and uneasy century drags along; the age of the Penal Laws. The English Government never yet observed any single treaty which it was convenient for them to break; and having solemnly agreed by the capitulation of Limerick not to impose penalties for Catholic worship, and having so disarmed the Catholic forces and ended the war, that Government, as a matter oi course, at once imposed penal laws through their servile Anglo-Irish Parliament. Everybody has heard of the terrible Penal Laws;” but not everybody knows what they were.
They took charge of every Catholic from his cradle, and attended him to his grave — Catholic children could only be educated by Protestant teachers at home; and it was highly penal to send them abroad for education.
Catholics were excluded from every profession, except the medical, and from all official stations without exception.
Catholics were forbidden to exercise trade or commerce in any corporate town.
Catholics were legally disqualified to hold leases of land for ( a longer tenure than thirty-one years; and also disqualified to
inherit the lands of Protestant relatives.
A Catholic could not legally possess a horse of greater value than five pounds; and any true Protestant meeting a Catholic with a horse of fifty or sixty pounds in value, might lay down the legal price of five pounds, unhorse the idolator, mount in his place and ride away.
A Catholic child, turning Protestant, could sue his parents for maintenance; to be determined by the Protestant Court of Chancery.
A Catholic’s eldest son, turning Protestant, reduced his father to a tenant for life, the reversion to the convert.
A Catholic priest could not celebrate Mass, under severe
INTRODUCTORY xxix
penalties; but any priest who recanted was secured a stipend by law.
Here was a code for the promotion of true religion; from whence it may appear, that Catholics have not been the only persecutors in the world. Some persons may even go so far as to say that no Catholic Government ever yet conceived in its heart so fell a system of oppression. However, it may be a circumstance in favour of the Protestant code (or it may not), that whereas Catholics have really persecuted for religion, enlightened Protestants only made a pretext of religion — taking no thought what became of Catholic souls, if only they could get possession of Catholic lands and goods. Alas, we may remark, that Catholic Governments, in their persecutions, always really desired the conversion of misbelievers (albeit their method was rough) — but in Ireland if the people had universally turned Protestant, it would have defeated the whole scheme.
Edmund Burke calls this Penal Code “a machine of wise and deliberate contrivance as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” Singular, that it originated with the “Glorious Revolution,” and was in full force during the reign of William the Deliverer, Anne, and the three first gracious Georges!
And it answered the purpose. The Irish people were impoverished and debased. And so the English having forbidden them for generations to go to school, became entitled to taunt them with ignorance: and having deprived them of lands, and goods, and trade, magnanimously mock their poverty, and call them tatterdemalions.
During that eighteenth century, the Catholics disappear from history and politics. Such sallies of resistance as were made in those years against the encroachment of British power, were made by Protestants (Swift, Lucas, Molyneux), in assertion of a Protestant Nationality, and for the independence of a Protestant Parliament. Indeed, when the Protestant Dissenters of England argued for the repeal of the Corporation Act and Test Act, which prevented them from holding certain State offices. Dean Swift, the Irish patriot, wrote a sarcastic petition, as if from the Irish Catholics, praying that they might be relieved from their penal disabilities; in order to cast ridicule and discredit on the pretensions of Dissenters, by way of reductio ad absurdum — We will have the very Catholics, said he, coming in next!
We might well expect, by the close of that century, to find Ireland altogether Anglicised — the Catholics all dead or
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converted — the ruling classes so completely British in their feelings as well as by their extraction that England would never more need to fear the uprising of a hostile Irish Nation. Ireland was to all human appearance dead and buried this time.
And in truth so she might have lain for ever, if the English could have repressed their national greediness (or “energy”) but a little. But it was impossible. The ruling class of Ireland, albeit Protestants, were soon taught that they were not to expect to be placed on an equal footing with men “whose limbs were made in England.” Express enactments were made, to put an end to several branches of their trade, and to cramp and restrict others.* Agriculture, too, which is the main concern of every nation, was accurately regulated in Ireland with view to British interests. One hundred years ago, Ireland imported much corn from England; because it then suited the purpose of the other island to promote Irish sheep-farming in order to provide wool for the Yorkshire weavers. Tillage and cattle-feeding were discouraged; therefore the Irish were forbidden to export black-cattle to England. Sheep then became the more profitable stock, and the port of Barnstaple
* In 1699 the manufacture of wool into cloth was totally destroyed in Ireland by law. Acts of the British and Irish Parliaments (the latter being wholly subject to the former) prohibited the export of woollen cloth from Ireland to any country whatsoever, except to England and Wales. The exception was delusive, because duties amounting to a prohibition prevented the Irish cloth from entering England or Wales. Before that time Ireland had a good trade in woollen drapery with foreign countries, and undersold the English. Therefore the British Parliament addressed King William, urging him to suppress the traffic. The House of Lords used this language — “Wherefore we most humbly beseech your most sacred Majesty, that your Majesty would be pleased, in the most public and effectual way that may be, to declare to all your subjects of Ireland, that the growth and increase of the woollen-manufactures there hath long been, and will be ever, looked upon with great jealousy by all your subjects of this kingdom, and if not timely remedied, may occasion very strict laws totally to prohibit it and suppress the same. ”King William the Deliverer, replied that he would do his utmost to ruin his Irish subjects. — “He would do all that in him lay to discourage the woollen manufactures of Ireland.” — And he was as good as his word. Acts of Parliament were very shortly after passed, whose effect was that Irish wool had to be sent to England raw to be manufactured in Yorkshire. — And there it goes in fleece, and thence a very little of it returns in broadcloth up to this day. Add to this the Navigation Laws; and the absolute prohibition of all direct Irish trade with the Colonies — no Colonial produce being admitted into Ireland until it had first entered an English port and been unloaded there; and you will be at no loss to find out how the English became so rich a nation and the Irish so poor.
Of these laws the Dean of St. Patrick’s wrote — “The conveniency of ports and havens which nature hath bestowed so liberally upon this kingdom, is of no more use to us than a beautiful prospect to a man put up in a dungeon”
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was opened to receive all their fleeces. But soon after, when England had full possession of the woollen manufacture, and that of Ireland was utterly ruined, it became apparent to the prudent British, that the best use they could make of Ireland would be No turn it into a general store-farm, for all sorts of agricultural price.* It is their store-farm to this day.
Those restrictive laws no longer exist. They have been repealed from time to time, merely because England wanted them no longer. The work was done; the British were in possession. To revive manufactures in Ireland, there must have been protective duties imposed on import of manufactured articles from England; but there was no free Irish Parliament to do this. Besides, the time became so enlightened that the Spirit of the Age was against such duties. In other words, the English could then afford to cry out “Free Trade!” “True principles of political economy!” and-so-forth; taking care only to prevent any interference by law or otherwise, with the satisfactory state of things they had established. To lose a trade is easy; to recover it, in the face of wealthy rivals now in possession, impossible.
When manufactures are crushed, and a peasantry bound to the plough-tail and the cattle-shed, of course the manufactured commodities they require must come to them from abroad, and their raw agricultural produce must go in payment for them.
Further, when the condition of the peasantry is embittered by subjection to an alien and hostile class of landlords, who hold by lineage and affection to another country, and whose sole interest in their tenantry is to draw from them the very uttermost farthing, that they may spend it in that other country† — and when that rental also, as well as the price of manufactures, must be paid in raw produce, the arrangement is as good as perfect. You can want no more to account for the starved skeletons of Ireland — and the comforts which brighten “the happy homes of England.”
So went by the eighteenth century in Ireland. One can hardly believe that the sun shone as he is wont in those days.
* Anderson, a standard British writer of those days, in his “History of Commerce,” explains the matter thus — “Concerning these laws, many think them hurtful; and that it would be wiser to suffer the Irish to be employed in breeding and fattening their black-cattle for us, than to turn their lands into sheepwalks as at present; in consequence” of which, in spite of all their laws, they supply foreign nations with their wool.” By a dexterous persistence in this line of policy the evil was remedied — the Irish ceased to supply foreign nations or themselves either; and they now successful!y fatten cattle and grow corn for the sister country.”
† In Swift’s days he set down the absentee-rents at half a million sterling, They are now four and a half millions sterling.
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So dreary and miserable is the landscape. — a good Bishop Berkeley putting these dismal queries in 1734 — “Whether there be upon earth any Christian or civilised people so beggarly, wretched, and destitute as the common Irish.”— “Whether, nevertheless, there is any other people whose wants may be more easily supplied from home.”* Or writing thus to his friend, Prior, in Dublin — “The distresses of the sick and poor are endless. The havoc of mankind in the counties of Cork, Limerick and some adjacent places, have been incredible. The nation, probably, will not recover this loss in a century. The other day I heard one from the County of Limerick say that whole villages were entirely dispeopled. About two months since, I heard Sir Richard Cox say that five hundred were dead in the parish, though in a county, I believe not very populous”; — a bitter Dean Swift, with accustomed ferocity of sarcasm, while the sæva indignatio gnawed his heart, making and publishing his “Modest Proposal” to relieve the fearful distress by cooking and eating the children of the poor.”‡
Yet, before the end of that same century — such vitality is there in the Irish race, and the Irish cause — Dublin streets beheld a wonderful spectacle — the Volunteer Army in its brilliant battalions, and an Independent Parliament legislating for the Sovereign Kingdom of Ireland! Apparently the conquest of Ireland had not yet been entirely finished.
For eighteen years, it seemed as if the steady progress of the British system in Ireland was about to be stopped or even turned back. The instinct and zeal of British “Amelioration,” indeed, was as strong as ever, but 80,000 volunteer bayonets stopped the way. British statesmen were as desirous as ever to regulate in their minutest detail all the trade and traffic of Britain’s sister island — surely for her sister’s good — but on the
* Bishop Berkeley’s works. — The Querist.
† See Swift’s Epitaph.
‡After a preface, the Dean’s “Modest Proposal” proceeds — “I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance, that a young healthy child well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasée or a ragout. I do, therefore, humbly offer it to public consideration that of the 120,000 children already computed, 20,000 may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males. The remaining 100,000 may at a year old be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune throughout the kingdom,” etc. — Again, “I have reckoned, upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh 12 lbs., and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, will increase to 28 lbs. I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”
[Plate:] The Lord Mayor of Dublin (Jeremiah Dunne), Baron Lefroy, Judge Moore: The bench at the opening of the Commission which convicted Mitchel, May, 1848.
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muzzles of the Irish artillery was engraved the legend “Free Trade or Else.”*
During those eighteen years of Irish independence then, British policy was suspended. Honest John Bull all those years was losing a yearly income which he felt to be justly his due. Our countrymen began to manufacture again; and seditiously consumed their own corn and beef. Revenue expended in public improvements at home, to the prejudice of the British services — the metropolis of Dublin beautified and enriched, to the heavy loss of industrious Londoners — Irish landlords keeping their town-houses in Ireland and spending their rents at home, instead of paying rent and wages in England! The thing was not to be borne — and through “intolerance of Irish prosperity,” preparations were made to conquer Ireland again by the Act of Union.
First, the Volunteers were to be disbanded and disarmed. Without that, no progress in civilisation could be made; nor could the British Providence carry out his wise designs. The disbanding was accomplished by pretending to grant fully (for the time) all that Ireland demanded. The too credulous people were taught that it would look suspicious if they kept up such an armament; and in an evil hour the Volunteers once more committed the defence of their island to her sister country.
Next, to frighten the gentry of Ireland into an Union, an insurrection had to be provoked. The expedients by which this was effected are known well enough; but the rebellion of ’98, when it did burst out, had nearly proved too strong for its fomenters: and it needed General Lake with twenty thousand disciplined men, and complete batteries of field-artillery, to suppress it in the county of Wexford alone.
The noble owners of nomination boroughs were bribed, at £15,000 per borough, to sell them to the English Government.
The Catholic Bishops were bribed by promises of Emancipation (which the English delayed to fulfil for thirty years), to deliver over their flocks into the hands of the British.
The country was in abject terror; the Press was crushed by prosecutions; public meetings were dispersed by dragoons. The Irish Parliament was crowded (through the prudent bargaining of the noble owners of nomination boroughs) with English officers — in short, the year 1800 saw the Act o>‘ Union. At one blow, England had her revenge. Ireland, and all Irish produce and industry, were placed totally in her power; and
* By “Free Trade,” Irish statesmen meant freedom not from duties but from foreign influence — meant the full power of their own Parliament to regulate their own trade by such duties, on export or on import, protective, discriminating, or prohibitory, as the interests of Ireland (not England) might require.
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Ireland having but one member in six to what, they called the Imperial Parliament, security was taken that the arrangement should never be disturbed.
This time, once more, Ireland was fully conquered — never nation yet took so much conquering and remained unsubdued. For twenty years after the Union the country was as absolutely prostrated in means and in spirit as she seems to be now; and as a matter of course she had her cruel famine every year. Without a famine in Ireland, England could not live as she had a right to expect; and the exact complement of a comfortable family dinner in England, is a coroner’s inquest in Ireland: verdict. Starvation. In 1817 the famine was more desperate than usual, and in the best counties of Ireland, people fed on weeds. In 1822 it was more horrible still. Sir John Newport of Waterford, in his place in the House of Commons,* described one parish in which fifteen persons had already died of hunger; twenty-eight more were past all hope of recovery, and one hundred and twenty (still in the same parish) ill of famine-fever — and told of another parish where the priest had gone round and administered extreme unction to every man, woman, and child of his parishioners, all in articulo mortis by mere starvation.†
* Commons Debates, June 27, 1822.
† Cobbett in his comment on that debate, makes these reflections — “Money, it seems, is wanted in Ireland. Now people do not eat money. No, but the money will buy them something to eat. What! the food is there, then. Pray observe this, reader. Pray observe this, and let the parties get out of the concern if they can. The Food is there; but those that have it in their possession will not give it without the money. And we know that the food is there; for since this famine has been declared in Parliament, thousands of quarters ofcorn have been imported every week from Ireland to England.” — Register, July, 1822. [xxxv]
All these years the Agricultural produce of Ireland was increasing more and more, and the English were devouring it. Indeed, so rapidly did this food-export (the only Irish commerce) grow and swell, that in 1826, to conceal the amount of it, the English Parliament placed it, “on the footing of a coasting-trade” — that is to say, no accounts were to be kept of it. ‡
During the same period, every Parliament was sure to enact at least one Arms Bill; intending to deprive all mere Celts of necessary weapons for defence, and to kill in them the spirit of men.
Two distinct movements were all this while stirring the people; [xxxv]
‡ In the first of these two dreadful famine years, 1817, there was exported from Ireland to England, 695,600 quarters of grain alone, besides vast herds of cattle. In 1822 there was exported to England, 1,063,000 quarters of grain, besides cattle. It must be remembered that the price of this wealth did not come to Ireland, but stayed in England to pay the rent, etc. — which was one of the reasons of that phenomenon noticed by Cobbett — plenty of food: and those who raised it having no money to buy it. [xxxv]
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one open and noisy — the Catholic Relief Agitation, the other secret and silent — the Ribbon and White-boy movement. The first proposed to itself the admission of professional and genteel Catholics to Parliament and to the honours of the professions, all under London Law — the other, originating in an utter horror and defiance of London Law, contemplated nothing less than social, ultimately political revolution. For fear of the last. Great Britain with a very ill grace yielded to the first. Unfortunately for Ireland, Catholic Emancipation was carried in 1829. “Respectable Catholics” were contented, and became West Britons from that day.
At the head of that open and legal agitation, was a man of giant proportions in body and in mind; with no profound learning, indeed, even in his own profession of the law, but with a vast and varied knowledge of human nature, in all its strength, and especially in all its weakness; with a voice like thunder and earthquake, yet musical and soft at will, as the song of birds; with a genius and fancy, tempestuous, playful, cloudy, fiery, mournful, merry, lofty and mean by turns, as the mood was on him — a humour broad, bacchant, riant, genial and jovial — with profound and spontaneous natural feeling, and superhuman and subter-human passions, yet withal, a boundless fund of masterly affectation and consummate histrionism — hating and loving heartily, outrageous in his merriment, and passionate in his lamentation, he had the power to make other men hate or love, laugh or weep, at his good pleasure — insomuch that Daniel O’Connell, by virtue of being more intensely Irish, carrying to a more extravagant pitch all Irish strength and passion and weakness, than other Irishmen, led and swayed his people by a kind of divine, or else diabolic right.
He led them, as I believe, all wrong for forty years. He was a lawyer; and never could come to the point of denying and defying all British Law. He was a Catholic, sincere and devout; and would not see that the Church had ever been the enemy of Irish Freedom. He was an aristocrat, by position and by taste; and the name of a Republic was odious to him. Moreover, his success as a Catholic Agitator ruined both him and his country. By mere agitation, by harmless exhibition of numerical force, by imposing demonstrations (which are fatal nonsense), and by eternally half-unsheathing a visionary sword, which friends and foes alike knew to be a phantom — he had, as he believed, coerced the British Government to pass a Relief Bill, and admit Catholics to Parliament and some offices.
It is true that Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington said they brought in this measure, to avert civil war; but no British statesman ever officially tells the truth, or assigns to any act its real motive. Their real motive was, to buy into the
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British interests, the landed and educated Catholics; that so the great multitudinous Celtic enemy might be left more absolutely at their mercy.
For, beginning on the very day of Catholic Emancipation, there was a more systematic and determined plan of havoc upon the homes of the poor. First, the “forty-shilling freehold” was abolished. This low franchise for counties had induced landlords to subdivide farms, and to rear up population for the hustings. The franchise at an end, there was no political use for the people; and all encouragements and facilities were furnished by the British Government to get rid of them. Then began the “amelioration” (for benevolence guided all) of clearing off “surplus population,” and consolidating the farms. It needed too much of the produce of the island to feed such a mob of Celts; and improved systems of tillage would give morecorn and cattle to English markets, more money to Irish landlords.
The code of cheap and easy Ejectment was improved and extended. All these statutes were unknown to the common law of England, and have been invented for the sole sake of the Irish Celt.
By an Act of the 25th year of George the Third (1815), in all cases of holdings where the rent was under £20 a year — that is, in the whole class of small tillage farms — power had been given to the County Judge at sessions, to make a decree for Ejectment at the cost of a few shillings. Two years afterwards, another Act was passed, which stated that in the proceedings under the former statute, “doubts had arisen” as to the admissibility, in certain cases, of the affidavit of the landlord or lessor, or his agent, for ascertaining the amount due, and then proceeded to enact that such affidavits should be held sufficient. Under these two Acts, many an estate was cleared, many a farmer uprooted from his foothold in the soil, and swept out upon the highways: but yet not fast it enough; so that by another Act of the first year of King George IV., it was declared that provisions of the cheap Ejectment Act “had been found highly beneficial, and it was expedient that the same should be extended”: and, thereupon, it was enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice, and-so-forth, that the power of summary Ejectment at Quarter Sessions should apply to all holdings at less than £50 rent; and, by the same statute, the cost of procuring these Ejectments was still further reduced. In the reigns of George IV and Victoria, other Acts for the same purpose were made. So that when the Famine and the Poor-laws came, the expense of clearing a whole countryside, was very trifling indeed.
To receive some of the exterminated, Poor-houses were erected
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all over the island, which had the effect of stifling compunction in the ejectors. The Poor-houses were soon filled.
Yet all these years, from 1829 to 1846, with all the thinning and clearing, Celts kept increasing and multiplying. The more they multiplied, the more they starved; for the export of their food to England was also increasing yearly; then, with the greater demand for farms, rents rose and wages fell; and when at last the first shadow of the famine fell upon the island, nine-tenths of the people were living on the meanest and cheapest food, and upon a minimum of that.
But all these same years, loud and triumphant Agitations were going forward — the “Precursor” Agitation; the Repeal Agitation — and the cheers of imposing demonstrations rent the air. Our poor people were continually assured that they were the finest peasantry in the world — “Alone among the nations.” They were told that their grass was greener, their women fairer, their mountains higher, their valleys lower, than those of other lands — that their “moral force” (alas!) had conquered before, and would again — that next year would be the Repeal year: in fine, that Ireland would be the first flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.
Not that the Irish are a stupid race, or naturally absurd, but the magician bewitched them to their destruction.
All these years, too, a kind of political war of posts was waged between O’Connell and British Ministers. Things called “good measures” were obtained; especially good men, friends and dependents of O’Connell’s (for he was generous as the day) got offices. “Ameliorations” were now and then proposed — and if they were humbugs too manifest, O’Connell in his Hall, turned them inside out amidst laughter inextinguishable; and said “Na bac leis” and “Thank you for nothing, says the gallipot.” Collateral issues all. Under all this, the heart and soul of Ireland — whatever of intellect and manliness was left in Ireland, beat and burned for independence — and England was skilfully laying her plans for the final conquest of her enemy.
For not one instant did the warfare cease upon farming Celts. In 1843, “Government” issued a notable commission; that is, appointed a few landlords, with Lord Devon at their head, to go through Ireland, collect evidence, and report on the best means (not of destroying the Irish enemy — official documents’ do not now use so harsh language, but) of ameliorating the relations of landlord and tenant in Ireland. . On this commission, O’Connell observed that it was “a jury of butchers trying a sheep for his life,” and said many other good things both merry and bitter, as was his wont; but the Devon Commission travelled and reported; and its Report has been the Gospel of Irish landlords and British Statesmen ever since.
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Three sentences of their performance will show the drift of it. Speaking of “Tenant Right” (a kind of unwritten law whereby tenants in the North were secure from ejectment from their farms while they paid their rent, a custom many ages old, and analogous to the customs of farmers all over Europe), these Commissioners reported “that they foresaw some dangers to the just rights of property from the unlimited allowance of this tenant-right.” On the propriety of consolidating farms (that is, destroying many small farmers to set up one large one), the Commissioners say, “When it is seen in the evidence, and in the return of the size of farms, how minute these holdings are, it cannot be denied that such a step is absolutely necessary.”
But the most remarkable sentence occurs in Lord Devon’s “Digest of the Evidence,” page 399:
“We find that there are at present 326,084 occupiers of land (more than one-third of the total number returned in Ireland), whose holdings vary from seven acres to less than one acre; and are, therefore, inadequate to support the families residing upon them. In the same table. No. 95, page 564, the calculation is put forward, showing that the consolidation of these small holdings up to eight acres, would require the removal of about 192,368 families.”
That is, the killing of a million of persons. Little did the Commissioners hope then, that in four years, British policy, with the famine to aid, would succeed in killing fully two millions, and forcing nearly another million to flee the country.
In 1846 came the Famine, and the “Relief Acts” advancing money from the Treasury, to be repaid by local assessment; and of course there was an aggravated and intolerable Poor-rate to meet this claim. Of which Relief Acts, only one fact needs to be recorded here — that the Public Works done under them were strictly ordered to be of an unproductive sort — that is, such as would create no fund to repay their own expenses. Accordingly, many hundreds of thousands of feeble and starving men were kept digging holes, and breaking up roads — doing not only no service, but much harm. Well, then, to meet these Parliamentary advances there was nothing but rates: and, therefore, there was the higher premium to landlords on the extermination, that is the slaughter, of their tenantry. If the clearing business had been active before, now there was a rage and passion for it; and as if the Cheap Ejectment Acts were not a speedy enough machinery, there was a new Poor-law enacted, containing amongst other clauses, the “Quarter Acre clause,” which provided that if a farmer, having sold all his produce to pay the rent duties, rates and taxes, should be reduced, as
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many thousands of them were, to apply for public out-door relief, he should not get it until he had first delivered up all his land to the landlord. Under that law it is the able-bodied idler only who is to be fed — if he attempt to till but one rood of ground, he dies. This simple method of ejectment was called “passing paupers through the workhouse” — a man went in, a pauper came out.
Under these various Poor-laws and Relief Acts, there were at least 10,000 government offices, small and great; looking and canvassing for these were 100,000 men; a great army in the interest of England.
At the end of six years, I can set down these things calmly; but to see them might have driven a wise man mad. There is no need to recount how the Assistant Barristers and Sheriffs, aided by the Police, tore down the roof-trees and ploughed up the hearths of village after village — how the Quarter Acre clause laid waste the parishes, how the farmers and their wives and little ones in wild dismay, trooped along the highways — how in some hamlets by the seaside, most of the inhabitants being already dead, an adventurous traveller would come upon some family eating a famished ass — how maniac mothers stowed away their dead children to be devoured at midnight — how Mr. Darcy of Clifden, describes a humane gentleman going to a village near that place with some crackers, and standing at the door of a house; “and when he threw the crackers to the children (for he was afraid to enter), the mother attempted to take them from them” — how husband and wife fought like wolves for the last morsel of food in the house; how families, when all was eaten and no hope left, took their last look at the Sun, built up their cottage doors, that none might see them die nor hear their groans, and were found weeks afterwards, skeletons on their own hearth; how the “law” was vindicated all this while; how the Arms Bills were diligently put in force, and many examples were made; how starving wretches were transported for stealing vegetables by night;* how overworked coroners declared they would hold no more inquests; how Americans sent corn, and the very Turks, yea, negro slaves, sent money for alms; which the British Government was not ashamed to administer to the “sister country” ; and how, in every one of these years, ’46, ’47, and ’48, Ireland was exporting to England, food to the value of fifteen million pounds sterling, and had on her own soil at each harvest, good and ample
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provision for double her own population, notwithstanding the potato blight. *
* Bantry Sessions. — Timothy Leary and Mary Leary were indicted for that they, on the 14th January, at Oakmount, did feloniously steal twenty turnips and fifty parsnips, the property of James Gillman. Found guilty. Sentence, transportation for seven years. This is but one of numerous instances. [xl]
To this condition had forty years of “moral and peaceful agitation” brought Ireland. The high aspirations after a national Senate and a national flag had sunk to a mere craving for food. And for food Ireland craved in vain. She was to be taught that the Nation which parts with her nationhood, or suffers it to be wrested or swindled from her, thereby loses all. O’Connell died heart-broken in 1847 — heart-broken not by a mean vexation at seeing the power departing from him; the man was too great for that; but by the sight of his People sinking every day into death under their inevitable, inexorable doom. His physicians ordered him to a warmer climate: in vain: amidst the reverent acclamations of Paris, through the sunny valleys of France, as he journeyed southward, that Banshee wail followed him and found him, and rung in his dying ear. At Genoa he died: ordering that the heart should be taken out of his dead body, and sent, not to Ireland, but to
* Mr. Martin of Loughorne, a competent and candid inquirer, in a published letter of October, 1847, gives a variety of statistical tables, and draws the conclusion that the total produce of food in Ireland the year preceding, amounted to;4i, 000,000 sterling, and her export to England, £45,000,000; but his estimate is very much under the truth: for in the year 1846, according to Thom’s Almanac, there were 1,875,393 quarters of grain alone sent to England, besides countless cattle, bacon, butter, and eggs. The trade in eggs had become so vast, that Richardson, in his Treatise on Domestic Fowl (Dublin, 1847), calculates that export at nearly a million sterling. But it may give a more vivid notion of the truth, if I copy here the casual notices of this export trade which I found in the newspapers of one week: — In the Daily News of October 3rd, 1847, it is stated that in the London market “the receipts of oats chiefly consist of the new Irish crop.” In the Examiner of October 4th, you may read that there was in one day an arrival in London of 11,050 quarters of Irish oats. By the Drogheda Argus we find that in one week, ending Oct. 3rd, there were shipped from Drogheda 1,200 cows, 3,500 sheep and swine, 2,000 quarters of grain, 211 tons of meal and flour, 130 boxes of eggs, besides butter, lard, etc. Waterford, in the same week (Evening Post, Oct. 3rd), sent off 250 tons of flour, 1,100 sheep and pigs, 308 head of cattle, 5,400 barrels of wheat and oats, 7,700 firkins of butter, 2,000 flitches of bacon. From Newry, within five days, in the end of September, there sailed eleven ships for England, laden with grain, exclusive of two large steamers, which sail four times a week, laden with cattle, eggs, butter, etc.
But Drogheda, Waterford, and Newry are but three of eleven seaports, (Derry, Coleraine, Belfast, Newry, Dundalk, Drogheda, Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Limerick), from each of which, at least two large steamers (from some of them five steamers), went twice in each week to England, laden with corn and cattle. And this without counting the minor ports, and the hundreds of sailing vessels all laden with corn and cattle. In short, during the four “famine years,” Ireland exported four quarters of grain for every quarter she imported, besides cattle; and of the grain imported, the greater part had been exported before, and came back laden with two freights and speculators’ profits to the helpless consumers.
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Rome; a disposition which proves how miserably broken and debilitated was that once potent nature.
Politics, by this time, was a chaos in Ireland. “Conciliation Hall” was sending forth weekly an abject howl for food! food! The “Irish Confederation” (of which the present writer was a member) had no much clearer view through the gloom; though it had more energy and honesty. Two or three vain efforts were made by its leaders to put a good man into the representation (Meagher at Waterford), or to keep a bad man out (Monahan at Galway) — both efforts in vain. The representation and the franchise were too cunningly calculated for British interests.
Every week was deepening the desolation and despair throughout the country; until at last the French Revolution of February, ‘48, burst upon Europe. Ireland, it is true, did not then possess the physical resources or the high spirit which had “threatened the integrity of the Empire” in ‘43; but even as she was, depopulated, starved, cowed and corrupted, it seemed better that she should attempt resistance, however heavy the odds against success, than lie prostrate and moaning as she was. Better that men should perish by the bayonets of the enemy than by their laws.
Clubs were formed expressly for arming; rifles were eagerly purchased; and the blacksmiths’ forges poured forth pikeheads. Sedition, treason, were openly preached and enforced; and the United Irishman was established specifically as an Organ of Revolution. The Viceroy, Lord Clarendon, became alarmed: he concentrated eight thousand troops in Dublin; he covered the land with detectives; and informers were the chief frequenters of the Castle. Walls were covered with placards (printed by Thom, the Government Printer), warning peaceable citizens that “Communists” intended to rob their houses, and murder their families; detectives went to unsuspecting blacksmiths and mysteriously ordered pikes for the “revolution” — then brought the pikes to the Castle; and thereupon Lord Clarendon had additional reasons to call for more regiments from England, to mount cannon upon the Bank; to garrison the College; to parade his artillery through the streets. But this was not enough: his Lordship wanted an organ at the press; for it happened that, about that time, all the decent journals of the country were pouring contempt upon him and his government, except the Dublin Evening Post, which was bribed with public money. It was necessary to secure another organ. The cause of “Law and Order” — the interests of civilisation — the wise designs of a British Providence required more support. There was then in Dublin a paper of the most infamous character; a paper that subsisted upon hush-money (the only one of the sort ever printed in Ireland);
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a paper that was never quoted, whose name was never named by any Journal in the city. Its editor, an illiterate being of the name of Birch, had been prosecuted more than once, convicted at least once, and imprisoned six months, for procuring money from timid citizens by threats of publishing disgusting stories of their private life. To this man my Lord Clarendon applied, that he might aid him with his counsel and with his pen. With him he consulted at the Viceregal Lodge upon the critical posture of affairs, and upon the best mode of carrying out the designs of Providence for Ireland. In order the more effectually to do this pious work, it was needful that the avowed enemies of that British Providence (of whom the present writer had the honour to be one) should be covered with obloquy, and pointed out to the execration of mankind as abominable; but seeing that reputable persons never saw the Viceroy’s new organ, it became necessary to circulate it gratuitously by means of public money. *
Under the advice of this Birch, who told the Viceroy that it was time for vigour, his Lordship called for a new Law of Treason. Immediately (April 19th) a Bill was brought in by Sir George Grey, and made into an Act by large majorities, providing that any one who should levy war against the Queen, or endeavour to deprive her of her title, or by open and advised speaking, printing, or publishing, incite others to the same, should be “deemed guilty of felony” and transported.
* All this might have remained a secret, but that Lord Clarendon’s friend. Birch, was obliged, three years afterwards, to sue his Lordship, and again Sir William Somerville, the Irish Secretary, for the balance due to him on account of Law and Order. The action against Lord Clarendon was compromised by payment of;2,ooo; that against Somerville was resisted and ‘tried. Thus it came out how his Excellency had sent for Birch to his residence; and, how Birch had been closeted with him often. Plaintiff’s counsel stated the nature of his services thus: — “I may say this, that he gave his Excellency the full benefit of his counsel, of his knowledge, of his intimate acquaintance with parties, with newspapers, with factions, and with public men. I am instructed that he even went the length of stating when the Government might be vigorous, and when it would be prudent to be cautious.”
Lord Clarendon in his evidence, says it was in Feb., ’48, that he entered into communication with Birch: — “I then offered him £100, if I remember rightly, for it did not make any great impression on me at the time. He said that it would not be sufficient for his purpose, and I think it was then extended to about £350. This was in the beginning of February, 1848, if I remember correctly. Did your Excellency know that any further sums of money were paid to Mr. Birch in London? — Yes. Is your Excellency aware from what funds it came? — From a fund placed at the disposal of Sir William Somerville at my request. Out of the public funds, was it? — I could not say it came out of the public funds. I said it was a fund placed at the disposal of Sir W. Somerville, at my request.”
Secret service money, in short. Lord Clarendon’s private secretary, a Mr. Connellan, was usually the instructor of Birch. It is unfortunate that all the letters have not come to light; for on payment of the £2,000 to settle Birch’s claim, his Lordship took care, as he thought, to get up all the papers. Birch prudently kept back a few, amongst which I find this note: — [xliii]
“V. R. L. (Viceregal Lodge), March, 1848. Dear Sir — The French news ought to turn to account the triumph of the moderate party, the defeat and certain ejection of Ledru Rolf in, the Irish fraterniser, and the vigorous proceedings of the provisional government in making arrests. I presume that to-morrow’s (Friday) mail will bring us an account of the capture of Blanqui and Cabet, the great Communist leader, etc. The moral of this might be well applied to Mitchel and Co.”
For of course it was one main point in his lordship’s policy to make people believe that the enemies of English government were “Communists,” and that Communists were robbers. Birch was recommended also by Lord Clarendon to Lord Palmerston; and was duly paid by that nobleman for supporting his policy. Here are two little notes which were read on the Somerville trial: — “Sir — Viscount Palmerston desires me to express to you his best thanks for your obliging letter of the 9th inst., and your able articles in the World newspaper. I am, sir, your obedient servant, Spencer Ponsonby. ”June 15, 1851, Mr. Ponsonby says — Viscount Palmerston desires to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of to-day’s date, and to request you to call upon me at this office on Monday or Tuesday, at a quarter before 5 o’clock.”
Such was one of the agencies made use of by Divine Providence for preserving British civilisation in Ireland. I never saw Lord Clarendon’s friend Birch; but am informed that he earned much of his money by weekly attacks upon me. [xliv]
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This act was passed with a special view to crush the United Irishman, and to destroy its Editor. If the offence had been left a misdemeanour as theretofore, the “government” knew that the United Irishman could not be put down, because there would have been no forfeiture in case of conviction; and they were all well aware that competent men would not be wanting to give a voice to treason, even though editor after editor should be chained up.
In the meantime the case grew pressing. All the country was fast becoming aroused; and many thousands of pikes were in the hands of the peasantry. The soldiers of several regiments, being Irish, were well known to be very willing to fraternise with the people, upon a first success and the police, in such an event, would have been a green-coated Irish army upon the moment.
Birch and Clarendon would not even wait to get their enemy fairly into the new felony. They caused three to be arrested in the meantime (O’Brien, Meagher, and the present writer), on a charge of sedition; but on bringing the two former to trial, it was found that the juries (special juries in the Court of Queen’s Bench) had not been closely enough packed; and the prosecutions failed. In my case, though there were two indictments, one for a speech, and one for an article, and two juries had actually been struck, “Government” felt that a failure would be at least dangerous; so the Viceroy suddenly caused my
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arrest on a charge o£ “treason-felony” under his new Act, and determined to, not try, but pretend to try me, at the next Commission in Green Street — at any rate to clear Ireland of me and so get rid of one obstacle at least to the fulfilment of British policy.
Here, then, this narrative leaves the general affairs of the country and shrinks to the dimensions of a single prosecution. From the day that I entered my dungeon (the 23rd of May, 1848), I know but by hearsay how the British Government fulfilled the designs and administered the dispensations of Providence in Ireland — how the Famine was successfully exploited; how the Poor-rates doubled and trebled, and were diligently laid out in useless works; how the Orange Lodges were supplied with arms from the Castle; how the mere Celtic peasantry were carefully deprived of all weapons; how the landlords were gradually broken and impoverished by the pressure of rates, until the beneficent “Encumbered Estates Bill” had to come in and solve their difficulties — a great stroke of British policy, whereby it was hoped (now that the tenantry were cleared to the proper point) to clear out the landlords, too, and replace them with English and Scottish purchasers. In short, how the last conquest was consummated, let other pens than mine describe.
The United Irishman was at that time admitted to be making progress in stimulating the just disaffection of the people to the point of insurrection. The first and most earnest efforts, therefore, of the enemy’s Government were now to be exerted for its destruction. And now came the momentous question of the jury. The Ministry of England happened to be a Whig Ministry; and one of the artifices by which the Whigs had gained their reputation for “liberality” was hypocritically censuring the Tories for packing juries — that is, carefully selecting their own friends apparently to try, but really to destroy a political enemy. I provoked them to this prosecution with the idea that if they did not pack, and were beaten on the trial (in a case of so open and flagrant “treason”), the prestige and the real power of the British rule in Ireland would be wounded seriously, perhaps mortally — but that if they broke through all Whig maxims, and obtained their conviction by the usual villainous means of excluding five-sixths of the people from serving on juries, the atrocity would still more exasperate the furious disaffection, and ripen the Revolution. In all this I under-estimated, on the one hand, the vigour and zeal of the British Government in carrying out the designs of Providence, and on the other, the much-enduring patience and perseverance of the Irish Catholics.
The day of trial approached; and it became well known in Dublin, that Lord Clarendon was resolved. Whig or no Whig,
INTRODUCTORY xlv
to pack at least this one jury most jealously. The juries to try O’Brien and Meagher had been selected, indeed, with considerable care; yet on each of those juries there had been left at least one friend of the national cause — a piece of official negligence which ended in the defeat of those prosecutions; and it was, therefore, clear that it must not be repeated. Just before my pretended “trial,” however. Ministers were taken to task about the instructions which had been sent to Ireland for the conduct of the State prosecutions; and returns were moved for. Lord John Russell replied, in a most virtuous speech, that nothing could be further from the intention of the Government ‘than excluding Catholics as such, from the jury-box, using “unfairness,” or turning the administration of justice into a matter of politics.* The report of that virtuous speech arrived in Dublin on the very day when the Crown prosecutors and Attorney General were packing the jury, to convict me, as never jury was packed before — excluding all Catholics, as such — excluding all Protestants who were not known to be my enemies — openly “using unfairness,” and using the false pretence of law and justice to crush a political enemy. There was not, of course, a single Catholic left upon this pretended jury; nor a single Protestant who was not well known to be for the Castle, and against the People.
* This is Lord John Russell’s virtuous speech — it was on the 23rd of May: —
“I certainly did not expect that there would arise any charge against us of partiality on the ground of exclusion of Roman Catholics. I entertain exactly the same opinions I held in 1844, that the exclusion of Roman Catholics, as such, unless they were members of the Repeal Association, or were distinguished by the violence of their conduct in those Associations — the exclusion of Roman Catholics, as such, is an extremely wrong and unjustifiable proceeding. I therefore did not expect that a charge of this nature would be made; but, however, notwithstanding that, I did write when I first received from my noble friend, the Lord Lieutenant, an intimation that it was the determination of the Government to prosecute those several persons for sedition — I wrote to him immediately, to say that I trusted there would not arise any charge of any kind of unfairness as to the composition of the juries; as for my own part, I would rather see those parties acquitted, than that there should be any such unfairness. (Cheers) I repeat, that whatever example there Inay be given by others, of disregarding the obligations of right, and making the part they have to perform in the administration of justice a matter of politics, and not of duty, the Government will be the last persons to allow any example of that kind to operate upon them.”
[xlvi]
Two or three days after my pretended trial — as I find in the papers — the same Lord John Russell, being questioned again by Mr. Keogh on the expulsion of Catholics on all the three trials, declared that in the case of Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Meagher, jurors had not been set aside for political or religious opinions; but, said his Lordship, “have no explanation to
xlvi INTRODUCTORY
offer with respect to what has taken place on the trial of Mr. Mitchel.”
In short, the cause of “civilisation” and of British Law and Order, required that I should be removed to a great distance from Ireland, and that my office and printing materials should become the property of Her Majesty. Though the noble old Robert Holmes, who advocated the prisoner’s cause that day, had had the tongue of men and of angels, he could have made no impression there. A verdict of “Guilty,” and a sentence of fourteen years’ transportation had been ordered by the Castle: and it was done.
The Clubs of Dublin, as I was credibly informed, were vehemently excited; and the great majority of them were of opinion that if an insurrection were to be made at all, it should be tried then and there — that is, in Dublin streets, and on the day of my removal. There is no reason why I should not avow that I shared in that opinion, and refused to sign a paper that was brought to me in Newgate, deprecating all attempt at rescue. I believed that if the City of Dublin permitted any Irishman to be put on board a convict-ship under such circumstances, the British Government could have little to fear from their resentment or their patriotism afterwards. Others of my Confederate comrades differed from me; restrained the Clubs; promised action in the harvest (a promise which they afterwards fulfilled to the best of their ability); bade me farewell mournfully enough; and in due course of time, some of them followed me on my circumnavigation of the globe.
Their decision was wrong; and, as I firmly believe, fatal. But that their motives were pure, and their courage unquestionable, I am bound to admit.
So much I have thought fit to narrate by way of Introduction to the diary which I kept in my cell. The general history of a nation may fitly preface the personal memoranda of a solitary captive; for it was strictly and logically a consequence of the dreary story here epitomised, that I came to be a prisoner, and to sit writing and musing so many months in a lonely cell. “The history of Ireland,” said Meagher to his unjust judges at Clonmel, “explains my crime and justifies it.” No man proudly mounts the scaffold, or coolly faces a felon’s death, or walks with his head high and defiance on his tongue into the cell of a convict-hulk, for nothing. No man, let him be as “young” and as “vain” as you will, can do this in the wantonness of youth or the intoxication of vanity.
My preface, then, will explain, at least to some readers, what was that motive, spirit and passion which impelled a few Irishmen to brave such risks, and incur so dreadful penalties for the sake of but one chance of rousing their oppressed and degraded
INTRODUCTORY xlvii
countrymen to an effort of manful resistance against their cruel and cunning enemy.
It will further help to explain the contumacy and inveterately rebellious spirit evident enough in the pages of the “Journal”; and, moreover, will suggest some of those considerations which lead the present writer to differ from the vast majority of mankind, and to assert that his native country has not been, even this time, finally subdued; that this earth was not created to be civilised, ameliorated and devoured by the Anglo-Saxons; that Defeat is not necessarily Wrong; that the British Providence is not Divine; and that his dispensations are not to be submitted to as the inscrutable decrees of God.
[Plate: Green Street, Dublin, on the opening of the Commission of Oyer and Terminer, May 1848; showing Newgate Prison, now demolished. The window marked X was that of the cell in which Mitchel was confined. xlx]
[xlviii-xlxi]
JAIL JOURNAL
CHAPTER I
May 27, 1848, — On this day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, I, John Mitchel, was kidnapped, and carried off from Dublin, in chains, as a convicted “Felon.”
I had been in Newgate prison for a fortnight. An apparent trial had been enacted before twelve of the castle jurors in ordinary — much legal palaver, and a “conviction” (as if there were law, order, government, or justice in Ireland). Sentence had been pronounced, with much gravity, by that ancient Purple Brunswicker, Baron Lefroy — fourteen years’ transportation; and . I had returned to my cell and taken leave of my wife and two poor boys. A few minutes after they had left me a gaoler came in with a suit of coarse grey clothes in his hand. “You are to put on these,” said he, directly. ”I put them on directly. A voice then shouted from the foot of the stairs, “Let him be removed in his own clothes” ; so I was ordered to change again, which I did. I asked to what place I was to be removed. “Can’t tell,” said the man. “Make haste.” There was a travelling bag of mine in the cell, containing a change of clothes; and I asked whether I might take it with me. “No; make haste.” “I am ready, then”; and I followed him down the stairs.
When we came into the small paved court, some constables and gaolers were standing there. One of them had in his hand a pair of iron fetters; and they all appeared in a hurry, as if they had some very critical neck-or-nothing business in hand; but they might as well have taken their time and done the business with their usual unconcerned and sullen dignity of demeanour.
I was ordered to put my foot upon a stone seat that was by the wall; and a constable fastened one of the bolts upon my ankle.
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But the other people hurried him so much that he said quickly, “Here, take the other in your hand, and come along.” I took it, and held up the chain which connected the two, to keep it from dragging along the pavement, as I followed through the hall of the prison (where a good many persons had gathered to see the vindication of the “law”) and so on to the outer door. I stood on the steps for one moment, and gazed round: the black police-omnibus — a strong force of the city constabulary occupying the street on either side; outside of them dark crowds of people, standing in perfect silence; parties of cavalry drawn up at the openings of the streets hard by. I walked down the steps; and amidst all that multitude the clanking of my chain was the loudest sound. The moment I stepped into the carriage the door was dashed to with a bang. Someone shouted, “To the North Wall!” and instantly the horses set forward at a gallop. The dragoons, with drawn sabres, closed both in front and rear and on both sides; and in this style we dashed along, but not by the shortest, or the usual way to the North Wall, as I could see through a slit in the panel. The carriage was full of police-constables. Two of them, in plain clothes, seemed to have special charge of me, as they sat close by me, on right and left, one of them holding a pistol with a cap on the nipple. After a long and furious drive along the North Circular road, I could perceive that we were coming near the river. The machine suddenly stopped, and I was ushered to the quay-wall between two ranks of carbineers, with naked swords. A Government steamer, the Shearwater, lay in the river, with steam up, and a large man-of-war’s boat, filled with men armed to the teeth, was alongside the wall. I descended the ladder with some difficulty, owing to the chain, took my seat beside a naval officer, who sat in the stern, and a dozen pulls brought us to the steamer’s side. A good many people who stood on the quay and in two or three vessels close by, looked on in silence. One man bade God bless me; a police-inspector roared out to him that he had better make no disturbance.
As soon as we came on board, the naval officer who had brought me off, a short, dark man of five-and-forty or thereabouts, conducted me to the cabin, ordered my fetters to be removed, called for sherry and water to be placed before us, and began to talk. He told me I was to be brought to Spike Island, a convict prison
JAIL JOURNAL 3
in Cork Harbour, in the first place; that he himself,t<however, was only going as far as Kingstown, where his own ship lay; that he was Captain Hall, of the Dragon steam-frigate; and that he dared to say I had heard of the unfortunate Nemesis. “Then,” quoth I, “you are the Captain Hall who was in China lately, and wrote a book.” He said he was, and seemed quite pleased. If he had a copy of his work there, he said he should be most happy to present it to me. Then he appeared apprehensive that I might confound him with Captain Basil Hall. So he told me that he was not Basil Hall, who in fact was dead; but that though not actually Basil Hall, he had sailed with Basil Hall, as a youngster, on board the Lyra. “I presume,” he said, “you have read his voyage to the Loo Choo Islands.” I said I had, and also another book of his which I liked far better: his “Account of the Chilian and Peruvian Revolutions,” and of that splendid fellow, San Martin. Captain Hall laughed. “Your mind,” said he, “has been running upon revolutions.” “Yes, very much — almost exclusively.” “Ah, sir!” quoth he, “dangerous things, these revolutions.” Whereto I replied, “You may say that.” We were now near Kingstown Pier, and my friend, looking at his watch, said he should still in be in time for dinner; that he was to dine with the Lord Lieutenant; that he had been at a review in the Park this morning, and was suddenly ordered off to escort me with a boat’s crew from the Dragon; further, that he was sorry to have to perform such a service; and that he had been credibly informed my father was a very good man. I answered I know not what. He invited me to go with him upon deck, where his crew were preparing to man the boat; they were all dressed like seamen, but well armed. I pointed to them, and asked, “Are those fellows marines?” He looked at me with a peculiar smile — “Well, come now, they are marines.” He was evidently amazed at my penetration in detecting marines without their uniform (I had asked the question in mere ignorance and absence of mind); “but,” he quickly added, “our marines are all seamen.” “I suppose so,” quoth I.
Captain Hall, of the Dragon, now bade me good evening, saying he should just have time to dress for dinner. I wished him a good appetite, and he went off to his ship. No doubt he thought me an amazingly cool character; but God knoweth the heart.
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There was a huge lump in my throat all the time of this bald chat, and my thoughts were far enough away from both Peru and Loo Choo. At Charlemont Bridge, in Dublin, this evening, there is a desolate house — my mother and sisters, who came up, to town to see me (for the last time in case of the worst) — five little children, very dear to me; none of them old enough to understand the cruel blow that has fallen on them this day, and above all — above all — my wife.*
What will they do? What is ta become of them? By this time, undoubtedly, my office, my newspaper, types, books, all that I had, are seized on by the Government burglar. And then they will have to accept that public “tribute” — the thought of which I abhor. And did I not know this? And, knowing it, did I not run all the risk? Yes; and I did well. The possible sacrifice indeed was terrible; but the enterprise was great, and was needful. And, moreover, that sacrifice shall not have been made in vain. And I know that my wife and little ones shall not want. He that feedeth the young ravens — but then, indeed, as I remember, young ravens and other carrion-birds have been better fed in Ireland than the Christians, these latter years.
After alii for what has this sacrifice been made? Why was it needful? What did I hope to gain by this struggle with the enemy’s “Government,” if successful? What, if unsuccessful? What have I gained? Questions truly which it behoves me to ask and answer on this evening of my last day (it may be) of civil existence. Dublin City, with its bay and pleasant villas — city of bellowing slaves — villas of genteel dastards — lies now behind us, and the sun has set behind the blue peaks of Wicklow, as we steam past Bray Head, where the Vale of Shanganagh, sloping softly from the Golden Spears, sends its bright river murmuring to the sea. And I am on the first stage of my way, faring to what regions of unknown horror? And may never, never — never more, O, Ireland! — my mother and queen! — see vale, or hill, or murmuring stream of thine. And why? What is gained?
* Mitchel’s Dublin residence in 1848 was No. 8 Ontario Terrace, Charlemont Bridge, Rathmines.
Let me set it down: —
First, then, I have compelled the enlightened “Government” — the Whig Government — after repeated warnings, challenges,
JAIL JOURNAL 5
taunts (so that everybody should know what I was about), compelled them publicly and notoriously to pack a jury, most strictly, in order to crush one man; and thus compelled them to prove that there is no “constitution” in Ireland at all; that the “Government” is not under, but above the Law; that trial by jury is a fraud; and that all Whig professions about conciliatory and impartial government in Ireland, were as false as the Father of Whiggery himself..
— They dared not have given me a fair trial before my ‘ countrymen. If I had beaten them on that trial, it would have been a victory which I could have followed up to their utter smash. I would soon have shown all Ireland the way — not to drive a coach-and-six through, but to ride rouglishod over their laws and them.
Second. — By demonstrating that there is no law or Constitution for us, I have put an end, one may hope, to “constitutional agitation,” and shamed the country out of “moral force” (in the O’Connellite sense). So, that delusion being put out of the way, there is a chance of my countrymen seeing, what is a solemn truth, that, for Ireland’s “grievances,” her famines, her party spirit, her packed juries, her exterminations, there is but one and all-sufficient remedy, the edge of the sword.
— As God is above me, this is true. On the truth of it I have staked body and soul, and will abide the issue. Those who consider that all through O’Connell’s forty years of “agitation,” the people had been industriously taught by him and the priests to keep the peace, and abhor bloodshed, and also to “keep within the law” (thus falsely and fatally acknowledging the existence of government, and the validity of London law) will understand the difficulty of making any way in respect of this matter, and also the need there was to enforce the true doctrine openly, and so to break the canting spell.
Third. — I have shown the Catholics of Ireland that they are not yet emancipated, for all their Clare-elections; that they are deliberately, ostentatiously debarred from executing the common civic office of jurors in any case of public concernment — that is to say, that they are not citizens in their own land — that is to say, that they are slaves — for there is no middle term. They are
6 JAIL JOURNAL
ruled now, as ever, by the sword; if they go on quietly obeying this kind of rule, let them obey, and be hanged!
— I do not know what they will do upon being made to learn this lesson. I only know what they ought to do. All Catholic judges, assistant-barristers, magistrates, and other functionaries, ought to resign their employments; all Catholic policemen ought to strip off their ignominious livery; all Catholic soldiers ought to desert — in one word, what the Catholics ought to do is to tear up society from its roots, but they will be citizens in their own land. What they will do, for the present, is the reverse of all this. Some of the respectable Castle-Catholics will thank me little for bringing their degradation so prominently into public view; they think they are emancipated enough, and will curse me by their gods, if they have any. Heaven! where is the great heart of chief and tanist? How has the rich blood of O’Conor and O’Donnell Roe grown pale! Is this, the stateliest family of the Caucasian race, indeed, starved and kicked into incurable Helotism?
But young Catholics are growing up — even, I trust, in the Castle-going rank of life — who will shame their fathers, and do honour to their ancestors.
Fourth. — I have made sure — for the thing is not going to stop here — that the breach between the Irish people and the Carthaginian government will be made henceforth wider and deeper than ever — that disaffection will grow and thrive — that Nice, Queen of Carthage, will not steer her yacht to Ireland this summer of 1848, as she graciously intended* — that Ireland will become ungovernable to all Carthaginian governments; and, finally, that the struggle will become a republican one in the long run.†
* But the next year Her Gracious Majesty did carry her beneficent intention into e£fect, and the debased ‘nation set its neck under her feet in a paroxysm of fictitious “loyalty,” It is painful to relate, but it is the disgraceful fact. — J. M.
†All these reflections, inferences, and predictions, I give exactly as I wrote them down at the time. I stand to them all; though I know that many will say subsequent events have belied them. We shall yet see whether those subsequent events will not have events subsequent to them also, and belying them; the remotion of the negative is the position of the affirmative. — J. M [7]
Now, if I have indeed done, or helped to do, or materially furthered and provided for the doing of these things — and if my
JAIL JOURNAL 7
zeal in this matter has not been born of greediness, or ambition, or vain-glory, shall I not say that I have done well? Shall I not go on my dark voyage with a stout heart — aye, and wear my fetters lightly, as garlands of flowers? I may not know, indeed, how the great game goes; newspapers will probably be wholly out of my reach. The cause may prosper soon and suddenly beyond my hope — or may be shipwrecked by fools, or sold by traitors, for a time. I, myself (but that is no great matter), may be named patriot and martyr — Heaven help me! — or, contrariwise, may be “sung and proverbed for a fool in every street”; or, indeed, clean lost sight of within a month. And I, in some far latitude, perhaps under the Southern Constellations, will be unconsciously doing my daily convict-work. What would I not give, six months hence, for a bulletin from Reilly or Martin, to tell me how it goes!
I am not afraid of either cowardice or treachery on the part of our chiefest men. Meagher is eloquent and ardent — brave to act; brave, if need be, to suffer. I would that he took the trouble to think for himself. O’Brien is bold and high-minded, but capricious, unaccountable, intractable; also, he is an aristocrat born and bred, and, being a genuine Irishman himself, he cannot be brought to see that his fellow-aristocrats are not Irish, but the irreconcilable enemies of Ireland. Then who will dare to write or publish one word of bold truth? The Freeman will be tame and legal till the evil days are overpast. The Nation will be so busy giving “the party” a properly Girondesque character, and discriminating carefully between the wild Montagnards — to wit, me and the like of me — on the one hand, and the truly respectable Lafayette-Lamartinists, on the other, that he will be of little use in dealing with the substantial Irish affair that lies before him. Dillon — O’Gorman — good and brave men, but not sufficiently desperate. My chief trust is in Martin and Reilly; but then they will probably be the very first devoured by the Carthaginian sea-monster. God be with them all and direct them; and, above all, put some heart into the poor people!
It darkened over the sea, and the stars came out; and the dark hills of Wicklow had shrouded themselves in the night-fog before I moved from the shoreward gunwale of the quarter-deck. My two guardians, the police-constables in plain clothes, who had
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never left my side, now told me it was growing late, and that tea was ready below. Went down, accordingly, and had an “aesthetic tea” with two detectives. Asked my two friends if they knew my destination. They knew nothing, they said; but thought it probable I would not be removed from Spike Island; supposed that Government would just keep me there “till matters were a little quieted down,” and then let me go. Well, I think differently, my plain-coated, plain-witted friends. On Ireland, or anywhere near it, assuredly I will not be allowed to live. But where then? The Carthaginians have convict colonies everywhere: at Gibraltar, at Bermuda, in the Atlantic; at Norfolk Island, in the Pacific; besides Van Diemen’s Land, and the various settlements in New South Wales; for on British felony the sun never sets. To any one of these I may find myself steering within the twenty-four hours. But be my prison where it will, I suppose there is a heaven above that place.
There is a good berth provided for me here, and I am as sleepy as a tired ploughman. Good night, then, Ireland, and Irish tumults, strugglings and vociferations, quackery, puffery, and endless talk! Good night, friends and enemies. And good night, my sweet wife and widow! — yet we shall meet again.
28th. — Sunday morning. A bright morning, but no land in sight. Found the United Irishman of yesterday in my cabin. The sixteenth and last number. Read all the articles. Good Martin! Brave Reilly! but you will be swallowed, my fine fellows. “Government” has adopted the vigorous policy.
Was invited to breakfast with the Lieutenants and surgeon. All very polite to me. One of them, whom I take to be the second lieutenant, is a fine young fellow, who has lately returned from the Pacific, after cruising there seven years, and is as brown as Queen Pomare. He is an Irishman, but far more familiar with the politics of Tahiti and Hawaii, than with Irish affairs. About ten o’clock the land-fog rose, and far to the northward I could recognise the coast about Youghal, the opening of the Blackwater, and beyond these, faint and blue, the summits of Knockmeldown. We had kept a wide berth from the land all night, but were now making straight for Cork harbour. Soon it opened; within half an hour: more we came to anchor opposite Cove, and within five hundred yards of Spike Island — a rueful looking place, where I
JAIL JOURNAL 9
could discern, crowning the hill, the long walls of the prison, and a battery commanding the harbour. A boat was instantly lowered and manned. My friends in plain clothes told me they would “take it on their own responsibility” (policemen have high responsibilities in Ireland) not to put me in irons as I went ashore. The Commander and first lieutenant buckled on their swords, and took their seats in the stern of the boat beside me. We were rowed rapidly to the island, and as we walked up the approach, we met an elderly, grave-looking gentleman, who said, “Mr. Mitchel, I presume!” How on earth, thought I, did you know already that I was coming to you? — forgetting that Lord Clarendon, before I was “tried,” made sure of my conviction. However, I bowed, and then he turned and escorted us to his den, over a drawbridge, past several sentries, through several gratings, and at last into a small square court. At one side of this court a door opened into a large vaulted room, furnished with a bed, table, chair, and basin-stand, and I was told that I was in my cell. The two naval officers took their leave politely, saying they hoped to meet me under happier circumstances; and they seemed really sorry. I bowed and thanked them; and I was left alone. I found I had the range of the cell and the court before it, no prisoner being there but myself. Mr. Grace, the Governor, came in to tell me I might write home if I chose, submitting the letter to him. I did write, telling where I was, and desiring a trunk to be sent to me with some clothes and a few books. Mr. Grace also offered to lend me books while I should stay. A turnkey, or guard in blue uniform, kept sauntering up and down the court, and sometimes lounged into the room. Asked him what he wanted. He told me he was not to leave me until lock-up hour — thought this a great grievance, and wished for lock-up hour. It came at last: my door was shut, and for the first time I was quite alone.
And now — as this is to be a faithful record of whatsoever befalls me — I do confess, and will write down the confession, that I flung myself on the bed, and broke into a raging passion of tears — tears bitter and salt — tears of wrath, pity, regret, remorse — but not of base lamentation for my own fate. The thoughts and feelings that have so shaken me for this once, language was never made to describe; but if any austere censor could find it in his
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heart to vilipend my manhood therefore, I would advise him to wait until he finds himself in a somewhat similar position. Believe me, O Stoic! if your soul were in my soul’s stead, I also could heap up words against you, and shake mine head at you.
It is over, and finally over. In half-an-hour I rose, bathed my head in water, and walked a while up and down my room. I know that all weakness is past, and that I am ready for my fourteen years’ ordeal, and for whatsoever the same may bring me — toil, sickness, ignominy, death. Fate, thou art defied.
29th. — In this court nothing is to be seen but the high walls and the blue sky. And beyond these walls I know is the beautiful bay lying in the bosom of its soft green hills. If they keep me here for many years I will forget what the fair, outer world is like. Gazing on grey stones, my eyes will grow stony.
After breakfast to-day Mr. Grace came into my cell with a turnkey. He had a suit of brown convict-clothes in his hand, and said it was an unpleasant duty he had to perform, but that I must put on those clothes. I obeyed without remark, and in a few minutes after this a fat, red man came in to look at me. This was the governor of Smithfield Prison in Dublin, who is about to return home, and who desires To be enabled to attest at headquarters that he had seen me in convict costume. To me the whole affair is totally indifferent.
Drew my chair to the door, sat down in the sun, and spent an hour or two in reading the “Merry Wives of Windsor.” Thank God for Shakespeare at any rate. Baron Lefroy cannot sentence Shakespear to death, nor so much as mulct him for damages, though I am told he deserves it for defamation of character, in the case of Sir John Falstaff. The real Falstaff, or Fastolf, I am assured, was a very grave and valiant knight, and built himself the great castle of Caistor to dwell in; never drank sack in Eastcheap, nor made love in Windsor; was neither poor, fat, nor witty, like our Sir John, but was, in fact, as like to other good knights of the period as one shotten herring is like another shotten herring. Well; suppose all this to be what you call “true,” which, then, is the more real and substantial man? I hold that our Sir John is the authentic Sir John, and that your Fastolf was
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an impostor. Why, I have seen the man, and laughed with him a hundred times: for though he is fat and groweth old, and his hair is grey, yet the fine old fellow will never die — in truth, he was born with a grey head and something of a round belly. And so he can take his sack still, witty himself, and the cause of wit in others even to this day. Oh! I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff.
While I sat in the sun, a large and important-looking gentleman came into the yard, who is, I understand, “Inspector”: four or five well-dressed young gentlemen were with him. They passed into my room, made a few muttered remarks to one another, and went out again, looking ver sharply at me as they passed. I gazed at them abstractedly, as if I were looking through them, and thinking of something else. They came, I believe, only to see me. « Veiy well: I wish them much comfort.
30th. — My turnkey, who is desired never to leave me, I find to be a good, quiet sort of creature. He is some kind of Dissenter, hums psalm-tunes almost under his breath, and usually stays as far away from me as our bounds will allow him. There is a door in the high wall leading into another inclosure, and as I was taking a turn through my territory to-day, the turnkey was near that door, and he said to me in a low voice — “This way, sir, if you please”; he held the door open, I passed through, and immediately a tall, gentleman-like person, in black but rather over-worn clothes, came up to me and grasped both my hands with every demonstration of reverence. I knew his face, but could not at first remember who he was; he was Edward Walsh, author of “Mo Chraoibhin Chno,” and other sweet songs, and of some very musical translations from old Irish ballads. Tears stood in his eyes as he told me he had contrived to get an opportunity of seeing and shaking hands with me before I should leave Ireland. I asked him what he was doing at Spike Island, and he told me he had accepted the office of teacher to a school they keep here for small convicts — a very wretched office, indeed, and to a shy, sensitive creature, like Walsh, it must be dally torture. He stooped down and kissed my hands. “Ah!” he said, “you are now the man in all Ireland most to be envied.” 1 answered that I thought there might be room for difference of opinion about that; and then, after another kind word or two, being
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warned by my turnkey, I bade him farewell, and retreated into my own den. Poor Walsh! He has a family of young children; he seems broken in health and spirits. Ruin has been on his traces for years, and I think has him in the wind at last. There are more contented galley-slaves moiling at Spike than the schoolmaster. Perhaps this man does really envy me; and most assuredly I do not envy him.
31st. — The important Inspector came to me to-day, accompanied by Mr. Grace. He asked me if I had any complaint to make to him? “None whatever,” I answered. He hesitated a moment, and then said, “It has become my duty to inform you that Government have determined on sending you out of the country.” “Indeed! How soon?” “To-morrow morning.” “May I ask to what part of the world?” “Bermuda.” “And by what conveyance?” “A man-of-war, which has arrived to-day in the harbour.” “Very good,” quoth I, and they left me. Presently Mr. Grace returned, said he was glad to tell me matters did not promise to go so hard with me as he had expected — that he had a letter from the Castle, directing him to treat me quite differently from “a common convict,” to let me wear my own clothes, not to put me in irons, etc. Further, that he had been already on board the ship which was to carry me to Bermuda — the Scourge, a large war steamer; that he had seen the instructions which had been delivered to the commander before he left Portsmouth, and which bore that I was to be treated on the passage “as a person of education and a gentleman” — so it ran; and to have accommodations there unto correspondent.
A person of education and a gentleman! And if such a person has indeed committed a felony, is he not just all the more felonious? If a person of education commit the real crime of endeavouring to subvert social order, to break down the sanction of law, and to destroy the Government under which he lives (supposing order, law, and government to exist), how does his education entitle him to indulgence above other felons? But possibly you begin to see. Gaff ei* John Bull, that I am no felon at all, and have committed no crime at all, notwithstanding your new “Act of Parliament,” in that case made and provided; and you think it impolitic, or else you are ashamed, to proceed to the utter
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most rigour with me. Cowardly John! You ought either not to take up the vigorous policy at all, or else to carry it through with a high hand. This is child’s play. Positively I am either a felon or no felon; that is to say, either I am a felon, or you, John, are a felon.
Mr. Grace excuses himself for putting me into convict dress — says he had no instructions to the contrary at first, and did not know how they might feel towards me at the Castle; and so he was afraid to refuse when the Smithfield gaoler required to see me in felon array, that he might report it in Dublin. Curious that this should have happened twice. In Dublin also I had to put on the convict dress and strip it off again instantly. Come, my Lord Clarendon, either I am a felon or not a felon.
But perhaps they do this to vex and hurt me, not knowing how callous I am.
Wrote this evening to my wife, a cheerful letter, telling her everything that is pleasant in my situation, and how I am to be a gentleman, at least while on board the Scourge. But I fear now that her expected letter will not arrive before I sail, and then I may not hear for months anything that has befallen since I took leave of her in Newgate: what seizures have been made by the police; what she is going to do with the house in Dublin; where she means to live; how my children are. My wardrobe, too, is somewhat scanty, for a “gentleman,” seeing that they brought me away from Newgate in an old brown summer coat, old shoes, and a glazed cap; and the trunk I wrote for cannot come in time. Mr. Grace, however, has kindly taken the trouble of procuring for me at Cove a few changes of linen and other small indispensables. The surgeon of the establishment, a young man from the county Monaghan, came to request some autographs from me. It seems the women in Cove importuned him; so I indulged him, with half-a-dozen, and wish the sweet girls much joy with them.
Speaking of this surgeon, I must not forget to record that the first time he saw me he made most minute inquiries about my health; and when I told him I was in perfect health, and never had been better in all my life, he remarked that I looked rather delicate — perhaps I had been subject occasionally to some complaint? Told him I had — to asthma, now and then; but was at present quite free from it. He said that would do. “Do what?”
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I asked. Whereupon he told me that it might be necessary, in order to justify Mr, Grace in not setting me to work, to have a certificate from him that my health was rather delicate. All this passed on Monday last, and before Mr. Grace had received orders from the Castle not to use me as a convict.
I set down all these trifling particulars relating to my usage here because I foresee the worthy “Government” will have occasion to tell official falsehoods on the subject before all is over; otherwise, they are of no importance to me at all.
At five o’clock to-morrow morning a boat is to come ashore for me.
June 1st. — It was on a raw, damp morning that I took my last look of Irish land. The first lieutenant of the Scourge, in full costume, with cocked hat and sword, came for me with a boat full of marines. The Scourge lay about a mile distant — a long, low rakish-looking steamer, with black hull and two funnels. In a few minutes I stepped on deck, and was presented to the captain, who was walking on the quarter-deck. He lifted his cap, and asked me to go below, and he would show me my quarter. The principal cabin is very handsome, divided into two rooms, of which the one farthest aft is to be occupied by me as a sleeping-cabin. It has couches, chairs, and a table, and is lighted by all the stern windows. During the day both rooms are to be open to me; and the captain said, that as he is obliged to consider me as a prisoner, there will be a marine always stationed on sentry at the foot of the companion-ladder; and that whenever I desire to go upon deck, which I may do when I please, I am to inform the sentry, who will summon a sergeant — that for the rest, he hoped his hours would suit me, when breakfast, dinner, and so forth, will be served in the chief cabin. He is a quiet, saturnine, bilious, thin man of about fifty, with a very low voice — not at all a bluff seaman, or a jolly tar, or the like; yet I dare say he is an excellent officer, and will execute his orders.
Mr. Grace had promised to go to Cove and inquire for my letter; and the vessel lay for an hour, waiting his return. He came and brought a letter. I snatched it eagerly, and found in it a small religious tract, which an unknown lady had sent me. No letter from home. Ten minutes after this we were steaming southward, at ten knots an hour. So my moorings are cut.
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It rained dismally. The wind sung ruefully in shrouds and,. rigging; and huge grey rain-clouds darkened over shore and sea. We were out of sight of land almost as soon as the ship had cleared the headlands of the bay. I waved my hand north-east by-north, then went below, and ate a tremendous breakfast.
So my moorings are cut. I am a banished man. And this is no mere relegatio, like Ovid’s, at Tomi; it is utter exsilium — interdiction of fire and water; the loss of citizenship, if citizenship I had; the brand of whatsoever ignominy law can inflict, if law there be. Be it so; I am content. There are no citizens in Ireland there is no citizenship — no law. I cannot lose what I never had; for no Irishman has any rights at present. As for the disgrace of “felony,” that sits very easy upon me. To make me a felon needs an act of my own. No “Act of Parliament” can doit! and what ignominy London “law” can stain an Irishman withal, I am content to underlie till my dying hour. Be that disgrace on my head and on the heads of my children.
But for the thought of those children and their mother, and what temporary inconveniences they may suffer before arrangements can be made for their leaving Ireland — but for that I should absolutely feel jolly to-day. There is something independent in setting forth on a voyage of three thousand miles, with an old brown coat on my back, and a few shillings in my tricolor purse. The onus is not upon me. You Sovereign Lady, Queen Nice, have charge of me now; look you take good care of me. I am in your majesty’s hands at last; but you may find, O Queen! that I am too dear at the price you have paid, and are like to pay. I will cost you, most dread sovereign, rather more than my rations.
It has come on to blow hard this evening. Dined on four teaspoonfuls of arrowroot.
2nd. — Blowing still worse. Hoped fervently for a thorough-going storm. When one is at sea, one may as well have trial of all the sea can do. Steward came into my cabin; asked him if it was a, storm. “No, sir; only half a gale of wind.” I cursed its halfness, and tried to sleep.
3rd. — Ship still pitching and rolling heavily; part of the bulwark, the steward told us, is stove in — still no storm. Went on deck. Storm or no storm, this Atlantic rears grand, mountain-
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ous waves. Porpoises tumbling — Storm-Petrel skimming. This bird is the Mother Carey’s Chicken or procellaria — but I scorn it. All these things, are they not written in the journal of any young lady sailing to India for a husband — or missionary, or “literary” (that is, book-spinning) naval officer, spinning as he goes, for a manufacturer in Paternoster Row?
Went over the Scourge, and surveyed her fore and aft. She is a fine ship. A long unbroken flush deck; one huge mortar, containing five tons of metal, close behind the mainmast — one “long gun” pointed over the bow — one brass field-piece mounted on a carriage in the stern — and four carronades. She is manned by 180 men and boys. The long gun is a tremendous instrument. The sergeant of marines who has charge of me, a very fat and good-humoured fellow who rolls in his waddle, as only a fat Englishman can roll, seems greatly attached to this gun. He saw me looking at it, and came over to show me all the conditions of it — how it traverses — how it is raised and lowered by a graduated scale for taking aim, and so forth. “Ah! Sir,” said he, “she’s a clever piece — she’s just a clever piece,” he repeated, slapping her affectionately on the breech as he said it. The men were called to drill by beat of drum, and here was a new thing to me; for it seems all the sailors, as well as marines on board a man-of-war are regularly drilled as soldiers. They were armed with musket and bayonet, cutlasses, boarding-pikes, and hatchets — altogether most formidable looking pirates. They were drilled by the principal gunner, and certainly know how to handle their arms; but the ship rolled so much that, as they were ranged along the deck, they had to balance themselves very cunningly, on toes and heels alternately; and sometimes seemed on the point of making an involuntary charge across the deck with fixed bayonets, pinning the gunner and half-a-dozen officers to the opposite bulwark.
The organiser and chief mover on board the Scourge is the first lieutenant. By the first word he addressed to me, I perceived he was a Derry or Tyrone Irishman — told him so, and found that I was right. He is a native of Tyrone; and he and I went to school in the same city, Derry, at the same time, more than twenty years ago, but not at the same school. For twenty-four years he has been in the navy, and is (the captain tells me), a most admirable officer; but seems to think he will never be any
[Plate:] Mitchel’s Residence in 1848 (No. 8 Ontario Terrace, Charlemont Bridge, Dublin)
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thing but a lieutenant. He has not parliamentary connections, and is an Irishman.
Dined with the captain, whose name is Wingrove. After dinner, the saturnine man relaxed a little, and even grew cheerful. He thought I ought to be deeply impressed by my survey of his ship, and duly awed by a contemplation of the power and majesty of “England.” Yes, it is all very terrible and very grand. Captain, but if Irishmen had only the sense and spirit to take the management pf their own concerns, you would want carriages for some of your guns: some of the gilding would be rubbed off your epaulettes, I apprehend. The herds and harvests that we send every year to England (getting neither money nor value for them) would build and man dozens of your spitfire Scourges, besides frigates, and line of battle ships, what may suffice. Wood, iron, hemp, gunpowder, would obey Irish hands as well as Carthaginian.
Captain Wingrove has good wine. He had just come from Madeira and Portugal, when he was ordered off to Bermuda, so that he has had opportunities. He is evidently curious about late events in Ireland, but does not like to ask me much about them. Said he understood there was a practice in Ireland, in the law courts there, called packing juries, and asked what it meant. I explained it to him; but it is clear that he hardly believes me: indeed, he listens to everything I say with a kind of quiet smile — and sometimes looks doubtfully at me, as if he thought me slightly insane, and expected me to break out in some strange manner.
7th. — The weather has been very beautiful and warm, for some days; but to-day it is rather foggy, to my sorrow, for we are passing through the Azores between Terceira and St. Michael’s, and cannot see them. They are most lovely islands, with fine mountains and livers, rich in grain and fruit. Portugal has these and Madeira yet; but perhaps the next war will give an excuse to the bullying pirates of Carthage to take the Azores for coal depots, or convict depots, and so create some situations to relieve the pressure of younger sons.
The officers of the ship seem desirous to make my voyage as little irksome to me as possible. Several of them have offered to lend me books — and though I had vowed to look on no book save
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sea and sky during the passage, I find I must have recourse to them. A sea voyage is a very tedious affair: the weather indeed is warm and serene, but I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun: he is advancing fast to his summer solstice, and we are rushing to meet him at the rate of 180 miles per day. The pure profound blue of the ocean is most glorious to see. One whose navigation has been confined to crossing St. George’s Channel, with its short chopping waves and dull leaden colour, has never seen the sea.
CHAPTER II
June 12, 1848. — On board H. M. S. Scourge. Lat. 34° N., long. 40° 22’ W. — No ship has been in sight for five days. The routine of the Scourge has grown familiar; and one tires of unbroken fine weather and smooth seas. No resource for me but the officers’ little library. Therefore I have been sleepily poring over Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast”: a pleasant, rough kind of book, but with something too much hauling of ropes and “handing” of sails in it. Dana’s voyage was a strange one. He shipped himself as a common sailor, on board a Boston ship bound to California, on a two years’ trading voyage, and subjected himself to short rations and the insolence of a brutal captain; and all because he had heard the sea was good for weak eyes. In fact, he cured the weakness in his eyes. Now, I have weak eyes, too. Cannot I assume this present sea-faring of mine, and my residence in Bermuda, to be merely a method I have adopted for the strengthening of my eyes? And I will probably have no insolence, or hard work, or hard fare to put up with, as poor Dana had; neither will I be one whit more a prisoner than he was.
Mr. Dana is now, I believe, a successful lawyer in Boston; and therefore, perhaps, more a prisoner, drudge, and slave now than ever. Truly I may think my own position sad enough; but what would I say if I were in poor Mr. Dana’s?
I have been reading, also, “The Amber Witch,” a most beautiful German story, translated into admirable English, by Lady Duff Gordon.
We are in the region now of flying-fish and dolphins — not Arion’s dolphins, nor, indeed, any dolphins at all, but what the ichthyological terminology of the British navy calls dolphins. Sometimes, also, we pass through whole flotillas of “Portuguese men-of-war,” as the naval branch of the United Service calls those beautiful little floating mollusks that cruise in these parts under their opaline sails of purple and rose-coloured membrane. And again, we are often surrounded by the Gulf-weed, which diffuses
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itself hereabouts, after its long navigation from the Gulf of Mexico — if such be really its history, which I doubt.
Met a large ship to-day. We passed at a distance of two miles. She shows French colours, and is supposed to be a West-Indiaman, homeward bound, and for France. In a few days the vineyards on Garonne-bank, or the quays of Nantes or Havre, will welcome her snowy sails. Oh, had I the wings of a dove!
14th. — Gulf -weed, Portuguese men-of-war, flying-fish.
15th. — Flying-fish, Portuguese men-of-war. Gulf-weed.
16th. — Gulf-weed, flying-fish, Portuguese men-of-war.
17th. — Reading — for want of something better — “Macaulay’s Essays.” He is a born Edinburgh Reviewer, this Macaulay; and, indeed, a type-reviewer — an authentic specimen-page of nineteenth century “literature.” He has the right, omniscient tone, and air, and the true knack of administering reverential flattery to British civilization, British prowess, honour, enlightenment, and all that, especially to the great nineteenth century and its astounding civilization, that is, to his readers. It is altogether a new thing in the history of mankind, this triumphant glorification of a current century upon being the century it is. No former age, before Christ or after, ever took any pride in itself and sneered at the wisdom of its ancestors; and the new phenomenon indicates, I believe, not higher wisdom, but deeper stupidity. The nineteenth century is come, but not gone; and what now, if it should be, hereafter, memorable among centuries for something quite other than its wondrous enlightenment? Mr. Macaulay, however, is well satisfied with it for his part, and in his essay on Milton penny-a-lines thus: “Every girl who has read Mrs. Marcet’s little dialogues on political economy, could teach Montague or Walpole many lessons on finance. Any intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying himself for a few years to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton knew after half a century of study and meditation” ; and so on. If Pythagoras, now, could only have been introduced to Mrs. Marcet, or even to one of her premium girls, how humbly would he have sat at her feet! Could Aristotle or Hipparchus but have seen Mr. Pinnock before they died, how would they have sung nunc dimittas! This nineteenth century man, and indeed the century generally, can see no difference between being told a thing —
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conning it in a catechism, or “little dialogue” — and knowing it; between getting by heart a list of results, what you call facts, and mastering science.
Still more edifying, even than Edinburgh wisdom, is the current Edinburgh ethics. Herein, also, the world has a new development; and as I am now about to retire a little while from the great business of this stirring age, to hide me, as it were, in a hole of the rock, while the loud-sounding century, with its steam-engines, printing-presses, and omniscient popular literature, flares and rushes roaring and gibbering by, I have a mind to set down a few of Macaulay’s sentences, as a kind of land-marks, just to remind me where the world and I parted. For I do, indeed, account this Reviewer a real type, and recognised spokesman of his age; and by the same token he is now, by virtue of his very reviewing, too, a Cabinet Minister.
In his essay on Lord Bacon, he freely admits the treacherous, thoroughly false, and unprincipled character of the statesmen of that age; thinks, however, we must not be too hard on them; says, “it is impossible to deny that they committed many acts which would justly bring down, on a statesman of our time, censures of the most serious kind” [as that a man is a liar, an extortioner, a hypocrite, a suborner]; “but when we consider the state of morality in their age, and the unscrupulous character of the adversaries against whom they had to contend,” etc.
And the state of morality, it seems, varies, not with the age only, but with the climate also, in a wonderful manner. For the essayist, writing of Lord Clive and his villainies in India, pleads in behalf of Clive, that “he knew he had to deal with men destitute of what in Europe is called honour; with men who would give any promise, without hesitation, and break any promise without shame; with men who would unscrupulously employ corruption, perjury, forgery, to compass their ends. ”And they knew that they had to deal with men destitute of what in Asia is called honesty — men who would unscrupulously employ corruption, perjury, forgery, etc. — so, what were the poor men to do, on either side? — the state of morality was so low! When one is tempted to commit any wickedness, he ought, apparently, to ascertain this point — what is the state of morality? How range the quotations? Is this an age (or a climate) adapted for open
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robbery? Or does the air agree better with swindling and cheating? Or must one cant and pray, and pretend anxiety to convert the heathen — to compass one’s ends? But to come back to Lord Clive, the great founder of British power in India; when the essayist comes to that point at which he cannot get over fairly telling us how Clive swindled Omichund by a forged paper, he says: “But Clive was not a man to do anything by halves [too much British energy for that]. We almost blush to write it. He forged Admiral Watson’s name.” Almost blush — but not just quite. Oh! Babington Macaulay. This approximation to blushing, on the part of the blue-and-yellow Reviewer, is a graceful, touching tribute to the lofty morality of our blessed century.
For morality, now — Lord bless you — ranges very high; and Religion, also: through all our nineteenth-century British literature there runs a tone of polite, though distant recognition of Almighty God, as one of the Great Powers; and though not resident, is actually maintained at His court. Yet British civilization gives Him assurances of friendly relations; and “oiu: venerable Church,” and our “beautiful liturgy,” are relied upon as a sort of diplomatic Concordat, or Pragmatic Sanction, whereby we, occupied as we are, in grave commercial and political pursuits, carrying on our business, selling our cotton, and civilizing our heathen — bind ourselves, to let Him alone, if He lets us alone — if He will keep looking apart, contemplating the illustrious mare-milkers, and blameless Ethiopians, and never-minding us, we will keep up a most respectable Church for Him, and make our lower orders venerate it, and pay for it handsomely, and we will suffer no national infidelity, like the horrid French.
For the venerable Church of England, and for our beautiful liturgy, the essayist has a becoming respect; and in his essay on Hallam’s Constitutional History, I find a sentence or two on this point worth transcribing. He is writing about the villains who reformed religion in England, and the other miscreants who accomplished the Glorious Revolution, and he says: “It was, in one sense, fortunate, as we have already said, for the Church of England, that the Reformation in this country was effected by men who cared little about religion. And in the same manner it was fortunate for our civil Government that the Revolution was effected by men who cared little about their political principles.
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At such a crisis splendid talents and strong passions [by strong passions he means any kind of belief or principle] might have done more harm than good. ”But then he immediately adds — for we must keep up an elevated tone of morality now — “But narrowness of intellect, and flexibility of principle, though they may be serviceable, can never be respectable.” Why not? If scoundrels and blockheads can rear good, serviceable, visible churches for the saving of men, and glorious constitutions for the governing of men, what hinders them from being respectable? What else is respectable? Or, indeed, what is the use of the splendid talents and the strong passions at all?
I am wasting my time, and exasperating the natural benignity of my temper, with this oceanic review of the Edinburgh Reviewer. But my time at least is not precious just now; and I will plunge into the man’s essay on Lord Bacon, which cannot fail to be the most characteristic piece of British literature in the volumes.
This must be done to-morrow; for there are two sails reported in sight on the weather-bow, which is an event of high interest at sea; besides, the sun is drawing near his evening bath — a grand imperial ceremony, at which I always assist.
The ships in sight are — one American and one Carthaginian.
18th. — Last night, after two bells (one o’clock), I was awakened by a great trampling, pushing, hauling, and thumping on deck. Something unusual was certainly going forward. Got up; went through the cabin, and to the foot of the companion-ladder; found the skylights of the cabin removed, and smooth deck laid in their place — the captain out on deck — the companion-ladder blocked up at the top. The deck was cleared for action. I heard loud words of command. Spirit of the Constitution! Has war been declared since we came to sea? Is Baudin — is Trehouart upon us? May the Powers grant it! Oh, Trehouart, Admiral of Heaven! — lay yourself alongside here. You can easily wing our accursed paddle, or send two or three fifty-pounders into us amidships, to derange the economy of our engine-room. I ran through the lieutenant’s room, telling a boy who was there to run up before me and report me to my sergeant. At the foot of one of the funnels I found a ladder that brought me on deck. Ah 1 there was no enemy (no friend) in sight; it was only British discipline
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that had started British prowess from his sleep, to practise in the dead of the night. We were alone on the wide, silent sea, and were going to bombard the moon. Four times we shelled her with our huge mortar; not, if truth must be told, with actual bombshells, but with quarter-charges of powder; four times we thundered at her with our long-gun; four times with our carronades; and then, British energy having blotted the white moonshine awhile with his gunpowder smoke, tumbled into his hammock again. No living soul, but those on board, heard that cannonade — for fishes are notoriously deaf. On the convex of the great globe we are all alone here: and even here amongst the guns the whole effect is mean, for there is no echo, and each report is a mere belch, far indeed from the reverberating thunderous roll of heavy guns alongshore. It is a pitiful pyrotechny; and the black thunder-bearing Scourge seems, in this silent immensity, but a small black spiteful spitfire doing its paltry worst to trouble the still empire of great ambrosial night. But the smoke soon melts away, drifting off to leeward, and the solemn Moon (unharmed apparently) looks down as mildly on ship and ocean as before the battery was opened upon her. Forgive the impudent spitfire, O soft Moon! Sink her not to the depths with a discharge of thy terrible aerolite grape — for thou, too, as I do remember, art potent in artillery. “What is to become of us, mortals,” saith Jean Paul, “dwelling on this bare convexity, and the Moon going round bombarding us with stones, like a Turk! “Let there be peace between us and thee, [Gk. name] Oh, fairest huntress [Gk. name]! Call to mind those nights on Latmos, and be gracious to mortal man. We have war-engines enough, argument enough, and diabolic rage enough, to tear, blow up, crush, and batter one another — ay, enough to glut thee in thy character of Hecate, without thy ordnance of meteor-stones. Needs not that thou exact human sacrifices, beautiful Bendis! Gentle Astarte, queen of Heaven! There be ill-favoured demons enough unto whom we may immolate our brothers — Mammon and Moloch, and the truly enlightened God of civilization, fair-spoken Belial. Do thou, O Moon! wheel thy bright orbit, weave thy mystic nodes, and fill thy horns in peace!
Fine rant this.
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After breakfast, when the sun burned too fiercely on deck, went below, threw off coat and waistcoat for coolness, and began to read Macaulay on Bacon — “the great English teacher,” as the reviewer calls him. And to do the reviewer justice, he understands Bacon, knows what Bacon did, and what he did not; and therefore sets small store by that illustrious Chimera’s new “method” of investigating truth. He is not ignorant; but knows that Lord Bacon’s discovery of the inductive “method,” or Novum Organum, is the most genuine piece of mare’s-nesting recorded in the history of letters. And, to do Bacon himself justice, for all the impudence of his title (Instauratio Scientiarum) and the pretentiousness of his outrageous phraseology, he hardly pretended to be the original discoverer of wisdom, to the extent that many Baconians, learned stupid asses, have pretended for him. Apart from the “induction” and the “method,” and the utterly inexcusable terminology (far worse even than the coinage of Jeremy Bentham), Bacon’s true distinction as a “philosopher” was this — I accept the essayist’s description — “The philosophy which he taught was essentially new. Its object was the good of mankind, in the sense in which the mass of mankind always have understood, and always will understand, the word good. The aim of the Platonic philosopher was to raise us far above vulgar wants; the aim of the Baconian philosophy was to supply our vulgar wants. The former aim was noble; but the latter was attainable. ”What the mass of mankind understand by the word good is, of course, pudding and praise and profit, comfort,’ power, luxury, supply of vulgar wants — all, in short, which Bacon included under the word commoda; and to minister to mankind in these things is, according to the great English teacher, the highest aim — the only aim and end — of true philosophy or wisdom. O Plato! Jesu!
“The former aim was noble, but the latter was attainable.” On the contrary, I affirm that the former aim was both noble and, to many men, attainable; the latter not only ignoble, but to all men unattainable, and to the noblest men most.
The essayist makes himself very merry with the absurdities of what they called philosophy in times of ante-Baconian darkness. “It disdained to be useful, and was content to be stationary. It dealt largely in theories of moral perfection, which were so sublime
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that they never could be more than theories; it attempts to solve insoluble enigmas; in exhortations to the attainment of unattainable frames of mind. It could not condescend to the humble office of ministering to the comfort of human beings.”
Now the truth is, that Plato and Pythagoras did not undervalue comfort, and wealth, and human commoda at all; but they thought the task of attending to such matters was the business of ingenious tradespeople, and not of wise men and philosophers. If James Watt had appeared at Athens or Crotona with his steam-engine, he would certainly have got the credit of a clever person and praiseworthy mechanic — all he deserved; but they never would have thought of calling him philosopher for that. They did actually imagine — those ancient wise men — that it is true wisdom to raise our thoughts and aspirations above what the mass of mankind calls good — to regard truth, fortitude, honesty, purity, as the great objects of human effort, and not the supply of vulgar wants.
What a very poor fool Jesus Christ would have been, judged by the “new philosophy,” — for His aim and Plato’s were one. He disdained to be useful in the matter of our little comforts — yes, indeed, “He could not condescend to the humble office of ministering to the comfort of human beings.” On the contrary, “whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are holy, if there be any virtue— ”
Why, good Messiah! this is the mere Academy over again. Have you considered that these are unattainable frames of mind? You offer us living bread, and water which he that drinketh shall not thirst again; — very beautiful, but too romantic. Can you help us to butter the mere farinaceous bread we have got, to butter it first on one side and then on the other? — to improve the elemental taste and somewhat too paradisiac weakness of this water? These are our vulgar wants; these are what the mass of mankind agrees to call good. Whatsoever things are snug, whatsoever things are influential — if there be any comfort, if there be any money, think on these things. Henceforth we acknowledge no light of the world which does not light our way to good things like these.
Almost this sounds profanely; but the profanity belongs to the
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essayist. His comparison of Plato’s philosophy with modem inventive genius is exactly as reasonable as if he had compared the Christian religion with the same. Ancient philosophy was indeed natural religion — was an earnest striving after spiritual truth and good; it dealt with the supersensuous and nobler part of man; and its “aim” was to purify his nature, and give him hope of an immortal destiny amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats.
Just so, says the essayist; that was what they called wisdom — this is what I, Lord Bacon and I, call wisdom. “The end which the great Lord Bacon proposed to himself was the multiplying of human enjoyments and the mitigating of human sufferings.” Any thing beyond this we simply ignore; let all the inquirings, all the aspirings of mankind stop here. Leave off dreaming of your unattainable frames of mind, and be content with the truth as it is in Bacon.
I can imagine an enlightened inductive Baconian standing by with scornful nose as he listens to the Sermon on the Mount, and then taking the Preacher sternly to task — “What mean you by all this — ‘Bless them that curse you’ — ‘Love your enemies’ — ‘Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect!’ What mortal man ever attained these frames of mind? Why not turn your considerable talents, friend, to something useful, something within reach? Can you make anything? — improve anything? — You are, if I mistake not, a carpenter by trade, and have been working somewhere in Galilee; now, have you invented any little improvement in your own respectable trade? Have you improved the saw, the lathe, the plane? Can you render the loom a more perfect machine, or make a better job of the potter’s wheel? Have you in any shape economised materials, economised human labour, added to human enjoyment? Have you done, or can you show the way to do, any of all these things? No! Then away with him! Crucify him!”
Ah! but the enlightened Briton would say, “Now you talk of religion; that is our strong point in this admirable age and country. Is not there our venerable Church? — our beautiful liturgy? There is a department for all that, with the excellent Archbishop of Canterbury at the head of it. If information is wanted about the other world, or salvation, or anything in that
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line, you can apply at the head-office, or some of the subordinate stations.
True, there is a department, and offices, and salaries, more than enough; yet the very fact is, that modem British civilisation (which may be called the child of this great British teacher) is not only not Christian, but is not so much as Pagan. It takes not the smallest account of anything higher or greater than earth bestows. The hopeless confusion of ideas that made Bacon and Macaulay institute a comparison between ancient. philosophy and modem ingenuity, is grown characteristic of the national mind and heart, and foreshadows national death. The mass of mankind agree to call money, power, and pleasure, good; and behold! the Spirit of the Age has looked on it, and pronounced it very good. The highest phase of human intellect and virtue is to be what this base spirit calls a philanthropist — that is, one who, by new inventions and comfortable contrivances, mitigates human suffering, heightens human pleasure. The grandest effort of godlike genius is to augment human power — power over the elements, power over uncivilised men — and all for our own comfort. Nay, by tremendous enginery of steam and electricity, and gunpowder — by capital and the “law of progress,” and the superhuman power of co-operation, this foul Spirit of the Age does veritably count upon scaling the heavens. The failure of Otus and Ephialtes, of Typhæus and Enceladus, of the builders of Shinar, never daunts him a whit — for why? — they knew little of co-operation; electricity and steam and the principle of the arch were utterly hidden from them; civil engineering was in its infancy; how should they not fail?
The very capital generated and circulated, and utilised on so grand a scale by civilised men now-a-days, seems to modern Britons a power mighty enough to wield worlds; and its numen is worshipped by them accordingly, with filthy rites. The God of mere nature will, they assure themselves, think twice before He disturbs and quarrels with such a power as this; for indeed it is faithfully believed in the City, by the moneyed circles there, that God the Father has money invested in the three-per-cents, which makes Him careful not to disturb the peace of the world, or suffer the blessed march of “civilisation” to be stopped.
Semble then, first, that the peace of the world is maintained so
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long as it is only the unmoneyed circle that are robbed, starved, and slain; and, second, that nothing civilises either gods or men like holding stock.
But I am strong in the belief that the portentous confusion both of language and thought, which has brought us to all this, and which is no accidental misunderstanding, but a radical confounding of the English national intellect and language, a chronic addlement of the general brain, getting steadily worse now for two hundred years, is indeed more alarming than the gibbering of Babel, and is symptomatic of a more disastrous ending. By terrible signs and wonders it shall be made known that comfort is not the chief end of man. I do affirm, I — that Capital is not the ruler of the world — that the Almighty has no pecuniary interest in the stability of the funds or the European balance of power — finally, that no engineering, civil or military, can raise man above the heavens or shake the throne of God.
On that day some nations that do now bestride the narrow world will learn lessons of true philosophy, but not new philosophy, in sackcloth and ashes. And other nations, low enough in the dust now, will arise from their sackcloth and begin a new national life — to repeat, it may be, the same crimes and suffer the same penalties. For the progress of the species is circular; or possibly in trochoidal curves, with some sort of cycloid for deferent; or more properly it oscillates, describing an zirc of a circle, pendulum-wise; and even measures time (by aeons) in
that manner; or let us say, in one word, the world wags.
* * * * * *
Another crimson evening is upon us. The sun, in a conflagration of clouds, flames on the very rim of Ocean. He, too, the unwearied Sun, is chasing his own shadow round and round the world. “The Sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place whence he rose. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers came, thither, they return again. The waters wear the stones: Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man. Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth.” Good night.
19th. — One other observation upon the “great English teacher” and then I bid him farewell. Try to measure the value of him
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and his teaching, even in respect of human comfort, power, and luxury, the great end of it all. First, he never discovered, or even thoroughly learned, or, properly speaking, knew, anything himself. He had a smattering, like Lord Brougham, of the science of his age; of the one chancellor it might be said, as it has been of the other, “if he had known a little law he would then have known a little of everything. ”But I crave his lordship’s pardon — his, new I remember, was a nobler mission — not to toil himself, amidst laboratory fumes, forges, and furnaces, but to direct others how to toil: to survey and lay out great leading paths of investigation, to take a vast comprehensive view of the whole field of science, and allot the labourers their tasks. This man, then, living in an age of extraordinary intellectual and experimental activity — shortly after Galileo had demonstrated the true solar and planetary motions and Kepler had fixed their laws — after the telescope and the mariner’s compass and the printing-press had been invented (and all without the Organum) — this smattering chancellor, who never himself discovered anything, except his law, is supposed to have shown quite a new way, given quite a fresh impulse and a worthy aim to “philosophy.” I want the evidence; but there is none. Therefore I dogmatically affirm that no chemist, no geologist, no mechanist, physician, astronomer, engineer, or other “philosopher,” ever since Bacon’s day, in any investigation or series of experiments, thought once of the instantiæ, or the vindemiæ, or any of the other uncouth verbiage which makes up that preposterous book. I affirm, further, that of those men who have really carried forward science and the arts, not one in forty ever read that book — that of those who read it not one in forty understood it — and that of those who understood it, not one at all made use of it.
Hereupon the essayist, you may be sure, would tell me that although indeed they did not read, understand, or value the teachings of that book, or know the things treated of therein by Bacon’s names, yet they did pursue their inquiries, and conduct their experiments with due regard to the very instantiae of the “Organum,” and gather in their vintages by the very process our great teacher taught — yes, they did so, just as Tubal Cain and Dædalus, Archimedes, Aristotle, Colombus, and Kepler did before them, and not otherwise.
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What Lord Bacon really did, then, the whole result and upshot of his teaching — if anything at all — was this — to cause mechanical ingenuity and experimental or empiric investigations into the laws of bodies (with a sole view to use and comfort) to be substituted for Philosophy and dignified with that venerable name. And the popular essayist, not being an ill-informed man, nor behind, nor before his age, acknowledges that this is what Bacon did and pronounces that he did well.
Now I am tired of Macualay [sic for Macaulay] and his Essays, and see with sur-» prise that I have filled up some fourteen pages with a tirade against him. He is, after all, a very clever and dexterous artificer in words; one of the deftest of the nineteenth century. His Lay of Horatius and his ballad of Naseby might be imposed at first upon anybody, for poems, for true Song. I took them for such myself not long ago: but the thing is impossible.
“And what’s impossible can’t be.
And never, never, comes to pass.”
It has grown intolerably hot: and there is no escape: not a breath of cool air can any longer be won, for the calm is like death, and the sea, burnished as a brazen mirror, flashes back fiercely the glare of the ardent sim, as if we were between two fiery furnaces. The little pennon of slender feathers, set up on the ship’s quarter, though we are steaming eight knots an hour, hangs straight against its shaft. The fat sergeant wipes the sweat from his brow. The water is hot in the tank — the wine hot in the bottles, and the sea-water, with solution of gunpowder, will co( it no longer. What true philosopher will teach man to cool his wine, without ice, under a tropic sun? Not a sail on the sea; nor a wing in the sky; nor anything to indicate that this wondrous ocean is not shoreless. What if we have missed Bermuda? No matter; I have no objection to circumnavigate the globe. But the sailing-master, for his part, seems pretty confident that to-morrow, about mid-day, we shall make the islands.
20th. — Bermuda! About ten o’clock to-day, after the amber morning mist had lifted itself from the sea, the man at the masthead sang out “Land!” It was the first land visible since leaving Ireland, and everyone was eager for a glimpse of it. I looked ahead more curiously than any one else; having at present more
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interest in Bermuda than my shipmates have. Soon it became visible from the top of the paddle-box; several low “hummocks” of land, sharply defined against the sky and quite near to us; for no point of Bermuda is more than 180 feet high, and it cannot be seen until you are almost upon it. Half an hour more and we lay-to for a pilot: presently a boat came off: the boatmen were mulattoes, with palmetto hats; the pilot himself an utter negro. Soon we passed the dangerous entrance that lies between the easternmost island (crowned by a battery of Carthaginian cannon) and a great reef that bounds the archipelago on the north; and then we coasted along two of the largest islands for about ten miles, and had a near view of the land, the houses and the people. Almost with glasses we might have inspected the domestic arrangements through their open doors. There is a thick population all along here: their houses are uniformly white, both walls and roof, but uncomfortable-looking for the want of chimneys; the cooking-house being usually a small detached building. The rocks, wherever laid bare (except those long washed by the sea), are white or cream-coloured. The whole surface of all the islands is made up of hundreds of low hillocks, many of them covered with a pitiful scraggy brush of cedars; and cedars are their only tree. The land not under wood is of a brownish green colour, and of a most naked and arid, hungry and thirsty visage. No wonder: for not one single stream, not one spring, rill, or well, gushes, trickles, or bubbles in all the three hundred isles, with their three thousand hills. The hills are too low, and the land too narrow, and all the rock is a porous calcareous concretion, which drinks up all the rain that falls on it, and would drink ten times as much, and be thirsty afterwards. Heavens! what a burned and blasted country.
“Where never fountain or fresh current flowed Against the eastern ray, translucent, pure, With touch ethereal of heaven’s fiery rod \”
The people, it seems, have to be assiduous in catching the rain; cunning in spouts and tanks; and their stone is at any rate good for filtering water when they have it. I can see no cultivation of any sort, except some gardens; and there is very little of the land cultivated at all. On the whole, this place bears to my eyes
[Plate:] Fortifications and dockyard of Ireland Island, Bermuda, in 1848,
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an unkindly and foreign aspect; and as we coasted along here mile after mile, and saw nothing but the small hills and shrubby cedars, and parched soil, I thought with keen desidenum upon our own green Banba of Streams. In that hour’s sailing I could not help continually murmuring to myself:
“A plenteous place is Ireland for hospitable cheer,
Uliagone dhu, oh!
Where the wholesome fruit is bursting from the yellow barley ear,
Ullgone dhu, oh!
There is honey in the trees, where her misty vales expand.
And the forest-paths in summer are by falling waters fanned,
There is a dew at high noontide there, and springs in the yellow sand,
On the fair hills of holy Ireland. ”
But, after all, these are fertile and fine islands; they bring forth and nourish thousands of creatures to all appearance human; have two towns even; cities of articulate-speaking men, one of them being the seat of government and “legislature” ; have a dockyard, two barracks, two newspapers, absolute “organs of opinion” (with editors, I suppose, puffs, and other appurtenances); what is better, have abundance of fruit, vegetables, and fish; and I can see some cows, and plenty of goats, pigs, poultry. Verily, the land is a good land. It was here, amongst these very cedars, that noster George Berkeley desired to establish a missionary college, with a view to convert red Americans to Christianity, and gave up his fat deanery of Derry that he might take up house here as Principal of his college at £100 a year. The English minister (Sir Robert Walpole, I think) promised a grant of £20,000 for that college; and on the strength of this promise Berkeley left Derry, went to New England, where he stayed a year, expecting the grant and charter, soliciting objurgating, reminding, remonstrating — till his heart was nearly broken, and then he came home to Ireland, almost in despair. Good man! he little knew what a plague Ministers thought him, with his missionary colleges; they had quite another plan for the conversion of the red people — to convert them, namely, into red humus. But they gave George a bishopric at Cloyne, and there he philosophised and fiddled till he died. It was to Bermuda, also, that Prospero, on a certain night, sent his Ariel “to
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fetch dew.” Albeit, one might hardly know these isles for the still-vexed Bermoothes, for they lie sleeping on the glassy sea to-day, as tranquil as an infant on it’s mother’s bosom.
And was it not here, too, that “metaphysical” Waller, having transported himself hither to shun the evil days, dreamed his “Dream of the Summer Islands?” and has not Moore, also, sung these cedars? Bermuda, then, has its associations; is even classical; in fact, is apparently a genuine fragment of the flowery earth, peering above the Atlantic flood here. At any rate, it is habitable; and truly, if I am to be allowed some moderate liberty here, say the range of one of the islands, I might bring out all my flock, and we could cultivate arrow-root, oranges, and potatoes, dwelling primitively in a white-roofed cottage, with the sea in front, and a forest of cedar behind. This might be; possibly the “instructions,” the sealed orders Captain Wingrove carries out, may admit of such an arrangement. The climate is said to be somewhat unhealthy; but my little ones would surely grow strong in the vital sunshine, and so we might hibernate [æstivate) here, until either the term assigned me by my kidnappers is past, or some “reason of state” (for British statesmanship is deep, deep) shall come to set me free.
At last we arrived at the anchorage in front of the government island, where the dock-yard is established. This island is at the extreme northwest of the whole group, and its name is nothing less than Ireland. On one side of us, as we come to anchor, lies the huge transatlantic steam-junk. Great Western; on the other side we find ourselves under the guns of a stately line-of-battle ship of seventy-four guns, with the square red flag at the mast head denoting that she carries an admiral. A small government steamer is moving about in the bay; the dock, or camber, sheltered by its breakwater, has several ships lying in it, and scores of boats, of a peculiar and most graceful rig, are flying in all directions — so that the scene is a very lively one to those who have been three weeks in the solitudes of the ocean.
This admiral, whose station includes the West Indies and North America, I find to be no other than the old Lord Cochrane — or Lord Dundonald, as they call him now — the very man who cut out the Esmeralda from the roads of Callao — the Chilian admiral under O’Higgins — the Greek navarch under the Congress of
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Epidaurus — who has sworn more oaths of allegiance to revolutionary provisional governments than any living man — who has been fighting the aquatic half of wars of independence all over the terraqueous globe, from his youth up. I have no doubt, however, that he regards Irish revolutionists as highly immoral characters.
The evening has been delicious, and I have spent it, until sunset, chatting on deck with the officers, and surveying the islands around through a glass. Ireland island seems a strong fortress. A handsome range of buildings crowns the hill in the middle of the island; this is a barrack, with government storehouses adjoining, all having arched and bomb-proof roofs. In front of this the hill is deeply scarped down to the level of the dockyard; and in rear the slope is cut into terraces, mounted with cannon. The barrack hill communicates, by a long, sweeping line of fortifications, with another hill on the extreme north of the island, which is occupied with other government buildings, and surrounded by powerful batteries. In the crescent formed by all these works, to the eastward, is the naval dockyard, with its stores, offices, and wet dock. Some of these are vast and sumptuous buildings.
There is no such naval establishment as this in Ireland — I mean the other Ireland. The Carthaginians have always taken good care of that.
Inside the camber I see moored three great clumsy hulks, roofed over, and peopled by men in white linen blouses and straw hats — and on the back of every man’s blouse, certain characters and figures, and the queen’s broad arrow. They seem to be drilled and marched like troops. Now, am I to be enlisted in these rueful squadrons, and marked for the queen’s own these fourteen years to come? — I trust not. But if it be so, be it so.
The sun has gone down, “like battle target red,” behind the cedars. The skimming Bermudian boats, with their black crews of marketmen and washerwomen, have vanished under the dusky shores. The flag-ship has fired her evening gun; and I have retired, for the last time, to my cabin on board the Scourge. The captain has reported himself and his errand to the admiral; the admiral has communicated with the Governor: — to-morrow, I will know my appointed home.
CHAPTER III
June 21st, 1848. Still on board the Scourge, Bermuda. — Another steamer appeared to-day in the north-eastern channel — another of the great West India packets, two of which rendezvous here at Bermuda once a fortnight. Her deck was swarming with passengers, male and female, as she came to her moorings beside us. She left Southampton on the 2nd of June, and brings London papers up to that date. Our second Lieutenant instantly boarded her as officer on guard, and brought back two or three papers; and as I had seen none later than the 26th May, I was glad to get a glance even at the Morning Post. The leading article is about “the convict Mitchel,” who is pronounced by that authority to be not only a convict but a scoundrel. What was more interesting to me, I found Sir George Grey’s reply to a question in Parliament, as to whether my sentence would be executed. “Her Majesty’s Government had sent instructions to Ireland, that the convict Mitchel’s sentence should be fully carried out. ”Infinite and inscrutable is the stupidity of mortal man! — the question was put by Edmund Burke Roche, and was to this effect: Whether the Government would really carry out to the full extent “the unjust and disproportionate sentence” pronounced in my case? Blockhead! — the sentence was neither unjust nor disproportionate, if I had been tried and found guilty — the nature of the trial, not the severity of the sentence, is the thing calling for explanation and inquiry, and to that Edmund Burke made no allusion. Of course the Minister in his reply takes care to rebuke the questioner, and properly, too, for calling a sentence “regularly pronounced in due course of law” unjust and disproportionate. Can legislatorial helplessness sink any lower than this?
But what I find most interesting of all in this paper is in the column headed “Ireland” — to wit, the prospectus of the Irish Felon weekly newspaper, signed by Reilly and Martin, established to preach the doctrine of “Convict Mitchel,” and to
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extend and promote the sacred principle of Irish Felony. This is very good, and cannot end badly. It will force the Carthaginians upon more and more decided efforts of vigour — that is to say, more and more outrageous atrocities of lawless tyranny; it will compel all Lamartinesque politicians to become “felons,” or else say at once they meant no revolution; it will rouse attention to the struggle, and to the true meaning of the struggle; it will induce more and more of the people to get arms; it will strip British Whiggery bare of his treacherous, conciliatory, liberal lambswool, and show him gnashing his teeth like a ravening beast — for no brute is so ferocious as your frightened capitalist; it will silence all talk of “law,” and shiver to atoms the “last plank of the Constitution” — leaving Ireland as naked of all law and government (save the bayonet) as on the day when she first rose from the sea — as plainly and notoriously naked of law and government (save the bayonet) as she has been really and effectually these fifty years. At last she cannot but know that she is naked — pray God she be ashamed \ Then, if the Irish people will obey British bayonets, I say again, from my heart, let them obey and be hanged!
To be sure, Reilly and Martin will be seized without delay, their paper stopped, themselves “tried,” as the phrase is, and probably transported; for an insulted government cannot stand this. And Meagher, Duffy, O’Gorman, O’Brien, Dillon, some or all of them, may follow. No matter; better men have been starved to death by hundreds and thousands.
I know very well that this whole idea and scheme of mine wears a wonderfully feeble and silly aspect in the eyes of statesmanlike revolutionists; they can see nothing more in it than a number of gentlemen agreeing to dash out their own brains, one after another, against a granite fortress, with the notion that they are laying desperate siege to it. These statesmanlike politicians say to us that we should wait till we are stronger; that we should conspire and organise in secret, keeping under the shelter of the law for the present; that when plainly advising men to arm is made a “transportable offence,” we should no longer plainly advise, but exhort and influence them privately, until, etc., etc. Wait till your principles take root before you disseminate them, said a prudent adviser to me. But he who talks thus knows nothing of Ireland.
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In Ireland there can be no secrecy, so thick is it planted with Castle-spies. In Ireland you can never organise to any useful purpose so long as they are so miserably cowed by “law,” and see nobody willing to deny and defy this law. In Ireland no private influence can make men procure arms, because they have been taught for forty years to account arms not honourable and needful, but criminal and illegal; and if you spoke to them about arms in their own houses or fields, they would, perhaps, give you up at the nearest police-barrack as a “Ribbonman” — so they have been instructed, poor fellows, by priest and agitator. How, then, are we to get stronger by waiting? Are we not getting weaker, baser, more cowardly, more beggarly, the longer we wait? No; we must try the virtue of plain, outspoken, desperate truth for once. We must openly glorify arms, until young Irishmen burn to handle them, and try their temper; and this we must do in defiance of “law,” and the more diligently that London laws are expressly made against it. We must, in short, make final protest against this same “law” — deny that it is law; deny that there is any power in the London Parliament to make laws for us, and declare that as a just God ruleth in the earth we will obey such laws no longer. I think there will be found some virtue in this statesmanship of mine, if men still grow in Ireland; at any rate I know no better.
At four o’clock this evening — as I was informed by means of a note to Captain Wingrove from the admiral — a boat was to come off to the ship for me; therefore I made ready my portmanteau. Several of the officers, whose names I will not write here (but shall not forget), judging correctly that wherever I should be stowed away I should want books, and knowing that I had no opportunity of providing such things before my kidnapping, begged I would allow them to give me a few volumes out of their store. This was genuine kindliness of heart; and, as I have no quarrel with these gentlemen personally, I took from four of them, one book from each. I have never found it easy, on a sudden, to haughtily repel any attention offered out of pure goodwill. It is not in me. Yet I believe that if time for consideration had been given me, I would have refused the courtesy of these decent fellows! What! shall I — I, John Mitchel, accept presents, almost eleemosynary presents from officers of the Queen
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of England? But I am glad that I had no time for exasperating reflections. Four o’clock came, and two boats approached, straight from the dockyard, and pulled by men in the white blouses. The hulks, then! No sea-side cottages or cedarn valleys for me — à l’outrance, then. Gaffer Bull!
Three men came on board the Scourge. One, a tall elderly gentleman, in a blue naval coat, announced himself as superintendent of convicts; another was commander of one of the hulks; the third, a medical officer. Fevf words passed. Captain Wingrove took a receipt for my body (on which it became the property of the man in blue), and bade me farewell with good wishes. Two of the officers stood at the gangway; and, as I stepped forward to descend the ladder, shook me warmly by the hand. We were pulled straight for the innermost of the three hulks, and in a few minutes I found myself on the quarter-deck. The superintendent then informed me that I was, for the present, to wear my own attire, and not to be sent out upon the works. I nodded. He then asked, “Have you any money?” “A few shillings,” “Any credit in the colony?” “None.” He called the chief mate of the ship to him, and said: “Take Mitchel’s money, and place it to his credit.” The mate, a tall old man with grey hair, locked at me dubiously, as if he thought me a novel species of convict, and did not exactly know how to proceed. So I took out my tricolor purse — “Here, friend,” I said, and emptied all I had into his hand. “Now,” said the superintendent, “you will find that nobody here has any disposition to add to the annoyances you must suffer — no severity of any kind will be used towards you, provided you are amenable to the rules of the place.” I nodded. “Especially,” he added, “it is my duty to tell you that you are to have no connection with public affairs, or politics, and are not to attempt to tamper with any of the prisoners on board.” I answered that I could hardly expect to be permitted here to take part in public affairs; and that I desired to have as little intercourse with the prisoners on board as possible.
The mate then said he would show me where I was to be lodged; I followed him down a ladder to the half-deck, and there, in the very centre of the ship, opening from a dark passage, appeared a sort of cavern, just a little higher and a little wider than a doghouse; it is, in fact, the very hole through which the main-mast
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formerly ran down into the ship, and would be quite dark but for two very small and dim bulls’-eyes that are set into the deck above. I cannot stand quite erect under the great beams that used to hold the main-mast in its place; but half of my floor is raised nine inches, and on that part I cannot stand at all. The whole area is about six feet square; and on the lower part I have a promenade of two steps [gradus), making one step [passus). When I entered, the cavern had, for furniture, one wooden stool. “Here’s your place,” said the mate. “Very well,” quoth I, sitting down upon the stool and, stretching out my feet to the comers of my apartment. So the mate and I looked at one another for a minute. “I suppose,” suggested I, “that I can have my portmanteau here?” He did not know yet, but would ask. He went away, and presently my portmanteau was sent to me, and a message with it, that if I wished to walk on deck or on the breakwater alongside, I might do so. Very glad to avail myself of the offer, as my dog house was intolerably close, I went up, and had a walk on the pier. Soon the “gangs” of prisoners began to come in from the works, and it was intimated to me that I had better retire. A hammock was then brought into my dog-hutch; and in order to make room for it, they had to swing it diagonally. A cup of milkless tea and a lump of bread were then brought me; and when I had despatched these, a piece of candle was left upon a narrow board or shelf projecting from the wall, and my door was locked. The light of the candle showed me a great many big brown cockroaches, nearly two inches long, running with incredible speed over the walls and floor, the sight of which almost turned me sick. I sat down upon my bench, and deliberately reviewed my position. They had not taken my books from me, nor my portmanteau. They had not even searched it, or me; nor taken this scribbling-book away, nor put me in company with the convicts. This is all good; but to-morrow may show me more. And what is the worst it can show me? Why, to be arrayed in a linen blouse and trousers, with my name and number, and the queen’s arrow stamped thereon, and to be marched to the quarries with pick-axe or crow-bar in my hand. Very well; my health now, I thank God, is good; I have hands, like other men. I am covered with my own skin, and stand upon my own feet, being a plantigrade mammal, and also, happily.
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rather pachydermatous. Let to-morrow come, then. As for my dog-hutch, the mate muttered something, before Jie left me, about another and better place being made ready for me in a few days. And for these huge brown beasts crawling here, I presume they don’t bite; other people sleep amongst them, and why not I? A bath in the morning, off the pier, will wash the sordes of ths. dog-hutch from about me.
Here goes, then, for my first swing in a hammock — and I feel myself a freer man to-night than any Irishman living at large, tranquilly in his native land, making believe that he fancies himself a respectable member of society.
22nd. — Bathed luxuriously in the sea; though I had to rise at half-past four that my bath might be over before the gangs turned out to work. Walked about a good deal on deck, which is pleasanter than the breakwater, as it is sheltered from the sun, though open to the air on both sides. It commands a view of the dock, the shipping, barracks, and batteries at one side, and at the other the wide anchorage and, “Grassy Bay,” with a great number of the islands beyond. They are all of the same height, garniture, and aspect, as far as the eye can reach. I think Bermuda is but young; it has pushed its hillocks up so high, and will undoubtedly grow bigger and better as it grows older. Plainly these rocks were part of the sea-bed not long ago; and they seem to me exactly like the land that is forming itself, saith Lyell, round the head of the Adriatic — the river sands, in short, and sea-sands, so soon as they are deposited, glued together, along with shells, pebbles, and the like, by a hard lime-cement — and so, gradually, by the help of nether fires, rising and becoming dry land. Bermuda, I see, is all made of the very same shelly concrete; and, without doubt, was heaved up to its present height in some volcanic paroxysm of the uneasy West Indian regions. And some future game of the playful earthquakes may give these islands a fresh impulse, and raise a peak or two into the clouds, to win some drops of gracious moisture there, and send them down in rills of living water. Then will Bermudians hear, for the first time, the murmur of a running brook, and see a miraculous “fountain of black, water” gushing from the heart of their arid hills: their tiny valleys will clothe themselves in a robe of daintier green,, and the development of the country will
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be as good as perfect. So, for aught I know to the contrary, your islands and continents are born and bred.
I observe to-day that great care is taken to keep me from all communication with the prisoners, to my very great contentment. The half-deck, where my dog-house is, seems to be reserved for the cabins and pantries of the mates, the surgeon and steward, and has no communication below with the fore part of the ship. Several prisoners are kept here in the capacity of servants, and one of them is assigned to attend upon me. For so far I have not been interfered with in any way as to my disposal of my time, and read or walk, just as it suits me; only when the prisoners are coming in for their meals, and while they are on board, I am expected to seclude myself. I do whatever I am bidden, at once and without remark, which seems to surprise my keepers a little. They did not expect me to be so quiet; and ascribing my conduct in Ireland, of course, to mere turbulence of disposition, and general insubordination of character, the commander has evidently some distrust of my extreme passiveness and submissiveness — he thinks it is all my deepness.
23rd. — As I sauntered to-day on the quarter-deck, with a book in my hand, two officers of the Scourge came to visit me. They had to deliver in their names and quality first, to be written down in a book; for I am given to understand that none but officers of the navy or arm are to be allowed the privilege of visiting me. In that case, I shall have but little company, as my acquaintances in the United Service are few.
I was well pleased to see, even for a short time, the faces of unhulked people.
25th. — Sunday. — Service on deck: the prisoners, all in clean frocks and trousers, arranged on forms over the deck forward; the guards and mates on the quarter-deck, amongst whom I had a seat apart. I attended service for a little variety; also to see what kind of chaplain we have. After service the chaplain came to me: he politely offered to lend me books, and even to procure me books from others. I rather like the man: he did not cant, as so many of those persons do, but seemed really desirous of serving me, so far as the rules would allow him. He is a Scotchman.
26th. — I have been installed in my new cabin, or cell; it is five feet wide, six feet high, and fourteen feet long — has a table, a
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chair, a basin stand, but, above all, has a window, that is, a port-hole, two feet and a half square, which, though heavily barred and cross-barred, gives plenty of light and air, as there is a glass lattice which opens and shuts. There are also two shelves for books, and the place is perfectly clean. This is a great improvement upon the dog-house.
I have observed that all the guards and officers of the ship, all the servants, and all the persons who remain about the place by day, employed as boatmen and otherwise, are every nian of them English. Was told by [must write no names here] that before I left the Scourge, all the Irish in this hulk, to the number of 80 or 90, had been removed to another, and their places filled up with Englishmen and Scotchmen.
The fools are actually afraid that I will stir patriotic mutinies here.
29th. — The commander came to me to-day, to inform me that I am to be removed to the hospital-ship. “Hospital-ship! why, [I] I am quite well.” — “An order,” said he, “has come from the Governor: you are to be removed in a boat this afternoon.” Shortly after, the medical officer. Dr. Warner, came in. “What’s the meaning,” I asked,” of sending me to an hospital — I am not an invalid?” No matter, he said, it would be a change greatly for the better, as regarded my comfort. He added that he understood the reason of the order to be a report made by the surgeon of the Scourge (I forgot to record in its proper place, that I had on the voyage a rather severe fit of asthma, which the surgeon thought it his duty to certify to the medical superintendent here). Accordingly, I have been removed; and but that I dislike being treated as an hospital patient, the change is certainly for the better. The Tenedos, which is used as an hospital, is a larger, newer, and cleaner ship than the Dromedary, my first abode: and she is moored about a quarter of a mile from land, in a most beautiful bay, or basin, formed by well-wooded islands, and far out of sight of the prison-hulks and the batteries. My cabin is a neat room, with two windows, and without any bars at all. The commander of this ship is Dr. Hall, a kindly old gentleman, who has been a good deal in Ireland, and knows several persons that I also know. He seems to imagine that I am very “unhappy,” and am always making vigorous efforts to conceal the
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circumstance; he never was more mistaken in his life — however, he is well-disposed to make me as happy as he can. If an Englishman wishes to be kind to any individual, his first thought is to feed him well: the foundation of all British happiness is victual; therefore, the steward has had special orders about my table. In truth, I do begin to set more store by that matter of dining than I ever thought I should. Tender Naso, in his captivity, hated the hour of dinner; or poetic pretends he did. I do not believe him; when one is cut off from all his ordinary occupation and environment, dinner is the great event of his day. If they keep me here many months, living all alone, and supply me with sapid viands, I shudder to think what an overwhelming moment dinner-time may become to me: how I will tear my victuals like a wild beast, gorge them in my solitary cavern, and then he down to doze until next feeding-time. Infandum!
Sometimes I put myself to the question about it — How can I eat thus heartily of British convict rations? — sleep thus calmly on a felon’s iron bed? — receive in graciouswise the courtesies of Carthaginian gaolers, looking my black destiny so placidly in the face? By heaven! it cannot be but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make oppression bitter. Go to — I will lash myself into suitable rage. But it will not do. The next time old Dr. Hall comes in, with his grey hairs and good old weather-beaten countenance, and begins to talk, my armour of sullen pride will fall to pieces: the human heart that, I suppose, is in me will know its brother, and I will find myself quietly conversing with that old man, as friend with friend.
July 4th. — The mail steamer from the West Indies has just arrived, on her way to England; so I have written to my wife, giving a long account of my voyage, and my way of life here. Cannot have her answer, at soonest, before the 19th of August.
9th — Sunday. — Service on deck as usual. The chaplain, who came down to my cabin after service, tells me he performs service at all the hulks and the hospital too. He darts about in a fast-sailing boat; rattles over our beautiful liturgy four times, preaches either twice or three times, giving himself about half an hour to take breath and dinner, and steers his bark homeward in the evening. The chaplain had left me about half an hour, and I was sitting at an open window reading Livy and drinking grog.
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beginning, indeed, to feel myself at home in the Tenedos — for I have been ten days on board — when Dr. Hall entered my cabin in a violent hurry, accompanied by a negro boatman. “An order to remove you,” he said, “directly.” — “Where now, sir?” I asked. “Oh! back to the Dromedary. The commander of the Dromedary has come in his own boat, bringing the governor’s order; and this man will carry your portmanteau upon deck. I am very sorry,” he continued, “and cannot guess the reason, but you must go.” I had by this time thrust my books and everything belonging to me into my box; and in five minutes more I was on my way back to Ireland Island.
We passed close by a piece of ground on this island neatly laid out as a graveyard. The commander, seeing me looking at it, informed me that it was the convict cemetery; for convicts, when they die, are not suffered to repose in church-yards by the side of corpses that take their ease in consecrated ground. I looked now still more curiously at the cemetery, and cannot say that I liked it. I have a respect for my own body, and wish that it may mingle with earth, if not in consecrated ground, at least not in unblessed company. Yet it is far from improbable that in this small enclosure between the sea and the cedars my bones will rest at last. The commander tells me there is, at some seasons, wonderful mortality on board these hulks; that in the first summer of their abode here, many are carried off by dysentery; and that sometimes they perish by hundreds in the West Indian yellow fever. I kept gazing at the cemetery until a point of land hid it from my sight, and as I turned my head away, I shivered.
Half an hour’s sailing brought me to my cell on board the Dromedary. Asked the commander if he knew the meaning of this last movement, but he professed to know nothing, except that a special express from Halifax (where the admiral is now) had arrived this morning to the Governor.
Heard, however, a full explanation of it from [Anonymous]. When the Irish in New York heard of my conviction, and deportation they made some demonstrations; and even threatened (words being cheap) to equip a vessel, or for that matter, I believe, a squadron, to rescue me. I learn further, that the Government surveying-steamer is forthwith to have her bulwarks pierced for guns, and to be armed as heavily as
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she can bear; and other formidable precautions are to be taken. In the meantime, the retired bay where the hospital-ship lies is not judged so secure a residence for me as this little well-grated cell, under the muzzles of the battery guns.
10th. — Everybody looks mysteriously at me to-day when I go up to walk on deck. They think they have got a troublesome shipmate on board; and the authorities look very determined. But I take notice of nothing, address nobody, am addressed by nobody, and walk about as before without any interference. Martial preparations are observable; workmen busy cutting ports in the steamer right opposite my window: further off, along the top of the fortifications, a Une of tents pitched, where, as I hear, the troops are to sleep at night for a time. All this is a little amusing to me.
14th. — Making myself at home in my den here, so far as circumstances will admit. A cot, instead of a hammock, has been provided for me, and Dr. Hall has sent two or three other small matters of convenience; also, a good-natured man, named Black, who tells me he is commander of the Medway, the largest of these hulks, has lent me some books, and told me (taking care, however, to speak to me in presence of the “first mate”) that he has a great quantity of miscellaneous material in the nature of books, which he will be happy to lend me from time to time.
With all these appliances, both for bodily health and mental dissipation, with liberty to write for, and receive any books I please from home (except political periodicals), with sufficient space to exercise in the fresh sea-air, with abundance of good food, and a constant supply of fresh water, and paper, and pens; with all these furtherances, I have been considering whether it would be possible to live here for some indefinite number of years, or even for the whole fourteen, should nothing happen to cut them short. And why not? Major Bernardi lived forty years in Newgate; but then he had his wife and family always with him; and, except for the mere accident of locomotion, was as much in the world as anybody outside. The Earl of Northumberland lived fifteen years in the Tower in the time of James the First; but, then he had leave to correspond with all the learned men of Europe about astronomy; had the White Tower, I suppose, for an observatory; no restrictions as to -ing with whom
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he pleased; and, I daresay, everything handsome about him. James the First of Scotland, indeed, was imprisoned eighteen or twenty years in Windsor Castle; but, to be sure, he had plenty of society, and a duchess to make love to, which would make a great difference. None of these cases is like mine. The Man in the Iron Mask is more to the purpose: he wore away all his weary days in close confinement. Delatude, also, the Bastile prisoner, ought to encourage me; he lived thirty-seven years in most rigorous imprisonment, and emerged (see the Duchess D’Abrantes) a fine hale old gentleman at last. I forget how long Tasso was kept in the mad-house; but Silvio Pellico was ten years in the Austrian dungeons. Bonnivard was six years in Chillon, a most uncomfortable place; and Raleigh thirteen years in the Tower of London. Who else? Balue, the founder of the great Evreux Cathedral, was kept by Louis XL twelve years in a loathsome den; and I find, from the Book of Kings, that Jehoiachim, King of Judah, lay in a Babylonian dungeon thirty-seven years. I wish I had books and materials here to collect a hand-book of prison biography, for encouragement to myself if I should hereafter chance to need it. Fourteen years are a long time; yet they will assuredly pass. I have nothing to do but keep myself alive and wait.
Suicide I have duly considered and perpended, and deliberately decided against, for reasons which I will here set down in order, so that I may have them to refer to, if that method of solution become a question with me hereafter; for, alas! I know that in fourteen years will be many a dreary day, many a weary night; and sickness and deadly tædium will fall heavily down upon my soul; and often the far-off end of my days of sorrow will be clean out of my sight for the thick clouds that will seem closing around me, veiling all my horizon in the blackness of darkness. Ah! long years in a lonely dungeon are no light thing to the stoutest heart — not to be laughed at by any means; not to be turned back or got rid of, or made to pass merrily as marriage-bells by any system of jesting, or moralising, or building up of sentences, philosophic or jocular, for one’s private edification or ghastly solitary laughter. And the way of escape will be always near me and often tempting; ‘tis but opening a door, but touching a spring, and the fardel of my life is cast down, and the black bars vanish from between me
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and yonder setting sun. Yet will I not lay hand” upon my own life, for the reasons here following: —
— First. Because I should, in such case, be a conspirator with Baron Lefroy, the Sheriff of Dublin, and the Ministers of England, against my own name and fame. Their parliament and their sheriff may nickname me “felon,” but if I, in despair, thereupon rush to my death, I will own myself a felon, indeed, and send my children scandalised to their graves, as the children of a self-convicted criminal and despairing suicide.
— Second. Because, having engaged in this undertaking with full knowledge that this imprisonment might, and probably would be, the end of it for me, suicide now would be a mean and cowardly confession that the consequence of my own acts, I find upon trial, to be more than I can bear.
— Third. Because, whereas I am now employed in carrying forward that undertaking, I trust to a happy issue, if I kill myself, I not only desist from the whole enterprise, but, so far as in me lies, undo all I have done. Sometimes to suffer manfully is the best thing man can do — passiveness may happen to be the most effectual action; and I do firmly believe that (unless my whole life has been one gross mistake from the first) I am this moment, though three thousand miles off, active in Ireland — not passive in Bermuda. The manner of my sham trial, the eager, fierce haste of the enemy to gag and ruin me, the open war waged against all constitutional and legal right in Ireland — all this will (or else the very devil is in them) sting the apathetic, shame the “constitutional,” and, above all, rouse the young to a pitch of wrathful disaffection that cannot but come to good. While I am known to be living in vile sinks of felony — and through such means — especially if other and better men follow through the same means, the mind of the young Irish generation will not easily settle down and acquiesce in the sway of the foreign enemy. But if I die. I, for one, will soon be forgotten. There will be one stimulus the less to Ireland’s friends — one difficulty the less to her foes. And if I die by my own hand, I will be worse than forgotten — I will have confessed that England’s brute power is resistless, and therefore righteous — at any rate, that I for my part, am a beaten man. It will be my last speech and dying declaration, imploring my countrymen to avoid the
[Plate:] Batteries – “The Medway” — “The Coromandel” — “The Dromedary” — “Victualling Stores ” — Keep and Commissioners House.
A view of Ireland Island, Bermuda, in June 1848.
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terrible fangs of British law — my pupils will hang their heads for shame; and, instead of an example, I shall have become a warning.
Fourth. Because my flesh creeps at the thought of the convict cemetery.
Fifth, Because I have much to live for — many duties but half-discharged or wholly neglected — young children brought into the world, and allowed to grow up hitherto, like an unweeded garden. For so busy has my life been that I never yet got much further than intending to begin doing my domestic duties. But if it be the will of Providence to draw me alive out of this pit, I hope to do my children some good yet before I die.
Sixth. Because * * * *
For these six reasons I mean to live, and not die. It may be that two years, five years, or seven years, may bring me freedom; for the time is like to be eventful, and Carthaginian policy is surprisingly deep and inscrutable; but, at any rate, I will live on, and see it out, and even economise my health and strength, that I may not be turned out at forty-six years of age a decrepit old man, but may have some stamina and spirit left to begin the world upon over again.
My six reasons so set out in black-on-white, I find to be altogether sufficient. And well they are so; for the cool determination to maintain a mere animal or vegetable life in an ignominious den like this has need of good reasons to justify it. Suicide is not in itself a bad act, though in any given case it may be a very dark crime indeed. Pliny’s sad saying — that the choicest blessing of this life is the power to end it — may not be universally true; yet that same is a blessing; and if there be a settled desire of death, and no adequate reasons for living — that is, if it be not your clear duty to live, then it is your clear right to die. Only let every man beware of mistakes in forming a judgment on the point: let him do nothing in haste, or out of impatience, spite, or passion: let him give himself a fair trial — a rare thing under the sun — and if he find, on impartial inquest, that the burden of his life is heavier than he can bear, and that his death, or manner of his death, will injure no one — then let him calmly, and in all good humour, in no spirit of impious defiance of heaven, or stupid scorn of mankind — let him, like good old Gloster,
Shake patiently his great affliction off,
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But, having gone so far into thig exhilarating tractate of self-murder, let me see if I can get to the root of the matter. There ii» an axiom of lawyers in all lands — and founded surely on sound ethics — that you may do what you will with your own, but so as not to hurt your neighbour. And what can be my own, if my own body be not? I will move it whither I please (unless somebody steals it from me and locks it up — as may sometimes happen) — or if I choose, I will keep it at rest, feed or physic it, pamper or starve it, Or, if I like, riddle it with bullets, cr drown it in the sea, but always provided nobody else is hurt by these proceedings. Locomotion, in like manner, is not in itself a crime — no more than suicide; yet one has not a right to exercise locomotive power by bolting from his place of abode, leaving his rent unpaid and his children starving.
It seems, then, that no man ought to leave engagements undischarged, or duties that he has implicitly or explicitly contracted to do, undone. Is this the key that opens the whole mystery?
Hardly the whole. I have heard people say, indeed, that in no case can one cast away life without deserting duty; for every man being born into a world of creatures like himself, all fitted for social life, and in need of one another’s help, and being endowed with faculties, wants, and sympathies accordingly — has claims (so they say) on all other men, and must reciprocally admit their claims on him — is bound, in short, to exercise those faculties, for the good of himself and others, to supply those wants and develop those sympathies and affections, and so become and continue, nolens volens, a good and useful member of society, until it shall please God Who made him to end his task. All this I deny. Nobody is obliged to “benefit his species” ; the notion of a man being able to benefit his species, or bound to do it, if able, is a mere modem humbug — not more, as I calculate, than ninety or a hundred years old. Our duties to “society,” to “mankind,” and the like, begin and end with our personal engagements, express or implicit: if you violate none of these, you may go about your business without leave asked of mankind or society: so far as they are concerned you are clear. In that case you need not search for reasons to justify your retreat; one’s own whim is reason enough; if you are of a bilious habit, and melancholy
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temperament, and fancy that you are tired seeing the sun rise every day, I know no cause why you should not thrust a sharp instrument into your dyspeptic stomach and let your disagreeable soul rush forth into the air; or, say that you love a woman who despises you, and being but young, fancy that you have done with life, and that your heart is broken, or “blighted” — or, if you like it better, “crushed” — and have no father or mother, brothers or sisters to be grieved, shocked or disgraced by you — why, then, paying first all your bills, yea, the very tailor’s, go by all means and take your lover’s leap. Mankind will go on without you; and for the lady, whose cruel heart you think to wring, she will be much pleased and flattered: your sad fate will have thrown a shade of romantic interest around her, and she will look more charming in it than ever. Bless your innocent heart, a dozen such scalps as yours at her war-belt will but heighten her rank and dignity in that savage tribe.
Yet this simple key, one may affirm, does not open the whole mystery; nor any key yet forged. I will only suggest, that there may be other considerations worthy a man’s thoughts (before he blows his brains out) besides his bare duties, debts to society, or engagements with other men, women, and children. Finding yourself here, a living man, may it not be worth your while (for remember it may be the only opportunity you will have for many an aeon) to stay and see what this life is, and what it is good for — to try what capacities of action and passion may be in this manhood wherewith you are thus mysteriously invested — how far it can look before and after — whether there be not matters worth seeing, doing, knowing, suffering even — consider, consider whether there may not be — I say not debts and duties — but privileges and high prerogatives vested in the very life and soul you are about to scatter to the elements, which will enable and entitle you, even you, by faithful manly action, to lift up that despised human nature of yours, not only out of the Slough of Despond, where it now lies weltering, but above the empyrean and the stars — yea, powers whereby you may illumine what is ark in you, what is low raise and exalt, and so —
By due steps aspire
To lay your just hands on the golden key
That open the palace of eternity.
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We know what we are, but not what we shall be; they say the owl was a baker’s naughty daughter; and I do verily believe that on the extent to which we purify and ennoble our own nature in life will depend the rank to be assigned each of us in the scale of God’s creatures at death. Therefore, on the whole, I say as Convict Socrates said: [Gk. word] as we are men, let us be men — as the Christian apostle said, “Quit you like men” — what is needful to be endured, endure it; what your hand findeth to do, do it; love, hate, work, and play, not envying, not oppressing, nor brooking oppression — above all, not lying (to yourself or others), and you will see good days before you die and after.
I am far from saying it is your duty to remain alive for all this — only your privilege. You are not obliged, but permitted; and you may throw away the privilege, and decline the trouble. But beware, lest on your next transmigration you find yourself looking out through the eyes of a baboon, or hearing with the ears of a jackass.
Reading over the above disquisition two hours after writing it, I find it consists of words mainly, or even echoes of words, with shadows and ghosts of meanings. Heaven be my witness, I know little of man’s life and its high destinies myself; and am often inclined to say there is nothing in it. All is vanity. Yet “look to the end of life.” Who can say all is vanity till he has tried it out? Thirty-three years have I walked the earth, and not idly nor with my eyes intentionally sealed. I have lived, and I have loved; and, up to the present date, cannot say that I find this world to be any great matter. But then, here is a new scene of it opening upon me; the hulks may teach me somewhat. I am resolute to wait and see.
20th. — A month in Bermuda, and there has not been one shower; but a heavy dew at night (which it seems Prospero was aware of), and even during the day, while a tyrannical sun is blazing down vertically upon this arid land, there is a surprising dampness in the air, so that salt standing in an uncovered vessel upon a shelf in the dry ship, soon runs to water. A southerly wind blows the whole summer, laden always with water; and without it there would certainly be no vegetation at Bermuda. As it is, however, vegetation is very rich, and the fruit is delicious.
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Good people have sometimes got a melon or pine-apple smuggled in to me by methods to me unknown.
My window commands a view of the whole dock-yard with its buildings, also the barrack and parade-ground. The 42nd Regiment of Highlanders is stationed here, and just before sunset, every evening, they muster on an esplanade right opposite to me, and march up to their barracks with bagpipes playing “The Campbells are Coming,” or some kindred air. But upon the other side, upon the breakwater, which is also in part visible from my window, is another muster, sad to see: many hundreds of poor convicts marched in gangs, some of them in chains, to their work, in the quarries, or the new government buildings. They walk, as I fancy, with a drooping gait and carriage. Their eyes, it is said, are greatly injured by the glare of the white rocks, and many of them grow “moon-blind,” as they call it, so that they stumble over stones as they walk. There are always two or three of those belonging to this ship kept in irons for one fault or another, and the clank of chains is seldom out of my ears. Within the month, also, several of them have been savagely flogged; the other prisoners are all mustered to see this exhibition; and though I am never summoned to any muster, I can hear in my cabin every cut of the sounding lash, and the shrieks of the mangled wretches. I once asked the attendant who brings my meals what fault a man had committed who was flogged that morning. “For giving cheek, sir,” answered the man; which means, using insolent language; but when I hear the officers or guards speaking to them (as when walking on deck I often do), it is always in an imperious, insolent tone and manner, even in giving the commonest order; which might well exasperate sometimes the tamesi drudge. No wonder the poor fellows are sometimes provoked to “give cheek.” Now, I am sentenced to the very same punishment with these convicts, yet here have I my “cabin,” my bookshelves, the attendance of a servant, wear my own clothes, go out and come in at my own times, am spoken to, not only without haughtiness, but with respect, and all because I am supposed to be (though I never said I was) a gentleman. See here the spirit of the British Constitution — a most polite Constitution! — a most genteel spirit! See of what fine porcelain clay your British gentleman must be made, when, even as a felon (for they are
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bound to pretend that they consider me a felon), the gentleman is not to be allowed to mix with the swinish multitude. Your gentlemanly convict, even, must have deference and accommodations, and attendance and literary leisure; but in the hulk, as elsewhere, there is the hard word and the hard blow, and unremitting, ill-requited toil, and fetters for the limbs, and a scourge for the back of the poor.
21st. — Mr. Hire, the deputy-superintendent, came on board to-day, and handed me letters from home. The Governor, too, had very courteously sent them to me unopened; but Mr. Hire said he expected that if anything in them related to public affairs I would give them up — which of course I promised — then hurried down to my den, and with shaking hands broke the seals. A long letter from my dearest wife, another from my mother. Matters had gone as I anticipated with my affairs in Dublin: the very day of my sentence the printing-office, with types, paper, and books had been seized by the police — and then, of course, agents and others who owed me debts would not venture to pay them; because, the books being in the enemy’s hands, if Lord Clardenon [sic for Clarendon] chose it, he might make them all pay over again. This I do not think likely; but in the meantime, under the false pretext of my “conviction,” the scoundrel robs my wife and children The people are collecting a “tribute” for her, which is humiliating to think of — yet what can be done? Besides, this payment of money in open sustainment of Irish “Felony” is a good thing. Nothing so fully interests some men in a cause, as subscribing money for it. My brother William has gone to New York at my mother’s earnest request: they do not tell me why; (I warned them not to give me any political news, which would only cause the letters to be kept from me) but I can guess that the “Government” are proceeding with vigour.
CHAPTER IV
July 24th. — On board the “Dromedary” Hulk. — Here is a violent provocation to me: newspapers have arrived, of course, by the monthly mail; I even see them passing from hand to hand amongst the guards and mates, and there is a whole month’s history of Ireland in them, continued from the day of my kidnapping, and I cannot see one of them. Special orders, it seems have been given to everybody on board, under heavy penalties, that no communications are to be had with me, save in matters of absolute necessity. The very servants who attend about the half-deck seem frightened if they find themselves passing near me; and everyone in the place seems to be watching everybody else. I learn also, that before I was brought back from the hospital-ship one of the guards of the Dromedary was discharged because he had spoken some words favourably of me before another, who straight reported it. He was an Irishman, you may be sure, and his name was Demey. Before I came to Bermuda, as * * * tells me, there was great latitude allowed in the matter of admitting newspapers; in fact, the prisoners saw the papers regularly; but stringent regulations have now been made, and solitary confinement, irons and flogging are to be the penalties of introducing the contraband article. And in such a case they are all spies upon one another, both guards and prisoners. This condition is hardly human, hardly earthly. The devil is in the place.
But why all this care and suspicion? How could my receipt of public news injure the “Government,” seeing I can send out nothing, except through the hands of my gaolers? There may be reasons for it unknown to me — statesmanship is profound.
Aug. 4th. — Received to-day a large trunk from home, with some clothes, a few books, and, what I value very highly, four exquisite coloured daguerreotypes of Gluckmann’s: one my wife in profile, another has my mother and wife together; a third,
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John Martin, my staunch and worthy friend — by this time, I suppose, my fellow-felon. What a mild and benevolent-looking felon! The Convict Jesus was hardly purer, meeker, truer, more benignant than this man is. The fourth likeness illuminates my cell with the right manly and noble countenance of Father Kenyon. He is standing with his arms folded, and a look of firmness, almost scornful defiance, but tempered and subdued, in his compressed lips and clear grey eye. Now, the speaking images of two such friends as these — to say nothing of the first two — will be high and choice companionship for me in my den. But what do they now? Where are they? How fare they? Is it possible that my gaolers can keep me fourteen years from learning what became of the great cause from the 27th of May last forward? I do not fear this; by prudence and caution, and patience, some bulletins of intelligence will be gained, methinks.
15th. — Each of these wooden prisons, with its inmates, affects still to be a ship and crew; the ofiicer second in command is called “chief-mate,” then we have second-mate, and quartermasters; the rank-and-file of the turnkeys are termed guards. The prisoners, or ship’s company are distributed into messes and watches; and half-a-dozen of them who are set apart to man the boats, swab the decks, and the like, are “boatswain’s mates.” All these matters I discover as I walk the quarter-deck in dignified silence, and observe the daily ongoings of my dismal abode. So I am to regard myself as one of a ship’s company — one who may, by good conduct, rise to be a boatswain’s mate! Rather, indeed, I seem a solitary passenger, bound on a fourteen years’ cruise, though fast moored by head and stem. The language, too, used by both officers and prisoners, is altogether ship-shape — d — b— , or b — your b — old eyes! One or other of these is the usual form of rebuke, expostulation, or encouragement (as the case may be) employed in the constant routine of duty. The chief-mate, the same tall old man who took charge of my finances, is a man high in authority, and d— s and b— s all the eyes in the ship at his pleasure, except mine and the commander’s. He is also the person specially charged to take care of me. It is he who locks my cell at night, and unlocks it in the morning; and besides that, he always pays me a visit about ten o’clock at night, and three times more between that and morning, to make
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sure that I have not escaped. If I am asleep, or pretending to be asleep, he makes the guard bring near his lantern, so that its light may fall on my face, and assures himself that it is I, and no other, who lies there. I see no way of escape, or else, God knows, I would try it: but I am given to understand this uneasy vigilance of my old friend the mate is a very peculiar and unexampled degree of attention. Yet it is not all: since my return from the hospital-ship I learn that a sentinel from the barracks keeps guard upon this breakwater all night close alongside the ship, as well as another sentinel at the place where a bridge joins one end of the breakwater to the fortifications — and that persons coming to the hulks here after sunset, even the surgeon and other officers, are obliged now to provide themselves with passes. Then the poor prisoners are restricted from much of the little liberty they had before, and must not saunter on the breakwater as they used. In short, the reins of discipline have been gathered up so tight for my sake, that I believe the whole “ship’s company” heartily wish I had been sent to Australia or to the d— 1. I seem unconscious of all this, and pace the quarterdeck in silence, walking the plank.
These planks, I may observe by the way, are undoubtedly the celebrated “last planks of the Constitution,” so often referred to by an illustrious gentleman deceased; and I find them to be of leak.
20th. — The August mail-steamer has arrived: bringing another month’s history of Ireland, but not for me. I have letters from home, however, all well. Wife and bairns at Carlingford for the summer.
28th. — I was right: news do leak, percolating through the strangest capillary tubes: a man cannot be sealed up hermetically in a hulk; and I am not to be fourteen years in utter darkness. Voici! Government continues to act with vigour: certain Chartists have been holding meetings in London to testify sympathy with me: whereupon the insulted Government clapped them up in jail and indicted them; the record of my conviction as a felon was produced by my friend Kemmis on their trial as part of the proof against them. Amongst others, Ernest Jones, an able man, a barrister, and editor of the Northern Star, has been convicted and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for attending one of
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those meetings, and saying in his speech there, that I, J. M., would one day return to my country in triumph, and Lord John Russell and Lord Clarendon would be transported. Fine vigour this! But then possibly Mr. Jones and the rest have had fair play in respect of juries in London. Of this indeed I can find no distinct intelligence; but there is actually Law and a Government in their country. If the juries were not packed, they have nothing to complain of; if they were fairly tried by their countrymen and found guilty, why, they are guilty.
In Ireland, Meagher has been arrested at his father’s house and carried to Dublin. His crime is a speech at Rathkeale, and “sedition” only, not “felony;” therefore he is liberated on bail. A warrant against Smith O’Brien — not yet executed. But John Martin lies in Newgate charged with felony, committed in the Irish Felon — and where else should felony be found? Duffy is also in Newgate, for a like felony done in the Nation; Kevin O’Doherty, and R. D. Williams, who established another felonious newspaper immediately after my kidnapping, under the title of the Irish Tribune, are also committed for felony: and — still more vigorous vigour — the issue of the three papers. Nation, Felon, and Tribune was stopped by the police, who even took them away from the newsmen on the streets: their offices were broken open, taken possession of and searched for felonious documents; and, in short, everything goes on in the genuine ’98 style. I like all this very well.
And poor Williams, with his fragile frame and sensitive poetic temperament — is he to be a martyr felon? And Martin! But perhaps Lord Clarendon may find these two amongst the stoutest he has yet to deal with.
Now will the philanthropic viceroy deliberately pack a Castle jury for every one of these criminals; and again systematically exclude three parts of the citizens of Dublin from the exercise of the commonest rights of good and lawful men? I think he will do it; at his peril he must do this atrocity. I told him he would have to do it, or else give up the government. He dares not give his prisoners a fair trial: “policy,” “statesmanship,” and the “force of circumstances,” will imperiously compel him to cheat these men, to work hideous injustice under colour of law, to tamper with the administration of justice, which it is his office
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to guard, to outrage Ireland, to lie to England, and to damn his own soul. Imperious force of circumstances. When will rulers conceive, in their benighted minds, that common honesty is the deepest policy, and that by far the cunningest statesmanship would be to do plain justice?
At any rate matters are now in train for plenty of excellent legal work in Ireland: they will know before all is over what fine laws and constitution they have there: the “law” will develop itself, and “Crown and Government” will get vindicated properly — jurors, also, one may hope, will learn their duty amidst all this (I mean the duty they will have to do so soon as trial by jury is restored) — the duty, namely, in all political prosecutions at the suit of the Queen of England, to find all ‘persons not guilty. Nay, they must carry it further, and insist upon bringing in special verdicts in all such cases, finding, on their oath, that the respective prisoners at the bar have merited well of their country — that is, if they have really delivered a damaging blow to “government.”
Either it will come to this, or else the philanthropic viceroy must pack closer, and ever closer, every Commission; and transport and hang men on the verdicts of his own particular tradesmen, “by special appointment” jurors to the Lord Lieutenant — which in the end may work as well.
Lord Fitzwilliam wants to “bring in a Bill” to pension the Catholic clergy, that is, bribe them to secure the peace of the country, while “government” is working its wicked will. Ministers appear to think the proposal too palpable and ostentatious in its corruptness at the present moment: so they are “not prepared to accede” just now. That small job is to stand over for a while.
Sept. 1st. — Three months this day since I sailed away from the Cove of Cork.
Shall I go on scribbling in a book, making myself believe that I am keeping a journal? Why, one day is exactly like every other day to me. On this fourteen years’ voyage of mine, it might seem that one seafaring practice at least might be dispensed with — keeping a log, namely. For my latitude and longitude, my course and bearings vary not from day to day: the altitude of the sun at noon is always just the same, save the season’s difference. Nothing ever happens to me. What have I to
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write? Or, if I write my nothings, who will ever read? May not the “chief mate” come in any morning and take away my log for his own private reading — or, if he think it worth while, deliver it to the superintendent, who may deliver it to the governor, who may deliver it to the Prime Minister? So it may even come to do me harm another day: for I am in their power.
Yet, notwithstanding all these considerations, I feel much inclined to jot down a page or two now and then, though it were but to take note of the atmospheric phenomena; or to praise or abuse some book that I may have been reading; or, in short, to put on record anything, whether good or bad, that may have occurred in my mind — if one may use so strong an expression as mind in this seaweed state. After all, in so very long a voyage, one might well forget from whence he set sail, and the way back, unless he have some sort of memoranda to refer to. This book will help to remind me of what I was, and how I came down hither, and so preserve the continuity of my thoughts, or personal identity, which, there is sometimes reason to fear, might slip away from me. These scrawls then will be in some sort as the crumbs which the prince (I forget his name) scattered on his way as he journeyed through the pathless enchanted wood. And there was in that haunted wood no browner horror than I have to pass through here. The Ancient Mariner, too, and his shipmates, who were the first that ever burst into that silent sea — surely they did not neglect to keep their dead reckoning.
For these reasons, and acting upon these examples, I shall go on with my notes of nothing. It interests me in the meantime: a vicious tirade discharged into this receptacle relieves me much; a dissertation helps me to think, and use reason aright, by means of a new organon I have invented, called the Method of Rigmarole: a good rant, like a canter on the back of a brisk horse, gives me an appetite for dinner. And surely amongst all this there cannot fail to be some things that my boys will read with pleasure in future years.
Memorandum. — To devise a certain and effectual mechanism whereby, if I should ever come to be searched for papers, I may pitch these pages overboard and ensure their sinking.
2nd. — As for the books I read, or am likely to read here for some time (until I can make better arrangements for myself).
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they furnish small matter of remark. The literature most in favour here seems to be the very paltriest of London novels reprinted in America; and (for “useful reading”) they have those vile compilations called “Family Libraries,” and “Cabinet Libraries,” and “Miscellanies,” and the like dry skeletons of dead knowledge; from which nobody ever extracted anything but the art of misusing scientific language. It is supposed to be “popularising” science when a compiler gathers a parcel of results in some department of knowledge, and sets them forth in familiar style, never troubling himself or readers — indeed, knowing nothing — about the processes whereby those results are got; and so your reader of popular literature learns to babble about the profundity of modem science — you must know it is all modern — and to bestow his enlightened pity on ancient people generally, but above all, on the poor alchemists and astrologers. Thus, also, in common discourse and the newspaper dialects, we perpetually find such words as to predicate (in the sense of to predict) — proposition, for proposal — conterminous, for adjoining, and the like.
But apart from the effects on language, and therefore on clearness of ideas, I complain of the universal system of compiling and scissors-editing, in that books under such treatment cease to be books — are no longer the utterances of individual men, but a composite gibberish. Here have I been reading an account of Abyssinia, being a volume of the “Family Library,” wherein you travel one stage (or chapter) with Bruce; then half a stage with some Portuguese missionary, and the remainder of it with Salt, or somebody else: you are never sure of your travelling companion. A book ought to be like a man or a woman, with some individual character in it, though eccentric, yet its own; with some blood in its veins, and speculation in its eyes, and a way and a will of its own. Then you may make acquaintance with it, receive impressions from it. But if it be a rickle of bones, still more if it be a made-up skeleton, collected out of divers graves by a popular editor — with Mr. Bruce’s spinal column wired to Mr. Salt’s skull-bones, and Mr. Belzoni’s pelvis and ribs, the thing is disgusting.
Two other volumes of the same Library, to wit: “Palestine,” edited by Dr. Russell, and “Persia,” by Frazer, I have also
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read diligently, not without many wry faces — and find them to be of the same indigestible material.
Howbeit I have swallowed a parcel of these volumes for want of something better (as Laplanders sometimes dine on blue clay and tree-bark): also a sheaf or fasciculus of novels printed in pamphlet shape by New York and Philadelphia pirates. Vast oceans of trash! I have always accounted myself remarkably eupeptic in the matter of books; thought that I could devour much deleterious stuff without evil effect — omnia sana sanis — otherwise, I should presently suffer from a horrible constipation of garbage. And one has need of a stomach like the organs of those ducks of Pontus (unto which, as Aulus Gellius saith, poisons are rather wholesome than hurtful), who adventures to gorge the current “literature” they compound for the unfortunate “masses” in this great age. But what will not a prisoner have recourse to for passing the time.
Not that I mean to submit to this long. Only for the present I am advisedly letting my intellect lie idle, basking in the sun, dozing in the shade, grazing upon every green thing. But I never dream of killing Time for fourteen years — if it come to that. Time would kill me — fourteen years would be too many for me: an occasional half-hour, to be sure, you may kill if you take him unaware, but to slaughter Time by whole lustra and decades is given to no mortal. Therefore, I intend, after having been at grass awhile, to cultivate friendly relations with Time — a thing to be done by working only — to get old Time on my side instead of living against him, that so I may use poor Walter Scott’s proverb, “Time and I against any two.” In plain English, if I find that I am likely to stay long here, and to have, as now, the disposal of my own time, I will try to procure from Ireland some requisite books (perhaps 150 volumes in all) — and thereafter deliberately write a certain book, a task which I have long lusted after, and often wished for leisure to set about. There is leisure enough now; and facturusne operæ pretium sim, I make no sort of doubt; for the task itself, by atoning me with Time, will be its own reward.
Touching work, I am by no means sure yet that I may not any morning be equipped in a linen blouse, with the broad arrow on its back, and sent out in a gang to the quarries to work there. I
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am quite ready: my health is very good. To know practically low to blast and hew stones, and build, will be no contemptible accomplishment; and perhaps I may live and thrive better, earn a keener appetite for my “rations,” and a softer pillow for my leep, working with my hands, than writing a book. It is but ourteen years (more or less) — and as for the queen’s broad arrow, hey cannot brand it upon my heart within, where many respectable members of society in Ireland have it stamped indelibly — men whose souls dwell in a hulk: the queen’s arrow may be branded on my garment, but into their souls the iron has entered.
On this same question — whether I, J. M., shall be, or ought to be, set to work like a convict — there has been a good deal of discussion in Parliament and the newspapers. The “authorities would willingly have their forbearance attributed to their tenderness for my delicate state of health; or in the alternative. — as public opinion may hereafter make it convenient to put the thing n the one ground or the other — they could ascribe the difference lade in my favour to consideration for a “person of education and a gentleman.” If the authorities do now, or shall ever account for it on the score of health, the authorities lie — not, I ween, for the first time — because I have never once complained f my health since I came to Bermuda, and never was in better health all my life. They cannot even plead the trifling illness I ad on my voyage, because while I was in Spike Island express instructions (I saw them) were sent thither from the Castle, not treat me in any way as a convict, or put me into convict clothes, Moreover, there are hundreds of poor convicts here, working too, in the quarries, far worse in health than I ever was, or, I hope, shall be.
In truth, all this great question is very indifferent to me. I do 3t much care whether they make me work like the convicts of 3 — nor how they dress me. I only set down the above facts because they are facts; and it may be convenient for me to remember them some other day.
At any rate work must be had in some shape. Facito aliquid eris, saith St. Jerome, ut semper te Diaholus inventiat occupatum. vel fiscellam texe junco; vel canistrum lentis plecte viminibus. — apum fabrica alvearia — texantur et lina capiendis piscibus, which reminds me that there is abundance of good fish here;
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mullet, boneto, a thick sort of flat-fish, a red-fleshed fish not very much worse than salmon. There is also a monstrous kind of mackerel, three or four feet long, a most powerful and voracious fish. They cruise to and fro in parties of three or four, and I have often watched them for an hour at a time swimming about in the deep green water, and occasionally making a superb charge amongst the shoals of young fry, like a squadron of Inniskilleners riding through a mob.
4th.-11th. — Reading Homer, and basking in the sun upon the sea side of the breakwater. Weather delicious. Have also been swallowing autobiographies — Gifford’s, Thomas Elwood’s, Capt. Crichton’s autobiography by Dean Swift. Crichton was an old cavalry officer, an Irishman, who had served in Scotland under the bloodhound Dalzell, against the Covenanters: and as he could not tell his story decently himself, the Dean, while he was staying at Markethill, took down the facts from the old man and set them forth in his own words, but using the first person — Crichton loquente. The product is highly amusing: in every page you see a Dean of St. Patrick’s riding down the Whigamores, or a Sergeant Bothwell in canonicals thundering against Wood’s Copper. But the best thing is that our admirable Dean makes Crichton (who did not care a button about the matter) deliver with bitter venom some of his, the Dean’s, own Jonathan-Swiftean opinions about church government, and contradict and vituperate Bishop Burnet with an odium almost theological, and he a mere dragoon. William Gifford’s account of himself is somewhat conceited and pragmatical, yet natural and manful. I have a deep and secret sympathy with Gifford. Elwood’s, however, is by far the best of the three, and is indeed one of the most downright straightforward productions I ever met with. What a book of books an autobiography might be made, if a man were found who would and could tell the whole truth and no more than the truth! But I suppose such a man will never be found. Nobody, surely, believes Mr. Gibbon’s statement of his own case: and you cannot well tell what to make of Rousseau’s. Perhaps Evelyn’s diary comes as near to the thing as any of these: but then it is almost entirely objective, not subjective; besides, Evelyn was so staid and well-regulated a fellow, so quiet a citizen and point-de-vice a gentleman, that what he has to tell is
[Plate:] Another view of Ireland Island, Bermuda, in June 1848 [.. &c.]
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not so well worth telling as one could wish. I conclude that the perfect or ideal autobiography no human eye will ever see; because they whose inner life is best worth revealing — whose souls have soared highest and dived deepest — are just they who will never make a confidant of the discerning public: or if they communicate anything, it will be but here a little and there a little, and not in the name of the Ego, but by way of adumbration, as in the case of those sybilline paper-bags put forth by the enterprising publishers, Stillschweigen & Cognie, of Weissnichtwo.
13th. — The glorious bright weather tempts me to spend much time on the pier, where I have been sitting for hours, with the calm limpid water scarce rippling at my feet. Towards the north-east, and in front of me where I sit, stretches away beyond the rim of the world that immeasurable boundless blue; and by intense gazing I can behold, in vision, the misty peaks of a far-off land — yea, round the gibbous shoulder of the great oblate spheroid, my wistful eyes can see, looming, floating in the sapphire empyrean, that green Hy Brasil of my dreams and memories — “with every haunted mountain and streamy vale below.” Near me, to be sure, on one side, lie scattered an archipelago of sand and lime-rocks, whitening and splitting like dry bones under the tyrannous sun, with their thirsty brushwood of black fir-trees; and still closer, behind me, are the horrible swarming hulks, stewing, seething cauldrons of vice and misery. But often while I sit by the sea, facing that north-eastern art, my eyes, and ears, and heart are all far, far. This thirteenth of September is a calm, clear, autumnal day in Ireland, and in green glens there, and on many a mountain side, beech-leaves begin to redden, and the heather-bell has grown brown and sere: the corn-fields are nearly all stripped bare by this time; the flush of summer grows pale; the notes of the singing-birds have lost that joyous thrilling abandon inspired by June days, when every little singer in his drunken rapture will gush forth his very soul in melody, but he will utter the unutterable joy. And the rivers, as they go brawling over their pebbly beds, some crystal bright, some tinted with sparkling brown from the high moors — “the hue of the Cairngorm pebble” — all have got their autumnal voice, and chide the echoes with a hoarser murmur, complaining (he that hath ears to hear let him hear) how that summer is dying and the time
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of the singing of birds is over and gone. On such an autumn day to the inner ear is ever audible a kind of low and pensive, but not doleful sighing, the first whispered susurrus of those moaning, wailing October winds, wherewith winter preludes the pealing anthem of his storms. Well known to me by day and by night are the voices of Ireland’s winds and waters, the faces of her ancient mountains. I see it, I hear it all — for by the wondrous power of imagination, informed by strong love, I do indeed live more truly in Ireland than on these unblessed rocks.
But what avails it? Do not my eyes strain over the sea in vain? my soul yearn in vain? Has not the Queen of England banished me from the land where my mother bore me, where my father’s bones are laid?
Sept. 26th. — Asthma! asthma! The enemy is upon me. For a few months I fondly dreamed that the fiend was shaken off, and that the change of climate had finally exorcised him. Once more I feel that, though I take the wings of the morning, there is no escape from this plague.
27th. — “B — his b eyes! What is he but a convict, like the rest of us — a d — b — convict?” — Meaning me. I heard this exclamation to-day through the wooden walls of my cell, when the gangs were in at dinner-hour: for they sometimes grow loud and energetic in their discourse, and then I cannot but hear some of their words. A b — convict like the rest! The man is right; and I am well pleased to hear the observation, and to see the black scowls that some of the prisoners give me when any accident brings them to meet me on the pier. By “Act of Parliament,” and by the verdict of a “jury,” I am a felon, as they are, and know no title I have to walk about “like a gentleman,” that is idle, while they work hard. Right, my felon friend! I like to know that such a feeling is astir; and truly it could hardly fail; these men, who have to take off their hats when they speak to the pettiest guard of the ship, and who dare not set foot on the quarter-deck, even if they have an errand there, without uncovering and making a low obeisance — see me marching up and down the same quarter -deck, with my hat on, and those very guards and officers, now and then, when they meet me in a quiet place, touching their caps to me — the prisoners see all this, and of course they look black, and curse. It is the only
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way they know of at present to express their indignation — and I honour their cursing, and venerate their black looks, trusting that their wrath will fructify into an intelligent and wholesome hatred of those damnable “institutions” which make so much of gentlemanhood and so little of manhood — to wit. the glorious British Constitution in Church and State.
On Sundays, when the convict-congregation is attending service on deck, and their palmetto hats are off, I have an opportunity of observing their faces and heads; an inspection which is facilitated by the close cropping of hair and shaving of whiskers enforced amongst them. At first glance they look just like the untransported population at home; but closer examination makes you aware that many of them have evil countenances and amorphous skulls — poor fellows! — burglars and swindlers from the womb.
By Nature marked,
Coted and signed to do some deed of shame.
Now what was to be done with these? Why were they begotten? Might not they take up a reproach against their Creator, as the Man of Uz — or say with Adam —
Did I request Thee, Maker, from my clay.
To mould me Man? Did I solicit Thee
From darkness to promote me?
We may become entitled to ask these questions when we know the secret things which belong unto God. May not these be even now expiating sin committed before they put on human flesh? May not this be their hell? — and a hell, one might say, infernal enough. Poor devils! I hope they may not have to go farther and fare worse.
Most of the prisoners, however, have good and well-conditioned faces, as men generally go — quite up to the average run that you meet in Ludgate Hill or Dame Street.
30th. — It was not until this day that I got a sketch of the news brought by the September mails. Something strange, it was plain, had befallen in Ireland, by the significant looks the guards sometimes gave me, and by their suddenly stopping their conversation whenever my walk on deck brought me near them. I
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have it; in the first place, the Habeas Corpus Act is suspended; this ordinary proceeding having occupied just seventy hours for its six readings and its royal assent. Well, there’s nothing very strange in that: I expected that somewhere about this time. But what comes next? John Martin found guilty of felony (by a well-packed jury of Castle-Protestants) — and sentenced to ten years’ transportation! I am very glad of this, because Martin is simply the best, worthiest, and most thoroughly high-minded man I ever knew; and because he has a large circle of acquaintances, who are all aware of his worth. One could not wish British law in Ireland a more damaging, damning sort of “vindication” than thus to be compelled to send such men, by such methods, to its hulks. Go on, brave Law! There is nothing like vigour.
John Martin a convict! John Martin in the hulks! Dragged away from the green shades and fertile pleasant places of Loughorne, and made one of a felon ship’s-crew at Bermuda or Gibraltar. But the end is not yet.
Who and what is this John Martin! A political adventurer seeking to embroil the state, in hope of somehow rising to the surface of its tossing waves? or a needy agitator speculating on a general plunder? or a vain young man courting puffs, paragraphs and notoriety? or a wild Jacobin, born foe of order, who takes it for his mission to overthrow whatever he finds established, and bring all things sacred into contempt? Great God! Thou knowest that the man on earth most opposite to all these is John Martin, the Irish Felon. By temperament and habit retiring, quiet, contented, one who has lived always for others, never for himself; his pleasures are all rural and domestic; and if there be any one thing under the sun that he heartily scorns, it is puffery and newspaper notoriety. All he possesses (and it is enough for his moderate wants) is landed property in fee-simply which a social chaos would assuredly whirl away from him. Instead of being a Jacobin, and natural enemy of Law, Property and Order, he venerates Law beyond all other earthly things — cannot bear to live where anarchy reigns; would for ever prefer to bear with unjust institutions, corruptly administered, if not wholly intolerable, rather than disquiet himself and others in a struggle to abolish them. But in the exact proportion in which this man reveres Law, he loathes and spurns the fraudulent
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sham of Law. He respects property — his own and other men’s — while it subsists; but he knows that when a large proportion of the people in any land lie down to perish of want, by millions (or were it only by thousands or hundreds), there is no property any longer there — only robbery and murder. Property is an institution of Society — not a Divine endowment, whose title-deed is in heaven; the uses and trusts of it are the benefit of Society; the sanction of it is the authority of Society; but when matters come to that utterly intolerable condition in which they have long been in Ireland, Society itself stands dissolved — a fortiori — property is forfeited; no man has a right to the hat upon his own head, or the meal he eats, to the exclusion of a stronger man. There has come, for that nation, an absolute need to reconstruct Society, to re-organise Order and Law, to put property into a course whereby it will re-distribute itself. And, inasmuch as such needful re-creations never have been, and never will be accomplished, without first tumbling down, rooting up, and sweeping away what rotten rubbish may remain of the old venerable Institutions, why, the sooner that business is set about, the better. If we must needs go through a sore agony of anarchy before we can enjoy the blessings of true Order and Law again, in the name of God, let us go through with it at once!
Now, is this John Martin’s thought I am setting out, or my own? I believe both. At any rate, John Martin is an Irishman, and can never endure to have “laws “made over his country by and for a foreign people. To make that outrage impossible he accounts the first duty of all Irishmen. There, at least, we are of one mind.
On another point, also, we are one. Since my boyhood, 1 have always looked with a sort of veneration upon an independent farmer cultivating his small demesne — a rural paterfamilias, who aspires to no lot but labour in his own land, and takes off his hat to no “superior” under God Almighty. Tenant-right, fee-farm, call his tenure what you will — only let him be sure that where he sows, he or his shall reap, eat and be satisfied. Such a farmer as this, though his acres be very few, can generally bring his children creditably forward in a life of honest industry, apprentice some of his sons to handicraft trades, portion the girls with twq cows and £20, and grow old among his grandchildren, like an
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uncivilised patriarch, as he is; never troubling his mind about the Progress of the Species, nor knowing in the least what that phrase may mean. I have loved to see, in the North of Ireland, whilst Ireland was, the smoke of the homesteads of innumerable brave working farmers, rising from a thousand hills; and often in my summer wanderings (in company with the other felon), from the farthest wilds of Donegal to the pleasant fields of Down and Armagh, we have fondly dreamed that our country’s hope lay in the quiet extension of this tenant-right spirit and practice throughout the island — Monuar! monuar! how many of the warm hearths we saw smoking then are cold to-day! How ill we had estimated the profound ferocity of foreign landlordism! How many of those simple people have had to arise in their old age, bid adieu to their forefathers’ graves, and hopelessly seek their fortune in a foreign land! I know that respectable puppies would laugh at the hardship of a mere peasant, one of the “masses,” leaving his native land. Respectable idiots! By Heaven, there is more true refinement of feeling, more resistless human passion, more delicate sensibility, more keen, natural affection, more genuine character in any one of ten thousand farmhouses in Ulster than there is in Dublin Castle, or in the “genteelest” residence of Fitzwilliam Square.
But these people have all been dealt with of late (by those who rule and rob) as “masses”; a sort of raw material, to be thinned when they think it too thick, to be absorbed or distributed as the interests of Society (that is, those who rob and rule) may seem to require. We have watched for years — we two felons — the gradual encroachments of landlordism on what used to be the property of the farmer — the rapid conversion of householders into “paupers” — the incessant efforts of the British Government to break down all individual self-respect amongst Irishmen — choosing a series of famine years to hold out for competition, in every district, a set of “situations under government,” and so turn a whole nation into servile beggars — the atrocious profligacy with which millions were laid out in this undertaking, and so laid out as to make sure they would never fructify to any useful purpose — never produce anything save a crop of beggarly vice, idleness, and rascality. Then we saw a bloody compact made between the Irish landlords and that diabolical government
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— they to maintain the “Union” for England — England to help and support them in killing as many people in Ireland as might be needful to preserve the sacred landlord property untouched. We saw that compact put into actual execution — and then, at last, we resolved to denounce, at least, this villainy, to rouse the people to resist it while there was yet time — at all events to cross its path ourselves, though it should crush us. And so we are a pair of transported felons. Be it so: better a transported felon than a quiet slave, or a complaisant accomplice in murder. Mine ancient comrade! my friend! my brother in this pious felony — whithersoever thou art now faring in the fetters of our pirate foe, I hail thee from far, across this Atlantic flood, and bid thee be of good cheer. The end is not yet.
Lord Clarendon is filling the gaols all over Ireland with suspected persons by virtue of the Habeas-Corpus-Suspension Act. And there is more Irish history, too, this month, if I could but get at it: but better care than ever is taken to keep newspapers out of the ship, and to prevent me from learning anything. I will take patience, however — John Martin’s transportation is vigour enough for one month.
Oct. 18th. — Three weeks of sickness, sleepless nights, and dismal days: and the “light” reading that I have been devouring I find to weigh very heavy. Yet the “Three Mousquetaires” of Dumas is certainly the best novel that creature has made. How is it that the paltriest feuilletoniste in Paris can always turn out something at least readable (readable, I mean, by a person of ordinary taste and knowledge) and that the popular providers of that sort of thing in London — save only Dickens — are so very stupid, ignorant and vicious a herd? Not but the feuilleton-men are vicious enough; but then vice wrapped decently in plenty of British cant, and brutified by cockney ignorance, is triply vicious. Dumas’s “Marquis de Letorière,” too, is a pleasant little novelette: but I have tried twice, and tried in vain, to get through a mass of letterpress called “Windsor Castle,” by Ainsworth; and another by one Douglas Jerrold, entitled “St. Giles and St. James.” It would not do: the loneliest captive in the dullest dungeon, dying for something to read, and having nothing else but those, had better not attempt them: they will only make him, if possible, stupider than he was before. This Jerrold is
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the same man who perpetually reads lectures to “Society” (in England) — abusing it for that it does not, in its corporate capacity, and with public funds, provide for the virtuous rearing of all the poor — yet takes upon itself to punish them when they steal, burn ricks, or waylay with intent to murder. And he writes never-ending “Serial” stories, purporting to be a kind of moral satires (only the satire has no wit and the moral no morality) showing clearly that poor children thus neglected in th§ir education by Society have a good right to commit reprisals by picking Society’s pockets, or the pockets of any member thereof. Think of thi«5 cruel Society, omitting to train up its children in the way they should go, yet having the unnatural barbarity to maintain constables and gaols for the punishment of those very children when they go wrong! But nothing so horribly disgusts this poor snivelling jackass as capital punishments. Hanging by the neck he considers every way unpleasant, and unworthy of the nineteenth century. How would he have liked stoning with stones — or crucifying, head downward? He undoubtedly regards the criminal legislation of the ancient Hebrews as a grossly barbarous code; but, to be sure, those were unenlightened ages, and had no “Serials” — nothing but hard tables of stone; one copy of the second edition. Society, in short, was in its infancy, and you must not expect to find an old head upon young shoulders — nor to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. H the compiler of the Levitical code were called on to compile laws now indeed, after the labours of Beccaria, Howard, and the philanthropists, he might make a better piece of work.
24ih. — What is this I hear? A poor extemporised abortion of a rising in Tipperary, headed by Smith O’Brien. There appears to have been no money or provisions to keep a band of people together two days. And O’Brien, Meagher, O’Donoghue (Pat of Dublin), and Terence M’Manus of Liverpool, all committed for trial to Clonmel gaol for being parties to the wretched business. I cannot well judge of this affair here, but in so far as I can learn anything about it and understand it, O’Brien has been driven into doing the very thing that ought not to have been done — that Lord Clarendon will thank him heartily for doing. An insurrection, indeed, has been too long deferred; yet, in the present condition of the island, no rising must begin in the
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country. Dublin streets for that. O’Gorman, Reilly, Doheny, have fled; and all prominent members of the Confederation in country towns are arrested on suspicion.
What glee in Dublin Castle and the blood-thirsty dens of Downing-street, at this excuse for “vigour”! And, of course, all the world thinks Irish resistance is effectually crushed; and that Ireland’s capacity for resistance was tested at this cursed Ballingarry.
Reilly, I am delighted to find, is safe for the present, but Duffy, Williams, and O’Doherty still he in gaol, awaiting their trial. Now, my Lord Clarendon, if your jurors but stand by you, “law,” will get developed and vindicated to a great extent. What is to be the end of all this? Are there men left in Ireland who will know how to press the enemy hard now? And who will dare to do it? Then the poor people — God comfort them! — have another famine-winter before them, for the potatoes have generally failed again; and, to be sure, the corn is not for the likes of them.
As for juries in these cases, the Clonmel juries will consist merely of Cromwellian Tipperary magistrates and frightened Protestant landed proprietors. The Castle Judge will put it to them to say what they think of revolutions, and what revolutionary characters deserve to suffer. It is possible these four worthy men may be hanged.
CHAPTER V
Nov. 7th, 1848 — In my cell, “Dromedary” Hulk. — This evening, after dusk, as I sat at my window, looking drearily out on the darkening waters, something was thrown from the door of my ceil; and lighted at my feet. I heard a quick noiseless step leaving the door. Picking up the object, I found it to be a London paper. The Halifax mail has arrived — I long for the hour when my cell is to be locked, and carefully hide my treasure till then.
At last the chief mate has locked and bolted me up for the night. I light a candle, and with shaking hands spread forth my paper.
Smith O’Brien has been found guilty, and sentenced to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution and hanged. The other trials pending.
21st. — All the four — O’Brien, Meagher, M’Manus, O’Donoghue — sentenced to death. But the enlightened Spirit of the Age — the d take his enlightened cant! — is going to spare their lives, and only transport them for life. I have seen a part of Butt’s speech in defence of Meagher — bad. Also the few words spoken by poor Meagher after conviction; brave and noble words.
I have been sick, and unable to write. Why do I not open my mouth and curse the day I was bom? Because — because I have a hope that will not leave my soul in darkness — a proud hope that Meagher and I together will stand side by side on some better day — that there is work for us yet to do — that I am not destined to perish on the white rocks of Bermuda — that the star of Thomas Meagher was never kindled to set in this Clonmel hurdle.
Of the state of public opinion in Ireland, and the spirit shown by the surviving organs thereof, I have but this indicium. The Freeman’s Journal, one number of which I have seen, ventures
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is a piece of incredible daring, to print some words used by Whiteside in his speech for the prisoners — words deprecatory of the racking of juries, or something of that sort. The editor ventures on no remarks of his own, and carefully quotes Whiteside’s words is “used by counsel.” Quite, quite down! Yet, on the whole, I do not much blame Gray for not flinging himself into the open pit. He was no way committed to this particular movement; md perhaps he is wise to let the storm blow past and keep his paper alive for quieter times.
Let me try if I can arrive at any reasonable estimate of the prospects of the great cause amidst all this ululu. Half-a-dozen gentlemen, or so, are “transported” (or suppose we had been impaled or broken on the wheel). This, we will say, is a loss to the half-dozen gentlemen and their friends. But the question is, las British government in Ireland been damaged by the collusion, or otherwise? Has a breach been effected? If so, we who were n the front rank at the assault, have no right to complain that we only help to fill up a ditch with our bodies for other men to pass over. Let us thank God if there be men to pass.
And I think British dominion has been damaged, and heavily. Of course, the contrary will seem to be the fact for awhile. All bold newspapers being silenced and all leading men put under ock and key, there will be a lull in the matter of “sedition” and “treason”; Ministers will sanctimoniously congratulate the peaceably disposed community; Cockney newspapers will crow most cheerily; and the Irish Rebellion will be matter of merriment to all sleek money-getting men in England. But is Irish disaffection growing less deep or deadly all this while? Will the strong healthy appetite for our glorious treason just subside when Lord Clarendon chooses burglariously to enter and gut all seditious newspaper offices? Will Catholic householders, who blow they are entitled to serve as jurors, paying the requisite taxes and having their names on the needful books, will they love the “government” any better than they did, when they find themselves publicly proscribed and excluded from the common rights and functions of citizenship? “And, I prithee, tell me how dost thou find the inclination of the people, especially of the younger sort?” Surely we have not been utterly losing our labour all these years past, with our Nations, and our Irish
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libraries, and ballads, and the rest of it. Boys have been growing up all these years; the national schools have not been idle. Within thousands of those “small curly heads” (celebrated by Reilly), thoughts have been kindled that Dr. Whately wots not of. Under many a thin poor little jacket, who can tell what a world of noble passion has been set aglow; what haughty aspirings for themselves and their ancient land; what infinite pity; what hot shame for their trampled country and the dishonoured name of their fathers; what honest, wistful rage? Ha! if the thoughtful fiery boy but live to be a man. What I mean to say is, in short, that there is now actually in Ireland, a sort of inchoate rudimentary public opinion independent of the Carthaginians on the one hand, and of the priests on the other. If I be right, or nearly right, in my estimate of the relative forces now extant in Ireland, Carthage will dearly rue her vigour of 1848.
For the persons on whom this vigour is exerted, it befalls happily that the chief men amongst them (not including myself) are of the highest, purest character. Acts of Parliament, verdicts of “guilty,” hulks, chains, hurdles, cannot blacken or disgrace these men. When persons calling themselves “government,” by conspiring with corrupt sheriffs and tampering with courts of justice, lay foul hands on such men, I believe that government cannot long survive its crime.
It is true there will be amongst the better-fed classes — of Catholics especially — a hideous display of meanness and servility on this occasion. I shall not wonder if corporations, bishops. Catholic assistant-barristers, and other notabilities publicly praise my Lord Clarendon for his “wise precautions,” and so forth. O’Connell’s son will zealously disclaim all connection with illegal persons, and profess anxiety to administer the poor dilapidated remnant of his hereditary “agitation,” as he calls it, in a strictly constitutional manner. All this is sad enough; yet, I say, the fact of a number of honourable and worthy men being oppressively and corruptly put out of the way by the English agents will assuredly bear good fruit in Ireland; the wholesome leaven will be working; “disaffection” will have received a new stimulus, motive and reason, and will be deepening and widening daily. Then the circumstance that half the transported felons are Protestant and half Catholic will surely help to convince the
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North (if anything can ever teach the blockhead North) that our cause is no sectarian cause. I rely much also on the exertions of the national school teachers to inculcate sound Irish doctrine dehors the class-books furnished to them by Dr. Whately. Very many of those teachers, I know, were fully bent, a year ago, on counteracting the influence of that old shovel-hatted Carthaginian who has so long ridden the national school system, like shovel-hatted nightmare.
On the whole, then, we have:
First. — The British Government unmasked — driven fairly from ts conciliatory position, and forced to show itself the ferocious monster it is.
Second. — All the generous sympathies and passions of the young and high-minded enlisted on behalf of the felons and their felony, and outraged and revolted by the atrocity of the enemy.
Third. — The strong appetite for national or seditious reading sharpened by Lord Clarendon’s press-censorship: so that the text pouring forth of sound doctrine will be as springs of water n a thirsty land.
Thus the breach is every way widened and deepened; arms ire multiplied, notwithstanding proclamations and searches; a [und of treason and disaffection is laid up for future use; and it will burn into the heart of the country till it find vent. And so the “Irish difficulty” will grow and swell into a huge mountainous impossibility. God prosper it!
Yes; we “convicts” may be very sure that of all our writing, speaking, acting and endeavouring, and of the labour we have laboured to do, what was true, just, faithful, will not perish or [ail of its effect, but will stand and bear fruit, even though we may be lying in foreign graves, our bones mixed with the unclean dust 3f unspeakable rascaldom for ever.
But what must our poor d go through in the meantime? Alas! what further, deeper debasement of mind and body is yet before them while those English still have power to torture the land with their “laws?” What exterminations, what murders, what beggary and vice, what fearful flights of hunted wretches beyond sea to the four winds of heaven! How long! how long!
22nd. — Letter from my brother William, who is in New York:
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it seems if he had not left Ireland at once he would have been arrested under the Habeas-Corpus-Suspension Act [which is the palladium of the British Constitution — the Habeas Corpus or the suspension of the Habeas Corpus?] Lord Clarendon is cramming the gaols: but Dillon, Reilly, O’Gorman, and Doheny all seem to have escaped. Dillon is in New York — O’Gorman escaped in a small vessel to some port in Bretagne. * I cannot make out Reilly’s whereabouts; but wherever he is, the worthy fellow is not idle.
French Republic still standing, and, I think, likely to stand. The information that has penetrated to me through my bars is but fragmentary; not presenting me with the panorama in due sequence, but only a tableau here and there; yet, what I have seen is good. In June, some people, whom the English newspapers call the “Red Republicans” and Communists, attempted another Paris revolution, which, if successful, would have been itself a horrible affair, and at any rate might have been the death of the Republic; but they were swept from the streets with grape and canister — the only way of dealing with such unhappy creatures.
I cannot believe that all the party called Red Republicans are also Communists, though the English newspapers use the terms as synonymous — of course to cast odium on the thorough-going Republicans. I suspect that there is a numerous party of staunch Republicans who believe the Revolution is but half accomplished, which, indeed, may turn out to be the case. But then these ought to make no common cause with Socialists; Socialists are something worse than wild beasts.
But I can see no French papers; I am in British darkness.
Note, that the gentle Alphonse de Lamartine has somehow dropped out of the tableau of late. I miss his dignified figure, and lofty brow with its invisible crown of thorns. I miss the high-flying language and gushing tenderness of that piteous poet — his Bedouin instep, and his eye in elaborate fine frenzy rolling. What has become of him I cannot make out, nor the special cause of his dechèance. But it was natural, necessary and right: let Alphonse retire to the East again, and see visions of a Druse-Maronite empire — let him pour fourth his mysterious sorrows on *
*No — to Constantinople. — J. M.
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Lebanon, and add with tears to the dews of Hermon. He had no call to the leading of a revolution, and was at best but what we seamen call a figure-head. The demission of Alphonse pleases me the better, as I predicted the same in the United Irishman within a month after the February revolution. So far, well; I have other political prophecies pending — fulfilment not due yet.
The Carthaginian newspapers, I find, are deeply distressed about this French Republic — mad that it yet lives. They are zealous in laying hold of and exaggerating all the inconveniences that cannot fail to grow out of the dislocation of interests and interruption of business occasioned by such a revolution; they are concerned about it chiefly for the sake of the French people, you may be sure; and one and all predict a speedy return to monarchy in the person of the young Bordeaux-Berri-Bourbon, if not of Louis Philippe himself. In truth, these newspaper-men are thoroughly frightened; or, rather, their owners or subsidisers, the aristocracy and credit-funding plutocracy of Carthage, are frightened at this near neighbourhood of liberty, and the danger of fund-confounding revolution; and so they all devote it from their hearts to the infernal gods.
Here is the mighty game of sixty years ago coming to be played again — to be played out perhaps this time; and the world is about to be a spectator of a most excellent piece of work. And am I, O my God! through all these crowded years of life, to sit panting here behind an iron grating, or to die an old hound’s death, and rot among Bermudian blattae! Infandum!
Jan. lb. — Last night, as my double-goer and I — for I go double — sat in my cell smoking our pipe together, the awful shade took occasion to expostulate with me in the following terms: — “I do observe,” quoth he, “a singular change in you of late days; a shadow of gloom, and almost a tinge of atrocity, staining the serene empyrean of your soul; and, what is yet sadder, I behold in you what seems to be a sort of conscious obliquity of judgment and elaborate perversity of feeling, which is — that is, it appears to me — that is, if I read you aright — which is blacker than mere natural malignity.”
The Ego (puffing thick clouds). — Explain; your language is unusual.
Doppelganger. — Well, then, first; What is the meaning of all
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this fiery zeal of yours for the French Republic? I know well that you feel no antipathy to either a monarchical or an aristocratic government, as such; that, in fact, within your secret heart, you care very little about Republicanism in the abstract.
The Ego. — Not a rush. What then?
Doppelganger. — Then I am forced to conclude that your anxiety for the success of the French Republic springs from something else than zeal for the welfare of the human race.
The Ego. — A fig for the human race; to be sure it does.
Doppelganger. — Yes; it is born of no love for mankind, or even French mankind, but of pure hatred to England, and a diseased longing for blood and carnage. You think a republic cannot long stand in France without a European war, which would smash the credit-system, cut up commerce, and in all probability take India and Canada from the British Empire — to say nothing of Ireland.
The Ego. — To say nothing of Ireland? But what if I were thinking of Ireland all the time?
Doppelganger. — And for the chance of getting Ireland severed from Britain in the dreadful melee, do you desire to see all Europe and America plunged in desperate war? For the chance of enkindling such a war, do you delight to see a great and generous people like the French, committing themselves and their children to a wild political experiment, which, as you know, is as like to breed misery as happiness to them and theirs?
The Ego — (Laying down pipe, and raising aloft an umbrageous pillar of smoke). — Now, listen to me, Herr Doppelganger. First, I care little, indeed, about Republicanism in the abstract; but the French Republic I watch in its growth with keen and loving interest. For Republicanism, or Monarchism, in the abstract, is nothing — a government is a thing that governs concrete living men under absolute extant circumstances; and I regard aristocratic and monarchic institutions, how good soever in their day and place — how defensible soever “in the abstract,” as being for the Western nations of Europe worn out — that is to say, worn out for the present; and until we shall have advanced to them again, via barbarism, in the cyclical progress of the species. For England, for Ireland especially, I believe those institutions are far more than worn out — were worn out fifty years ago, and have only been kept seemingly alive by the commercial world,
[Plate:] The Convict Garb at Bermuda in 1848.
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and for purposes of traffic — to stave off the inevitable bankruptcy, smash, and alteration of the style and firm; but in so sustaining a fictitious credit, and pushing trade to such desperate lengths under it, those money-making people are likened unto the man who built his house upon the sand — the longer he has been able to shore it up (building additional storeys on it all the while) the greater will be the fall of it. Secondly, I hold that in all marches and counter-marches of the human race, France of right leads the Van. Your Anglo-Saxon race worships only money, prays to no other god than money, would buy and sell the Holy Ghost for money, and believes that the world was created, is sustained, and governed, and will be saved by the only one true, immutable Almighty Pound Sterling. France recognises a higher national life, aspires fcr ever to a grander national destiny than mere trading. France mints the circulating medium of thoughts and noble passions, and sets up poor nations in business with capital of that stamp. Paris is the great moral metropolis of mankind. Thirdly, Mein Herr, the French have no right to stipulate for their own “happiness,” while they discharge this high public duty. Neither for man nor nation is happiness the end of living — least of all for those who utter new truths and lead in new paths. Let a nation act with all the energy of its national life — do with its might what its hand findeth to do — the truth it has got to utter speak it in thunder. Therein let it find its “happiness,” or nowhere.
Doppelganger. — You speak as if France were fighting the republican fight for all the world, and in advance of all the world. Apparently you forget America, and where France herself went to school to learn republicanism. At any rate, the United States were a republic before ever France was one.
The Ego. — And San Marino before the United States; but I was speaking of the great ancient nations of feudal Europe, and the struggle and travail that is appointed them before they can slough off the coil of their decrepit or dead aristocracies and heraldries, which have come to be humbugs — a struggle which the United States never knew, nor had need to make; for those British colonies in America, once the yoke of King George was broken, found themselves republics by the necessity of the case; they had no material there whereout to form any other sort of
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government. The difficulty there would have been to get up a dynasty — to find the original parents out of whom to breed an hereditary aristocracy. In short, external circumstances and agencies, and mere necessity, made America Republican. But France — France, with all her circumstances, habits, traditions, tending the other way; ancient France, Mother of Chivalry, heritage of Charlemagne’s peers, environed by a whole world of monarchism, landlordism, and haughtiest gentility — tearing off the clinging curse, trampling it under foot, and fronting the naked swords of all raging Europe, while she stood forth in the simple might of manhood, uncrowned, unfrocked, untabarded, showing what, after all, men can do; then, after her own hero, in whom she trusted, lifted up his heel against her, when she was hacked and hewn almost to pieces by the knives of allied butchers, hag-ridden by the horrid ghost of a dynasty, and cheated by a “citizen king,” — cherishing still, deep in her glowing heart, the great idea, through long years, through agonies and sore travail, until the days are accomplished for the god-like birth — this, I apprehend, is another kind of phenomenon than the Declaration of Independence. And we ought to be thankful to the good God (you and I) that we live in the days when we may reasonably hope to see this noble work consummated, though it be in flames and blood.
Doppelganger. — You say nothing in answer to my charge, that all this enthusiasm of yours is mere hatred of England.
The Ego. — No; I scorn to answer that. But what mean you by England? — the English people, or the English Government? Do you mean those many millions of honest people who live in England, minding their own business, desiring no better than to enjoy, in peace and security, the fruits of their own industry, and grievously devoured by taxes? Or do you mean the unholy alliance of land appropriators, and fund-men, and cotton-men, who devour them? Do you mean the British nation? or do you mean what Cobbett called the Thing?
Doppelganger. — By England I mean, of course, all her people, and all her institutions: tradesmen and nobles. Church and State, weavers, stockholders, pitmen, farmers, factories, funds, ships, Carlton clubs. Chartist conventions. Dissenting chapels, and Epsom races. I mean that.
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The Ego. — You do? Then let me tell you it is a very unmeaning kind of lumping you make; I hold that now, and for fifty years back, the best friend to the British nation is simply he who approves himself the bitterest enemy to their government, and to all their institutions, in Church and State. And thus I claim to be, not an enemy, but a friend, of England; for the British people are what / call England.
Doppelganger. — Excluding, of course, those cruel capitalists, mill-owners, landlords; everybody, in short, who has anything?
The Ego. — Excluding nobody! But you are aware that in every possible condition of human society, no matter how intolerable to the great majority, no matter how grievously it may cry aloud for change, there are always many fat persons right well content with things as they are — to wit, those who thrive upon things as they are. Why, in Ireland, even, are many grave and well-dressed persons (I have seen them myself in Belfast, and even in Dublin, among the fed classes) — who say, Ireland is doing reasonably well, and likely to do well. Now, in speaking of Ireland and the Irish people, I do not exclude those persons: only set at naught their opinion, and set aside their particular interests in consideration of the vital general interest. Therefore, when I say that I would cut down and overthrow, root and branch, the whole government and socisd arrangements of England, I am entitled also to call myself a friend to the English people, to all the English people — yes, to the very money-men in Lombard Street, to the very dukes, the very bishops — I would make them all turn to some honest occupation.
Doppelganger. — Do you imagine capitalists eat their money, and so make away with it out of rerum natura? Or that land-proprietors devour and digest the entire produce of their estates? Or, in short, that the wealthy, be they ever so malignant, can use their riches otherwise than by employing the poor, and paying them for their labour? Or do you propose to enable all the poor to live without labour or wages?
The Ego. — I am not to learn from you first principles of political economy, taken out of Dr. Whately’s little primer. Perhaps you will next be urging that mill-owners are not, by nature, anthropophagous, and that landlords are not, by anatomical structure, hyaenas, but men. Let us suppose all those matters
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you have mentioned, just proved, admitted, put out of the way: they are nothing to the purpose. But the case is this — those you call capitalists are, as a body, swindlers — that is to say, the “commercial world” is trading on what it knows to be fictitious capital, — keeping up a bankrupt firm by desperate shifts, partly out of mere terror at the thought of the coming crash, and partly because — what often happens in bankruptcy — those who are active in the business are making their private gains in the meantime out (the already dilapidated estate — and all this is but preparing for a heavier fall and wider-spreading rum — the more undoubting confidence in the stability of the concern is felt by fools and pretended by knaves, so much the greater number of innocent and ignorant people will have their homes desolated at last. Again, I say that fifty years ago the Crown and Realm of Britain was a bankrupt firm, and that the hollow credit system on which it has kept itself afloat is a gigantic piece of national swindling — which must end not in ruin merely, but in utter national disgrace also.
Doppelganger. — Ah! The nation is swindling itself then! I perceive you think England must be ruined by the national debt — that huge sum of money due by herself to herself.
The Ego. — Yes — due by England to herself; that is to say, due by the millions of tax-payers to the thousands who have interest enough to get themselves made tax-eaters — that is to say, due by the workers to the idlers — due by the poor to the rich — yet, incredible to tell, incurred and created at first by the idlers and the rich, to sustain a state of things which keeps them idle and rich. In short, over and above the eternal inequalities of condition in human society, which for ever doom the many to labour that the few may eat and sleep, over and above this, British policy has thrown an additional burden of eight hundred millions or so upon the working many — placed an item of that amount on the wrong side of the account — to make the workers, I suppose, work the better — to make them look sharp, and mind economy — lest they should wax fat and kick, possibly kick down the whole Thing.
Doppelganger. — But, after all, the main question as to this national debt is, whether the objects for which it was incurred were to the nation worth the money, or rather worth the inconvenience of owing the money and burdening the industry of the
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country with the interest of it. England was certainly saved from invasion — her vast commerce and manufactures
The Ego. — Yes, England was saved from invasion; her” institutions in Church and State, from ruin; her game-preserving aristocracy from abolition and the lamp-iron; her commerce and manufactures were kept going on a fictitious basis — and India, Canada, Ireland, were debarred of their freedom. These are the things for which the eight hundred millions were squandered — and instead of incurring a never-to-be-paid debt to avert all those sad events, I tell you that, to the English people, it had been worth many a million to effect them — every one — to the Irish people worth the best blood in their veins.
Doppelganger. — But why do you keep saying fictitious basis, fictitious capital? What is there fictitious in all this commerce? Does it not hold myriads of men employed? Does it not pay them in hard money every Saturday? Does it not keep their families in comfortable houses, and clothe and feed them as only the families of British artisans can pretend to be clothed and fed? Does it not enable them to save money and realise an independence for their old age?
The Ego. — How do they invest their savings? In buying land?
Doppelganger. — No; you know well that small properties of land are not a common commodity in the market. The soil of the British islands is not just yet cut up into little fee-farms: your revolution has to come yet.
The Ego. — How then do these hard-working men secure the money they have realised, as you tell me, for an independence in their old age?
Doppelganger. — Why, in the public funds — or, in the savings-banks, which invest it for them in the same funds. And I believe, when they wish to draw out their deposits, those banks generally pay them without demur.
The Ego. — They do — the insolvent State has not yet shut its doors. Yet I do affirm that these poor honest people are laying up their savings in a fund beyond the moon — they take debentures on the limbo of fools. Why, the last holders of these securities will all inevitably be robbed; that grand national swindle, which is called the “national credit” (and to keep up the “stability” of which all newspapers and organs of opinion
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are subsidised to express confidence, and to vaunt daily the infinite resources of the empire) — that national credit swindle will cheat them irremediably at last. There is no money, or other wealth, in those same funds: there is absolutely nothing to meet these poor people’s claims — nothing but confidence — and they are exchanging their hard earnings for draughts of east wind.
Doppelganger. — But how well, how wonderfully it works! Consider how many people live comfortably on the yearly produce of these same debentures, zind bequeath them to their children, or exchange them for farms and merchandise — and never know that the notes are but drafts of Notus and Company upon Eurus and Sons. Consider the amount of gainful business actually done upon this great national credit — the vast interests that depend upon it. Why may it not go on and expand itself infinitely, or, at least, indefinitely?
The Ego. — Because, Because it is the inevitable fate of mere sublunary soap-bubbles to burst, when they are blown to a certain predestined bigness — because a lie, be it never so current, accepted, endorsed, and renewed many times, is quite sure (thank God!) to get protested at last. Is it not so written in the great book of noster Thomas? — Written also in the yet greater books of nature and history, with an iron pen? — “Great is Bankruptcy.”
Doppelganger. — Suppose all this is true — I, at least, cannot think, without pain, of the inevitable destruction of all this teeming and healthy, glowing action. It is a bright and stirring scene.
The Ego. — But look well at the background of this fine scene; and lo! the reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls of Skibbereen! — and the ghosts of starved Hindoos in dusky millions.
Doppelganger. — Surely these sore evils are not incurable — by wise administration, by enlightened legislation: the ghosts and skeletons are not an essential part of the picture; not necessary to the main action of the piece.
The Ego. — Absolutely necessary — nay, becoming more and more necessary every hour. To uphold the stability of the grand central fraud, British policy must drain the blood and suck the marrow of all the nations it can fasten its desperate claws upon: and by the very nature of a bankrupt concern sustaining itself on false credit, its exertions must grow more desperate, its
WP’
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exactions more ruthless day by day, until the mighty smash come. The great British Thing cannot now do without any one of the usual sources of plunder. The British Empire (that is, the imaginary Funds) could not now stand a week without India — could not breathe an hour without Ireland: the Thing has strained itself to such a pass that (being a sublunary soap-bubble, and not a crystalline celestial sphere), the smallest jag will let the wind out of it, and then it must ignominiously collapse. Or you may call this abomination a pyramid balancing itself upon its apex — one happy kick on any side will turn it upside down. For ever blessed be the toe of that boot which shall administer the glorious kick!
Doppelganger. — And must every new order of things in the revolutions of eternity be brought about only through a fierce paroxysm of war? Let your mind dwell for a minute on the real horrors of war.
The Ego. — Let your mind dwell a moment on the horrors of peaceful and constitutional famine; it will need no effort of imagination, for you have seen the thing — and tell me which is better, to pine and whiten helplessly into cold clay, passing slowly, painfully through the stages of hungry brute-ferocity — passionless, drivelling, slavering idiocy, and dim awful unconsciousness, the shadow-haunted confines of life and death, or to pour out your full soul in all its pride and might with a hot torrent of red raging blood — triumphant defiance in your eye, and an appeal to heaven’s justice on your lips — animam exhalare opimam? Which? Nay, whether is it better that a thousand men perish in a nation by tame beggarly famine, or that fifty thousand fall in a just war? Which is the more hideous evil — three seasons of famine-slaughter in the midst of heaven’s abundance, at the point of foreign bayonets, with all its train of debasing diseases and more debasing vices, or a thirty years’ war to scourge the stranger from your soil, though it leave that soil a smoking wilderness? If you have any doubt which is more horrible, look on Ireland this day. “They that be slain with the sword,” saith Jeremiah the prophet,” are better than they that be slain with hunger; for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field.”
Doppelganger. — I cannot see the absolute necessity of either.
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Those good people may not be mere idiots, after all, who look forward to the total cessation of war.
The Ego. —
[Two lines of Gk. verse.]
See Aristophanes. Let me also refer you to the Homeric verse —
[Gk. vers
Doppelganger. — Let me have none of your college quotations.
The Ego. — Then give me none of your confounded cant about cessation of war. Nature has laws. Because the Irish have been taught peaceful agitation in their slavery, therefore they have been swept by a plague of hunger worse than many years of bloody fighting. Because they would not fight, they have been made to rot off the face of the earth, that so they might learn at last how deadly a sin is patience and perseverance under a stranger’s yoke.
Doppelganger. — I hear you say so; but I want some reasons. Nature has laws; but you are not their infallible interpreter. Can you argue? Can you render a reason?
The Ego. — I never do. It is all assertion. I declaim vehemently; I dogmatise vigorously, but argue never. You have my thought. I don’t want you to agree with me; you can take it or leave it.
Doppelganger. — Satisfactory; but I find the Irish people draw quite a different moral lesson from late events. They are becoming, apparently, more moral and constitutional than ever; and O’Connell’s son points to “Young Ireland,” hunted, chained, condemned, transported, and says: “Behold the fate of those who would have made us depart from the legal and peaceful doctrines of the Liberator!” And they hearken to him.
The Ego. — And do you read Ireland’s mind in the canting of O’Connell’s son? or in the sullen silence of a gagged and disarmed people? Tell me not of O’Connell’s son. His father begat him in moral force, and in patience and perseverance did his mother conceive him. I swear to you there are blood and brain in Ireland yet, as the world one day shall know. God! let me live to see it. On that great day of the Lord, when the kindred and tongues and nations of the old earth shall give their banners to the wind, let this poor carcase have but breath and strength enough to stand under Ireland’s immortal Green!
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Doppelganger. — Do you allude to the battle of Armageddon? I know you have been reading the Old Testament of late.
The Ego. — Yes. “Who is this that cometh from Edom: with dyed garments from Bozrah? This that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength? Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the wine vat? I have trodden the wine-press alone, and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment. For the day of vengeance is in my heart.” Also an aspiration of King David haunts my memory when I think on Ireland and her wrongs: “That thy foot may he dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and that the tongue of thy dogs may be red through the same.”
Doppelganger. — Anathema! What a grisly frame of mind!
The Ego. — Ah! the atmosphere of the world needs to be cleared by a wholesome tornado. The nimble air has grown obese and heavy; charged with azote and laden with the deleterious miasmata of all the cants that are canted. Tell me, do you believe, or rather understand, that these neighbouring West Indian islands would soon be uninhabitable to any living creature save caymans and unclean beasts, but for an occasional hurricane?
Doppelganger. — Very true; and I observe the analogy. But I do not understand that men in the West Indies get up hurricanes, or pray to heaven for hurricanes. Remember that God, in the hollow of whose hand is the cave of all the winds, sends forth His storms when He sees fit.
The Ego. — And His wars also. The difference lies only in the secondary agencies whereby the Almighty works: when tornadoes are wanted to purify the material atmosphere. He musters and embattles the tropic air-currents from Cancer to Capricornus, be they moist, dry, dense, or rare, under their several cloud-banners; and at the blowing of the thunder-trumpet they rush blindly together, crashing calamitously through cane plantations, blowing the sails off sugar-mills, and desolating colonial banks — but when the moral tornado has to blow upon the earth — when wars and revolutions (the truest moral force) are needed to purify and vivify a comatose world, then Providence uses another kind of power — to wit, Man. For not more surely, not more absolutely
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are the winds enclosed in the hollow of the Almighty hand, than are the gusts and tempests of mortal passion, or even what we deem our coolest and best regulated resolves: and when strong indignation against oppression, when pity, and pride, and sacred wrath have grown transcendental in divine rage against falsehood and wrong, and arm for desperate battle against some hoary iniquity, then charge in the name of the Lord of Hosts!
Doppelganger. — But a mistake may occur. In your high-blazing transcendent fury you may chance to be fighting the devil’s fight.
The Ego. — Be that at the peril of every man who goeth up to the battle.
Doppelganger. — Enough, enough! I seem to smell the steam of carnage. I envy you not your bloody dreams. Though all this were as you argue —
The Ego. — I do not argue.
Doppelganger. — Well, as you harangue; yet one is not obliged to delight in the storm of human wrath and vengeance, any more than in the wasting tornado. Though it must be that this offence come, woe unto him by whom it cometh! Oh! pity and woe, if the same be his chosen mission, wherein his soul delights. In such gloating over thoughts of dying groans and hoof-trampled corpses, and garments rolled in blood, there is something ghastly something morbid, monomaniacal — to you surely something unnatural, for you have always lived peaceably. And though we were very Manichaeans, and believed that the principle of destruction, disorder, and darkness were for ever to maintain unextinguishable and infinite battle with the spirit of Order and of Good, yet I cannot think he chooses the better part who enlists under the banner of Ahriman — who loves to destroy, and builds — creates — nothing.
The Ego. — Hearken once more, O Double-goer! Consider how this habitable earth, with all its rock-built mountains and flowery plains, is for ever growing and perishing in eternal birth and death — consider how the winds, and lightnings, and storms of rain and hail, and flooded rivers, and lashing seas are for ever cutting, mining, gnawing away, confringing, colliding and comminuting the hills and the shores, yea, and the sites of high-domed cities — until every mountain shall be brought low, £md every
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capital city shall lie deep “at the bottom of the monstrous world,” where Helice and Buris, Sodom and Gomorrah he now — this, I suppose, you call destruction — but consider further how the nether fires are daily and nightly forging, in the great central furnaces, new granite mountains, even out of that old worn rubbish; and new plains are spreading themselves forth in the deep sea, bearing harvests now only of tangled algæ, but destined to wave with yellow corn; and currents of brine are hollowing out foul sunless troughs, choked with obscene slime, but one day to be fair river-valleys blushing with purple clusters. Now in all this wondrous procedure can you dare to pronounce that the winds, and the lightnings, which tear down, degrade, destroy, execute a more ignoble office than the volcanoes and subterranean deeps that upheave, renew, recreate? Are the nether fires holier than the upper fires? The waters that are above the firmament, do they hold of Ahriman, and the waters that are below the firmament, of Ormuzd? Do you take up a reproach against the lightnings for that they only shatter and shiver, but never construct! Or have you a quarrel with the winds because they fight against the churches, and build them not! In all nature, spiritual and physical, do you not see that some powers and agents have it for their function to abolish and demolish and derange — other some to construct and set in order? But is not the destruction, then, as natural, as needful, as the construction? — Rather tell me, I pray you, which is construction — which destruction? This destruction is creation: Death is Birth and
“The quick spring like weeds out of the dead.”
Go to — the revolutionary Leveller is your only architect. Therefore take courage, all you that Jacobins be, and stand upon your rights, and do your appointed work with all your strength, let the canting fed classes rave and shriek as they will — where you see a respectable, fair-spoken Lie sitting in high places, feeding itself fat on human sacrifices — down with it, strip it naked, and pitch it to the demons: wherever you see a greedy tyranny (constitutional or other) grinding the faces of the poor, join battle with it on the spot — conspire, confederate, and combine against it, resting never till the huge mischief come down, though the whole “structure of society” come down along with it. Never
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you mind funds and stocks; if the price of the things called consols depend on lies and fraud, down with them too.* Take no heed of “social disorganisation”; you cannot bring back chaos — never fear; ro disorganisation in the world can be so complete but there will be a germ of new order in it: sansculottism, when she hath conceived, will bring forth venerable institutions. Never spare; work joyfully according to your nature and function; and when your work is effectually done, and it is time for the counter operations to begin, why, then, you can fall a-constructing, if you have a gift that way; if not, let others do their work, and take your rest, having discharged your duty. Courage, Jacobins! for ye, too, are ministers of heaven.
Doppelganger. — In one word, you wish me to believe that your desire to plunge your country into deluges of slaughter arises out of philosophical considerations altogether.
The Ego. — Entirely: I prescribe copious blood-letting upon strictly therapeutical principles.
Doppelganger. — And revenge upon England, for your own private wrong, has nothing to do with it.
The Ego. — Revenge! Private wrong! Tell me! are not my aims and desires now exactly what they were two years ago, before I had any private wrong at all? Do you perceive any difference even in point of intensity? In truth, as to the very conspirators who made me a “felon,” and locked me up here, I can feel no personal hostility against them: for, personally, I know them not — never saw Lord John Russell or Lord Clarendon; would not willingly hurt them if I could. I do believe myself incapable of desiring private vengeance; at least I have never yet suffered any private wrong atrocious enough to stir up that sleeping passion. The vengeance I seek is the righting of my country’s wrong, which includes my own. Ireland, indeed, needs vengeance; but this is public vengeance — public justice. Herein England is truly a great public criminal. England! all England, operating through her Government: through all her organised and effectual public opinion, press, platform, pulpit, parliament, has done, is doing, and means to do, grievous wrong to Ireland. She must be punished; that punishment will, as I believe, come upon her by and through Ireland; and so will Ireland be avenged. “Nations are chastised for their crimes in this world; they have
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no future state.” And never object that so the innocent children would be scourged for what the guilty fathers did; it is so for ever. A profligate father may go on sinning prosperously all his days, with high hand and heart, and die in triumphant iniquity; but his children are born to disease, poverty, misery of mind, body and estate. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. Mysterious are the works and ways of God. Punishment of England, then, for the crimes of England — this righteous public vengeance I seek, and shall seek. Let but justice be done; let Ireland’s wrong be righted, and the wrong done to me and mine is more than avenged; for the whole is greater than its part. Now, Mein Herr, you have my theory of vengeance; and for such vengeance I do vehemently thirst and burn.
Doppelganger (musing). — He has a great deal of reason; I do begin to be of his opinion.
The Ego. — Yes; we generally come to be of one mind in the long run. But it grows late, and we have talked long enough. Let us drink our rum-ration; and I will propose to you a national toast — [rising up and speaking solemnly) — “Arterial Drainage.”
Doppelganger — (with enthusiasm). — “Arterial Drainage!”
The Ego. — Good night.
Doppelganger. — Hark! I hear the first mate coming with his keys. Good night.
(Doppelganger flies out of the port-hole, between the bars. The Ego tumbles into bed.)
CHAPTER VI
Nov. 20th, 1848 — In my cell on hoard the “Dromedary” Hulk. — The whole convict Domdaniel is fluttered in its dove-cotes this morning. Three prisoners escaped last night from the Coromandel hulk, close by my residence. There is school on board these hulks on certain evenings in the week, attended by such of the convicts as choose to learn; and last night was school night in the Coromandel. These three men, one after another, asked leave to go out upon the breakwater after dark, and as it rained furiously no guard went with them. They ran to that end of the breakwater which, as it juts out into the sea, is not guarded by a sentry, swam in their clothes across the entrance of the camber, and betook themselves to the country. Alarm was given instantly, and guards were out in all directions. One of the three was caught, but the two others are still at large. They have the range of all the islands, which are so near one another that one can easily swim over all the straits: and these limestone rocks are, of course, full of caves by the seaside, so that it may be difficult to find them for a while. It seems they proceeded, in the first place, to rob a house and store, frightening the inmates nearly to death, and supplying themselves with biscuit and rum: then they seized on a boat, and actually attempted to put to sea for North America. If they had once got clear of the islands they would probably have reached Charleston or the Chesapeake (as four convicts did in a common gig last year) — but their boat stuck fast upon a sandbank, and she was found there, abandoned, this morning. The men must still be upon the islands, because no other boat is missing. To-day the pursuit is very hot: the several telegraph stations have the signal hoisted all day — “Prisoners escaped.” All boats are now put under surveillance; and I suppose the unfortunate scoundrels must be taken. They will be simply flayed alive.
21st. — Weary guards home to-day at daybreak — with no trace or intelligence of the fugitives. The governor has now ordered out the troops; and every cove, cavern, and cedarwood in his
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dominions will be thoroughly explored within twenty-four hours. It seems that Capt. Elliott looks upon this escape as a thing of most dangerous example, occurring while he is honoured with the custody of me. I trust the wretches will get clear off; otherwise they will be savagely punished.
22nd. — They are caught, and brought back in heavy irons. One of them was found dressed in a woman’s clothes. The Governor came this morning in person to Ireland Island, though it is Sunday, to give special orders about the mangling of these culprits to-morrow. It is to be a most solemn and terrific butchery. Heretofore every delinquent was flogged on board his own hulk; but these three men are to be flayed in all the three hulks, one after another, receiving twenty lashes in each — sixty altogether.
Mr. Hire, the governor’s deputy, is highly important to-day: he always presides on such occasions, and is said rather to like them. He is a stem old naval officer — has been superintendent here twenty-four years — and holds that the Palladium of the British Constitution is a good cat of nine heavy cords, on every cord nine hard knots. On this point of constitutional law I differ from him: the true Palladia of that immortal Constitution are a suspended Habeas Corpus, and a pretended trial by jury.
I do not love this old naval officer, although he has always been — after the first day — quite courteous to me. Ancient habits, and twenty-four years’ supreme rule over convict desperadoes, have given him an imperious manner: besides, I always fancy that he exhales an odour of blood. At first he used to eye my cap uneasily whenever he addressed me, as if he imagined I ought to take it off, or at least touch it — an old Carthaginian sea-dog! But I ought not to call him bad names; for he has lent me many books, and on the whole is as civil to me as his nature will allow him; seems also reconciled to the sight of my hat upon its right place.
I wish to-morrow were over.
23rd. — The laceration is finished. The gangs are sent out to their work after being mustered to witness the example: the troops who were drawn up on the pier have marched home to their barracks: quarter-masters and guards have washed the blood-gouts from their arms and faces, and arranged their dress aain: the three torn carcases have been carried down half-dead
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to the several hospital-rooms. Though shut up in my cell all the time, I heard the horrid screams of one man plainly. After being lashed in the Medway, they had all been carried to this ship, with blankets thrown over their bloody backs: and the first of them, after receiving a dozen blows with miserable shrieks, grew weak and swooned: the scourging stopped for about ten minutes while the surgeon used means to revive him — and then he had the remainder of his allowance. He was then carried groaning out of this ship into the Coromandel, instantly stripped again, and cross scarified with other twenty lashes. The other two men took their punishment throughout in silence — but I heard one of them shout once fiercely to the quarter-master, “Don’t cut below the mark, d—— you!” I have been walking up and down my cell gnawing my tongue.
Not that I think it wrong to flog convicted felons when needful for preservation of discipline. But think of soldiers and sailors being liable to be beaten like hounds! Are high spirit and manly self-respect allowable feelings in soldiers and sailors? And can high spirit survive the canine punishment of scourging? In the Carthaginian service, indeed, those sentiments are not allowable; private soldiers and sailors and non-commissioned officers are not to consider themselves men, but machines.
But when even felons are getting mangled, I had rather, as a matter of personal taste, be out of hearing.
Dec. 1st. — It is six months this morning since I sailed out of Cork harbour in the Scourge. The weather has grown gloomy and cold. A Bermudian winter, though not absolutely so cold by the thermometer, is far more trying than good honest frost and snow in Ireland. The winds are very damp, dank, and raw, piercing through joints and marrow. And, to tell the plain truth, I am very ill, and do not sleep o’ nights — for nearly two months I have had very constant and severe asthma, especially by night, and have been fully thrice in every week, one week with another, obliged to sit on a chair all night through — and that in the dark and the cold. I am grown ghastly thin, and my voice weak. I am like a sparrow alone upon the house-tops — Courage!
Dec. 2nd. — The admiral’s ship has arrived again at Bermuda from Halifax, accompanied by the Scourge steamer. He will spend the depth of winter at the West Indies, come back to
[Plate:] Dromolane House, Newry. The Mitchel Family residence. The large upper window is that of the room in which Mitchel died
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Bermuda in spring, and then to Halifax for the following summer so that it appears an admiral on the North American station can always choose his climate anywhere within fifty degrees of latitude, and enjoy summer air £uid summer-fruits all the year round — I wish the fine old fellow his health.
I have omitted, of late, to set down the titles of — for want of a better name I must call them — 600, that I have been reading these past months; chiefly because they are such utter offal that there is no use ine remembering so much as their names. Madame Pichler’s Siege of Vienna (Sobieski’s Siege — a grand page of history spun out into many hundred pages of pitiful romance, and interwoven with a love-story); a life of Walter Scott, by one Allen, advocate, wherein the said advocate takes superior ground, looking down, as it were ex cathedrâ, upon his subject, searching out the genesis, and tracing the development of this or the other power or faculty in that popular writer; and thus, by philosophic histoire raisonnée, informing us how it fell out, to the best of his, the advocate’s, knowledge that Walter Scott came to write the books he did, and at the times of his life, and after the fashion he did. — Good Heaven! what a knowing age we have the luck to live n! — In truth, the book is very presumptuous and very stupid; yet it is far excelled in both these respects by another I am reading now, a life of Cowper, by Dr. Memes (bookseller’s hack literator of that name). Not that the writer is without genius; for he las succeeded in making a book as repulsive as it is possible for a book giving anything like a narrative of Cowper’s life to be.
And have I read no books, then, save bad ones? That I have. amongst those sent to me from home is an old Dublin copy of Rabelais, in four volumes, imprinted by Philip Crampton, of Dame Street — and it has kept me in good wholesome laughter for I fortnight — laughter of the sort that agitates the shoulders, and shakes the diaphragm, and makes the blood tingle; than which 10 medicine can be more cordial to me — I have read the cause of his effects in Galen. With Shakespeare also I hold much gay and serious intercourse; and I have read, since coming here, three or our dialogues of Plato, with the critical diligence of a junior sophister. The Politeia, indeed, as a gentle exercise of my mind, am writing out in literal bald English; which I do chiefly with
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a view to compel myself to read the accurately, and not gobble it, bones and all.
One of the last books I have laid hands on is Lieutenant Burnes’s (afterwards Sir Alexander Burnes) Journey through Bokhara and Voyage up the Indus. And, not to speak of the intrinsic merits of the work as a narrative of travel,’ which merits are moderate, it has become remarkable on account of events which have befallen since its publication. This Burnes was sent to those countries (in plain English) as a spy, to make observations and get intelligence which should be available to the Anglo-Indian government, in the project they had of invading, civilising, plundering, clothing in cotton, and finally subduing Lahore and Cabool. That I may not forget this performance, I will take here some extracts from it; they may be useful to me if I ever write — and hoc erat in votis — an account of the Carthaginian power in India.
Old Runjeet Singh, magnificent old Maha Raja, was still alive; and the pretext of Mr. Burnes’s journey was to convey to him a present of some English cart-horses, from Bombay. The direct, easy, and usual route to Lahore was, of course, by Loodianha, and across the Sutledge; but one main business of Burnes was to explore the Lower Indus, and ascertain whether it was navigable for British steamers from the sea. Now the Ameers or chieftains of Scinde (the country lying on the lower part of the river’s course) were at that time not only free of British protection, but fully resolved to continue so; and so they jealously watched, and indeed were rather likely to detain English travellers; therefore, says Burnes, “That a better colour might be given to my deputation by a route so unfrequented, I was made the bearer of presents to the Ameers of Scinde. ”But the Ameers did not well understand; they were somehow suspicious of this Sinon with his cart-horses; besides, there was a treaty under which no English were to attempt to navigate the Indus without leave; and, in short, Mr. Burnes and his party were delayed a good while about the river’s mouth, while the Hyderabad Ameer negotiated, evaded, and gained time. Nothing, in the meantime, could be fairer than Mr. Burnes’s language; he gave to one Zoolfkar Shah, an agent of the Ameer, assurances which might have satisfied any reasonable barbarian. For “I told him,” says the lieutenant, “that he had formed a
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very erroneous opinion of the British character, if he considered that I had been sent here in breach of a treaty; for I had come) strengthen the bonds of union; and, what was further, thai the romise of an officer was sacred. ”Satisfactory, surely, to hear lis from the officer’s own lips.
On their passage up the Indus — when at length they were [lowed to go up — they found (what the English always find in every country they have a mind to) that the people were cruelly treated by their native government, and would wish to receive the British with open arms, if the villainous Ameers would only [low them. “We saw much of the people, who were disposed om the first to treat us more kindly than the government. [hey complained much of their rulers, and of the ruinous and oppressive system of taxation,” etc., etc. Some of them, however, appear to have known better, especially the priests and holy men. t one place,” A Syud stood at the water’s edge; he turned to is companion as we passed, and in the hearing of one of our arty said, ‘Alas! Scinde is now gone, since the English have seen the river, which is the road to its conquest.’ If such an event do happen,” continues Burnes, “I am certain that the body of the people will hail the happy day.” In the nineteenth century, you know, one would not think of invading and laying waste any country, except for its own good — to develop its resources, as it were.
Well, we know that happy day has since dawned upon Scinde. instead of hailing it, to be sure, the “body of the people,” forgetting their true interest, fought desperately at Meeanee, to put off the day; but Sir Charles Napier made them happy whether they would or not, and out of pure zeal for their amelioration, cut a great many of their throats.
Burnes gets to Hyderabad, and describes it professionally, with view to the future interests of civilisation: as thus — fort, “a mere shell; ditch, 10 feet wide by 8 deep; walls, twenty-five feet high, but going to decay. In short, he says, “Hyderabad is a place of no strength, and might readily be captured by escalade. In the centre of the fort there is a massive tower, unconnected with the works, which overlooks the surrounding country. Here are posited a great portion of the riches of Scinde. ”This tower and its contents interest the worthy officer much. Again he sets it in
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his “Memoir of the Indus,” a kind of appendix to the work, like a well-trained setter, thus: “The treasure” — that is, the public treasury of the country — “it is said, amounts to about twenty millions sterling, thirteen of which are in money, and the remainder in jewels: the greater portion of this cash lies deposited in the fort of Hyderabad” — which might be so readily taken by escalade. And sure enough, the British did, in due course, take Hyderabad and rob the tower. The plunder of that place, however, fell far short of their spy’s estimate, for it amounted only to one round million of pounds sterling: but even this was no bad booty for one town.
Nothing made so deep an impression on Mr. Burnes as any display of wealth on the part of the natives. When he arrived at Khyrpore, higher up the river than Hyderabad, the Ameer there treated him and his party with lavish and costly hospitality; sent to his quarters provisions for one hundred and fifty persons daily, — also, twice a day, a meal of seventy-two dishes — and, says Burnes, “they were served in silver.” In Khyrpore, as usual, he found the people sorely dissatisfied with their rulers;” nor is the feeling,” says he, “disguised: many a fervent hope did we hear expressed in every part of the country, that we were the forerunners of conquest, the advanced guard of a conquering army.” Mr. Burnes, however, would by no means admit such an idea; and showed much maidenly modesty in combating such seductive advances: for example, the vizier of one Meer Roostum Khan came to him to offer alliance, and began protesting that he might as well do so in time — “for it was foretold by astronomers and recorded in books, that the English would in time possess all India.” When the British would ask why the chief of Khyrpore had not come forward with an offer of allegiance — “I tried,” quoth Mr. Burns, “to remove, but without effect, the sad prognostications of the minister.” As he writes this, he winks his eye to the British reader, and the British reader twigs.
Higher up still, they came to the country of the Doodapootras; and there again the Khan received them with profuse hospitality. “He was attended,” says Burnes, “by about a thousand persons, and I observed that he distributed money as he passed along.” To Mr. Burnes himself this Khan sent valuable presents, and two thousand rupees in money; and at parting, Burnes told the
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honest Khan that he would certainly not forget him — “I assured him, what I felt most sincerely, that I should long remember his kindness and hospitality.” But it would have been far better for the Khan if Burnes had forgotten him.
At length they approached Lahore, and at the frontier were waited on by Sikh officers of Runjeet Singh, bringing welcome and presents. “Each individual delivered a purse of money in gold and silver, and by his Highness’s desire asked for the health of the King of England, and the period that had elapsed since we left London; for the Maharaja, it seemed, believed us to have been deputed from the royal footstool. I replied as circumstances required. ”
There was no end to the wealth Mr. Burnes saw in Lahore — the money, the silver chains, the gold bedsteads, the jewels, rich hangings, silken carpets. Cashmere shawls — dazzling even to read of. And so, having solemnly presented his cart-horses, and made careful inventory of all the valuables he could see, and the weak points of strong places, the prudent lieutenant now returned to Bombay, across the Sutledge, presented his report, and got his meed of praise and his captain’s commission.
Soon, however, he was seized with an intense desire to visit the Punjab again, and to penetrate to Cabool and Bokhara. There were at that time two ex-kings of Cabool, Shah Zemaun and Shoojah-ool-Moolk, living in India, as pensioners of the British; and it was in contemplation to restore some one of these injured monarchs to their rights — their English protectors, indeed, were not just sure which — but the state of Cabool, and the terms to which the exiled monarchs would respectively submit — in short, “circumstances” would determine that point. It was, therefore, above all things, needful for the Anglo-Indian government to get full information about Cabool, and the road thither, and the practicable passes, and the force and disposition of the Afghan tribes. Mr. Burnes, too, had quite an amiable school-boy enthusiasm about the “Conquests of Alexander” — about “the scene of romantic achievements which he had read of in early youth,” and so forth. In one word, a clever spy was wanted, and this romantic Lieutenant was the very man.
Mr. Burnes, therefore, was again furnished with an outfit, and passports as a captain of the British army returning to Europe”; not that he had any notion of really returning to Europe, but the
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story would serve well enough to tell the barbarians: for what could be more natural than that a British captain should take the overland route on his return to his native country?
This time Capt. Burnes went straight across the Sutledge into Lahore; and was again received with frank hospitality by brave old Runjeet: who made, however, inconveniently minute inquiries. “Runjeet made the most particular inquiries regarding our journey; and since it was no part of my object to develop the entire plans we had in view, we informed his Highness that we were proceeding towards our native country.” In short, they told him they were going straight to England; for Burnes immediately adds,” He requested me to take a complimentary letter to the King of England. ”The phrase “it was no part of my object to develop,” etc., is the gallant gentleman’s mode of saying, that being a spy he told such lies as suited his purpose.
After feasting his eyes again upon the gold and jewels of Lahore, Burnes proceeds across the Indus into Cabool. The king. Dost Mohammed, he always takes care to style in his book, the “chief” — remembering that the true king was in fact one of the two Indian pensioners, or somebody else, who might suit the views of generous England. Burnes was presented to this “chief,” who asked much after Runjeet Singh and his power — “for sparing whose country,” says the traveller, “he gave us no credit. He wished to know if we had designs upon Cabool. ”No answer is recorded to this simple question; but we may be sure the answer was such as circumstances required.
One is grieved to find that so intelligent a traveller found much falsehood, insincerity, and want of candour amongst the Asiatics. “With every disposition,” he says, “to judge favourably of Asiatics — and my opinions regarding them improved as I knew them better — I have not found them free from falsehood: I fear, therefore, that many a false oath is taken amongst them. ”What a painful thought to a European!
I had almost forgotten the Koh-i-noor. It was in the first journey, when Mr. Burnes was admitted to his “audience of leave” of Runjeet Singh, he bethought himself that although he had seen gold and silver enough in all conscience to justify British “intervention” in the affairs of the Punjab, he had not yet beheld with his own eyes that monstrous diamond, in itself
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worth a king’s ransom. Therefore, “in compliance,” he says, “with a wish I expressed, he produced the Koh-i-noor, or Mountain of Light, one of the largest diamonds in the world, which he had extorted from Shah Shoo; ah, the ex-king of Cabool.” — the very man we are supporting by a pension — so that the diamond as good as belongs to us. “Nothing,” exclaims Mr. Burnes, “can be imagined more superb than this stone: it is of the finest water, and is about half the size of an egg. Its weight amounts to 3½ rupees; and if such a jewel is to be valued, I am informed it is worth 3½ millions of money: but this is a gross exaggeration. ”Certainly, it was important to have all the particulars in the matter of such a diamond as this — a main part of the resources of Lahore, afterwards to be developed by British energy. It was the size of half an egg: its weight was accurately ascertained by the commonest silver coin — but lest there should be any mistake, he adds, “The Koh-i-noor is set as an armlet, with a diamond on each side about the size of a sparrow’s egg.” Thus it was made pretty certain that in any future sack or plunder of Lahore, the rudest soldier going in there, to see what he could develop, should not fail to identify the Mountain of Light. The Maharaja also showed him a large ruby weighing fourteen rupees, a topaz as large as half a billiard-ball — showed him enough, in short, to awaken the sympathies of the British public in favour of Lahore.
“The last thing I heard of the Mountain of Light was, that it was safe “under the protection of British bayonets.” *
There is no need to follow Captain Burnes through Cabool and Bokhara, or to copy the prudent remarks he everywhere makes upon the strength of defences, and the booty to be expected in cities. He acquitted himself like a cunning serviceable spy, gave satisfaction to the gang of robbers he belonged to; and, as all the world knows, was at last put to death by Akbar Khan’s people during the first British invasion of Cabool; justly put to death by the indignant people as a detected spy and ungrateful traitor, which he was. The British, as usual, called the transaction “insurrection” and “murder.”
* But the very last is that the Mountain of Light was exhibited in the London Crystal Palace, as a jewel of Queen Victoria’s. So that poor Shah Shoojah has got neither kingdom nor diamond.
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But the most amusing portion of this whole book, is that which sets forth the gallant officer’s views about pushing a sale of British soft goods in Asia. For a thorough-bred British spy must be also a kind of “commercial traveller”; and besides his reconnaissances, taken for the purposes of pure brigandage, he must be cunning in cotton patterns, wise in the statistics of turban-cloth and shawls, and must ascertain where consignments of divers sorts of fabrics may be successfully poured in. Having maturely studied this subject, Burnes recommends that the fabrics of Tata, Mooltan, etc., be copied in England — “as we did,” says he, “the chintzes of India.” — “We may then,” he says, “supersede the lingering remnants of trade in those cities.” The policy of British traffic in the East has always been to make low-priced counterfeits of all native manufactures — at first, of good serviceable quality, until the genuine maker was thrust out of the market, then gradually “pouring in” worse and worse Manchester rubbish, so as to effectually cheat the consumer, starve the artisan, and ruin the employers. It is needful to keep in mind the shabby history of this business, in order to understand some of the gallant commercial gent. ’s speculations; and I remember that the most striking picture of the dismal effects produced by that roguish policy in India is to be found in Bishop Heber’s Narrative. Dacca and other places in Bengal, once vast and flourishing manufacturing cities, employing many tens of thousands of Hindoo artisans, and working up the Indian cotton into those fine textures with which they supplied Europe and Asia sixty years ago, are now, for the greater part, only jungle-matted ruins, where wild beasts of the desert dwell, and jackals make night hideous — worse, if possible, than the Liberty of Dublin: the miserable natives perish of famine by thousands every year; the cotton is exported 10,000 miles to be woven in Manchester and re-imported in the shape of such indecent printed rags as the poor devils are now able to buy insomuch that cunning British commerce is beginning to find it has by its very greediness overdone the system. Accordingly, Mr. Burnes, while he shows how to cut out the manufacturers of Lahore, takes care to say “I do not touch upon the policy of supplanting still further the trade of India.” Because the people there are already brought to the starvation point and below the clothes
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wearing condition, where one’s customers cease to be profitable, even for one’s very vilest “fabrics.”
This epauletted bagman has given, plainly enough, the history of the usual British procedure in one case. “The chintz of Moultan,” he says, “was formerly exported to Persia; but in its competition with the British article the manufacture has almost ceased. The European article, when first introduced, about twelve years ago, was sold for twelve rupees per yard, and may now be had for as many annas, or one-sixteenth of its original value. The Moultan manufacturers, being unable to reduce their prices to so low a standard, find little sale for the goods.” And how comes it one may ask, that the British manufacturer can reduce his prices to so low a standard, producing his goods, as he does, in a very highly-taxed country, and charged, as he is, with freight half round the globe and back again? How? Why, first, by starving the artisans of the West, and then by cheating the people of the East. He can keep down his prices in no other way than by making bad articles, and cutting down wages, so that the extension of this traffic is no gain, but loss, to British artisans, who have the honour, indeed, to “clothe the world,” but go without whole shirts themselves. The beneficent spirit (you know) of peaceful commerce, which binds in a golden chain (so the phrase runs) most distant regions, etc.
On the whole, the gallant gent, recommends the pouring in of” woollens” to Lahore and Afghanistan. About silks he hesitates, fearing they might not answer yet; but adds, “I do not of course include brocade, which is at present imported.” Watches, cutlery, jewellery, or glass he hardly recommends for the present; but “ardent spirits” would be brought to a better market. “It is true,” he tells us, “the Punjabees still prefer the fiery drink of their own soil.” This is sad; but if some good cheap British gin, with plenty of aqua fortis in it, were poured in, who knows but we might supersede their fiery drink?
So did Captain Burnes approve himself a prudent and serviceable spy, and that in respect of all the several matters cognisable by a true British spy. In his capacity of geographical traveller, under pretexts of carrying presents, he took soundings of the Indus for British steamers. As a commercial traveller he explored new markets, and made himself learned in patterns and textures, to be
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counterfeited by the British weaver; and, as a mere brigand scout, he took notes of the amount of plunder to be got, marked the exact spots where every good booty was to be found, and estimated the strength of the walls, bolts, and bars, with a view to future British burglarious operations.
The troops are forming on the parade ground, and I must quit Captain Burnes, to listen to the music. Ireland Island, instead of St. George’s, was some time since made the headquarters of the 42nd for my sole sake, and therefore their splendid band plays here for my peculiar solacement. There are two fine bands now at the dockyard, one of them belonging to the Wellesley flagship; and the land and the waters utter delicious strains, sole or responsive.
So much for the waltz music of the 42nd. And by an odd chance the very next book I took up, after “Burnes’s Travels,” was ‘‘ Sketches in Portugal during the Civil War of 1834,” by Capt. Alexander, of the same 42nd, another military commercial traveller, though far less dexterous and intelligent than Burnes. He had been engaged by the Royal Geographical Society’ to go to South-Eastern Africa and make “researches” there; and, in the first place, proceeded to Portugal to get papers, maps, passports, and other furtherance, to enable him to traverse the Portuguese possessions with advantage. This captain’s book, as a book, is worth simply nothing; and I should never have written down the title of it but for the sake of two sentences, at which I have laughed. I will extract them for the sake of another laugh some future day. The gallant officer is much cheered by the thought of all the good that his mission will do the poor Africans, especially in a moral point of view. He says: “For the philanthropic and patriotic mind no prospect can be more agreeable than that of seeing the interest of the African tribes attended to, the arts of civilised life introduced amongst them — then the mild spirit of Christianity, from all which will most assuredly flow wealth and prosperity to our own native land.” And this is only reasonable. One would not surely give one’s Christianity to the savages for nothing.
The other sentence I take from the Christian missionary’s speculations on soft goods — “Show a Turk a fast-coloured silk for twelve piastres, and show him another not with fast colours (and brighter because it is not so fast); explain to him the difference
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between them, and tell him he may have the last piece for six piastres, which will he take? Undoubtedly not the twelve piastre piece.” It is not very clear to me that if this missionary commercial captain and man-milliner were actually chaffering with the Turk in the case supposed, he would feel quite bound to explain to his customer the whole of the difference between the pieces — that is if the cheap and bad piece were the more profitable to sell, which is usually the case with British goods.
How this pettifogging, huckstering nation degrades the profession of arms, making its officers common riders for Lancashire weavers! Why not let mill-owners employ their own bagmen — as they did Mr. Lander, who was commissioned to explore Central Africa for customers by one or two private merchants. This would keep military officers minding their own business, and a huge amount of dreary letterpress would be spared the human race.
Surely, amongst other great benefits which the next European war will confer on the family of mankind, not the least will be the suspension of military and naval authorship for a time — and perhaps the changing of those gentlemen’s tone and tune for all time.
I have read no Greek for six days; and begin to fear that in pretending to myself I loved Plato and Æschylus I was no better than an impostor. Enough of books — I would give all the books I ever read for a pair of lungs that would work.
Dec. 3rd. — Another red morning has dawned, and finds me sitting, bent down on my chair, with weary limbs and dizzy brain, worn out with another night’s long agony. It is the twelfth night since my head has pressed my pillow — Almighty God! — is the angel Sleep to visit me never more? All night, in darkness, I have wrestled with a strong fiend in this cell — other wrestling than Jacob’s at Penuel — and now, at sunrise, when I can breathe somewhat more freely, the sense of deadly weariness comes upon me heavily. My feet are cold as marble: my body and head bathed in sweat. I look at my image in the glass, and verily believe my mother would hardly know me: my eyes have the wild fearful stare that one may imagine in the eyes of a hard-hunted hare, couched and gasping in her form; a cold dew stands in beads upon my forehead; my cheeks are shrunk and livid; my fingers
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have become like bird’s claws; “and on mine eyelids is the shadow of death.” The Asthma demon has fled westward, keeping within the great shadow of the world — riding in darkness like Satan. Ah! he will put a girdle round the earth, and be with me again at set of sun. All tortured and weary wretches, all exiles, and captives, long for the night: and the ambrosial night brings them Lethean balm, and liberty, and home — for those few blessed hours they may have back their youth, and tread their native land, and see the sweet eyes of those who love them — And to me —
But this, after all, is an unprofitable line of observation. If I once begin to write down my “grievances,” I will but think the more of them. And I am resolved not to listen to myself on that topic. Moreover, if the night was bad the morning is glorious, and is flooding the earth with heavenly splendour: the heavy sighing of the wet sea-wind had sunk, and the waves that dismally tumbled and plashed all night against the ship’s side are now but a gentle ripple, trembling in the warm sunshine. It is a deep calm.
Slowly and painfully I prepared myself to go out; and have now basked in the sun for an hour on the pier. These December days (though the nights be cold) are as bright and warm as July days in Ireland. No wretchedness, on this side despair, could resist the soothing power of such a sky and scene, such Favonian airs and blue gentle seas. Strains of soft music from the band of the flagship in the bay come floating on the still air; and the cedar-tufted Bermoothes, with their white cottages and dark groves, are like a dream of Elysian tropic islands where the Hesperian golden fruitage grows. Surely there is mercy in the heavens :’ there is hope for mortal men. I am strong; I am well. Soul and body are refreshed; and I can meet again, and conquer again, the demon that walketh in darkness.
Dr. Hall, the medical superintendent, came to see me to-day in consequence of the continued reports made by the surgeon of this ship of my continued illness. In truth, for more than two months I have been almost constantly ill, and that to a degree which I had no idea of in all my life before, though an asthmatic patient of ten years’ standing. Dr. Hall told me plainly I could not expect to improve in health at all in this climate, especially in confinement — that Bermuda is notoriously and excessively un-
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friendly to asthmatic persons; and that I must grow worse until my frame breaks down altogether: in short, that if I be kept here much longer I must die.
“And is it,” I asked, “a settled part of the transportation system that an invalid is to be confined to that penal colony, of all others, which is most likely to kill him — I am sure the English have convict establishments in many other countries?”
“The Government,” said he, “never makes any distinction of that kind — I assure you many hundreds of men have died here, who need not have died if I could have had them removed to a more healthy climate.”
“Is there no escape for me, then?”
“Why, with respect to you, I do think something may be done. And in fact I have come to you to-day to urge it upon you to make the necessary exertion for this purpose You must absolutely apply for your removal, or at least be taken out of this strict and solitary confinement.”
“But I have never,” I answered, “since they made a felon of me, asked for any kind of indulgence or mitigation. I was prepared for the worst the Government could do to me: and, live or die, I cannot make any appeal ad misericordiam.”
“No,” said the Doctor, “but write to the governor informing him of your state of health; tell him I have announced to you that you cannot live under your present circumstances and refer to me for my report.”
“And why not tell him all this yourself? You know it.”
“I cannot. I cannot. The form must be complied with. I must not interfere officially, unless upon reference regularly made to me — and that can only be done when you bring the thing under the notice of the governor formally.”
“By my own autograph? — a petition, in short. Well, then. Dr. Hall, to you personally I am of course grateful for the kind feeling that makes you urge this point as you do. But I will never, by throwing myself on the mercy of the English Government, confess myself to be a felon. I will not belie my whole past life and present feelings. I will not eat dirt.
The Doctor was now going to leave me, but came back from the door, up to where I sat, and laid his hand upon my shoulder. I saw that tears stood in the good old man’s eyes. “And are you
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going.” he said, “to let yourself be closed up here till you perish a convict, when by so slight an effort you could — as I am sure you could — procure not only your removal but probably your release? You are still young: you have a right to look forward to a long life yet with your family in freedom and honour. Write to the governor in some form — a simple letter will do; and I know he wishes to exert himself in this matter if it be brought before him so as to justify his interference. Take your pen now and write.”
“I will write something,” I said, “but not now. I will think of it, and try to make it possible for the governor and you to procure my removal, seeing my actual MS. is essential to that end.[”]
After leaving the cell he returned to say I should be sure to give Captain Elliott his proper title as governor. I answered that I believed the gentleman was, out of all doubt, governor of Bermuda, and that of course I would address him properly. So the Doctor left me.
If a man were in the hands of a gang of robbers — I mean mere ordinary unconstitutional highwaymen — and if he were cooped up in a close pestilential crib, the oubliette of their cavern, would he not call out for more air? — and would his so calling out amount to an admission that when they waylaid and robbed him they served him right — or an acknowledgment of their title to rob on that road? — I trow not.
I am not sentenced to death. If the pirates put me to death by this ingenious method, it would be well at least to let the proceeding be known abroad. Not that I think they really want to kill me;* and possibly they would even be glad of some excuse to extend “mercy” to me — the rascals! At all events I will take care to ask for no mitigation of my sentence, still less “pardon”; but demand only that I shall not be murdered by a slow process of torture. To-morrow I will do somewhat. Ah! if the life or death of this poor carcase only were at stake
Dec. 4th. — Several newspapers have come to hand; also, Blackwood’s Magazine for October. Blackwood has a long article on Irish affairs, which pleases me much; for they say it is now clear the British Constitution, with its trial-by-jury and other respectable institutions, is no way suited to Ireland; that even the
* I now think differently; the reason will appear in the sequel. — JM.
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Whigs have found out this truth at last; that they, the Blackwood’s men, always said so; and who will contradict them now? — that Ireland is to be kept in order simply by bayonets; and when the vile Celts are sufficiently educated and improved, they may then perhaps aspire to be admitted to the pure blessings of, etc., etc.
This is quite right, friend Christopher; we ought to have nothing to do with your Constitution, as you call it, until, as you say, we know how to use it; which, under bayonet tuition, is a secret we cannot but learn, I trust, at last; and then we will certainly use it after its deserts.
So I am to write to-day to this British governor of Bermuda, and respectfully, too. Indeed, if I write to Captain Elliott at all, I am no way entitled to address him otherwise than respectfully. On my arrival here, when he despatched my first letter to my wife, he had the courtesy to write to her himself, to set her mind at ease as much as he could.
I have written. The letter is superscribed, “To his Excellency the Governor of Bermuda.” It merely contains a statement about my health, with reference to the medical superintendent, and suggests that “as I am not sentenced to death,” it might be well to get some change made in my position, either by removal to a more healthy climate, or otherwise, “so that I may be enabled, physically, to endure the term of transportation to which I am sentenced.”
As this document does not call itself a petition or memorial, and does not end with a promise to pray, possibly the governor may decline to notice it, yet I think he will use his influence to have me removed; and if he suggests this to the London Government, policy will probably incline them to mitigate the atrocity of their outrage. Let me but escape out of their clutches with my life, and I will let them hear of my gratitude for all their policy to me.
At any rate the letter has been despatched to Government House, and in a great hurry, lest I should rue, and not send it at ay. There is sore humiliation in stooping to ask anything of these pirates — even air that I can breathe.
True, a man captured by Malays or Greeks, or other buccaneering rovers, would think it no shame to do thus much or more, for
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life or liberty; and this simple note may save my life or gain my liberty. Yet it has cost me a grievous effort. I feel the wrong done to me tripled since enforcing myself to condescend so far; and if it pleases God, to Whom vengeance belongeth, to award to me my share, then, by God’s help, I will have additional revenge for this.
Two months will bring me the result. Till then I must keep aching body and panting soul together, as best I may.
[Plate:] Forging pikes in 1848
CHAPTER VII
The “first mate” has been with me inquiring after my health. He rather suspects me, I believe, of malingering. This old fellow is very voluble in his talk, believes himself to possess great conversational power, and is ready to give his opinion (being a Londoner) upon every subject. Gives it as his decided opinion that the thing which ails me must be “something internal.” Asked me earnestly how I thought I had contracted this illness, I told him if it was not by skating against the wind in Flanders, I could not think what else it wasn’t. “And a very likely way too,” said the first mate.
Dec. 8th. — I have been wasting my time sadly for three months — doing, learning, thinking, stark nothing. There is surely no necessity on me to live this worthless life, even in a hulk. By idleness I am helping the sickness that saps my strength. The chafing spirit devours the flesh; the blade rusts, and consumes its scabbard. This very possibility of getting shortly removed hence has restrained me from writing to Ireland for the books I want; and books and writing are the only occupation I can think of in my solitude. In truth, I did deem myself stronger than I find myself to be — stronger in body and mind; thought I could live wisely, calmly, and be sufficient unto myself in my own strength of quiet endurance, into whatsoever profoundest depths of penal horror the enemy might plunge me. To do and to be all this, I apprehend, needs more training than I have yet undergone. To attain the maximum strength, whether of mind or body, you require exercise, [Gk. word] education of every muscle and limb, of every faculty and sense. Sometimes I strive to guess what Goethe that great artist in living well, would recommend, by way of institutio vitæ to a man in a hulk, ridden by the asthma fiend; but that sage relied too much, perhaps, on physical agencies, and the ennobling influences that come to us from objects of sense and taste, and the creations of highest art — to be of much use in cases like these. The pleasant country set apart for learning how to live
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in Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahr, with its stately repose and its elegant instrumentalities, material and spiritual, for making human life godlike, is as far out of my reach here as Utopia. Goethe, I think, never tried the galleys. One could wish he had — that so hulked men might have the spiritual use and meaning of the hulking world developed in transcendental wise, to help their solitary researches in all their convict generations. But, indeed, he made it one of the rules of his own life to shun all violent shocks, rude impressions, harsh noises, and the like; a temper that his nervous mother gave him, they say: at any rate, he nursed and petted himself in that refined sensitiveness; and thereby surely excluded himself from at least one-half the experiences of this world, so harsh and rude. If he had been bolted in fetters of iron, and whirled away to the galleys with a loaded pistol at his ear, he might have found the impression rather strong: but who can tell what he might have learned, to teach other men? Who can measure our loss herein?
I venture to dogmatise further — that by reason >of this very system of his, living the easy half only of life, this Goethe fails of being the prophet, preacher, and priest, that a certain apostle of his in these days affirms he is.
That other Prophet, who preceded both Goethe and Mohammed, did not shun disagreeable impressions: He fasted forty days, and then fought and vanquished the devil and his angels — the sweat of His passion was as drops of blood — He was spitefully entreated — struck with the palms of ruffian hands — scourged like a convict as He was. He sounded the bass string of human misery and shame — insomuch that it is possible — I do not peremptorily dogmatise here — it is possible, that by intense contemplation of the character, passion, and death of that Prophet, more perfectly than by any other spiritual training, man may serenely conquer the flesh and the sense, defy the devil, and triumph gloriously <over pain and death.
Dec. 18th. — I learn that a ship is to arrive at Bermuda early next year, carrying a cargo of convicts from London, with orders to deposit them here, and then proceed to the Cape of Good Hope with another similar cargo, made up of “recommended” prisoners from Bermuda, to be selected from amongst those who have gone through most of their terms of sentence. When these arrive at
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the Cape they are to be set at liberty by what is termed “ticket-of-leave.” How will the Cape colony relish this consignment of miscreants — to be let loose in their fine country? I suppose they have no voice in the matter. The man in Downing Street is their divine Providence; and they must submit to the inscrutable dispensations of the clerks in that office.
Seeing this shipload is actually to be sent, however, it may possibly occur to my keepers in England, that as I am not likely to die here without remark, they had better send me to the Cape. I should like it well: that colony has a noble climate: I should be in some sort of liberty; and if likely to be kept there many years, I could bring out all my household; and actually live through my captivity instead of suffering a daily and nightly death-in-life, as I do here.
Scarce half I seem to live — dead more than half
And buried —
Myself my sepulchre — a moving grave.
Fresh air, free motion, books, solitude without bars and gratings employment on my own ground, as a vine-dresser and a husbandman, and in teaching my boys — and the sweet society of all that are dearest to me. I will speak to Dr. Hall about it: he may suggest the thing to the governor, who may suggest it to the Colonial Secretary. If I must be a prisoner — or while I must — there could be no more tolerable imprisonment than this.
O’Doherty of the Irish Tribune, I see, has also been sentenced to ten years’ transportation — and what then can have become of his colleague, Williams? There is not one word about him in the paper, I have seen. Perhaps he has died in the prison. The jury in O’Doherty’s case was also closely packed.
Some Catholic clergymen have drawn up and presented to Lord Clarendon a respectful address, humbly deprecating the packing of juries in all these cases, and suggesting that Catholic householders should be allowed to stand for “good and lawful men.” Lord Clarendon replies boldly that he did pack the juries; and that under the circumstances he did right to pack them. Here is an honest ruffian!
About the time of my trial I remember some newspapers (and even Mr. Henn in his speech) said I had no right to complain of the exclusion of Catholic jurors — not being a Catholic myself —
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and now as O’Doherty is a Catholic himself, they say he cannot surely expect to be tried by his co-religionists; they would be partial to him. ’ So in all cases good true-blue Protestants must do the Queen’s business. All this talk about the religion of the jurors is of course exasperating religious animosities in Ireland; and the English newspapers attribute this to us, because we complained about the packing. I wonder now if there is anybody in Ireland daring enough to hint that the religious distinction was made by the Crown, not by us — that we never asked to be tried by Catholics or Repealers, but that the government took care we should be tried by Protestants, and Castle Protestants only — that we demanded to have our conduct pronounced upon by our countrymen legally represented in the jury-list, not by one sect of our countrymen, still less by one section of one sect, least of all by twelve men skilfully chosen (by those who knew how to choose out of that section of that sect. But I suppose nobody dares to say this — Lord Clarendon would soon lay up the audacious traitor in Newgate as a suspected person.
23rd. — Saw Dr. Hall to-day. He tells me that my letter was referred to him by the governor for his official opinion — that he gave it distinctly to the effect that I am a dying man, unless I be removed from Bermuda; and the governor has transmitted this to London. In process of time, therefore, I may probably be removed, unless I die in the meantime.
Mentioned to him what I had heard about the Cape; and asked him why I might not be sent to that place. He looked surprised: and asked me if I really wished to sail in a transport ship, to the Cape of Good Hope, with convicts. I answered, “Most certainly — I wish to go to any country where there is air I can breathe.” He said the ship would be crowded with convicts. Told him I did not care — I wanted to fly for my life, and would not be choice either in my conveyance, or my company. He then said he would certainly mention to the governor the conversation he had with me; and as there would still be time to communicate with England before the ship would sail for the Cape, he had little doubt that I might be put on board of her, if I chose.
In short, I believe the pirates will send me to the Cape. And what care I for the convict ship’s-company? No doubt they will give me a separate place on board, for my own accommodation,
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as usual, out of no love for me, but lest I should raise a mutiny; for they have a wholesome terror of my propensities and talents in that way. At worst it will be but a two or three months’ voyage; and one can endure anything for two or three months.
Christmas Day. — They have had service on deck to-day. The men have had a holiday. The weather is bright and warm; and the whole of this wooden building is reeking with plum-pudding. I hear a distant sound of loud applause and stamping of feet, reminding me of Conciliation Hall. The man who attends me says it is a company of amateur convicts enacting a tragedy on the lower deck; the guards and officers are among the spectators, and there is a general gala — something as near to a saturnalian revel as would be safe among such a crew of miscreants. I wish them all a merry Christmas, and many happy returns of the same; but I doubt if it ever will return to me; I am sitting all day, shrunk together in my cell, dismally ill, and wrapped up in coats, like a man on a box-seat of a coach. Read “Antony and Cleopatra.”
Exit the year 1848.
1849 — Jan. 15th. — Bravo, Forty-Nine!* Great news of the French Republic. Prince Louis Bonaparte (the same who was transported in Louis Philippe’s time) is elected President, and that against General Cavaignac! The English newspapers, which, to my horror, are my sole channels of intelligence, are in high delight, or pretend to be. For this, they say, is a distinct renunciation and abandonment of the Republic. If it were the Republic France cared for, she had chosen Cavaignac, an able man, and staunch democrat; but behold! they neglect Cavaigriac, and all France runs wild after the imperial name of Bonaparte. But these villainous newspapers see in the transaction just what they wish to see, and nothing else; or rather, put on it the interpretation which they wish their poor stupid readers to receive; and let them receive, and swallow, and digest it for the present. Oh! let there be no premature alarm in the moneyed circles. Let Credit stand on its wooden legs as long as it may.
* I fear that I applauded France and her Prince under a mistake; but of this I am not yet quite certain. Respice finem. Therefore I leave room hereunder for another note. Bothwell, V. D. L., 12th February, 1853.
Other Note. — I still believe in the French Republic, and regard the Emperor as an accident, and his alliance with England a delusion. New York, 22nd February, 1854.
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But the French worship not the imperial, but the heroic name of Bonaparte. Republican formula, or monarchical, is not the thing they care for; but the glory of France is their god. Lalso see in this thing what I wish to see — and I see in it an expression of the great national want of France — that thirst, yearning, burning, passionate, in the soul of every Frenchman, to he quits with Europe for Waterloo and the occupation of France; and to tear into small shreds the Treaty of Vienna. On my white rock here, hard by the Tropic of Cancer, comes to my ear in melody the first growl of that gathering storm which is destined to shake the pillars of the globe: St. Helene! Waterloo! Vengeance! Now, ye credit-funders, look to it — Prenez garde! ameliorators of Celtic Ireland! Ça ira.
Poor sick, Celtic Ireland, in the meantime is miserably quiet, nobody daring to utter one honest word about public affairs, for fear of the Castle-vigour. O’Brien, Meagher, and the other Clonmel convicts have had their case argued before the twelve judges, on a writ of error. Decision against them of course. And O’Brien and MacManus go to the English House of Lords. Meagher, it is said, has decidedly refused to do this. He will never seek for justice out of Ireland. Right, brave Meagher!
O’Donoghue follows Meagher’s example; but still I can learn nothing about Williams. Since his arrest I have not once met with his name. He was very delicate in health; I fear their dungeons have killed him. *
I have been very ill for the last month; but do not yield to it an inch. Must live, if I can, for some years to come. It may be this Napoleon has sought the Presidency, not with Republican, but with dynastic views. If so, he is an idiot as well as a traitor, and his empty head will fall. He seems, for so far, to mean fairly. And, heaven! what a destiny is within his grasp; but has he brains? And a heart?
February 1st. — There is a sort of “commission” sitting here, my servant tells me, consisting of Mr. Hire, Dr. Hall, and several other hulk authorities, to determine on the prisoners who are to
* New York, February 22nd, 1854. — These dismal misgivings as to the fate of Mr. Williams were happily illusory. He is still alive, and in Alabama; though, I fear, he has not a very valuable plantation there. The best in the South is not too good for him. — J. M.
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be recommended for the Cape of Good Hope. Several men, it seems, to whom this recommendation was offered, have refused to leave Bermuda. This servant himself has been placed on the list and intends to go. He tells me he does not like Bermuda. “It’s a rum country, sir, is this ‘ere — one of the rummest countries as is.” I asked him if he had heard of any objections being made by the people of the Cape against receiving them. “No, sir,” said he — “not as I knows on — I s’pose Government will take care of all them there things.”
Get on but slowly with my translation of the Politeia: and nearly repent that I began it; for I lack energy to go through with it. On some days I have hardly strength to mend my pen, or strength of will to do so much as determine upon that important measure. Dawdling over Keightley’s history of the war in Greece, compiled out of all the newspapers and all the memoirs. Full enough of incident certainly; for the author seems to give different versions of the same event as so meiny different transactions, and he ruthlessly kills more Greeks in the course of this war than there have been in all Greece at one time since the days of Philopcemen not to speak of incredible multitudes of Turks, whom he generally slays at least thrice. Then I have been turning lazily over the pages of a certain “magazine,” called the “Saturday Magazine,” which the worthy chaplain has lent me. There are six double volumes of this astounding rubbish; or more properly six strata — a huge, deposit of pudding-stone, rubble, detritus and scoriae in six thick stratifications; containing great veins of fossil balderdash, and whole regions of what the Germans call loss and trass; amongst which, however, sometimes glances up a fragment of pure ore that has no business there, or a gleaming splinter of diamond illuminating the foul opacity. After an hour’s digging and shovelling, I meet perhaps with an authentic piece of nosier Thomas himself — there are two of those in the whole six beds — and once I turned up what made my heart leap — “The Forging of the Anchor” — which I straightway rolled forth till the teak timbers rang. There are a great many not intolerable wood engravings in the volumes, and some readable topographical description: but on the whole the thing is of very base material — “Amusements in Science” — “Recreations in Religion” — no, but “Easy Lessons on Christian Evidences” — much apocryphal
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anecdotage of history, but, above all, abundant illustrations ol British generosity, valour, humanity — British wealth, commerce, and civilisation: statistics of cotton fabric — how many million yards of it are made by the year, and how many times this would go round the globe, marry, I believe the earth’s orbit — statistics of steel pens — how many tons of iron are snipped up into pens, — and yet how the quill trade (delightful to know) is not one feather the worse. What “literature” — what commerce there must be here! What correspondence — what scrip! How many indictments, parliamentary reports, and bills in chancery! What book-keeping I What book-making! — Surely there is no end to the energy, traffic, wisdom, property, virtue, and glory of this immortal British nation! — This is the character of all popular British “literature” which is got up in these late years “for the million” (poor million!) — Its look is wholly introverted: it can see or tell of nothing in the world but the British empire and colonies. The true British spirit is now-a-days well content with itself — looks no longer above or without itself, but keeps gazing with stupid delight intently at its own navel. The symptom may be called omphaloblepsy, and is diagnostic of a very fatal national disease — a thorough break-up, I trust, of the Constitution.
And how happens it that I can sit for hours turning over (with many a pooh! and psha!) leaf after leaf of this same stratified debris? If I despise it so sovereignly, cannot I shut it up and lay it on the shelf? — nobody has set me a task in it. Yet to me intently revolving this matter, it is apparent that the value of any book is not in the mere thoughts it presents to you, expressed in black-on-white, but rather in those it suggests, occasions, begets in you, far outside the intentions and conceptions of the writer, and even outside the subject of his writing. If some dull rogue writes you an essay, on what he does not understand, you are not bound to follow his chain of reasoning (as perhaps he calls it) — the first link of his chain may fit itself to other links of your own forging, and so you may have whole trains, whole worlds of thought, which need not run upon the dull rogue’s line, nor stop at his terminus. One must not disdain to draw matter of reverie from “even a sot, a pot, a truckle for a pulley, an oil bottle, or a cane chair. ”But what talk I of essays and writings? Some
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poor wood-cut turning up suddenly in this paltry magazine, by the fancied likeness of one feature in it — a church tower, a tree, a human eye, or lip — to somewhat you have seen far away and long ago, may carry you, as on a sunbeam, into distant valleys of vision, and bless your eyes with gleams of a wonderful light, whose fountain who shall tell? — yes, and place by your side companions old and dear, whose discourse you hear and answer, and whose fare — so real is the presence — you would hold it but just to pay to any ferryman on the crossing of a river — a piece of honest dealing inculcated by Uhland —
“Boatman, take this coin, I pray thee;
Thrice thy fare I cheerfully pay thee —
For though thou seest them not, there stand
Anear me, Two from the Phantom Land. ”
The genesis of our thoughts is a mysterious operation — not yet fully explained by Dr. Thomas Brown, with his Law of Association; but thus much seems clear, that in order to think at all, one has need of some kind of mechanical helps — in utter solitude, darkness, and silence, your intellect would soon be extinguished, drowned in that “stagnant sea of idleness, blind, boundless, mute, and motionless” — and idiocy would ensue, or raving madness. When a man is shut up in a rigorous confinement for many months seeing nothing but the same dungeon walls, the same bars, the same unwearied sun sending the same shadows every evening at the same pace along the floor, and nothing human, save a most down-looking and felonious felon, setting daily food before him, the intellect cannot but stagnate, starve, and grow dull, for lack of needful food and exercise. It is then one feels the value of even a very bad book — of anything, in short, that will help imagination and memory to take the place of the senses and of human converse, furnishing occasion and stimulus to thought.
But what is this? Is it the abyss of metaphysics I see yawning before me? Assuredly, I will not plunge into that bottomless pit again, after having drawn myself out of it, with pain and labour, full fifteen years ago — just so long is it since I endeavoured to walk with my own head in my teeth, like the decapitated Christian martyr celebrated by Mr. Gibbon — or to rival that “Irish saint,” known to Thomas Carlyle, who swam across the Channel with his
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head so secured — “a miracle,” saith Carlyle, “which has never been repeated.”
But, halting on this side the brink of psychology, I have yet made: a sort of excuse for at man in solitary imprisonment putting up with exceedingly bad books. They may be to him a succedaneum in some sort, for the various scenes and intercourse of life and the ordinary “uses of this world,” which you know are often as weary, stale, and flat almost as the very dullest piece of “literature” ever heaped together — yet out of which you can always secrete and assimilate so much various pabulum as will keep the soul from devouring itself. Cor ne edito — it is not wholesome: stay your stomach with any sort of garbage rather than that.
February 3rd. — Between my cabin, and the place occupied by the convicts, are two wooden bulks, or walls, and a room or passage between those walls — yet when the men talk loud in quarrelling or argument, I often hear their abominable discourse. To-day I heard a long and angry dispute, the subject and phraseology of which I shall not commemorate — but all that comes to my ears, or eyes, of the way of life in this place, shows me more and more clearly what a portentous evil is this transportation system. Each hulk, each mess or ward, is a normal school of unspeakable iniquity: and young boys who come out, as many surely do, not utterly desperate and incurable villains, are sure to become so very soon under such training. I hear enough to make me aware that the established etiquette amongst them (for there is a peculiar good breeding for hulks as for drawing rooms) is to cram as much brutal obscenity and stupid blasphemy into their common speech as it will hold — and that a man is respected and influential among his messmates in direct proportion to the atrocity of his language and behaviour. Gambling is common, and for large sums, four and five pounds being sometimes lost and won at a game of cards. A few of them, it seems, are able to get money, partly by stealing, partly by traffic. Those who work in the quarries and buildings earn threepence per day, of which but one penny per day is given them to spend: but there are tradesmen, and these sometimes work at their trades after hours; so that in one way or another they contrive to carry on a considerable traffic with the Bermudians, who communicate with them on the
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works in various Ways. Many prisoners are employed constantly about the ship as boatmen, servants, and the like; and they have ample opportunities to steal, of which they avail themselves to the fullest extent. If any of them were to discover a scruple about stealing, or decline or neglect to steal when he might, I find it would ba resented as an offence against the laws and usages of the commonwealth, and punished accordingly. In short, evil is their recognised good — and the most loathsome extremities of depravity in mind and body are their summum bonum. Think of a boy of twelve or fourteen years, who has been driven by want or induced by example to commit a theft, sent to school at Bermuda for half his lifetime, in order to reform him! But what enrages me more than all is to think of the crowd of starved Irish, old and young, who have taken sheep or poultry to keep their perishing families alive in the Famine, sent out to Bermuda to live in a style of comfort they never knew before even in their dreams, and to be initiated into mysteries and profound depths of corruption that their mother tongue has no name for. About two months before my arrival here, came out a great shipload of Irish — the harvest of the Famine special commission — from twelve years of age up to sixty. They were all about threequarters starved, and so miserably reduced by hunger and hardship, that they have been dying off very fast by dysentery. As to the behaviour of these poor creatures, I learn from the commander that they have no vice in them, are neither turbulent nor dishonest, nor give any trouble at all. “But,” adds the commander, “they will soon be as finished ruffians as the rest. ”No doubt they will, poor fellows. He informs me that they were astonished, at first, at the luxuries provided for them — fresh beef three days in the week, and pork the other days, pea-soup, tea, excellent loaf -bread — things they had never seen before, except in shops, and which they no more knew how to use than Christophero Sly. Then they have liberty to write home as often as they like; and when they tell their half-starved friends how well a felon is fed, what can be more natural than that famished Honesty should be tempted to put itself in the way of being sent to so plentiful a country? This man tells me he has many prisoners in the Dromedary who have been here before, and not a few in their third term; that he has several fathers and sons together; and that it is
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not uncommon to find families who have been hulked for three or four generations. Hulking, as a profession, is as yet confined to England — that it will become a more favourite line of business there, as the poverty of the English poor shall grow more inveterate, cannot be doubted. God’s mercy! is Ireland not to be torn out of the hands of these ameliorative British statesmen until they have brought this crowning curse upon her, too?
There are now about two thousand convicts at Bermuda — about a thousand at Spike Island; how many may be at Gibraltar and Australia, not to speak of the several depths for them in England, I know not; but on the whole there is an immense and rapidly growing convict community distributed in all these earthly hells, maintained in much comfort, with everything handsome about them, at the cost of the hard-working and ill-fed, and even harder working and worse-fed people of England, Scotland, and Ireland. That there is a limit to all this, one may easily see.
What to do, then, with all our robbers, burglars, and forgers? Why hang them, hang them. You have no right to make the honest people support the rogues, and support them better than they, the honest people, can support themselves. You have no right to set a premium upon villainy, and put burglars and rickburners on a permanent endowment. It is not true to say that in Bermuda (for instance) the value of their own labour supports them, because that labour is employed upon most extravagant public works, which government could not undertake at all without convict labour, and the wages come out of the taxes paid by the honest people; in short, they support themselves just as seamen on board a man-of-war support themselves, and do not earn their living half so hard. The taxes keep up the “convict service,” just as they keep up the navy and the excise men.
In criminal jurisprudence, as well as in many another thing, the nineteenth century is sadly retrogressive; and your Beccarias, and Howards, and Romillys are genuine apostles of barbarism — ultimately of cannibalism. “Reformation of the offenders” is not the reasonable object of criminal punishment, nor any part of the reasonable object, and though it were so, your jail and hulk system would be the surest way to defeat that object and make the casual offender an irreclaimable scourge of mankind. Jails ought to be places of discomfort; the “sanitary condition” of
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miscreants ought not to be better cared for than the honest, industrious people — and for “ventilation,” I would ventilate the rascals in front of the county jails at the end of a rope.
Feb. 8th. — Tired to death of reading books — at least all books of an instructive sort — and have now been devouring (for about the fifth time) “Ivanhoe” and “The Heart of Mid-Lothian.” My blessing on the memory of Walter Scott! Surely all prisoners and captives, sick persons, and they who are heavy of cheer, ought to pray for his soul. One is almost reconciled to “popular literature,” because it has made the Waverley Novels common as the liberal air. — A famine of books, I begin to find, is very emaciating: and I know not well how I am to ensure a due supply. All my own, my well-known, friendly old books are sold off, and I cannot allow my poor wife to lay out any part of her small monies on books for me. What a loss to a bookish man is the loss of his own books! books in which you can turn to the place you want as easily as you thread the walks in your own garden, whose very backs and bindings are familiar countenances. Of all refinements in royal luxury, I know none more enviable (though the Parc aux cerfs was well enough) than the great Frederick’s library arrangements. He had five palaces; and, in the course of a stirring life, had to spend much time in each; but in each was the same library: same editions, same bindings, same disposition on the shelves; there was a room for the library of like size, same figure, same furniture; so, when he sat down by his study-fire of an evening, in the same dressing-gown and sHppers, the great Frederick was always at home. And if he did not want to turn to any place in any book, but preferred dozing, he knew, at least, that he could easily turn to any he might want, which is often quite as good, or even better.
Feb. 12th. — Mr. Hire, the superintendent, came to-day to inform me that the governor had received directions to let me go to the Cape, where, on my arrival, I am to be set at liberty, but within a limited district, and under police surveillance. So the worst seems to be over; that is, if I five to reach the Cape, of which Dr. Hall seems doubtful.
Mr. Hire tells me further, that there is a good deal of discontent among the Cape Colonists, at the prospect of having their country made a receptacle for convicts, but that it seems to be the work
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of a faction, and that the Government at home do not pay it any attention. It seems to me very strange that there should be “factions” at the Cape on such a question — th[a]t they do not rise up, as one man, to resent and resist such an outrage. But Africa knows its own business best. It is no concern of mine. Certainly I shall have no scruple in going anywhere out of Bermuda.
Feb. 22nd. — Opening of the London Parliament on the 1st of this month, and Queen’s Speech. Her Gracious Majesty asks her Parliament for a continuation of “extraordinary powers” in Ireland, that is, continued Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and continued powers to thrust anybody in to gaol, without any charge against him; for, although, says her gracious Majesty, “Peace” has happily been preserved, “there still exists a spirit of disaffection in that country.” What! Even still! after so much amelioration being done for them — after the very bulwarks of the Constitution, Habeas Corpus, and Jury-trial, being destroyed for them — and all to maintain the “law?” — after the land-appropriators being strengthened by all the powers of government, special commissions, and a thundering army, to exterminate and transport them; and all for their own good. And disaffection still! Well, there is no gratitude in sinful man.
A spirit of disaffection! Yes, I thank God there is.
April 1st. — Festival of all fools. All March is gone — thirty-one long and slow-pacing days, and the Cape ship not yet arrived. I am sick to death. Dr. Warner, the medical officer of the hulks, informs me that he communicated with Dr. Hall, some days ago, about my bad state of health, and the uncomfortable nature of my quarters here, and that they both applied to the governor, to have me removed once more to the hospital ship, where I should have a much better room and more comforts of various sorts, but without success. It was not by my wish, or with my knowledge, that such an application was made, for I never ask for anything or complain of anything, in respect of my comforts and accommodations. Dr. Warner, however, tells me, that if any other prisoner in the colony had been in my condition he would have been sent to the hospital six months ago, and that without consulting the governor at all. It is still judged necessary to pretend to be afraid of the Americans coming and rescuing me, which I now believe to have been bflt a pretext from the first. So now, I sit constantly panting and
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struggling in asthma, both night and day, exposed to a damp and bitter north wind, that sometimes blows out my candle at night; for the ship is old, and the port-hole is much rounded away at the edges, so that the casement window does not properly fit it. Of course there is no fire.
I cannot well understand the intentions of the “Government” with regard to me, or divine whether their instructions to my keepers here are tp be kind to me, or to kill me. I said so to Dr. Warner to-day, and he only replied by shaking his head. Certainly ten months’ solitary confinement of a sick man in an unwholesome den is but a doubtful sort of indulgence. But I await the Cape ship. She is the Neptune, of 700 tons; and she sailed from England on the 15th of February. They are now looking out for her every day. This same cruel north wind, that blows out my candle at night, is roaring, I trust, upon her quarter, and straining tack and sheet with her bellying canvas.
CHAPTER VIII
April 2nd, 1849 — In my cell, “Dromedary” Hulk. — Yesterday ended ten months of my exile and captivity — ten months out of fourteen years leave one hundred and fifty-eight months. What mortal can keep Despair and the Devil at bay so long? and all alone; “lone as a corpse within its shroud.”
April 5th. — The Neptune has arrived, and is to sail in about a fortnight. There is still, I understand, a good deal of agitation at the Cape against the project of establishing a penal colony there; and, assuredly, it is a brutal act of tyranny, if it be indeed done without their consent. Our authorities here, however, seem to make very light of it. They say the opposition is got up by a parcel of canting Dissenters.
Have been reading in Tait’s Magazine an elaborate review of a new book by the indefatigable Government literator, Macaulay — no less than a “History of England.” Tait gives copious extracts from which I easily perceive that the book is a piece of authentic Edinburgh Reviewing, declamatory in style, meagre in narrative, thoroughly corrupt in principle, as from all this man’s essays on subjects of British history must have been expected. *
* Bothwell, V.D.L., 4th August, 1851. — I have read the book itself here; for, having become one of the most popular books in the world, it is even in the village library of Bothwell. Mem. — It is a clever, base, ingenious, able, and shallow political pamphlet, in two volumes. This writer has the rare art of colouring a whole narrative by an apparently unstudied adjective or two, and telling a series of frightful falsehoods by one of the most graceful of adverbs. What is worse, the fellow believes in no human virtue — proves Penn a pimping parasite, because he hated penal laws; and makes a, sort of Bromwicham hero out of the dull Dutch Deliverer. [129]
April 12th. — At length British vigour is checked in Ireland, provided it be now firmly met. Mr. Duffy has been tried for his felony a second or a third time, and the Crown is beaten again; that is, they have failed in obtaining a conviction, which is to them utter defeat. Matters have arrived at the point I aimed at from the first; the “Government” have come to be ashamed of the barefaced packing of so many successive juries; or have [129]
[Plate:} British military camp at Tipperary, July 1848.
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begun to see that it is impolitic — and so they allowed a Repealer or two to stand amongst the twelve who tried him. And of course these men not only refused to agree with the rest in finding him guilty (knowing that no Irishman can be guilty, in Ireland, of any offence against the Queen of England) — but some of them insisted on applauding the national sentiments of the prisoner’s counsel, with “Hear, hear,” and clapping of hands. This is very good and right, and highly satisfactory. British “law” in Ireland stands on the very brink of the bottomless pool. But what now will my Lord Clarendon do? He cannot, and dare not, allow himself to be beaten in this case: and I think he will boldly pack on the next trial, and secure this one conviction at all hazards; for Duffy is not only editor of the Nation, but is the very man who urged poor O’Brien upon his Tipperary war. If they even stay proceedings against him now, they are finally vanquished, and he can drive Government into the sea. He can: but will he? dare he? Alas! the unfortunate man is too evidently cowed and prostrated to the earth — he produced on his trial evidence of character — literally, people to bear witness of his good moral character in private life — and not only that, but of his legal and constitutional character. I read that Father Mathew and Bishop Blake were brought forward to prove that Mr. Duffy is not only a very amiable and religious person, but also far from being the sort of a man to meditate illegal violence, or the disturbance of “social order” — not he. Carleton, too, is produced to give his testimony to the prisoner’s general character — of which Carleton is an admirable judge. And, what is almost worse than all, the poor man tries to evade the responsibility of some of the prosecuted articles, by proving that they were not written by himself. This is all very wretched work; yet still, unless there be some utterly ignominious concession, “Government” will not be relieved from the difficulty. He is led back to prison; and try him they must at the next Commission; and they must pack the jury, and that very closely, or — oh! it is a fine thing to see a “liberal,” a “progressive[”] a “conciliatory” British Government brought to this.
I shall be very anxious to hear the result of the next trial. Would to God there were someone found in Ireland to press the enemy hard now! Would to God it were in this man to do his duty! He this Duffy, might now win to himself the immortal honour of
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abolishing English law in Ireland, if his fine private character would but allow him. It is absolutely necessary to try out this legal controversy — a drawn battle will not do; all constitutional rubbish must be swept away, and the ground cleared for the trial of the final issue. The battle of the (Irish) Constitution must be fought, in the jury-box first, then in the streets, lastly in the fields.
To-day, without a moment’s warning, I was carried off from the Dromedary in a boat, and brought to the hospital-ship once more. The Neptune is to sail within a week; and it seems I am to have a few days’ hospital treatment, to fit me for so long a voyage; “lest they should find it necessary,” says Dr. Hall, “to lower you from the yard-arm between this and the Cape.” He says that he procured this arrangement with difficulty, by distinctly certifying that I am too ill to be put on board ship, and that in his opinion there is danger I may not survive the voyage. I did not think I had been so ill; curse on them; they have gone near to murder me. Yet I do not believe that the voyage will be hurtful to me, or that I am now in danger of death. The danger was in being kept in solitary confinement here. Indeed, weak as I am in body, I feel stronger in soul than ever I was; for which I sincerely thank Almighty God. Many foul shadows that seemed threatening to rise up between me and the sun have scattered themselves and sunk. I have risen into a clearer atmosphere, and feel myself more in accord with whatsoever is good in this world. Let some philosopher account to me, upon either physiological or psychological principles, which he pleases, for this phenomenon — the mind growing strong as the frame grows weak — growing hopeful, contented, indomitable, the nearer a man looks upon the face of death; death in a dungeon; death among his enemies. For my own part, I bethink me, that if there be work for me to do on the earth, the Almighty will keep me alive to do it, and draw me out of this pit in His own time — that if not. He knows what is best for every one of us; can raise up friends and guides for my children, better friends and guides than I could ever be; can find means and instruments that I never dream of, to elevate our poor country out of the dust, and set her high among the nations, and give her peace and prosperity within her cottages. In short, everybody can do without me; and if I am to perish in this exile.
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I shall take it as a certain sign that all things will go on better without me. Yet I do ardently desire to live and to act: to rear my own children, to do my own duties, to act and speak amongst men that which I know to be just and true. And all this will I do if it be God’s will; if otherwise, then God’s will be done.
Dr. Hall is very kind and attentive to me; seems determined to give me as much health as I can take in for the time I remain here. The weather, too, has decidedly turned to summer again, and that very suddenly, so that all chances are in my favour. The islands around this bay, where the Tenedos is moored, with their green fruit gardens and dark cedar groves, and narrow beach of white sand, are like opening paradise to me, after the dockyard and its loathsome hulks.
April 13th. — I have just been gratified (no matter how or by whom) with a sight of some newspapers, which announce, among other things, a signal defeat of the enemy in the Punjab, at the hands of the gallant Sikhs. The Governor-General of India is hastening to support Lord Gough with large forces, and there will probably be a sharp campaign there. The British will undoubtedly make desperate efforts to retrieve their fortune, even though they should immediately after evacuate the country altogether — having first robbed and desolated it — as they did in the case of Cabool. The expenses of all this, however, will be vast; it is not the plunder of a few cities that will cover it; and so will the good work speed. “Great is bankruptcy.”
Meantime, Europe is arranging itself into very singular combinations. England, after fostering Lombard Liberalism, is now courting and flattering Austria — feeling that a day may shortly come when she cannot do without Austria; then Austria, for her part, cannot do at all without Russia, which brings England and Russia en rapport, as they ought to be, for they are natural allies. And then Hungary is not subdued yet, as the murderous English newspapers boasted she was: on the contrary, with Poland (or rather Poles) to aid, she seems far more likely to subdue Austria, And then you may be sure Russia cannot bear that Hungary and the Poles should become friends; and begin defying emperors — so she will thrust in her weighty sword. And then the tricolor of France flies out, and Lombardy, Italy, North Germany are
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up: and then slowly and reluctantly the British leopard (or “lion,” as the brute calls himself) must come up to the scratch — slowly and reluctantly, for he had much rather roar in India, or New Zealand, or (after carefully disarming the people) in Ireland. And Ireland, one is alarmed to hear, has a “spirit of disaffection,” — and will, ere long, have an opportunity of showing whether she can do anything but keep eternally moaning her “grievances.”
All this while Germany is bringing herself to bed of something she calls a Constitution, with much travail, at Frankfort; which Constitution the King of Prussia, and even the old hyena of Hanover, will be sure to reject and set at naught. The Constitution, I can foresee, will be still-born; and North Germany, Prussia, Hanover, and all, will become perforce republican. Kings and Grand Dukes will not suffer them to stop short of that — men will waken some morning in Cologne and Cassel, and Carlsruhe and Baden, and Berlin, and find themselves in battle with kings and kingships — they will awaken to the fact that kings are not to be trusted, not to be bound by any treaty, character, or pact with their subjects, nor, in short, to be otherwise dealt with — once their office becomes useless — than by the old and well-known method, war to the knife, and amputation of the crown, with the head in it. Thus Germany is preparing her part for the great European melée. As for France, she seems wholly occupied just now in settling her internal affairs; and, indeed, before she settles into her normal state, she may fall into strange confusions and do the wildest things; for our worthy France is somewhat eccentric; but in the coming journée — once European affairs are brought so far — there is no doubt or uncertainty as to where gallant France will be found. Let the trumpet sound, and France will be in her place with sword on thigh. Such is the programme, I imagine to myself: but the thing may arrange itself otherwise.
In the meantime, one is truly concerned to learn, by her Britannic Majesty’s gracious speech, that Ireland cherishes a spirit of disaffection.
There is a gallant game toward. And am I to he groaning in a wooden gaol here in the Atlantic, or pruning vines in African captivity, under southern constellations, while kingships and nationhoods are lost and won? I trow not.
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April 20th. — The spring weather here has become most genial, and sky, sea, and land are altogether lovely to see. This ship is not moored fore-and-aft, but swings by the head; and from my cabin window, by night and by day, I can see the whole amphitheatre of isles circling panoramically round, as the wind shifts. Sometimes the rising sun will stream bright into my window, and the same evening, through the same window, the setting sun will blaze redly in; and perhaps by the next morning, as I open my eyes (for I have begun to sleep again), I can see from my pillow once more the dawn blushing, and the eastern side of St. George’s a perfect amethyst. Here is the advantage of living, not on the dull, tame shore, but in a heliotrope hulk. About two miles off lies the great flagship, and astern of her the Neptune, a stately ship enough, with the man-of-war pennant flying from her main top, which it seems, she is entitled to carry, as having a naval officer on board — the surgeon-superintendent, namely, who is to have command of the prisoners.
The Neptune is to sail the day after to-morrow. I am told there is a separate little cabin fitted up for me, opening upon the quarter-deck, so that I shall enjoy otium cum dignitate during the voyage, as befits a gentleman. Voyage! — voyage to Africa. Sometimes I open my eyes vigorously, and rub my ears, and take my personal identity to task. Can this be the very Ego, late John Mitchel, sometime of Upper Leeson Street, who is going to sail in that tall ship to the land of the Caffirs and Bosjesmans, Dutch boers, and springboks? It seems indubitable — hoc est corpus meum — yea, verily
“Me vel extremos Numidarum in agros
Classe releget.”
Yes, indeed, you John Mitchel, now resident in Bermudian hulks, and numbered 2014, are about to cross the fine, and navigate southern oceans, in the track of Bartolomeo Diaz.
[Three line of Greek verse.]
How these lines and syllables of poetry, in divers tongues, throng upon my memory in this solitude. The less one has to
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observe, to do, to be, and to suffer, the less present life he has — the more, perhaps, he remembers of the past. If not by way of outward eye or ear, then, by memory and imagination, will come in grist for the spiritual mill: this is like the ears of a blinded man growing keener, to give his darkened mind what help they can — one faculty of soul or sense sharpening itself as another dulls — the impressions of the past growing vivid as the soul shuts itself from the present. To me, in these long, lonely months, with about as high development of present life as a zoophyte, working at less than oyster-power, many scenes of my hot youth, scenes long forgotten — have arisen fresh and clear, almost with the glow of present action and passion: and I now recall, without effort, lines and passages from books, read twenty golden years ago, that I could not have repeated two years ago, no, not to save my neck from the Barons of the Exchequer. In what limbo did those memories sleep all that while?
But not to go further towards the brink of the abyss profound, it is very certain my memory has improved at Bermuda. And monuar! monuar! I wish no darker memories crowded upon me than hues of Æschylus or Horace: but my whole life lies mirrored before me; and it is not bright nor fair to see. I would that I could find in it one single good action (besides the action for which I was convicted as a felon). I wish the mild shade of my father wore a less reproachful aspect — and I wish he had less reason *
Surely, it is in youth man is most thoroughly depraved. Hell lies about us in our infancy. The youthful innocency sung by aged poets (who forget their first childhood) is nothing but ignorance of evil. As the child comes to know evil, he loves it; and by the time he is entering on manhood, in the very pride and flush of life, then his heart is often hard as adamnant, and so transcendental is his selfishness, that he has become a god unto himself, and owns none other; if he tells the truth, and is honest towards his fellows, it is out of pride and scorn he does it. Your fine, ingenuous young man is commonly the wickedest creature on this side Gehenna. I do solemnly believe this. Whatsoever
* This passage is liable to be misunderstood. Mitchel was free from what is euphemistically termed the indiscretions of youth. He refers to his having frequently taken his own course when a youth without consulting, and sometimes in opposition to, his father’s wishes.
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of good is ever found in man’s nature is won by sore conflict with the devil — that is, with himself. The foul heart is purified by suffering alone: the hard heart is softened only by passing through the “flint mill.” And what now if this same hulking has been awarded me by Almighty God in mercy — as a lesson I stood in need of — seeing that nothing less would do? Of ordinary troubles that befall men, indeed I had a good share before; but this peculiar sort, ignominious personal restraint, was a part of my education heretofore neglected. No human being ever enjoyed, prized, and exercised an unbounded personal freedom of action more recklessly, more haughtily than I; and there, where I had pampered my own pride most, even there it may have been needful for me to be made to feel my own helplessness — to feel that I am not, after all, “stronger than the wonderful and terrible God. And so a gang of ruffians, in coronets and in ermine, were commissioned to conspire against me, and carry me off to a lonely cell, where a turnkey locks me up, and leaves me to learn and digest my hard lesson, and “ponder the path of life” at leisure.
Perhaps it is good for me to be here; but no thanks to the coroneted and ermined ruffians.
— How I do ramble and rave, giving carte blanche to the pen of rigmarole! I have been talking like a member of the Tract Society — and what matter? Why should I not talk so, if I say but the truth? One must not be afraid of anything — not even of becoming worthy to be admitted into the Tract Society. But I grow too discursive, and am ashamed, besides, on looking back over all the paper I have blotted, to find it such a monstrous mass of egotism. Even in a solitary dungeon a man ought not to pay himself so much attention, nor confide his egoisms even to his faithful private tablets. What am /, that I should listen to myself with such respect, and even take down my own remarks on paper? What am /? Why, am not I The Ego — the very Ego meant and insisted upon by Fichte? And is not that an important personage — rather indeed the only personage? I begin to doubt whether there is, or ever was, any Non-Ego at all — even Fichte himself — even the turnkey. I am the All. But my pretty little daughter 1 You, also, I think, are extant, somewhere in infinite space.
April 21st — Saturday. — We are absolutely to sail to-morrow; and the mail from England, due two days ago, has not arrived. I
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may now have to set sail for the Cape, without having received my monthly bulletin from Newry; and then who knows how many months will pass before I hear how my darlings are faring. Besides, I have no money: I never would allow any to be sent to me here, but in my last letter I wrote for a few pounds, that I might not be put ashore on the continent of Africa in a state of utter destitution. I have but a few small silver coins between me and a state of nature, and may have to turn Bosjesman. Here is a pretty state of things for a “gentleman of education. ”The Scourge steamer, in which I was originally kidnapped, arrived here some days ago, after making the tour of the West Indies; and has now just sailed for England, to be paid off. She has been lying at Bermuda three several times since she brought me here; and I have often wondered that, after the first visit I had from two of her officers, I never saw any of them again. The first Lieutenant, indeed, had distinctly promised that he would come sometimes to see me, and he never came at all. I have now got some newspapers which fully explain all that. It seems the admiral on the station, when he found that I had not been treated like a common convict during my voyage, severely censured Capt. Wingrove; and there was a good deal of language about this both in Bermuda and in England — gentlemen in Parliament asked sharp questions of Ministers about their instructions for the usage of “convict Mitchel,” to wit — where the said convict dined, and who drank wine with the said convict; and British “public opinion,” so agitated and indignant, that there was even danger of the worthy commander being dismissed the service. Now, it is to be observed here that British public opinion was altogether right; either I was bona fide a convict, or else not a convict; if not a convict, I ought not to have been carried off at all; if a convict, I ought to have been treated exactly like other convicts. But it appears further, that the aforesaid opinion grew still more inflamed when it was discovered that, on my short voyage from Dublin to Cork, I had actually breakfasted with the surgeon and other officers of that steamer, also. No wonder British opinion felt itself insulted: had it not pronounced this man a felon with all the bellowing of its manifold lungs in Parliament, in the press, not to speak of its particular “jury”? and would nobody consent to look upon him as a felon, or treat him as a convict after
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all? So the poor Shearwater surgeon (on whom, I know not why, the blame chiefly fell) was pounced upon by the Admiralty with much apparent fury; and some lying excuse or other had to be invented for him. That lying excuse I have not seen, but have just been reading the lying excuse made in Parliament for Commander Wingrove, on the last occasion of this matter being opened in the legislature; for I now perceive that it has been a standing subject for months; and a Mr. Robinson, a Mr. Lockhart, and Colonel Vemer, member for county Armagh, whenever they wanted to embarrass Ministers, would start up from time to time and desire to be informed how convict Mitchel fared on his way to Bermuda? who conversed with him? whether his hair was dressed according to the convict cut? and whether he was kept properly at his work in the quarries there? Well, on the last of these occasions, as I find it reported in the Times, a certain Admiral Dundas (one of the lords of Admiralty, I believe) assured the House that the instructions in the case of the convict Mitchel were, that the commander of the ship should treat him as a convict on his passage, and keep him in a separate place, so as not to permit him to mingle with the officers of the ship; but that, as there was no second cabin in the Scourge, Captain Wingrove had been obliged to keep him in his own cabin, and entertain him at his own table; but that he had been kept most strictly apart from the other officers. How very gravely these rascals he.
In the first place, the Scourge has a separate cabin, as this lord of the Admiralty must know; and that second cabin was my room; I slept there, had exclusive use of the room, and as there were couches, chairs, and a table in it, there was nothing to hinder my being served with meals there, if such had been the instructions. But, in the second place, such were not the instructions; instead of being ordered to treat me as a convict. Captain Wingrove was specially ordered to treat me not as a convict, but as a “gentleman.”
And, in the third place, it is untrue that I was kept apart from the officers; I spent most of my time on deck, in company with the officers.
So the statement of this admiral is a falsehood on the whole and in each of its parts; from the beginning to the end, Dundas lied.
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Commander Wingrove, I am very sure, was no party to the falsehood.
But I find further, that while Admiral Dundas lied in the Commons, Lord Landsowne [sic for Lansdowne] lied in the Lords; for he told their lordships, in reply to a similar inquiry in that House, that it was true the instructions given to the commander of the Scourge permitted him to use his discretion as to his treatment of the prisoner, on the ground of Mr. Mitchel’s delicate state of health. This also is a mere falsehood. Captain Wingrove had no discretion allowed him in the matter; Captain Wingrove had never heard of my delicate health; and neither had Ministers; nor had I then made any complaint of ill-health at all. Thus did these two liars of State lie inartistically for want of concert. May God help us, and forgive us all our sins.
So much I set down here upon a subject immeasurably small, because I may have occasion to call it to mind, small as it is, hereafter. It was extremely immaterial to me where a cover was laid that I should dine, or in whose company I sat down to table. My practice has been, ever since I fell into the hands of my enemies, to sit, stand or walk, wheresoever I am desired, as becomes a true prisoner, and to eat such things as are set before me without remark. Neither did I feel at all honoured by being invited to Capt. Wingrove’s table: nor should I have felt degraded if he had thrust me into the lowest dungeon in his ship in chains. When the British Government got me nicknamed “Felon,” and sent me away from my own country, as a convict they did their worst: it is impossible for them or their servants, by any severities or by any” indulgences,” either to aggravate or to mitigate that atrocity.
On the whole, I sympathise with the outraged public opinion of the British nation — generous, chivalrous, magnanimous British nation.
April 22nd — Sunday. — My last day in Bermuda; it is a bright spring morning, and the first thing I saw, as my eyes opened, was the mail steamer shooting across the smooth bay towards the dockyard. So I shall have my bulletin from Newry.
A boat is to come for me after breakfast. I am not sure that I shall be allowed to go without being questioned, or possibly searched for papers: this memorandum book may be taken from
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me; and if anybody should chance to take the trouble of reading it, I fear a seditious expression may be found in it here and there. It is true, I have never been questioned in this way yet: even my portmanteau has not been searched; and how the authorities here reconcile this with their duty, I know not. For aught they know, I may have in that portmanteau, picklocks, files, and a brace of pistols, or even an infernal machine. For aught they know, I have been employing my literary leisure to indite seditious and disaffected writings, qua mox depromere possim. — But all this is their affair, not mine. In the meantime I keep my book in my pocket, and my window open, until I get fairly off — intending, if any search be instituted, to throw my valuable remarks overboard, using means to load the little book so that it must go to the bottom.
Four o’clock. — At sea. The cedar-groves of Bermuda are sinking below the hazy horizon. — So ends my “Dream of the Summer Islands.”
******
Received my letter from home. Through the kind courtesy of the governor, it was sent to me after I was on board, and arrived just as the Neptune was weighing anchor. All well at home. I have written a very long and cheerful letter to my wife; for indeed matters begin to look somewhat brighter for us: I begin to see day-light: my health has been improving rapidly; will probably continue to improve at sea: and why may it not be completely re-established in the climate of Africa? Then it does not seem clear that the “Government,” intend to keep me confined to the Cape: Lord Grey, I see, talks of something that he calls a “conditional pardon,” to be obtainable by the prisoners who go to the Cape, on payment of fifteen pounds — and the effect of which will be to make them “free exiles,” free, namely, to go anywhere they please, except to Ireland, England, or Scotland. If I can get this document (whatever its name is) for £15, I will certainly buy it, and think it very cheap at the money. What is it to me that they choose to call it a “pardon”? If they even call it a plenary indulgence, or a charm against the bite of a mad dog, still I will gladly become the purchaser of an article that enables me to withdraw myself from under the poisonous shadow of the Carthaginian flag. Then if this “pardon” be not for me,
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at the worst it is but living a few years in some quiet nook in Stellenbosch or Swellendam, amongst my own people, surrounded by the worthy Dutch folk, and patriarchally tilling the ground, and pastorally keeping sheep, until my deliverance come.
Some doubt indeed still seems to me to hang over the disembarkation at the Cape: the last intelligence from thence shows that the spirit of opposition to such a measure is increasing; yet Dr. Dees, the surgeon-superintendent, who has charge of the Neptune, tells me his instructions are positive, and that he carries out instructions, equally positive, to Sir Harry Smith, the governor, for instant disembarkation of the whole crew. Still, if the colonists make it manifest that they are nearly unanimous in opposition, or even that a large minority of them feel strongly opposed to the introduction of convicts into their country, it would surely be very tyrannical and insolent in the English government to force the matter with a high hand. To have one’s country and the home of one’s children turned into a sink of felony, where the colluvies of a vast empire is to settle and fester, is no light matter. I shall certainly feel no surprise if we find on our arrival at the Cape that Sir Harry Smith has received orders to pass us on to Australia.
For my own particular, I might perhaps not choose to sail in this ship, with the chance of being carried all round the habitable globe with such a ship’s company, knocking at the door of all the continents and isles, to see if they will give shelter to 300 ill-omened strangers: but I am flying for my life. On the whole, I am content, even to go to Australia, even in such company, rather than await another winter in these summer isles: and am absolutely setting forth on my voyage with a heart nearly as light as my purse (which has but thirteen shillings in it). Grim death is behind me, among the black cedars. And even should the ill-favoured demon of asthma give chase, I will outstrip him in this broad-winged ship — he shall have a race for it athwart the ecliptic, through seventy degrees of latitude, into regions whereon the Great Bear never shone. And if the Grim Feature overtake me there, I will fight him while a shot is in the locker.
Our voyage to the Cape, as they calculate, will hold us about two months. Hurrah! as poor old Dan used to say — “My bosom’s lord sits lightly on his throne” — Africa will be sure to
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bring forth some new thing, according to the ancient wont of that fruitful mother of monsters.*
Poor old Dan! — wonderful, mighty, jovial, and mean old man! with silver tongue and smile of witchery, and heart of melting ruth! — lying tongue! smile of treachery! heart of unfathomable raud I What a royal, yet vulgar soul! with the keen eye and potent swoop of a generous eagle of Cairn Tual — with the base servility of a hound, and the cold cruelty of a spider! Think of his speech for John Magee, the most powerful forensic achievement since before Demosthenes — and then think of the “gorgeous and gossamer” theory of moral and peaceful agitation, the most astounding organon of public swindling since first man bethought him of obtaining money under false pretences. And after one has thought of all this, and more, what then can a man say? what but pray that Irish earth may he light on O’Connell’s breast — and that the good God who knew how to create io wondrous a creature may have mercy upon his soul.
April 23rd. — I find myself provided with a very filthy little cabin here, having a window that looks forward over the quarterdeck. On the quarter-deck the soldiers, not on duty, saunter about, smoking and chatting. Beyond the gangway forward, the prisoners in their Bermuda uniforms, are swarming over deck, forecastle, and bulwarks, but are not allowed to come aft. Above s the poop-deck, where I am privileged to walk — long, broad, md clean, affording ample scope for exercise. On this poop also iaunter and smoke two officers of the military guard.
Dr. Dees, as the “surgeon-superintendent” is named, commands in chief, and wears the epaulettes of a naval surgeon. He :ame this morning into my cabin, and divining what he came to;alk about, I was minded to give him a taste of my quality, that le and I might understand one another, and be at our ease, for the voyage. He began by telling me that arrangements had been made at Bermuda by which I was to have the same accommodations as to board, etc., that they had in the cuddy; and that if I wanted anything I should let him, Dr. Dees, know. I answered :hat I was quite sure I should want for nothing — that at any rate — made it a rule never to ask for anything, and never to complain
* “Vulgare Graeciae dictum — Semper aliquid novi Africam afferre.”— Plin, Nat. Hist. VIII. 16.
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of anything — but that as to the special arrangements in my behalf I was quite at a loss to know what claim I had to any better accommodations than other prisoners. “All I know about it,” said he, “is that matters have been so ordered by the Governor of Bermuda — I regret,” added the doctor, “that you must live quite solitary here, and have no access to the cuddy, nor intercourse with the officers of the guard; not that I myself would have the least objection, nor, I presume, the officers either; but in fact — the fact is”
“The fact is,” supplied I, “that you and they would be dragged before Parliament, like Captain Wingrove, or perhaps tried by court-martial.” “Exactly so: that is just the whole case.” “Well, then, sir,” I said, “make your mind very easy about all that. Ever since I have become a prisoner, and cannot choose my company, I prefer my own society to any other. The worthy gentlemen in Parliament are much mistaken if they imagine the society of any state-cabin in her Majesty’s navy would be an honour or a comfort to me: and as for the military officers you mention, if they do not obtrude themselves on me, be assured I shall not obtrude myself on them.”
Dr. Dees was silent a little while, and then said, “The truth is, that in your case all official persons who have to do with you seem to be constantly well watched; and, after the proceedings of Parliament and the Admiralty Board in respect of Captain Wingrove and the officers of the Shearwater, we are all afraid of being involved in something unpleasant.” “It seems,” I answered, “that in my case, formal conviction and actual deportation are not enough; it needs the continued and strenuous exertions of both branches of the legislature and the Admiralty, and the Colonial Office, to keep me in my new position of a felon, or even to force their own officers to pretend for one moment that they regarded me as a convict or a felon at all.” He laughed, and said that was true enough, “But, indeed,” he added, “it has been rather a hard matter to know what to do with you; the Government, I feel sure, have not been disposed to treat you with harshness, or to give you the usage of a common convict; yet, on the other hand, they have public opinion to satisfy. On the whole, there has been a good deal of puzzle about it altogether.”
“No wonder,” I said; “there is always puzzle and embarrass-
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ment in carrying through any dishonest transaction. If I were indeed a felon, you know, there ought to be no puzzle at all; and what, pray, do you mean by ‘harshness,’ and by not wishing to treat me as a convict. Absolutely, I am either a felon or not a felon.” To this formula of mine the doctor assented. “And,” I continued, “if I am not a felon, then those who sent me here are felons.” To this he apparently thought it prudent neither to assent nor demur; and I did not press him. “Public servants,” quoth the doctor, making a general remark, “are sometimes unsafe, even in acting precisely according to their instructions; for they are not permitted to reveal those instructions, if the matter should become a subject of public censure, but must allow the blame and consequences to fall on themselves rather than on the Government.” “I am well aware of that practice,” I answered; “it is one of the privileges of a superior officer in the British service to invent and publish any story he pleases, to screen himself and Government, at the expense of a subordinate; and one of the duties of inferior officers to support him in his story, though to their own ruin. Captain Wingrove can tell something of that practice, and so could Captain Elliott, from his experience in China. Perhaps you do not know that he acted in China according to his plain instructions, and when the transaction was supposed to have turned out unfortunate, and Parliament and the press were raving, he durst never plead those orders, but had to let Ministers make up what story they liked. Indeed, I have no doubt that Government, after directing Captain Wingrove to do just what he did, would now stand coolly by, and see him convicted by a court-martial, of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman; so you cannot be too cautious. Doctor.” The Doctor seemed to be growing a little uneasy at the tone of my remarks; yet his politeness, I saw, was restraining him from stopping me, as he had clearly authority to do; so I changed the subject. He is a mild, well-bred, and amiable man; I believe I shall like him — for a gaoler.
All this day there has been a perfect calm; and the light-house of Bermuda is still in sight. One of the prisoners has been assigned me, as usual, to attend me as a servant; and with his help I have been arranging matters in my little cabin. I shall feel quite at home for two months.
CHAPTER IX
April 24, 1849. — at sea — We spoke to-day the brig Palos, of Boston, homeward bound from Buenos Ayres. Her captain, a broad-hatted, lean-faced Yankee, cast an indifferent glance over our swarming deck, as he asked what port we were bound for. He seemed to understand the nature of our cargo right well. Britain’s convict-ships are well known in all seas.
20th. — We have a fine breeze from the east to-day, and are running southward at a rapid rate.
The Doctor has sent into my cabin a Daily News, which came by the mail on Sunday. Now, why could not Mr. Duffy have made ballads in some quiet place all his days? As if purposely to relieve the enemy from all embarrassment in their “vindication of the law,” he has allowed a petition to Government to be got up, very extensively signed, praying, that as he is totally ruined; as he has already been long confined; as he is an admirable private character; as his health is delicate; as the violent and revolutionary articles in his newspaper appeared during a period of great excitement, and extended over but a few weeks, the enemy would, of their mercy, forbear to prosecute him farther — the very thing they wished to have any decent excuse for. I say, he has allowed this petition — because no petitioners could make such implied promises of amendment without his sanction; and especially because he has not disowned the mean proceeding. It is quite in keeping with his miserable defence upon his last trial, his production of evidence to character, and his attempt to evade the responsibility of articles published by himself. Sir Lucius O’Brien, too, who presents this memorial to Lord Clarendon, takes occasion to admit the “guilt” of the culprit. With what joy the enemy must gloat upon this transaction, and exult over us and our abandoned cause! The Daily News seems very glad, as any British newspaper may well be, at the appearance of this decent excuse; says, that for its part, it rather thinks a gentleman, of so very good a private character, may be now set at liberty with
[plate:] The Arrest of Smith O’Brien at Thurles Railway Station
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perfect safety to the public. Shabby and paltry, indeed! A curse upon his private character! Yet one cannot be angry with Duffy, who need not have been expected to get himself hulked for any principle, object, or cause, whatsoever. Duffy never could sustain life without puffery; the breath of his nostrils was puff; and these teak timbers are no flatterers. When a man comes to this, he touches ground — all rose-coloured puff-clouds vanish from beneath him, and drift down the wind. Let no man live exclusively on that deleterious, flatulent pabulum — filling his belly with too much east wind. Do we not know that Widenostrils the swallower of windmills — whom Pantagruel saw in the dominions of Queen Entéléchie — when he could no longer get his customary diet, but had to chew hard kettles and frying-pans, fell away in his flesh, and at last died in the very hands of his physicians. How would Widenostrils have thriven, think you, upon a dietary of iron bars and leg-bolts? Verily, in this Bermuda, nobody seems to be sensible of the merits and fame of those fine young literary men, who, from their little coterie, breathed a new soul into Ireland.
You cannot get out of any man what is not in him; but yet this miserable grovelling of Duffy’s is a bitter disappointment to me. He had a grander opportunity than any one amongst us; and now he will let the “Government” march off the field with some semblance of having still a rag of law and constitution to cover them, when he might have torn off every shred, and shown them as they are — an armed garrison, ruling a hostile country at the bayonet’s point.
Even if “Government” should refuse compliance with this memorial, and bring him to trial again, what juror will have the heart to stand up for a prisoner who has retreated from his position? Or of what value will be his standing up? The thing is bad every way; but the end is not yet.
I suppose Mr. Duffy and his advisers, by this promise of abstinence from politics, mean to intimate that Ireland’s cause is desperate, or is not worth struggling for; mean, so far as they are concerned, to give up the country, and let the English “make a kirk or a mill of it.” And this at a time when all colour of law is taken away or perverted to the ruin of honest men; when four-fifths of the inhabitants are avowedly debarred from exercising
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the common functions of citizens, one-fifth of them perishing miserably of hunger, and the island occupied by troops as a hostile territory. And so the proprietor of the Nation, for his part, begs pardon — meant no harm by all those loud words of his, but was as constitutional as a Quaker all the time, and will never do the like again. So precisely the matter stands, unless this Daily News grossly mis-describes the “memorial.”
A plague of all cowards! The cause is not desperate; and it is both base and impudent to say, to mean, to think, or to hint that it is.
The Ballingarry failure is hardly, I suppose, to be treated as a criterion. A gentleman — a very estimable and worthy gentleman, certainly — goes with three or four attendants (who are wholly unknown to the people they go amongst) into the counties of Kilkenny and Tipperary, and there tells several persons they are to rise in insurrection under his guidance and free the country. He has no money, this gentleman, to pay troops: no clothing nor arms to give them, no food to keep them alive. He just exhibits a pike, and bids them follow him and free the country. Well, the people are desirous enough to free the country; let them be but /!a//-armed, half-clothed, and one-quarter fed, and they will show what mind they are of. But this abrupt proposal of the worthy gentleman takes them by surprise. Very few of them have any arms at all. For fifty years it has been the constant policy of the hostile Government to disarm them, and twenty Arms Bills have been enacted since the Union, with that special purpose. Very politic policy it was; for the enemy knew that if once these people became familiar with arms, they would be sure to put them to the only righteous and Christian use. All kinds of weapons, therefore, for half a century back, have been associated, in the minds of Catholic Irishmen, with crime, gaols, informers, petty sessions, hand-cuffs, and policemen. And, as if that were not enough, all the influence of the constitutional agitators, and, in a great measure, of the priests also, has been exerted to make the use of arms appear a sin against God. They have not been taught that it is the prerogative of man to bear arms — that beasts alone go without them; that Arms Bills are passed by the British Parliament on the same principle on which other robbers disarm those whom they mean to plunder. No;
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they have been taught such drivelling maxims as, “Let others die for their country, we prefer to live for her”; “One living patriot is worth a churchyard full of dead ones.” Now, this is not the sort of people, so debased, so benighted, and reduced, to a beastly helplessness, that you can expect to rise en masse on a call to arms, be their slavery as intolerable, their wrath as deadly, as you will. Before there can be any general arming, or aptitude to insurrection, there must first be sound manly doctrine preached and embraced. And next, there must be many desultory collisions with British troops, both in town and country, and the sight of clear steel, and of blood smoking hot, must become familiar to the eyes of men, of boys, and of women.
The American Revolution was begun by riots — “paltry riots,” on the streets of Boston. The last grand Lombard insurrection was prepared and ripened by months and years of exasperating collisions in theatres and at the comers of streets, until society became one angry ulcer; and such will for ever be the history of resistance where the oppressed people are individually high-spirited, and not emasculated by vicious teaching.
It is nothing but a pitiful excuse for desertion of the cause to cry out now, “These people do not wish for freedom, are not worthy of freedom; they would not rise at Ballingarry.” I affirm that my countrymen are not cowards, and do not love their chains; and I do hope, captive and exile as I am, to see some day an opportunity given them to prove the same.
It is too clear, however, that for the present, one excuse or another — the Ballingarry failure, the “vigour” of Government, ill-health, etc., will serve the weak and irresolute as good reasons for falling back on peaceful O’Connellism, or else! — “withdrawing from politics” — what a beggarly phrase and idea! — and so staying peacably in Ireland, becoming respectable members of society, and peeping about to find themselves dishonourable graves.
But the history of Ireland is not over yet.
I see, further, by these latest papers, that the French Republican army is actually battering the walls of Republican Rome, to compel the Romans to drive away their own chosen Triumviri (of whom that good and noble Italian, Mazzini, is the chief), and to reinstate the “monstrous regiment” of priests. There is some
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vile mistake here; or rather this Bonaparte, with his Odillon Barrots, and other politic monarchists about him, is a traitor to Republicanism and to France. There is a strong party opposed to him and his Government, who are all, without distinction, branded as “Socialists,” by the English Pi ess. But I begin to imagine that the sincere and thorough-going Republicans are classed with this very party; for it is impossible that hteral Fourier-Owenism should be the creed of any large body of men. Heaven knows the social problem in Modem Europe has come to be a hard one; but Fourier-Owenism is not the solution.
Would I could see some French papers: I am in the dark.
One thing is easy to see — that a stupid cant has arisen about “Order,” — as if order were the chief end of man and of society. Of course the moneyed people do their best to spread this cant. Yet what a senseless cant. Order, quotha! — there is more order in the hulks at Bermuda than in the Champs Elysees.
Hungary keeps Austria gallantly at bay. The Kaiser has called upon the Czar for aid; which he will be too ready to give. Kossuth is a great genius and hero.
But in India, the enemy have obtained a signal victory over the Seiks, and have taken and robbed Moultan, one of the cities that Burnes sei for them. Moultan was very gallantly defended.
28th. — We are running near Barbadoes, and, as I hear, must tack northward again. The weather is lovely, and not oppressively hot. I am in high health, and walk and lounge on the poop lazily, and with right vacant mind, by night and day. Not being a “Member of Society,” and not having the entrie of the cuddy, I keep my own hours, dress as I like, and hold no communication save with the Doctor, and with a species of parson or “Instructor,” such as they always send in convict-ships. The skipper is an old, red-whiskered Scotchman, and the cuddy-circle is composed of the said skipper, the doctor, two tarry individuals called mates, the first and the second mate, two officers of the 91st regiment, and the parson or instructor. The skipper and the two mates, tarry but worthy persons, occasionally enter into conversation with me when I am in the humour to allow them; but the caution of the two gallant officers in that respect amuses me: these gentlemen seem resolved that they shall pot be tried by
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court-martial for undue attention to me — and so they give me a wide berth on the poop, walking always on the side opposite to me. At first they seemed to labour under the apprehension that I would try to force m5elf on their society, and looked sidelong at me as a modest maid might look at some horrid man that she thinks is meditating her ravishment. They need not be at all afraid — I will not violate their British honour.
The instructor, whose name is Stewart, a Glaswegian, has very obligingly placed his books at my disposal during my voyage. He reads service to a small number of Protestants who are amongst the convicts — sets them to learn reading, and tries to make some impression on them in the way of reformation. When he speaks to me, however, he never mentions religion, which shows his discrimination.
Thus I take reconnaissance of those who are to be my shipmates for two months.
July 12th — Twelfth of July. — I trust the maniacs in the North of Ireland are not cutting one another’s throats to-day.* Yet, if they are, there is one comfort in it — those whose throats are cut will not be starved to death.
We are nearly three months at sea: never once in sight of land; and have not yet gone half way to the Cape. Such stupid navigation, I believe, has not been heard of, at least since the invention of the mariner’s compass. Three times we have crossed the line — passed three times slowly and tediously through that belt of the ocean called the “region of calms.” The captain has long since given up all hopes of reaching the Cape without touching somewhere in Brazil for provisions and water; and we are now shaping our course for Pernambuco. The crew and prisoners are on half-rations and half-allowance of water: the water has grown very bad, black, hot, and populous with living creatures. Sickness has begun to prevail both among prisoners and soldiers: and we have already pitched overboard seven corpses to the sharks. Many were frightfully ill in scurvy: fever is strongly apprehended; and as this delay has occurred in the hottest region of
* For the elucidation of this passage to American readers, I should mention that the 12th of July is the principal anniversary consecrated by the Northern Orangemen, to celebrate the Victories of the Dutch King of England over their own countrymen.
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the globe (we are eight weeks on the very line, or within three degrees of it), the only matter of surprise is that so few have died yet. A few days ago, the Doctor issued orders to give each person only quarter-allowance of water — namely, a pint and a half in the day, to serve for cooking, for tea, and for drinking; but that very evening down came a tremendous tropical torrent of rain — and by properly arranging the awning, and fitting it with a canvas tube, ten tons of cool clear water were caught, and conducted into barrels in the hold, all within six hours. The thermometer has been for weeks at about 84 of Fahrenheit, and this glorious shower was high luxury to everyone on board. When it grew dark I went out to the gangway, stark-naked, and stood there awhile, luxuriating in the plenteous shower-bath.
This gracious shower gives us a prospect of reaching Pernambuco on half instead of quarter-allowance of water.
For me, I positively enjoy everything — heat and coolness, wet and dry, whole rations, half-rations, and quarter-rations: and after basking in the sun like a tortoise all day, I smoke and drink considerably at night. Not that the sun — if one is to speak by the card — really shines much in these equinoctial regions, but the warm air is quite luxurious enough to bask in.
July 13th. — Your shark is but a puny fish: eight or nine of them have been dragged on board here since we came within the tropics, and scores have been swimming around us that would not take the bait — not one of them above five feet long, with an opening to serve for mouth hardly wide enough to admit a good cocoa-nut, and innumerable small, flat, cartilaginous, triangular teeth, so thin and weak that a good kick from a strong boot would be sure to drive sixty or seventy of them down their throats. Their flesh looks rank and coarse, and has an evil smell, even fresh killed, but a few of the sailors and prisoners eat it.
This weary “region of calms” has a strange and mysterious aspect, with a Stygian twilight hanging over it, and an infinite silence, as of the realms of Dis. The air is damp, warm, dark, almost palpable. Save one black squall, or at most two, in the day, there is not a breath of wind; but the sky is an uniform gray, and there is a heavy swell in the dark, glutinous-looking Waters. We ate altogether out of the track of ships, too, and
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have been many weeks rolling upon this sunless sea in ghostly solitude. I repeat often to myself:
“The very deep did rot — -O Christ!
That ever this should be —
And slimy things did crawl, with legs,
Upon the slimy sea.”
If a squall comes upon us at night, and sends us for a quarter of an hour flying through the water under reefed topsails, we leave a wake of pale fire shooting far astern into outer darkness, and the foam from the ship’s bow rushes blazing past like Pyriphlegethon in sparte.
A heavy shower is always a blessing to us, and I never knew so well before the exquisite luxury of a draught of cool, fresh water — not even after half a day’s ranging over dry mountain-tops, when I came upon a green hollow, with its clear stream, or a well under the shade of some rock, hiding its diamond treasure from the thirsty sun. Sometimes I sit here for hours, watching the course of a black rain-cloud on the leaden-coloured horizon, as it sails heavily on with freight of gracious waters, and makes the “wine-dark sea” pitch-black beneath — hoping that the lazy veering tropic breezes may bear it hitherward. I keep my fierce thirst to be quenched out of its dusky bosom, patiently eschewing the black ship-liquid and lime-juice, and lustfully eyeing the wealth of sweet water that, “kerchiefed in a comely cloud,” comes this way sailing like a stately ship of Tarshish, bound for the isles of Javan or Gadire, with all her bravery on. I have visions of crystal brooks, and my ear and brain are filled with the murmuring of the Roe and Bann. I cherish and enjoy my raging thirst (hoping speedily to drown the fiery fiend in such a rushing flood), and ingeniously torment it by thinking all thirsty thoughts — of gorged wolves lapping, with dry tongues, the fountain of black water — of caravans faring through calcined Syrian deserts — of the mariner who had to bite his arm and suck the blood before he could sing out, “A sail! a sail!” But lo! now, three leagues off, or more, before my envious eyes, the disdainful rain-cloud stoops at last to the ocean, and lavishes her priceless treasure, to the last bright drop, on the ungrateful, unfruitful brine — “the wilderness wherein there is no man.” And what art thou, O Man that the bottles of heaven should decant themselves to thee?
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Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Hath the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the drops of the dew? Not I. So I must quench my enemy with the ship-liquid, qualified with a little lime-juice and sugar, and, for that matter, a glass of brandy.
July 14th. — We begin this day to feel the first breath of the south-east trade-wind; and being now as far east as 25° W. L., the captain hopes to be able on this wind to make Pernambuco in a few days, without being swept by the current to leeward of Cape St, Roque once more, in which latter case we should certainly fare very ill. I can perceive that the strong probability of making the port this time is a great relief to the surgeon-superintendent, who has been extremely. anxious for some days past. And well he may; if provisions and water should altogether run out, and the ship still far at sea, or becalmed off an unknown coast, with four hundred men on board, and three hundred of them desperate reprobates — discipline would soon vanish, and the question would be, which of the well-fed cabin-people should be first, which last devoured. The parson is rather fat, and some days ago he imparted his anxieties to me with white lips — “We shall have mutiny here,” said he. “We shall have murder, and cannibalism, and everything horrible.” I told him cannibalism was beginning to be rather common — that in Ireland people had been eating each other for some time, though lean — and I eyed his well-filled waistcoat. He shuddered visibly: said he trusted it would all end well.
July 15th. — We are, beyond all doubt, fairly in the trade-wind, and nearing the coast of South America at the rate of 150 miles a day. Poor Dr. Dees, who has been suffering both from ill-health and anxiety, begins to look more cheerful: the chaplain eats his dinner with a better appetite — feels he is fattening for his own behoof: the gallant officers even though always exhibiting a gentlemanly sang froid, smoke, methinks, somewhat more placidly. The “belt of calms” is now behind us, and a brisk, dry, south-easterly breeze ripples the blue water: the sun once more goes blazing over the zenith in his daily course, and plunges into the sea at evening in glory unimaginable. We have passed clear out of the Acherontean pools, and revisit the blessed sunshine.
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July 18th — Land! — A far-stretching, low-lying coast, within two miles a head, thickly mantled with majestic woods down to the water’s edge — tall cocoa-nut palms, standing ranked on very sea-sands — a stately, white-walled, high-towered city, extending full two miles along the shore, built down to high-water mark, and seeming hardly able to make good its footing on the edge of that unconquerable forest. On both sides of it, the vigorous vegetable life seems to mingle with houses and convents, and push itself into the streets; and as the land gently rises beyond, I can see it deeply covered for leagues, even to the tops of distant lulls, with the umbrage of untamed woods. But an hundred and twenty thousand human beings lead their lives in this city between forest and ocean; there are many great churches and monasteries of imposing Lusitanian architecture — great stores and quays, and in the harbour ships of all nations. It seems these forests are tracked by certain mule-paths, leading to pasture-prairies, and plantations of sugar, coffee, and tobacco, far inland, of which Pernambuco is the port of export. On the ships riding at anchor, besides the Brazilian green and yellow ensign, I see the North American, the French, the English, the Dutch, the Peruvian, and, on one vessel anchored about a mile from us, the yellow banner of fever.
Here we expect to secure a supply of fresh beef (of wild oxen captured by the lasso), and some water, and yams, limes, and oranges, to rout the scurvy. We are in deadly need of them.
20th. — Boats have come off to-day bringing store of oranges, limes, vegetables, and fresh-baked bread. The oranges are very large and delicious, some with a brown rind like russet-apples, and others emerald-green. I became proprietor of thirty for sixpence, and shall never, never wish to forget the brutal rapture with which I devoured six of them on the spot. Several of those who had charge of these boats and merchandise were slaves, perhaps African born (for these Brazilian ports, together with Havana, are great marts of African men). I surveyed them long and earnestly, for before this day I never saw a slave in his slavery — I mean a merchantable slave, a slave of real money-value, whom a prudent man will, in the way of business, pay for and feed afterwards. The poor slaves I have been accustomed to see are not only of no value, but their owners will go to heavy
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expense to get rid of them — not imported slaves, but surplus slaves for export — slaves with a Glorious Constitution, slaves with a Palladium — a Habeas Corpus to be suspended, and a trial by jury whereby they may have the comfort of being routed out of house and home, transported, and hanged at the pleasure of the “upper classes.” These slaves in Brazil are fat and merry, obviously not overworked nor underfed, and it is a pleasure to see the lazy rogues lolling in their boats, sucking a piece of green sugar-cane, and grinning and jabbering together, not knowing that there is such an atrocity as a Palladium in the whole world. Besides, the condition of slaves in any Spanish, Portuguese, or French colony, is not by any means so abject as it was under the English and is under the Americans. To the exercise of power this Anglo-Saxon race always adds insolence. Slaves in Brazil are expected to work moderately, but are not treated with contumely. They are often admitted to the society of the families they serve, and lead in some measure the life of human beings. Is it better, then, to be the slave of a merciful master and a just man, or to be serf to an Irish land-appropriator? God knoweth.
I do not pretend that I altogether like the sight of these slaves. If I were a rich man I would prefer to have my wealth in any other kind of commodity or investment — except, of course, the credit funds.
July 25th. — We have been a week lying off Pernambuco, revelling on yams and fruit. The yam is a most admirable vegetable, hardly distinguishable in taste, colour or texture, from a good potato — far better than the average of potatoes, especially in these latter years. But, though native to this fat South American soil, yams are exorbitantly dear, £20 per ton, which, indeed, seems incredible. And, while oranges are five for a penny, new milk in this land of cattle is sixpence per pint. I cannot examine or explain these “facts” in political economy, inasmuch as I am not permitted to go ashore; and, even if I were permitted, perhaps I would not ask a single question about them. Indeed, on looking over all my memorandum-book, purporting to be a journal, I find there are shamefully few “facts” in it. I have made no “additions to science.” Useful knowledge will be no whit the better for me. I remember that the indefatigable Humboldt, while he wandered in these same South American woods.
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observed amongst many other things, certain monkeys which always howled in the trees at surnise [sic for sunrise]; it was in the llanos of Caraccas. And that great man, by multiplied observations, ascertained that the distance at which their howling could be heard was, as near as possible, “1,705 yards.” The preciseness and importance of this “fact” has made it dwell distinctly on my memory, though I have forgotten many minor things. Now to arrive at so satisfactory a result the philosopher must have made repeated observations and careful measurement — some mornings to windward of the monkeys, and again to leeward, and then calculated the mean. Cannot I also try to observe some phenomenon or other, marine or meteorological, and enrich science? Was it not the same Baron von Humboldt who had his “cyanometer,” a delicate instrument for measuring the intensity of blue in the sky? It was an invention of that great man’s own, and he set much store by it. I do fear it is but unphilosophical to keep gazing up into this blue empyrean by day and night, like a beast, without having its intensity marked for me on a graduated scale.
July 26th. — Dr. Dees has just brought off to the ship English papers, up to 12th June; and, after a useless appeal to the English House of Lords, and judgment against them. Smith O’Brien, Meagher, O’Donoghue, and MacManus are to be sent off instantly to Van Diemen’s Land; Martin and O’Doherty are to go, too. They are all six on the high Atlantic this day. They protest against being transported, pleading that the Queen’s commutation of their sentence of death is illegal — as it is. But Ministers ask Parliament for an “Act” to make it legal. Of course they will get it, and without delay. Parliament has confidence in Ministers; and if they asked for an Act, reciting, “Whereas it is expedient that the bodies of William Smith O’Brien, etc., should be put on board the transport ship, and conveyed to,” and thereupon enacting the same by and with the consent of the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, etc., etc., why, it would be passed for them amidst loud applause; for Parliament has confidence in her majesty’s advisers.
If at any time for one moment I hesitated about holding my transportation a high honour, I repent of that hesitation now; for John Martin, Smith O’Brien, and Thomas Meagher are
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transported convicts. If any Irishmen wish to be accounted an honest man, let him straightway get transported; let him aspire to be enrolled amongst those whose presence in Ireland is incompatible with the existence of the thing called “Government”there —
Aude aliquid brevibus Gyaris et carcere dignum
Si vis esse aliquis
As matter of curious speculation, now, I shall be desirous of watching the upshot of this business, to see how a government will get on after hulking several of the very best men in the country it “governs”; and doing it not by law, but by open and avowed perversion of law. It is an experiment whose result maybe worth noting. How coolly I can write of this preternatural atrocity! But my friends are all men, not old women.
July 27th. — I have written nothing for a week. Have had a low fever, and am to-day barely able, for the first time, to crawl upon deck. We are still rocking in the roads of Pernambuco; by British tars called Penny-booker.
I do affirm before God that there are no three men now living in Ireland more reverentially obedient to law, more thoroughly and devoutly loyal, than those three now on their way to the Antipodes as felons and outlaws. It is because they reverence law, and scorn and loathe the false simulacrum of law — because their souls have yearned for peace, older, justice, under the sacred majesty of law — that they sail in a convict ship to-day. Analysing, here at a distance, the character of all my acquaintances, I know not three other men so expressly formed as O’Brien, Martin, and Meagher, for a life of tranquil enjoyment, and the discharge of all peaceful duties in proud obedience to the laws of the land. But they could not stand by and see diabolical injustice wrought without end, under this foul pretence of law — they would not be parties to the slaughter of their countrymen by millions that this foul pretence of law might flourish for ages to come — “And of its fruit their babes might eat and die.” — Therefore they sail this day in a convict-ship with the concentrated quintessence of all the offal of mankind.
For my own part, if I had indeed been convicted of a crime against the laws of my country I could not support my life — the load of my shame would be too heavy for me to bear.
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Will a day ever come to set these things right? Possibly never on earth. “That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.”
I have just had a visit from two American ship-captains, whose vessels lie here. They approached me most reverentially, gave me some fine language, and very probably took notes of me. *
August 4th. — A merchant on shore, of the name of Dowsley, has sent me a hamper of fruit. He says he is an Irishman, and claims a right to show me civility on that account.
Have not of course asked leave to go ashore, though probably I might have leave for the asking — but I ask for nothing. I remember, if that be any comfort — that Prince Louis Bonaparte, when he was transported in Louis Philippe’s time, and his ship lay in the harbour of Rio on this same coast, was kept in close custody on board, and not permitted to set a foot on shore notwithstanding urgent entreaty. One would not neglect any topic of consolation that turns up. The mates and the doctor, however, who have visited the city, tell me it is a very bustling place of business, with dirty and narrow streets, barely wide enough for two loaded mules to pass — no carriages, a great many pretty women, Portuguese and Quadronas, white and brown — tell me, in short, what anybody may find in books.
The enemy thinks I am dead. In a parliamentary report in one of the papers, I read that the Home Secretary, replying to some inquiries about me on the 3rd April, spoke as follows: “On his arrival at Bermuda, he was found to be in such a state of health that his prolonged sojourn in that island was out of the question. It was accordingly arranged [after a solitary “sojour ” of ten months] that he should be transported to the Cape of Good Hope, where he would be allowed a “ticket-of-leave,” in the event of his surviving till he reached that colony — a contingency which, judging by the most recent accounts of his health, appeared to be very doubtful.” Let the Secretary be comforted. He will rejoice when he learns that a sea-voyage has been so beneficial to his interesting patient’s health. It may be, after all, that the rogues want to kill me.
* So they did. I have just read in the Dublin Freeman’s Journal, the account which these worthy skippers gave of their interview. Bothvell, V. D. L., I2th August, 1850.
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August 9th. — Pernambuco still: we are now nearly three weeks at anchor here, and not yet supplied with stores for our onward voyage. The reason is, we are lying in an open roadstead two miles from land, exposed to the unbroken roll of the Atlantic; and usually the swell is so high that the merchant who has contracted to supply us cannot induce the people to come out in their lighters. Then, perhaps, a fine day comes, but it is a holiday, so the bells are all ringing, the people in their gala dresses, and nothing to be done. Our people, skipper and mates the lazy foreign lubbers. “Think of the excuse the rascals make,” said the mate to me — “They don’t choose to risk the loss of their slaves coming off in this weather their eyes! Why, English or American boatmen would have finished the job long ago.” Indeed, the Brazilian people who come off to the ship take the impatience of these English coolly, and as a matter of course — they expect it always, and seem to regard headlong hurry as a national disease, pitying the sufferers, but taking good care not to be affected themselves. I do respect an indolent nation, a nation that will take its time, will take its holidays, and will not risk the loss of its slaves. Your English and Yankees go too much ahead — hardly give themselves time to sleep and eat, let alone praying — keep the social machinery working at too high a pressure (endangering the bursting of their boilers), and for ever out of breath. Do they call this living?
Long life, then, to the subjects of the Emperor — seeing they insist upon living all their lives: long and easy life to them: long may they reap without need of sowing — may the forest yield them store of plaintain and spontaneous cassava-bread — may their sugar-canes drop abundant sweetness, and boundless prairies rear them countless herds! — So shall holidays abound, and the Virgin and all saints be duly honoured.
CHAPTER X
August 9th — On board the “Neptune,” of Pernambuco. — Let me not omit, after all, to chronicle here the fact that Brazil cannot be an absolute paradise either for white, black, brown or red. But a few months have passed by since there was a bloody insurrection of the slaves in this Pernambuco. And, Dr. Dees tells me, the city bears ample witness to its violence in wrecked houses and the like. In the other two great cities of Rio and Bahia, also, there have been formidable insurrections of late. I see no great harm in this: the moment the black and brown people are able, they will have a clear right to exchange positions with the Portuguese race. That is to say if the Portuguese have now any right to hold the others in slavery at all.
For the actual traffic in slaves from Africa it was always sad enough to think of; but Sir Fowell Buxton (this I believe is the name of him) and his humane accomplices in the British Parliament have aggravated the horrors of it four-fold. For in order to procure the requisite supply now, in spite of the pirate cruisers of humanity, four times the number of slaves have to be shipped; they calculate on losing three cargoes out of four, but those three cargoes, if so lost to them, are not taken from them by the cruisers, and set free or “apprenticed,” — not at all — they are thrown overboard all alive, to avoid the forfeiture of the ships. When slavers are chased by a humanity pirate, and in danger of being taken they simply pitch all the negroes into the sea, together with the loose planks that make the slave deck, and then he to and invite the British officer on board. He finds no slaves, and by the terms of the treaties must let the ship go free. Then the captain proceeds along the coast of Africa again to get another cargo. But this is not the only loss the shippers have to count upon. Formerly they used, for their own sake, to provide roomy ships for the slaves, and to embark in each only so many as could be properly accommodated, with due attention to their health — if it were but pigs a man were importing from abroad, he would
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take care to have them stowed in such a manner as would give him a good chance of receiving them alive — but by reason of the benevolent pirates, they have now to build small brigs and schooners, with a view to speed mainly, and stow the poor creatures in a solid mass, with their heads touching the deck as they sit, and each man having another man sitting between his legs — each body being thus in actual contact with other bodies on all its four sides — every man flattening his nose against a woolly head in front, and having a nose flattening itself against his own woolly head behind. So Sir Fowell Buxton has arranged them. Therefore, about one-third of them always die, and the survivors arrive in a state of miserable debility and pain, from which many never recover.
Few persons, except some serious old women, are such fools as to believe that the British Government keeps on foot that African armament with any view to humanity at all, or conscience, or Christianity, or any of the fine things they pretend in Parliament. They have just two motives in it: one is to cut off the supply of labour from the sugar-growers of Brazil and Cuba, or make it so dear to them that they cannot compete with the planters of Jamaica and Barbadoes; and the other is to maintain British “naval supremacy” and the piratical claim of a right to search ships, and accustom the eyes of all who sail the seas to the sight of the English flag domineering over everything it meets, like a bully, as it is.
Aug. 10th. — To-day I learn that we have actually got our stores on board, and are to weigh anchor to-morrow. Had a visit from Mr. Dowsley, who is our contractor for supplying the ship. Asked him a great deal about Brazil; he says it is a noble country to live in — “and a genuine land of liberty, too,” he added. Told him I was not quite prepared to hear that; “But you mean,” quoth I, “that the laws are made by Brazilians, not by strangers, and are fairly administered, and for Brazil, not for any foreign nation: if you mean that, it is liberty indeed.” He did not exactly mean that, though that was all true — he meant that they had regular representative government and elections, “and all that.” Asked him how the elections were carried on — if there was much excitement and party-feeling — also what the party feeling was all about, and what parties they were at all. “Party
[Plate: Trial of William Smith O’Brien at Clonmel in 1848
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feeling!” said he; “excitement! Oh there is nothing of all that — the whole business is managed by the police.” “By the police? Is there not voting, then? are there not rival candidates?” “No, no; the police provide the candidate — and as to voting, or venturing to propose rival candidates, bless your soul! the police would allow nothing of that sort — they would soon clear out the place, and shut it up.” “The key,” quoth I, “belongs, I suppose, to the Emperor. But I understand you now; and if the laws be indeed, as you say, just and fairly administered, why, Brazil is a genuine land of liberty — only the police elections might perhaps be dispensed with.”
Mr. Dowsley tells me I have many friends in Pernambuco — so many that, said he, whenever you are at liberty to go where you like, you could not do better than come and settle here. Told him I should consider that, so soon as the world was all before me, where to choose. He gave me, also, a pleasant piece of news, if true — that my brother William has obtained a situation under the American Government, and that he is residing at Washington. There could be no mistake, he said, for the person was described in the American papers as Mr. William Mitchel, brother to the rebel.
12th. — Came on deck this morning, and saw, dimly fading off on the horizon, the long-stretching coast of South America, with its beautiful white-walled city and endless wilderness of primeval forests. It is all gone: the sun is high, and we are in blue water again. Have my eyes verily seen forests and cities on the firm continent of South America, firm, rock-based, wide-watered continent, crowned by the many-fountained Cordilleras? Or is it all a ghostly dream? A dream indeed, and also real; I have eaten golden fruit fresh plucked from Hesperidean trees; I have drunk of cool waters that gushed out of far Brazilian mountains, where the arch-chemist sun breeds diamond and chrysolite; I have heard the tolling of South American bells, noted the time by a South American clock, yet never set foot on South American ground. This authentic vision has passed before my face — whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell — and is gone — the wind’s wings have wafted it — the great deep has opened and swallowed it. Adieu! adieu!
There is somewhat dreamlike indeed in this life I am leading.
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My utter loneliness in this populous ship amidst the strange grandeur of the ocean, and for so many days — the continual bustle and work, with their incidental merriment or quarrelling, that naturally go on where four distinct communities are jostling each other — the sailors, the convicts, the soldiers and the cabin gentry (besides me who am a community by myself). And the numberless questions that arise to be settled and interests to be reconciled almost within arm’s length of me — while for me no question or interest arises at all, but all my life is in the seeing of the eye only: and then my objective familiarity with the faces, names, voices, and even characters of these soldiers who are for ever talking, laughing, and humming their tunes (the whole detachment have but three) before my open window, while they know not the sound of my voice — and then this wondrous rising, like an exhalation from the sea, of gorgeous forests and cities, and again their wondrous setting. All this makes me feel like a man before whose entranced vision some phantasmagoria is flitting by: they are ghosts, these sailors and soldiers, doing their ghostly business before me on the great deep for a season; and in the morning the cock will crow for me in some distant land, and I shall awake, and the whole rout of Atlantic spirits shall vanish speedily, shrieking on the blast. Whereupon enter other ghosts. But do I learn nothing — find no food for thought in the movements and gibberings of these ghosts? — In the actions and relations, external and internal of these four commonwealths, in the psychological phenomena of so many phantasmic men, is there then no light, no order, nothing but the chaotic stuff that dreams are made of? Here, also is not my long neglected education making progress?” Even here there is pabulum for the soul, more or less — and a harvest for the quiet eye to reap —
[Greek poetry] (God send it!) [Greek poetry].
Sept. 11th. — A month from Pernambuco — Four months and twenty days from Bermuda, yet still more than a thousand miles from the Cape; but we have now a steady fair wind, which is often a heavy gale, and forces us to strip to our close-reefed topsails. It is here the depth of the southern winter, and as we are several
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degrees south of the Cape latitude, it is very cold. After the flagrant equinoctial summer we have passed, I am somewhat sensitive to the chill of this wind from the antarctic ice mountains — and my enemy, like a cowardly lubber, has made several foul attacks upon me; but I have defied him, and trampled him under foot. A flock of Cape pigeons never leaves us; these are, in fact, a kind of petrel, but the British tax calls them Cape pigeons. They are most beautiful and graceful creatures, as they skim, on level wings, round and round the ship (making no more account of our nine-knot speed than they do of the precession of the equinoxes), or, as they float, with their white breasts proudly undulant on the long swell. Also, we have usually three or four great albatrosses flying round, with their long, sinewy, rigid wings (twelve feet from tip to tip), bent into the shape of a Turkish scimitar. Heaven knows how deeply I envy these albatrosses their sublime faculty of locomotion, and the preternatural lungs the devils have. Is there in all the world an asthmatic albatross? I think not; for if any one of them were so afflicted, the rest would instantly set upon him and put him to death, according to that universal instinct which prevails among brutes, and perhaps ought to prevail among men also, those anomalous and fallen brutes. A herd of deer will drive the wounded one from their society, or gore him to death; poultry have no sympathy with a sick hen; your community of beavers — a well-regulated commonwealth — keeps no hospital for ailing beavers, but just sends them down the river. Even amongst mankind, the simple-minded, unsophisticated Troglodytæ carefully strangled all their worn-out and sickly fellow-citizens, but solemnly and in an honourable manner, with a cow’s tail. One of the soldiers here caught a Cape pigeon in a lasso, put a broad collar of red cloth on it, and sent if off again; it flew about the ship as usual for a while, but the others, when they observed its red deformity, fell upon the poor bird with great animosity, and he soon disappeared from their company. This is not for naught; are sick beavers to expect that the public granary will be open to them, seeing they never put a grain into it? Are invalid albatrosses, who cannot fish, to think they will be fished for? Above all, is a monstrous red-backed sea-pigeon to be allowed to deprave the breed, and in time confound the hereditary colours oi the whole South Atlantic family? We are
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often bid to take lessons of industry from bees, beavers, ants; of faithfulness from dogs; of gentleness from lambs and doves; and why may not human statists leam something of prudent sea-pigeons and politic beavers; especially as this conservative maxim of social economy is confirmed (for I deny the story of the storks) by every beast, after its kind, throughout all zoology. Not that my mind is made up on the applicability of the beastly maxim to our case; the civilised human practice may be better for human animals, possibly — in their fallen state, as it were. I only throw out the brutal idea, that’s all — ex volucrum monedularumque regno. One is not bound, I suppose, to make up one’s mind on all the questions that arise.
One question, however, is easily settled. The British transportation system is the very worst scheme of criminal punishment that ever was contrived; and I seriously think it was contrived by the devil, with the assistance of some friends. Something of its working I saw and heard at Bermuda; but since I embarked on board this ship, Mr. Stewart, the “instructor,” an intelligent man, has been telling me more and more horrible particulars. He has had peculiar opportunities of making himself acquainted with the details of its operation, because, before he became a chaplain to transport ships, he was employed for years as a missionary in the pauper purlieus of London. The people there, he assures me, speak of transportation without the least horror or repugnance, merely as one of the ways of making off life, and, on the whole, as rather a good line of business. The notion of ignominy that we are accustomed to attach to it, has quite disappeared, he tells me, in the midst of the bitter poverty and hideous debasement of those regions. Amongst the prisoners brought out to Bermuda, in the Neptune’s present excursion, was one young man of rather good address, by trade a locksmith. This fellow, after he was removed from the depot prison, and put on board the Neptune, at Portsmouth, wrote a most affectionate letter jointly to his father and mother; but, as he attempted to send it privately, it was intercepted, read, and destroyed. It was to the effect that he had embarked on board ship for Bermuda — that he was in an agreeable mess; that he was never asked to do anything (like the poor devils of sailors and soldiers on board), but ate and drank of the best, and walked about “like a gentle
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man” — that if he had known how pleasant a thing it was to be transported, he would have turned his attention to it long ago; that he was in prime spirits; and, finally, that he intended to take a black woman at Bermuda, and would live very happily. This, it seems, is the usual way in which such matters are talked of; and one would not wonder at a man writing to his brother burglar in this strain; but, God’s mercy! think of a fellow writing to his parents so — as an encouragement for them to bring up his brothers and sisters to the same jolly profession!
But if this transportation turns out to be no punishment at all to the criminal population generally, it is, on the contrary (and partly for that very reason) a far too severe punishment — far worse that the cruellest death — to the unhardened and casual delinquents, who have sometimes, for one moment of mad passion and sore temptation, to dree this rueful doom. No punishment, but a sure and comfortable establishment for all the tribe of professed rascaldom — but utter, final shipwreck of soul and body to the poor wanderer, who might be taken by the hand and led from the devil’s path, if only the laws were made and administered by any others than the devil’s servants.
One main feature in convict life I have ascertained to be a deep and heartfelt respect for atrocious villainy — respect the more profound as the villainy is more outrageous. If anything can add to the esteem which a man in the felon world secures by the reckless brutality of his language and manners, the extent of his present thievings, and ingenuity of his daily lyings, it is the enormity of the original offence for which he is supposed to be suffering. Several instances of this fact, which have been told me since I came on board the Neptune, remind me of a whimsical illustration of the same which I saw last year, while I passed a few days in the Tenedos hospital ship. On my arrival there, I had hardly been left alone in my cabin before a convict softly entered. He was a servant to the assistant-surgeon, and came with a pine-apple which his master had sent me. The man was about 50 years of age, but very stout and active-looking, and highly consequential in his manner, as it soon turned out he had a good right to be. “I trust, sir,” said he, “you will find everything as you wish here: if I can do anything for you, I’m sure I shall be happy — I’m Garrett.” “Well, Garrett?” quoth I.
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“Garrett, sir, Garrett; you must know all about me; it was in all the papers; Garrett, you know.” “Never heard of you before, Garrett.” “Oh! dear, yes, sir, you must be quite well aware of it — the great railway affair, you remember.” “No, I do not.” “Oh! then I am Mr. Garrett, who was connected with the railway (I forget the name of the railway). It was a matter of £40,000 I realised. Forty thousand pounds, sir: left it behind me, sir, with Mrs. Garrett: she is living in England in very handsome style. I have been here now two years, and like it very well — devilish fine brown girls here, sir — I am very highly thought of — created a great sensation when I came. In fact, until you came, I was reckoned the first man in the colony. Forty thousand pounds, sir — not a farthing less. But now you have cut me out.” I rose and bowed to this sublime rascal. The overwhelming idea — that I should supersede a swindler of forty-thousand-pound-power, was too much for me. So I said, graciously bowing, “Oh, sir, you do me too much honour: I am sure you are far more worthy of the post of distinction. For me, I never saw so much money in all my life as forty thousand pounds.” “My dear sir,” said my friend, bowing back again — “My dear sir! but then you are a prisoner of state, patriotic martyr, and all that. Indeed, for my part, my little affair was made a concern of State, too. Lord John Russell, since I came out here, had a private application made to me, offering to remit my whole sentence if I would disclose my method — the way I had done it, you know: they want to guard against similar things in other lines, you understand.” “I trust, sir,” quoth I, respectfully, “you treated the man’s application with the contempt it deserved.” The miscreant winked with one eye. I tried to wink, but failing, bowed again. “You may be sure of that, sir,” said he — “’tis very little I care for any of them: I enjoy myself here very much — have never had a day’s illness — very often go across to this nearest island to look after Dr. Beck’s ducks. Ah! sir, there are two or three splendid coloured girls on that island: then I sometimes correspond with the newspapers: have a private way of getting anything I please sent out, without these people knowing anything about it — should be most happy to have any document sent for you in a quiet way, you know — of course you will want to show up those rascals
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mow and then.” “No, Garrett,” said I, getting tired, “there, that will do, you may leave the room.” The old monster looked a little blank, but walked off at once, and as I requested to be protected from such intrusion for the future. Dr. Hall took the order with him, and I saw him no more.
Now, this railway swindler is a man of rather good address — far better than Hudson, the head of his sect, I believe, can boast of; a portly man, a respectable man, one who understands his own high position in society, and his claims to the respect and consideration of the world — he has “done” the world out of forty thousand pounds — and it is a claim which amongst true-born Britons is always admitted instantly. I shall not be surprised to hear of Mr. Garrett representing, a few years hence, some great commercial constituency in that majestic assembly the British Parliament, and making “laws” there. But no, I err — it is only your unconvicted felon who can aspire to that honour. If I had the ordering of the matter, however, I would transport Garrett to St. Stephen’s to represent York there, and return Hudson to Bermuda to serve as member for the North Junction Railway — or else (what would be better still) I would hang them both.
I have done. Absolutely I will lecture on convict economy no more; but only repeat here, that if a prize were offered amongst “thirty thousand cart-loads of black devils” to any devil of them who would invent the most diabolic system of criminal jurisprudence for mankind, the devil a fiend amongst them could improve on the modem and enlightened British system of transportation.
Two soldiers before my window have been disputing some matter of fact; they have freely called one another liars; as indeed they do continually. This sort of language the poor fellows are obliged to take and permitted to return; and to resent it by a blow would be treated as a serious breach of discipline. I greatly desire to know whether a French or Austrian soldier is obliged to take, and allowed to give, the lie direct amongst his comrades. To me it seems that nothing is more degrading to manhood than this; except only scourging — and British soldiers have to endure both. But the British soldier, or any other British poor man, must not be indulged in the
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feeling of self-respect or personal dignity; that is for his betters — respect for the service he may have, jealous regard to the honour of his regiment, high pride in those fine young men, his officers — but a thought of individual honour, and the quick resentment of a personal indignity, are things far above his sphere. “An officer and a gentleman” would laugh consumedly at any such phenomenon in a private soldier, or other man belonging to one of the ungentlemanly castes.
In no country on earth is the immeasurable distance between gentry and vulgar so constantly and offensively kept in view throughout the whole social system, as in England. In a “Tour” on the Rhine, executed by Chambers, an Edinburgh literator, I remember that the writer cannot forbear from showing how much his British notions of propriety were confounded, when in some of the great frontier garrison-towns occupied by Belgian, Prussian, and Austrian troops, he saw officers of high rank nodding familiarly to the privates as they passed, or standing chatting and laughing for a while with two or three of them at a street corner. Let the human mind try to imagine one of our supercilious young gentlemen (not drunk) behaving in a manner so derogatory to the character of a British officer.
I have learned at Bermuda, and without surprise, that soldiers often intentionally exchange from the military service into the “convict service.” That is to say, they desert, knowing that if taken they will be transported, and deliberately preferring the life of a convict to the hard duty and debased position of a soldier. Once, while I was in Bermuda, a ship came in from Halifax, bringing twenty-two deserters to the hulks; and it is remarkable that their regiment had been quartered at Bermuda two years before; therefore they had an opportunity of observing the Queen’s convict service, and disliked garrison duty in comparison. I saw these men as they were brought into the Dromedary hulk, and ranged on deck — they seemed in excellent spirits. Further, I learn that deserted soldiers make nearly a fifth part of the whole number of prisoners in the colony; and that on board this Neptune are some twenty deserters or more. What wonder? Self-respect is dead already within these men, or rather machines — felony can bring them no lower. A soldier, to be sure, is told that it is an honour to belong to the glorious and immortal British service, and
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that hard as the life is, it is not degrading like the convict service — he is told so; but he feels his degradation — or else is so utterly degraded that he feels it not: he knows that he is liable to be flogged like a slave or a beast of burden — and what can they do to a convict more? In the haughty bearing of his superiors, he is made to feel that the gulf separating him from the respectable classes is just as wide and impassable as felony could make it. He has no franchise, no citizenship, no home, any more than a convict. Then he knows that a convict has an easier life, has good and abundant food, fewer masters over him, is not strangled with belts and knapsack, nor choked with pipe-clay — has generally a shorter time to serve, and the prospect of a favourable settlement in some fertile colony at last.
Whether these are the considerations that commonly induce soldiers to make this exchange or not, I am told that in practice transported deserters speak of themselves as “promoted”; from the ranks, namely, to the gangs.
[Note]: In the Irish Army there shall be no scourging. Deserter for first offence, shall be imprisoned, for second, shot. Note further, there shall be no ‘pipe-clay. Men shall not be kept in perpetual clouds of white dust, labouring to conceal the dirt of their accoutrements with coats of still dirtier dirt.
I have now sufficiently vilipended two branches of the United Service — the convict and the military; the naval must be kept for another occasion. May God look down upon us all, soldiers and convicts, officers, and turnkeys; and especially the unhappy statesmen who are expected to order all these matters aright (without an idea of order in their heads, or a ray of truth in their souls); and more especially me, lonely, sea-faring patriot and martyr, who am thus austerely animadverting upon mankind, as we tear through the heavy seas under close-reefed topsail, about four hundred leagues from land. It is deep in the night. The wind roars wildly, and the waning moon shines in upon me with pale face through the shrouds. So I go upon deck to see the grim white moonshine on the tossing manes of ten thousand breaking billows. A yellow summer moon streaming soft through the whispering tops of bowery trees upon velvet-swarded glades, is one thing, and this grim white moon careering through torn and rifted clouds, on a stormy night at sea, is quite another thing,
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though Euler’s calculations, I believe, are said to be applicable i6 both. After all, the winter moon of these southern oceans is no other than the very harvest moon of Ireland, shining calmly into the room where my children are sleeping this blessed night. For we are not far from the meridian of Newry, though six thousand miles to the south; and I know that this white disk struggling here through antarctic storm-clouds is the very globe of silver that hangs to-night between the branches of the laurels of Dromalane. A thought this, compiled from somebody; I only know it does not belong to me. It was once Jean Paul Richter’s, no doubt; but is not Jean Paul dead? And has he not bequeathed this and all his other assets and effects to you and to me?
12th. — We are still clearing more than two hundred miles a day, and that point-blank towards the Cape. Some god with his broad hand is urging our keel below; either that or else this snoring northwest wind is doing it. We shall certainly make the coast of Africa within a week, if we hold on our way. Everybody on board seems more alive, as if awaking from a long doze. There is one woman in the ship, the wife of a sergeant, who is coming out as guard to the convicts. By great luck she is an Irishwoman, of the county Clare. By good luck, because for twelve months and more I have heard no other human accents than the loathsome twang of vulgar English — which is just barely human. When Mrs. Nolan, therefore, comes up to the poop for a little fresh air, I always go and talk with her a while, merely that I may fill my ears with the liquid music that distils from a kindly Munster tongue. It is well that she is so old (say half a century), else I should fall in love with Mrs. Nolan.
There are nearly two hundred Irish amongst these prisoners — the famine-struck Irish of the Special Commission; many who have not a word of English, and most of them so shattered in constitution by mere hunger and hardship, that all the deaths amongst the prisoners, ever since we embarked, have been Irish. As I am far removed, however, from their part of the ship, I seldom hear their voices, except when they sing at night on deck. And such singing is mournful beyond all caoines, coronachs, and næniæ. What a fate! what a dreary doom has been spun and woven for you, my countrymen! They were born, these men, to a heritage of unquenched hunger, amongst the teeming plenty of
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their motherland — Shunted like noxious beasts from all shelter on her hospitable bosom — driven to stay their gnawing enemy with what certain respectable fed men call their “property.” And so now they are traversing the deep under bayonet-points, to be shot out like rubbish on a bare foreign strand, and told to seek their fortune there amongst a people whose very language they know not. Many of them, I believe, being without families, are glad of this escape, as they might be glad of any escape from the circle of hunters that chased them for life at home. But then there are many others (boys from twelve to seventeen years of age, and some of them very handsome boyrs, with fine open countenances, and a laugh so clear and ringing) whom it is a real pain to look upon. They hardly know what troops of fell foes, with quivers full of arrows, are hunting for their young souls and bodies; they hardly know, and — so much the more pity for them — hardly feel it. But in poor frail huts, on many an Irish hill-side, their fathers and mothers dwell with poverty, and labour, and sorrow, and mourn for their lost children, with a mourning that will know no comfort till they are gathered to their people in the chapel-yard. For indeed these convict boys were not born of the rock or the oak-tree — human mothers bore them, sang them asleep in lowly cradles, wept and prayed for them. But Ireland was under the amelioration of British statesmen in those days, getting her resources developed by them; and so the sons of those woeful Irish mothers were rocked and suckled for the British hulks, to be ameliorated amongst London burglars, and reformed by the swell-mob, that they might help to carry British civilisation to distant continents and isles.
Thoughts like these often come upon me when I hear at night, rising from the ship’s forecastle, some Irish air that carries me back to old days when I heard the same to the humming accompaniment of the spinning-wheel; and then I curse, oh! how fervently, the British Empire. Empire of Hell! when will thy cup of abominations be full? But I always check myself in this cursing; for there is small comfort in unpacking the full heart with indignant words. Indignant thoughts, even, must be stifled and hushed to rest for the time. “These things must not be thought after these ways. So, it will make us mad.”
Sept. 15th. — A poor wretch who has been dying for months
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died outright to-day: an Irishman, by name Brophy. He is the seventh prisoner (exclusive of one sailor and one soldier) who has died since we left Bermuda.
Sept. lyth. — Within one hundred miles of the Cape: and a steady breeze is sending us along at eight knots an hour: we must make the land to-morrow morning.
So this five months’ voyage is as good as over. It has been, everyone says, very long and wearisome; yet to me it has been neither. But now that land is near, with new scenes and cities of articulate-speaking men, I must rouse myself from my blue-water dreaming, and gird up my loins to meet whatsoever new thing Africa may bring forth. Ghosts, avaunt!
Sept. 18th. — Before sunrise this morning I was awaked by three cheers from the forecastle. I knew Table Mountain must be in sight; so I jumped out of bed and went on deck. There, right ahead of us, the curtain of mist was lazily furling itself up from a rough mountainous coast not two miles from the ship: we could see the shaggy copse-wood fringing the rocks, and close upon the beach two or three low houses. We could hear the surf as the long swell broke heavily upon the sand. It is substantial Africa.
But can this be the Cape of Storms? After flying along for a fortnight under a strong gale that never failed us a single hour, we find ourselves here, off the terrible Cape, where we counted on having to fight our way into port through hurricanes ingruent from all points of heaven, lying motionless on the water, with sails flapping against the masts in a breathless calm. And well for us that it is so; for we came close into the shore during the night, about four miles too far north: that is to say, we have the Cape of Good Hope still to double before we can make the entrance of False Bay: that is to say, we have missed the very thing to make sure of which vessels bound for the Cape always sail two thousand miles to the westward of their direct course. And the wind almost constantly prevailing on this coast is the south-east, with a strong current setting in the same direction: and so, if a wind stir to-day and do not run us ashore (where we must certainly go to pieces) it will drive us far to the north-west; and after being within four miles of our port, we may have three weeks’ navigation yet before we come within actual reach of it. So say sea-going men. But luck may favour us.
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About noon, the mountains were all clear; and there, sure enough, is the unmistakable platform of Table Mountain predominating over them all. Where we lie here we see no land but the rugged peninsula which divides Table Bay from False Bay, the outer coast of which seems to extend about thirty miles. The northern part of this peninsula is a magnificent mass of mountains; and straight opposite to where we are now drifting, the mass is cloven through by a narrow inlet called Hout’s Bay, where the cliffs seem to rise sheer out of deep water at an angle that would make the footing of a goat imsure — yet in that very inlet, as I hear, round the skirts of those grim rocks, are some of the best vineyards in the colony. I thirst for the juice of these African grapes, and refuse any brandy to-day, out of disgust.
Mrs. Nolan, the sergeant’s wife, who had thought, I believe, that the captain had missed his way and sailed into unknown seas beyond the world’s end, is in great, though quiet delight. She says Table Mountain is for all the world like Callan (a mountain in Clare) — and has been thanking God all day in a low voice.
Caught some capital fish, and dined luxuriously, getting drunk afterwards on imaginary Constantia of the choicest vintage.
Saw in the afternoon a phenomenon symptomatic of the end of a convict voyage, viz., a wonderfully worn pack of cards floating alongside, very brown, and with corners all rounded off. They had been thrown overboard: this day their long service is at an end; and if one could ascertain how much money has been lost and won by their means, within these five months, it would be a curious statistic to lay “before Parliament.” Some of our worthies, too, who have been till now wearing prison apparel, of fustian or corduroy, have been taking out of the fold to-day, and trying on an astonishing quantity of new and very good clothes, which they had provided at Bermuda, with a view of entering on their campaign respectably at the Cape. In fact, there are some very gentlemanly London thieves and swindlers here: several of them have better coats and hats than I have; so that I will not be the most “respectable” convict landed at the Cape. Now, then, worthy householders of Africa, look to
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your door-bolts and locks; hardware of that sort will rise in price hereabouts before six months are out. Gentlemen of Africa! take care of your pockets. Assuredly it is a gross outrage upon any community whatsoever to discharge amongst them such a cargo of iniquity as we carry. But if the colonists, as I hear, be content to receive the consignment, why, let them make their profit by it as best they can.
Sept. 19th. — Hurrah! hurrah! Africa has brought forth a new thing — a right noble birth this time — and from the bottom of my heart I wish her joy.
CHAPTER XI
Sept. 19th, 1849. — On board the Neptune. Simon’s Bay, Cape of Good Hope. Last night I wrote down my congratulations to Africa, and drank her health with enthusiasm.
The case is this — The colonists here are not content, and never were content, that their country should be made a penal settlement. The assumption that they were so was a lying pretence of the English newspapers, and a fraud of Earl Grey, the Colonial Minister. This “statesman” had publicly declared, two years ago, that no colony, not heretofore a penal one, should be made a receptacle for convicts without its own consent; on which promise the colonists here, like simple fools, had been relying; but the statesman afterwards, by the clandestine method of an “Order in Council,” just made the Cape a penal colony, and let the honest inhabitants know of it after he had settled everything and chartered a ship to carry the first cargo of felony to their shores. So, during the whole of our five months’ voyage, a most vehement excitement has been growing and spreading all over South Africa. The people have forced the Legislative Council to dissolve itself — the Governor, Sir Harry Smith, was compelled a month ago to promise that when the Neptune should arrive, he would not suffer one convict to land; and the colonists themselves, tradesmen, merchants, butchers, bakers, inn-keepers and all, have combined to a man in an universal “Anti-Convict Association,” vowing that they will neither employ any convict, sell anything to any convict, give a convict a place to lay his head, or deal with, countenance, or speak to, any traitor who may so comfort or abet a convict, from the governor down to the black coolies and boatmen. As we were so long at sea, the excitement and effective organisation had time to grow strong — newspapers, public meetings, pulpits, had been loud and furious; and so, when we, all unconscious, sailed up False Bay to-day, the Cape was fully ready for us. Before we make the harbour of Simon’s Bay (which is a small basin inside False Bay, about twenty
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miles from Capetown), the Neptune was known by her signals, and a boat from the shore hailed us. It was the harbour-master of Simon’s Bay bringing Dr. Dees a note from the governor, ordering him to cast anchor in the bay, and neither to go ashore himself nor suffer any communication between the ship and the shore till further orders. The same gentleman brought a bundle of Cape newspapers, that we might see the doings of the “Anti-Convict Association,” and how impossible it is for the cargo of felony to be unloaded here. Doctor Dees sends his despatches to the governor.
The harbour-master also handed me a letter from —— —— and a gentleman’ who came off with him, introduced himself to me as Dr. Stewart, “health-officer” of the port; gave me some newspapers which he had brought for me, and told me, that so far as I am concerned there is no objection to my landing on the part of the people — that they understand quite well how I happen to be here, that none of this agitation,” of course,” has reference to me and so forth — adding somewhat of an apologetic nature about the popular violence. I told him I was delighted to find the colonists so determined to resist the abominable outrage attempted by “Government” — that they were completely in the right, and hoped they would stand out to the last extremity — that as to myself, though everybody indeed knew I was no felon, yet I could not expect the people here to make distinctions in my favour: they were engaged in a great struggle, involving the very existence of their society, and could not afford to attend to particular exceptions. He seemed surprised at my warmth; but I was willing to let the first Cape man who spoke to me, know what I think of the business.
The harbour-master informs me that everyone at the Cape, knowing we had left Bermuda five months ago, had concluded that the ship must have gone down with all hands, and that so the Colony would be saved the struggle it has been preparing for. In fact, several clergymen have been praying to God in their pulpits, to avert the infliction, and, complacently remarking in their sermon upon the presumed loss of the Neptune, with every soul on board, as one of the most special Providences yet recorded. The same harbour-master tells me that about a week since, the Swift, a man-of-war brig, touched here and took in provisions, on her way
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to Sydney, having on board O’Brien, Meagher, O’Donoghue and MacManus — that he was the only person who saw them, and that the Swift remained but one day and part of the next.
Martin and O’Doherty were not on board: they, I presume, were stowed away in a common convict-ship. Being proprietors of newspapers, the “Government” wish to visit them with the uttermost disgrace of felony. This is because an honest man, armed with a newspaper, is the most dangerous enemy the persons called Government can have in Ireland at present; therefore, they do us the honour to dishonour us as far as they are able.
It was nearly dark when we got into the land-locked basin called Simon’s Bay; it seems to be surrounded by steep gloomy mountains; about a dozen large ships are in the bay, and the lights of the town appear within a quarter of a mile. — a quarter of a mile, yet as far off as the Aurora Borealis: for it seems pretty certain that I shall never set foot upon African ground.
This is assuredly, in one point of view, a great disappointment to me: no man can guess what our ultimate destination may be: probably Australia; and of Australia I have ever felt the utmost abhorrence. It was always a matter of wonder to me that free emigrants with their families — people who might go if they liked to Dahomey or Whidah, or Nova Zembla, or Tierra del Fuego, went voluntarily to settle in a penal colony and adopt it for their country. To live among natural unsophisticated savages, though it were in Labrador or the Sahara, would be tolerable; but to dwell and rear one’s children amongst savages who are outcasts of civilisation, savages -civilised — savages uniting more than the brutality of Timbuctoo with all the loathsome corruptions of London, is a nauseous and horrid idea. Yet I have inured myself to a wonderful indifference, and actually feel small concern about the whole matter. I am right well content that I so peremptorily forbade my own people to come out to the Cape to meet me for the present; and so long as it is but myself I have to care for, and my health stands firm, I find that I reck but little to what point of the compass this ominous ship shall next direct her bowsprit. Most strangely I feel this night a sort of joyful sensation — a pleasing sub-excitement — a warm glow in the region of the praecordia, that makes my blood to tingle. We have just
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fallen in here upon a very pleasant conjuncture in British colonial affairs; and if matters be, indeed, as I divine they are, we are going to see a handsome piece of work.
Plainly, the Governor of the Cape cannot take it upon him to send the ship away — certainly not to another colony — without orders from England; and we may lie here in a kind of moral quarantine for six months, before any decisive order arrives. Then there are many guesses, all equally probable, what that order will be: whether we are to be forwarded to Australia, brought back to Bermuda, summoned to the Thames, forced in upon the Cape, or consigned to some unheard-of country in the Pacific, or I know not where.
It is certain that the men in Downing Street will, with a very bad grace, yield to the Cape demands. I think they can hardly make up their minds to do it at all; the first impulse pi Englishmen, in such cases, is always to bully. Yet, if they force this matter, it will be worse for the poor prisoners themselves, who are like to be dealt with on the footing of wolves or Caffirs. About the whole affair there is an utter and glorious uncertainty. The people, I trust, are in no uncertainty about their course of procedure.
The convicts do not yet know how the land lies, and are still making sure of going ashore to-morrow; but the “authorities” of the ship are looking blank at the thought of being imprisoned here, they know not how long. As for Dr. Dees, he is in pitiable consternation. The anxieties of his long voyage, and this unlooked-for reception, operating on a weak constitution and nervous temperament, threaten to make an invalid of him. He expected to meet here his brother, who is surgeon in Admiral Reynolds’s ship; but; ust three days before we arrived, the admiral was replaced by a commodore, and his ship sailed for Plate River. On the whole, the poor creature seems quite distracted to-night, and can hardly speak without weeping. That he, a British officer, executing the orders of his sovereign, should be regarded, on his arrival at a British colony, as if he were the captain of a Malay pirate ship! So we all have our own peculiar grievances.
Down plunges the Neptune’s bow anchor with its rattling chain cable, making the old ship quiver. Where next, then — in Moreton Bay or Port Philip, at the Falkland Isles, at Blackwall, jrqnce. mpreundr. the Bermuda cedar boscages — will. that anchor
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make its next plunge? Gentlemen of Downing Street, here is a little matter for you to adjust, with your red tape, or other appliances. I have nothing to do with it; the onus is upon you; therefore I will quietly take a smoke, and wish you a difficult deliverance.
So we cast anchor, and wish for the day.
20th. — The sun rose to-day, quite as usual, without any apparent anxiety upon his countenance — “all unconcerned with our unrest” — and showed us where the ship is riding. Simon’s Bay is a cove, or recess, on the west side of the great False Bay, enclosed by rugged hills, from 800 to 1,400 feet in height; and the town, with its dockyard building, is built round the head of the bay, on the steep face of the hill, like a small Genoa. At one end of the town a deep ravine brings down a stream from the mountains, and close to its mouth stand a few trees. Several handsome houses, hotels, a good many shops, a church, a small barrack, a range of navy store-houses, make up the whole town; and three or four gardens have been made to climb up the abrupt acclivity behind, though for some of them the soil must have been carried up, not in carts, but in hods. There is about as much pasture near the water edge as might feed three cows. The trees are now in full leaf, and the grass, and the gardens, and the heath upon the mountains are all as green as emerald. The hills are everywhere tufted with low copse, the aborescent heaths of the Cape, and in some places are purple already with the wild geraniums, that make a South African wilderness to blossom like the rose. To the north, rising over all the rest, peeps one shoulder of Table Mountain, and on the eastern side of False Bay (about fifteen miles off), is a vast range of high and shaggy mountains, with splintered peaks and naked precipices. Along the head of False Bay lies a level tract of sandy-looking land; and beyond that, ridge rising over ridge, the far-off mountains of the interior, some of them with snow yet lying on their rugged and fantastic summits.
Simonstown is in evident excitement to-day; there is a public meeting, attended by a good many Capetown members of the “Anti-Convict Association,” who instantly posted down to hold a solemn council of war, in full view of the enemy. In Capetown itself, a great gong they have in the town-hall was last night
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made to sound in funereal wise (one beat in every half-minute), by order of the municipal authorities of the city; and this dismal tolling is to go on, day and night, while the Neptune remains within the limits of the colony. Simultaneous meetings are in all districts; orators roaring, and clergymen cursing louder than ever. The entire community seems to have but one thought, one purpose — the colony is bristling itself up into one resolute, strong-bristling porcupine to repel the touch of this felonious gang. More Power!
We shall not hear to-day the decrees of the anti-convicts; but everyone tells us there is absolute unanimity; so that I can guess there will be but little moderation.
Dr. Dees has received, this evening, a note from the governor acknowledging the receipt of the despatches, but intimating that he does not intend, for all the despatches, to relieve the doctor of his charge, nor to allow any one on board the Neptune to come ashore; that the doctor is therefore to consider himself under the orders of the commodore — who has his frigate lying at anchor beside us, and has supreme command over everything that is afloat in these waters — and to wait for further despatches from England.
21st. — Everything goes on favourably. The meeting yesterday resolved on applying the anti-convict “pledge” rigorously. The pledge is against selling anything to anybody on board the Neptune, or to anybody who will so deal, or to any one who will assist any convicted felon to land, or enable him to live when landed — or to the government, or anybody for the government, so long as the Neptune even remains afloat within the waters of the colony. All the Simonstown shopkeepers were made to sign this pledge on the spot, though sore against their will; for this little town depends wholly on the dockyard and the custom of men-of-war’s men. Watch has been set on shore (men with telescopes, called Committee of Vigilance) to keep a constant eye upon the Neptune and the boats to and fro — also, on the Simonstown shopkeepers, who need watching too. The commodore, indeed, yesterday sent us fresh beef for all hands, but a message with it that he could not hope to supply us for more than a day or two, as, if found out, he would get no more beef for himself and his crew. Indeed, he “threw in” this supply by stratagem, as they do for blockaded
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towns — ordering two days’ beef at once for his own ship, then slipping half of it over his deck into a boat on the side furthest from the town, and so to the Neptune.
The road to Capetown lies close along the beach, winding round the base of the mountains, being, in fact, the sea-sand moistened and hardened by the tide. Along this road there is now a continual posting, riding, and running. Two or three military persons one being Quarter-master General, and two medical officers, came on board the Neptune to-day, sent by the governor, to inspect. After they had examined the fore part of the ship, the state of the sick, and so forth, Dr., Dees came to me, saying the inspecting-officers wished to see me. Just as I was answering their questions about my health. Dr. Dees, who stood close by me, suddenly fell down, moaning and writhing in a frightful manner.
I thought it was a fit of epilepsy; but six hours have gone by, and he has never come to his senses, nor ceased from convulsive movements of the limbs. I fear the poor fellow will die. Lord Grey’s colonial experiment has destroyed him at any rate.
The excitement on shore seems to increase every hour. A cart of bread, on its way from Capetown for the supply of the navy, was stopped by a mob outside that town, and the governor was obliged to send with it an escort of troops.
I have got Cape newspapers for the last two months, and have been reading the proceedings of the various anti-convict associations within that time. In the remote parts of the colony the indignation and firm resolution of resistance are, if possible, more powerful and universal than even at Capetown. The Dutch inhabitants, who are three to one, are more desperately enraged than the English, and seem perfectly willing to resist by arms; indeed, they are so thoroughly disaffected to the British Government that they desire nothing better than a fair pretext for a quarrel. Both races, however, are unanimous upon this: the “pledge” has been adopted at all meetings; and nobody who travels through the country is to get provisions or lodgings for his money, or pasture for his bullocks, without producing a certificate in Dutch and English from the Anti-Convict Association of his own district that he is a pledged man — the pledge itself being printed in both languages on the back of the certificate. In some regions exclusively Dutch, the farmers flocked to
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the meetings from a distance of forty and fifty miles across mountains and Karroos, as they call the barren deserts of this country — “These simple people,” says the newspaper, “did not know what a convict was — had never heard of Earl Grey, or a Colonial Office, or Downing Street” — but when the matter was explained to them, how that a shipload of convicted criminals, Bandieten, from England and Ireland were sent by Graaf Grey to be let loose upon their country, and when the orators enlarged upon the circumstances and way of living of these colonists, dwelling on lonely farms, the men often from home for weeks together — often traversing unfrequented plains and mountain passes with their bullock-waggons as they carry their produce to the seaports — and when they reminded them that heretofore they have never needed lock or bar by day or night, nor felt a moment’s uneasiness when absent from their families — and then pictured the horrors of this bandit invasion, and told them terrific stories of the atrocities of Australian bush-rangers, until their imaginations were excited to the utmost, and they thought of Lord Grey’s “exiles” as a band of preternatural desperadoes, coming with an express mission to rob, ravish, burn, and murder — Donner en blitzen! [sic.] the worthy farmers, in hot Dutch wrath, not only adopted the pledge by acclamation, and signed it on the spot, but swore, gutturally, lifting their hands to heaven, that they never would submit to this wrong — would renounce their allegiance rather, and take up their rifles to repel the felon invasion with more hearty goodwill than ever they had marched against Caffirs. And the stout Boers are like to be as good as their word: I trust they are — one would gladly fall in upon some corner of the world where men who threaten loud have some notion of putting their threats into execution.
It is to be remarked that the Dutch farmers here are all well-armed, all practised shots — never heard of a “Disarming Act,” and having been at various times organised in militia corps against the Caffirs, have some touch of military discipline, and a wholesome taste for powder and ball. Nobody ever explained to them that they herein commit a crime, and that he who commits a crime gives strength to the enemy.
In many districts, after the public meetings, they went straight
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to their places of worship, heard an Anti-Convict sermon, and prayed that the judgments which threaten the land might be averted. After describing one meeting of this sort, the newspaper breaks forth — “And thus ended the 18th of August. May it long be remembered in Zwartland. May fathers at their rising up and at their lying down, etc., etc.” Indeed, I have not seen more heroic phraseology anywhere, not even in the Nation, than these newspapers supply. They uniformly denounce the whole scheme as a deliberate fraud of Earl Grey (which it is), and charge him with direct lying throughout. They say if the high-wrought civilisation of Britain breeds such a mass of crime, Britain ought to deal with her criminals herself, and not turn colonies which were established and peopled with quite other views and other hopes, into sinks or common sewers of felony — they say the Cape, like every other community, has its own delinquents to keep in order, and can neither afford to take charge of imported scoundrelism, nor bear to inoculate its society with fresh varieties of villainy’ — and surely in all this they say only what is right and reasonable. The British Government claim to be entitled to palm some of their convict rascality upon the Cape, because they supplied troops to save the Cape from Caffirs — but, say these newspapers, you did this to uphold British supremacy in Southern Africa, not to protect our households — and though it were not so, still we say, take your troops, take your ships: we will defend ourselves from the Caffirs; at the very worst, we prefer Caffirs to convicts.
Was there ever, since the beginning of the world, a juster cause than these colonists have now, to stir their blood?
But the agitation by no means confines itself now to the anti-convict question. On every side a cry is rising for a representative government, with control over supplies — they will be ruled no longer by red-tape puppies in Downing Street, and a British legislative council at the Cape. Here is a resolution passed at a meeting in Worcester district, on the 11th August — (Mr. Petrus Jacobus de Vos, in the chair) — “That the system by which the colony is at present governed is arbitrary and unjust in its nature, and that a more liberal system of government ought to be substituted. Further, that the present legislature has become un-adapted to the wants of the colony, and ought to be superseded
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by a representative constitution.” Some similar resolution now passed at every meeting.
In the meantime the “government” here is completely paralysed: the members of the legislative council have resigned: the executive council never meets; and the Colony is virtually without any government at all. The people are quietly but effectually taking all affairs into their own hands: all the banks and insurance offices have given notices that they will have no dealings with anybody who is not pledged, or who may supply the government in any manner, until after the Order in Council, making the Cape a penal colony, shall have been cancelled: and Sir Harry Smith, to “re-establish confidence,” has taken a questionable step — proclaimed that he is about to issue a government paper currency, to be advanced on such security as “a board of officers” shall approve, and to be exchangeable for taxes.
All this I have culled out of the newspapers: the agitation seems to have gone forward with still increasing violence till the day the Neptune sailed into port: and matters are now growing worse (or better) every day.
22nd. — No more fresh meat. The “Committee of Vigilance” found out the commodore’s manoeuvre, and now the people refuse to supply meat, or anything else, to the commodore himself or to any ship of the squadron — or any branch of the naval department. There are four ships of war lying here, with about nine hundred men, and they are all reduced to salt rations as well as we. By good luck there is great abundance of excellent fish in this bay: and one of the frigate’s boats has just drawn a noble draught of them. So we are supplied with fresh fish for to-morrow.
The Association at Capetown are now directing their whole energies to one point, to coerce the governor, by absolute starvation of the public services, to send the Neptune at once, somewhere, anywhere, out of the waters of the colony. They are applying the non-intercourse pledge in all its force. Contractors for the supply of all government departments have as one man declined to fulfil their contracts, preferring to forfeit the penalty in their bonds. Government has advertised for new tenders (by big painted placards, for no printer will print for a convict government) — not one tender sent in.
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Even at Simonstown the people are compelled to enforce the pledge. The Neptune’s steward went ashore to-day, by a circuitous route, going first to the Minerva, an East Indiaman lying near us, then to the shore in the Minerva’s boat. He went to butcher’s shop; asked for mutton; the boy in attendance said he would sell him two pounds: steward said he wanted a leg of mutton; boy did not know; would call his master. The master came, and the steward pretended to fall into a violent passion. He was the steward, he said, of the Minerva; and were his cabin passengers, ladies and gentlemen from Madras, to be starved because a cargo of damned rascally convicts were lying in the bay? For all his passion, the butcher put him to a strict cross-examination, to make sure that he did not belong to the Neptune; and eventually the steward carried off the leg of mutton.
This is all, perhaps, a rather serious business, and likely to be more serious to those whom it may concern; but there is much excellent amusement in it, I laugh over the newspapers till tears stand in my eyes. I laugh on the poop at every fresh piece of news that comes on board as the agitation develops itself; and sometimes I laugh for half-an-hour in my bed.
24th. — Nothing but fish to eat yet; but I hear the commodore has resolved to ride on forays by night, and drive a creagh from the farms. The governor takes no notice of the Neptune now at all. The doctor still very ill, in a state of constant nervous excitement, with occasional violent paroxysms.
2Sth. — There is a dismasted ship lying in the Bay — the old frigate Seringapatam; and to her, one hundred and twenty of the prisoners were transferred yesterday evening, which must certainly give much more air and room to those who remain. We seem to be preparing to spend the summer here.
To-day the poor doctor was removed in one of the frigate’s boats, stretched upon his bed, to the naval hospital on shore. I believe he will never leave it.
Our old skipper went ashore to-day, taking a brace of pistols with him. He found the people very quietly disposed; only they would “hold no intercourse” with him — he walked into several
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shops, tried to buy a tobacco pipe, a glass for his watch, a fresh roll of bread, but in vain; they would hold no intercourse. He went into the house of a poor woman, who keeps a small bakery and confectionery shop, and who has hitherto lived by supplying the men-of-war with fresh breakfast bread. She told him, with tears, that she was utterly ruined — that the farmers and millers had ceased sending flour or grain to Simonstown, that but one baker could now keep his oven hot, and was restricted to selling at each house what would feed its known inmates only. While they talked, the baker’s cart came up; the captain begged her, as she was buying for herself, to get two loaves more, and sell them to him; but she protested, in the greatest agitation, that if she even asked for such a thing, she would get no more bread for herself. He came on board again, declaring he had never met with such fools in his life; our skipper belongs apparently to that numerous class of persons who cannot understand how sane men, Britons too, professing Christianity, and living in the nineteenth century, can bring themselves, on mere public grounds, to refuse to turn a fenny. He is an old East India captain, and knows a sure way, he tells me, to bring these people to reason — namely, to give “three dozen all round” to the colonists, and a double allowance to the clergy.
26th. — The Commodore has driven a prey of bullocks; he sent out a boat’s crew last night; and before morning they drove into Simonstown a herd of cattle; a fife and drum headed the procession, playing one of the jolly airs to which seamen are accustomed to “walk away” when they raise a topgallant-mast. The “Committee of Vigilance,” keeping vigil all night upon a balcony, were astounded. The commodore, of course, pays for the cattle, and herein differs from a stark moss-trooper. An officer who was on board to-day tells me the sailors of the frigate are growing highly excited against the rebellious colonists, and that the gunner’s mate being on shore yesterday evening, and hearing a man talking on the street about the infamous government design of sending convicts among them to corrupt their morals, and violate their daughters, came up to the indignant patriot, “Ah! you be hanged; you’re one of the cursed anti-convict lubbers,” said he, and he gave the man a blow between the eyes that felled him where he stood.
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There is no relaxation of the blockade, however, shopkeepers here will absolutely sell nothing to anybody belonging to the ships of war or the Neptune. Simonstown, indeed, must go to ruin, if the struggle last long, and the inhabitants are complaining bitterly; but public opinion is inexorable.
CHAPTER XII
27th Sept. — On board the “Neptune,” Simon’s Bay. — The Captain went up yesterday to Capetown, and returned this evening, bringing me three letters from home, the reading whereof drove clear out of my head, for an hour or two, convicts and anti-convicts, the Cape, the commodore, the governor and all.
The captain came from Capetown in an omnibus, which contained two gentlemen coming down to relieve the “Committee of Vigilance” on the balcony, and take their turn with the telescopes. They did not know who their fellow-traveller was, and their talk was all of the Neptune and the felons. When he told them he had been at Simonstown, and had seen the ship, they urged him with questions — had he seen me, J. Mitchel? — had he heard that I had declared the colonists were right, and ought to persevere? Was it true that I walked about on the poop, where the captain walks? etc. He told them that was true enough, as any one might see from the street at Simonstown.
He describes the excitement at Capetown as being extremely violent; business is nearly at a stand, and many hundreds of persons are thrown out of work. Some families are preparing to wind up business, selling their property, and declaring they will fly the country. New buildings are stopped; debts called in: everyone thinks that howsoever this affair ends, it will go near to destroy the colony. An impression prevails that the emigrants who have been assisted to come here for years 4)ast by government funds were in fact some of Lord Grey’s convicts in disguise; and the farmers who had hired them as servants and labourers are now dismissing them ignominiously. These poor creatures, of course, flock into Capetown, and add to the ingredients of turbulence that are now fermenting there. Capetown is a city somewhat larger than Kilkenny, peopled by three or four distinct races, English, Dutch (constituting the ruling caste), Malays, Hottentots, and a very large number who are half Dutch and half of the
1 88
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ferocious Malay breed; these are the artisans, boatmen, coolies, servants, and the like. Here are materials for plenty of rough work.
The anti-convicts are now divided into two parties; one, the “moderates,” being willing to let the government, the army and navy, and even the Neptune, be supplied with provisions until the decisive despatch arrives from England, but then (if the despatch be unfavourable) to enforce the “pledge,” and use every means of resistance — the other, the immoderates (and only genuine anti-convicts), insisting on the governor, and all his satellites, being instantly excommunicated, unless he sends the Neptune to sea at once, waiting for no despatches. These are the great majority.
28th. — Poor Dees, whom the governor would not relieve, has been relieved by another authority. He is dead.
2()th. — Military guard changed to-day: a party from the 73rd regiment has come on board, under charge of a non-commissioned officer. Our two smoking officers have gone to smoke on shore.
30th, Sunday. — The “Bishop of Capetown,” by name Dr. Gray, came on board to-day and preached to the convicts on the main deck. I had the curiosity, whilst he preached, to walk near enough to hear how he addressed them. Mr. Stewart, the “instructor,” never says, “my brethren,” but always “my men”; which I suppose is the custom of convict chaplains: for though preachers say that we all have sinned, yet it would be truly monstrous if convicted sinners were allowed to think themselves brethren to a minister of the gospel. We all have sinned, indeed; theoretically — or rather it is the etiquette for us to say so, in our polite intercourse, as it were, with the Almighty. To my surprise, however, the bishop called the poor convicts, “My dearly beloved brethren.”
After service he inquired for me: the captain came for me, and as he, in the doctor’s” absence, is my head jailor, I went with him into the after-cabin, and was introduced to the reverend man. He is a young man for a bishop, but wears a highly orthodox shovel-hat, and a very peremptory silk apron girt round his loins. I found him a most agreeable person: he heartily approves of the anti-convict movement: told him I was glad to hear that — that I also approved of it. He declared that if the colony were but a
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little stronger it would rise in arms at once upon this argument — to which I said bravo! This circumstance, however, he mentioned not explicitly as his own episcopal recommendation, but as the universal feeling of the people. We conversed for nearly half an hour, and I was sorry when he went away.
Oct 1st. — The people of Simonstown, I fear, can hold out no longer. Shopkeepers, it is said, have begun to fly from the place, and bills are appearing in the windows. Most of them, indeed, are opening their shops again, a very superficial examination being enough to satisfy the traders that all is right. Even in Capetown, though they still refuse all intercourse with government, or any of the departments as such, yet they will sell goods to any one as an individual. There are no tenders yet for new contracts, and the victor of Aliwal is in sad straits.
In the country parts the excitement and irritation increase daily. The presence of this plague ship in their waters acts on the colony like some acrid irritant introduced into a living body — there is fever and pain till the peccant matter is got rid of — the people really cannot bear this poisonous blister of felony: they get no rest at night, but are waylaid in dreams by atrocious convicts — they are now actually urging and obsecrating the governor daily to send the ship at least out of the bay and beyond the Cape horizon, with orders to cruise off this fearful coast until the expected despatches arrive — that is for three, four, or five months. This he has announced he cannot legally do — the Attorney-General so advises him — for the Cape also has an Attorney-General — whereupon the anti-convicts have laid the case before some dozen eminent lawyers, Dutch and English, who unanimously affirm that he can legally do it. And so the anti-convicts say he ought to do it, must do it, and if he will not do it, they will apply the pledge machinery to him in all its power — will absolutely refuse to let anything be purchased for his private use, even by individuals — they will cut off his gas, will turn off his water, will create on all sides a vacuum around (and inside of) the government and all official persons; so that the thing, it is hoped, must collapse. Various mischievous rumours heighten the perturbation. One day it was said that a few of the most unspeakable felons had made their escape from the Neptune by
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swimming, and had straightway dispersed themselves over the country on their errand of plunder, blood, and ravishment.
In the meantime the governor has, they say, so far complied with the Association as to promise decidedly that if the final order of the Colonial Office be to land the convicts, he will not be the instrument of inflicting so great an injury, but will resign. Therefore, we are likely to he here the whole summer, till February or March next — while his resignation goes to England, and a new governor comes out.
What complicates the business greatly, and adds materially to the Downing Street difficulty, is that the Australian colonies are also up in arms against the admission of any more British felony there. A ship that lately arrived at Sydney roused an opposition nearly as strong as we see here now, but not so well organised; for that governor at once landed the prisoners and shut the gates of government house against a deputation coming to remonstrate. And there are two or three shiploads of convicts, including that which holds Martin and O’Doherty, now at sea on their way to N. S. Wales, or Van Diemen’s land — for on Britain’s convict-ships the sun never sets — and it is hard to guess whether these will be suffered to land their cargoes when they arrive. If we should be sent forward, therefore, to any part of Australia, it would be only another experimental trip: and the worthy colonists there also might bid us pass on. At worst we cannot go much farther from home: if my kidnappers make me sail any farther on that tack, I shall only be coming round upon them at the other side: which is one advantage of inhabiting a spherical body or spheroid, not heretofore noticed by the learned.
Several persons have come to see me, either out of simple curiosity — having heard that there is a felon of a rather unusual sort to be seen here — or from a kinder motive. A young midshipman of the Castor frigate came on board the other day, introduced himself to me, and said he was an Irishman: so we had some talk thereupon. A Church of England clergyman, named Sandberg, by birth a German, being on his way from India, and making some stay at the Cape, has been several times on board, and has preached, he says, to the prisoners, between decks. He offers me the loan of books, and is otherwise polite and attentive. Also, several others, whom I forget.
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Oct. 12th. — Our good colonists are growing frenetic. Rumour and rage, and “preternatural suspicion,” are driving them mad. The last week seems to have been hurrying matters forward to some violent issue. Finding that the ship was not ordered away, nor likely to be, and that the published opinions of Dutch jurisconsults were disregarded, as well as the published harangues of the clergy and the published prayer adopted in the Jews’ synagogue — and that both army, navy, government, yea, and the very convicts, were actually feasting on Cape beef and mutton, though at some inconvenience to the providers, and not without a display of force — seeing all this, and imagining that all was lost if the ship were allowed to await Lord Grey’s decision, the anti-convicts convened a great open-air monster meeting yesterday, and have solemnly resolved to shut all shops, and to deal with nobody but their own customers and pledged persons. They really hope to make it impossible for the governor to subsist the convicts, or even himself while he harbours the convicts. The resolution is printed, and posted everywhere, by way of proclamation; and one hour after it was promulgated yesterday, every shop in Capetown was shut up. A courier was sent post to Simon’s Bay, with a copy of the new edict, and injunctions to enforce the observance of the pledge most rigorously from this day forth. Simonstown, therefore, is once more inaccessible. The unanimity with which all this business goes on is wonderful. Even the “moderates,” though they deprecate such an extreme measure, say they will act with their countrymen. Nobody, in fact, dares to disobey the plebiscitum. Here it is: —
“Anti-Convict Association.
“At a special meeting of the Association, held in the Town Hall this day, Thursday — J. J. L. Smuts, Esq., in the chair — moved by J. Fairbairn, Esq., seconded by Thos. Sutherland, Esq.,
“That in consequence of the bad faith of the Right Hon. the Earl Grey, and of his attempts to make this colony a penal settlement, against the wishes and in defiance of the petitions, remonstrances and protests of the inhabitants; and in consequence of the detention within the limits of the colony of the ship Neptune, with convicts on board, whose destination is the Cape of Good Hope, on the ground of a professional opinion given by her
[Plate:] William Smith O’Brien (1848)
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Majesty’s Attorney-General, as to the illegality of sending them away, which the whole of the other members of the Bar have pronounced to be erroneous, society in this colony is rapidly falling into disorder, from one end of the country to the other, and the local government is fast becoming, by reason of this disorder and dissatisfaction, less and less capable of fulfilling the duties of a free government, and less and less capable of protecting the lives and property of the frontier and other inhabitants, should any troubles arise among the native tribes and people on the borders:
“Therefore, it is the duty of all good and loyal subjects of her Majesty, at once from this day to suspend all business transactions with the government, in any shape or upon any terms, until it is officially declared that the Neptune, with the convicts on board, will go away as soon as all necessary supplies for her voyage can be put on board — and that all intercourse and connection between private individuals and his Excellency and heads of the victualling departments shall be dropped from this day — the merchants, auctioneers, bakers, butchers, shopkeepers, and all other good and loyal people dealing only with such private individuals as they know and clearly understand to be unconnected with those departments by or through which supplies, sufficient to afford a pretext for the detention of the convicts, may possibly be obtained.
“And that, the measures already taken for this purpose being too slow for the urgency of the case, it is recommended that after this moment all shops and stores shall be closed as for a solemn fast, except for the accommodation of ordinary private, and well-known customers that his Excellency may no longer be in doubt as to the impossibility of detaining the Neptune with her convicts within the limits of this colony. “Carried unanimously.”
Possibly, the wisdom of this last procedure may be questionable. Certainly, it is not to be thought of that the governor of a maritime colony, having plenty of ships and troops at his disposal, can be coerced by mere starvation to do what the popular will dictates. He may be inconvenienced, and the troops may be made hostile to the country; but all that will not make it “impossible” to retain the Neptune in Simon’s Bay for a few months, or even years. Here she will assuredly stay, notwithstanding what they call the urgency of the case, till the English despatch comes in; therefore
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it may be that the course proposed by the “moderates” is the wiser course, to let matters go on quietly, in the meantime (content that felony is kept afloat) reserving extreme measures of resistance to meet the actual atrocity of landing the cargo, if this should be attempted.
I have a strong suspicion, however, that these “moderates” would still be moderate to the last, and that if the preservation of the Cape depended upon them, it would be a lost country.
When we came in here at first, the chief leader of the movement seemed to be a Mr. Ebden; but he has been backsliding into moderatism, and is superseded by a newspaper editor, named Fairbairn, a man of much ability and energy, and a most immoderate opponent of convicts. Ebden’s portrait, lately hung up in the public hall of meeting, has been thrown down and dishonoured. Artists are now engaged on a grand historic piece representing the public meeting of yesterday, with Mynheer Smuts in the chair, and Mr. Fairbairn in the act of moving the great resolution interdicting the governor from fire and water. There is talk of martial law; and, in fact, any moment of excitement now may give excuse for it. Capetown streets are always crowded; there are continual open-air meetings; and the smallest act of imprudence, on either side, might bring about a collision whose issue it would be hard to foresee.
The chances of a revolt are beginning to be much discussed. The Dutch, like every other nation that has ever had to do with the English Government, cordially hate the English Government; and are said to be perfectly willing, on any day, to proclaim the country independent, and take up arms to make good their words. The colonists of British descent also (except the small party of moderate slaves) are quite as determined in this business as their neighbours, and as disaffected too. On the other hand, the city of Capetown is absolutely commanded by the “Castle” and two small forts; besides, it could be blown to atoms by the ships of war in half a day. The interior country, however, is very strong, and to conquer it would need four times the force that the governor can command.
One result of the present movement seems likely to be a true national spirit: this common danger threatening their country, common risk and loss in repelling it, mutual help and counsel
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against one and the same treacherous foe — the very certificates, in Dutch and English, that carry travellers of either race through every valley, kloof, and plain, in the wide continent, opening all doors and all hearts to an enemy of Graaf Grey — these are the influences that have power to make an accidental aggregation of settlers become a national brotherhood instinct with the vital fire of liberty, and can transform the sons of English and of Dutch fathers into a self-dependent, high-spirited nation of South Africans. So be it! There will be one free nation the more.
I drink to-night, with enthusiasm, in red wine of Cape vines, the health of the future South African Republic.
I have procured from shore a dozen of very tolerable wine — for they do not seem to regard their pledge as applying to me — and am disgusted at their practice of selling their own red wine with a seal upon its cork bearing the legend “Port,” and their white as “Sherry.” And they actually manufacture and drug their grape-juice to make it resemble what the English drink for port and sherry in their own country. It is a mean, narrow-minded, and altogether British proceeding — the South Africans ought to have respect to the produce of their own vineyards, be it good, bad, or indifferent — and some of it is bad enough. At any rate, they ought to call it Cape wine, designating the kinds according to the district or vineyard that yields them. Has not Drakenstein as good a sound as Rudesheim? or Houtbaai as Côte d’Or? When the Republic is established, they must reform this altogether.
13th. — The blockade at Capetown has grown very strict. Three persons have been detected supplying things to the government secretly, and so turning a clandestine penny, to the prejudice of the common weal. Their names and crimes were instantly blazoned on the corners of all the streets — intercourse with them was suspended (opteschorten) — all commimications with them cut off (aftesnyden). One of them owned houses — all his tenants forthwith bundled up their effects, and fled as from plague-infected dwellings. Another attended a bullock sale, and bid for a lot — it was knocked down to him — he had the money in his hand to pay for it, when he was recognised as one of the traitors; the lot was forthwith put up again. The name of one
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of these unfortunate persons is Benjamin Norden, touching whom I extract an advertisement from the Zuid Afrikaan: —
Notice. — It is suspected that a person named Lery, or O’Leary, from George, is purchasing articles for Benjamin Norden. (Signed) Alexander Miller, 13 Heerengracht. 12th Oct., 1849.
The Cape newspapers, I observe, never mention my name: they cannot afford to let the public mind dwell upon the fact that there is anything on board the Neptune but a mass of incarnate burglary, thievery and corruption. They call us all “the unhappy men.”
It is now generally supposed, by the naval persons here, that the last anti-convict movement will at last compel the governor to suspend the Constitution (such as it is), and proclaim martial law — or rather put aside all law, and take what he wants as in a hostile territory. My own impression still is that he will be able to maintain the public establishments without that odious proceeding: besides, he has none of the usual excuses for such an outrage, because the people are quite peaceable, every man only exercising his undoubted right over his own shop or warehouse. Nevertheless, Sir Harry, having a garrison of three of four thousand men to feed, would be already in sad extremity but for one or two desperately loyal individuals who are coming to his relief. There is a certain Captain Stanford, who has a large estate in Swellendam, and he has placed 2,000 head of cattle, besides sheep without number, at the governor’s disposal: but soldiers have to butcher the meat, to bake the bread, to build ovens to bake it in, and to endure incessant volleys of civilian laughter all the while. There was, by chance, in Table Bay, a vessel called the Rosebud, laden with flour for Port Natal: the governor laid hands on it, paid the freight to Natal, and brought the flour on shore — but soldiers had to row the boats: the black boatmen would hold no intercourse.
All this while the commodore, who is our governor at Simonstown, and absolutely rules everything afloat, quietly provides store of sheep and bullocks by repeated raids. In the mornings I can count, through a glass, the tired brutes lying or grazing on a small patch of grass in front of his door.
18th. — Mr. Stewart, the “instructor,” went a few days ago to Capetown, and took up his lodgings in a hotel: he has just
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returned on board, having been obliged to walk half the way because when they recognised him at W3mberg he could get no horse or conveyance for hire: says he left the hotel voluntarily; but if he had stayed another night, would have been turned out. He went into a woollen draper’s shop, to purchase materials for a waistcoat; the cloth was folded and papered up for him, when someone came in who knew the convict-instructor: there was a whispering with the shopkeeper for a single instant, and then Mr. Stewart was informed that he could not be supplied. He asked, with high indignation, if their pledge required them “to deny clothing to a minister of the gospel to cover his nakedness?” This strong way of putting the case staggered the woollen draper, who had not considered the matter in that precise point of view: he said he would step over and consult Mr. Fairbairn (the newspaper editor aforesaid), and on coming back said positively the thing could not be done. Mr. Fairbairn sent word to Mr. Stewart that he might go to the governor for waistcoats. Sir Harry Smith, victor of Aliwal, was the man to supply the convict department.
Intelligence has arrived of the effects produced in remote places, Graaf Reynet, Grahamstown, etc., by the announcement that the accursed Neptune had actually cast anchor in Simon’s Bay. “Solemn fast” everywhere: windows hung with crape; bells funereally tolling: government officers placed under a complete interdict, until the bandits leave Simon’s Bay. Butchers and bakers say to them— “We deal not with the dead: you are no more (for the Neptune floats in Simon’s Bay) — and it is impossible that departed spirits should need bread or beef. We cannot take money from ghosts; therefore avaunt, in the name of God! — the convicts ride at anchor in Simon’s Bay.”
Almost all the justices of the peace throughout the country, who are paid officers of the government, are pouring in their resignations; and great numbers of persons called Field-cornets are doing the same. I do not well understand the office and duty of these Field-comets: but whoever they are, they cannot think of holding any sort of communication with Sir Harry Smith till the Neptune leaves the Bay.*
* Field-Cornet — Veldt-Cornet — is the Boer local registrar. In wartime it is part of his business to assemble the Commando — that is, the farmers of his official district — equipped for the campaign.
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There is a functionary named Montague, secretary to the governor; and a very great man of the kind. He is just now on an official tour through the interior; and though he has been accustomed to distinguished receptions at all the district capitals upon such occasions — local authorities turning out to meet him with trumpets, or such other instruments of noise as they have — now he can hardly get horses to hire, or lodgings to sleep in. Horses they will give him to return to Capetown, but none to proceed; and he reckons himself fortunate if he can borrow two chairs under a cattle-shed to spend the night, and dry bread enough to keep the life in him. To give him even so much, I regard as a culpable dereliction of principle.
The Apollo, a large troop-ship, is come into the bay, and is moored within a cable’s length of us. She is a frigate; carries four hundred men of the 59th regiment, and is bound for Hong Kong. Her arrival is chiefly important in that the splendid military band plays every morning and every evening, making the soft air thrill and tremble with delightful melody of march or waltz.
Her arrival, however, said to be regarded by the governor as important in another point of view; he may need the soldiers to quell a rebellion, and he may need the ship, to send her to St. Helena or Rio for provisions. So she is to remain here a few weeks, with her band.
19th. — The shops of Capetown are still shut up; but I gather from the papers, that the natural effects of a stoppage of business have begun to be felt severely — small tradesmen, journeymen, porters, all, in short, who depend on their daily wages, are suffering: a few days ago the coolies went to the governor in a body three hundred strong to demand work and food; the governor, it seems, sent them to Mr. Fairbairn, Mr. Fairbairn bade them go to Benjamin Norden, Benjamin Norden sent them to Mr. Sutherland. Now this is not the way to feed capons, much less coolies; and I fear if the struggle last long the labouring classes will tire of it altogether: they will think anti-convictism is good, but daily bread is better: shopkeepers, too, unless rich, must soon give way, for rent and taxes cannot be paid out of closed shops. All this is unfortunate; and I am truly sorry for the colonists — the violent demonstrations they have already
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made may provoke the Downing Street ruffians to persist in swamping the country with felons, just because it is too weak and too poor to resist them effectually — mean, cruel, and treacherous tyrants!
Mob-work has fairly begun. Mr. Norden was attacked by a violent mob in the streets, and his house was afterwards beset and the windows broken. He fired on them, but nobody was wounded. The very same evening a number of Malays fell upon Mr. Fairbairn at his house at Greenpoint, beat him, and destroyed a good deal of furniture. The persons who committed this last outrage were evidently employed by government people, for those of them who have been identified turn out to be officers’ servants. The governor avails himself of these riots to begin coercion: he has just issued a proclamation forbidding assemblies in the streets “under pretence” of discussing political questions (as if the public interest in the matter were all a pretence) and intimating that the police have orders to disperse all such assemblies. This is his first step — the next may probably be to prosecute Mr. Fairbairn and other newspaper editors, and suppress their papers: such is the way of governments. If Sir Harry Smith, now, would order his Attorney-General to indict the worthy Fairbairn for sedition before a prudently selected jury, composed of his own creatures and dependents, with the gunner’s mate of the Castor as foreman, I imagine Fairbairn would soon be a convict instead of an anti-convict. But I do not believe Old Sir Harry would condescend to this species of ruffianism. He is a downright soldier, and no “Ameliorative Viceroy.”
I fear, I fear the colony is not strong enough to resist coercion, and to scourge this British redcoat into the sea. The whole Cape population, white, black, and brown, scattered over a vast territory, is under 200,000 — and they are not able to reproduce the grand drama of Boston, Saratoga, and Yorktown, just yet. And their cause is more righteous — the outrage sought to be put upon them a thousand times more grievous. But justice and right do not always prevail in this world, nor often. “That which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.”
23rd. — I have just learned that the Cape convict question is about to be still more complicated. One of Lord Grey’s de-
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spatches to the governor mentions that the “Government” were about to send out to the Cape the wives and families of the Neptune convicts. In fact, when the list of recommended prisoners was made out at Bermuda for transmission to England, two or three months before the Neptune came to Bermuda, each man was asked whether he was married, in what parish and county his wife and family resided, and whether he wished them to be brought out to him at the Cape, “Government” paying half the expense. The married men all availed themselves, I was told, of this offer: the names and residences of their wives, etc., have been in Lord Grey’s hands now more than half a year; and it is quite possible that these poor helpless women and children are even now at sea, on their way to this hospitable clime. The inhabitants of the Cape are now looking out for their arrival by every fair wind that blows into Table Bay. What kind of reception awaits the poor souls, the following extract from the proceedings of the anti-convict people indicates: —
ANTI-CONVICT ASSOCIATION.
The report of the Simon’s Bay Committee having been read — it was unanimously
Resolved — That Messrs. Hablutzel & Hugo, Butchers, at Simon’s Bay, have broken the Pledge.
Moved by H. Sherman, Esq., seconded by P. Law, Esq.,
That this meeting being of opinion that the intention of Earl Grey to send to this colony the wives (or reputed wives) and families of convicts as referred to in his despatch to the governor of this colony, dated 18th July, 1849, would be highly injurious to the interests and moral welfare of the community. Resolved, that they will not under any circumstances knowingly employ, admit into their houses, or establishments, work with, or for, or associate with any of the afore-mentioned wives and families of convicts, and that they will drop connexion with any person who may give them employment.
Carried unanimously.
A resolution was proposed by Mr. Fairbairn, the consideration of which was ordered to b :t postponed — till a special meeting, to be held on Thursday at 10 o’clock.
(Signed) J. J. L. Smuts, Chairman.
And the stupid rogues in Downing Street, who work all this woe and ruin, still call themselves the “Government,” and do not, and will not, go and hang themselves.
CHAPTER XIII
Oct. 26, 1849. — Still on board the Neptune, Simon’s Bay. A ship has arrived from England, but does not carry our destiny. Two weekly newspapers. News from Europe up to the nth August. The Hungarians are still beating both Austrians and Russians in gallant style. It has begun to be highly probable that Hungary will be a free and potent nation. Whereupon the English newspapers have discovered that Hungary really was a nation, and had a right to assert her nationhood. Lord Palmerston, too, in Parliament, declares that the hearts of the people of England — bless their hearts! — are enlisted on the side of the Hungarians, if that be any comfort. Bern and Gorgey have brought matters so far. Lord Palmerston being asked why Britain should content herself with expressing an opinion against Russian intervention in Hungary — why not take arms? — answers, in the enthusiastic cant which now prevails, “That opinion is stronger than arms.” It is enough to make the Russian bear laugh.
British opinion, however, seems to be little regarded on the Continent. The levy of enlisted “hearts” is not reckoned a very formidable contingent. Clubs are trumps there, and hearts do not count.
This delightful spirit of peace which now rules British councils must be very satisfactory to the Sikhs and to the Irish. British reverence for “opinion,” also, is surely most comfortable in Ireland, where all anti-British opinion must be suppressed, and those who utter it imprisoned or transported.
I find a paragraph copied from the Globe, stating that Mr. Duffy, being now at large, and safe from any further trial on his present indictment, has advertised a new series of the Nation, to be shortly commenced; but the Globe adds, that the “Government” (the same fellows who so profoundly revere opinion — their own opinion) have refused to issue stamps for it. A law has been found, too — a most convenient law — whereby no newspaper in
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Ireland may publish anything at all, save by favour and Sufferance of the “Government” — or transmit a single number, even stamped, through the post-office, save by the courtesy of the postmaster-general, that is, of the same “Government.”
One is at first inclined to say, that the people of England are looking stupidly on at all these late proceedings in Ireland — blind to the danger that menaces their own liberties. But not so; every Englishman feels that by this tyranny over press and people in Ireland, British supremacy is the thing that is asserted. They know that it means simply “the Red above the Green.” They never dream of Irish government maxims being applied, or applicable to England; and they are right.
In this particular case of the Nation, however, if Lord Clarendon do indeed refuse stamps, it will be a gross blunder. He ought to allow Duffy to publish, for the new series will be perfectly constitutional, safe, and legal — cannot be otherwise after the evidence Mr. Duffy produced on his trial to prove his moral-force character; indeed, it will be such a newspaper, as, if not published by Duffy, Lord Clarendon ought to pay somebody to publish — taking care, also, to give it the very name, “The Nation.”
Oh, patient! patient public! A new series of the Nation, by Duffy — and after the scenes of the last few months. I know no parallel to this, except the “young spodizator,” whom Dr. Rabelais saw with his own eyes, earning his livelihood in a somewhat peculiar manner — namely, very artificially drawing [Gk. word] out of a dead ass, and retailing them at fivepence per yard.
Queen in Ireland. — This year her Majesty’s advisers deemed the coast clear for the royal yacht. Plenty of blazing, vociferous excitement, called “loyalty.” Loyalty, you are to know, consists in a willingness to come out into the street to see a pageant pass. Besides, the visit was most happily timed; the “additional powers” would not expire for a month yet. Habeas Corpus still in suspension; jails still yawning for seditious persons; Lord Clarendon still wielding his lettres de cachet. No happier combination of circumstances could be imagined; so her Gracious Majesty has come and enthroned herself in the hearts of her Irish subjects; and the newspapers are to say (at their peril) that a brighter day is just going to dawn for Ireland.
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Mr. Tim O’Brien does the honours of the city of Dublin to the British sovereign; presents her with the keys of the “gate” — a gate somewhere between Irishtown and the end of Lower Baggot Street, where was no city gate in my time. And Mr. Tim O’Brien is made, or to be made, a baronet. Now, it is certainly the sheriff of last year rather, who ought to have been so honoured. No gentleman in Ireland deserves reward from the Queen of England more richly than last year’s sheriff. If the intercession of so humble a convict as myself would have any weight with her Majesty, I should venture to recommend Mr. French (that is the individual’s name, I believe) for something handsome. And if my fellow-felons, Messrs. Martin and O’Doherty, were not so far off, I feel sure they also would be happy to add their testimony in his favour.
N. B. — The newspaper I have seen says the Queen met with nothing but loyalty; and that “Young Ireland was nowhere to be seen.” And the Times asks triumphantly, “Where were the vitriol bottles?” as if anybody had proposed to sprinkle the Queen with vitriol.
N. B. (2) — Her Majesty wore, at Cork, a “green silk visite”; also, carried a parasol of purple silk (perhaps vitriol proof). Her Majesty first touched Irish soil at the Cove of Cork, which is henceforth Queenstown. Her Majesty did not visit Spike Island.
N. B. (3) — Her Majesty, on board her yacht in Kingstown harbour, took her children by the hand, and “introduced them (in dumb show) to the Irish people,” in a very touching manner.
N. B. (4) — Synod of lilster had a deputation of their paid preachers to meet her Majesty in Dublin. Oh! where were the Remonstrant Synod? Do they apprehend no danger to their little donum?
N. B. (5) — Her Majesty did not visit Skibbereen, Westport, or Schull; neither did she “drop in” (as sometimes in Scotland) to dine with any of the peasantry, on their “homely fare.” After a few years, however, it is understood that Her Majesty will visit the West. The human inhabitants are expected by that time to have been sufficiently thinned, and the deer and other game to have proportionately multiplied. The Prince Albert will then take a hunting lodge in Connemara.
* * * * * * *
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But Ireland, as I see by these same papers, has had a far more royal visitor. Carlyle has been there again, in company with a gentleman named Forster. I have no doubt that he will be delivered of a book on the subject of Ireland soon. Unless I much mistake his symptoms, he was going on with such a book eighteen months ago. There will be a curious book!* I trust that I may be in some part of the world whither its winged words will find their way; for, indeed, Thomas Carlyle is the only man in these latter days who produces what can properly be termed books.
* It has not come to light yet; and one is even inclined to hope that it may have miscarried. Carlyle cannot write rationally about Ireland; and he believes that Carthage has a mission to conquer the world. Bothwell, 1st January, 1852 [205]
Meantime enter a basket, with superb clusters of grapes — African grapes: smooth and round, with a glow of opaline light in the heart of them — clusters that might seduce Erigone.
1850 — Jan. 1st. — Still riding at anchor in this weary Simon’s Bay. There is no change whatever since I made my last memorandum — more than two months ago; and how much longer we may have to stay, nobody can guess. About three weeks since arrived to the governor a despatch from Earl Grey, simply acknowledging the receipt of his alarming and objurgatory despatches of August last, and adding that he will send a final order for the further disposal of the prisoners on board the Neptune, “after he shall have heard of the arrival of that ship at the Cape” — that is to say, after the prisoners shall have been five months or so in a close unwholesome prison here, recruiting after their five months’ voyage. There is something very cool in this. The colonists are nearly frantic; they made sure that, in reply to Sir Harry Smith’s August despatches, would come an order to take the Neptune away; and are now mortally afraid that when the extreme measures of the ultra-party (denying victuals to the army, etc), shall come to be known in England, ministers will think themselves bound, for the dignity of the Empire and the United Service, and all that, to coerce the Cape into receiving this one shipload at least. A new feature in public opinion here is, that it now pretends to commiserate the poor convicts, so long detained in custody by Lord Grey’s cruel delay. If Sir Harry Smith, now, had but complied with the urgent demand of these philanthropists
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three months ago, and sent the Neptune to cruise between this and the South Pole, the poor convicts would have seen the end of their sorrows long since: and the Neptune, cruising there, in secula seculorum, would have been a new Flying Dutchman to the mariners of the south.
Hungary is down — Venice, Rome, Baden, all down, and the Kings and Grand Dukes are everywhere rampant — for the present. In their very rampant folly and fury, lies hope for the future. Parma — even Parma, forbids people to meet “under pretence,” of casinos, circles and the like. The Austrians are hanging and shooting general officers, and scourging noble ladies on the bare back. Kossuth, the immortal governor, and Bem, the fine old general, refugees in Turkey. Other Hungarians and Poles flying to the United States. Justice and right everywhere buried in blood. Has the people’s blood then been shed utterly in vain? By God, no! The blood of men fighting for freedom is never shed in vain — the earth will not cover it — from the ground it cries aloud, and the avenger knoweth his day and his hour. Hungary is henceforth and for ever a great nation — how much greater now than before her bloody agony! how much grander her history! how much richer her treasure of heroic memories! how much surer and higher her destiny! It is through this bloody travail and by virtue of this baptism of fire, and only so, that nations ever spring forth, great, generous and free. If Ireland, in ’82, instead of winning her independence from the coward foe by the mere flash of unbloody swords, had, like America, waded through carnage to her freedom, like America she had been free this day. A disastrous war even, had been better than a triumphant parade. Indeed, those lines of Byron are profoundly true and noble: —
“For Freedom’s battle once begun,
Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son
Though baffled oft, is ever won.”
Ah! then. Freedom, once it is fairly and dearly won, is no commodity for trading politicians to sell, as the high-minded chivalry of Ireland sold and delivered our ‘82 simulacrum of liberty.
In the meantime it is amusing to the mind to see the self-complacency of all literary organs of “Order,” as they call this chained quiescence.
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In India, the enemy’s government are preparing for the invasion of Cashmere, no doubt to establish order there. Gholab Singh holds Cashmere, and has a fine army and 150 pieces of cannon.
But England in Asia and England in Europe, are two very different things. In Europe, that truly civilised and Christian nation is only offering her opinion; and it gives me sincere pleasure to remark how cordially that is contemned on all sides, and how the nations are beginning to perceive that the old cannot afford to fight. The London newspapers praise everything that succeeds: they patted Hungary on the back for a month or two, but now congratulate Austria most warmly, and the Times recommends to the Emperor England’s dealings towards Ireland, as an example for his future administration of Hungarian affairs. By the same rule they ridiculed the French excessively at first for their attack upon Rome; but now find that, after all, the cause of the French was the cause of “Order,” and that, therefore, it is all right. The anxiety they show to keep on good terms with France, especially, is highly diverting to the benevolent mind which remembers the superhuman friendship between France and England about the breaking out of the great Revolution. What is highly satisfactory is that Europe is clearly beginning to understand all this British cant about “Peace” and “Order,” to know that it means simply credit-funds, and the commercial status quo. And Europe will act accordingly. The events of last year have brought the prestige of Britain immeasurably and irremediably down. This is good.
Have been reading the Quarterly Review on Lyell’s tour in North America. The Quarterly rejoices, quite generously, in American Art, and “Progress,” and so forth — but is mainly solicitous that the Americans should — for their own sake, of course — stay at peace. “For,” says the generous reviewer, “As the future of America, to be a glorious future, must be a future of peace, so we would hope that it may be fruitful in all which embellishes and occupies and glorifies peace.” — Most balmy language! but was it in peace, then, that Athens or Corinth grew great in art? Was it in times of peace that Holland, from a community of clodhoppers, sprang up into a high-spirited and noble nation, renowned in art and in all which embellishes and hallows, et cetera? Was the age of Louis Fourteenth an age of peace to France!
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When the Italian cities were becoming the chosen home of Learning, Freedom, Commerce (honest Commerce), Art, and Glory — was there peace in the land in those days? As for America herself, what made America? Was it peace? In short, everybody in America as well as everybody in Europe must by this time understand thoroughly the British peace-cant.
* * * * *
I have seen extracts from the new Nation. Mr. Duffy can hardly find words for his disgust, his contempt, “his utter loathing” of those who will say now that Ireland can win her rights by force. I thought so. The Times praises the new Nation, and calls its first article “a symptom of returning sense in Ireland.”
The Ballingarry folly, this Nation calls “an utterly unsuccessful revolution.” Young Ireland calls upon his countrymen to accept the defeat of Ballingarry. Ireland’s strength, he thinks, was tested at Ballingarry. If the country (says Young Ireland) could have been saved by human prowess, hâc dextrâ fuisset, at Ballingarry. Therefore, Mr. Duffy is for the system of Irishmen growing individually independent, energetic, and truthful men (under British rule) — and then when they shall feel, after stem self-examination, that they are fit to manage their own affairs, then dissolve the Union with England. Thus blasphemes this traitor: thus snivels, rather, this most pitiable sinner.
The Cork Southern Reporter echoes the new Nation, and even tries to go beyond it in treason. Mr. Barry quarrels with Mr. Duffy for keeping the independence of Ireland before men’s eyes even as an ultimate and far-distant object; he is for “putting it in abeyance,” that is, dropping it altogether. Mr. Barry, therefore, is stupid and cowardly, but not half so dishonest as Mr. Duffy. These poor creatures will soon have few readers among the country people. *
One number of the Irishman has come to my hands: it is published at No. 4 D’Olier Street, and by Fulham; and the editor is
* I have seen reason to believe that I did injustice to Mr. Barry in the above. I find that Mr. Barry, after the signal failure to make so much as an insurrection (to say nothing of a revolution) in ’48, openly, frankly, and without any arrière pensée, gave up the cause of Ireland as a distinct nationality, accepted the provincial destiny, and concluded that Ireland must make the best of that. In freely avowing this change of sentiment he was at least not “cowardly” — whether stupid or not will appear hereafter.
-J. M. [1854].
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Joseph Brennan. This appears to be the true representative of the old Nation; but they have not a proper staff of competent writers for it. The Irishman professes to preach the doctrines of me, J. M. If I am their prophet and guide, I am like to lead my votaries and catechumens on a cruise to the Southern Ocean — [Gk. phrase]] Yet, I know not. Mr. Fulham is a man of business; possibly they calculate on the jury-packing system being blown and broken down; and if they be right in that calculation, they have the game in their hands. I would they had two or three dashing writers!
Last July, the “Government” got up a very horrid massacre in the County Down. There was a great Orange procession of armed men: they marched with banners displayed, through a district chiefly inhabited by Catholics; and there, at Dolly’s Brae, between Castlewellan and Banbridge, a collision took place, of course: a large force of police and military was present, and they took part, also, of course, with the Orangemen: five or six Catholics were killed, five or six of their houses burned; only one Orangemen or two seriously hurt — and the procession went on its way in triumph. Lord Roden, it appears, had feasted the Orangemen at Bryansford, and excited them with “loyal” toasts; and afterwards, when informations were sought against the Orange rioters at the hands of the said Lord Roden, presiding at a bench of magistrates, he very properly refused. Very properly, for there is no law in Ireland now. I know no reason why Orangemen should not burn Papists’ houses now.
However, this demonstration went somewhat beyond the Government intention — or they pretend that it did; and they take Lord Roden to task. Lord Roden justly feels this to be a piece of treachery as well as insolence — reminds the government that they wanted a loyal demonstration in Ulster this year. Well, this is a loyal demonstration. What would they have? Government, however, feels constrained, by virtuous public opinion, to dismiss Lord Roden and two other rampant Orangemen from the Commission of the Peace. *
In the South, there is a universal feeling this winter that the
* It was proved, however, on the investigation into this case, that the Government had sent a supply of arms shortly before to Belfast, out of Dublin Castle, for distribution amongst the Orange Lodges. — J. M.
[Plate:] John Martin (1848); John Martin (1865)
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persons who raise corn ought to provide for their own sustenance before any other charge, even rent: it is called a horrid conspiracy in the newspapers: the country people meet by night in armed parties, and carry off grain, etc., to places of safety, leaving the bailiffs and poor-rate collectors to mourn over empty haggards. They also beat off, or shoot, or stab the police, when those functionaries interfere. All this also is quite right. The people know now that there is no law in Ireland, no property, no rights: they are in a state of nature, and they know it at last. Any other nation in Europe, under similar circumstances, would have recognised that fact three years ago.
Jan. 13th. — It blew a hard gale from the S. E. last night: this morning a strange ship, with only one mast standing, was seen deeply bedded in the sands here in Simon’s Bay. She had been driven in during the night. Turns out to be a slaver, captured in the Mozambique channel, and sent here under charge of a naval officer. She will be allowed to go to pieces where she lies, and her materials will be sold.
This is surely the stormiest coast in the world — the wind at this season almost constantly from the S. E., and once in ten days there is always a furious storm. During calms the weather is very hot now: I trust I am not to spend another Christmas in light clothes, panting under an awning. I wish the southern hemisphere well, but shall not take up my abode here if I can help it. I respect the Southern Cross, but pray that my own destiny may be cast under Arcturus and his suns. All the traditions and associations of times and seasons are reversed and confounded here: think of May morning falling at Hallowmas! — and instead of burning a yule-log, wooing thorough draughts and hiding from the flagrant sun at Christmas! What becomes of St. Swithin and his showers? Of Candlemas and its ice?
Si Sol splendescat Maria purificante
Major erit glacies post festum quam fuit ante.
What a wrong-sided view of Christianity you get in these parts! Why, the apple-trees are in blossom at Halloweve, and on St. John’s Day men wear thick greatcoats in the house.
Besides, there is no action, no living, properly to speak, in a country so remote from all the great centres of this world’s
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business: whatever is done here can only be said to be inchoate, provisional, and not a perfect act, until news of it go to England, and an answer return. You address yourself to the public opinion of your countrymen through the newspapers, and for three months your eloquent remarks lie frozen, or if not frozen, at least sodden, in the “region of calms,” and the sultry trade winds — it is all the same — your countrymen do not hear a word you say until the whole affair is months old, and when the result of your appeal comes to hand, perhaps you are dead. You are three months in arrear of events, and will never come up with them — panting steam toils after them in vain. Heavens! while I sit scribbling here, there may be a European campaign half ought out — the credit funds may be burst — Changamier or Oudinot may be in Buckingham Palace — Tipperary may be — In short — in short — it will never do, wasting time here, pretending to be alive on what Milton calls the backside of the world. If I am put ashore within the Colony, under whatsoever vigilance of custody, it will go hard, but I will revisit the glimpses of the moon. But be still, O my soul!
The agitation and excitement here still continue as violent as the newspapers and Anti-Convict Association can contrive to make them; but with all they can do there is evidently an abatement from the original fervour of anti-convict rage, though none whatever in the universal determination to adhere to the pledge, in its strictest letter, if Graaf Grey should ultimately order the convicts to be landed. Meanwhile we all await the Downing Street doom, and I, at least, with perfect equanimity and good humour. It was on the 12th of October (three months ago yesterday), that the Eurydice frigate sailed out of this Bay bearing intelligence which was expected to elicit Lord Grey’s final despatch; and it is therefore possible that the mystic packet of red-tape destiny is now off Madeira, or Ascension, or beating to windward near the coast of Brazil, or scudding to leeward under close-reefed topsails in the latitude of Tristan d’Acunha. Or the ship may have gone down with the red-tape in her — or the Eurydice herself may have been lost on her way home. Ah! miseram Eurydicem! Or the Ministry may have gone out, and the new Colonial Secretary will know nothing about it — must have a correspondence with the Cape before be can decide anything; a few half years, more or
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less, will make little difference to a crew of convicts. Did ever human destiny hang before on so precarious a tape?
As to the place we are likely to be sent to, if not landed here, conjectures are numerous and wild. The favourite guess now seems to be that the Neptune is to make a beginning of a new penal colony in New Guinea, among the Papua cannibals. At the Cape, or at New Guinea, our reception promises to be equally hospitable — here the people would give us nothing to eat — there they would feed us indeed, but only to fatten us for their own tables. These are cheering speculations.
I have omitted to make a regular record of the “anti-convict movements”; for, in fact, there is so much sameness in them that I tire of reading the papers. The symptoms of a chronic disorder, being the same every morning, would not be interesting to read of. But from yesterday’s Commercial Advertiser I will copy two letters, the reading of which, and consultation thereupon, formed part of the business of the Association at its last meeting: —
“Sir, — About the month of October last I sent three waggons of mine, with sheaves, to the town-market. On their arrival there a young man of colour came and offered my children a reasonable price (without mentioning what it was for); but when the bargain was closed, he would show where the waggons were to be unloaded. The waggons were subsequently brought by that lad to New Street, behind the residence of Adrian Beck; and when they were unloaded, Adrian Beck made his appearance, and paid for the sheaves. My children have, consequently, sinned innocently, because, as the bargain had been already concluded, and the best part of the sheaves delivered, they had no alternative. But this had, however, the effect that my children were placed under the pledge, as also myself, with a wife and young children. This has gone to the extent that no one will buy from, or sell to them or me. And moreover, I have in consequence been summoned by one of my creditors, who, but for this occurrence, would not have done so. I therefore beg leave to pray you, as chairman of the Anti-Convict Association, to bring my case before your meeting, and kindly to decide in my behalf, in order to prevent my total ruin. Expecting a favourable answer, I remain, etc.,
Wentzel Pieter Laubscher
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Poor Laubscher lives in the district of Stellenbosch; and the Association have simply referred him and his complaint to the local authorities, that is to the Stellenbosch Branch Association. The truth is, Mynheer Laubscher’s account of himself is not satisfactory: he was bound, or his innocently sinful children were bound, to be sure they were not selling their sheaves to a traitor; and Adrian Beck is a well-known supplier of convicts and government: I know his name as the name of a “bad member” months ago; and while I eat his bread and beef I denounce him as a traitor.
The other letter is from Hendrick Johannes Morkel: —
Sir, — It is with great reluctance that I again trouble you, but circumstances render it unavoidable. You are aware, sir, that for an alleged violation of the pledge all intercourse was dropped with me by the public. When I perceived it, immediate steps were taken by me to disprove the charges thus falsely laid against me, and satisfy the public mind that I was perfectly innocent of what I was accused of. I applied to the Anti-Convict Association of Hottentots Holland for the privilege of having my case inquired into; and, if found innocent, to be restored to public favour. This, my application, has been entirely disregarded; and I find that I can no longer endure the pain of public contempt, whilst I sincerely regret any proceeding of mine which may have been construed into an act of disrespect for the opinion of the public; and being desirous of granting all my influence and support to the Anti-Convict Association, in order to aid the people in accomplishing this grand object, I beg to request that the A. -C. Association of Capetown, as the parent of all the other Associations, will cause the necessary inquiries to be made into my case, and to see justice done to one of its true members.
“I have, etc.,
“H. J. Morkel. ”
With this letter came a certificate, signed by the delinquent’s father, solemnly declaring that the “sheep were sold” under a mistake. — Referred, as before, to the local association.
See how “public contempt “brings this fellow to his knees! He is ready to sink into the earth at the imputation of so
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shameful a crime as being loyal to Downing Street and traitor to the Cape.
Thus public opinion with a high hand rules the Cape. How, in the meantime, the governor and commodore get their supplies I know not; but so it is, they eat and live. And as for the convicts, I wish the unconvicted Irish could keep half so good a table.
CHAPTER XIV
January 20th, 1850 — On board the “Neptune,” Simon’s Bay. — Matters go on as before. The colonists await the Downing Street award: and so do I. But there is feverish impatience and expectancy ashore; and no wonder. What a terrible new element convictism will be to this colony if the red-tape rascals succeed in forcing it on! But the people seem to be girding themselves up to prepare for the worst — providing door-bolts and locks, also rifles and ammimition, with commendable diligence. A good clergyman of Simonstown — why should I not name the worthy fellow? — Mr. Judge, who comes to see me sometimes, has assured me that the inhabitants of the country, even in the neighbourhood of Capetown, seldom secure their houses at night by barring the door or otherwise: and when he speaks of the bare possibility of these three hundred choice miscreants, who have graduated in burglary and thievery in the finest schools on earth, being let loose among his parishioners, tears of indignation and apprehension stand in his eyes. I trust the evil day may be averted.
Feb. 8th. — No despatch yet; and we have been rocking here in Simon’s Bay, “wearing the ring of our anchor,” as the captain says, nearly five months. Oh! thou despatch of heaven, rise upon our darkness like a star! let thy red-tape dawn upon us out of the northern wave? I am tired of the Cape: for the vintage season is long past; and I can no longer have my usual breakfast of grapes and coffee.
A few days ago there was an alarm — a large black-hulled steamship, like a man-of-war, appeared rounding the southwestern point of False Bay. I thought I recognised the Scourge, the very pirate craft that carried me to Bermuda, two years ago. Our despatch at last, thought everyone. The captain of the Neptune, the “surgeon-superintendent,” the naval people on shore, all made sure that suspense would be at an end in half an hour. Signal flags carry the news flying over the mountains and Constantia vineyards, to Capetown. Now, ye anti-convict
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leaders, what if the crisis is upon you? what if Lord Grey have sent out positive orders to land the bandits, and an additional regiment of soldiers to look on? How beats the general pulse at the Town Hall this morning? Turns the cheek of Fairbairn pale or red? I could almost wish to see the issue tried.
But the ship turns out to be the Hindostan, a Red Sea steamer, returning from London, where she has been newly refitted. And she brings no despatches.
Sir Harry Smith has not issued his government paper-money — if he did, I believe nobody would take it at any price. Never was a nominal government before brought to such a state of contempt. One thing is said to gall the fine old soldier terribly; the colonists had a project lately of erecting at Capetown a marble statue of the hero of Aliwal, the Pacificator of the Caffir frontier; and subscriptions were opened for it in all districts. The contributors are now everywhere changing the destination of the money, and transferring it from the statue fund to the Anti-Convict Association. The man who would not send the Neptune straight to sea again, the very moment of her arrival, shall have no statue in South Africa. But nothing has so perfectly convinced me of the impotence of the government, and omnipotence of people, as certain legal proceedings that have lately taken place.
A Mr. Letterstedt brought an action of damages against Fairbairn and others, members of the A. -C. Association, for having published his name and pointed him out for public vengeance, and so injured him in his business: he claimed £5,000. The Attorney-General, Mr. Porter (an Irish lawyer and very able man) was his leading counsel. The case excited intense interest, as so many other cases must stand or fall with it. But when it came on for hearing before the three judges of the Supreme Court (in civil cases there are no juries), the defendants declined the jurisdiction of the court, on the ground that two of the three judges had already prejudged the case, because they had given their opinion to the government that it would be illegal for him to send away the “Neptune “by his own authority. So preposterous a ground of declinature never was heard of in any court; and so the Attorney-General clearly proved; and so it was ruled by the majority of the judges, that is by the two who were excepted
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against; whereupon the third, one Musgrave, Said he was not satisfied, and that he would not sit with the other two to try the case. And now comes the best part of the story: Mr. Musgrave having retired, the other two were to proceed with the trial, and appointed a day. On the day appointed, the defendants withdrew their plea — they would make no defence — would not, even by their presence, countenance any judicial proceedings of government judges, convict judges, judges who found law against sending the Neptune away — they would just let these evil bandit judges decide as they pleased, and would carry the whole affair before the Queen in Council — then the Attorney-General was to proceed ex-parte, making no doubt of heavy damages for his client. Another adjournment of the court took place, and on the next morning, Mr. Attorney comes into court with a long countenance — announces that his client, Mr. Letterstedt, will not proceed with his action. Neither plaintiff nor defendants, on maturely considering the matter, will hold any communications with Sir Harry Smith’s judges — who had dreamed of law against sending away the Neptune.
In other words, the case was removed from the Supreme Court to the new Super-Supreme Court of Public Opinion, by certiorari. The Anti-Convict Association is now the Court of First Instance and of Last Resort in South Africa.
* * * * *
I have been very ill again for the last two months — the same damnable asthma: nearly as bad as at Bermuda, but not quite. It is the close imprisonment, I think, and the suspense, and want of exciting occupation, that give the foul fiend such power over me.
Feb. 10th. — The Cape papers give extracts from Van Diemen’s Land papers, by which I find that O’Brien, Meagher, O’Donoghue, and MacManus, in the Swift, and Martin and O’Doherty in the Elphinstone, all arrived at Hobart Town about the same time — that they have been allowed to live at large, but each within a limited district, and no two of them nearer than thirty or forty miles. Even to be admitted to thus much liberty, each was required to promise that he would not make use of it to effect his escape. O’Brien refuses to give this promise, and is, therefore, sent to a small island off the coast, named Maria Island, which is appropri-
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ated to the most desperate convicts. It is not easy to understand the object of so carefully separating the prisoners, and planting each by himself in the midst of a felonious population, unless it be, by depriving them of one another’s society, to force them into association with such miscreants as they are likely to meet, that so they may become at last the felons their enemies call them. Or, possibly, it is done with a view to more easily reducing them singly to submission. “Government,” of course, would like to bring us all to our knees, and present us in the attitude of begging pardon. And if these men were allowed to live together, they might support one another’s spirits, and speak disaffected words, and possibly even hatch seditious schemes for future practice. Now, it is hoped that, surrounded by strangers, never hearing or seeing anything to remind them of their cause and comrades, and almost forgetting the sound of their own voices, they may grow weary of their lives, their spirit may bow or break, and they may crawl to the foot of her Gracious Majesty’s throne. My Lords Grey and Russell and Clarendon we will try conclusions with you in this matter.
But the lot of these men is hard and cruel: and I now expect that it will be my lot also. Whatever “Her Majesty’s Government” may do with these poor Neptune convicts, my destiny, I feel assured, will be an allocation in some remote Van Diemen’s Land police district — to live there alone, as best I may, breathing the miasma of that most hideous den, that so I may cease to do evil and learn to do well.*
Feb. 13th. — I knew it. Lord Grey’s despatches have arrived, captain of the flag-ship came on board here to-day, accompanied by some naval officers. He took his stand on the quarter-deck at the capstan; and the prisoners were ordered up from below to hear their fate. I was walking on the poop, and stopped at the rail a few minutes looking down at the scene. The men poured aft as far as the gangway in gloomy masses, some scowling black, some pale as death; and when Captain Bance unfolded his papers the burliest burglar held his breath for a time. Neptune to proceed forthwith to Van Diemen’s Land; on arrival there prisoners to receive (in compensa-
* “Cease to do Evil — Learn to do Well” was the inscription set above Richmond Prison, Dublin wherein O’Connell and the Traversers, and, later, some of the Young Irelanders were confined. — Ed.
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tion for the hardships of their long voyage and detention) her Gracious Majesty’s “conditional pardon” — except “the prisoner Mitchel,” whose case. Lord Grey says, being entirely different from all the others, is reserved for separate consideration, but special instructions respecting it are to be forwarded to the governor of Van Diemen’s Land. When the reader came to the exception of “the prisoner Mitchel,” he raised his voice, and spoke with impressive solemnity. In a moment all eyes, of officers, sailors, prisoners, soldiers, were fastened on my face; if they read anything but scorn, then my face belied my heart.
So it runs — I am to spend certain years, then, among the gumtrees in grim solitude — utter solitude, for I cannot bear to think of bringing out my poor wife to those regions of outer darkness, or rearing up my boys in that island of the unblessed: I will be lonely, with a solitude that Zimmermann never dreamed of, lonelier than “a corpse within its shroud” — for I must make to myself, as it were, a shell to walk in, and present porcupine quills on all sides to the beings in human shape who will there flit around me — for that is a land where men are transfonured into brutes — “let a man be what he will when he goes there, a man’s heart is taken away from him, and there is given to him the heart of a beast.” And of the whole population of V. D. Land, more than three-fourths are convicts, or emancipated convicts, or the children of convicts, begotten in felony, and brought up in the feeling that their hand must be against every man, as every man’s hand is against them. Oh! I descend into the realms of Dis — my ears hear already the rushing of Cocytus flood, and the waiting of damned spirits thereon. Be strong now, and be calm and humble withal, O my soul! Let what tincture of philosophy soever I have drawn in my eclectic method from Porch, from Garden, from Grove, yea, from Mount of Olives, too, let all stand by me now. Let me provide the charm of mild words and demeanour, a demulcent sop for the three-headed dog; but towards the great enemy — the grand government necromancer, who keeps those gardens of hell, let my face be as marble, my heart as adamant. So may Almighty God preserve me in my human shape, and when my infernal pilgrimage is done, lead me forth again to upper air through the Gate of Horn.
But this is mythology — in plain English, I will root myself
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somehow in the earth, and daily dig and delve there, holding as little intercourse as possible with the people around me, but showing no pride or ill-will to them — only to the “Government,” and so pass through this ordeal as quietly and gallantly as I may.
15th. — I have seen some English papers: this Cape affair has caused wonderful excitement and indignation: a horrid insult has been offered to the supreme Majesty of England — not to speak of the savage inhumanity of refusing victuals to the public services, and to the poor sea-beaten convicts. England does not, of course, charge herself with all this; yet she, or her Government, is the only party guilty of inhumanity, and of treachery (which is worse), in attempting to run such a cargo as this: all the consequences resulted necessarily from that villainy. And the colonists are not only justified in refusing provisions to the servants and soldiers of such a government, but would been have justified in cutting all their throats.
I can find in these papers hardly anything relating to Ireland. Ireland, I do fear, is too quiet. The “Government” papers speak of that country now as a piece of absolute property that has fallen into them, and as to which they have only to consider how best it is to be turned to their advantage. If the country were not lying a dead corpse at their feet, would the Times venture to express itself thus — the worthy Times is commenting on Lord Roden’s dismissal, and recounting what painful but needful measures the “Imperial Government” has been taking for Ireland of late. “Law,” says the Times, “has ridden rough-shod through Ireland: it has been taught with bayonets, and interpreted with ruin. Townships levelled with the ground, straggling columns of exiles, workhouses multiplied and still crowded, express the full determination of the legislature to rescue Ireland from its slovenly barbarism, and to plant the institutions of this more civilised land.”
Here is the tone in which these most infamous Government scribblers (who do, however, scribble the mind of the Government), presume to speak of Ireland. And the clearance devastations are evidently as determined as ever: and there is no law in the land in these days; and the O’Connell-Duffys are preaching constitutional agitation; and the Orangemen are crjdng.
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“To hell with the Pope,” and the Catholic bishops are testifying their loyalty; and Murder and Famine and Idiocy are dancing an obscene Carmagnole among the corpses. “Of a surety,” exclaimed Don Juan D’Aguila, “Christ never died for this people. ”
17th. — There is an urgent hurry here to get the Neptune to sea: the commodore has been kept in the bay for the last four months, when he ought to have been cruising in the Mozambique Channel, because the governor would not let him go while we stayed, and while there was danger of disturbance at the Cape. He sends a party of his sailors now every day to the Neptune, to hasten the storing and provisioning: we may probably sail to-morrow.
There is great rejoicing at Capetown — a reconciliation of parties; moderates and immoderates burying their differences. There are to be high public rejoicings, a grand dinner, and illuminations, such as South Africa has never yet beheld; Capetown has for years been lighted with gas, and on the night after we have set sail (not before, for they would not insult the poor convicts) the southern firmament is to be startled by a splendour that will out-blaze Fomalhaut and the bright star of Ara. I have got the Cape newspapers, with their advertising columns full of “the Dinner,” “the Illuminations,” in large capitals. Here are my last extracts from the South African Press —
PUBLIC REJOICINGS
Fireworks may be had, wholesale or retail, at G. Ashley’s.
THE ILLUMINATIONS
Composition candles — Large stock — which, for the present joyful occasion,
will be sold at low prices.
Lord Grey’s despatches have been published by the governor: they are very long, partly apologetic, and partly expostulatory, altogether shuffling. It is quite clear that he expected this resistance, and was fully aware both of the existence and extent of the feeling here against his measure, but persisted in it, with the hope of overbearing everything by Government authority and influence. Indeed, he never denies that he was aware of all the facts in time to prevent the Neptune from leaving Bermuda: for he only says they came to his knowledge after orders had been given to the Neptune to sail — that is, from London, with her cargo to Bermuda. He is a monstrous rogue.
Three o’clock in the morning. — I have been walking all night
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on the deck, enjoying a most lovely night, and taking my last look of Africa. So the contest is over, and the colonists may now proceed about their peaceful business, with no worse enemies to disquiet them than the Caffirs and the panthers. May their vineyards and corn-fields be fruitful to them while the sun visits Capricorn! Long may they sleep in peace, without bolt or lock on their hospitable doors! and travel over kloof and karroo with the bullock-whip for their sufficient weapon! Most heartily I congratulate the Cape on the fearful importation she has escaped.
I watched the sun set behind the hills; and his last purple gleams blushing on the peaks of distant mountains, turning every splintered cliff into a perfect amethyst. And well I know within the foldings of those amethystine ridges lie many emerald vales; and to the good people who dwell there, the feet of those who cany this day’s tidings will be beautiful upon the mountains. Morning will dawn to-morrow on the proudest day South Africa has yet beheld.
“Adieu! the Orient glimmers afar,
And the Morning Star
Anon will rise over Madagascar brightly.”
[I wonder whether the Cape knows Freiligrath’s glorious Cape ballad. ] Good-night Africa!
19th. — We sail this day: the wind full against us, blowing straight up the bay: no matter — the commodore has sent the Geyser war-steamer to tow us out. We have got the hawser fixed, and are moving slowly out of Simon’s Bay, and down the broad expanse of False Bay. The mountains are fading behind us. Another continent has arisen from the sea before me, and now Africa vanishes too. Shall I ever set foot upon dry land more?
April 4th, 1850. — It is more than a month since I made my last entry in this dreary log-book. All this time we have been going straight before the wind, which is always westerly in this southern ocean, along the parallel of 46° south latitude, and often at the rate of 200 miles a day. They say we are nearing Van Diemen’s Land.
I have been very ill all the time; and grow worse. Seafaring has become a horror to me, for it is more than eleven months since I came on board this ship of evil omen, “rigged with curses,”
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freighted with hell — and I long to touch some shore, were it even the New Jerusalem, where there shall be no more sea. The mob of prisoners on board, as I look down over them from my solitary walk on the poop, seem in high spirits, at the thought of being all landed free, in a magnificent new country, where the climate is matchless, and labour is highly paid. They look at me with a sort of respectful pity; and doubtless think my crimes must have been enormously villainous indeed to merit the distinguished consideration of being singly excepted from their imiversal emancipation.
6th. — The mountainous southern coast of Van Diemen’s Land! It is a soft blue day; soft airs, laden with all the fragrances of those antarctic woods, weave an atmosphere of ambrosia around me. As we coast along over the placid waters, passing promontory after promontory, wooded to the water’s edge, and “glassing their ancient glories in the flood,” both sea and land seem to bask and rejoice in the sunshine. Old Ocean smiles — that multitudinous rippling laugh seen in vision by the chained Prometheus. Even my own sick and weary soul (so kind and bounteous is our Mother Earth) feels lightened, refreshed, uplifted. Yet there, to port, loom the mountains, whereunto I am to be chained for years, with a vulture gnawing my heart. Here is the very place the Kaf, or Caucasus, where I must die a daily death and make a nightly descent into hell.
It must have been on these mountains [Gk. phrase] that strength and force bound the victim Demigod — for did not Kratos say unto Hephaistos, “We have come now to the utmost verge of the earth?” Where was that, but at the antipodes? — the limited geographical knowledge of the poet was unequal to his inspiration. Would that I had committed the godlike crime, and gathered fire from those empyrean urns whence the stars draw light — then might I hope to possess the godlike strength also of the Titan crucified! Oh! Divine Æther! and ye swift-winged winds! ye gushing river-fountains! and thou boundless endless, multitudinous chorus-laugh of ocean waves! Oh! Earth! mother of all things! and world-seeing circuit of the sun! No answer; but, enter convict-servant with a mockery of dinner. Eating or sleeping is not for me these three days past; partly from severe illness, partly from the excited expectation of
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once more, at the end of two years, seeing the face of a friend. There, amongst or behind those shaggy mountains, wander Martin, O’Brien, Meagher, each alone in his forest-dungeon. Surely I shall contrive some means of meeting them once.
This evening we entered the inlet known as D’Entrecasteaux’ Channel, which runs up about twenty-five miles on the west side of Bruni Island, and divides it from the mainland of Tasmania. On the east side of Bruni spreads out Storm Bay, the ordinary approach to Hobart Town harbour; but this channel adjoins Storm Bay at the northern extremity of Bruni; from whence a wide estuary runs many miles farther inland. We are becalmed in the channel; but can see the huge mass of Mount Wellington, ending to the eastward in steep cliffs. In the valley at the foot of those cliffs, as they tell me, bosomed in soft green hills, bowered in shady gardens, with its feet kissed by the blue ripples of the Derwent — lies that metropolis of murderers and university of burglary and all subter-human abomination, Hobart Town.
But as we lie here becalmed, between lonely wooded hills, the land seems virgin yet, as when La Perouse sailed up the same channel of old, startling the natives from their kangaroo flesh-pots on the shore. These woods are all of evergreen trees; and even from the deck I can see the long streamers of bark peeling oft their trunks and festooned from branch to branch; for all this tribe, the Eucalypti, shed not their leaves but their bark. The trees seem almost all of great height; but on the whole the forest looks poor and ragged, because the boughs and branches are so conspicuous in their nakedness; and the foliage is thin compared with the bulk of the trunks. This is certainly the first impression made on an eye accustomed to the umbrageous masses of beech and sycamore that build up the cathedral arches and aisles of our European woodlands. But I can scarcely believe that I am verily to set my foot upon dry land again.
7th. — We made our way this morning to the head of D’Entrecasteaux’ Channel, where it communicates by a narrow passage with the great Storm Bay — took a pilot on board at this passage, a little dark man, at whom I gazed as narrowly and curiously as ever did Abel Jans Tasman at the first Australasian savages he saw, or they at Abel. But indeed our little pilot was a mere Englishman in tweed pantaloons and round jacket; and he
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came down to his boat from a neat white cottage on a hill, with a greensward lawn sloping from its door to the boat-pier, and some sweet-briar hedges protecting and adorning its garden.
Two o’clock afternoon. — We are at anchor in the Derwent, a quarter of a mile from the quays and custom-house of Hobart Town. Why should I write down, here again, what I see, what everybody sees, at every sea-port? The town slopes from the river to the hills precisely like any other town. Several church steeples, of course; a small battery on a point; a windmill on a height; merchants’ stores along the quays; waggons carrying merchandise hither and thither; and the waggons have wheels; and the horses are quadrupedal and solid-ungular. A good many ships lie in the harbour; and one Carthaginian frigate, the Mæander.
Our bold captain and surgeon-superintendent have dressed themselves (and the latter in sword and epaulettes looks grand enough), to await the official persons; the official persons ashore, with that deliberate dignity which becomes their high position, move slowly, and in their several convict bureaus prepare their stationery and tape, that they may board us in due form. So I have time to dwell upon, to appropriate and assimilate, one of the loveliest scenes in all the world. The harbour is the broad estuary of the river Derwent. The town lies on the western side, backed by gardens and villas, rising on the slope of wooded hills and ravines, which all lose themselves in the vast gloomy mass of Mount Wellington. On the eastern side, which seems nearly uninhabited, there are low hills covered with wood; and directing the eye up the river valley, I see nothing but a succession of hill and forest, till blue mountains shut up the view. I long to walk the woods, and leave behind me the sight and sound of the weariful sea.
8th. — Official persons on board, with their stationery and tape, also police constables. I know not what forms and ceremonies are going forward, because I stay close in my cabin; but I hear a calling of roll; and the prisoners, with washed faces, are walking aft one by one. The doctor tells me nothing will be known about me and my destination till to-morrow. The special despatch, regarding me, has gone of cour§e to the governor, one Sir William
[Plate:] Father John Kenyon, Parish Priest of Templederry, Co. Tipperary
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Denison; but that potentate is on a hunting party, and may not be in town even to-morrow. Meanwhile the real convicts on board are said to be in high glee: they are to land free: and a proposal has come out to the ship, inviting twelve of the most powerful men to take service as constables on the island. Dr. Gibson, our superintendent, who has been here before, and knows the ways of the place, informs me that almost all the petty constables on the island, and even some of the chief-constables, are convicts; and further, that the most desperate villains are actually selected for the. office. “A dozen of our worst Neptune ruffians,” said the doctor, “you will see in a few days dressed in blue, armed with carbines, and placed in a position to predominate over you, and your friends who have arrived here before you. ”
Dr. Gibson, however, says he believes (whether he has reason to believe it I know not), that the instructions are to treat me with some consideration: and he promises that he will go ashore tomorrow, and if he finds I am to be assigned a residence in some of the interior police-districts, he is to use his influence to induce the governor, on account of my shattered health, to let me live along with John Martin. Some Hobart Town newspapers have come on board. O’Brien is still in very close confinement on an island off the east coast, called Maria Island, a rugged and desolate territory, about twelve miles in length, where the jailers keep one of their main strongholds. He has refused to accept their “ticket-of-leave “on the terms of giving them his parole not to escape while he holds it; and the convict-authorities are much irritated by his determination. They use him hardly enough! And his health is failing.
By the advertisements I see there are no fewer than five ships at present laid on for California from the two ports, Hobart Town, south, and Launceston, north. There is now a brisk trade between Van Diemen’s Land and San Francisco: apples, onions and potatoes being the chief articles of export from this island. Along with these specimens of the vegetable kingdom, however, the Californians must be receiving from Van Diemen’s Land assortments of the choicest and rarest scoundrelism in all creation. Emancipated convicts, also, have the “sacred hungering for gold.”
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Evening. — An official person was brought to my cabin door half an hour ago, by the doctor, and introduced to me by the name of Emmett. A convict official by the name of Emmett! He handed me a communication from an individual styled “Comptroller-General,” informing me that instructions had been received from the Secretary of State to allow me to reside at large in any one of the police-districts I might select (except those already used as the dungeons of my friends) — subject to no restriction, save the necessity of reporting myself to the district police-magistrate once a month. This condition of existence is, I find, called “Ticket-of-leave. ”I may accept it or not, as I think proper; or, having accepted, I may at any time resign it: but first of all, I must give my promise that so long as I hold the said “ticket,” I shall not escape from the colony.
O’Brien, as I said, has refused to give his promise; but Martin, Meagher, O’Doherty, and the rest have done so. Some of them, as I hear, speak of surrendering their “comparative liberty,” and, of course, withdrawing their promise, so soon as their health shall have been re-established by a few months’ wandering in the bush. I decide to do as the majority of my friends have done, especially as Dr. Gibson informs me that the close confinement of Maria Island would probably kill me at once. He seems, indeed, most anxious to get me ashore; and takes credit for bringing me so far alive, after my ten months’ solitary confinement in Bermuda, and eleven months and seventeen days’ cruising in the Neptune.
Wrote a note to the “Comptroller-General,” and placed it in the hands of Emmett, informing him that I would promise not to escape so long as I should enjoy the “comparative liberty” of the ticket: and, on his suggestion and the doctor’s, I wrote another note, telling the authorities I was very ill; had been ill for many months, and was utterly unfit to be sent off by myself, to one of the remote districts, amongst entire strangers. The doctor is to back this with his professional authority; and he and Emmett say the governor will be sure to allow me to go up to a place called Bothwell, where John Martin vegetates. So Emmett left me. He says he is related to the family of; but no, the man is an impostor.
Hobart Town has quite an imposing appearance from the water,
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standing out against its grand mountain background. Why should not I write a minute account of the town this evening, as I have leisure, and no prepossessions or narrow personal observations to distract me? Sterne gave to the world a valuable directory of Calais upon that principle.
Hobart Town, Hobartia, Hobarton. Coat of arms, a fleece, and a kangaroo with its pocket picked; and the legend Sic fortis Hobartia crevit: namely, by fleecing and picking pockets. This town, if we may trust its archives, the authority of which I see no reason to call in question upon the present occasion — was once no more than a small village; and, as it boasts at present no less than twenty thousand inhabitants, it must have grown up little by little, I suppose, to its present size — and so forth.
To my utter amazement, I had a letter to-day from Patrick O’Donohue, who has been permitted to live in the city of Hobart Town, informing me that he has established a newspaper called the Irish Exile, enclosing me a copy of the last number, and proposing that I should join him in the concern. Herein is a marvellous thing. How happens it that the convict authorities permit him to conduct a paper at all? Or what would be the use of such a publication here, even if he were competent enough to manage it? The thing is a hideous absurdity altogether: but I am glad to learn that none of my friends takes anything to do with it; though I suppose it assumes to be a sort of “organ” for them. The Irish Exile is bepuffing me now most outrageously: God preserve me from organs of opinion! Have I sailed round the terraqueous globe, and dropped in here in a cove of the far South Pacific, to find an “able editor” mounted stilt wise upon phrases tall, and blowing deliberate puffs in my face? Gladly I would bare my brow to all the tornadoes and ouragans of the West Indies, to the black-squalls of the tropics, to the heavy gales of the British Channel, and the typhoons of the China Seas, rather than to the flattering flatulence of these mephitic airs. I was tired, indeed, of the sea; but at sea there are, at anyrate [sic], no organs of opinion. Eurus and Boreas are often rude enough; but, at least, they blow where they list, and pipe not their notes under the censorship of a Comptroller-General.
To be sure, one may cite Virgil against me, with the Comptroller-General Æolus, and his quos ego.
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But what of this? I retire to my cot to-night in a black and blaspheming humour, vilipending both sea and land.
* * * * *
12th. — Sitting on the green grass by the bank of a clear, brawling stream of fresh water. Trees waving overhead; the sunshine streaming through their branches, and 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 on me with his mild eyes.
CHAPTER XV
April 13th. 1850. — The village of Bothwell, where John Martin and myself are now privileged, by “ticket-of-leave,” to live or to vegetate, contains about sixty or seventy houses; has a church where clergymen of the Church of England and of Scotland perform service, one in the morning and the other in the evening of Sunday; has four large public-houses, or hotels, establishments which are much better supported on the voluntary system, and have much larger congregations, than the church; has a post-office, and several carpenters’ and blacksmiths’ shops, for the accommodation of the settlers who live in the district; and a police-office and police-barrack, with the police magistrate of the district predominating there.
It is situated in a valley about three or four miles in width, and twice that in length, at an elevation of 1,300 feet above the sea; and is surrounded by rough wooded mountains, rising perhaps 1,000 feet higher. Through the valley, from north to south, nms the little river Clyde, turning two mills. Two miles below Bothwell, the Clyde makes a leap of forty-five feet into a profound cauldron between high rocks, and thence enters a narrow gorge between lofty and rocky banks, where it rushes along with great rapidity, and about sixteen miles lower down passes another village with a Lanarkshire name, “Hamilton,” from whence it still continues a southern course, till it enters the large river Derwent, which collects the drainage of all the high central region of the island. This particular valley of the Clyde was settled principally by Scotch colonists, which accounts for the Lanarkshire names.
Hamilton, however, is a police-district by itself, and lies out of the bounds of our dungeon. Northward the district of Bothwell extends twenty-four miles to the. shores of Lake Crescent and Lake Sorel; and the farther shores of the lakes bound the territories of Meagher and O’Doherty. Eastward the district of Bothwell is defined by the course of the Jordan, a stream still
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smaller than the Clyde, which I crossed on my way hither a few days ago, without knowing it: for it is always dry except in winter. Westward we reach the large river Shannon, which runs through a lonely wilderness of forest and mountain, between lofty banks, and after joining with the Ouse, a still more western river, loses itself in the same Derwent. Beyond those rivers lies the almost unexplored region of the island, utterly barren and inhospitable, spreading in a great plateau, at an elevation of nearly 4,000 feet, to the Western Sea.
We climbed to-day one of the minor hills, and from the summit commanded a vast view of endless mountains, covered with wood, closed to the south-west by a great range already covered with snow, though it is still warm autumnal weather here.
The trees are almost all of one or other of the gum species; lofty and vast, but not umbrageous, for the foliage is meagre, and but ill clothes the huge limbs. In some of the huge valleys, however, there is more richness of foliage, and along the river’s bank the gum-trees are chiefly of the sort called black gum, which makes a grand leafy head, almost as massive as the European beech or sycamore. On the slopes of some of the hills are great thickets of mimosa, called by the colonists the wattle-gum, a most graceful evergreen tree, but stripped at this season of its splendid gold-hued blossoms. The air is laden with the fragrance of these gum-trees, and illuminated by the flight of parrots of most glowing and radiant plumage, that go flashing through the arches of the forest like winged gems.
I grow stronger every day. And whether it be the elastic and balmy air of these mountain-woods that sends the tide of life coursing somewhat warmer through my veins — or unwonted converse of an old friend that revives the personal identity I had nearly lost — or the mere treading once more upon the firm flowery surface of our bounteous Mother Earth, after two years’ tossing on the barren, briny ocean — Mother Earth breathing vital fragrance for ever, for ever swinging the censer of her perfumes from a thousand flowers; for ever singing her eternal melodies in whispering tree-tops and murmuring, tinkling, bubbling streams — certain it is, I feel a kind of joy. In vain I try to torment myself into a state of chronic savage indignation: it will not do here. In vain I reflect that “it is incumbent on me diligently to remember”
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(as Mr. Gibbon says) how that I am, after all, in a real cell, hulk, or dungeon, yet — that these ancient mountains, with the clouds-shadows flying over their far-stretching woodlands, are but Carthaginian prison walls — that the bright birds, waving their rainbow wings here before me, are but “ticket-of-leave “birds, and enjoy only “comparative liberty” — in vain — there is in every soul of man a buoyancy that will not let it sink to utter stark despair. Well said the Lady Eleanora —
“When the heart is throbbing sorest
There is balsam in the forest:
There is balsam in the forest for its pain” —
Said the Lady Eleanora.
Moreover, at my side walks Martin; and pours me out such a stream of discourse. The slight sketches or partial glimpses I had got in my seafaring captivity of the history of our most rueful and pitiful rebellion needed to be filled up: and he has three months’ later history of Ireland than I knew. Three ignominious months!
It seems the three rebels whose dungeon-districts all touch Lake Sorel are in the habit of meeting almost every week at those lakes, which is against the rule, to be sure; but authorities connive at it — thinking probably that no great or immediate harm can accrue to the British Empire thereby. And Martin is to guide me to-morrow to the rendezvous; having written immediately on my arrival to the two others, announcing the day of meeting. Martin has a grey pony; O’Doherty and Meagher have each a horse; and I, having none yet of my own, am to hire one from a man in the village. This evening I have deluged Martin with talk, as we sat at our wood fire, smoking like two volcanoes. We have lodgings in a neat cottage of the village, our hostess being a woman who conducts the church-singing on Sundays. She is very attentive to us; and to show me she is a person of respectability, she took an early occasion of informing me that she “came out free”; which, in fact, is the patent of nobility in Van Diemen’s Land. Here, a freeman is a king, and the convict-class is regarded just as the negroes must be in South Carolina; which indeed is perfectly right.
I have seen none of the neighbouring gentlemen yet; but John
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Martin tells me that they have almost all called on him, and shown him kind attentions during the five months he spent here alone. I feel pretty indifferent to society, however, at least yet. But it is agreeable to find that even English and Scotch settlers of good character and rank refuse to regard us as “felons.” A piece of contumacy indeed against their own Government, but a considerable pleasure and advantage to us.
Martin has brought out some books, which, together with my small store, make our lodging look literary. Martin is an old brick; he has listened to me haranguing to-night with commendable attention. So that I trust I have improved his mind.
To-morrow we start at eight o’clock in the morning for our re-union in a certain shepherd’s hut on Lake Sorel.
15th. — Lake Sorel. Promontory of the “Dog’s Head,” or Cynoscephalœ. Yesterday morning dawned cold and gloomy; the first morning apparently of their Tasmanian winter. Before we rose it had begun to rain violently; and all the sky was dark. Evidently the day was to be tempestuous; and on the hills round about the valley we could see that it was snow instead of rain that was falling. Our landlady and her husband advised us not to move, as we might be stopped by floods in the high country; and, besides, I was still extremely weak and nervous, though improving rapidly.
We waited till noon; but at noon, as it rained more furiously than ever, we resolved to brave it and mount. We set out north-eastward through the valley, which is perfectly level, sandy, clothed with a short, dry, yellowish grass, and sprinkled with trees. After a ride of four miles we passed a handsome stone house, with very extensive outbuildings for convict labourers and the tradesmen required on a sheep-farming estate. It lies nestled at the very root of the great Quoin hill; and commands a most extensive view over the plain in front and the distant mountains to the south. This is Denistoun, the residence of Mr. Russell, a Scottish settler, and a good friend of Martin’s; but we rode past without stopping, and through a large green paddock, surrounded by the stables and workmen’s huts. Immediately on clearing this we found ourselves in the wild bush, and ascending a gorge of the hill behind. From this point the rain began to change into snow.
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and for many miles we rode on through the blinding tempest, which prevented any special reconnaissance of the country. I was only sensible that we were continually ascending — that the track was very obscure, and wound amongst dead trees and rocks — and that at every mile the forest became more wild, and more encumbered with naked and fallen trees; until at last I thought the whole world might be challenged to show a scene of such utter howling desolation.
Still we rode on, Martin always saying that when we should be half-way to Lake Sorel, we might turn if we liked. Fifteen miles from Denistoun we passed a rough log-fence, and saw before us a level plain extending full two miles, partially adorned with majestic trees, like some spacious park in Ireland. And, though it was bleak enough yesterday, with a snow-storm driving ind hissing over it, yet it was easy to see we had got into a country of a different character. In short, we had finished the long ascent, and we were now on the great plateau of these two lakes. We galloped over the plain with the snow beating furiously in our faces, and found ourselves on the bank of a small river, beyond which seemed to be a tract of very close and rugged woodland “The Clyde again,” said my companion; “we are but a quarter of a mile from the point of Lake Crescent, whence it issues; but you cannot see the lake through the close bush.”
We crossed the river by a rough wooden bridge, made by some of the settlers for the passage of their flocks when they drive them down for the winter to the low country; and then for four miles farther we had a most savage and difficult region to pass, covered with thick and shaggy bush, and very much encumbered with the monstrous ruins of ancient trees. No Hving creature was anywhere visible; but now and then a few sheep cowering under the lee side of a honeysuckle tree (for all these regions are parcelled out into sheep-runs); no sound, but the roaring of the wind, and the groaning and screaming of the trees.
Lake Crescent was now visible on our right; and for three or four miles we had no track, or other guidance on our way save that by keeping the lake in sight, on our right hand, we must strike on the point where the other lake communicates with it by a short stream. And there lay the hut where, I was assured, we should find a human being, a hermit named Cooper, who would
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be sure to give us a mutton-chop, and enable us to proceed on our way.
I had pretended, up to this time, that I was not fatigued, and could still ride any distance; but the weakness produced by my two years’ close confinement began now to be visible. My companion encouraged me by the assurance that we were within two miles of Cooper’s, and we now got into open ground again, where we could push our horses to a canter. At last we found ourselves on a low tract of land, about half a mile across, having Lake Crescent still to the right, and the great Lake Sorel to the left. This is a magnificent sheet of water, thirty-five miles in circuit measured by the sinuosities of the shore, varied by some bold promontories, one small wooded island, and a fine range of bold hills on its northern side. The water looked black, and had an angry curl; the snow, which had abated somewhat, came down thicker than ever; and at last, to my great contentment, I could see a smoke mounting amongst the trees before us. There, upon the edge of a marsh, and just at the point where a sluggish winding stream leaves Lake Sorel, to carry its surplus waters to Lake Crescent, stood a small hut of round logs, thatched with grass— the first human habitation we had seen since we left Dennistoun. The sound of our horses’ hoofs brought out a man of about forty years of age, with a thin, sharp, intelligent face, and hair somewhat reddish, dressed in the blue woollen shirt, which is the invariable uniform of the shepherds and stock-keepers. He welcomed us with great cordiality, and said at once that Mr. Meagher and Mr. O’Doherty were at Townsend’s all day waiting for us. Townsend’s is another hut, four miles further on, and situated in the district of Ross, which is usually made the place of meeting, because it is a better house, and has several rooms. On dismounting, however, to sit a little while at Cooper’s fire, I found myself too much exhausted to ride any farther; so Cooper took one of our horses, and set off to Townsend’s, to ask our friends to come to me, seeing I could not go to them.
“You just keep the fire up, gentlemen,” said Cooper, as he girthed the saddle, “that I may get the tea and chops ready when I come back, and I’ll engage the other gentlemen will be
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here in an hour or less.” We threw on more wood, and tried to dry our clothes.
It now began to grow dusk, for we had been four hours and a-half on the way; and the evening was fast growing dark, when we heard the gallop of three horses, and a loud laugh, well known to me. We went to the door, and in a minute Meagher and O’Doherty had thrown themselves from their horses; and, as we exchanged greetings— I know not from what impulse, whether from buoyancy of heart, or bizarre perversity of feeling— we all laughed till the woods rang around; laughed loud and long, and uproariously, till two teal rose, startled from the reeds on the lake-shore, and flew screaming to seek a quieter neighbourhood.
I suspect there was something hollow in that laughter, though at the time it was hearty, vociferous, and spontaneous. But even in laughter the heart is sad; and curses or tears, just then, might have become us better.
Both these exiles looked fresh and vigorous. Kevin O’Doherty I had scarcely ever met before; but he is a fine, erect, noble-looking young man, with a face well bronzed by air and exercise.
After giving the horses each two handfuls of oats, all we had, we turned them out to find shelter and grazing as best they could. Beside the hut is a large enclosure, made by an old post-and-rail fence; and into this, with much compunction, on my part at least, we turned out the poor animals. However, such is the usage that horses are accustomed to here, where they are seldom stabled, even in winter. Indeed, the bush everywhere affords good close shelter for all sorts of animals, under the thickets of “wattle-gum,” and the dense dark shade of the honeysuckle-tree. Horses also eat the leaves and tender shoots of both these trees, when the ground happens to be covered with snow, which, even at this height among the mountains, is exceedingly rare. All this time, while we were employed about our horses. Cooper was in the hut broiling mutton-chops, boiling tea in an open tin-can, slung over the fire, and cutting the damper into thick slices — mutton, tea, and damper being the morning refection, and mutton, damper, and tea being the evening meal in the bush. Damper is merely a large flat cake of flour and water, baked in the
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wood embers on the hearth. We sat down upon blocks of gumtree, and Cooper being possessed of but one knife and one fork, we dined primitively; but all were ravenously hungry, and it seems Cooper is notorious in the lake region for the excellency of his chop-cookery.
Our talk was all of Ireland, and of Richmond and Newgate prisons, and of Smith O’Brien; and it soon made us serious enough. I had still very much to learn— though before coming up to Bothwell at all, I had met MacManus at a wayside inn, and he told me all he knew. They have been in Van Diemen’s Land just five months; and they inform me that Smith O’Brien has been during that time subjected to most rigorous, capricious, and insolent treatment by the “Comptroller-General” and his subordinates. His confinement for a while, indeed, was as strict as my own had been in Bermuda; and only the representation of the medical officer, that his health was sinking under it, compelled them to relax the discipline so far that he is now allowed to wander over part of the island at stated times, attended by an armed constable. When he writes to any of the others, or they to him, the letters are all opened by the official people; and so petty has been the system of restriction exercised upon him, that they would not, for a good while, suffer him to receive his usual supply of cigars, sent to him from Hobart Town. To a man all alone, and already goaded and stung by outrage and wrong, even such a small privation as this may be a serious grievance. The “Comptroller-General,” one Hampton, is specially exasperated against him, because O’Brien could not bring himself to show him some of those external marks of respect which he is in the habit of exacting from the real convicts: and being restrained from using his usual methods of coercion and punishment in our case, scourging, hard labour, and the like, the Comptroller (who is bound somehow to assert his dignity), strives to conquer and torture his haughty captive by hourly mortification in detail. I suppose it is the man’s trade; and we must all live; but how much better it had been for that gallant heart, if he had been shot down at Ballingarry, or even hanged before the county-jail at Clonmel.
Our meeting at the Lakes, begun with factitious jollity, soon grew dismal enough; and it was still more saddened as we talked
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of the factions of Irish refugees in America— factions founded principally on the momentous question, who was the greatest man and most glorious hero, of that most inglorious Irish business of ‘48; and each imagines he exalts his own favourite “martyr” by disparaging and pulling down the rest— as if the enemy’s Government had not pulled us all down, and ridden roughshod over us. It seems that I have my faction, and Meagher a still stronger one. If our respective partisans could but have seen — as we discussed this question of our own comparative importance — how bitterly and how mournfully we two smiled at one another across the gum-tree fire in that log-hut amongst the forests of the antipodes, perhaps it might have cooled their partizan zeal. This morning, when we looked out on the snowy waste, we found that all the horses had broken out through the fence into the woods. So we sallied out and spent an hour searching for them all over the rocky country between the two lakes. At last, in a dense part of the forest, we found them cowering under some honeysuckle trees, and nibbling the leaves— a sorry breakfast. Drove them in; and after partaking of Cooper’s breakfast, we mounted and rode on to the “Dog’s Head.” This is a fine promontory running about a mile out into the lake, and fringed all round with noble trees. In a snug cove at the northern side of the “Dog’s Head” is a stone house inhabited by the shepherd in charge of a large flock belonging to a Mr. Clarke, the owner of all the eastern shores of the lake. The day became beautiful and bright. The snow had all disappeared by twelve o’clock, and the lake lay smooth as a mirror. Opposite to us rise several rough wooded peaks; and all that side of the lake is said to be utterly trackless, and nearly impervious, swarming with “native devils” and “native tigers,” two species of hideous beasts of prey about the size of sheep-dogs, which at times make great havoc among the flocks. We have taken the little boat belonging to this station and rowed over to the island, then to another quiet bay where there is a sandy beach, called by the shepherds the “Diamond Beach,” from beautiful little agates and pieces of yellow quartz often found amongst the sands.
18th.— To-day we reluctantly parted, promising to be at the rendezvous again the week after next; and rode our different ways. This day, as the snow was gone, and the forests were all
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glowing in the sunshine, I wondered the country had seemed desolate to me before. We passed along the skirts and nearly under the perpendicular precipices of Table Mountain; and at last found ourselves on the shoulder of Quoin Hill, and looked down over the valley of Bothwell, which already seems a sort of home to me. From this point the view is wide and magnificent — endless forests and mountains; with small bits of clearing here and there, looking like impertinent intrusions upon the primeval solitudes. Two eagles soar majestically above: and from far down in the profound umbrage below, rings the clear bugle note of the white magpie— a bird which, though called magpie by the colonists, is of a species unknown in the northern hemisphere. So ends my first visit to Lake Sorel: and it has pleased me well at any rate to find that my friends are all unsubdued. The game, I think, is not over yet.
CHAPTER XVI
Bothwell, April 20th, 1850— Under the guidance of John Knox (as O’Doherty insists on naming Martin), I have been exploring the district of Bothwell on every side. The hills are all similar in shape and structure— all with a gradual slope at the side, and a steep “bluff,” broken sometimes into grand precipices at the other: and herein every hillock resembles the great Table Mountain, or the huge ranges of the south-west. Never country was so uniform as this, both in structure and in garniture. There is an extensive bed of sandstone lying at or near the base of all the hills, worn into caves where the edges of it are exposed in the precipitous bluffs. Over this there always rests a mass of greenstone, which ascends to the summits, and is often formed into rude columnar blocks, as in the precipices of Table Mountain, We have ridden to a lonely region, known as the “Blue Hill,” being a succession of small hollows lying westward of a high mountain which bounds our valley at one side. Went up to the first settler’s place we came to, a rather humble wooden house; but with a large bam and offices near it. John Knox approached the door like a man who knew the way, and was received most joyfully by the proprietor, one Kenneth M’Kenzie, an ancient settler, from Ross-shire. He brought us in, sent our horses to the stable, introduced me to his wife (one of the MacRae’s), a true Gaelic woman of tall stature and kindly tongue, who speaks Erse better than English, though thirty years an exile here. She has never been in Hobart Town since she passed through it on her arrival, and hardly even in our metropolis of Bothwell for many years. Here is a genuine family of Tasmanian Highlanders, trying to make a Ross-shire glen under the southern constellations. In the parlour stands a spinning wheel. On the wall hangs an ancient and highly ornamental dirk, which one of the girls unsheathed for us, and then sheathed again, in the Highland manner, by a difficult but graceful movement of the wrist. Delicious milk was set before us, such as has frothed in Highland quaich since the death of Cineadth Vich Alpine; and as we sat round the table, and the tall youths and maidens came in, and were addressed by such names as Colin, Jessie, and Kenneth, I could almost fancy myself in some brae of Balquhidder.
24th.— I was very glad this morning to receive a kind, frank, and interesting letter from Smith O’Brien. It is dated “Darlington Probation Station, Maria Island.” He says, of his refusal to give his parole (which is the reason of his close confinement on Maria Island), “My determination was formed after full consideration; and as I had resolved to refuse my parole, even in case I should be offered a free range over the Australian settlements, you may suppose that I did not feel much tempted to abandon that determination, when I found that in exchange for the pledge exacted we were offered only a sort of mock liberty, in a district about as large as a couple of parishes. I do not regret, but on the contrary rejoice, that I refused to give the pledge required. My resolution, however, very nearly cost me my life. I am persuaded that if the diabolical regulations framed by Dr. Hampton [the ‘Comptroller’], with reference to my confinement, under which I was deprived of opportunities of exercise, and even subjected for an unlimited period to absolute silence and solitude, had continued to be rigorously enforced, I should long before now have been either in my grave or in a mad-house. Nor can I consider my present prospects as very brilliant.” Speaking of the behaviour used towards me, J. M., he says:— “I cannot believe that public opinion in England, ungenerous as it has been in reference to Irish patriotism, will tolerate the exceptional vindictiveness which the Whig Government have displayed in your case, and which has denied to you the indulgence granted to the lowest class of felons who have undergone sufferings far less acute than those which you have sustained. I fully expect, therefore, that you will receive a ‘conditional pardon’ before long,” etc., etc. He has not, I fear, accurately estimated how much or how little the generosity of the British public can tolerate in the case of an Irish rebel. Perhaps, if he lives long enough, he will have opportunities of judging in that matter more correctly. His letter came to me sealed with the “Comptroller-General’s”
[plates:] Thomas Francis Meagher (May 1848 & Brig-Gen. of the Irish Brigade, 1861-4)
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seal, which imports that it was read by that functionary. Of course it makes no allusion to political affairs in Ireland (if there can be said, indeed, to be any such thing as political affairs there), moreover, even if we had an opportunity of talking together face to face, we should be sure to differ widely. He cannot endure my root-and-branch revolutionism, nor I his moderation. But what a ghastly correspondence is this ! It is miserable to think of that proud soul, striving gallantly to stand— though set in a frame gradually weakening and sinking-— still to stand, “like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved,” holding at bay a Comptroller-General and his whole pack of hell-dogs. They evidently mean to break his spirit, and force him by mere dread of so hideous a death, to accept their “comparative liberty.” Knox and I do heartily wish he would yield the point. This confinement is as rigorous and humiliating as mine was at Bermuda: and I believe he is more sensitive than I. We have sadly smoked the pipe of deliberation over this affair (sitting in the bush, at sunset, upon a prostrate gum-tree), and find no solution. Yield, or bend, he will not— endure the torture long, he cannot. He will die there. On this we mused, with little interruption by conversation, save a curse or two, until our own “comparative liberty,” even in these glorious forest-solitudes, became irksome, wearisome, loathsome to us. Sunset was bathing those gloomy woods of the Blue Hill in a flood of purple and crimson and gold; and the clarion note of the “white magpie” rang clear and mellow through the still evening air. For us in vain. We wished ourselves in one of the “Probation Stations”; and feel that the aspect of a surly jailor, and the grating of bolts in our doors, would be wholesomer sights and sounds than all the glory and music of these evening woods.
Meantime we are to make up a small parcel of books which he has expressed a wish to have in his dungeon— they must first, however, be subjected to the censorship and criticism of Dr. Hampton; and if he think them inoffensive they will be placed in the hands of his ward and pupil. We must also write him, and try to shake his resolution about the parole. Yet, I fear, in vain.*
* About five months after this, however, Mr. O’Brien did give his promise; and came to reside at New Norfolk, intending, however, to revoke the parole after a time.
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Some of the principal settlers in the neighbourhood of Bothwell have called upon me; and we have spent some agreeable evenings in their houses. They are all large landed proprietors, and have myriads of sheep and cattle upon a thousand hills. The convict class, who form the majority of the entire population of the island, are strictly tabooed. But by common consent we Irish rebels are excepted from the proscription. It gave me a sort of home-feeling, when I found myself, for the first time in two years, seated in the pleasant parlour of Ratho, the home of a most amiable and accomplished Edinburgh family; the social tea-table presided over by one of the most graceful and elegant of old ladies; the books, music, flowers — and the gentle converse of high-bred women, could not fail to soothe and soften an exasperated soul in any but its very darkest hour; and I walked home to our cottage dreaming, dreaming how blessed a privilege it is to have a home.
Yet I have written to Ireland, still dissuading my own household from coming out here.
April 26th. — Some Irish newspapers. I can hardly bear to look into them. But John Knox diligently scans them, with many wry faces, and sometimes tells me part of the news. “Conciliation Hall “still stands, still spouts, still gathers money, though not much now, and still sends up an evil smell into the general nostril. Also another small opposition “Conciliation Hall,” named “Irish Alliance. ”It spouts also and gathers money, in humble imitation of its great parent on Burgh Quay; and though fresher now than the real old Hall, is destined I think, to decompose and putrefy even sooner. In America, which swarms with our refugees of ‘48, there have been pitiful quarrels and even riots; in which, however, neither O’Gorman nor Dillon (now residing in New York) has taken any part whatsoever. I do not mean to censure all the parties to these quarrels; because I know not the merits or demerits of the questions at issue. One of the questions, it is humiliating to me to know, is about the relative importance of me, J. M., compared with other “leaders. ”Nevertheless, some of those who are named as engaged in these disputes I know to be honest and able men. At this distance I cannot presume to blame them for a course of conduct which may have been forced upon them. It is easy for me, here at the antipodes, cut
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off from the whole scene of bustling life as by the shearing scythe of death — with the whole mass of the planet lyang between me and my former work and life — easy for me, sitting placid under a honeysuckle tree, basking in the balmy air of these meadows of Asphodel 01 Lotus, facing the Magellan clouds and stars unknown before, to smoke and philosophise with tranquil mind, and to look down upon the petty squabbles of mankind with superior smile. This, perhaps, is not well. Those refugees are exiles, too — have suffered, as well as we, the demolition of home, and means, and hopes. Moreover, they are still present in the scene of our failure; still stung by the coward taunts of our enemies, and feeling the onus on them to do somewhat, to move somewhither — a burden which has fallen from our shoulders for the present — yes, and no doubt maddened, too, by the poisonous rumours and “preternatural suspicions “that hover round and haunt the ruins of a baffled cause. Ah! we can all meet here, by the margin of the smooth lake, and under the greenwood tree, with brow as unruffled as the lake, smile as genial as the riant landscape — but place us in the very heart of that mean turmoil, even in the refuge city of New York — expose us to the keen daily torture of conscious helplessness, while so much is to do, to the conversation of sinners, the canonisation of nonsense, and the outrages of a triumphant enemy — all together, and then, who knoweth his own heart?
April 28th. — Rebels went to church, this being Sunday. The post of Episcopal clergyman for this district is now vacant — the last incumbent (who was a most mediaeval “Puseyite”) having been removed in disgrace; disgrace not for Puseyism, but for swindling. The preacher, therefore, upon this day was Mr. Robertson, a Scottish Presbyterian divine; who is a real literary man, has a good collection of books himself, and has got up a decent village library besides.
So long had I been absent from religious services of all sorts, that I had forgotten the practice of praying for the Queen of England and all “Governors,” etc.: — why, this includes Lord Clarendon, and the Sheriff of Dublin! One could not rise and leave the church, because we ought to have known this would be done, as a certain part of the service, just as the British “national anthem” is played in Theatres Royal, between play and after
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piece: — and a man has no right to go into a church to disturb the congregation. Therefore, I contented myself with cursing as the pastor blessed.
30th. — At the lakes yesterday and to-day. I ride a horse lent me by Mr. Reid, of Ratho; John Knox, his grey pony, a half Arab; St. Kevin, a beautiful and fiery little black horse; and Meagher, a brown pony. We have had some wild bush-riding, the practice of these laking-parties being to ride at furious speed through almost trackless woods, and the consequence is sometimes disastrous. Meanwhile, St. Kevin leads us all upon his little black steed; and any shepherd who might see us careering in this dashing style, with laugh and jest, might say in his heart — There goes a merry party! But let not the shepherd envy us too much, or be very sure of our merriment. Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd? Dost thou know that black Care mounts behind the horseman?
Yet this life, in respect it is in the woods, pleases me well.
We cannot with safety to the flocks, bring dogs with us through this country. A dog, of what breed soever, unless very carefully educated indeed, will occasionally dart aside to rush amidst a “mob” of sheep (so they term their flocks), and before you can call him, he will have worried a couple or so. We have not, therefore, had a kangaroo hunt yet; and, indeed, I have seen but one or two kangaroos. They are growing scarce; for although there are very fw human inhabitants in these parts to persecute them, yet every human inhabitant is a shepherd or stock-keeper, with a double-barrelled gun and plenty of time on his hands; and then, unluckily for the kangaroo, his skin is worth certain shillings in the market; and to collect kangaroo and opossum skins is one of the methods by which the rural population here procure money to gamble with, and solace their leisure hours with rum.
“Rural population!” It is almost profane to apply the title to these rascals. 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 families; 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
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all, what a strange animal is man! The best shepherds in Van Diemen’s Land are London thieves — men who never saw a live sheep before they were transported; and, what is stranger still, many of them grow rather decent — it would be too strong to say honest — by their mere contact with their mother earth here. They are friendly to one another — hospitable to travellers (partly because they thirst for news), and otherwise comport themselves partly like human beings. Yet human they are not. Their training has made them subterhuman, preterhuman; and the system of British “reformatory discipline” has gone as near to making them perfect fiends, as human wit can go. One is perpetually reminded here of that hideous description of Van Diemen’s Land, given by a person who knew it well: — “Let a man be what he will when he comes here, the human heart is taken out of him, and there is given to him the heart of a beast.” What a blessing to these creatures, and to mankind, both in the northern hemisphere and the southern, if they had been hanged!
Rode down this evening. A storm of rain and sleet. The Tasmanian winter is approaching.
July 22nd. — Have had a serious consultation with John Martin, as to whether I should at length allow my wife and family to come out to Van Diemen’s Land. None of our friends, except Mr. O’Brien, seem to regard my speedy release as a thing at all probable. I may have to live the remaining twelve years of my sentence here, unless some chance arises of effecting an escape honourably. To escape otherwise, that is clandestinely, would indeed be easy to all of us at any time; but it is not to be thought of.
It is grievous to think of bringing up children in this island; yet by fixing my residence in this remote, thinly-peopled, and pastoral district, engaging in some sort of farming and cattle-feeding, and mingling in the society of the good quiet colonists here, we might almost forget at times, the daily and hourly outrage that our enemies put upon us in keeping us here at all; and enjoy the glorious health which this matchless climate would be almost sure to inoculate our veins withal. Several families (one especially, in which I have grown intimate) express a strong wish to see my family residing with me here. I could
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devote a good deal of time, also, to teaching the children; and, in short, I do so pine for something resembling a home — something that I could occasionally almost fancy a real home — that I have written this day to Newry, inviting all my household to the antipodes. Pray God, I have done right.
Visit from Terence MacManus; he has ridden up the valley of the Derwent and Clyde from New Norfolk, to see us by stealth. If discovered outside the bounds prescribed to him, he would be probably placed in custody and subjected to some punishment. He came to our door in the evening, and sent in his name (Dr. Smith) by the little girl. We go up to the lakes again the day after to-morrow, and have induced him to prolong his trip so far along with us, though h will then be sixty-five miles from his dungeon; but the temptation of meeting Meagher and St. Kevin, and of seeing an actual congregation of five Irish rebels together again (more than enough, by law, to make a “riot”) is too strong for him to resist. When we shall have drawn together such a power, we hope to be strong enough, if not to make a revolution, at least to shoot some ducks. The lakes swarm with a very fine kind of duck, the “black-duck,” besides the “mountain-duck,” a small kind with splendid plumage, teal, musk-duck, a very large but uneatable bird, not to mention jet-black swans, which swim either in pairs, or in fleets of five or six.
30th. — MacManus made some days pass pleasantly for us, but he is gone home — that is, to his dungeon district. We have ridden about twelve miles north-west from Bothwell, to see the Shannon. All the way, the country, the trees, the hills, have that sameness in figure and colour which makes the island so uniform — valley and bluff perpetually repeating its own features, and every wooded hill mirroring the wooded hill that stands opposite. On all the road, we passed but one house; a piece of Tudor barbarism in yellow stone, lately built by an eccentric settler in the dreariest spot he could find within many a league. At last we arrived at the brink of a deep valley, beyond which, on the western side, the hills rose more wild and mountainous. The valley spreads just below us into a grassy plain, with a few fine “black gums” dotting its green floor; cind as we descended, we soon heard the murmurous dashing of a river hidden yet by the trees. It is the
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Shannon, a flushing, whirling, tumultuous stream that derives its waters from the “Big Lake,” a noble reservoir some thirty miles farther to the northwest, lying high on a desolate plateau of Tasmania. It is the greatest lake in the island, and is said to measure ninety miles round. Through the whole of its course this river runs very rapidly, having a fall of two thousand feet in those thirty miles; and like all the other Van Diemen’s Land rivers, it is icy cold.
All my life long I have delighted in rivers, rivulets, rills, fierce torrents tearing their rocky beds, gliding dimpled brooks kissing a daisied marge. The tinkle, or murmur, or deep-resounding roll, or raving roar of running water is of all sounds my ears ever hear now, the most homely. Nothing else in this land looks or sounds like home. The birds have a foreign tongue: the very trees whispering to the wind, whisper in accents unknown to me; for your gum-tree leaves are all hard, homy, polished as the laurel — besides, they have neither upper nor under side, but are set on with the plane of them vertical; wherefore, they can never, never — let breeze pipe or zephyr breathe as it will — never can they whisper, quiver, sigh or sing, as do the beeches and the sycamores of old Rostrevor. Yes, all sights and sounds of nature are alien and outlandish — suggestive of the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Circle — save only the sparkle and the music of the streams. Well I know the voice of this eloquent river: it talks to me, and to the woods and rocks, in the same tongue and dialect wherein the Roe discoursed to me, a child; in its crystalline gush my heart and brain are bathed; and I hear, in its plaintive chime, all the blended voices of history and prophecy and poesy from the beginning. Not cooler or fresher was the Thracian Hebrus; not purer were Abana and Pharpar; not more ancient and venerable is Father Nilus. Before the quiet flow of the Egyptian river was yet disturbed by the jabber of priests of Meröe — before the dynasty was yet bred that quaffed the sacred wave of Choaspes, “the drink of none but kings” — ere its lordly namesake river, in Erin of the streams, reflected yet upon its bosom a Pillar Tower, or heard the chimes from its Seven Churches, this river was rushing through its lonely glen to the southern sea, was singing its mystic song to these primeval woods.
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“Oh! Sun-loved River 1 wherefore dost thou hum
Hum, hum, alway thy strange, deep, mystic song
Unto the rocks and strands? — for they are dumb
And answer nothing as thou flowest along.
Why singest so, all hours of night and day?
Ah I river! my best river! thou, I know, art seeking
Some land where souls have still the gift of speaking
With Nature in her own old wondrous way!”
I delight in poets who delight in rivers; and for this do I love that sweet singer, through whose inner ear and brain the gush of his native Aufidus for ever streamed and flashed — how some perennial brook of crystal glimmered for ever through all his day-dreams! how he yearned to marry his own immortality with the eternal murmuring hymn of that bright Blandusian fount! Wisely, too, and learnedly did Clarence Mangan discourse with the rivers, and attune his notes to their wondrous music. How gloriously he interprets the German Moerike and his melodious theme! —
“What on cold earth, is deep as thou?
Is aught? Love is as deep.
Love only is as deep:
Love lavisheth all, yet loseth, lacketh naught;
Like thee, too. Love can neither pause nor sleep.
“Roll on, thou loving river, thou! Lift up
Thy waves, those eyes bright with a riotous laughing!
Thou makest me immortal! I am quaffing
The wine of rapture from no earthly cup!
So, too, with Mueller; he delivers himself and you up to the entrancement of the Naiad: —
“There danceth adown the mountain,
The child of a lofty race:
A streamlet, fresh from its fountain,
Hies through the valley apace.
“Some fairy hath whispered, ‘Follow ‘
And 1 have obeyed her well:
I thread the blossomy hollow.
With my pilgrim stafl and shell.
“On, on, behold me straying,
And ever beside the stream,
As I list its murmurous pla3dng.
And mark how its wavelets gleam.
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“Can this be the path I intended?
Oh! Sorceress, what shall I say?
Thy dazzle and music blended,
Have wiled my reason away!
“No mortal sounds are winging
Their wonted way along;
Oh, no! some Naiad is singing
A flattering summer-song!
And loudlier doth she flatter
And loudlier, loudlier still”
But, behold! plump into the water, just under the bank, tumbles a Platypus, uncouth, amphibious quadruped, with broad duck-bill; and shrill from a neighbouring gum-tree yells the “laughing jackass” — a noisy bird so named by profane colonists.
We are in Australia, then! Knox has been sitting on the bank, musing with dreamy eyes on the passing waters: but now we awake, and see that the dusk is approaching, a dusk that will call forth stars which never glassed themselves in the other Shannon. So we mount for our “registered lodgings” in Bothwell, and reluctantly leave that most lovely glen.
Yes, in Australia, indeed! We overtake on our track homeward, a man and woman — the woman, a hideous and obscene-looking creature, with a brandy-bloated face, and a white satin bonnet, adorned with artificial flowers. She is a pass-holding servant, just discharged from some remote settler’s house, and she is going to Hobart Town in custody. The man is a convict constable: he carries a musket on his shoulder, and his blue frock is girt by a belt, on which hang and jingle a pair of handcuffs. He knows us, and touches his cap as we ride hastily past.
May 8th, 1851 — Bothwell. — For many months I have not jotted down a date or incident. Our life here has been uniform and dull, and our main object has been to kill thought by violent exercise on foot and on horseback. We still go to the lakes and meet with Meagher, and this is our chiefest pleasure; but O’Doherty has removed to Hobart Town, and has employment in his profession.
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To-morrow, I go, by permission of the gaolers, to Hobart Town also, to meet my wife and family, who are due by this time: but I have yet no information as to the ship they have sailed in, or whether Hobart Town is the port they are bound for. The moment they arrive, then back to the bocage of Bothwell! Quod exeat bene!
CHAPTER XVII
May 2ist, 1851 — Hobart Town. — An excursion yesterday to Brown’s River, with St. Kevin. He borrowed a horse for the occasion. I have here my own Fleur-de-lis (pretty chestnut mare, destined for my wife); so, after breakfast, I gave myself up implicitly into the hands of St. Kevin, and we sallied forth from the town in a southerly direction, by the Sandy Bay Road, leading along the shore of the estuary. On the right, mountains that form the roots of Mount Wellington; on the left, the broad blue Derwent. For some miles the road is studded with pretty villas, the country residences of some of the wealthy Hobartonians; and all these have luxurious gardens. Gardens, indeed, are a luxury to which this soil and climate afford all facilities and temptations. All the flowers that grow in English gardens, and many of those which must in England be protected by green-houses, thrive and flourish here with little care; and some of the ornamental flowering shrubs, for instance, the common hawthorne [sic] and sweet-briar, which have been brought from Europe by the colonists, blossom in Tasmania more richly than at home. There is now hardly a settler’s house without hedges of sweet-briar; and they are more uniformly and all over radiant, both summer and winter — in summer with roses, in winter with scarlet berries — than I ever saw hedges before. Besides the imported European flowers and shrubs, there are some very beautiful native trees, generally found in deep mountain valleys, which add much to the glory of the gardens; but the colonists usually seem to prefer surrounding their new houses with something that will remind them of the old; so that all over the country, round the cottages, instead of the gorgeous golden-flowered mimosa, you may see the more lowly, but not less golden gorse, called in the North of Ireland, whin.
No indigenous plant in all Van Diemen’s Land is identical with any European plant; even the grass is altogether different — much less green and succulent, but far more nutritive to cattle in
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proportion to its quantity. The best native grass is of a greyish-yellow colour, and grows in little, short, woolly tufts, which turn almost white at the top in summer; so that wherever one sees a field of the true emerald green, he may be sure it is artificial grass, grown originally from European seed. The native flowers are abundant, and many of them splendid, especially up in the lake country. One of them is superb, the Waratah; but it grows only on the very summits of some high and almost inaccessible mountains. The whole bush, however, is adorned with a wonderful variety of plants, like heaths (yet not the true erica), bearing purple, crimson, scarlet, white, or rose-coloured bells. The finest of them all has no bell or visible petals at all, but round scarlet berries, about the size of a pea, which cluster so thickly on it as nearly to hide its rich dark green leaves; and the savage rocks are sometimes found clothed all over with this imperial Tyrian mantle.
In our wanderings through the woods John Knox thinks he has discovered one European plant the common flax. Certainly in the marshy land, near Lake Sorel, we have plucked stalks of the veritable flax, with its blue flower and slender graceful stem, but shorter than Irish flax, which, however, may be imputed to the dryer climate. I do not believe this flax is indigenous. There are a thousand ways in which grains of flax-seed may have come out here, mixed with corn or grass seeds, and cattle have long been grazing, and even some oats were formerly grown,, at Lake Sorel,
The genial kindness of this climate towards all sorts of animal and vegetable life, is admirable to behold. Twenty years ago there was not a bee in the island. Some settler brought a hive; and now the land sings with them. It seems the flowers of the fragrant gum and mimosa furnish food for them. The Tasmanian honey is the best in the world; every settler’s garden has a long row of bee-hives (which, in fact, are nothing but old tea-boxes) ] and they need no care either in winter or summer. One man here, in Bothwell, advertised last year for sale three tons of honey, all produced in his own garden.
In this gracious southern air, too, all breeds of dogs grow larger and handsomer, in the second dog-generation. Of sheep-dogs there are immense numbers; and instead of the rough and shabby
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looking collie, the sheep-dog here is a large and handsome dog, with silky, glossy long hair. The dogs, also, as well as the horses, are more good-humoured than at home: young horses, though with quite as high spirit, have far less vice; and that this circumstance is due to climate there can be no doubt, for the same difference in temper is very observable in the human race of these parts. Native Tasmanians, both men and women, grow up frequently tall, straight, and handsome, with a mild expression of countenance, and manners always affable, gentle, and kindly. They have, however, the same languor that is said to characterise all the Creole races of America and the West Indies — that soft, luxurious, voluptuous languor which becomes the girls rather better than the men. On the whole, our species grows to a splendid perfection here; but the finest specimens of the genus are those who have been born in the northern hemisphere and who came hither children. They have both the European stamina and the southern culture in so matchless a clime, and the result is sometimes marvellous. A young lady there is, now in Hobart Town, born in France of English parents, and brought out here at three or four years of age, upon whom, after Europe had given her all it could, the southern stars must have rained their choicest, rarest influences. She is a most superb and imperial beauty, a beauty proud andpuissante, whose first overpowering glance would turn you pale, and stop your pulse for a beat or two. One loves to see how far Nature can go, how much Nature can do, giving her the most favourable conditions, materials, and influences she can ask, and letting her work her very best. This woman, I apprehend, is her chef-d’oeuvre — she will never beat this: yet it is praiseworthy to be always making the attempt, and she ought not to be discouraged — doubtless she will yet turn out pretty pieces of workmanship. In the meantime it is one of the fasti in any man’s life when his eyes have seen the most beautiful — and the first day of such a vision is a white day in his history.
But in this kind of rhapsody I must not forget that St. Kevin and I are now on horseback, on our way to Brown’s River. On we ride, along the skirts of the right-hand hills, or on near the strand of the left-hand river; the road sometimes crossing deep ravines, that bring some of Mount Wellington’s thousand rivulets
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trickling to the Derwent. The day is gloriously bright and warm, though early in winter; the trees glittering and shivering with all their polished leaves in the sun and wind; the parrots all awake, chirping, screaming, flashing in their ruby and emerald radiance from branch to branch. At six miles from Hobart Town, all the suburban boxes and their gardens have ceased and vanished; the metropolis of scoundreldom lies behind us; and so lonely are the forests on our right and the broad bay on our left, that St. Kevin thinks himself riding by the shore of Lake Sorel, or, peradventure, even dreams he wanders, once again.
By that lake whose gloomy shore,
Skylark never warbled o’er.
St. Kevin 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 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. The potency of those dark glances, darting like electricity through the dull massive planet, shooting through crust and centre, strikes him here, and flashes on his day-dream. Now we approach the brow of a deep glen, where trees of vast height wave their tops far beneath our feet: and the farther side of the glen is formed by a promontory that runs out into the bay, with steep and rocky sides worn into cliffs and caves — caves floored with silvery sand, shell-strewn, such as in European seas would have been consecrate of old to some Undine’s love — caves whither Ligea, if she had known the way, might have come to comb her hair; and over the soft swelling slope of the hill above, embowered so gracefully in trees, what building stands? Is that a temple crowning the promontory as the pillared portico crowns Simium? Or a villa, carrying you back to Baiae? Damnation! it is a convict “barrack.” And as we follow the winding of the road through that romantic glen, we meet parties of miserable wretches harnessed to gravel carts, and drawing the same under orders of an overseer. The men are dressed in piebald suits of yellow and grey, and with their hair close cropped, their close leathern caps, and hang-dog
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countenances, wear a most evil, rueful, and abominable aspect. They give us a vacant but impudent stare as we ride by. I wish you well, my poor fellows; but you ought all to have been hanged long ago!
The next hollow we come to is the valley of Brown’s River. I see little in it, not being in the humour. This is a favourite excursion for Hobart Town people when they plan a day’s amusement; so that, of course, it has a mean suburban air. The river itself is a very small stream; not so ample as our Bothwell Clyde; and the whole valley is precisely like every other valley in the country, save that the head of it, where the gorge is narrow, and loses itself at last in the gloomy mass of Mount Wellington, is on a grand scale. We walked all day on the sands and cliffs of the bay shore, dined at the hotel, and rode back to town.
May 23rd. — A letter from Adelaide, in South Australia. It is from my wife. They have arrived there (my whole household) in the ship Condor, from Liverpool, seven in number, including a servant. It seems they took passage to Melbourne, in Port Philip, whence there is communication twice a week with Van Diemen’s Land, and did not know, till after the ship was at sea, that she was to touch first at Adelaide, and discharge some cargo there; a business which will hold them a full month. My wife is uneasy and impatient, and announces to me that she will quit the Condor, and take passage in some of the small brigs or schooners plying either to Hobart Town or Launceston, so that she may now be at sea on this second voyage.
25th. — More news from Adelaide. A ship-captain found me out to-day at my lodging: told me he commanded the Maid of Erin, just arrived from Adelaide — that my family were to come on by his vessel, but thought they would not have sufficient accommodation in her — that, therefore, they had taken passage in a brigantine, bound for Launceston: and, said the captain, “if you intend to meet your lady on her arrival, you had better go to Launceston at once.” No more need be said. I take my seat in the night mail coach for Launceston — one hundred and twenty miles off.
Longford, June 9th. — Longford is a village on the South Esk, twelve miles from Launcetown. The brig that bears all my care
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has not yet arrived; and the weather has grown, for the last week, furiously tempestuous. Bass’s Straits are formidable in this sort of weather: so that wrecks and disasters are looked for. I am on a visit here with an old schoolfellow, a Mr. Pooler, formerly of Armagh, who is now an extensive merchant of Tasmania, and has at Longford the largest grain-stores in the island.
For one day and night I was in prison at Launceston, which fell out thus: — having got sudden information at Hobart Town that my family might be looked for at the north side of the island instead of the south, I went to an official person (the Deputy-Comptroller), who has charge of such matters, told him I must go at once, and was by him exhorted to lose no time. The formal documents authorising my change of place would be forwarded by him through the post, so that no delay need intervene at Hobart Town, nor any inconvenience happen to me at Launceston. I was obliged to the official person for his civility (because he might be uncivil if he liked), and hurried off without a minute’s delay; travelled all night; arrived at Launceston by nine next morning, and put up at the Cornwall Hotel; walked up the hill where stands the signal flag-staff, and awaited all day the reports of the signal-master. It was rainy and stormy; nothing came up the Tamar, which is a winding and dangerous estuary, forty-five miles long from Launceston to the sea. Next morning I bethought myself that I had better report my presence in Launceston to the police magistrate of the town; and accordingly proceeded to the police-office, which I found crowded by the town’s people getting police business transacted. I walked in; asked the clerk if the police magistrate of Launceston was present. “Yes, sir,” he said, pointing to a tall, elderly, and very ill-favoured person, who occupied the bench, and who now gazed at me with evident curiosity, as to what urgent business I could have, which might justify me in stopping his court-business. When he was pointed out, I said,” My name is John Mitchel. I have come here to tell you that I am now in Launceston, and that I stay at the Cornwall.”
Mr. Gunn seemed in consternation whenever I mentioned my name — because it was from Launceston, and from within his jurisdiction, that MacManus had happily escaped only a few weeks before. He asked me, with some agitation, what my errand was
[plate:] John Blake Dillon
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in Launceston. “To meet my Wife and family, now due, and expected at this port.” “Have you had permission to come here?” “Yes.” “I have had no notification of it.” “Can’t help that.” “Sir, I tell you I know nothing of your being permitted to come here.” “Sir,” I replied, “I did not come to discuss the matter with you, I came to tell you that I am John Mitchel, that I am in Launceston, and that I stay at the Cornwall Hotel.” With that I turned and left the office: but I knew very well I should hear more of the matter; for it was now clear to me that my polite friend in the Comptroller-General’s office must have forgotten to forward the needful paper to this old Gunn.
It befel as I expected. An hour after leaving the office I was walking with the aforesaid Mr. Pooler in Brisbane Street; when a man dressed in somewhat gentlemanly style came up, and said, “I believe, sir, you are Mr. Mitchel.”— “Yes,” — “Mr. Gunn has directed me to require your attendance in the police-office. I am the chief-constable of Launceston.”— “Am I in custody, then?” He bowed, and said he would show me the way. When we entered the police-office, Mr. Gunn was looking very formidable and determined. “Pray,” he said, “have you any written authority to be in Launceston?” — “No.”— “Then, Davis (the chief-constable), make out the examinations.”— “Now, sir,” he said to me, “I shall teach you to pay proper respect to a magistrate on the bench. When you came into this office, an hour ago, your deportment was exceedingly incorrect: it was haughty, sir; it was contemptuous, sir; it was insolent, sir. Davis, have you that examination ready?” I asked him what he was going to do with me. “Send you to jail, sir.”— “Very well, I suppose you have the power to do so; my behaviour may have been contemptuous; but I did not intend, whatever I may have felt, to let it appear in my manner ” — “Davis, read the examination.” The document was read. It bore that I, a prisoner, holding a “ticket-of-leave,” had come from my registered residence — namely, Bothwell, to Launceston, without a passport; and after two or three questions asked of the police, I was brought off by three constables and thrust into Launceston Jail. A special express messenger was at the same time despatched to Hobart Town, inquiring what was to be done with me.
The police magistrate, I suppose, could not have acted other
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wise; a want of papers and passports is certainly suspicious; and contemptuous behaviour irritating to the magisterial mind; at any rate, the affair was wholly indifferent to me but for one circumstance — my wife might arrive that very day; and our first meeting, after nearly three years’ separation, might be as oiu: parting had been, in a British dungeon. But for this chance I would have considered my imprisonment a wholesome and tonic mental medicine. There is a danger of us growing too soft, good-humoured, and balmy, in our present bush life, breathing an air so luxurious, and seeing the face of no present gaoler; therefore to hear the wards occasionally grating in a British lock I regard as a salutary stimulant, and think of taking a course of it once a year while I remain in captivity.
After spending twenty-four hours in jail, however, during which time the good-natured gaoler, knowing how the case stood, gave me very considerate usage, I was released. The official person in Hobart Town had only missed a post, or, I believe, two posts, — for the birthday gala was overwhelming — and then had sent forward the needful documents.
When I returned to my hotel, I found that my friend Mr. Pooler had, without my knowledge, obtained leave for me to visit him at Longford; and accordingly here I am for the last week.
When the circumstances of my arrest came to be known, some of the newspapers commented severely on the harshness of the treatment used towards me; and particularly the Colonial Times, a well-conducted Hobart Town paper, which warmly urged that meetings should be held, and petitions adopted by all the colonists, both of Van Diemen’s Land and Australia, praying for the “pardon” of all those gentlemen known as the “Irish State Prisoners.” When I saw the article this morning, I immediately wrote a short letter to the Times, commencing thus — I suppose it will be accounted another act of “contempt” — (To the Editor of the “Colonial Times.”)
Launceston, 9th June, 1851.
Sir, — I have just seen a paragraph in your journal, commenting on the short interruption of my “comparative liberty” which has occurred at this place. For the kind feeling which prompted your remarks, accept my thanks; but as to your suggestion that the inhabitants of the Australian colonies should petition the Queen of England to pardon the Irish State prisoners, I must take the “comparative liberty” of requesting, in case
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of such a petition being made, that my name may be excepted from the prayer of it. I have no idea of begging pardon, or of permitting any one to beg pardon for me, if I can help it. In arresting me, I presume the worthy police-magistrate did no more than his duty — perhaps even less than his duty. I do not, indeed, know what may be the duties of British official persons; and, not having the honour to be a British subject, do not study to inform myself; but I am inclined to conjecture that it was his duty, on this occasion, to put me in chains. My misconduct, it seems, was very glaring — making such haste to come to Launceston, that I arrived here before the official notification of my journey had reached Mr. Gunn’s hands. If he erred in this matter, through excessive lenity and urbanity, I trust it will not be remembered to his hurt. etc.
l8th. — After nine days more, spent uneasily in waiting at Longford, I had a letter from St. Kevin to-day informing me that the brig Union had arrived in Hobart Town, carrying my expected consignment, all well. Have written to ensure their meeting me at Greenponds, being the point of the public coach road nearest to Bothwell, I set off for Greenponds by tomorrow night’s coach.
20th. — Greenponds. — To-day I met my wife and family once more. These things cannot be described. To-morrow morning we set off through the woods for Bothwell.
21st. — We made a successful journey this day, though the weather is snowy and rainy. I hired a spring-cart for the rest of the household, and myself rode Fleur-de-lis, who has been waiting for this journey for the last three weeks at Greenponds. As the cottage where John Knox and I have been living for ten months back, is too small for us, is almost unfurnished, and lies six miles from the township, we have betaken ourselves for the present to the comfortable hotel of Mrs. Beech — incomparable cook of kangaroo — in the village itself. Knox was waiting for us; and we spent such an evening as seldom falls to the lot of captives.
Bothwell, after six weeks’ absence, has a wonderfully homelike aspect to me, returning to it now with all these materials and appliances of home. Methinks I shall have something like a fireside again. Not on any consideration would I go now to take up my abode in any other district of the island: here we have pure air, glorious forests, lovely rivers, a thinly-peopled pastoral country, and kind friends. To-morrow I commence my research for house and farm wherein to set up my ticket-of-leave penates.
CHAPTER XVIII
August 26th, 1851 — Nant Cottage, Bothwell. — Here we are established, at last, on a farm of two hundred acres, nearly three miles from the village, situated on the Clyde, which runs along the eastern end of the land. From the windows we command a noble yiew of the valley stretching about three miles northward to the base of Quoin Hill. The land is capital pasture: and I am stocking it with sheep and cattle. Four hours every day are devoted to the boys’ lessons; then riding, or roaming the woods with the dogs.
We set out, my wife and myself, to visit Smith O’Brien, who has been staying some months at Avoca, a district in the mountains in the north-east. He accepted the “comparative liberty” almost a year ago (of course giving his parole at the same time), and resided first at New Norfolk; but wanting some occupation, he removed to the house of Dr. Brock, a settler at Avoca, and has undertaken the instruction of his sons. We have not seen him for three years and a half; and from Meagher’s description, I fear we shall find him much altered.
In this place I may narrate one of Sir William Denison’s acts of vigour. When Mr. O’Brien was about to leave New Norfolk for Avoca, he wrote to Martin and me about a fortnight before, to say that as Bothwell and Lake Sorel lay both straight in his way, and as this was, in fact, the shortest road to his destination, although there are here no regular roads or public conveyances, he would send his trunk round by the mail-coach, and would himself make his way to us at Bothwell, spend one or two days here, then ride up to the lakes with us to visit Meagher, who would bring him on from thence to Campbelltown, which is in Meagher’s district, and from whence he could easily get across the country to Avoca. None of us saw any objection, or foresaw any interference. On a former occasion, MacManus, having the same journey to make, had taken the same road without calling forth any remark. And, in fact, the real criminals, in passing from
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one part of the island to another, habitually select their own route and take their own time.
Of course, we were both delighted with the prospect of seeing him, even for a day or two, and mentioned that we expected this visit to our acquaintances at Bothwell, who seemed to look forward to it with almost as much pleasure as ourselves. We were to meet O’Brien at Hamilton (twenty miles south of Bothwell), and to lead a spare horse for him to ride up. But it came to the ears of our head gaoler: and, three days before our appointed meeting, the police magistrate at New Norfolk received an official order to be communicated “to the prisoner named in the margin” (O’Brien), giving him peremptory command — that on leaving New Norfolk to proceed to Avoca, he should quit his then present residence on the same day on which he should give notice of his removed at the police-office; that then he should repair to Bridgewater, the nearest point at which the coach-road from Hobart Town passed by his district; thence proceed upon his journey by that coach-road, diverging neither to the right hand nor to the left — and that he was “not to loiter by the way.” The effect was, to compel him to take a circuitous route instead of a straight one; and all to prevent our meeting with our friend. This was the meanest piece of malignity of which the old gaoler had yet been guilty, and it proves that he has the soul of a turnkey.
Since my family came out, however, I have been distinguished by special favour, and almost put on the footing of the real convicts holding tickets-of-leave — by being permitted to go about from one district to another on taking out a “pass” for that purpose (describing my height, the colour of my eyes, &c.), which I am to exhibit at the police office of any district I may visit. It may be supposed that I do not avail myself often of this handsome privilege. But on the present occasion, for the sake of making this excursion to Avoca, I have regularly taken out the passport.
Yesterday, I saw in one of the Van Diemen’s Land papers, an extract from some London periodical, in which, as usual, great credit is given to the “Government” for their indulgence and clemency to the Irish prisoners. Now, the truth is, the exceptions which are made in our case to the ordinary treatment of real convicts, are all exceptions against us. There are three or four thou-
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sand ticket-of-leave-holders on the island, who may all live how and where they please; and are only required to report themselves twice a year, not personally. We, on the contrary, are restricted in all our movements, and required to report ourselves personally once a month in our respective police-offices. And, in addition to all this irritating surveillance, they exact our parole; under the false pretence, I presume, that in return for this guarantee, they forbear to set us to work, and to hire us out to settlers, like assigned servants. This, I say, is false. We would all be glad to be placed to-morrow on the footing of the genuine convicts, because we would then escape instantly; and the governor knows that every colonist on the island would aid us to do so. The alternative is not, parole or work — but parole or death in a dungeon — parole, or such custody as I endured at Bermuda, and O’Brien at Port Arthur. *
This morning we set off, my wife and I, on horseback: we had twenty-four miles to ride through the woods to Oatlands, where we were to take the coach. The horses. Tricolor and Fleur-de-lis, were in high order, and devoured the bush. The spring day has been most lovely, and the mimosa is just bursting into bloom, loading the warm air with a rich fragrance, which a European joyfully recognises at once as a well-remembered perfume. It is precisely the fragrance of the Queen of the Meadows, “spilling her spikenard.” At about ten miles’ distance, we descend into a deep valley, and water our horses in the Jordan. Here, as it is the only practicable pass, in this direction, between Bothwell and Oatlands, stands a police station. Two constables lounge before the door as we pass, and, as usual, the sight of them makes us feel once more that the whole wide and glorious forest is, after all, but an umbrageous and highly-perfumed dungeon.
* It is with reluctance I publish these passages of my Journal, describing the exceptional rigours of our captivity. But I find that, even yet, English newspapers speak of us as having been the objects of “clemency” and indulgence; and there is no harm in letting the facts be known. If the British Government had shown us “indulgence and clemency,” I should despise it, inasmuch as the thing we sought was not a mild execution of our sentence, but a real trial before our countrymen — was, in short, not “clemency,” but justice. This, I think, was not unreasonable to demand at the hands of a Government which professed to be administering and vindicating law. But, inasmuch as there was no trial at all, and the execution of the false sentence was more atrociously rigorous than any of their real criminals undergo, what is to be thought of this British cant about indulgence?
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Climbing the hill on the other side of the Jordan valley, we are once more in the wild bush; and in due time arrive at Oatlands Hotel. At one o’clock up comes the Hobart Town and Launceston day coach, which, in all its appointments, is precisely like what an English stage-coach was before the railroads had swallowed them all up. The road is excellent, the horses good. The coachman and guard (prisoners, no doubt) are, in manners, dress, and behaviour, as like untransported English guards and coachmen as it is possible to conceive. The wayside inns we passed are thoroughly British; even, I regret to say, to the very brandy they sell therein. The passengers all speak with an English accent; the guard, on entering a village, performs upon his bugle the last popular negro melody. It is hateful to me, when some urgent occasion requires me to come down from our remote pastoral district of Bothwell, to mingle in the unclean stream of travellers by this public road. Bothwell, being bounded on the west and north by unsubdued forests and desolate mountains, is on the way nowhither; and in its rural quietude one can sometimes forget, for a little while, the horrors of this dreadful life. Every sight and sound that strikes eye or ear on this mail road, reminds me that I am in a small misshapen, transported, bastard England; and the legitimate England itself is not so dear to me that I can love the convict copy.
We rested for the night at the principal hotel in Campbelltown, a very elegant house, and splendidly furnished, which would be a credit to Bray or Kingstown. From hence’ we are to take a public conveyance the day after tomorrow to Avoca, where Mr. O’Brien is to meet us.
An election is approaching; the first election of representatives under the new Constitution, granting to the colony a legislature — one-third nominees of the crown, and two-thirds elected by the people. Of course there is great excitement; everybody being delighted to have another opportunity for mimicry of the “old country.” Walls covered with placarded addresses to the independent electors; rosettes of blue ribbon, or else of red, fixed to the ears of coach-horses, and in the bar windows of inns; flags flying at the tops of high poles, expressive of the political predilections of those who sell bad spirits or brew nauseous beer under the said flags; in short, all the mechanical helps and
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appliances for creating mobs — a thing somewhat difficult in so sparse a population — and for promoting large consumption of drink — a thing not so difficult. There is but one political question now existing — the transportation system. Most of the decent colonists, having families growing up, and feeling the evil effects of the moral and social atmosphere that surrounds them, and the ignominy of having no country but a penal colony, no servants, no labourers, few neighbours even, who are not men fairly due to the gallows — ardently desire to use this new Constitution, such as it is, to make vigorous protest against the continuance of the penal system. The late discovery of gold mines in Australia, which tempts multitudes of our Tasmanian ruffians over the strait, interests the colony of Port Philip very vehemently in the same cause; and an “Australasian League” has been formed, embracing the best colonists of New South Wales, Port Philip, South Australia, Van Diemen’s Land, and New Zealand; with their banner of five stars on a blue ground; with large funds, able writers at the press, and almost all the talent of the Southern hemisphere enlisted on their side. This starred banner now flies from many a mast-head in the inter-colonial traffic, and floats over all anti-transportation platforms in Van Diemen’s Land. On the other side, the governor at Hobart Town, and his large gang of highly-paid officials, having a deep interest in the continuance of probation stations, chain-gangs, and the like, are using all the resources of patronage, corruption, and intimidation in their power to get up some presentable body of public opinion in their favour, but without brilliant success. The governor, however, has his “organ,” too, the Hobart Town Advertiser, the proprietor of it being, I am ashamed to say, an Irishman, and its principal writer (the head scribbler, indeed, of the party) being no other than Balfe, one of the Government informers of ‘48, once an ultra-revolutionary member of the Irish Confederation, but now, in reward for some unnameable service, Deputy Assistant Comptroller of Convicts, and Justice of the Peace, with a handsome salary and large grant of land.
The policy on which the governor and his party rely is almost too base and diabolical for belief. It is to represent the anti-transportation movement as a thing hostile to the prisoner-population and their descendants, instead of being, as it is, the first
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step towards gradual obliteration of the social distinctions (which must for ever subsist while the country is an actual jail), and the amalgamation, within a generation or two, of all the people; so would the stream of this colonial life begin to run clear; the pure air of a new country, and the blessed influence of our kindly mother earth — for I have strong belief in the potency of these material agencies upon human life — would absorb the foul elements, and infuse new and fresh ones, till men might safely forget the abominable fountain from whence the current flowed at first. Sir William Denison, conscientiously working for his “Government,” and for his gaoler-salary (poor devil!) is trying, through every agency at his command, to get up a convict esprit du corps: for this purpose, veritable Government mobs of convicts, organised by convict officials, have actually begun to threaten the peace di Hobart Town. The Advertiser, and another newspaper (conducted by another Irishman) are their organs. Balfe is their literary Coryphoeus: a miscreant called Gray, son to the Monaghan murderer of that name, and himself transported for forgery and subornation of perjury, is their mob-leader. They are taught to call themselves “the people,” to speak of themselves as a “class of society,” and when duly excited by drink and nonsense exaggerating the natural brutality of their manners, and emboldened by the idea that they are “Government-men,” and under the special protection of his Excellency, these fellows are not a little dangerous to honest people.
Surely, it is no wonder that the decent, free colonists should desire to be rid of the system which breeds this misrule. Some of them, indeed, for a quiet life, are leaving the country either for Port Philip or England; but most of the residents seem determined to put the thing down, and to nm all risks and make all sacrifices to do it. The main agency on which the colonists rely is, of course, the approaching election, at which they hope to return a pledged anti-transportationist for every constituency.
I am reminded of all these things to-day by the sight of a sort of procession passing our hotel windows, to escort the Government candidate, or transportation candidate, for the district, a Mr. Allison, to the village of Ross, where a meeting of his supporters comes off this day. One carriage, a drag with four horses, several spring-carts, and gigs, make up the cortege; and there is much
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display of red ribbon and British convict enthusiasm. Tomorrow the opposite, or country party, are to meet at Avoca, so that we shall have an opportunity of witnessing their proceedings. Their candidate is Mr. Kermode, son of one of the richest settlers of the place, a man of great zeal and earnestness in the cause, therefore, very obnoxious to the government; and the election for Campbelltown district is accounted the most critical in the colony.
October 15th — Avoca. — We came to-day, in a spring-cart twenty-one miles, through the wild valley of the South Esk, bounded on the north side by a range of mountains overtopped by the tremendous precipices of Ben Lomond, a mountain five thousand feet high, and therefore much grander than its Scottish godfather. At Avoca itself, the South Esk is joined by the St. Paul’s River, and near the angle of their junction rises “St. Paul’s Dome,” a noble round-topped mountain, belted with magnificent timber. These valleys and mountains remind me more of scenery in Donegal or Down than any other part of Van Diemen’s Land has done. Our fellow-passengers were going to the Avoca meeting; and a gentleman rode alongside with a large bundle strapped before him on the saddle, which on close survey I discovered to be the five-starred flag of the League, destined to wave that day over the independent electors of Avoca.
We alighted at a decent hotel, and in a few minutes a gentleman passed the window, whom, after nearly four years, we had some difficulty in at first recognising for William Smith O’Brien. We met him at the door as he entered; and our greeting was silent, but warm and cordial, although the last of our intercourse in Ireland had been somewhat distant. He seems evidently sinking in health; his form is hardly so erect, nor his step so stately; his hair is more grizzled, and his face bears traces of pain and passion. It is sad to look upon this noblest of Irishmen, thrust in here among the off-scourings of England’s gaols, with his home desolated, and his hopes ruined, and his defeated life falling into the sere and yellow leaf. He is fifty years of age, yet has all the high and intense pleasure of youth in these majestic hills and woods, softened, indeed, and made pensive by sorrow, and haunted by the ghosts of buried hopes. He is a rare and noble
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sight to see: a man who cannot be crushed, bowed, or broken; who can stand firm on his own feet against all the tumult and tempest of this ruffianly world, with his bold brow fronting the sun like any other Titan, son of Coelus and Terra; anchored immovably upon his own brave heart within; his clear eye and soul open as ever to all the melodies and splendours of earth and heaven, and calmly waiting for the Angel Death.
“For near him lies his grave, hidden from view
Not by the flowers of Youth, but by the snows
Of Age.”
We were at breakfast when he came in; and that over, he proposed a walk, that he might lead us up the glen of the South Esk. We wandered several hours, talking of ‘48. He gave me a more minute account than I had before heard of his own movements in Tipperary; and attributed his failure, in great part, to the behaviour (what shall I call it? — the cowardice, the treachery, or the mere priestliness) of the priests. Priests hovered round him everywhere; and, on two or three occasions, when the people seemed to be gathering in force, they came whispering round, and melted off the crowd like a silent thaw. He described to me old grey-haired men coming up to him with tears streaming down their faces, telling him they would follow him so gladly to the world’. s end — that they had long been praying for that day — and God knows it was not life they valued: but there was his reverence, and he said that if they shed blood they would lose their immortal souls; and what could they do? God help them, where could they turn? and on their knees they entreated him to forgive them for deserting him. So they slunk home to take care of their paltry old souls, and wait for the sheriff’s bailiff to hunt them into the poor-house. On the whole, O’Brien accepts defeat — takes desertion or backwardness of the people, and the verdict of the Clonmel jury, such as it was, for a final pronouncement against armed resistance; and therefore regards the cause as lost utterly, and the history of Ireland, as a nation, closed and sealed for ever. So do not I.
He is well aware that he would be released upon making ever so trifling a submission; and distinct intimations to that effect have reached him indirectly, through members of his own family.
‘He is too proud for this; and cannot endure the thought of
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begging pardon; yet, with his views of the meaning and moral of his failure, why not? If I could bring myself to believe, for one minute, that the country had really pronounced against us and condemned our intended rebellion, and moreover that I had been tried by my countrymen and afterwards found guilty of that attempt — that is to say, if I believed Queen Victoria to be really the sovereign of Ireland and not a foreign tyrant, I would certainly beg her pardon. At least, I at present think I should.
Then he related to me the whole story of his attempted escape from Maria Island. It seems he was allowed to walk over the island attended by an armed constable; and sometimes went to a distance of five or six miles from the station. When his friends in Hobart Town had bargained for the vessel, a small schooner, they contrived very secretly to communicate to him what they had done, and to let him know that a vessel would appear off a certain point of the island about a certain time, and would send a boat ashore, leaving it to him to elude or overpower his keeper, so as to be at liberty to jump into the boat, and push off. Delays occurred at Hobart Town; and the poor prisoner walked daily for several weeks to the same point, straining his eager eyes to the southern horizon. He did not know that, in the meantime, Ellis, the skipper of that schooner, had gone to the Government House, and there had sold him for certain moneys — that the gaolers on Maria Island itself were in full possession of the whole plot; and that every step of his daily walk was duly watched and taken note of.
At last, as he wandered on the shore, and had almost given up all hope of the schooner, the schooner hove in sight. To give time for her approach he walked into the woods for a space, that he might not alarm his guardian constable by his attention to . er movements. Again he sauntered down towards the point, with apparent carelessness, but a beating heart. San Francisco was to be his first destination; and beyond that golden gate lay the great world, and home and children, and an honourable life. The boat was coming, manned by three men; and he stepped proudly and resolutely to meet them on the shore. To be sure there was, somewhere behind him, one miserable constable, with his miserable musket; but he had
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no doubt of being able to dispose of that difficulty, with the assistance of his allies the boatmen.
The boat could not get quite close to the beach, because they had run her into a kind of cove where the water was calm and encumbered with large tangled weeds. O’Brien, when he reached the beach, plunged into the water to prevent delay, and struggled through the thick matted sea-weed to the boat. The water was deeper than he expected, and when he came to the boat he needed the aid of the boatmen to climb over the gunwale. Instead of giving him this aid the rascals allowed him to flounder there, and kept looking to the shore, where the constable had by this time appeared with his musket. The moment he showed himself, the three boatmen cried out together, “We surrender!” and invited him on board; where he instantly took up a hatchet, no doubt provided hy the ship for that purpose, and stove the boat.
O’Brien saw he was betrayed, and, on being ordered to move along with the constable and boatmen towards the station, he refused to stir, hoping, in fact, by his resistance, to provoke the constable to shoot him. However, the three boatmen seized on him, and lifted him up from the ground, and carried him where-ever [sic] the constable ordered. His custody was thereafter made more rigorous; and he was shortly removed from Maria Island to Port Arthur Station.*
So conversing we returned towards our hotel. A large black snake, the first I have seen this summer, lay upon our path; and my wife would probably have walked over it, but that O’Brien, who saw it first, pushed her back, and jumped forward to kill the snake with a staff. It glided away, however, as they will always do if they can, amongst some dense tufts of iris, and we could not find it.
Oct. 16th. — This morning we were to part. Mr. O’Brien had fourteen miles to walk up the St. Paul’s Valley; and asked us
* Ellis, the captain of the schooner, was some months after, seized at San Francisco by Mr. MacManus and others, brought by night out of his ship and carried into the country to undergo his trial under a tree, whereupon, if found guilty, he was destined to swing. MacManus set out his indictment, and it proves how much Judge Lynch’s method of administering justice in those early days of California excelled anything we know of law or justice in Ireland — that Ellis, for want of sufficient and satisfactory evidence then producible, was acquitted by that midnight court under that convenient tree.
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to go with him about two miles that he might show us a beautifully-situated cottage and farm, on the St. Paul’s River, which he advised me to rent; for I may now live in any district I please, as independently as any ticket-of-leave rick-burner in the land.
We sauntered and lingered as long as we could in that beauteous valley. At last it was necessary for us to part, he on his way to Dr. Brock’s residence, where he must give certain lessons this evening; we, back to Avoca, to take the public spring waggon for Campbelltown. We stood and watched him long, as he walked up the valley on his lonely way; and I think I have seen few sadder and few prouder sights. Oh! Nice, Queen of Carthage! pour thou upon that haughty head all the vials of thy pitiful revenge; heap on that high heart all the ignominy that can be imagined, invented, or created by thee — and that head bows not, that heart breaks not, blenches not. Of honour and dishonour, thou, O Queen! art not the arbiter or judge; and the Parliament, platform, pulpit, press, and public of thy mighty people, know nothing about the same.
We turned slowly away — I, with a profound curse, my wife with a tear or two, and came back to Avoca. To-morrow we start for Bothwell; and are to take Lake Sore! on our way, visiting Meagher’s fairy cottage
CHAPTER XIX
October 16th. — Back to-day to the Campbelltown Hotel, where we are to spend the night.
17th. — This morning we took a conveyance, a sort of spring-cart, and drove sixteen miles through the valley of the Macquarie River to the Sugar-loaf; where dwells a worthy Irish family, emigrants of thirty-two years ago from the county Cork. Their name is Connell. We had promised to visit them on our way back from Avoca; and Mr. Connell had kindly sent for our horses to Oatlands, and has them ready for our ride to-morrow up to the lakes. Mr. Connell and his wife have had severe hardships in their early days of settlement — a wild forest to tame and convert into green fields — wilder black natives, to keep watch and ward against — and wildest convict bushrangers to fight sometimes in their own house. Mrs. Connell is a thorough Celtic Irishwoman — has the Munster accent as fresh as if she had left Cork last year, and is, in short, as genuine an Irish Vanithee, or “Woman of the House,” as you will find in Ireland at this day — perhaps more so; for Carthaginian “civilisation” has been closer and more deadly in its embrace amongst the valleys of Munster, than it could be amongst the wilds of the Sugar-loaf forests. Most of their laborious toil and struggle is over; their farm smiles with green cornfields and their sheep whiten the pastures; their banks are well furnished with bees, and Mrs. Council’s mead is seductive; the black Tasmanians have all disappeared before convict civilisation; and even the bushrangers are not “out” so often these late years. Still it is needful that every lonely house should be well supplied with arms: and not many years have gone by since Mrs. Connell performed, against these marauders, an achievement memorable in colonial story. An armed party of four or five men had taken possession of the house in the absence of her husband. Two of them were stationed outside; one in the house kept his gun pointed at the family, while the fourth ruffian robbed the premises. Under pretext of
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pointing out some valuables which the robber wanted, Mrs. Connell induced him to go into a closet upstairs — locked him up there, slipped down hastily, and entered the room where the man on guard stood — pinioned him round the arms from behind with a grip like death — then, with the help of the children, disarmed and tied him, and immediately securing the doors, began firing out upon the two rascals in the yard: they returned two or three shots, and decamped, leaving their comrades in the hands of Mrs. Connell; they were hanged of course; and the family of the Sugar-loaf (according to the usage of that period), had an additional grant of land allowed them for the exploit.
Oct. 18th. — Mounted our horses and rode straight towards a gloomy gorge of the “Western Tier,” as the colonists name the great ridge of mountains that run north and south through Van Diemen’s Land: passed some handsome houses of settlers on the plain; and at eight miles from the Sugar-loaf found ourselves among the mountains. Our guide, young Connell, now left us; and we pursued our way up a rude track which climbs amongst rocks and huge trees. The mimosa soon disappeared; shortly after the white and blue gum; and at a thousand feet above the plain we found ourselves amongst lofty, straight, and gloomy” stringy-bark “trees, a species which does not shed its bark like the other Eucalypti, and whose wood is very hard, heavy, straight-grained and durable, so that it is much used in building and fencing.
We still ascended, the mountain becoming wilder and steeper at every mile, until we were full two thousand feet above the plain of Ross. Here an opening among the trees gave usi a view over the low country we had left, wide, arid, and parched in aspect, with ridge after ridge of rugged-looking wooded hills stretching far towards the Pacific eastwards. High and grim, to the northeast, towered the vast Ben Lomond; and we could trace in the blue distance that valley of St. Paul’s, where we had left O’Brien wandering on his lonely way. We were now almost on the ridge where our track crossed the summit of the western range; we had dismounted, and I was leading the horses up the remaining steep acclivity, when we suddenly saw a man on the track above us; he had a gun in his hand, on his head a cabbage-tree hat.
[plate:] Thomas Devin Reilly
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and at his feet an enormous dog. When he observed us, he sung out “Coo-ee!” the cry with which people in the bush make themselves heard at a distance. “Coo-ee!” I shouted in reply; when down came bounding dog and man together. The man was Meagher, who had walked four miles from his cottage to meet us! the dog was Brian, a noble shaggy greyhound, that belonged to MacManus, but of which Meagher had now the charge.
We continued our ascent merrily, and soon knew — though the forest was thick all round us — that we had reached the mountain-top by the fresh breeze that blew upon our brows from the other side.
And now, how shall I describe the wondrous scene that breaks upon us here — a sight to be seen only in Tasmania, a land where not only the native productions of the country, but the very features of nature herself, seem formed on a pattern the reverse of every model, form, and law on which the structure of the rest of the globe is put together: a land where the mountain-tops are vast lakes, where the trees strip off bark instead of leaves, and where the cherry-stones grow on the outside of the cherries?
After climbing full two thousand feet, we stand at one moment on the brink of the steep mountain, and behold the plain of Ross far below; the next minute, instead of commencing our descent into a valley on the other side, we are on the edge of a great lake, stretching at least seven miles to the opposite shore, held in here by the mere summits of the mountain range, and brimming to the very lips of the cup or crater that contains it. A cutting of twenty-five feet in depth would, at this point, send its water plunging over the mountain to form a new river in the plains of Ross. At another part of its shore, to the north-west, a similar canal would drain it into the lake river which flows along the foot of the mountains on that side. As it is, the only outlet is through Lake Crescent and the Clyde; and so it comes to fertilise the vale of Bothwell, and bathe the roots of our trees at Nant Cottage.
We pass the Dog’s Head promontory, and enter a rough winding path cut among the trees, which brings us to a quiet bay, or deep curve of the lake, at the head of which, facing one of the most
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glorious scenes of fairy-land, with the clear waters rippling at its feet, and a dense forest around and behind it, stands our friend’s quiet cottage. A little wooden jetty runs out some yards into the lake; and at anchor, near the end of the jetty, lies the little Speranza, a new boat built at Hobart Town, and hauled up here, through Bothwell, a distance of seventy-five miles, by six bullocks.
On the veranda we are welcomed by the lady of this sylvan hermitage, give our horses to Tom Egan to be taken care of, and spend a pleasant hour, till dinner-time, sauntering on the lake sfiore. After dinner, a sail is proposed. Jack is summoned, an old sailor kept here by Meagher to navigate the boat: the stern-sheets are spread with of possum-skin rugs and shawls; the American flag is run up, and we all sally forth, intending to visit the island, and see how the oats and potatoes are thriving. For Meagher means to be a great farmer also; and has kept a man on the island several months, ploughing, planting, and sowing. The afternoon, however, proves rough; the wind is too much ahead, and, when a mile or two from the shore, we give up the trip to the island, and put the boat about. She stoops, almost gunwale under, and goes flying and staggering home. The afternoon had become raw; and we enjoyed the sight of the woodfire illuminating the little crimson parlour and the gaily bound books that loaded the shelves. Pleasant evening, of course; except when we spoke of Ireland and the miserable debris of her puny agitators, who are fast making the name of Irishman a word of reproach all the world over.
We talked much, however, of the Van Diemen’s Land election, and of the Australasian League, wherein I find Meagher takes considerable interest. We both sympathise very heartily with the effort of the decent colonists to throw off the curse and shame of convictism — not that the change, indeed, would at all affect us, Irish exiles, who would be quite sure to be kept safe at all events, but because all our worthy friends here feel so great and so just a concern about the question, for the sake of the land they have adopted for their home, and their children’s inheritance. Our interest in the matter is also much heightened (at least mine is) by the inevitable satisfaction which I needs must feel at every difficulty, every humiliation, of the Carthaginian government. For
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this I enjoyed the Cape of Good Hope rebellion; for this I delight in the fact that these colonists are growing accustomed to regard Downing Street as a den of conspirators and treacherous enemies, accustomed to look for nothing but falsehood and insolence from that quarter; for this I mean to publish shortly an account of the anti-convict resistance at the Cape of Good Hope, from materials collected on the spot. The Colonial Times will be sure to print it for me in consecutive numbers to any length I please. *
Meagher, also, has not been idle in this good cause; nor is his influence small at Ross and Campbelltown. I took up at Avoca Hotel the “Address” to the electors of that district, printed in large placards, and brought down here by Mr. Kermode to be posted and distributed. A pile of them was lying on the table while the candidate addressed his supporters. An expression caught my eye that led me to look further — the sharp pen of the hermit of the lake pointed every sentence: in every line I recognised the “fine touch of his claw.”
19th. — Tom Egan brought our horses along the shore as far as Cooper’s hut, and we had a delightful sail to various points of the lake. The air up in these regions seems even purer and more elastic than in other parts of the island, the verdure brighter, the foliage richer; and as we float here at our ease, we are willing to believe that no lake on earth is more beauteous than Sorel. Not so berhymed as Windermere is this Antarctic lake; neither does the cockney tourist infest its waters, as he infests Loch Lomond or Killarney; not so famous in story as Regillus or Thrasymene; in literature, as Como or Geneva, is our lake of the Southern woods. It flows not into its sister Lake Crescent with so grand a rush as Erie flings herself upon Ontario; neither do its echoes ring with a weird minstrelsy, as ring, and will ring for ever, the mountain echoes of Loch Katrine and Loch Achray. What is worse, there is no fish: not a trout, red or speckled, not a perch, pike, or salmon. But, en revanche, see the unbroken continent of mighty forest that clasps us round here. On the north frowns
* Mitchel carried out this intention, and published the portions of his Journal dealing with the Cape in the Colonial Times. It stimulated the successful resistance of the decent Tasmanian Colonists to the continued use of that country as a British convict depot. This was the first occasion of any publication of the “Jail Journal”.
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the peak called “Cradle Mountain,” with its grey precipices rising out of the rich foliage — one peak merely of the Great Western tier, rising not more than a thousand feet from the lake, but almost four thousand feet above the sea. Opposite, and farther off beyond the Crescent Lake, rises the grand Table Mountain. No signs of human life anywhere. No villas of Elizabethan, or Gothic, or of Grecian structure crown select building-sites along the shore. No boats carry parasolled picnic parties, under direction of professional guides, to the admitted points of attraction, and back at evening to the big balconied hotel, where dinner has been ordered at four o’clock. All along that wild sweep of the northern shore, there is a savage and utterly trackless wood, through which St. Kevin and the rest of our company once made our way on horseback, at much risk of life and limb; sometimes plunging through lake, and again leaping over prostrate trees, or pushing by main force through thickets of scrub, that almost dragged us from our saddles. One slender curl of smoke only we can see all round the shore — it is from a hut on the north-west, six miles off across the lake, where a solitary shepherd predominates over a flock that picks up its summer pasture in those parts.
Why should not Lake Sorel also be famous. Where gleams and ripples purer, glassier water, mirroring a brighter sky Where does the wild duck find securer nest than under thy tea-tree fringe, O Lake of the south! And the snow-white swan, that “On St. Mary’s Lake floats double, swan and shadow” — does he float more placidly, or fling on the waters a more graceful reflection from his stately neck, than thou, jet black, proud-crested swan of the antarctic forest waters? Some sweet singer shall berh5mie thee yet, beautiful lake of the woods. To quoque fontium eris nobilium. Haunted art thou now by native devils only; and pass-holding shepherds whistle nigger melodies in the balmy air: but spirits of the great and good who are yet to be bred in this southern hemisphere shall hover over thy wooded promontories in the years to come — every bay will have its romance (for the blood of man is still red, and pride and passion will yet make it burn and tingle until time shall be no more), and the glancing of thy sun-lit, moon-beloved ripples shall flash through the dreams of poets yet unborn,
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We near the Bothwell side of the lake: we drop into the cove where stands the lowly log-built hut of Cooper, and the high sun warns us that it is time to begin our journey homeward. But I never leave the lakes without regret, and never visit them without wistfully marking out, in every green nook and sheltered bay we pass by, on the Bothwell shore, sites for my own hermitage of gum-tree logs, which, in fact, John Knox and I had often been on the very point of building. But Bothwell village seems to be our predestined home or dungeon, while we tarry in these realms of Hades.
One charm of the lake country is its elevation; high above all the odious stations, and townships, and the whole world of convictism and scoundreldom, we find ourselves, as we float on these aerial waters amongst the very mountain peaks, two thousand feet nearer to the stars than the mob of gaolers and prisoners that welter and wither below. So are we among them, but not of them. We are in a higher atmospheric stratum; and the air we breathe, untainted by lungs of lags, is wafted to us from the wine-dark Indian Ocean, or the perfumed coral-isles of the sun-bright Pacific.
We glide now about forty yards down the river which connects the two lakes, to the rude bridge where Cooper keeps watch and ward. Tricolour paws the ground impatient on the shore, and Fleur-de-hs, with her high-bred head aloft, and dilated nostril, seems to smell the stable of Nant Cottage. So with kind adieux we part. I carry a young kangaroo in a bag (a present to the children from the good family at the Sugar-loaf), and with this nursling resting on my arm find it as much as I can do to manage my horse. Madame, on Fleur-de-Hs, leads the way; round the western horn of Lake Crescent we fly in spanking style; over the Clyde (which straightway hurries down into profound gorges, impervious to horses, and we shall see it no more for twenty miles); under the precipices of Table Mountain, blazing now like furnace walls before the westering sun; still descending, though gradually, for we are on the broad-backed ridge, not on the flank of the mountain range, and at last draw bridle on the green-sward of the “three-mile marsh,” which, indeed, is no marsh at all, but a lovely three-mile meadow, studded with stately trees. Before us now rises the rocky pyramid of the Quoin Hill, which presents
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to this side its precipitous bluff — for there is no Tasmanian hill without its breakneck bluff — and seems to taper to a rude peak, inaccessible to anything but the eagle. Yet I have seen a young lady of Bothwell, a daring Scottish lassie, ride to the very apex of that craggy peak, in derision of a gentleman who had done the feat for a bet.
Another mile, and we have reached the shoulder of the Quoin, whence Bothwell valley can be seen like a map all unrolled far below. The country seems here to descend suddenly, not presenting any uniform sloping escarpment, but broken into a chaos of wooded hills and winding glens, all clothed with noble trees, and glowing with the golden-blossomed underwood of mimosa. To our right, and far below, opens the narrow rocky gorge through which the Clyde breaks its way through the mountains; beyond, stretches, vast and gloomy, the mass of the Blue Hill; and far to the south are the peaks of the mountains beyond the Derwent, covered with snow.
We have still seven miles farther to ride; but after descending the mountains slowly, there lies before us only the level grassy plain of Bothwell, wooded like a vast park, over which our horses career like lightning, till they bury their muzzles in the clear waters of the Clyde, at the foot of Nant farm. John Knox and all the children are walking in the field with the dogs; they see us from the moment we have forded the river; they run to meet us with welcoming outcry; and there is joy at Nant over the little kangaroo.
1853, January 1st — Nant Cottage, — It is long since I have made an entry in my log-book. Of literature I am almost sick, and prefer farming, and making market of my wool. There is somewhat stupefying to the brain, as well as invigorating to the frame in this genial clime and aromatic air. A phenomenon for which I strive to account in various modes. One of my theories is the peculiar condition of the atmosphere with respect to electricity. In the three years I have wasted amongst these hills and woods, there has not been one good thunderstorm; of single peals or rolls of thunder, not more than a dozen in three years! and even a silent flash of summer lightning as rare as the phenomenon searched for by Diogenes with his lantern! How precisely such kind of atmosphere affects human blood and nerves and brain I
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cannot tell; but the fact is certain — there is more langour [sic], and less excitability amongst Tasmanians, native or imported, than I have ever witnessed before. They love not walking, and are forever on horseback; they are incurious, impassive, quiescent — and what is singular, they can drink more strong liquor, without wild drunkenness or other evil effect upon health, than I could have conceived possible. We, also, John Knox and I, have eaten narcotic lotus here; and if it has not removed, it has surely softened the sting, even of our nostalgia. We, too, have quaffed in these gardens the cup of lazy enchantment, mingled for us by the hands of Fata Morgana the Witch: and if we have not forgotten the outer busy world, at least the sound of its loud passionate working comes to our ear from afar off, deadened, softened, almost harmonised, like the roar of ocean waves heard in a dream, or murmuring through the spiral chambers of a sea-shell.
Surely it is not good for us to be here. I wish at times to be awake; long for a rattling, sky-rending, forest-crashing, eartlh-shaking thunder-storm, and fancy that the lightning of heaven would shoot a sharper life into blood and brain. Lazily and sleepily we even look into the papers that bring us periodical news from the northern hemisphere — news perhaps four months old; and how is it possible for us to feel that keen human interest in transactions whose effects may all have been reverted, and their movers and actors all dead long before the sound of them has reached our ears? What care we that Louis Napoleon made a felonious coup d’etat a year ago, and fusilladed Paris, and imprisoned and transported better men than himself? Perhaps he is guillotined by this time, or rusticating at Ham again, or gambler in London, or Emperor of France — it will be all one, I suppose, in a hundred years.
Deathly quiet is all the dreary world — asleep or swooned away under the high-piled and double-locked and bolted fetters of royal and imperial conspirators. Only a few vehement spirits hover over and around the dark and silent globe, searching for a spot where the dull mass may be touched and informed with vital flame once more. For a moment I left almost awakened when the news came to us that Louis Kossuth had left his Turkish retreat, and had sailed first to England eventually to
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America — and I read, almost with a sense of returning life, the glorious Governor’s impassioned harangues. Through the United States the Governor moved like a demigod; and the world once more hung enraptured on the fire-tipped tongue of a true orator, discoursing of Justice and Public Law and Freedom and Honour. But I knew not that the Great Republic had detected him as an impostor; and that the magnificent Magyar had sailed for Europe again as Mr. John Smith.
Perhaps he thinks his Smith surname will save his letters from being rummaged in the British post-office; but no. Governor Smith, you are one of the dangerous classes, and the British Home Secretary knows his duty to his god “Order. ”And whither now wilt thou fly, O! Kossuth Smith? — to what powers on earth, or over or under the earth, wilt thou next appeal? Behold, this world is ruled now by Order and Commerce (Commerce, obscenest of earth-spirits, once named Mammon, and thought to be a devil), and there is no place for thee. What heart can dare now to kindle itself at thy heart of fire? What ear will trust itself to the entrancement of thy tones of power? I would. Governor, that thou wert now at Nant Cottage — as well here as in any other penal exile — and we would take thee to hunt the kangaroo, and put on thy head a cabbage-tree hat, and into thy mouth at evening the dreadful pipe of peace — we would mount thee on a steed of steeds, and sweep with thee through forty miles of flowery and fragrant forest, per diem, until the nepenthe had steeped thy soul; and thine own Hungary and Danube-stream would become to thee as the dim Platonic reminiscences of a life thou hast led in some former state of being, before thy latest mother bore thee.
A year ago, our comrade Meagher formally withdrew his parole; and then, with the assistance of friends, made his escape. He is now in America; and has been generously hailed and welcomed there. I have seen some of his speeches and lectures; and one may easily guess that he will keep most of the favour he has won. There is no other change of consequence amongst our friends here. O’Doherty is still at Hobart Town, acting as resident-surgeon of St. Mary’s Hospital; and sometimes he steals up to Bothwell, to visit us and breathe some of our high mountain air.
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O’Brien is at New Norfolk again for the last year. His health is quite restored. I often hear from him; and sometimes go down with one of the boys to see him. Next week, I mean to make such a journey, but in the meantime am busy mowing my hay.
Now here is my entry for New Year’s day, 1853. Probably I shall not jot down another memorandum till next New Year’s day; for this diurnal has gradually changed, first to a hebdomadal, next to month’ s-mind, and at last to an annual.
CHAPTER XX
Jan. 3rd, 1853 — Bothwell. — I have not yet, in this veritable record, described any of our kangaroo-hunts — and what is Van Diemen’s Land without a kangaroo-hunt? Therefore, here goes.
Sometimes, when Sir William Denison comes to the country for “high hunting,” with his aides-de-camp and secretaries, I am told he hunts with a pack of beagles, and a great field of horsemen; but this is not our style, nor indeed the usual style. The proper dog for this sport is a kind of powerful greyhound bred for the purpose; and two of them are enough. One day, not long ago John Knox and I rode out with Mr. Reid and his two dogs, one a small thorough-bred greyhound, the other a large strong kangaroo dog, very like what is called in England a lurcher, but of finer make and taller stature. We took the direction of the Blue Hill, westward, and soon found ourselves in a hilly, rocky, desolate and thickly-wooded region, much encumbered by dead, prostrate trees, and cut up by hundreds of precipitous gullies running in all directions; and the little hills all as usual so like to one another, that to fix a landmark is impossible. Save by the position of the sun, you cannot tell towards what point of the compass you are going. The trees are so dense, also, on the sides of all the hills, and the ground is so rough with broken and burned stumps, rocks, and holes, that fast riding is out of the question.
The dogs kept close to our horse’s feet, as we slowly penetrated this wilderness, until at last, from behind a huge decaying log, with a shrill chirrup of terror, bounded a kangaroo. In three huge leaps, springing on hinder legs and nervous tail, he was out of our sight, and away behind the bushes and down the rocky gorge. But from the moment his mouselike ears appeared as he rose to his first bound, the dogs were on his trail. “Hold him. Dart!” “Into him. Dean!” (for one of the dogs is named after the mad Dean of St. Patrick’s). The hounds also are out of sight in an instant; and we hold in our horses, and stand motionless,
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awaiting the result. In five or ten minutes they will have either worried him, or lost him altogether. In either case they will come straight back to where they left us; and, the moment they appear, we shall know by the expression of their countenances whether they have done their business. If the kangaroo has got away, they will slink back with drooping ears and penitent eyes, and lie down to pant at our feet. If they have slain the enemy, they will come bounding through the trees, with their heads high and their jaws bloody, and before coming quite up to us, they will turn and trot off, and so bring us to the spot where he lies dead with his throat cut, and his spine broken at the neck.
We listen, and for a while can hear the crash of the dead branches as the dogs rush on — then, occasionally, a short angry bark — then dead silence — and, presently after, the contrite Dean and shame-faced Dart come panting along; they do not dare to look us in the face, for your dog is a reasonable and accountable creature, but approach in a zig-zag manner, and lie down on their sides, heaving as if their ribs would burst. We do not reproach them — their own failure is punishment enough; and, in fact, in a country like this, if the kangaroo can get a rocky descent to make for, with a rough and scrubby place at the foot of it, he is almost sure to get clear off, because his spring is much longer going down hill, and the rocky encumbered ground would cut the dogs to pieces if they put on their full speed. But if they can once get the rogue before them, in full view, and on a partially clear and level place, they will be upon him in a few leaps. For the actual speed of a kangaroo is by no means equal to that of a hare.
We proceed still further amongst the hills, and presently another “brush” breaks cover. Again the dogs disappear in a twinkling. We hear a sharp, angry, almost constant barking — then there is silence, and then from a distance of a quarter of a mile rings the loud yell of one of the dogs. They are worrying the enemy; and by that yell we know he does not fall entirely unavenged. We dare not move, however, in that direction, lest we should miss the dogs among the winding gullies, but wait impatiently a minute. The dogs come up! they assure us it is all right; but Dean has his face torn open from the ear to the muzzle. For when a powerful kangaroo is driven to bay, he sets himself against a tree, holds his head back, and fights with his
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long hinder feet, which he raises up before him, like a man kicking, and the middle toe is armed with a formidable claw.
But now comes an incident that shows the training and pluck of one of these fine dogs; for, just as we are moving on to follow the dogs to their slaughtered prey, another kangaroo leaps out in full view. The dogs, though tired and panting, stretch out again; but Dean, old, lazy, and wounded, after a few springs, gives up, comes back, and asks leave to he down, which, in consideration of his age, character, and services, is granted. Dart is far out of sight, and we wait for him a quarter of an hour. We hasten for his bark, but hear nothing save the shriek of a cockatoo, or the bugle-note of a white magpie. At last he approaches with slow steps and trailing tail, yet with a placid triumph in his eyes. “He has him,” said Reid; “Well done. Dart!” “Good Dart!”
Now, I asked, “Which kangaroo will he show us? There are two killed, and they he in different directions.” “You shall see,” was the answer. So Dart led us over several hills, through several ravines, and presently stood still at the foot of a rock. There we found the second kangaroo — yet warm, with the hot life-stream still flowing from his neck. We strapped him on one of the saddles. And now for the other! Will Dart ever find his way to the spot where the first victim lies? for the two runs had commenced from the same point, but in directions at nearly right angles with one another. Reid, however, now said to the dog, “Go on, old fellow! go on! go on!” and the intelligent creature, giving first a look all round, though he could see nothing but the trees and rocks immediately around us, started off quite confidently in the direction he had selected. He did not even bring us back to the point whence the two chases had diverged but moved steadily, as straight as the crow flies, through several narrow valleys, over three or four small hills; and, after following him half a mile, we found the first killed kangaroo lying at the root of a gum tree. It was a very large female, and must have weighed full 50 lbs. She must have been hard nm; for we found in her pocket one of her young ones, that she had not time to throw away. The females, always as they rise from their lair, at sight of an enemy, put their hands in their pockets, and throw their young ones into some place of safety, that they themselves
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may run lighter. This one had fought desperately for her life and her little joey, as the young are called. Old Dean’s face will bear the furrow ploughed by her claw till his dying day. Round her lay a plenteous pool of blood; her head was almost torn off; and in her side was a deep wound, through which Dean’s vengeful muzzle had drank up her life. We tied her up, and slung her across another saddle.
In the course of about three hours we started five, out of which the dogs lost two and killed three. This is now considered rather a good day’s sport; for the kangaroo is becoming scarce all over the inhabited parts of the island. They are much sought after, not only for their dainty brown flesh, which much resembles hare, but also for their skins, which, in Launceston and Hobart Town, are tanned into very fine soft leather, by means of the mimosa, or wattle-bark. This is the best tanning material in the world; and of late years the mimosa has become of considerable commercial importance, as many cargoes of the bark are annually sent to England. It is one of the very loveliest species of acacia; and, unlike the acacias of the northern hemisphere, can endure a cold climate; even at the lakes, here in Van Diemen’s Land, I have seen it flourish, more than 3,000 feet above the sea. However, this is a treatise of kangaroo-hunting, not of botany. A kangaroo has strictly no connection with the wattle-tree, more than a calf has with a lemon-tree; yet, as a loin of veal may legitimately suggest a lemon, so may a kangaroo skin associate itself with the graceful tree whose bark is used to dress it. Wonderful and subtle is the association of ideas — a “laughing jackass” (grey bird, about the size of a thrush) brays and giggles on a branch near by; if one should only let his mind nm along the chain of associations linked with the name and the senseless guffaw of this creature — where would it stop? Such and so philosophic are our reflections, as we sit upon a prostrate tree, near a spring; and, content with our day’s hunting, take a moderate sip from the tiny brandy flask. Then to Bothwell, and to dinner at Mr. Reid’s.
January 5th. — I am prosecuting my hay-harvest diligently, with the aid of two or three horrible convict cut-throats, all from Ireland — and all, by their own account, transported for seizing arms. This is considered, amongst these fellows, a respectable
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sort of offence. The rascals can earn ten British shillings per diem, at harvest-time; and they live all the year round like Irish kings, not to speak of Irish cut-throats. They don’t like to work too hard, and require a good deal of wine. They come early from their work, smoke and chat with one another all evening in the yard, and go to sleep in their opossum rugs in the bam. Yet, with all this high reward they receive for their crimes, this paternal care to make thievery happy, and munificent endowment of rascality, the creatures are not utterly bad — not half so bad, for example, as the Queen of England’s Cabinet Councillors. They are civil, good-natured with one another, and not thievish at all — partly because they are so well off that there is little temptation, and partly because the punishments are savage. However, it is a remarkable fact, which I will set down, that in nearly three years, during which time I have been in Van Diemen’s Land, for most part in a lonely cottage, with windows all round close to the ground, and quite unsecured, and with two or more prisoner-servants always about the place, my family have felt as secure, and slept as peacefully, as ever they did in Banbridge; and save one double-barrelled gun, nothing was ever stolen from me. It would be pleasant enough to see these creatures comfortable, and tolerably decent in their behaviour, but for the thought that this whole system is in truth a fruitful “breeder of sinners,” and that the same hateful Government and state of society in England, which so richly reward these men for their villainies, punish, starve, and debase the poor and honest, for being poor and honest. Many a time, therefore, as I look upon these quiet, well-behaved men reaping, not too arduously, singing, or smoking in the fields, or cheerfully “following the plough upon the mountain side,” or tending their masters’ flocks in the fair forest pastures, like human husbandmen and simple Arcadian shepherds — instead of rejoicing in their improved conditions and behaviour, I gaze on them with horror, as unclean and inhuman monsters, due long ago to the gallows-tree and oblivion; and then the very sunlight in this most radiant land takes a livid hue to my eyes! the waving, whispering woods put on a brown horror, like the forests that wave and sigh through Dante’s Tartarean vision. The soft west wind that blows here for ever, has a moan like the moan of damned souls! the stars look dim; and
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on the corner of the moon there hangs a vaporous drop profound. The Devil’s in it.
This subterranean and altogether infernal mood of mind is helped by some of the names that the early colonists have given to hills and rivers. In Bothwell district we have a ravine called “Hell’s Gates,” through whose dismal shade you pass to a hill overlooking the junction of two rivers, a steep and grassy hill, embowered with thickets of mimosa, but bearing the awful name — “Hill of Blazes.” Into the Derwent, near New Norfolk, flows the river “Styx” ; and Charon’s ferry-boat never touched the banks of Asphodel meadows so fair as the tufted hills that are laved by the crystalline waters of this Tasmanian hell-stream, named of hatred. Flows here, too, the real Lethe; and men grow like Lethe’s own fat weeds, that rot themselves at ease. There is darkness around us, and a sulphury smell. How horrible to live here! How horrible to die! I pray, as prayed the bearer of the Seven-fold Shield, Oh! slay me at least in daylight!
Tartarean reapers of Erebus! ye are reaping, with your damned sickles, a harvest of hell; and preparing the ground in these Cimmerean regions of outer darkness to yield crops of abomination and horror, some thirty-fold, and some sixty-fold, for generations of unborn men. — For is not the human species making “Progress?”
7th. — Letter from Reilly; very welcome to me, though it has been long on the way. He writes from New York, where he seems to have endured many a struggle and agony that might well have crushed and subdued any less fiery spirit. Truly, we think our own case hard, chained here under the Southern Cross; yet on the whole, our poor friends who escaped the talons of British law, have had a far worse time of it. The letter is in his usual style, glowing now with a wild, rollicking eloquence, melting with brotherly tenderness (for we are brothers, indeed), raging with the savage indignation that gnaws his heart — full of hope, full of despair; merry and miserable. I have read it with much laughter; and if I had yet tears to shed, they would have flowed over it. *
* Thomas Devin Reilly is dead. The largest heart, the most daring spirit, the loftiest genius of all Irish rebels in these latter days sleeps now in his American grave. Many a reader will be glad to see how, and in what terms, he wrote of the men and scenes around him, to a friend at the antipodes.
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First, he addresses himself, poor fellow! to console and encourage me: — “Now, that your wife and babes are with you — that you have sheep and ducks and lambs, and goslings, you ought to be as happy as any man can be, born on the Acropolis, and banished to Arcadia. Would you make yourself Touchstone, and sigh for courts and the busy world? For shame, man. It is well for you, at all events, for the last two years, that you have been tied up by your enemies.” Be it so: but who told you that I was a Touchstone, and sighed for courts, my dear friend? Courts, quotha? I sigh only to set fire to them; and as for being “happy” here — come and spend one year with me at Nant Cottage, and see how it will agree with you! Here is the account he gives (the letter is dated April 24th, 1852) of the European republicans in those days. The strange narrative of his interview with the intellectual Kalmuck, Kossuth, will give a vivid page to my memorandum book.
“Garibaldi carrieth hides and corn, somewhere in your vicinity, on the Pacific, between South America and California. Mazzini has allied himself with the English ‘Liberals’ and ‘Protestantism,’ disowned the Chartists, abused the French Socialists, and avowed himself for the establishment of a liberal ‘consolidated Italian unity,’ and against popery as a religious creed. He is dead and done for, and will have to go, with his ‘ liberals ‘ and his ‘Protestantism.’” — This, to me, oh Devin! is not so clear. There is no harm, I suppose, in a man’s being against popery, or against Protestantism, “as a religious creed” — no harm, I mean, in a revolutionary sense, and for this world’s business (for of course his soul will “go,” as you call it). But, if I mistake nftt, Thomas Jefferson (no bad revolutionist) was against popery as a creed. However, enter the Kalmuck — “Kossuth has played the devil with himself — allied himself with the English Liberals, too — breakfasted, dined, tea’d, and was led round by Lord Dudley Stuart, and that rascal crew [let me interpose here to remark that Lord Dudley Stuart is not rascal, but only ninnyhammer, amadan and mooncalf] — then came to this country with a suite, in uniform and livery, put on a devil of a lot of airs, made magnificent and telling speeches in the good cause, but beslavered the English and their Constitutions, advised the Irish to unite with them, and help the great English people, from Palmerston down
[plate:] Michael Doheny
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to the voter, ‘to free Europe!’ — and may now be considered to be snuffed out, or flickering. I must confess this is an inconstant people, especially to distinguished strangers: after bepraising them, bedining them, and bespeeching them, lest the rogues should, on their return to Europe, repay their hospitality by abusing them, as Dickens and Moore and others of that kidney did, they take time with the whip-hand, and anticipate the poor devil they have honoured by immediately abusing him themselves — [And why not? It is acting upon the ancient receipt, to prevent one’s self from being tossed by a bull, ‘Toss him.’]. It is a national characteristic, founded on wit and policy, and experience of distinguished strangers. But, at the same time, Kossuth has not done well or wisely. He has gathered some money, and considerably injured a good cause. He is as precipitate as a vixen, puts on sagacity in public, as a foolish girl would a hood, and keeps eternally looking out at the bystanders, to see if they know him under the disguise.”
Well, I cannot say that the above paints the Hun to my eyes very life-like; but here comes the governor in person. Reilly continues: “I had a private interview with him of some length. He reminded me of Urquhart. No doubt he set me down for an Irish idiot; but. Lord! it was a comical scene. … He is a fine-looking fellow: has great eyes, half-a-dozen foreheads round his head, and probably one at the back, stuffed with all sorts of ‘languidges,’ including the ‘languidge of flours and luv’; dark hair, and brownish-black beard, both roughcast with grey, like imitation granite, and the latter as stiff as a heckler’s steel comb, and sticking out huge, round and round, like rays of the light of darkness; light made, middle-sized — a most intellectual Calmuck.”
Now, that will do. The man is posed; he is mis en scene. Now for your interview of some length. Go on. “They had slavered him here at such a rate that when I proceeded to argue with him he bounded off his chair, cooled himself with a cigar, fore-fingered a fellow (like Urquhart, you know), and proceeded to show me in the usual dogmatic manner that that was that. Dixi. So did I, just the same; gave him Dixi for Dixi, with a profound dip and a flat contradiction. Lord! if you had seen him then! — ten hundred Urquharts ‘rowled into one’ were nothing to
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him. So we came to figures; he calmed, and became placid. I begged him not to precipitate the whole cause of Europe on himself and his country. No? his letters informed him that in three months insurrection would be in France, and a true republic. I hinted my experience in programmes, upon such occasions especially as to dates. Like John Martin, he propounded the orthodox dogma that I was a ‘young man’ — my experience was nothing. He had played with the blood of nations on the battle-field. (Lord! how that stung! but he did not see it. If we had only fought, somebody else, too, would have played with at least two units of the blood of nations) — but my experience, he continued, might come yet. Then I would know what it was to hear the cries of a nation sinking unto death. In three months, his standard would be above him — in three months the armies of the true French Republic would be — and so forth. Within three weeks and less, the news reached us that Louis Napoleon had mastered the French people by a coup, a razzia at night, and a battue on the general public for ten days after.”
My dear fellow! all this I know, through “the usual channels of information”; for the immortal printing-press executes its holy mission even here also. Therefore drop contemporary history, and give me more about the Magyar. I can fancy these two strange interlocutors — a Celtic O’Reilly of Brefni-O’Reilly, and a Calmuck Tartar, whose forefathers pitched black tents on the steppes of the Yenisei, meeting in one room in that busy New York City, so indifferent to both Celt and Calmuck — and trying, by help of cigars and gesticulation, to bring about an agreement between themselves as to how this globe was to be rescued from the kings and the devils. I wish I had been there to make a trio. But go on, Devin.
— “The Irish and priestly organs here had opposed him and his country (they now toast and bless Louis Napoleon for having saved ‘ Order’ and Religion), and so I told him that I wished at all events to assure him of the deep sympathy and affection of all Irish republicans. I explained to him, however, exactly, and in plain terms, what he would get — refusal, in the way he sought help. Whether it was that my always eloquent method of public speaking came to my aid, or that it was the first honest and true
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word he had heard here (but I think it must have been the public speaking), he hung his head for a minute, was silent, and the big tears stood in his eyes. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘my mission ‘ (what fools to have missions! But probably it is the way they speak commonsense and manhood in England, and among the ‘liberals,’ that taught him the damned idiom) — ‘then mine mission is lost — defeated — I may return to mine country and die.’
“I fear he will go back with a very bad idea (in both senses) of the real springs of policy in this country. However, he has extinguished himself, and will never lead in Europe again [be not too sure of that, O! Devin Reilly], and being so, you can fancy the above interview [Yes, I can] — this child on one side, and a, Calmuck Urquhart made of India-rubber, jumping about, one moment sinuous as a pickpocket or a rattle-snake without the rattles — then ricochetting on his chair at the smallest contradiction, using arms, legs, head, face, eyes, tongue, beard, forefinger, cigar, and back-bone in joints, in his tremendous eloquence.”
Ah! it is enough. Shady is the vale of Clyde, and rural the cottage of Nant; but, without meaning disrespect to the South Pole, I would that I were smoking a cigar with that Calmuck and that Celt in that Excelsior Knickerbocker city! Stay, here is still more of the Magyar, from another part of the letter.
Sayeth the Celt of the Calmuck
“He ‘prays to God’ too much, speechificatorily, carries his tears in his pocket, and can weep, and can actually wet his handkerchief, as mere touches of rhetoric and good points. His thanks for an5hing and everything he gets (a Rev. Mrs. O’Donohue, of Cincinnati and pork, presented him with her infant son as an offering to Hungary — he would be taught to raise his little hat and feather to the cause of Hungary, when he would hear in his little ears of her being freed by the great Kossuth; and he took it, and made a prayer — O Lord, what a prayer! — if He who sitteth in the heavens heard it. He must have laughed — pray Grod that blessed infant may not be tempted to try experiments with the hat and feather, as naughty Master Gargantua did with the lady’s ruff; for it might tear his tender flesh with the cruel buckle, and so defeat the hope of Hungary) — pardon this
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parenthesis, Master John [now, what is the use of a second parenthesis to excuse the first; which provokes this third parenthesis from me?] — in capacity to take anything he gets, and to appraise it in thanks, he is as good as O’Connell. But I tire you with this long description.”
Why, yes; a little. Take up another man: say yourself, my dear friend. He (Reilly) is now, it seems, writing in the Democratic Review; and from the tone of much of his letter I perceive that he is exerting every nerve of body and brain, labouring as did never Hercules in his combat with the hydra of Lema — to kill, to crush, to smash, blow to atoms, turn inside out, and trample into the earth, a gang of desperadoes (they must be the enemies of the human race) whom he names Old Fogies. Now, the usual channels of information have not brought me information who these old sinners specially are: but I sympathise with my friend’s animosity, and hate them in advance. He gives a sad account of himself before the reviewing came, and this deadly fight with the Fogies. He says — “When I received that letter of yours, I was in the depth of poverty and misery of mind, yet struggling to compass this position I have now attained. My heart was too sore, and I was too anxious to tell you some good news, to answer it. Then, as the prospect brightened, and I saw before me an eventual success in my efforts to get the Review, I began to scribble and scrawl, in fits and starts, my plans; and the accumulated bulk of prospective intentions is now in part condensed in the columns thereof.”
He has found an Irish wife, too, in America; and in all his “soreness of heart,” his poverty and misery, this treasure of a wife seems to be his best guardian, guide, and tower of strength. On her is lavished all the passionate tenderness of his exaggerative nature: and he loves her as he hates an Old Fogy. In doleful strain he goes on: “In my worst misery I lost my boy, called after you; then in my first month of editing I had to rise from my writing to bury my little daughter. I thought God, or fate, was going to strip me stark naked for the combat — and that long ill-health, fretting, poverty, and these accumulated sorrows, were about to deprive me even of the last vesture, my wife.”
Here follows a record of more, and more touching sorrows; but let them be sacred. God or fate never smote a stouter
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heart; and from that sore smiting, stripping bare, and crushing fall to earth, the young earth-bom Titan will spring up more Titanic still.
Soon he leaves his own sorrows behind him; and begins to tell me eagerly and earnestly about a certain “Douglas.” Now, who the mischief is Douglas?* Enter Douglas, introduced by Devin Reilly — “A fine little fellow, about forty, or five-and-forty, squat-built, of great eloquence and rare abilities as a statesman, a thorough democrat, and hates England very well for an American.”
One begins to take an interest in this small man of great eloquence; and on reading further, I discover that Reilly and his Review want to make him no less than President of the United States.
“It was a desperate move, to carry a nation by storm; and we may be killed in the very heart of the citadel [I hope not, Tom]; but it was the best move on the board; and once carried, all was pretty certain afterwards. Douglas, if he attain power (he may be, and is, timid and wavering in the method of getting in, but), once in, I am persuaded, if the Maker of men does not sell wooden nutmegs, that he will prove spicy to the core, and ride rough-shod over all antagonists, native and especially foreign [From which I infer that this Mr. Douglas is, at any rate, not an Old Fogy]. It is now acknowledged we, that is, T.D.R., that is The Democratic Review, have killed dead the Old Fogies, and carried for him in convention the State of New York.”
What this last carrying in Convention may mean or amount to I know not — but I am glad the Old Fogies are dead. John Knox indeed, as he smokes by the fire, while I read him the letter, often lifts his eye-brows high, and sometimes takes the pipe our of his mouth to exclaim, “God bless me! who are these poor Fogies?” He trusts their sins may be forgiven them; but I, on the other hand, insult their ashes, in sympathy with the fury of my friend; and drink to-night to the success of Douglas, small of bulk, but spicy to the core.
I beg pardon now (New York, August 1st, 1854), for the excusable ignorance betrayed in the above ejacualtion [sic]; which, however, may be somewhat palliated by my retired way of life some years before. — J. M.
CHAPTER XXI
8th January, 1853 — Bothwell. — To-day we resumed (John Knox and myself) our reading of Reilly’s letter, or letters, from New York. There are about forty-five pages of them, written at various times; and with supreme disregard to consecutiveness and coherency; so that we feel as if our impetuous friend were sitting with us, at our cottage door, in the summer evening, smoking and pouring out by fits his wild discourse.
It seems he has been writing in three or four other publications before throwing himself into this Democratic Review. His first publication was The People, a weekly newspaper, wherein he seems to have tried with all his might to explode the old principle of American “non-intervention.” He accounts for the failure of that organ intelligibly enough. “To both parties,” he says, “the principles of intervention in European affairs were foreign: and since (save in times of political refugeeism, and even to some extent then), the immigration here was composed of characters not always the most trustworthy or true, and of human semblances not always the most gratifying examples of European production, a general distrust of all foreigners pervaded the entire people. Add to this, my profound ignorance of American politics on my arrival, and further ignorance of parties and persons.”
Then his associate in the undertaking was, it seems, a “whig,” “A good fellow named Robinson, of the great family mentioned in Carpenter’s spelling book, in connection with Smith, Brown, and Jones, and with drowning; who, being an extravagant whig blowing-horn among the Irish, drowned me.”
John Knox here quarrels with Devin’s metaphor, saying reasonably enough, that it is impossible to be drowned by a blowing-horn. “If he had said blown up, now,” said Knox, “or blown away”; but I, deeming his criticism frivolous, interrupt him with the interjection, “You be blowed!” and continue my
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reading. “No effort of mine could save me from the charge of being a whig, and therefore a bad democrat and bad Irishman, because I had formed this connection.”
“Again — I had some few who understood me, especially Poles, Italians, French [no doubt, they would understand intervention] and Republican Americans: but, generally speaking, I was in this fix — Americans, from the President (and old Zack did pay his subscripticn like a man, peace be to his fine old red corpse of rusty iron) down to my tailor, looked at my paper, sneered, shrugged, pooh-poohed; or said ‘clever,’ but always added ‘Irish.’” “Then the priests, when I plainly took sides against the Pope, and ‘interests of religion,’ pronounced me a heretic [ “God bless me,” says Knox, “could the poor priests do less?”] and the Church organ excommunicated me [that, says Knox, was going too far] —— and the servant maids shuddered at my name ” —— “O, weary me! you know it all: well, that’s the way the People failed.” — And a very natural way, too.
Then came poverty, and more poverty — Tom’s American tailor now doing worse than sneering: but he continues — “Living on nothing at all a week and finding myself, would not do: so I was soon in New York, taking or about to take the Whig Review (leading Conservative and High Tory organ) as far as possible into democracy. I will send, if possible, some of these. [No Whig Reviews, however, have reached Tasmania]. For six months I wrote in that Review, and drove the knife up to the handle as often as I could” — [that is, he drove the Red Republican and fillbuster sword of sharpness into the flabby body of whiggery — so “the whigs drove me out of their ranks as an incendiary and wolf in sheep’s clothing, and a snake in the grass, and a monomaniac, and the devil knows what besides.”
Yet, it seems he leaves an impression — Thomas Devin Reilly, his mark; which can afterwards be read by those who run. He says: “Elections come on. I receive letters, invitations, thanks, praises from the leaders of the Democratic Party. The other night, I walked into their meeting, heard my dreams of years pronounced from the Democratic platform, received the pledge of the influential to drive the matter on, was introduced all round as the author of so-and-so.”
“Really, my friend, if I succeed in these things, and have but
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one hand in pouring down one American torrent upon Europe, I shall consider, when we meet, that though I was swept over and under and up again, and did many wrong, many despairing, many rash things, as is natural to ‘a young man’ with red hair, and peculiarly nervosanguineous temperament (as one of my medical friends remarks on shooting excursions), that I have really done something which may entitle me, when you shall be at the head of affairs [ “What does he mean by that?” says Mr. Knox, taking his pipe from his lis. Why, he means, my dear fellow, when I shall be in America, directing the filibusterng and crusading energies of that republic to the regeneration of the human race — sending forth armies of fiery Yankees to set Poland on her feet, to set Kossuth high in Buda Pesth, to shut up the Emperor Napoleon in Ham once more — to erect provisional governments in Dublin Castle, Buckingham Palace, Vienna, Berlin, and Milan, to drive the Czar back to Tobolsk, to turn the Italian “sigh of ages” into an lo Poean, and to kick the Pope’s three hats from Cape Spartivento to the Alps. He means this. “Ah! very likely,” said Knox] — entitle me,” continues Devin, “to a placid hole in some sweet valley, a burly meerschaum, and an unfathomable drink. Now, I have given you my history; and I hope its exceeding vanity and impertinent exterior may afford you a much amusement as the history of any other nomadic Irishman or Gascon.”
However, the history of this amazing Gascon Irishman is not over yet. He rushes with all his soul into the Democratic Review. Here is the account he gives of his associates in the undertaking: “My publisher is an able Red Republican American, and scarlet Democrat, piratic and honest — Allow me to make you acquainted. Mr. Holly, Mr. Mitchel — bow. Mr. Holly is the best friend I ever met in America; and as (should the chance offer) we have agreed to make together a little peaceable campaign and shooting excursion, not on the moors, but, strange to say, cockney-fashion, about London, I trust that in this country or the next you may meet. [Happy to make the acquaintance of this scarlet Democrat, piratic and honest. ] I am commissioned also to present to you the ‘ love ‘ of a Western American — and I had rather take his love than his hate — Corry, of Ohio, whose speech formed the leading feature of our late ‘ great meeting. ’ His democracy is
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very extensive, about six and a half feet from the sole of the foot to the crown, and sharp in its way, for there is not a pick on him. He is a Democratic lamp-post, holding a big light in its head, on an almighty thin body. He knows you, too.”
[Sir, I am delighted to welcome you at Nant Cottage. Please to walk in. Stoop a little, lest you crack your lamp. You will join my friend Mr. Knox and me in a pipe of Cavendish and a glass of Bothwell beer. ]
Then comes Mr. Saunders, another able man, and true Democrat. But I have extracted enough. Reilly proceeds to talk of Irish affairs, and informs me of the pending election for New Ross; wherein Ireland is to be saved, at last, by the return of Mr. Gavan Duffy, or, as my correspondent writes the name, Mr. Give-in Duffy. On these Irish affairs, he expresses himself, I must admit, in a very wild manner. “About the ‘priests and holy wells,’ all I shall say is, pray God to sink the first to the bottom of the second!” And, again, as to Ireland. “I have not excused, or refused to acknowledge the black degradation to which our country is reduced; but I have said, ‘ I grant everything bad you can possibly say of my country and countrymen; but then, the worse she is, the greater proof of her political servitude, for her people are a fine and gallant people, and fight, as you well know. Being so, you must elect to make her a friend or an enemy. She must be the avant-garde into Europe, or the Vendue. Throw an army into her, and you smash financially and territorially the British Empire; but let the revolution burst and work its way in Italy, and be misrepresented by priests and Britishers — and Ireland becomes the deadliest foe of republicanism in Europe. I have talked in this style, not without effect, I hope. I will not say more than that I hope.”
We close this singular letter, and sit silent awhile. At last, quoth John Knox, “Clearly to be an Irishman is no high recommendation in the world at present. I pity Reilly, wearing and wasting himself there, in that coil of American politics, shedding out his heart’s blood coined into dollars, for Whig or for Democratic place-hunters, if they will only give him a hope, and hardly a hope, for Ireland — lavishing without stint or measure the ore of his teeming brain for them — if they will but say a kind word (or, as he says, poor fellow), pledge themselves in the cause of Ireland. Still
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Ireland! Ireland! — as if Ireland were still alive, and not a corpse. And all this, while the ignominy of our dismal failure is fast making the name of Irishman a hissing and an abomination. It is a desperate and most touching loyalty this of Reilly’s. ”
“And what would you have for Reilly, then?” “A ticket-of-leave,” says Knox, “and a gum-tree hut, for the present; an escape from the turmoil of what they call politics, and an opportunity to lay up and hoard thought, instead of wasting and squandering it; to feed and mature his genius here in the forests, in the kind lap of his mother Nature, instead of beggaring and debasing it, in pursuit, indeed, of radiant visions shining from afar, but of mean personal intrigues, cumbering and spoiling all his present life. Better be a shepherd at the lakes till better times.”
“That may do well enough for you and me, Mr. Knox, but for Reilly, action is his life. In this same vehement action and passion; in this grapple and struggle with fate and the busy world, in exercising, and even wantonly wasting every faculty and energy of mind and body, fitfully flashing out the rays of his intellect, be it to illuminate or to set on fire — that restless spirit finds its only joy, its only possibility of being. Bring him here, and he would hang himself on a gum tree. Rather let him expend himself there, in fighting Fogies, in crushing joyfully under his heel the head of humbug and cant. e has, at all events, a noble aim, and he will prosecute it nobly. Like Ram-Das, that Hindoo saint or god, he feels that there is fire enough in his body to burn up all the baseness and poltroonery in the world. Let him fire away.”
“But he will perish.” Let him perish. It will be in a great cause — and to have an aim and a cause, is not this happiness? How many are there of all the human race who have faith in anything, or aspiration after anything higher than their daily bread and beer, their influence, social position, respectability in the eyes of the unrespectable world? Even in this very devout, almost despairing loyalty to his discrowned Queen and Mother Ireland, is there not a joy, that colder, tamer spirits never know? Through his dreams there shines in upon him the beautiful, mournful face of his sad Roisin Duhh, the torn and crushed dark rose that
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he has worn in his heart from a boy, thrilling him with an immortal passion, like the passion that consumed the chieftain of Tir-conail — .
“Over dews, over sands,
Will I fly, for your weal;
Your holy, delicate white hands
Shall girdle me with steel —
At home . . . in your emerald bowers,
From morning’s dawn till e’en,
You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers.
My Dark Rosaleen I
“Over hills, and through dales,
Have I roamed for your sake;
All yesterday I sailed with sails
On river and on lake
The Erne . . . at its highest flood,
I dashed across unseen;
For there was lightning in my blood.
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Oh I there was lightning in my blood —
Red lightning lightened through my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen!”
Happy whose veins yet shoot and glow with red lightning-blood, instead of trickling white serum and Bothwell beer!
“Don’t the men,” said Knox, “finish the hay to-night?”
“Confound the hay! I tell you that I envy Devin Reilly for being alive — alive as you and I will never, never be alive again.”
True enough, the hay was all stacked, and the men came to be paid. One of them, a civil and hard-working cut-throat, from the county Limerick, asked me to sign a printed paper for him. It was a certificate that he had been in my employment, and had behaved moderately well. “I’m off for the diggin’s in Port Phili,” said he, “to-morrow; my ‘conditional pardon’ has come to hand, and I must have this paper to show the magistrate to-morrow morning, when I go to take out my free papers.”
“I wish you luck, Mike; don’t spend all your money in Maskell’s public-house to-night,” “By my sowl, sir,” said Mike, “I must drink to-night to ould Garryowen, and the
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sky over it. Good night, sir.” To-morrow I ride down to Hobart Town, and am to return by New Norfolk,
13th January. — A new personage has appeared amongst us — dropped from the sky, or from New York. When I arrived in Hobart Town, two or three days ago, I went first, of course, to St. Mary’s Hospital, where I found St. Kevin in his laboratory. He opened his eyes wide when he saw me, drew me into a private room, and bid me guess who had come to Van Diemen’s Land. Guessing was out of the question, so I waited his revelation. “Pat Smyth!”
“Transported?” “No, my boy: commissioned by the Irish Directory in New York to procure the escape of one or more of us, O’Brien especially — and with abundant means to secure a ship for San Francisco, and to provide for rescuing us, if necessary, out of the hands of the police magistrate, after withdrawing the parole in due form. He travels this day by the day coach from Launceston, and is to meet O’Brien and me this evening at Bridgewater (ten miles off), instead of coming into Hobart Town direct. You will go with me. O’Brien is to ride down from New Norfolk, and we can consult on the affair. There cannot be a doubt of success,” added St. Kevin, “for at least one of us.”
I shook my head at first, which the Saint was going to resent as a personal insult. So we agreed to say nothing about it till we should meet our friends in the evening. Smyth’s mission certainly looks serious; for he is a cool-headed rebel, by no means likely to come so far without a plan, or to play at any child’s game.
St. Kevin borrowed a horse from a priest. I rode my own; and at the hour appointed we met O’Brien, almost at the door of the hotel, mounted on old Squirrel. The coach had not yet arrived. Seven o’clock came, and no coach, though it was fully due. Eight o’clock, half-past eight, and still no coach. All this time we spent sauntering in the garden, talking of the matter in hand. The difficulty, and almost impossibility of the whole four of us availing ourselves of the chance, occurs at once. O’Brien is clearly of opinion that the only mode of discharging ourselves of our parole will be to withdraw it formally, each in the police office of his own allotted district, giving the authorities full opportunity to take him into custody if they are able (if not able, it will be their mis-
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fortune) — that this must be done within proper business hours, from ten till three — that any previous bribery will be quite legitimate — even to buying the police magistrates, if there be money enough — that any force or violence (O’Brien says, short of killing) will then be allowable if the rascals attempt to secure us within their offices — but that, in any event, we are bound to present ourselves in proper person, and make the magistrate clearly understand (within his own office, and with his constables about him) that our parole is at an end, that our ticket-of-leave is resigned, and that we are going away.
That we should all four do this simultaneously, in our respective police offices, appears, on full consideration, impossible: and O’Brien insists that / shall take this turn.
I propose another plan, by which we should get ourselves placed under arrest in one spot, and in circumstances that would make a rescue easy: but O’Brien and O’Doherty hold to the mode of procedure I have already described.
Some mischance had delayed the coach; and the hour came when O’Brien and St. Kevin must return to their respective “registered lodgings.” They left me, and I engaged a bed at the hotel for the night. Half an hour after they had gone, the coach drove up: it was dark: I stood in the hall, which was brightly lighted by a lamp. All the passengers left the coach, and walked into the hotel. Amongst others, a young man stepped down from the coach, and entered. He looked me full in the face, and I him. It was Smyth; but neither of us, after four years, knew the other. I listened, as he went to the office, and engaged a bed; yet I did not know his voice. He came out to get his portmanteau, and we passed each other again in the hall — “It must be Smyth,” I said; “nobody else would be stopping short here, within ten miles of Hobart Town.” So I followed him out, and went round after him to the outer side of the coach, where all was dark. “Is your name Smyth?” He turned upon me suddenly: clearly he thought it was a detective — thought that he had been traced all the way to the very spot where he was to meet us — that he was a prisoner, and all was over. I hastened to undeceive him, for he looked strongly tempted to shoot me, and bolt. “All right, Smyth: silence: follow me into the parlour.” So I strolled carelessly in.
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Presently he joined me, and the coach drove off. We spent the evening together in a private room.; and each had much to ask; but we deferred speaking particularly of his plans till we should meet the rest.
The next evening at O’Brien’s lodgings in New Norfolk, Smyth explained his instructions — to secure the escape of O’Brien and of me, or either of us, if both could not go — Smyth himself being ready and willing to take the principal share in all the risk of rescuing us by force, if force were needed. O’Brien’s “sentence” being for life, we both earnestly pressed on him that he should first avail himself of Smyth’s services. He entered fully into his reasons for declining — he had already had his chance, had made the attempt to escape from Maria Island — it had failed; and the expenses incurred by it had been defrayed by public money. This, he said, is your chance. Besides, you have stronger motives to betake yourself to America than I have; and you will be more at home there. It may be, he continued, that the British Government may find it, sometime or other, their best policy to set me free, without making submission to them: in that case, I return to Ireland: if I break away against their will, Ireland is barred against me for ever.
O’Brien, as his friends know, is immovable; therefore, we soon desisted from the vain attempt to shake his resolution: and I then declared that I would make the attempt, in the way he prescribed.
Yesterday, Smyth and I set out for Bothwell, I on horseback he in a sort of public conveyance; for there is a rough road up the valley of the Derwent as far as Hamilton, where the Clyde falls into it. Hamilton is a pretty, straggling village, with a good hotel a police-office, a jail of course, a church, a public pound, and about thirty grog-shops. Hence to Bothwell, the way lies through mere forest and wild hills. A saddle-horse was not to be had: so, Smyth was obliged to hire a small spring-cart, with a man to drive it, and I rode alongside. A pleasant journey of twenty miles through the summer woods; and here we are at Nant Cottage.
As we passed through the township of Bothwell, I turned aside from our direct course to ask for letters at the post office. Smyth, having discharged his conveyance, came with me on foot.
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“Where is this formidable police office?” he said. “Come and see: it is in the same building with the post office.” As we approached, he narrowly reconnoitred the premises; and while I asked for letters at the window, he walked coolly into the police office, and into the magistrate’s room, surveyed that gentleman a moment, and his police clerk sitting at his desk — then crossed the hall, strolled into the chief-constable’s office; made reconnaissance of its exact situation, of the muskets ranged in their rack, of the hand-cuffs, and other instruments of convict coercion hanging on the wall — then came out; observed the watch-house opposite; the constables lazily walking about (one of them civilly holding my horse); the police-barrack on a little hill facing us, and the other features in the scene of future operations.
“I think,” he said, “three or four men, or at most half-a-dozen, with Colt’s revolvers, might sack the township, and carry off the police magistrate. A great man is Mr. Colt — one of the greatest minds in our country.”
The cottage is in a stir to-day. Smyth had been intimately acquainted with us in Dublin, and also with John Knox. Since then, he has been roving over Ireland, trying, like the rest, to kindle an insurrection that would not burn — then escaping by a Galway emigrant ship, in the guise of a frieze-coated peasant, to America — making off life by precarious methods in New York — editing a newspaper in Pittsburg — agitating, in the New York Sun, the Nicaragua railroad question, and striving to rile up the American mind against England thereupon; in short, discharging like Reilly, all the duties and functions of a true rebel and refugee. He is also, from of old, a close friend of Meagher, and gives us a pleasant account of all the actings and sayings of that ex-prisoner formerly of the Dog’s Head, Lake Sorel, but now of the Metropolitan Hotel, Broadway; how the gobemouches worried him; how the old Confederates shed tears of joy over him; how the priests scowled upon him; how the ladies smiled upon him; all which one can very well imagine.
Smyth is to stay with us two or three days, then proceed to other parts of the island, to consult our friends and make needful arrangements.
Already I begin to snuff the air of the upper world, and to see daylight through the opening gates of Hades.
CHAPTER XXII
January 16lh, 1853 — Bothwell. — Smyth (or, as we prefer to call him, Nicaragua, from his Central American labours) has gone to Melbourne, to negotiate about a ship, Hobart Town being considered more dangerous, as well as offering fewer facilities. I brought him up by Lake Sorel, thence down the mountains to the great northern road. We expect to hear how the mission speeds there within a month or six weeks.
John Knox agrees to avail himself of this chance also, seeing that he and I both live in the same district, and have one common police office to deal with.
If the thing succeed, I must leave my family at Nant Cottage, to follow under Nicaragua’s escort, as best they may, to San Francisco. Yet my wife does not shrink from all this risk and inconvenience. She sees all the terrible evils and disadvantages of rearing up a family in such a country as this, and under such circumstances as ours; and instead of dissuading, urges me strongly on the enterprise. Of course we say nothing about our intention to any of our acquaintances here; as success must depend entirely upon utter secrecy, until the moment of making our formal communication to the authorities.
Feb. 12th. — No intelligence yet from Melbourne. A good horse being essential to our business, in addition to our present stock, I have been on the look-out for one. Mr. Davis, even the police magistrate himself, had one of the best in this district — a white horse, half Arab, full of game, and of great endurance. I knew Mr. Davis had offered him for sale; and the idea pleased me, of buying my enemy’s horse to ride off upon; which would have the double advantage of strengthening me and of weakening the enemy. Accordingly I secured the horse. Mr. Davis, on delivering him, very conscientiously thought it his duty to give me a warning. “I must tell you, Mr. Mitchel,” he said, “that if you attempt to put this horse into harness he will smash everything — he never was in harness but once, and it would be dangerous
[Plate:] Terence Bellew MacManus
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to try it again. ”I said, I was aware of that peculiarity in the horse. “It is right,” he continued, “to mention the fact to you, as I do not know the precise work you want him to do.” “Merely to carry me on his back, wherever I want to go some time or other probably on a long journey.” “Well,” said Mr. Davis, “I know you ride a good deal; and you may depend upon Donald for that.” So I have my new horse out at Nant; and intend to give him regular work and feed him well, that he may be ready when called upon for this long journey.
March 18th. — At length a letter from the indefatigable Nicaragua. He says “he has made up his party for the diggings, and that all goes well with him” — by which I understand he has succeeded in procuring a ship. Further he says, “that he is to meet the rest of his party of diggers at the Bendigo Creek” (which is at present the favourite gold region), “three days hence” ; which is nothing more or less than a notice that he will meet John Knox and me at Lake Sorel on the day specified.
25th. — We rode up to the lakes on the appointed day, met Nicaragua, accompanied by John Connell, of the excellent family of the Sugar-loaf. All is right. The brigantine, Waterlily, owned by John Macnamara, of Sydney, is to come into Hobart Town; clear thence for New Zealand, then coast round to Spring Bay, on the eastern side of the island, about seventy miles from Bothwell, and lie there two days, under pretence of taking in timber. At Spring Bay there is, of course, a police station; but it never has more than three or four constables; and we are to count upon disposing of them by bribery or otherwise. Mr. Macnamara, the owner, comes himself with the ship, and will go round in her to Spring Bay to see us safely off. Nicaragua takes Fleur-de-lis, and rides down to Hobart Town to-morrow.
April 9th. — All is ready. The Waterlily sails from Hobart Town to-morrow, and will be in Spring Bay on Sunday night, at anchor, with Mr. Macnamara’s flag (a red cross with the letter M in one corner). Knox and I, who are entirely passive, and do what Smyth bids us, are to present ourselves on Monday, in the police office, withdraw our parole, and offer ourselves to be taken into custody. Nicaragua brings with him five friends, all armed, as good lookers-on. If we escape the clutches of the Bothwell
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police, we are to ride straight to Spring Bay, a relay of horses being provided for us at half the distance, arrive there during the night, and be ready to embark at dawn. Then, up anchor, and away for the Golden Gate. If the police boat at Spring Bay attempt to board, the captain engages to run her down, or sink her if needful.
Monday evenings — Bothwell. — At Bothwell still. Our plot blown to the moon I Yesterday we were informed, through a friendly resident at Bothwell, that Nicaragua’s whole plan has been intimately known to the governor for a fortnight — that the ship we were to embark in was known — the place where we were to embark’ — the signal we were to use — the friends who were to accompany us — that the Waterlily was purposely allowed to clear out at Hobart Town, without examination, for New Zealand; and finally, that a reinforcement of constables had been sent up from Hobart Town to Bothwell, together with two additional chiefs of police, to be in readiness for any move on our part. This morning I discovered that two armed constables had kept watch all night on the hill behind the cottage.
Council of war at Nant to-day. We had not, of course, calculated on having to deal with more than the ordinary force of constabulary stationed in Bothwell district; the attempt had always been regarded as contingent on our intention remaining a profound secret till the last moment. And certainly the police magistrate having charge of the district, and having at his command a force purporting to be sufficient for all police purposes within that district, for the coercion, if needful, of all the prisoners in it — had no right to such odds against us. If we should go in, and attempt to do our business in the mode intended, there would be, in the first place, a conflict in Bothwell street; and if we succeeded at Bothwell, against all odds, there would, doubtless, be another force at Spring Bay, where the, vessel itself might be already in the hands of the police.
If we thought proper, indeed, to dispense with the formal business before the magistrate, there was nothing to prevent our riding away from Nant this day (or any other day), notwithstanding the vigilance of the constable patrol; and the Government, in that case, would certainly never hear of us again; for, with good horses; and all the population at our side, we might
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remain a year in the island in their despite, until another ship could take us up at the same point. But neither Martin nor I admitted this idea for one moment.
Council of war, therefore, decided that the enterprise could not be attempted this day, or by the help of the Waterlily. Our friends dispersed; O’K— — northward, R— — and C— — south. Smyth and Connell have started for Spring Bay to send the ship off; and all is over for the present.
But Nicaragua and I are determined to have another trial for it.
April 12th. — Note from John Connell. Nicaragua has been arrested. He found a large force of constables waiting for him at Spring Bay; they surrounded the hotel the moment he had dismounted, and took him into custody as John Mitchel. Connell had parted from him, before reaching Spring Bay, and had, fortunately, carried off his papers. In vain Nicaragua protested he was not John Mitchel: he was thrust into the watchhouse, and kept there all night. From the windows he saw the little Waterlily in the bay, with the signal at her mast-head; she was waiting for us still. He was thence carried in custody, through the forest, to Hobart Town, and lodged in the police offices on his journey. The chief constable of Richmond knew me by sight: he volunteered his evidence that they had the wrong man; but the magistrate of Richmond would not hear his testimony, would not interfere in any manner with the execution of the warrant, and so, poor Nicaragua was passed on. One night he travelled all night, in an open spring-waggon, and the weather is becoming very cold; so that, by the time he arrived in Hobart Town, as well as from excitement and disappointment as from hardship, he was in a high fever. After being kept some hours in custody at Hobart Town, he was discharged without a word of apology or explanation, save that it was all a mistake. He now lies extremely ill in the house of a worthy friend of ours.
13th — Hobart Town. — I rode down, yesterday, to see how it fared with Nicaragua: found him ill enough, but convalescent. I went straight to the police office; saw the gentleman who officiates as police clerk; told him I understood there was a warrant against me--if so, here I was; that I understood a gentleman had been
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arrested in my name; that I wanted to know who had issued this warrant, and for what reason; and that I requested him to go and inform the police magistrate I was here. He said it was all a mistake; and treated it as a good joke. However, I told him I could not see the jocoseness of it — and neither could Mr. Smyth — that I conceived the arrest of Mr. Smyth for me, at Spring Bay, was not only an outrage upon him, but upon me still more — that they were all aware I had promised not to leave the island without first giving the proper authorities the opportunity of arresting me; but this proceeding assumed that I was making my escape clandestinely, and therefore disgracefully. Mr. Midwood said, if I would be good enough to sit down he would go and tell the police magistrate I was here, and what I had said. In a few minutes he came back, accompanied by two other well-dressed men, whom he introduced to me by names which I forget. I asked who they were — “Chief Constables of Hobart Town.” — “And you have come to take a look at me?” Chief Constables bowed.
I came back to Nicaragua’s bedside almost exasperated. He agrees with me, that the setting a watch upon my house, and the issuing of a warrant to apprehend me in the act of “absconding,” are most insulting proceedings, especially as the rascals must know that neither these precautions nor any other precautions could have retained me on the island for the last three years, nor for one week, if I had thought fit to abscond. He also is grievously outraged on his own account; and we have therefore resolved, so soon as he is sufficiently recovered, that we two alone will pay our formal visit to Mr. Davis’s office (with revolvers in our pockets) — and, if necessary, take our chance for a ship afterwards.
June 6th. — Nearly two months have gone by since the arrest of Nicaragua. He recovered his health and strength slowly. He is at present with us in Nant Cottage; and the day after to-morrow we shall probably proceed to business. A ship bound for Sydney is to sail on that night from Hobart Town; and if we can reach Hobart Town after dark, the agents of the ship, who are friendly to me, will place me on board at the mouth of the river, after all clearances by police and custom-house authorities. Nicaragua has been judiciously bribing so far as was prudent; but with all
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he can do in this way, the odds against us will be heavy at all times in the police office. John Knox has decided on keeping out of the affair this time; because, if we miss the vessel at Hobart Town, we might then have to spend several weeks on the island; and be subjected to much hardship (for it is now the depth of winter), and assume various disguises — for which he is not well adapted.
8th. — The town is full of police to-day — we put the business off till to-morrow. In the meantime I send James down to Hobart Town to ask the agents if they could delay the ship for a few hours longer. Whatever be the answer, however, we mean to see the affair out to-morrow. By the prudent employment of some money, Nicaragua has made sure that there will not be mere than the ordinary guard of constables present. We would bribe them all, if we dared trust the rascals. As matters stand, we are certain to meet not only the police magistrate himself, but also the police clerk, a respectable man, not purchasable by money, and at least two constables, neither of whom has been bribed, and both of whom will, probably, under the eye of the magistrate, attempt to do their “duty.”
12th. — In Westbury district, full seventy miles from Bothwell. On the 9th, as we had resolved before, Nicaragua and I mounted at Nant Cottage — he on Donald, I on Fleur-de-lis. The eldest of the boys walked through the fields into Bothwell, that he might be ready at the police office door to hold our horses. Before we had ridden a quarter of a mile from the house, we met James (boy number two), coming at a gallop from Hobart Town. He handed me a note from the shipping agents. Ship gone; it was impossible to detain her any longer without exciting suspicion; and the shipping agent conjured me to give the thing up or defer it.
As we now stood, therefore, there was no arrangement for escaping out of the island at all; and if we got clear out of the police office, it was a matter of indifference to me whether I should ride north, south, or east. Westward lay impassable wilderness.
We overtook Mr. Russell of Dennistoun, on our way into Bothwell. He asked me, with some interest, what prices I had got for certain grass-fed wethers which I had sold a few days before-—
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also, whether I meant to put any of my land in crop for thd ensuing season — to all which I replied with much agricultural sagacity and pastoral experience. All the while I saw John Knox, and the boy number one, hurrying along near the river bank, that they might be in the township as soon as I.
At the entrance of the village Mr. Russell parted company with us, and called at a house. Nicaragua and I rode leisurely down the main street. At the police-barrack, on the little hill, we saw eight or nine constables, all armed, and undergoing a sort of drill. At the police-office door there was, as usual, a constable on guard. Mr. Barr, a worthy Scotch gentleman, and magistrate of the district, was standing within a few yards of the gate.
We dismounted. I walked in first, through the little gate leading into the court, through the door, which opened into a hall or passage, and thence into the court-room, where I found his worship sitting as usual. Near him sat Mr. Robinson, the police clerk. “Mr. Davis,” I said, “here is a copy of a note which I have just despatched to the governor; I have thought it necessary to give you a copy.” The note was as follows: —
Bothwell, 8th June, 1853. To THE Lieut. -Gov., etc. —
Sir, — I hereby resign the “ticket-of-leave,” and withdraw my parole. I shall forthwith present myself before the police magistrate of Bothwell, at his office, show him a copy of this note, and offer myself to be taken into custody.
Your obedient servant,
John Mitchel.
Mr. Davis took the note; it was open. “Do you wish me,” he said, “to read it?” “Certainly; it was for that I brought it.” He glanced over the note, and then looked at me. That instant Nicaragua came in and planted himself at my side. His worship and his clerk both seemed somewhat discomposed at this; for they knew the “Correspondent of the New York Tribune” very well, as also his errand from New York. I have no doubt that Mr. Davis thought I had a crowd outside. There is no other way of accounting for his irresolution.
Then I said, “You see the purport of that note, sir; it is short and plain. It resigns the thing called ‘ticket-of-leave,’
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and revokes my promise which bound me so long as I held that thing.”
Still he made no move, and gave no order. So I repeated my explanation: “You observe, sir, that my parole is at an end from this moment; and I came here to be taken into custody pursuant to that note.”
All this while there was a constable in the adjoining room, besides the police clerk, and the guard at the door; yet still his worship made no move. “Now, good morning, sir,” I said, putting on my hat. The hand of Nicaragua was playing with the handle of the revolver in his coat. I had a ponderous riding-whip in my hand, besides pistols in my breast-pocket. The moment I said “Good morning,” Mr. Davis shouted, “No — no! stay here! Rainsford! Constables! “The police clerk sat at his desk, looking into vacancy. We walked out together through the hall; the constable in the district constable’s office, who generally acts as his clerk, now ran out, and on being desired to stop us, followed us through the court, and out into the street, but without coming very near. At the little gate leading out of the court into the street, we expected to find the man on guard on the alert between us and our horses. But this poor constable, though he heard the magistrate’s orders, and the commotion, did not move. He was holding two horses, one with each hand, and looked on in amazement, while we passed him, and jumped into our saddles.
We concluded that we had done enough, and that there was no reason to wait any longer; therefore
We gave the bridle-rein a shake;
Said, Adieu for evermore, my dear;
And adieu for evermore!
Mr. Davis and two constables rushing against one another, with bare heads and loud outcries — grinning residents of Bothwell on the pathway, who knew the meaning of the performance in a moment, and who, being commanded to stop us in the Queen’s name, aggravated the grin into a laugh; some small boys at a corner, staring at our horses as they galloped by, and offering “three to one on the white un “— this is my last impression of Bothwell on the banks of the Tasmanian Clyde.
We crossed the river just below the town, and held on at full
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Speed for a mile to the south-westward; then, finding ourselves fairly in the forest, we pulled up, exchanged horses and coats, and parted — Nicaragua, on Fleur-de-lis, rode due north for Nant Cottage, intending to call there a moment, and then go to Oatlands, to take the coach for Launceston. I rode on about half a mile further into the woods, and found, according to appointment, my good friend J— — H— — , son of a worthy English settler of those parts, an experienced bushman, who knows every nook in the island, and “every bosky bourne from side to side,” and who had undertaken to guide me by shortest and obscurest paths to any point I desired. Brief was our consultation; the Hobart Town ship having sailed, all parts of the island were alike to me; and in all was I sure to find friends. We determined to strike northwards, and over the mountains to this district of Westbury, which is chiefly inhabited by Irish immigrants, and where we should be within a day’s ride of Bass’s Straits. Where we stood then, we were a hundred and thirty miles from the sea in that direction; but our horses were fresh.
H—— laughed at the idea of pursuit; and I, with the load of that foul ticket-of-leave fairly shaken off, and my engagement discharged, felt my pulse begin to beat again with something like life. To be sure, I must yet be some weeks in the country before Nicaragua could get a ship and bring it round for me. Nicaragua himself might be arrested; and, at any rate, he does not yet know what direction I have taken. Also the Government would be sure to send special despatches all round the coast, to put their police on the alert to guard every landing place, and watch every boat; yet I was quite secure. Having once shaken the Bothwell dust off my feet, and resolved not to be retaken alive, I felt myself already a free man.
It was almost mid-winter. The weather was bright and clear; no snow on the ground, but keen frosts at night; on the whole, favourable for hard riding. H immediately took me out of all ordinary tracks, and we plunged into the wilderness of rocky wooded hills, westward of Bothwell, where I had sometimes hunted kangaroo. After ten miles’ hard riding, we came to the track leading from Bothwell to the Shannon river — crossed this track after reconnoitring the road a moment, and then pierced once more into still wilder and more desolate hills. For about
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two miles we rode along the ridge that bounds the Shannon valley, and, for the last time, I saw the gleam and heard the dashing of that bright river — then, turned north-east, continually ascending in the direction of Lake Sorel. High among the mountains, we had to plunge for three miles through the dreary “Soldier’s Marsh” (so named from two soldiers killed there of old by the bushrangers). The marsh was frozen over, so that our horses’ feet did not always break the ice, but occasionally slipped over it — a progress both perilous and slow; and after thirty-five miles’ travelling we found the night darkening round us, and Lake Sorel not yet gained. At last we heard the barking of the stock-keeper’s dogs at “Kemp’s Hut,” — avoided it by keeping to the left; and held on our way for six miles farther along the [the] western shore of the Lake.
It was dark as Erebus; and we had still to go through the most difficult part of the journey to the lake-river, where we proposed to spend the night at the hut of Mr. Russell’s shepherd. There was a high, steep, and rocky mountain to descend, where even in daylight the track is not easy to find; and H thought it prudent to call at a hut on the shore, to procure a guide. There were three men in the hut, the first human beings we had seen since we left Bothwell. They told H it would be dangerous to attempt the descent on so dark a night; and, with the customary shepherd hospitality of those Arcadian swains, invited us to share their fire and opossum-rugs. But we were too near Bothwell yet for this. So we got one of them out to show us the best way to the “saddle” — that is, the watershed between Lake Sorel and the lake-river, from whence we thought we could make our own way.
The guide lost himself, and of course lost us. Told us that, after all, we had better come back, and that, at anyrate [sic], he would go back himself. We thanked and paid him for his services, and then tried to feel our way over the edge of the mountain. We found ourselves evidently descending, yet certainly off the track, and on very rough ground, where to dismount and lead the horses was an absolute necessity. Presently, we came amongst precipices and fields of loose rock, a mere wilderness of shattered stone, but still thickly wooded; for this gum tree seems to live by breathing through its leaves instead of drawing nourishment
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from the soil. The horses began to stumble against us in the darkness, striking us now with their fore-feet, and again knocking us down with their heads. It was midnight; the frost was intense; we had no overcoats or other muffling; neither ourselves nor our horses had eaten anything since breakfast; there was no herbage, and the horses were starving; no water near us, and we were devoured by thirst. Yet we heard far below us, through the still night, the rush of the Lake-river, and now and then the barking of old Job’s dogs.
Neither backwards nor forwards could we move one yard: and there, within three miles of our proposed shelter for the night, we were forced to make our dismal bivouac. We lighted a fire with some dead branches (for no true bushman goes without matches); tied our poor horses to a honeysuckle tree; looked to our pistols; picked the least polygonal stones to sit down upon; lighted our pipes, and prepared to spend eight hours as jovially as possible. Soon sleep overtook us, from utter exhaustion, and we would lie a few minutes on the sharp stones by the fire until awakened by the scorching of our knees, while our spinal marrow was frozen into a solid icicle. Then we would turn our backs to the fire, and sleep again; but, in five minutes, our knees and toes were frozen; our moustaches stiff with ice, our spinal marrow dissolving in the heat. Then up again — another smoke, another talk.
The dawn reddened at last; and the mountains beyond Arthur’s Lakes to the west glowed purple. We expected to find the horses stiffened and half dead; for they were both accustomed to be stabled and bedded at night; and this was the most savage night I had ever experienced in the country. But well-bred Van Diemen’s Land horses have great life and unconquerable pluck; they were fresh as the dawn. We soon found the track, and in half an hour rode up to old Job’s door. It happens that Job’s house was the first place Meagher had stopped at for rest and refreshment, a year and a half ago, on his ride from Lake Sorel; and the moment Job saw me, he knew what business was in hand. He received us joyfully, bade his wife prepare breakfast, and we went with him into the stable, to get our horses fed. Then breakfast before a roaring fire. Meagher, it seems, had shaved off his moustache here for the better disguise; so, after breakfast, Job presented me with a razor, looking glass, basin, and soap, wherewith
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I made a complete transfiguration of myself. I wrote a short note to my wife, to tell her which way I had taken, and without the least hesitation entrusted it to Job Sims, who was to go over to Bothwell the next day with some cattle for Mr. Russell, and who undertook to deliver the note personally at Nant. This man is an Englishman, and has been an old prisoner; yet I know he would not sell that note to the enemy for a thousand pounds. Mounted after three-quarters of an hour’s delay; and Job rode with us two miles, to show us the ford of the Lake-river. After that H and I held on over a rough mountain, but with a
pretty well-defined track. We intended to make first for the house of a Mr. Grover,* whose son, a well-affected Tasmanian native, was known to be ready to aid me in any such affair. Neither of us had ever seen this young Grover; his father is a magistrate of the colony; but we had no hesitation about going straight up to the house.
As we slowly descended the narrow track, at a sudden turn among the trees, we encountered two gentlemen, riding up the mountain. We exchanged salutations and passed, when H—— said to me, “I never saw Charles Grover, but I am almost sure the elder of those two is he.” The “natives” of this island generally know one another by some sort of freemasonry — a circumstance which I had not at that moment time to investigate and trace philosophically. “We must not let him pass,” said H. “Then coo-ee to him. ”H sung out the coo-ee loud and clear; and in a minute the two gentlemen were seen riding back to meet us. “You are Mr. Charles Grover,” said H . “Yes. ” “This is Mr. Mitchel. ”He asked two or three eager questions; found out in a moment how the case stood; asked if our horses were fresh, and where we intended to stop that night. The horses were tired; we were making for Mr. Wood’s-f place in Westbury. Our new friend instantly turned with me; gave up the business, whatever it was, that urged him to his journey; told H he might go back to Bothwell, and leave me with him; made his companion give up his horse to me, and mount Donald, with directions to take him to his (Grover’s) father’s house, to be cared for after the journey; and then started off with me, to bring me by the most secret
* Grover is not the gentleman’s real name. † Wood is also a fictitious name.
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road to Mr. Wood’s. “I am glad I met you,” he said, “because it will save you the necessity of calling at my father’s house; the governor, you know, is a magistrate; and it is as well not to nm risks. ”
Most gratefully and affectionately I parted from H——, who turned, intending to go back for that night to Job’s; and next day, by a circuitous route, to Bothwell. For me, I committed myself, without a moment’s thought, to the care of my new acquaintance. We rode on merrily, got out of the mountain region, and skirted along the base of the great Western Tier, at its northern side. Before dusk we rode into the yard of a large and handsome house, where a tall gentleman came to meet us. It was Mr. Wood. “Here is our friend,” said Grover (I had never seen Wood before), “Mr. Mitchel.” “Ah!” he said, quietly, “I have been expecting you here these two months.” Last night I spent with this gentleman and his amiable family. But as there is a police station within a hundred yards of his gate, and as the police of Westbury were certain to be on the watch all over the district, from this day or to-morrow, it was thought best to remove me this morning to the farm-house of a fine young Irishman, named B——, six miles from Mr. Wood’s, and here I am this day, awaiting news of the movements of Nicaragua and Sir William Denison.
June 12th. — Mr. B. and his wife are very kind to me; keep me in great privacy; seem almost proud to have the charge of so illustrious a patriot (as myself); and assure me I am safe enough here, for a month to come. However, I do not go out, even into the woods, except at night, and never without loaded arms. No news yet of Nicaragua.
16th. — News at last of Nicaragua. On the day he and I parted in the woods near Bothwell, he arrived safely at Oatlands, but was hotly pursued; left Fleur-de-lis, a well-known mare of mine, in the stable of the inn, reeking with sweat; made urgent inquiries whether he could have a horse to travel eastward to Spring Bay — then, at night, left the hotel, through the garden; climbed over several walls at the back of the houses; came round to the road outside the village; waited for the coach, and travelled northward to Launceston, where he is now, duly shaved and disguised.
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At Bothwell there was violent excitement. Seven mounted police were instantly despatched thence, to scour the country on all sides in pursuit. They traced Nicaragua to Oatlands; found my Fleur-de-lys in the stable; learned that the gentleman had asked for a horse to carry him to Spring Bay; and, accordingly, all that region is diligently scoured, and videttes, on the promontories of the coast, are exchanging anxious signals.
I find, also, that Mr. Davis, at Bothwell, charged one of the constables who were present (an Englishman), with failing in his duty, by not securing me, when ordered; and, further, charged him with having been bribed. He, therefore, dismissed him; whereupon the man got drunk on the spot, and spent the evening invoking three cheers for me. It is not true that this poor fellow was bribed: but I wish he had been; for, it is now clear he was open to a bribe, wanted a bribe, and deserved a bribe.
The Westbury police are patrolling night and day, for my sake; but this is no more than the constables of all other districts are doing; evidently, all trace of me is lost; and the government folk have no reason for supposing me to be in this district, rather than any other. At anyrate, in any case, whatever may befall me, I feel absolutely out of the enemy’s power. The end of the enterprise now, must be America or a grave.
CHAPTER XXIII
June 20th, 1853 — Westbury, V. D. L. — I have been now a week at Burke’s farm-house, and in the closest privacy. Even the few friends in this district, who know of my whereabouts, do not dare to come to the house in daylight; but the staunch O’K, on whose own house a strict watch is kept by the police, contrived last night to evade their vigilance, leaving home in the afternoon, riding first in some other direction, and then making a circuit, so as to come down upon Burke’s after midnight. With him came a Launceston friend, who brought me a note from Nicaragua Smith. Nicaragua is now in Hobart Town, and has not been molested, although it is well known that he was with me at the Bothwell police office; but as no violence was actually done, nor even arms exhibited, there is nothing to endanger him. However, all his movements, also, are under strict surveillance.
He assures me, in his note, that the enemy have not the slightest suspicion of my having come to this part of the island, and the impression is general that I am already at sea. Bets are pending in Hobart Town as to the direction I took — as to my having sailed, or not — and if so, by what ship. In the meantime, he is negotiating about a brigantine, the Don Juan, one of Mr. Macnamara’s ships. She is to sail shortly from Hobart Town, bound for Melbourne; and he hopes to arrange it so that she will call on the north side of the island, in some lonely bay, to take me up — I to make my way to the rendezvous as I best may.
22nd. — Special messenger from Nicaragua. The Don Juan is to call at Emu Bay, five days hence; the distance is about eighty miles from my retreat; but there are four rivers to cross, and no road, no bridges. And now. fate has apparently declared against me; for within the last two days. Emu Bay has become totally inaccessible by land. The winter floods have begun. It has rained furiously in the mountains; and the Forth, Mersey, and Don, all fordable in the summer, are rushing down now, in raging
3x8
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torrents, that would sweep us into the sea if we were mounted on elephants. Then, if we go down to the sea-shore, and attempt to pass westward, by crossing the mouths of the river in boats, a difficulty arises — there are generally no bosts to be found there, except the police boats; and every river mouth is watched by constables, who have all received a specied warning to be on the look out for a man thirty-five years of age or so, with dark hair, stature five feet ten inches, etc., etc.
What is to be done? The Don Juan will certainly call in at Emu Bay, and wait there two days. My Launceston friend devises a plan. He has hurried off to Launceston, to employ the captain of a small coasting smack, as a messenger to Emu Bay, with directions for the Don Juan to come eastward again, if the weather permit, and to lie off and on at a solitary beach, between West Head and Badger Head,* a little to the west of the Tamar mouth. To that place I can go without crossing any river except the Meander. The plan does not look feasible, because the weather has grown wild, and the Don Juan, if she can even leave Emu Bay, and coast eastward, may find it impossible to lie to, off that dangerous coast. It is determined, however, that I am to try the chance.
The country between this place and Port Sorel is wild, marshy, rocky, and desolate — all the better for our purpose, if we can only cross the Westbury road, and get through the settled country south of the Meander, without exciting suspicion. Our course is to be due north — the distance nearly seventy miles; we are to set forth about ten o’clock at night, and if possible, to reach the sea the next day.
Latest accounts from Bothwell tell me that all is well at Nant Cottage; all our good neighbours of Bothwell are delighted at my escape (which they think is an accomplished fact already), and kindly attentive to my family. My wife, however, knows that I am still on the island, and every morning expects to hear either of embarkation, capture, or death. If I should even have the good fortune to get on board the Don Juan, my adventures will have only begun. For she goes to Melbourne. At Melbourne there is doubtless a warrant against me, long since in the hands of the police, with description of eyes, hair, and stature; and, since the discovery of gold mines there, careful note is taken by the
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authorities, of every passenger and every sailor coming from Van Diemen’s Land. Many captures are made every week. To get into Melbourne, and to get out of it again, will be about equally perilous; but the “work of the hour” is to get out of Van Diemen’s Land.
24th. — We start to-night. It is gloomy winter weather; the country having been first thoroughly drenched, is now frozen; but the moon is out and on duty. I am to have a considerable cavalcade and body-guard: the two Burkes, Mr. Wood, and his brother, O’K——, O’Mara, brother-in-law to my host, and Foley, a powerful Tipperary man, somewhere between six and seven feet high. If we meet a patrol of constables either on the journey or at the coast, the meeting will not serve the cause of “law and order.”
I have written two letters, one to my wife at Bothwell, one to my mother at New York — a kind of provisional adieu, indeed — for I scarcely hope to meet with this Don Juan; and, failing her, I shall have to disperse my party, and retire from the coast again with all speed and secrecy. Mr. Wood, in that case, proposes to send me to a very remote “station” of his, among the mountains of the north-west, to spend the winter there, and let all thought of pursuit die out. Meanwhile, my kind hostess, Mrs. Burke, is busied in preparations for our departure, and in providing what is needful for our journey. Amongst other things, the good creature gets some lead and judiciously casts bullets. Her husband comes with us, as well as his brother; and their father lends me a good horse.
26th — Port Sorel, Bass’s Straits. — We are here, but the Don Juan is not. The night before last, as had been arranged, about ten o’clock, after taking farewell of Mrs. Burke and her little boy (whose principal nurse I have been for a fortnight), I rode away accompanied by the two Burkes, O’K——, O’Mara, and Foley.
We were to meet the Woods on the Westbury road, at a given point. It was cold, but clear, and the moon shone brightly on the hoar frost. Having been joined by the Woods, we rode nearly due north; and some time after midnight descended through some dark and winding gullies to the valley of the Meander. Just on the farther bank, and in a very solitary place, stood the house of our friend O’K—— . He is a respectable farmer, an intelligent,
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well-informed man, who emigrated hither, after Lord Hawarden’s great extermination of tenantry in Tipperary. O’K—— was one of the tenants turned out upon that occasion; and saw his house pulled down, while all the neighbours on the adjoining townlands were warned not to shelter him, or any member of his family. Some natural tears he shed, and uttered some natural imprecations; but shot neither landlord, nor agent, nor sheriff’s officer — which would have been natural, too. With the help of some good friends he found means to emigrate hither, and has a good farm, far from Lord Hawarden; but still hates with a holy hatred (as in reason he ought) the British aristocracy and British Government. Of course he takes an interest in Irish rebels, and was Meagher’s faithful companion and guide on his last Tasmanian excursion. The river was high and rapid; the banks were steep and rough; but O’K—— knew the ground and led the way; the flood dashed up to our horses’ shoulders; but in a few minutes we had scaled the opposite bank, and galloped up to O’K——’s door.
Here we halted to sup and feed our horses. The family were asleep: but ere long, a roaring fire blazed, beef-steaks hissed, and at the head of his rough but kindly board, O’K—— welcomed me (he hoped for the last time) to the hospitalities of the Tasmanian bush.
One of the peculiarities of Westbury district is that you find Irish families, and whole Irish neighbourhoods, associating together and seldom meeting foreigners: for even the assigned convict-servants whom these people select are all Irish. Thus they preserve, even in the second generation, Irish ways and strong Irish accents; and but a few weeks have gone by since, in
this very house, on the death of O’K——’s old mother, a regular wake was held, and experienced crones raised a true caoine over the corpse, startling the cockatoos with their wild and unwonted ululu.
The two Woods are native Tasmanians, of English stock, and do not fully understand the Tipperary enthusiasm and Munster
demonstrativeness of O’K—— and his wife. They are men ofvery large property, bold horsemen, indefatigable bushmen, and seem to have come into our present enterprise for the sake of the excitement as well as from a sincere regard for Irish rebels. They
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sat smoking and looking on in silence, while O’K—— narrated the black story of the clearing of his village in Tipperary.
At last, it was time to mount once more. The moon had gone down and the night was dark. Seven miles farther on we found ourselves near a hut. which Mr. Wood recognised as the stock-hut of his nephew, young Lilly. He said the owner was in it, and insisted that we should all dismount, knock him up, and demand some tea. I objected, supposing that there might be other strangers in the house, and it was not expedient (seeing I was almost certain we should miss the Don Juan) that my journey in this direction should come to be known. In vain I objected. Wood only laughed, and said it was all right, and thundered with his hunting-whip on the hut door. After some grumbling in the inside, the door was cautiously opened by a man with a gun. Four men were within, including Lilly, the proprietor, who had come that way to give directions to his stock-keepers. He quickly tumbled out of his opossum-rug, recognised my friends, but did not know me, and invited us all to partake the usual bush-fare.
Though displeased at the delay and risk of blabbing, I went in: and we remained an hour; so that dawn was breaking before we resumed our journey Young Lilly was informed, before I left, of the nature of the excursion, and undertook to keep his shepherds, and also a strange shepherd who was there, closely employed about the place for some days, lest they should spread abroad the intelligence that such a party of horsemen had been riding coastward upon such a night.
When the morning reddened in the sky, we found ourselves in as wild and impervious a country as I have yet seen in Van Diemen’s Land — no mountains, but countless hills, divided almost uniformly by dangerous marshes; rocks, dead trees, deep “creeks” with rotten banks; such, without intermission for forty miles, was the scene of our tedious travel. The only comfort was, that no constables would venture into those wildernesses in winter.
Once O’K—— , who was mounted on a powerful black mare, sunk unexpectedly deep into a morass, covered with treacherous herbage. He flung himself off the saddle; and, by dint of some desperate plunges, the mare was extricated. We came into a
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narrow gorge, very rocky and entangled with almost impassable “scrub”. Down the gorge flowed, or rather oozed, through the slimy soil and prostrate decayed trees, a kind of creek, which we must cross: but never in all my bush riding had I seen so hideous and perilous-looking a task for a horseman. Last winter, the floods had been peculiarly heavy hereabouts; and the channel had been much deepened and widened. Immense dead trees lay along and athwart it in all directions; the banks were high and composed of soft red soil; and in the bottom, wherever the bottom could be seen, there seemed to be nothing but unfathomable red mud. We struggled a full hour along the bank, looking for a point where it was possible to cross; and every moment going farther out of our way, as was too apparent by the sun.
O’Mara, who was mounted on a fine young bay horse, once dashed at the creek, shouting, “Follow me!” He went down the slope safely; and in a moment we saw the noble horse springing up against the opposite bank, O’Mara leaning over his neck and urging him with spur and voice. He gave two or three tremendous bounds, but the soft earth always gave way under his feet; and, at length, with his fore-feet pawing wildly in the air, down he went backwards to the bottom; but O’Mara, grasping a branch of a dead tree, swung himself from the saddle, and thus saved himself from interment in red slime under his horse. We spent an hour in extricating the poor animal, which, by dint of main force, we accomplished; but it was too clear that was not a place for crossing.
Over the creek, however, we made our way, and late last evening, came out from the hills upon the broad tide-water of the Tamar, near a small settlement called York. Avoiding the houses, which might have contained disaffected persons — to wit, constables — we proceeded about a couple of miles into the woods beyond, but were still five miles from the sea-coast at Badger Head.
Darkness came on; and the country before us was almost impassable even in daylight; so we bivouacked in the wood. Fortunately it was a grassy place, and the horses could pick up something to eat. We lighted a good fire, roasted upon forked sticks certain pieces of mutton we had carried with us from O’K——’s, finished the supply of brandy, and having duly
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smoked our pipes, fixed saddles under our heads for pillows, and slept.
At daybreak this morning we were astir; for we all thought it quite possible that the Don Juan, if her captain had received the message recalling him, might have been off the designated beach yesterday evening; and if so, the wind of last night, blowing in towards the shore, would have obliged her to work as far to seaward as possible, otherwise, the rocks of Badger Head would be fringed with her shivered ribs this morning. It was calm and mild weather as we started from our lair; and, after four miles’ difficult journeying, through marshes, we heard the roar of the sea, and saw Badger Head towering to our left. Still, the water was invisible, for the shore was bordered by a line of high sand-hills, clothed with honey-suckle trees and boobialla. We scaled the sand-hills; and there was the blessed sea — but as far as the eye could sweep it, not a sail!
We gazed blankly into one another’s faces. Determined, however, to wait there all day, and look out for a sail. The coast here makes a fine sweeping curve between the two rocky promontories; and there is a broad smooth beach of sand.
A vessel suddenly hove in sight, round the point of Badger Head. A brigantine! She was four miles off, and we had no doubt, from her apparent tonnage and rig, that she was the Don Juan. She stood out to sea, and seemed to be coming out the Tamar mouth, where she had probably taken shelter last night.
Now we eagerly watched her movements, expecting every instant that she would tack. From the distance, we were unable to see whether she had Macnamara’s signal-flag at her masthead: but we gathered some dried branches, and set fire to them and to the long grass that covered a sand-hill. Soon a pillar of smoke rose into the air that might have been visible thirty miles. The insensible brigantine made no sign, nor swerved from her steady course, steering direct for Melbourne. In an hour she was out of sight, and we took counsel what we should do next. There we could stay no longer, if only for want of food; and it was necessary that the party should separate. Mr. Wood renewed his proposal of sending me to his stock-station among the north-western mountains, where I might stay all winter as a stock-keeper. In the meantime we agreed to ride in the evening
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to the house of a gentleman named Miller, about nine miles to the west of us, on the shore of Port Sorel inlet; stay with him all night, and consult with him in the morning.
The coast all along is totally uninhabited; and we did not see a human creature all day. Half a mile from Miller’s, we halted, and Wood rode on to make sure that no strangers were about the place. Miller himself returned with Wood. He had never seen me before; but seemed delighted that we had come to him. He assured us that as he had no servants at that time, and as his house was quite off all tracks and roads, I might, if necessary, remain three months there unsuspected. On the other side of Port Sorel inlet, which is not half a mile wide at the mouth, stands a township, with police office, magistrate, and the rest of the apparatus; and Miller says the last stranger who appeared at his house was a constable from Launceston, bearing the despatch a fortnight ago to all the stations along that coast, announcing my departure from Bothwell and enjoining vigilance for my sake.
“All special messengers,” said he, “bearing despatches from Launceston, must come to me, and request me to put them across the water in my boat, which is the only boat on this side. So, you see, it is all right; you can stay here in perfect safety.
O’K—— declared he could not see how this made all right; for said he, “If our journey in this direction comes to be known, as it must be in a few days, your next visitor will be another express constable.”
“The very thing,” said Miller, “that we want. The fellow can’t go over without my help: — I can make him drunk here, and take the despatch from him, or bribe him to return and say he delivered it; or drown him, if you like, in the passage.”
This did not appear a very satisfactory prospect; yet, as we must separate, and as the Don Juan may still appear to-morrow or next day, I have resolved to stay with Mr. Miller, and keep a look-out for it. All my escort are to go to their several homes to-morrow, and Burke is to communicate with Nicaragua Smith.
Miller is an Englishman, long resident in London; but, like all the other honest people in this country, he cordially abhors Sir William Denison and his government, and will go any length
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in my service; not, perhaps, that he loves me more, but that he loves Sir William less.
27th. — Before sunrise this morning, I went with O’K——, took an excellent telescope of Miller’s, and went over the sand hills to get a view of the sea. Not a sail in sight. Wind steady from the north-west, and likely to remain so. This is a fair wind for the Don Juan, coming from Emu Bay towards Port Sorel; but I begin now to despair of her.
After breakfast, all my friends went off — all promising to return if required. They leave me Burke’s horse, the same that I rode from Westbury.
They had gone about four hours, and Miller and I were sitting on the sand-hills smoking, when a sail came in sight, from the westward; we watched her eagerly, but she turned out to be a barque. Here, then, I remain, within a mile of a police barrack; Miller’s land forms a point which runs out far to meet the opposite shore of the inlet: the point is well wooded; and immediately on the shore the hills of sand are thickly fringed with a dense shrubbery of boobialla, a small, beautiful tree, rising to a height of seven or eight feet, and forming a close screen with its dark green leaves, which greatly resemble the leaves of the arbutus. From behind this shelter I can see the sleepy-looking village, which seems to be peopled mostly by constables, sauntering about with their belts and jingling handcuffs.
July 1st. — Four days at Miller’s. No Don Juan: no news from Launceston, or from Nicaragua Smith. Though my host is well-informed and agreeable, I begin to execrate this lurking life. The suspense and terror at Nant Cottage must be grievous. I despise myself as I sit here behind my boobialla fence, and am very much inclined to cut short the business by some coup. Mr. Miller proposes a plan. He says there is a vessel in the mouth of one of the rivers, fourteen miles west, taking a cargo of sawn timber on board for Melbourne. “She will be cleared,” continued Miller “by our friend over the way, the chief constable. Now, I have a brother in Melbourne, lately arrived from England. I have been expecting him here to visit me; and Mr. Nicholls, the police magistrate, and the chief constable are aware of it. If you choose, I will bring you over to the village, the day before the ship is to sail; introduce you as my brother to the worthy magistrate; he
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will ask us to dine; he will give you a certificate; in the evening, you and I will go along with the clearing officer himself, across the country to the river Forth. You will be put on board in due form of law, as Henry Miller, and proceed upon your travels respectably. Does the magistrate, or any of the constables, know your appearance?”
“How can I tell? You know they are always changing the constables from one district to another. However, I think my disguise is complete.” Miller ran to his boat, sculled across, and within an hour returned, laughing — “I have told Mr. Nicholls that you are here; and I think he will feel that it is only civility to come over and visit you. I also mentioned you to the chief of police, telling him that, although you have been so short a time here, you are tired of the country (which is true), and want to go to Melbourne. I told him you did not much like the idea of travelling back to Launceston, to take your passage in one of the steamers, and asked him if there were not a good vessel shortly to sail from some of these rivers. ‘There is the Wave’ said he — ‘the very thing for your brother.’”
“Well,” I asked, “what more?”
“Why,” said Miller, “he is going over to the Forth to-morrow, will go on board the ship, and will bring us back full particulars as to the accommodation, fare, etc. Then you and I are to dine with the police magistrate, on our way; and the clearing officer will have an interview with you in the police office, and will make all smooth for my brother. This thing will do. You must come.”
“I agree to everything but the dinner party at the police magistrate’s. I will not sit down at any man’s table under a feigned name; but let us impose on him otherwise, if you like.”
“You agree, then, to go as my brother?”
“Certainly; I am tired of skulking about; though your society and conversation, my dear fellow, are .”
“Hurrah!” said Miller, running to tell his wife of our plan. He seems rejoiced beyond measure that he is to have the whole credit of taking me off, when all my Irish friends had failed, and swears he will go with me to Melbourne. To-morrow he goes across to the village again, to learn all the particulars about the cabin of the Wave, “for we must pretend to be very fastidious about our accommodations.”
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2nd. — To-day he pushed his boat over again. “It is all right,” he said, when he returned — “everything arranged. We sail on the 8th. The police magistrate will come over in the meantime to visit you. ”
So the matter stands, then. If I do not hear of some better arrangements made by Nicaragua Smith, or my friends in Launceston, before the Wave lifts anchor, I shall sail as Henry Miller.
Miller has two magnificent kangaroo dogs. His son George and I rode out to-day upon Badger Head, taking the dogs with us; and, in the scrubby hollows of the promontory, we raised two kangaroos; but, I grieve to say, lost them both. The “scrub,” was too close for the dogs to run. We saw, on our return, three superb eagles, poising themselves on moveless wings, high in the air. The lambing season has commenced; and these three murderers have come down from the mountains to keep an eye upon Miller’s young lambs.
5th July. — About eleven o’clock to-day two horsemen were seen approaching through the trees, from the direction of Badger Head. An unusual sight; for the last eight days no human being has appeared on this side of Port Sorel, and it happened that the foot-prints of one solitary m£in had been seen on the sand, the very day we came here, which kept Miller’s family speculating and wondering ever since. So there was commotion in the house, when one of the boys ran in to tell us of the approaching horsemen. Miller locked me up in my own room, having first warned me to look to my pistols. He walked out to meet the strangers. Presently I heard well-known voices, and came out — the two Burkes have come, to bring me to Launceston. My indefatigable friend Dease, a merchant in that town, has bargained it seems, with Capt.— — , of the steamer— — , to bring me from Launceston to Melbourne; and my passage has been secured on board the steamer, in the name of Father Macnamara. I must be in Launceston to-morrow evening; go on board at once, and remain there all night. Next morning the steamer sails. They tell me no time is to be lost, for it begins to be rumoured that I am still on the island, and the police have a nose like the nose of the behemoth that pierceth through snares.
Launceston is fifty-five or sixty miles off; and the . country is, in this season, altogether execrable. They have only ridden
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to-day from the Tamar mouth (about fifteen miles), and propose that I start at once, and go so far this evening as a certain hut they know. To-morrow to Launceston.
Farewell, then, to my kind English host and hostess; and once more in the saddle. Miller says that I had better go by the Wave, and be his brother Henry.
8th. — On the 6th we slept (the two Burkes and I) at a hut in the woods. On the 7th, a wet and stormy day, we made good our way, though with great labour and fatigue, to Launceston. Went to the house of— — , and got rigged up instantly as a Catholic priest — shaved from the eyes to the throat; dressed in a long black coat, with upright collar, the narrow white band round the neck, and a broad black hat, I waited for Mr. Dease to come and bring me on board. Dease came, accompanied by Connellan of Hobart Town.
This plot also miscarries; and they all fear the case is almost desperate. Capt. says positively that he dares not take me on board at Launceston, nor even anywhere along the river on his way down, at least until after his ship has been cleared at Georgetown, forty-five miles below Launceston: — says the rigour of searching has been greatly increased since I left Bothwell, and that the police magistrate at Georgetown has got very special orders: so that he (the captain) cannot take me, even concealed in his own cabin — that retreat, which used to be a sanctuary, being now subject to the narrowest scrutiny. In short, he said, I must go down in an open boat this night — so as to find myself below Georgetown, between the very capes of the river’s mouth, to-morrow about three o’clock. There he will take me up.
Dease had come to tell me that a boat was ready for me, and that I must start at once. It was a dreadful night, wet and stormy. I had ridden fifty miles, mostly through rain, rivers, and morasses, and was thoroughly tired. I declared I would go on board in the morning openly at the quay, as Father Macnamara, and run all the risk; but my friends overruled this, and almost carried me down to the river.
It was profoundly dark. Two boatmen were waiting for us at the water side. Dease and Connellan came with me. I threw myself along the bottom of the boat, in ten minutes was fast asleep; and so we started on our nocturnal expedition of about fifty miles.
CHAPTER XXIV
9th July — Launceston, V. D. L. — We have come back here. Baffled again.
To resume the story of our almost desperate attempt to get out of the river Tamar in an open boat: — We were rowed nearly all night after leaving Launceston, and a little before dawn arrived at a point of the river (or rather estuary), where it is above two miles in width. On the right bank, just here, lives a worthy colonist, named Barrett, to me unknown, but for whom my companions vouch as well affected. We put the boat ashore, and walking up to the house, in the dark, thundered at the door without ceremony. Barrett came down. We asked him for his boat (a good gig), and people to pull it, intending to leave the little skiff that had brought us down at his place, until my friends should be returning up the river, after depositing me on board the steamer at the river mouth. The boat, the men, everything was at our service. We stayed an hour or two, breakfasted, and then Mr. Barrett volunteered to go with us himself, and to see me fairly at sea. There was good daylight when we started, and we had only sixteen or seventeen miles to go to Georgetown. So we dropped down the river at our leisure. It is a most winding and dangerous estuary, varying in breadth from a quarter of a mile to three miles, bordered by hills, all covered with unbroken forest, except where a small farm has been cleared here and there.
Before coming quite opposite to Georgetown, Mr. Barrett put me and Connellan ashore for a while in the woods on the western bank, and went himself over to the village, in order that he might see the chief of police, and give him some account (a false account of course) of his errand down there with his boat. Unless this precaution were taken, he said, the police would assuredly take notice of the strange boat, and send an armed police boat to question us.
We remained an hour in the woods; Barrett was to return to
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our side at a point two miles lower down the river than the place we landed, to take us up there whenever the steamer should appear. He had scarcely pushed across to Georgetown before the black funnel and its streamer of smoke came round a wooded promontory within three miles. The usual custom is to delay these steamers about an hour at Georgetown, while they undergo a thorough and final search, so that we calculated on having abundance of time. The captain had directed us to be in the middle of the river in the boat, after he should have got rid of the searchers, and he would lie to and take me on board. I had my priestly garments and broad-brimmed hat along with me, so as to enable me to act the character of Father Macnamara with proper dignity and sanctity.
But while Connellan and I were making our way to the point at which Barrett was to take us up again, and just after we had seen the police boat come out to overhaul the ship, we saw, to our utter dismay, that the boat left her again instantly, and she, without stopping, steamed away down towards the Heads. Barrett’s boat had not yet left Georgetown to come over for us; half an hour passed, and the boat did not come. The steamer was now four miles down the river, and there, close by the light-house, we saw her stop.
Now, we thought all was right. Barrett’s boat at last approached, pulled with desperate energy by four men. We jumped in, and put off, still keeping our eyes on the steamer, when, at that moment, up went the steam again. The captain evidently had come to the conclusion that something must have happened to prevent me from keeping my appointment; and he had waited full fifteen minutes. We were too far off to be visible from the ship, close under the shore as we were; and, just as our rowers were stretching to their oars with all their force, the steamer moved slowly off before our eyes, swept round the lighthouse, and away on her straight course for Melbourne.
The chance was lost. The sun set in a red and angry sky; it was certainly to be a stormy night; and there we were, far from shelter, opposite one of the strongest and most vigilant police stations of the island. Back to Launceston we must absolutely make our way, and that before morning. Moreover, as Mr. Dease one of our companions, had been left in Georgetown, Barrett
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must call for him. I objected to go in the boat to Georgetown; but said I would go on shore again with Connellan, on the west bank, and let Barrett come for me, after taking up Dease.
We accordingly went into the woods again, and watched the boat going across. Half an hour, at the utmost, would suffice to bring her back. Half an hour passed, but no boat came. It was now dark. An hour went by, two hours, still no boat came. We knew that something was wrong, and conjectured that some of the boatmen had got drunk, and let out the secret. “In that case,” said Connellan, “the first boat that comes over will be a police boat.” Another hour elapsed, and we had made up our mind to spend the night in some very secret part of the forest, and walk next day, by West Head and Badger Head, back to my friend Miller, when we heard in the darkness the sound of oars working in their rowlocks. Presently the prow of a boat ran up against the gravelly beach; but it was impossible to see anything at one yard’s distance. I told Connellan to go down towards the place where he heard the sound, and if all was right to sing out “Coo-ee” ; but, if it was a police boat, then to make no sound, but try to rejoin me instantly. In the meantime I put caps on my pistols.
“Coo-ee!” It was Barrett’s boat; the delay was caused only by two of the boatmen getting drunk; but there had been no blabbing, so far as Barrett knew. To my surprise, I found also Dan Burke, of Westbury, in the boat. He had taken his passage in the steamer, and was to have gone with Father Macnamara to Melbourne. Says that the steamer did not delay an hour, as usual, only because the chief of police at Georgetown, called the “clearing officer,” had happened to be in Launceston, had come down on board the steamer, and had made his researches on his way; so, when the police boat came alongside, he had nothing to do but drop into it, and go ashore. Burke says that the captain had then no pretext for delay — that if he had stopped anywhere nearer to Georgetown, he would be sure to be visited again by the police — that when he did stop, down at the Heads, he had anxiously kept looking out with a glass, to see whether our boat appeared; and at last had given us up. The failure, therefore, was not the captain’s fault, but is due to the “Fates and Destinies,
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the Sisters Three, and such branches of learning.” Burke himself had left the steamer at the Heads, and had come back in the pilot-boat.
We had a weary pull up the river again. The night came down in a horrible storm, and we were twice on reefs. Reached Barrett’s about one o’clock: took our Launceston boat and boatmen again; bade adieu to poor Barrett, who is very desponding about my fate — these repeated failures being, as he thinks, a pronouncement of heaven against me — and then we set out for Launceston. I was now fully resolved to stay no longer on the north side of the island, but to make my way to Hobart Town, and put myself in the hands of some ship-owner to be smuggled away like contraband goods, as he in his wisdom should think best. The storm roared and raged more furiously every moment; in the windings of the channel we were several times driven ashore; yet, as the wind was with us we kept the sail set, hoping to get up to the town before morning. The rain came down in torrents; the woods groaned and even shrieked; and, through the blackness of the night, we could see nothing but the glimmer of the white foam. When we were yet sixteen miles from Launceston a dreadful squall came down upon us, and before the men could drop the lug-sail we were driven violently ashore. The boatmen declared that they would not go to Launceston till the storm was over. We were in a perfectly trackless wood; the earth was soaked, the trees were dripping; but we did not care for that, having been drenched to the meirrow of the bones some hours before. Five or six hours we spent in those dismal circumstances, deriving an imperfect consolation from smoking; but so thoroughly exhausted were we, that every one of us lay down and slept, under the pouring rain.
Embarked again this morning; and of course, reached Launceston in broad day. I was put ashore a mile from the town, and was to walk up, accompanied by Dan Burke, and proceed openly to the house of Father Butler, behind the Catholic Chapel, where the others were to meet me. There is nothing like coolness. We walked quietly into and through the town: and the man of five feet ten, dark hair, and so forth, passed quite unchallenged, through the streets — probably, because there are so many men whom that description fits. In truth, if my wife had
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met me in that walk, she could not have suspected me. So I reached the worthy priest’s house safely.
When Connellan, Dease, and his brother came, they all agreed with me, that the north side of the island has grown too hot to hold me. The two Launceston boatmen, who have just brought us up, though my name was never mentioned before them, must, at least, suspect. Barrett’s men knew me well enough. Besides, the long journeys of the Burkes, to and fro, must have been noticed; and I, therefore, tell my friends that I am resolved to go straight to Hobart Town, and by the public coach. The distance is 120 miles, the coach road passes through seven or eight townships, and by a dozen police offices. Yet, still relying on my clerical character I think this safer than any other mode of travelling.
Connellan has gone to take two places in the night mail, for the night after next, one for himself, and one for the Rev. Mr. Blake. In the meantime, the good Father Butler proposes to conceal me in the belfry of his church. How can I ever acknowledge the great services rendered to me by all these kind people?
12th July — Hobart Town. — The Rev. Mr. Blake has accomplished his perilous journey. The night coach started from Launceston at half-past five p.m., when there is still daylight, and Father Butler would by no means hear of my going to the coach office in the most public part of the town. He, therefore lent me a horse, and rode with me out of town, to wait for the coach at Frankland village. As we rode on we approached a turnpike gate. “Here,” said Mr. Butler, “you can test your disguise. Clergymen, of all denominations, are privileged to pass the toll-gates free in Van Diemen’s Land. If the man has no doubt about your being a priest, he will politely touch his hat to us both. But if he does not believe in your holy orders, it will cost you threepence.” I saved the threepence, and my dignified nod was as good as a blessing to the gate-keeper.
When I bade adieu to Father Butler, and got into the coach, I found, besides Connellan, two other passengers inside, one of them, a man whom I had met and talked with, at least once before, and who certainly would have known me, had I been less effectually disguised. He is T. MacDowell, late Attorney-General for the colony — a dangerous neighbour. Not that I
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believe it would have been running any risk to confide the matter to him, but there was another stranger. Mr. MacDowell tried to draw me into conversation, asked me about “my bishop,” but I was shy, unsatisfactory, Jesuitical.
Towards morning, we passed the point of the mail road nearest to Bothwell; within sixteen miles; and I gazed wistfully up at the gloomy ridge of the Den Hill. Beyond that hill, embowered among the boscages of Bothwell, lies my little quasi-liame, which my eyes will never see again, with all its sleeping inmates lulled by the murmuring Clyde.
The coach changed horses at Greenponds, as usual; and everybody at Greenponds knows me by sight. Several men were about the coach; they looked into it, and all over it, as if expecting to see some traveller. I took no note of all this, till Mr. MacDowell said to one of them, “Ah, you are up early” (it was about four o’clock in a winter’s morning). “Yes, sir,” was the answer, “on special duty.” I now looked more sharply at the man; it was the chief constable of Greenponds, with some of his force. If it was for my sake, however, they had risen so early, it was in vain, for not one of them recognised me. I looked as calm and mild as if Deus vobiscum were on my lips; but I was preparing to open the coach door farthest from the hotel, at a moment’s notice, with one hand, and with the other took hold of a pistol in the pocket of my clerical soutane.
We passed on. It was clear day this morning before we reached Bridgewater; and it would have been madness to proceed with the coach to the door of the Ship Inn, at Hobart Town, where there is always a crowd of detectives; so I left the coach, and went into the hotel to remain there all day, and take the evening coach into town. Connellan remained in his place, and bade farewell very respectfully to Mr. Blake. He says Mr. MacDowell looked somewhat keenly after me, and observed, “Your reverend friend, Connellan, does not carry any luggage.”
I spent the day walking along the Derwent, and amongst the woods; dined at the solitary inn, and in the evening took a place outside on the coach which was to reach Hobart Town at eight o’clock. Six miles short of Hobart Town we stopped a moment at a hotel. St. Kevin O’Doherty climbed the coach, and sat down directly in front of me, looking straight in my face. A flood of
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light from the house was upon us at the moment. He had come out expressly to meet me; he knew I was to be dressed as a priest, yet I was a total stranger to him. Before going down into the centre of the town, I made the coachman pull up, left the coach, and walked through the dark streets (for the city is not lighted) to Connellan’s house, in Collins Street. I knocked at the door; it was opened by Nicaragua. “Is Mr. Connellan at home, sir?” “No, sir; he has gone out to take a drive.” “Will he soon return?” Nicaragua all this time was looking at me curiously and anxiously. Connellan, in fact, had gone to Bridgewater, in a gig for me. It was now full time for him to return, and when a stranger came instead, poor Nicaragua thought all was over, that I had been taken, and that his visitor was a detective come to search for papers — such an atmosphere of “preternatural suspicion” do men breathe in this Tartarean island.
I saw now that my disguise might carry me through a birthday ball at Government House. I walked into the hall, shut the door, went into the parlour, where lights were burning, took off my broad-brimmed hat, looked at Nicaragua, and laughed. Then he knew me. It was the first time we had met since we exchanged horses and coats in the wood behind Bothwell, just five weeks ago, and he has since had almost as much travelling and hardship as myself.
He has much to tell me; was up two or three days ago at Nant Cottage. All well there; everyone in Bothwell, and all over the island, laughing at Mr. Davis, the police magistrate. A song is sxing now in those parts, celebrating his worship’s horse, Donald, that he lent his prisoner to escape upon. There are grave suspicions over him; and many will continue to believe that I bought not the horse, but the owner. This makes his worship nearly frantic; and he has since converted his police office into a kind of fortress, with two armed constables, instead of one, always keeping guard at the door, who have the strictest orders never to hold any gentleman’s horse. They have really been too careless at these offices, and I take some credit for reforming the discipline of this one. Mr. Davis declares he will exculpate himself before all Europe; he will appeal to the human species. In the meantime, he sternly awaits an attack from John Knox.
Nicaragua himself goes everywhere without molestation, having
[Plate:] Charles Gavan Duffy [signature] (1846
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been a mere spectator in the Bothwell affair, and not an actor; but his motions are watched closely; and on Connellan’s coming into the house, it was decided that I could not stay in that house, even for one night, in safety. Nicaragua and I, therefore, left the door at different times, walked different ways, and met at Mr. Maning’s door. Mr. Maning is agent in Hobart Town for Macnamara’s ships, and I knew him to be well-affected to me, although a frequenter of Government House, and birth-day balls, and the like.
In half-an-hour we had our plan arranged. The Emma, regular passenger-brig, sails hence for Sydney within a week. Nicaragua sets out to-morrow for Bothwell, to hasten and assist the winding-up of all affairs at Nant Cottage, sale of stock, etc., so as to enable my wife and family to sail by the same vessel — they to go on board at the wharf, and be regularly “cleared;” by the authorities — I, being contraband, to be taken down the bay by Maning himself, in his own boat — the Emma to time her lifting anchor, so as to drop down the stream at dusk — I, to be put on board in the dark three or four miles below, but to preserve my incognito strictly while on board, even to my own children. There might be some disaffected passengers in the Emma; and if any of them should know me and betray my presence in Sydney, I would be as certainly arrested there as in Hobart Town itself. Meantime, Mr. Maning has brought me out to-night to the house of his father, two miles down the Sandy Bay road, in a quiet country place, where I am to remain concealed till the ship sails.
This is a bold move; but, unless some tmtoward accident occurs, it will be successful. Then away for San Francisco.
July 19th — At Sea. — The Emma, with all sails set, is gliding northwards. Maria Island, O’Brien’s old dungeon, is straight opposite, and the long-stretching mountainous coast of Van Diemen’s Land extending to windward as far as the eye can reach.
Yesterday evening I was placed on board in the bay by moonlight. Capt. Brown received me as a passenger he had been expecting, merely observing: “You were almost too late, Mr. Wright” — then brought me down to the cabin, and introduced Mr. Wright to the passengers, including Nicaragua. My wife was
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sitting on the poop with the children in the moonlight, eagerly watching my embarkation, but did not say a word to me; and Mr. Wright walked about as a stranger. The ship is full of passengers; but not one of them knows me.
July 20th. — 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, full of sorrow and gnashing of teeth — Island of fragrant forests, and bright rivers, and fair women! — Island of chains and scourges, and blind, brutal rage and passion! 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 fire-sides will blend for ever in my memory with the eloquent song of the dashing Derwent and deep-eddjdng Shannon.
Van Diemen’s Land is no longer a penal colony. That is to say, the British Government, yielding with a very ill grace to the imperious remonstrances of five potent colonies, has announced that no more prisoners shall be sent thither. In a generation or two, then, the convict taint may be well-nigh worn out of the population; and those most lovely vales will be peopled by beings almost human. May it be so! Tasmania will then be the brightest of the five Australasian stars that have already dawned on their blue Southern banner.
Vanish the peaks of the Bay of Fires; a storm is gathering, and the Straits are going to show us this night the utmost they can do. I go below, and having already formed some casual acquaintance with Nicaragua and other passengers, Mr. Wright sits down to smoke and chat.
July 23rd — Sunrise. — We are off the entrance to Sydney harbour — Narrow entrance; perpendicular cliffs on both sides. Lighthouse perched on one of them. After getting through the entrance, a spacious bay appears, running into many coves stretching in all directions, in every one of which a fleet might lie at anchor. Low wooded hills all around. The city crowns the head of the bay, and who needs to be informed that there is plenty of shipping.
Here, Mr. Wright must run the gauntlet again; for the Emma,
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as usual, is to be searched by police authorities, and they possess undoubtedly a description (probably a too flattering portrait) of the man of five feet ten, with dark hair. But Captain Brown, who is familiar with the chief officer, takes him at once down to the cabin, produces brandy and water, tells the official person some new anecdote of a jocose description, and so gets rid of him. Then he makes ready his own boat, and tells Mr. Wright that he is going to bring him ashore first. Mr. Wright nods a slight farewell to Nicaragua, and his other acquaintances among the passengers; but does not presume to address Mrs. Mitchel (not having been introduced to that lady), and drops into the boat.
Twelve o’clock. — Mr. Wright was conducted by the captain straight to Macnamara’s house in the best part of the city. Was kindly received by Mr. James Macnamara (his father is now in Melbourne), is domiciled in the house for the present, and, instead of Wright, has become “Warren.”
Nicaragua is to take lodgings for the family. And my friend James Macnamara, has gone out to inquire about a ship — any ship bound either for San Francisco, Tahiti, or the Sandwich Islands.
CHAPTER XXV
July 24th, 1854 — Sydney. — Weather very mild and bright, though it is the depth of winter, and the city seems very cheerful. Sydney is built on a great bed of sandstone rock, and the public buildings and most of the stores and private houses are built of this stone. From the cellars of every house they quarry stone enough to build the walls; and it gives the place a lively and substantial appearance. The streets, also formed upon the sandstone rock, are clean and smooth as garden walks. However, I have no notion of describing Sydney. A seaport town of 80,000 inhabitants, and there an end.
Mr. Warren (for that is my name), dwelling peacefully in Mr. Macnamara’s: drove out this evening in his carriage, along with his wife and daughters, to the South Head, where the lighthouse stands. Climbed the lighthouse; and, assuredly, Warren has never seen so lovely a bay as this of Sydney, except Lough Swilly, in Donegal. Mr. James Macnamara is making inquiries about a vessel. If possible, he will secure a passage for all of us in the same ship; but there is no ship at present laid on for San Francisco, and there may be none for a month to come. An English barque, the Orkney Lass, of London, is about to sail in three or four days for Honolulu, in the Sandwich Islands; and once there, we could find easy transit to California. On inquiry, we find that the Orkney Lass is already full of passengers, and the captain could make room only for one. I am urged by my friends here to take this passage and get clear out of the British colonies with all speed, seeing that Nicaragua is fortunately here to escort my family to San Francisco. To-morrow I shall decide.
July 25th. — My wife came to Mr. Macnamara’s to visit Mr. Warren; brought me a letter she had received, before leaving Bothwell, from Smith O’Brien, very warmly congratulating her on my escape; also a letter from John Knox. She had the kindest assistance from our neighbours of Bothwell in all her
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business arrangements — selling horses, and sheep, and so forth. Nant Cottage and farm are already occupied by an English gentleman recently arrived in the colony, and he took the furniture at a valued price. Fleur-de-lis, our old favourite, is sold to a young lady. May her rack long abound with hay, and the oats never fail in her manger. Tricolor goes to Connellan; Donald to Dan Burke; Dappel, the boy’s little brown mare, has been sold; and Mr. A. Reid promises to take care of her colt. I was very fond of all these horses, and hope to hear sometimes how it fares with them, as well as with my human friends.
Mrs. Mitchel has secured agreeable rooms in a house at Wooloomooloo, a large suburb of Sydney, which has retained its outlandish native name.
A cabin passage is taken for Mr. Warren in the Orkney Lass, for Honolulu. Nicaragua is to bring on the rest of the party by the next good ship bound for San Francisco; so that we shall all meet again, inside the Golden Gate. An American ship, the Julia Ann, is to sail from Melbourne to San Francisco in a few days, and to call at Sydney. If there are berths enough unoccupied for the family, they will come on by that ship.
July 28th. — Went to-day on board the Orkney Lass, Captain John Martin. Difficulty occurs about getting away, as some of the sailors have left the ship, intending to go and dig gold; they have been arrested, but there must be legal proceedings and delay. Every hour’s detention is perilous to me; and this difficulty with the sailors brings “water-police” about the ship, a class of men whom, under existing circumstances, I do not affect. Mr. Warren, indeed, walks about on the poop coolly, conversing agreeably with the other passengers; yet he likes not these water-police.
— — — None are for me
Who look into me with considerate eyes.
This delay is likely to last a few days: so I go ashore again to Macnamara’s, and visit my family at their lodgings.
29th. — Still no prospect of lifting anchor for a day or two longer. I went on board in the evening, found we were not to sail; returned on shore along with a French gentleman who is one of my fellow-passengers, and the captain; went insanely to an evening
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party, and after that repaired with my friends to an oyster tavern — greatly to the surprise and alarm of my friend James Macnamara, who watches over me like my good angel.
Note that the oysters of Sydney are good — those of Hobart Town are bad.
Aug. 2nd. — On board. The complement of our crew is made up. We lifted our anchor at eleven o’clock. Very faint breeze, and that rather against us. The ship was to be searched at the Heads — the last searching.
It is over. The man five feet ten in stature, with dark hair, was recognised by no enemy. We cleared the Heads about four o’clock; and a fresh breeze sprang up from the north; and now the sun is setting beyond the blue mountains; and the coast of New South Wales, a hazy line upon the purple sea is fading into a dream. Whether I ever was truly in Australia at all, or whether in the body or out of the body — I cannot tell; but I have had bad dreams.
20th. — Nearly three weeks at sea. We approach Tahiti, where we discharge some cargo before proceeding to the Sandwich Islands. Our cabin passengers are numerous; and, shades of Bougainville and of James Cook! — we carry four English actresses to the theatre of Honolulu; also an American circus-rider to the circus of that city. The ladies intend giving a concert at Papeete, the town of Tahiti, during our short stay there; and, in the meantime, they make the cabin nearly uninhabitable by practising there in the evenings. They are assured that the French officers and the traders in the town will give them a good house. A lady of Sydney and her little girl going to visit relatives at Tahiti — my friend, the Tahitian Frenchman, a Malouin by birth, and by name Bonnefin, gay and fiery young Breton, of highly agreeable manners — a Mr. Piatt, English commercial gentleman, also young but in bad health, going to Tahiti, partly for health, partly for trade — an American of Honolulu and -his wife — an Italian, by name Serpentini, and his signora, who is, indeed, a tall, black-haired, English girl — this is a kind of list of the cabin passengers of the barque Orkney Lass.
Our voyage has been like all other voyages. No land in sight anywhere since leaving Sydney, although we passed within forty miles of the north point of New Zealand.
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24th. — Tahiti is in sight, north-east; it Seems covered with high mountains. On our other bow lies Morea, an island of the same group, which rises out of the sea like a mere cluster of uncouth and fantastic peaks, presenting precipices of four or five thousand feet high, some of them overhanging their base.
Before sunset we come near enough to Tahiti to see clearly enough that between the mountains and the sea lay a belt of woodland: wherein as yet I can distinguish no tree except the plumed cocoa-nut palm. We he, this evening, becalmed between the two islands; but have yet to sail some thirty miles before making the coral-bound harbour of Papeete.
25th. — Off the mouth of the harbour. My Malouin friend is vehemently excited and impatient. He has a valuable interest in our cargo; and that I may be for once instructive, I shall here set down an invoice (as it were) of his venture purchased at Sydney to be sold at Tahiti; bright-coloured printed calico, and black satin and gorgeous silks, for the Tahitian women — rainbow-hued shirts for the men — shoes, coarse, huge and heavy — rum, gin, brandy, and claret. The two last-named importations surprised me at first: for, why should a French settlement take the produce of its own mother country through an English colony? But he had got them out of the bonded stores in Sydney — free of duty; besides, I find that the greater part of the claret and brandy is of those inferior and dubious sorts wherein Great Britain has a more flowing vintage than France.
The day is profoundly calm and brilliant, the sea without a ripple, the sky without the very downiest cloud. But, between us and the island, we see hues of huge breakers, with their foamy crests flashing white in the sun. They burst upon the coral reefs, we see houses, embowered amongst palm and bread-fruit trees: one building, larger than all others, is the French Commissariat’s store: and high up among the thickets of the trees what do I behold? A dome towering above a high-pillared colonnade. I address my Breton friend, and inquire what altar, or what god receives sacrifices in that temple — for Tahiti, as I had always been led to believe, is the Cyrprus of these seas, and may not these be the hallowed porticoes of Paphos or Arsinoe?
“That is the theatre,” said my friend, “commenced by our last governor, and still unfinished.” Wherever a very few
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Frenchmen are gathered together there will be a theatre in the midst of them. As a hotel is to an American — as a church to a Spaniard — so is a theatre to a Frenchman.
In the harbour lie about a dozen vessels — one, a rather shabby French corvette, the Moselle. Pilot boat comes up to us. Pilot, a Frenchman; his crew Tahitians. The pilot falls upon Bonnefin’s neck, and embraces him; then tells him, “with effusion,” that all is well at home.
In the afternoon, having passed through an opening in the reefs, we were at anchor. From this point, We can see more of the low ground of the island, which is here from one mile to two miles wide, between the sea and the mountains. It seems a wilderness of verdure. The gorges of the mountains are also wooded halfway up: thence, all is bare and bleak. I ought to say mountain, not mountains — for all the ravines lead up towards, all the ridges build up, and, buttress-wise, support a grand pyramidal mass, tapering and towering to the aerial peak of Orohena, nine thousand feet high, untrodden yet by foot of mortal man. *
Of course, oranges, cocoa-nuts, and bananas are brought on board, and everyone makes a debauch on them. Mr. Warren goes ashore with the captain, accompanied by Piatt the Englishman, and Bonnefin the Frenchman. We call at the British Consul’s office; he is one Miller. Bonnefin tells me he is an unpopular and ill-conditioned creature, and, if he knew me, would probably endeavour to induce the French authorities here to arrest me. They would not comply: but still I keep my incognito.
We walk along the beach, which is also the main street of Papeete: meet hundreds of men and women — a tall, well-made, graceful and lazy race. The women have great black eyes, long, smooth black hair; and on every glossy head a wreath of fresh flowers. They wear nothing but the farieu, a long robe of some bright-coloured fabric (made for them in world-clothing Manchester), gathered close round the neck, and hanging loose to the
* The Tahitians are too lazy to climb mountains, and see no object in it. Lieutenant Wilkes, of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, detached a party to climb Orohena, for surveying and other scientific purposes. They could only make their way about 6,000 feet. Their Tahitian guides, when they arrived at a point where the wild banana no longer grew, concluded that Heaven was against further progress, and sat down. A French officer set out once alone, to scale Orohena, but never returned.
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feet without even a girdle. I am not reconciled to this dress, though they generally have forms that no barbarity of drapery can disguise — nor to their wide mouths, though their teeth are orient pearls.
Cocoa-nut and bread-fruit trees shade the streets; and the mountains send down several small streams of pure cold water. French restaurants are numerous; and there you have an opportunity of mingling the cool Water with claret, a mixture grateful to the seafaring heart.
30th. — Our singing women gave a concert last night in a public room. It was a failure. Neither Governor Pages nor any of the French officers attended, owing, it is said, to a failure of etiquette on the part of the mellifluous ladies — they had sent no complimentary tickets. Most of the audience were Tahitian women, in rainbow parieus and exuberant chaplets of scarlet hibiscus flowers. Two daughters an4 a little son of Queen Pomare were present — the son a most beautiful boy. The Queen lives in a large cottage in the village, kept up for her by the French Government, and came herself last night, and mingled with the crowd at the door of the singing-house. M. Bonnefin brought me out, and presented me to her Majesty, a large bare-footed woman of about forty-five. She can scarcely speak a word of English, or French either, and excused herself from coming in by the simple monosyllables, “No dress.”
A splendid sixty-gun frigate, Le Forte, came in here yesterday, carrying a French admiral. Two or three days ago also appeared a small war steamer, the Phoque. So the place is full of officers and sailors. The permanent garrison of the station consists of a body of gens d’armes. But it is said that a larger French establishment is shortly to be kept in the Pacific; and that these ships are to be followed by three others, all destined for some service yet unknown. New Caledonia, or the Fiji islands, are supposed to be the object.
31st. — Went with M. Bonnefin to visit the frigate. We were shown politely over the hip by a lieutenant; saw a lithograph portrait of the Empress Eugenie in the admiral’s cabin, and drank eau sucré with the officers.
Every morning Mr. Warren goes with the captain, M. Bonnefin, and young Derby the American circus-rider, to bathe in the Fow-
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towa River, a fine dashing limpid stream, almost overarched by palm, orange, breadfruit, lime, and guava trees.
September4th. — Hired a horse, and rode with M. Bonnefin up the valley, or rather ravine, that brings down the Fowtowa from the mountains. For the first two miles there was nothing but a wilderness of guava (a most noxious root-spreading tree that chokes all other vegetation, and has made wilderness of much land which was once cultivated for taro); through and through this forest roved myriads of hogs, the principal live stock of the Tahitians, devouring oranges, cocoa-nuts, and guavas. All this level ground, M. Bonnefin tells me, was once in cultivation, when the island was ten times as populous, wealthy, and contented as it is now (before civilisation overtook it); but ever since Europeans have infested the place, the inhabitants have grown Icizy and they are at present under solemn engagements to their respective chiefs not to work more than needful to support themselves — and this is very little — while the French or any other foreign nation hold the island. The consequence is, that all stores for this naval station must be brought from America. The French, however, to do them justice, hardly interfere with the natives at all, do not take possession of their lands, nor enforce them to adopt any of the usages of European life, nor compel them to labour and till the ground. If the English or Americans were here in their place, the poor brown fellows would surely be compelled to labour, to read English, to say their catechism, and raise produce for their masters, or their brown backs would be made acquainted with the civilising cat-o’-nine-tails.
But long before the French took Tahiti, the missionaries had nearly turned it into a desert and a pandemonium. The vices and diseases of Christendom had worn down the population to a shadow: and such agriculture as the creatures carried on had been ruined by the introduction of execrable guava: for that also is a gift of the missionaries, as well as “rum and true religion.”
As we rode up the valley, the guava disappeared, but the stately bread-fruit tree, with its green knobs about the size of a baby’s head, was frequent in our path; and the orange and lime trees, dark as sepulchral yew, threw a black shadow on the pools of the river. The ridges of the hill rose high and steep on either side; and, in the windings of the gorge, we seemed sometimes
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walled round by mountains. We tied our horses to a tree, and went down (for such is Warren’s uniform custom) to sit on the river’s bank, and listen to its narcotic murmuring. Here, in the very heart of the garden-bower of these romantic South Sea isles, Mr. Warren’s mind reverted to Queen Oberea and her dusky houris, with their aprons of tappa and too hospitable manners. Oberea for so euphonious mariners named the regnant Pomar of those palmy days — unhappy and too-confiding queen! — why took she ever to her brown heart that wicked Christian, Sir Joseph? Infelix regina! The Phoenician Elissa never was so deceived by pious Æneas. Her fair isles are an unpeopled desert, isles
Whose air is balm, whose ocean spreads
O’er coral rocks and amber beds.
And her degenerate descendant, arrayed in satin of Lyons, drinks too much wine of Bordeaux. In a nook of the rock here, by the river, where Oberea and her nymphs were wont to bathe, I find three empty bottles, bearing on a label the legend, “Bass’s Pale Ale. ”O, Bass, boundless bottler of beer, thy name and thy liquor pervade the globe: thou hast built thyself a monument more enduring than brass in the quenched thirst of all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. The Australian shepherd blesses, as he unwinds the clasping wire from thy bottle’s burly neck: Dutch boer on karroo of Southern Africa feels his thirst assuaged in advance at very sight of thy label of blue. These eyes have seen thy cork, erst hammered down in that bottling-store of London, leap up towards the Southern Cross and startle the opossum on his lofty branch in Van Diemen’s Land forests — here, too, that bounding cork has overtopped the plumes of the loftiest palm — this quiet dell of the Poljmesian Fowtowoa has witnessed libations to thy numen, to thy power and thy genius; and the slumbering echoes of Orohena have been awaked by thy good report.
My companion, Bonnefin, is a handsome, agreeable, high-spirited young Breton. He knows who Mr. Warren is, and takes much interest in learning all the details of that gentleman’s escape and adventures. We rode down, and dined at a restaurant under Bonnefin’s special patronage, on fowl à la mayonnaise.
Sunday Evening. — Strolled up with Bonnefin to Queen
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Pomare’s palace or cottage. It has been a gala evening. The admiral and governor are in the queen’s verandah; the delightful band of the frigate playing polkas and schottisches. The maids of honour (of whom there are six or eight, all in pure white parieus, with flowers radiant in their dark hair), and scores of other Tahitian maidens, some of them splendidly dressed, were dancing on the lawn in front with the young French officers. Mr. Warren is pained to say that the feet of the girls are broad; figures otherwise faultless, eyes supernatural, and the carriage of the head and neck, of that proud and fierce beauty that you see in the bearing of the desert panther.
When the dusk came on, the governor and admiral retired from the scene, but the amusement then only commenced. Bonnefin, Warren, and Piatt made their way from the verandah to the presence-chamber, where we were instantly recognised by the king — that is to say, the present man, for Pomare has had four, some of whom are alive; and indeed one of them was present, this evening, a huge fat Polynesian, now known as the King of Bola-bola, and the husband, ad interim, of the queen of that dependent island. Queen Pomare’s present husband (as in reason he ought) is the handsomest man in the island. I had met him before, and he had shown me, with much pride, a gold watch and several other French presents which governors and admirals had given him. On this Sunday evening, however, being a grand reception evening, I hardly knew my friend; for he was dressed in a close-fitting, heavily-laced, tremendously-epauletted French military blue coat, and wore a field-officer’s hat with a crimson plume like a cocoa-nut palm. But when the great men went away, and his majesty saw us in the room, he instantly threw off his coat, for coolness, and swinging about at his ease, invited us to a side-table in the presence-chamber, where we found as fine sherry as ever entered the lips of Mr. Warren. Queen Pomare, in a parieu of green satin, looking very grand, and as sober as she could, occupied a kind of large armchair, which, I suppose, is called her throne. Her white-robed maids of honour were flitting about, trying to hammer out a few words of French or English to their numerous admirers; and the discarded prince-consort, now king of Bola-bola, seemed on excellent terms with the present man.
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Sept. 11th. — The Tahitian cargo of the Orkney Lass is discharged. She is drawn out from her wharf, and to-morrow we weigh anchor for the Sandwich islands.
12th. — The pilot came on board to take us out, but it is a dead calm. We cannot stir till to-morrow.
13th. — This morning a barque was reported in sight, outside the reefs — an American barque; and, as I was on shore with M, Bonnefin, I heard various speculations as to what she might be. She seemed crowded with passengers; and one man said he knew her to be the Julia Ann. The name aroused me. I took a glass, and soon saw that she was lying off, with no intention to enter the harbour. Soon a boat put off from her side, and came into the opening of the reefs. Anxiously I watched the boat; and while it was still a mile off I recognised one of my own boys sitting in the bow, and Nicaragua beside him. They have come for me.
7 o’clock, p.m. — On board the Julia Ann — I transhipped myself, of course, immediately — within an hour after the boat appeared, I set foot on the deck of an American ship, and took off my hat in homage to the Stars and Stripes. Here, then, Mr. Blake, Mr. Macnamara, Mr. Wright, and Mr. Warren, have all become once more plain John Mitchel. I am surrounded by my family, all well; we are away before a fine breeze for San Francisco; my “Jail Journal” ends, and my “Out-of-Jail Journal” begins.
24th. — The southern constellations go down behind the globe, and I hail once more the North Pole Star and Charles’s Wain. After long syncope, and five years’ sleep of nightmare dreams, life begins again.
We were made as comfortable on board the Julia Ann as the narrowness of the accommodation and the crowd of passengers admit. Capt. Davis, of Newport, Rhode Island, is our commander, and the owner, Mr. Pond, of New York, is also on board. The passengers and crew are all Americans, and already I feel almost a citizen.
Oct. 9th. — We sail, in company with a fleet of merchantmen into the long-wished-for Gate of Gold; Nicaragua and I go ashore, and immediately search for our worthy comrade, MacManus; learn that he is fifty miles out of town, at San José; where he
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has a ranch — but find ourselves surrounded by troops of friends.
Nov. 1st. — Three weeks in California. We have been the guests of the city; and more than princely are the hospitalities of the Golden City; we have spent a week at San Jos6; cantered through the oak-openings at the base of the coast-range, and penetrated the Santa Cruz gap, amongst wooded mountains, where our senses were regaled with the fragrance of pine woods — unfelt for five years. MacManus has spent all his time with us, talking of scenes new and old. My wife has recovered from the effects of her long Pacific voyage, and Nicaragua and I have been feasted at the grandest of banquets, presided over by the Governor of the State.
We are now on board the steamship Cortez, bound for New York, by the Nicaragua route; have bidden farewell to MacManus, our old friend, and to hundreds of new friends, and are steaming again out between the bare hills that form the piers of the Golden Gate. In less than a month I shall see my mother, my brother and sisters, and Reilly, mine ancient comrade, and Meagher, and Dillon, and O’Gorman, and Michael Doheny, that devoted rebel, and the whole band of refugees — shall mutually hear and tell of all our good and evil fortunes since the fatal and accursed ’48; and together consult the oracles whether that black night is ever to know a morning.
13th: — After coasting along the mountainous coast of Lower California, and Guatemala, and passing the pirate-ship Caroline, whose destination all our passengers seem to know, we have entered a small crescent-shaped bay, with a few wooden houses at the head of it, San Juan del Sur. Here we wait all day till a sufficient number of mules are brought together to convey such a multitude across to the Nicaragua Lake, fifteen miles. At length we start; I carrying my little daughter on the saddle before me — two gentlemen kindly taking charge of two others of the children. We are now on board the lake steamer at Virgin Bay.
14th — Castilla Rapids. — Yesterday we traversed the Lake, about ninety miles from Virgin Bay to the outlet of the San Juan River — a vast and lovely lake, surrounded with untam[e]able forests, and here and there a lofty mountain peak. Thus far we
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have come down in the lake steamer; but here rapids occur, where a transfer must be made; a walk of a quarter of a mile, and re-embarkation on another steamer below the rapids. We are housed in a most comfortless hotel for the night.
15th. — This morning we floated down the San Juan to its mouth, on the Atlantic side. It is a rapid, full, and powerful stream, bordered close to the water’s edge, not by hedges, but by high walls of most luxuriant tropical foliage; the lofty trees bound together and festooned by all manner of trailing vines, making the whole a chaotic mass of almost solid verdure. No living thing but alligators, wallowing in the shallow water, and occasionally diving when gently titillated by a ball from a revolver. At last, we glide into the calm expanse of the bay of San Juan del Norte, called by its English “protectors” Greytown, after an illustrious, but roguish statesman, of the name of Grey. The town stretches and straggles about a mile along the shore, backed by wooded heights; seems to contain sixty or seventy houses, and one or two large hotels. * We come ashore, and the Prometheus, our Atlantic steamer, not having yet arrived, we secure with difficulty, at an extortionate price, two bed-rooms in Lyon’s Hotel, a large wooden house. Lyon is an American; and indeed, all the good houses in the place seem to be American; but there are also some Englishmen, and a few French. The non-arrival of the Prometheus seems to these people an interposition of Providence in their behalf, because they have seven hundred passengers delivered over to their tender mercies, to treat them at discretion, and mulct them as much as they will bear.†
The British have never, it seems, formally given up their protectorate of the Mosquito “kingdom” and its Sambo sovereign. A flagstaff stands here, with a piece of bunting flying therefrom,
* All blown to atoms now, burned down, reduced to ashes, and the ashes scattered on the wind — razed, trampled, sown with salt, and become even as Sodom and Gomorrah, by reason of the impious irreverence of some of the inhabitants thereof towards one Solon Borland, august representative of a first-rate Power.
† A certain amount of punishment these Greytown people assuredly deserved for their uneatable dinners and their extortion: but the human mind, even of one who has suffered by their practices, would, perhaps, have been satisfied with some less condign and signal vengeance than that which has fallen upon thna,
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displaying in the corner the Union Jack, and on the field some device representing the sovereignty of the most gracious Gallinipper, who holds his court, and drinks as much rum as he can get credit for, at Bluefields, a place near the coast, north of Greytown. But there is a sort of municipal government established in the town; the Mayor being an American; and the British never interfere now with the domestic concerns of Greytown. It is an anomalous species of government; for the ground undoubtedly belongs to the State of Nicaragua; and Greytown, in its present condition must, ere long, breed quarrels. ’
It was here that an English ship fired into the Prometheus, two or three years ago, while insisting on the payment of harbour dues, payable by the American steamer in Greytown, as a British port; and although the dues are not now levied or claimed, yet it will depend entirely on England’s convenience and strength, whether and how soon, they may be demanded again. In the meantime, to maintain a foothold on the soil of Central America, the Downing Street men keep up the protectorate, and, as if to mock at American Republicanism, they insist on a poor, diseased, abject, drunken, idiot Indian, being called his majesty the king. Great is the assertion of a principle!
16th. — The Prometheus arrived this evening, but will not take us on board till to-morrow. So, the innkeepers of Greytown are to have twenty-four hours’ harvest more. We keep our rooms in Lyon’s Hotel, but can neither eat nor drink there. By researches in the town, we have found a little restaurant, adorned all round with uncouth pictures, kept by a Frenchman, who makes eatable omelettes, gives a good dinner, and keeps good claret.*
One other night, then, with the inexorable mosquitoes of Greytown.
It would be pleasing to think that our hospitable Frenchman’s wooden shanty had been spared in the late sack, even as the house of Pindar was, in the bombardment of Thebes. But one can scarce dare to hope this. No; Captain Hollins’s avenging boats’ crews have devoured his poultry, and washed down his omelettes with his claret, or with as much thereof as they could hold. Then they put a torch to his picture gallery; and brought his roof-tree crashing down amidst his broken bottles. Behold the fate of those who refuse to pay dollars, and make apologies to a first-rate Power! The sailors, and marines, however, though all the other formalities of a sack were quickly complied with, did not slay the men or ravish the women (which, perhaps, their crimes had deserved), for, in fact, they fled into the wood? whenever the batteries first opened.
[Plates] John Savage (1848) and D’Alton Williams.
CHAPTER XXVI
November 18th, 1853 — Greytown. — To-day a small steamer came across the bay, about a mile from “Vanderbilt Town” — a town which seems to consist of one building and a wharf. At one trip it brought over all the New York passengers, and transferred them to the Prometheus. Then it returned to Greytown, and carried away those bound for New Orleans, who were to proceed thither by another steamer, moored close by the Prometheus. On this second steamer’s stem I read the word Pampero. An American gentleman was standing by me, and to him I said “Pampero! The name is familiar in my ear — was not this the ship that — — ”
“That carried the Argonauts,” he said, “who sailed to win the Golden Fleece of the Antilles, but found there a stormy Medea.”
“Yes; the days of heroic emprise are not yet ended for evermore. Gorgeous Tragedy can still sweep over the earth in sceptred pall, or unsceptred. Cuba may be as Colchis, and the thing which hath been is the thing which shall be. But who was that compatriot of yours — for I forget his name — who, being ordered to turn his back, and kneel down to be shot by Spanish soldiers, made answer that he would stand erect, and face his death ‘like an American?’”
“Crittenden — as brave a man as ever fell in a good cause. His blood, and the blood of his fifty comrades, will hardly sink into the earth under Atares Castle (you will see Atares Castle in three or four days), and bear no fruit. Even as your Greek tragedies generally went in trilogies. Até chasing Wrong, and slaughter breeding slaughter, so that gallant blood will fructify a hundredfold ere the end come. Cuba is bound to come in.”
“After all,” I asked, “have the Americans a right to Cuba?”
“No; but the Cubans have a right to Cuba, even as the Irish have a right to Ireland; and Spain holds it against the right owners with a monstrous garrison, as England holds Ireland against you. Would a filibuster expedition of Americans to
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Ireland, to aid you and your friends in driving out the British, appear to you an act of piracy and robbery?”
“Oh, heaven! an apostleship — a mission of redemption and salvation. But in truth I read of that Cuba enterprise only in British newspapers, and during my bondage amongst Britons. A British atmosphere surrounded me, and it sorely refracted and deflected every ray that came to me from the outer world. All with whom I held converse were British colonists; and their mouths were full of cursing and bitterness against the American ‘ pirates ‘; and they rejoiced over the defeat, and gloated over the garotte. Yet, I knew how Cuba was governed, and instinctively I felt, even there, that the cause of Lopez was righteous — that the blood shed at Atares was real martyrs-blood, of the sort which germinates.”
My Californian friend was silent a while, and then merely said — “We call at Havana, to take coal on board, within four days. You shall see a beauteous and stately city, destined to be the southern centre of American commerce, as New York is the northern.”
Evening. — All on board the Prometheus (Captain Churchill), but she does not lift anchor till to-morrow.
19th. — I have got some European news brought by the Prometheus — news hardly more than three weeks old at London and Paris. I approach nearer and nearer to the great centres of the world’s business, and begin to feel the beating of its heart. For nearly six years I have been shivering at the extremities, whereunto slender capillaries brought but trickling drops of life, where the systole and diastole could hardly be felt to throb; and where the old Earth “o’er the embers covered and cold,” borne in ships from far-off fires, has to warm her frosty fingers.
The above reflection is partly nonsense, yet not all nonsense. The pen of scribbling mortals running recklessly in chase of a metaphor, plunges, but too often, unwarily, into the quagmire of balderdash. For at the antipodes, also, and the Ultima Thule, life glows and passion burns. Wherever the heart of a man beats and his brain works, there is, to him, the centre of the universe. The world has no common pulse and circulation, neither do the extremities thereof borrow life from any metropolitan heart, or through any central grand-trunk aorta: for it is written, “The
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masses do indeed consist of units, and in every unit, a heart beating.” So, even in that shady Clyde-valley, which turns its back to the “Great Powers,” and slopes towards the Antarctic Circle — if there be a hundred men and women, there are a hundred worlds.
Nevertheless, I am glad to meet here so late intelligence from Europe — and what portentous and thundering news it is! — The Czar is up. His long-nursed designs on Turkey are, in his imperial opinion, ripe; and to protect the rights of the Greek Christians, and gain them access to their holy places on fair terms, his imperial majesty has moved his troops across the Sereth; they have occupied Moldavia and Wallachia, and are swarming on the Danube. Before those troops retire again, the nations will see a good time. Magnificent Czar! I bow to thee in grateful homage. After years of tranced sleep in darkness and cold obstruction, as I cross this isthmus threshold of the northern hemisphere, and the Old Atlantic dashes at my feet once more, thy bugle, O Czar! blown upon the Danube, comes to me like a morning salutation, and sounds the reveille to a dreaming earth. No more musical matin-song did ever Memnon (let alone the lark) sing to the rising sun.
Now for the protocols! Now, will couriers gallop, and telegarphic [sic] wires be taught their lesson. Not so much to keep the Czar out of Constantinople (though that were something), as to smother in its cradle this blessed war of the Lord, the devil will employ all his plenipotentiaries; he will send forth his diabolic diplomats to fly abroad over the whole earth, and, for a time, men will breathe an atmosphere of lies and fraud. For, assuredly the commercial powers of Europe will now put forth their very uttermost resources of diplomacy to confine this war, to hem it in, to draw a cordon around it, to let it burn itself out within a ringfence, while the general interests of civilisation and commerce hold on the even tenor of their way. But there are good men on the earth who will have strength given unto them, as I trust, to baffle all the wiles and assaults of the devil. I have not heard yet where Kossuth is now — probably still in England. Louis Kossuth! He of the aquiline eye, and a nose (like behemoth’s) that pierceth through snares — how beats the more than imperial heart of the great ex-governor now? Keenly and passionately that
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glowing eye must be darting over Europe and Asia, measuring the forces of kings, and taking note what signs of life show themselves in the people. He must see that this war — if the Czar have indeed resolved on war — must spread; that the tyrant of Hapsburg, who lies heavy on Hungary and Italy, must take part in it; that France and England will be goaded or dragged into it, though doubtless (at least on England’s part), after long delays and reluctant diplomatic wrigglings — for the British lion does not like now to come to the scratch, except with black savages or Burmese; that the Five Powers will be no longer an united “Pentarchy,” or happy family; and that so debt will grow, and immortal Bankruptcy, like Deus ex machinâ, will at last step forth and settle Europe. Governor Kossuth does not get much sleep these latter nights.
In garrets in London, Brussels, New York, this news must refresh many a weary exile. Blanc and Rollin, Cavaignac and Victor Hugo, Garibaldi and Avezzana — their names rise to my lips like a litany. And I see before me, in vision, Guiseppe Mazzini, with his lofty brow and pensive eye, shadowed by many a doleful memory, of the murdered Menotti, and the mangled Maroncelli, and the youthful brothers Bandiera betrayed to their death, and the Langelotti pining on the rocks of Caprea, and the noble struggle of those last of Romans in fatal ‘48. “Italian Unity” may well, up to the present hour, bear its emblem, the cypress branch; but now Mazzini looks up again, with hope chastened by doubt and sorrow. O, triumvir! is this dawning hope also to fade in another evening shadow of despair? Is this to end but in another Ramiorno expedition? another Carbonaro conspiracy? another Bandiera treason? another Roman carnage? Mazzini knows not; but one thing he knows — if the neck of this foul European “peace” be once broken, the cypress branch of Young Italy will be reared again, and the resolute watchword, Ora e sempre shall ring along the Apennine.
I dwell to-night on the hopes and fears of these foreign lands, and am afraid to breathe the name of Ireland, or to write it down, even in my secret tablets, as the name of one of the nations that have a destiny to achieve, and wrongs (how matchless and how bitter!) to avenge. Yet, what is Italy to me? and what have I to do with Hungary? Does Ireland still live?
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Will anything — will the trump of doom itself, awaken Ireland? Or can it be, that Ireland is indeed “improving and contented,” as the London papers say, glad to be rid of her noxious agitators; and now, as she breathes again, after the sore dispensation of the famine, is she indeed contrite and subdued under the chastening hand of Providence and England. I shall not know the very truth of all this till I arrive at New York, and almost I dread to hear the truth. For I know, that after five or six years’ brooding in bondage, lying down every night in stifled wrath and shame; rising up each morning with an imprecation — a returning exile is prone to exaggerate the importance of all this to the world, to his country, even to himself. How can I expect to find men in New York, though they be banished Irishmen, too; or in Ireland, though they be unhappy in not being banished — so full of these thoughts as I am? Six years, that have been ages and centuries of bitterness to me, have been to them six years of work and of common life. I know that, let exile be as long as it will, the returning wanderer is apt to take up his life again, as it were, at the very point where he quitted it, just as if the interval were a hasheesh dream, wherein men spend years, and lead weary lives in a second of time; or, as Mohammed was carried by the angel through the seven heavens, and beheld all the glory of them in the spilling of a water-vase, insomuch, that when his winged guide brought him back to earth again, he found the vessel he had overturned at his departure yet pouring forth its contents. That was a miracle; but though there was no change in the world while Mohammed tarried in the heavens, I fear there is change since I dwelt in Gehenna. The very nation that I knew in Ireland is broken and destroyed; and the place that knew it shall know it no more. To America has fled the half-starved remnant of it; and the phrase that I have heard of late, “a new Ireland in America,” conveys no meaning to my mind. Ireland without the Irish — The Irish out of Ireland — neither of these can be our country. Yet who can tell what the chances and changes of the blessed war may bring us? I believe in moral and spiritual electricity; I believe that a spark, caught at some happy moment, may give life to masses of comatose humanity; that dry bones, as in Ezekiel’s vision, may live; that out of the “exodus” of the Celts may be born a Return of the Heracleidæ.
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Czar, I bless thee. I kiss the hem of thy garment. 1 drink to thy health and longevity. Give us war in our time, O Lord!
19th. — We bid farewell to our New Orleans friends. We weigh anchor. Prometheus, for the Empire City; Pampero, for the Crescent City; and gladly we see the low, tropical jungle, with the wooden houses of Greytown (peopled by extortioners and vermin), and the swampy delta of the San Juan, receding from our stem. Nicaragua Smith has looked with almost a fatherly interest upon this isthmus of his affections, on whose future destinies he shed of old the radiance of the New York Sun. Since we landed at San Juan del Sur till we left Greytown, he has gazed curiously and keenly at whatsoever was visible, with a view to future American colonisation, so as to make it and its facilities of traffic a sure and inexpugnable possession of the American Republic for ever more.
This evening as we sat on deck and smoked, watching the low-lying coast vanishing behind us, we entered upon high discourse, touching the “destinies” of Central America. In Nicaragua’s opinion there are several other reasons besides the imperative need of mastering, owning, and securing against interference, the best route from Atlantic to Pacific, which make it expedient for the United States to exclude and deny all British interference here. In the first place, my excellent friend considers that the British, by setting up a drunken, diseased Sambo for king, and trying to get United States ships to pay harbour dues to his mangy Majesty, mean a mock at Republican institutions; so, he would have the United States seize, without delay, upon the whole concern, king and kingdom; sell his Majesty to a sugar-planter, who would give him his proper work to do; and let England vindicate the cause of her ally as she could and dared. Moreover, said Nicaragua, the present disorderly and anarchical condition of that villainous kraal — pointing with his cigar to the marine metropolis of Mosquitia — is disgraceful and dangerous. Six or seven hundred Americans (men and women), once in the fortnight, brought here and delivered up to that gang of reprobates, abandoned of God and man! “Then,” he added, “consider their bad drinks (Nicaragua has become in five years a thorough American, and this grievance seems to sting him). On the whole, considering the British protectorate in Central America,
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and British insolence towards the United States in that matter, and adverting, moreover, to the poisonous liquors vended there, my politics,” said Nicaragua, “are fully described in that confession of faith announced once by a Missouri citizen, ‘ I am agin’ bad brandy, and lor the next war. ’”
21st. — We are coasting along the north-western shores of Cuba, and within five miles of the shore. It has a ridge of mountains not very high; between the hills and the shore rich plantations, bounteous in sugar and tobacco. Amongst our passengers there is much talk of Lopez, the Pampero, and the Isle of Pines. The prevailing sentiment on board, in regard to the fair Queen of the Antilles (as I collect the same), may be expressed in these words “She is bound to come in.”
22nd. — Shortly after daybreak, this morning we were under the Moro Castle, steaming into the narrow entrance which leads into the harbour of Havana. The towers and batteries of the Moro, were on our left bristling with guns; another battery on the right; the passage about a quarter of a mile wide: a place intimidating to the heart of filibusters. Clearly, Havana is no game for an excursion party of Louisiana sympathisers; but, if the Creoles be really as disaffected and oppressed as they are represented to be, a landing anywhere, under a bold leader would soon carry the country, leaving Havana to be last devoured.
A signal from the castle brought us to: a boat with officers of her Catholic Majesty boarded us, and, after some questions, left and the Prometheus passed on. Soon a noble city, appeared on our right, a wide basin opened before us, crowded with ships of all nations; the Prometheus proceeded to a kind of wharf on the southern side of the harbour, where she is to take in coals; and there we found another American ocean steamship, coaling for her voyage to Charleston.
My American friend pointed to a suburb on the shore of the bay, about two miles from us. “There,” he said, “is Atares. In the castle, which you see above, Crittenden and the fifty Americans were confined; and, on the open ground before it, they were shot as pirates. The balance is against us, but the account remains open.
Here we remain till to-morrow afternoon.
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‘yrd. — Last night Nicaragua took the boys with him to the city, in company with two or three American gentlemen, and went to the famous theatre, where an opera troupe at present delights the faithful subjects of her Catholic Majesty; but soldiers were drawn up before the theatre; and soldiers marshalled the playgoers to their places. If there be disaffection in Havana against the government, it seems they are prepared to repress its manifestation in the theatre.
To-day I explored part of the city with Nicaragua and our sententious American friend. The streets are stately and clean, but narrow and sombre; the shops are cavernous, and the people have a quiet, and subdued aspect. Everywhere troops ase on guard; and fine, soldierly-looking men they are. On the island are twenty-five thousand of them; and all from old Spain. “If the Cubans,” said our sententious friend, “are well-affected and well-off, as all Captain-Generals make it a rule to say — what is the use of these troops?”
“Why to meet your American filibusters on the shore.”
“And the British army in Ireland? Is that to meet a foreign invader, or to crush native rebellion?”
“What other proofs have you of disaffection among the Creoles? Does it show itself through the Press?”
“There is no Press, except a government Press, as in Ireland — and that is another proof of notorious disaffection.”
“And what else?”
“The disarming of the native population. Cuba and Ireland are the two islands of Arms Bills, the hunting-fields of gens d’armes, the paradises of informers and detectives.”
“Yet the Government shows no particular jealousy of strangers Here we are, all presumably Americans, possibly devotees of the ‘ Lone Star,’ walking peacefully in the streets of Havana, and discussing the wrongs of Cuba.”
“Yes; but we did not come ashore without a Government permit. The Captain-General knows us, and has his hundred eyes upon us. Get you into a volante, drive round and through the city by all manner of circuitous routes, and a mounted officer will follow you all the way and take note of where you call.”
“But what are the substantial wrongs of Cuba?”
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“A wealthy State Church, maintained for the comfort of Spanish clergymen; high taxes imposed on indispensable articles of import; the revenues of the island swallowed up by thousands of civil and military officials, who gather fortunes here, and spend them in Madrid; every honourable career barred against the Creoles and their sons, and contempt poured upon them by every younger son of every hungry hidalgo, who comes here to do them the honour of devouring their substance. What do you think of this?”
“My friend, it is another Ireland.”
“Except in the matter of patience and perseverance in starvation. There, the Irish are unmatched amongst the white inhabitants of the earth. No people will he down and die of hunger by myriads and millions, save only the natives of that gem of the sea.”
In reply, I could but bite my tongue.
We went into several tobacconists’ stores. In every one they were making cigaritas. Then we strolled into Dominica’s elegant restaurant, with a small court inside, refreshed by a beautiful fountain. Passed on to the palace of the Captain-General, a very handsome and massive-looking house, near the quay. In front of it is a shady court, open on all sides to the streets. There I stood awhile, and looked up at the palace with horror and hatred, as at another Dublin Castle. Those two strongholds of hell! When will they be razed and swept away, and the places where they stand sown with salt!
We came on board again; and on getting into our boat at the quay, we perceived that the eyes of soldiers were upon us. This evening we passed again under the guns of the Moro; are entering the Gulf Stream, and have lost sight of the mountain diadem that crowns the Queen of the Antilles. Now for New York at last!
26th. — We have passed the coasts of Florida and Georgia, and are fast coming into cold weather; for it is already winter in the northern hemisphere, and our gallant ship is “stemming nightly to the pole.”
Almost of? Cape Hatteras. On our starboard beam, and at no very great distance, lie the Bermudas — islands of weeping, and cursing, and gnashing of teeth: my dismal dungeon for ten
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months. After circumnavigating the globe, looking in at thred continents, surveying wide spaces of sea and land —
[Gk. line of verse]
I can fancy that I see the baleful cedar-groves blackening the eastern horizon. What change has come for the better, since I ruminated there, four years ago in my cell of pain? If I am to consider myself a “martyr,” has my martyrdom done any service to my cause? — or the reverse? If I regard myself as a mere prisoner, fraudulently seized upon, and cruelly used, what chance have I ever for justice in my own person, to say nothing of justice for my country? Here I am now, with all dungeons behind me, and a wide world just opening before — that is to say, the time of irresponsible idleness and mid-summer nights’ dreams is past; the time for responsible action in broad day is upon me. Shall I do good or evil in my generation? Or would it be better that I had died amongst those black cedars there, and had been buried in that foul cemetery, where all the dust is dust of demons!
A gloomy question to press itself upon me now, just as I am about to tread the land of Washington! I am going to be a demigod for two or three weeks — so my American friends warn me, with many a prudent caution — going to have a reception, and dinners, and shall be material for paragraphs in the morning papers. If I were a fool, I would be happy.
Well, from the gobemouches, good Lord, deliver me! As for my cause, I know that it has been just and true — that it is now hopeless, would be treason to say. England, the enemy of the human race, will come down and sit in the dust like the Daughter of Babylon; the “interests of civilisation” in Europe will be dislocated; that is to say, the rogues are falling out; and then some of the honest folk may have their own. But on the whole, I say, “Magna est Veritas, et non praevalebit.”
29th. — This morning, the heights of Nevisink, then Sandy Hook, Staten Island, Long Island. We steam rapidly up the outer harbour. My wife and I walking on deck, enjoying and admiring the glee of some of our New York acquaintances on board, as the great ocean avenue to their native city opens before them, after years of absence in California. They eagerly
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point out every well-known feature in the vast bay; and ask us to admit that it is the most beautiful bay in the world. I answer that it is the most useful.
In truth, we can hardly speak, for now we pass the Narrows, leave Staten Island behind, and straight before us looms the dense mass of the mighty city, fringed on both sides with forest of masts that stretch away into the blue distance. Hardly less magnificent, the City of Brooklyn crowns its heights, and lines for miles the shores of Long Island with stately buildings. Williamsburg on this side; Jersey City on that — a constellation of cities! — a ganglion of human life!
We come up to the pier. My brother and Meagher step on board to welcome us — we go into a boat, which takes us to a steam-ferry; without entering the city at all, we pass straight over to Brooklyn, where my mother awaits our arrival; and here ends my Journal.
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THE JOURNAL CONTINUED
[This continuation was published in Mitchel’s Irish Citizen (New York) in 1869-70. ]
The New York Reception
Nov, 29th, 1853 — New York. — I undertake to continue the Journal of my life, and to take it up on the day I laid it down — that is, the day of my arrival in New York for the first time. What were my impressions of this great new country; what has befallen me here since that day, nearly sixteen years ago; what I have done, or tried to do; whither I have travelled within the United States and out of them, what part I have essayed to take in public affairs and what has come of it — this, I am told, might possess a certain amount of interest for some readers. If so, they shall have it.
It is at the beginning of a hard winter that my little household finds itself established in a house of Brooklyn. It was Meagher who showed me the way to this house, and who introduced me to my mother.
* * * * * *
After a little while arrives a carriage bringing the rest of the ‘* crowd,” including Pat Smyth, my rescuer and faithful friend. We dine quietly. In the evening comes John Dillon, with his wife — two very dear friends; Dr. Antisell, whom I had never met before: Michael Doheny, erst of Tipperary; and others too numerous to mention. It grows dusk, it grows dark, and we, are seated at tea, when the sound of distant music is heard. It approaches; it is rolling out “Garryowen.” My friends all smile; they know this city; and they presently tell me that I must get up and prepare to receive the greetings of my friends. To my very great amazement. Union Street is quickly filled up with ranked men, glittering bayonets and waving banners. Civic societies and military companies are here pell-mell, all coming to welcome me to a land of liberty — to make me feel
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good (as they say here) after my long captivity. Now this is very kind, very natural. We all rush to the front windows; pull out the sashes; throw the hall-door open; receive deputations; make speeches; review military companies defiling through the hall; shake hands with the innumerable good fellows, Irish and American; and at last, about eleven o’clock, see the last of the processions, and as the music of the last band dies away we go to supper.
This sort of thing went on for three or four nights; there seemed no end to the societies, clubs, companies, that made it a point to come and welcome me to their hospitable land. Now, it would be a most formidable body of piratical looking fellows with glittering axes — the ship carpenters, at your service, bearded and brawny. And as to their hand-shake, one had better shake hands with a vice. Then would follow several delegations from benevolent societies, with ribbons in their buttonholes; and multitudes of little speeches had to be made; nonsensical enough, to be sure; but reporters of the morning papers were at our elbows taking down every word.
Now all this was very absurd; but I do affirm that it was exceedingly pleasant. Remember, that I had been five or six years in the solitude of Antarctic woods, and in the outer darkness of the ocean. It was not in nature that I should not enjoy these first holidays of freedom; and, besides, all the proceedings I have spoken of had a large, broad, free-and-easy, devil-may-care sort of air, yet all so kindly, genial, cordial — here in this large street, thronged with armed men, sometimes cheering, sometimes singing, there was not once the faintest symptom of disorder, nor did I see a single policeman. It began to be apparent to me that here I had got into a very different sort of country from any of those which I had seen before. It was too soon to speculate on the matter; I could only enjoy myself in the new and fresh and human atmosphere.
Hard frost for weeks; with light falls of snow; intensely cold, by the thermometer, but dry, bright and pleasant. Before going over to New York proper, we explore Brooklyn, a very beautiful city of at least two hundred thousand people; most of them foreigners, as one can easily perceive. Great multitudes of the business people of New York have their dwellings here;
[Plate:] P. J. Smyth ( “Nicaragua”) From a water-colour by Edward Hayes, 1854
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and there are long, clean, quiet streets, shaded on either side by trees; showing but small sign of life or activity during the day — nurses and children, mainly; but every evening, and far into the night, ringing with music and vocal with songs of all nations. There is a very large Irish population in Brooklyn; still larger German; and I find plenty of Danes, Norwegians, and other Scandinavians.
Friends conduct me to the most elevated regions of the city, especially a place called Fort Greene, a hill which commands a most magnificent prospect over the two great cities; over Staten Island and New Jersey, as far as the first ranges of the Alleghenys [sic], the navy-yard on East River; the “Palisades” on the Hudson, and the densely packed smoky mass of New York itself (which I have never yet visited) stretching, with its mighty fringe of masts, away to the horizon.
A few days after my arrival comes a deputation from the “City Councils” of Brooklyn to request my attendance at a solemn procession, in my honour, around the city, and a reception in the City Hall. I feel bound, in this truthful Journal, to record and acknowledge all the public compliments and attentions which were offered to me in those early days; and the more bound, seeing that compliment and flattery were soon enough changed to horrible abuse — through my own fault, of course. Carriages came to the door; the Mayor of Brooklyn, Mr. Lambert, a quiet and well-bred gentleman, took charge of me. Lon, dense ranks of men, armed and uniformed, were on hand by way of escort; and amongst these I was specially desired to notice a very fine body of men in buckskin breeches, old-fashioned blue coats and mediaeval hats — the “Continentals.” When I came out, in charge of the Mayor, I was greatly cheered, took off my hat to the Continentals, and we proceeded on our way; but I must say I felt somewhat ashamed, puzzled, almost alarmed, by all this demonstration. What in the world can I do for all these good folks, I asked myself, in return for so much generous kindness?
Slowly, and in grand state, we proceeded through the handsome streets of Brooklyn. Beautiful women waved handkerchiefs from the windows; some threw bouquets into the carriage, which the polite Mayor picked up and handed to me with a
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smile. Good God! what is all this for? What are these people going to make of me? City Hall; a quite stately building of white marble, with a fine piece of ornamental ground in front. Pictures, speechifications; introduction to the City Authorities; painful hand-shaking, and then home, where the Mayor delivers me back safely into the bosom of my family.
Dillon — I asked that evening — what is the exact sense of all this? What value am I to give for it? To what does it bid or oblige me? He laughed. Never mind, he answered; you will be asked to do nothing: you are free as the wind, and so are we all -. but peste! in a democratic country, people must make capital. They are heartily welcome.
At last I go over to New York, by a steam ferry-boat which looks like a piece of a street cut off, crowded with vehicles and waggons, and having in the “ladies’ saloon” at least three hundred persons. Another vast ship of this kind rushes in as we rush out; and on our voyage of five minutes we meet another one crowded with people. Yet this is only one of half a dozen ferries. We land in New York at the foot of Fulton Street, which will bring us straight up to Broadway. Just here, close on the water, is one of the great markets of the city, the Fulton Market, a thoroughly disgraceful and squalid mass of shanties, such as would not be allowed to call itself a market in any city of Europe one-fourth the size of New York. Nevertheless, I admit they can show good beef and mutton here, and great variety of exquisite tropical fruits, but at enormous prices.
Fulton Street, William Street, Broadway: nothing to be said about these thoroughfares: a great crush of vehicles, of course: great packing and unpacking of heavy bales and boxes at the doors of wholesale warehouses. At the Broadway intersection of Fulton Street is a brown church, excessively ugly (St. Paul’s). Close by that is the lofty and massive Astor House, all of granite; looking highly respectable. Nearly opposite, the City Hall — the only object I have seen in New York that I would call architectural.
And now, having come to this City Hall, let me have done with it: for here, also, I had to be paraded, by way of public reception, flags flying, military presenting arms: innumerable introductions and congratulations; the thing was “put through,”
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It was a nuisance, but it came to an end; and then the Municipal Authorities (I forget the Mayor’s name) brought me back to Brooklyn.
In the midst of all these public honours, we did not forget our friends who were left behind us in Van Diemen’s Land. Smyth was eager to undertake the rescue of Smith O’Brien, and felt sure he could effect it. The committee that had charge of certain funds for Irish revolutionary purposes, thought it could not appropriate a part of those funds more wisely than in furnishing Mr. Smyth with the means of achieving that enterprise on which he had set his heart, and which my own case had proved to be possible. In short, he was supplied with the needful resources, and left us for England, intending to go out openly to Australia, making no secret of his object. How the English Government defeated him by pardoning O’Brien and his comrades I shall have to tell hereafter.
At the moment of my arrival in New York the great Crimean War was breaking out. Great and mighty armies were in preparation in English ports, destined to execute sharp and summary justice on the Czar of Russia. The Czar had just been discovered (in England) to be a liar, a thief, and a cheat; and his shield as a Knight of the Garter had been broken to pieces in the Chapel of Windsor and swept out upon the dust-heap, as the escutcheon of a dishonoured Knight.
I thought that I could foresee a war which would not confine itself to the Black Sea and Baltic; and with this hope resolved to establish a political organ in New York, for the behoof of our multitudinous Irish population in the United States.
So was conceived, within two weeks after my arrival, the first issue of the Citizen.
December, 1853. — I am in New York: “When I was at home I was in a better place,” as our friend said in the Forest of Arden. New York excels all the cities of the earth, as well in other respects (çela va sans dire), as in respect of wooden posts and poles. Poles and posts stand up here before you at every turn; the barbers’ poles are enormous; like the “masts of some tall admiral.” The telegraph poles, crossed by short yards, give to some streets the aspect of a pine forest, somewhat blighted, but still umbrageous. Then I back New York against all the cities
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of the habitable globe for flag-staves. Paris, indeed, has plenty of little stems, or stalks, or rather pegs, to hang out the tricolour upon; but, God bless you! it is nothing to New York. On every hotel is a great mast; every newspaper office must have one as tall as the next newspaper office can afford to set up; the City Hall — a really handsome and perfectly respectable building — has about four masts. There are upon the streets at least forty thousand poles, sustaining awnings in front of the shops, or, as they choose to call them here, “stores”; on the whole, it is wonderful to let your mind dwell upon the illimitable forests primeval of this Continent, and on the havoc that must have been made in them to supply the poles and posts of this city!
I am bound to say, also, that I find it, in other and more important respects, a very grand and wondrous city. Consider this one fact: Since I arrived here, only a few days ago, a great many thousands of Irish men and women (about eleven thousand per week) have been emptied out of emigrant ships upon those quays. This is not counting Germans. Now what becomes of these people? They are not to be seen crowding the streets and making mobs; they do not organise themselves to rob houses and cut throats; in fact, they are not seen at all: the potent vital force of this mighty country somehow absorbs them at once; they permeate and percolate through the community, and find their place and find their work. They get railroad cars on the very evening of their arrival, and are whirled away to where loving friends are awaiting them on the banks of the Wabash, or hard by some bright lake of Michigan; or else they get immediate occupation in the city itself, where there is always a fine demand for broad shoulders and willing hands. This phenomenon is, on the whole, the most wonderful and admirable thing I have seen in New York.
After all, this “Journal” of mine is not, strictly speaking, a Journal at all; though, for convenience, it is occasionally dated. In truth and fact, it is written long after its ostensible dates; and, therefore, I may inform my reader that this city of Brooklyn, where I am now inditing, and which was a place of some two hundred thousand inhabitants when I first entered it, is now a vast city of four hundred thousand. The village, when
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I saw it first, had no supply of water; and we drew our water from pumps at the street corners. Now every house has its own bath-room, and its water pipes, warm and cold. Our poor infant Brooklyn had no theatre; now it has one of the most superb opera-houses in the universe.
Thieves entered our house, several evenings in succession, and carried away everything in the hall; that is, overcoats, hats, umbrellas. I bought a new overcoat, for the weather was cold; that same evening it was carried off. Somebody was watching at the street corner to ascertain when anybody got anything new and worth taking. The worst of it was, all my friends only laughed; said that the new arrival and the excitement and the confusion gave a chance to the thieves, and that a man must live. Went to the City Hall; demanded to see the head police authority; asked him in a rage whether this was a civilised country? He replied, with a smile, that he guessed so. When I told him my indignant story, and expected to find him excited by it, he merely took a memorandum euid bowed me out; but from that day no thieves came to my hall. My impression is — and sixteen years’ observation and experience has confirmed it — that police duty (with all the grumbling of these folks, and they do grumble dreadfully) is better and more thoroughly done than in any city of Ireland or England. This vast city here, at least six times the size of Dublin, a huge seaport, too, always swarming with ragamuffin sailors; an enormous depot, too, of destitute and bewildered immigrants, has not so many policemen as Dublin, to keep its peace. As for nocturnal violence, I have this testimony to give: For more than a year I have had constant occasion to pass at all hours of the night through the streets of New York and Brooklyn, and to cross the ferries — I never yet witnessed any disorder, assault, or as much as rudeness. Have heard of such things, indeed, or read of them in the newspapers; but, as a general rule, did not believe them.
News coming in every day, which to me is exciting. Russians have destroyed the Turkish fleet in the harbour of Sinope; Turkish fleet caught in a trap; its commander being an Englishman, one “Slade.” Will these Turks never leam the lesson of Navarino, nor any other lesson? But the combined fleets of
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the French and English (sweet allies!) are on their way into the Black Sea; and, of course, the Russian navy will have to go up the river to Nicolaief, where it will be perfectly safe. Meanwhile the English will open the Circassian slave-trade in white girls, which the Russians had stopped. Not only thai, but cheap Manchester fabrics will be poured into the ports of the Black Sea in payment for those girls. I am in a hurry to establish my newspaper, that I may help to do justice upon these British philanthropists.
I have mentioned that I had a public reception at the New York City Hall. Small and commonplace speeches must, of course, be made on such occasions. In responding to the polite Mayor, I made it a point to mention that I accepted honours of this kind in America expressly as an insult to the British Government, inasmuch as nobody could pay public respect to me without an outrage to that concern. The Mayor hummed and hawed. Coming out, as we passed through the corridor, a friendly New York Journalist took me apart for a moment. Don’t, he said, don’t say that kind of thing; these people do not mean any affront to the British Government at all; they mean to pay you a passing tribute of respect; take it as it comes, and don’t push it too far.
Now my friend, the New York Journalist, was perfectly right. It may be true that I saw no value in these public compliments except in so far as they were a denial, a defiance, a contradiction, and a snub to the Enemy’s Government; but it is also true that I was not entitled to dwell upon this view of the case, and to thrust my construction in public down the throats of my hospitable entertainers. On this one point, let it be admitted that I made a slight blunder. But when I found how little was really meant by the complimentary demonstrations, I must confess that I took but very slender interest in them.
Great banquet in the Broadway Theatre! — and this is positively the last occasion I shall have to acknowledge hospitalities from the City of New York. The Broadway Theatre does not exist now — was pulled down — and its place is covered with marble and iron buildings. On that illustrious occasion the pit was floored; the great area covered with tables; the boxes illuminated with women; a very eminent gentleman of New
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York (whom I do not Choose to name) presided and did the honours; a highly distinguished journalist expressed his enthusiastic sentiments. It is enough: I hope that I understand the demonstration just as it was intended, and no more and no less.
Foundation of “The Citizen ‘*
December, 1853. — The Press of New York, hitherto quite un* known to me, I have been, of course, studying diligently every morning; it is the most obvious and available map, or plan, or picture, one can obtain of any new community one enters. After the advertisements you read the leading articles; then you go into the selection of news; and on the whole you obtain a sort of general idea of the sort of folks you have got amongst, and what they are doing or thinking of. It is imposable to deny the great ability of the New York Press, which must have been improving considerably since the voyage of Mr. Martin Chuzzlewit. The Tribune is indeed a very admirably written newspaper; but very abhorrent to me by reason of its philanthropy, human progress, and other balderdash. They were all considerably bewildered now on the subject of the new war in Europe, not very well assured what they ought to say about it. From the long continued habit of merely echoing British sentiment regarding all European affairs, these organs of American opinion are just parroting the British prate — about Russia being a great public malefactor that must be punished; that the grand Omnipotent (and especially moral) Powers of Western Europe are now going to execute justice upon the wretched criminal, and so forth.
In short, I find, on my arrival here, a very slender acquaintance with the Eastern question. Our worthy Americans have been too much absorbed by contemplation of the West, and they have forgotten the East. Nevertheless, there is an East, as they will find. In the meantime all the absurd English insolence about Russia is reproduced here in a most docile spirit every day.
January yth, 1854. — First number of the Citizen. I had announced it as about to be conducted by John Mitchel, “assisted by Thomas Francis Meagher,” and my friend had entered eagerly into the project; but in fact, he was at that moment
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starting on a tour to California: and neither then hof at any subsequent time had I much service from his dashing pen. My assistants, in fact, were John M’Clenahan and John Savage, both Irish, and both with some experience on the Press, and no small literary capacity.
It was a hazardous or, perhaps, audacious enterprise to undertake a weekly newspaper, so soon after my arrival in the country. Would have been wiser, probably, to enter, in New York, my own profession of the law, as some of my exiled friends had done; attended to the private interests of clients, and let the grand interests of universal mankind take care of themselves. But, in short, the new European war, promising to be a much grander European war than it turned out afterwards, excited me; and I resolved to use such influence as I might possess with our multitudinous Irish population in America, in order to direct their sympathies at least aright, and perhaps prepare the way for some noble enterprise in Ireland, if this gracious war should open a way for it. So came forth the first number of the Citizen, with this prospectus, in which I spoke for Meagher and myself: —
“The principal conductors are, in the first place. Irishmen by birth. In the second place, they are men who have endured years of penal exile at the hands of the British Government, for endeavouring to overthrow the dominion of that Government in their native country. In the third place, they are refugees on American soil, and aspirants to the privileges of American citizenship.
“The principles and conduct of their new Journal will be in accordance with their position, their memories, and their aspirations.
“They refuse to believe that, prostrate and broken as the Irish nation is now, the cause of Irish independence is utterly lost.
“They refuse to admit that any improvement in the material condition of those Irishmen who have survived the miseries of the last seven years (if any improvements there be) satisfies the honour, or fulfils the destiny, of an ancient and noble nation.
“They refuse to believe that Irishmen at home are so abject as to be ‘loyal‘ to the Sovereign of Great Britain, or that Irish
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men in America can endure the thought of accepting the defeat which has driven them from the land of their fathers, and made that beloved land an object of pity and contempt to the whole earth,
“The movement of all the Western and Southern nations of Europe is towards Republicanism. After a few years of dismal ‘peace‘ and ‘order‘ — after l3mig like a corpse, motionless, breathless, from her last giant struggle — with the fetters of her tyrants weighing down her limbs, and their bayonets at her breast — Europe is again ripening fast for another bursting forth of the precious and deathless spirit of freedom. The dumb masses of English life — men voteless, landless, rightless, who labour for ever in mines and factories, who have no part in the government of their own land, no interest in the oppression of Ireland, in the plunder of Asia, or in the European balance of power — those masses, we apprehend, were not finally crushed into the earth on the loth of April, 1848, as some persons believe — they are finding voice and spirit again. Germany and Italy are not dead — Hungary is not even asleep. War already rages in Europe; other wars are threatening — that is to say, promising; and all over Europe and America there are eyes watching and hearts burning for the occasion to turn all diplomacy and war to good account for the cause of Republican Freedom. Mankind is once more becoming charged with the electricity of Revolution, and one of the poles of that battery we believe to be situated somewhere in or about New York.”
Mitchel and the Russian Minister
In the early months of this year, 1854, as the mighty preparations were slowly going forward for the Russian war, I, of course, steadily addressed myself, in the Citizen, to the task of exposing the odious designs of England, about all that Eastern business, in which, indeed, the policy of England has been more base and homicidal than anywhere else in the world, except only in Ireland. The war hung fire for a long time; the parties were evidently tender of hurting one ‘ another very much — that is, in vital parts; and though the English naval forces in the Baltic and Gulf of Bothnia burned many fishing villages, tore up the nets, plundered the stores, ravished the women and
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sailed away; yet no progress was made towards St. Petersburg by way pf the Gulf of Finland and Cronstadt. There was a most magnificent British fleet in the Baltic, commanded by Napier, an officer who had served of old in the war of 1812, in Chesapeake Bay, under Cockburn, and who, therefore, understood the whole art and mystery of destroying defenceless villages and robbing hen-roosts. He had also, this terrible old Admiral, declared, on starting from the Downs, that he was bound for “Hell or Petersburg,” and had bought and shipped along with him a droschky, Russian waggon of that name, in which he announced his intention of driving through the streets of Czar Peter’s city. Nothing seemed to be going forward, of a serious nature, for many months; and I became impatient. Went to Washington, travelling through the great cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore, to see the Russian Minister at this capitol. Baron Stockl. Found him residing in a house at a place called Georgetown Heights, and when he received my card he came instantly to greet me with much warmth. He was a subscriber, he said, to the Citizen, and a “constant reader” ; yet the Baron surmised, not without some show of reason, that the part I took in the impending war, endeavouring to turn away the sympathies of America from the allies, and engage them on the side of Russia, was instigated by my abhorrence of England only; not by any particular love for Russia. I admitted the impeachment; but tried to make the Minister understand that I was the enemy of England, only because England (that is the English Empire, English Government, English thing, as Cobbett called it) is the enemy of the human race; and the most authentic agent and vicegerent of the Fiend upon the earth.
This theory being settled I pressed the Minister to another matter; told him that the Irish in Ireland and Irish in America were most eagerly awaiting some chance of striking England a mortal blow; that in their present state of disarmament at home and restriction in America (through the neutrality laws), they could do nothing; but that they would be most happy to strike a blow, make a diversion for Russia — and for themselves — if some material aid could be only furnished them to make a beginning.
The Baron listened attentively; spoke with kindly warmth
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of Ireland and her cause; politely admitted my title to speak for my fellow countrymen of the National cause, and seemed a good deal moved by my representations that England could be so easily and so fatally struck to the heart by way of Ireland. But, he said (pointing to a map of Europe), you see, with Russia as a basis of operations, how can we stretch a hand to you in Ireland? The Baltic Sea is blocked up; so is the Black. Against the two combined navies of France and England we cannot even hold command of those inland seas, but must lay up our ships in fortified ports. Money, the Minister said, would do you no service (and this I admitted), because to introduce war material and stores you would need a covering force.
After a long conversation, the Baron took a memorandum which he requested me to make out for him, and asked me to meet him in New York three days later, at the Metropolitan Hotel. I did so; nothing came of it. Baron Stockl had no doubt of the hearty disposition of the Irish to fight on the side of Russia, or anybody else, if it was only against England; no doubt, either about the tremendous and decisive element which diversion would introduce into the pending war; but he did not see his way into the practical method of using this great force; and, to tell the truth, neither did I. Ireland was disarmed, cowed, pretty well starved out; and though full then, and at all times, of the choicest fighting material, yet men do need arms; for, as Dean Swift says very forcibly, “Eleven men armed to the teeth will always defeat one man in his shirt.”
So ended my tentative effort to make the Crimean War available for our Irish purposes.
But now came on the battle with the Know-Nothings, a species of miscreants who came up about that time. I shall have much to say concerning these desperadoes.
The Know-Nothing Agitation
February, 1854. — I* was in these early months of 1854 that the native American mind began to take genuine alarm about the “foreign vote,” and the Pope of Rome, and the Jesuits, and the perilous influx of “ignorant foreigners.” They thought, naturally, that their institutions (which require, as we know, high cultivation for their proper use and development) would be
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corrupted and destroyed by this unlimited influx of illiterate outsiders, especially Papists; persons who had not been educated in our common schools.
It was, of course, the British Press that inaugurated this noble American crusade. We do not take the liberty here of forming any sort of opinion that the British Press does not give the signal for. I find, in a residence of two or three months in America, that although politically (for the present) independent, we are intellectually and morally most intensely provincial and colonial. It suits the policy of Great Britain, whilst the wholesome process of making Ireland uninhabitable to the Irish is going on, that other lands also be made, to say the least, uncomfortable to them. It is a race of people to be extirpated and abolished, or else British civilisation can never have fair play. So British literature and the British Press gave the word, hoisted the signal, and American literature and the American Press (the most servile on earth) opened in full cry. We would never, never give up American liberties to the Pope of Rome, the Jesuits, and the Dominicans of the Inquisition.
To come down from those high considerations — which, in truth, nobody ever thought of for one moment — the case was this: — One party, the Democrats, held power and enjoyed the emoluments of office too long; the Whigs, Federals, Massachusetts Protectionists, felt that they should have their turn — so they raised a cry. They thought it would answer at least for a campaign; and it really did answer, to an extent I had never expected, amongst the uneducated people of this most noble country, a class of people, indeed, which I find to be in very enormous proportion to the rest. No old story out of Fox’s “Book of Martyrs” was too monstrous to be dwelt upon by the orators of this grand Protestant movement. The old women of all the three sexes — masculine, feminine, and neuter — were to be frightened and irritated, and this was easy enough.
An apostate Italian priest, named Gavazzi, had come but lately to this country, and had gone round lecturing against the Pope and the Irish servant girls. Two Englishmen had undertaken the business of street preachers in New York and Brooklyn, and had caused many Sunday riots in both cities; for, our young firemen and other rowdies are willing enough to
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be amused on a Sunday, and will turn out, with their revolvers in good repair if they have a chance to fight the Pope or his emissaries. They are not going to stand (our rowdies are not) invasion and conquest of this free country by armies of Dominican Friars, who will stretch us on the rack while they hold crucifixes to our noses. Perish the thought! In short, the patriotic rowdies very generally went into this Know-Nothing business. One of the English street preachers who disturbed our Sundays was Folgar; another was Orr, a crazy fellow, who was called the “Angel Gabriel” — indeed the creature wore this device upon his hat.
On the whole, I think it would be hard to point out in the history of any civilised (or demi-civilised) country so foolish, so filthy, so imbecile a movement as this of the Know-Nothings, and the “mystery of iniquity,” in the densely populated parts of the city chiefly inhabited by Irish Catholics; and these, though patient and good-humoured, could not always endure the outrage. Brick-bats appeared in the air; then it turned out that the congregation of the street-preachers had all come armed with revolvers, then bludgeons, fence rails, and the like, came into requisition; heads broken on the one side, pistol-wounds received on the other. Such was the result of the day’s exercises. But the worst part of the affair was that while the anti-Papist mania was raging, not the slightest attempt was anywhere made to throw the shield of legal protection over the people thus menaced. In September, the “Protestant Association,” of New York, went over to New Jersey, made a procession in Newark, made a riot, and attacked and wrecked the Catholic church of that town. One man was killed, many others were badly wounded. It all happened at noon-day; nobody was ever even charged with having a hand in it, to say nothing of being brought to justice. In fact, there was a great general consent to suppress all evidence. Commenting on which the Citizen said: —
“Newark, it seems, has no adequate police force to rely upon in such an emergency for prevention of outrage. But has Newark no magistrates. New Jersey no supreme court for its punishment? Out of an armed mob who sack a church in open noon-day not one has been arrested. A man is killed; a
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coroner’s jury sits upon his body; but the jury know nothing. There is, in fact, no evidence to incriminate anybody. Witnesses ‘ saw a man ‘ pursue the deceased with a gun; saw ‘ two persons ‘ following Pigeon; ‘ men in the procession ‘ fired shots, but nobody can tell who the man, the men, or the persons may be. John Wilson, of Lodge No. 4, swears he was in the procession, and ‘ did not see anyone molest the Catholic church nor know that there was any row. ’ One Sears, a Wesleyan teacher, ‘ saw a woman, with a rifle or pistol, going from the rear of the church — doubtless, the woman who lay in wait there to shoot the procession — but ‘ will not swear that it was not a broomstick! ‘ “
The appearance of the scene of the outrage is thus described: “The Catholic church which was destroyed is a German church, and is in William Street. It presents a truly desolate appearance. The fences are shattered, the shrubs about the door crushed and broken; and, in the interior, the altar overturned, the sacred utensils and sacerdotal robes strewed around and trampled upon — the organ broken to pieces. The images, consisting of a costly Munich figure of the Madonna, and Crucifix corresponding, together with the pictures, altar-piece, and a splendid holy-water font, were also destroyed.”
However, it swept over the country like a storm, and had many riots in the cities, and gave rise to very shameful outrages upon peaceable people. Of course, the Irish Orangemen dwelling in this country attached themselves to the new party, although themselves proscribed by it; but they understood well enough that its blows would be aimed mainly against the Catholic Irish; and they were always ready for that kind of game. I say Irish Orangemen, not Irish Protestants; for it would be grossly unjust to charge the great body of Protestants, whether in Ireland or the United States, with any participation in that shameful conspiracy. Thousands of Englishmen also joined the Know-Nothing Lodges, and wealthy English merchants in several cities contributed largely to election expenses for candidates of this party. In truth, the whole affair was rather British than American. It arose here after the famous agitation in England against “Papal Aggression”; it carefully reproduced all English abuse and calumny against Catholics, and even a wrecked church or two, not to fall behind our Anglo-Saxon exemplars.
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I may as well mention two or three characteristic incidents of this odious affair, and so wash my hands of the whole vile business. All the summer, in this year 1854, the excitement kept increasing; there were riots excited (most naturally and necessarily) by the foul-mouthed vociferations of street-preachers Englishmen all — against Jezabel.
As to the Protestant Associations which sprang up and became rampant at that period they had various names. One, I think, was the Columbia Lodge, another the Mount Vernon — for they took care to give themselves patriotic American titles.
Here is a card that was sent to me announcing a sort of religious or comic meeting, which duly came off as advertised: —
Bible Presentation to Mount Vernon Lodge No. 14 A.P.A., at 18th Street M. E. Church (between Eighth and Ninth Avenues), on Tuesday evening, September 19th, 1854.
The following eminent speakers have been engaged: Rev. J. S. Inskip, Rev. T. L. Cuyler, Nathan Nisbet, Esq.; also the following popular singers: S. Brouwer, Esq.; James G. Scott, Esq.; Miss Ra3mer, Miss Hendricks.
The Waldense Guard have accepted ah invitation to be present.
Programme Singing
Singing . . . . . Mr. Scott
Duet …. Miss Ravner & Miss Hendricks
Singing … Mr. Brouwer
Presentation of Bible Reception of Bible Rev. J. S. Inskip
Reception of the Bible … Rev. T. L. Cuyler
Singing . “We won’t give up the Bible “Mr. Scott
Singing …. Comic … Mr Brouwer
Address on the History, Aims, and Objects of the A.P.A. ….N. Nisbet
Duet … Misses Rayner & Hendricks
Singing …. Mr. Brouwer
Singing . “Hail Columbia!” ….. Audience
Tickets, 25 cents. Exercises to commence at eight o’clock.
The Mount Vernon Lodge and its backers, bible-readers and comic singers, met accordingly and had a good time. One of the speakers explained that the organisation had been got up by some faithful Irish Protestants who desired to see as good and true-blue a body of Orangemen here as at home (a great acquisition it would be to American society), glorified the Battle
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of the Boyne, the Siege of Derry, and the sacking of Newark Catholic church; and declared that, Republican as he was, rather than let Catholics bear rule in this Republic, he would have another King William in America.
Of course the Bible was presented and received. “We Won’t Give up the Bible” was sung with much spirit to the tune of “We Won’t go Home till Morning,” and then the faithful were regaled by a comic song.
So ended the “exercises.”
Far away in Maine, at a place called Ellsworth, a most horrible deed was perpetrated. A poor old priest, named Bapst, was seized upon by a furious mob, dragged out of the house of a friend, where he was staying, marched through the streets of this town of enlightened New England, beaten, stripped naked, robbed of his watch, and his money, coated with tar and feathers, “ridden on a rail,” and so expelled from the place almost a dead man. Nobody at all in that place seemed to have interfered, or so much as remonstrated. Apparently, they were all in it; and, in fact, the thing was done in pursuance of a resolution passed at a town meeting. For poor Father Bapst, like many other Catholic clergymen, had objected against the young people of his flock being forced in the common schools to bolt King James’s Bible. He had done more; he had appealed to the laws of the State to protect his young flock against that illegal imposition. So, on the 8th of July, a town meeting unanimously adopted the following preamble and resolution, offered by G. W. Maddox, Esq.: —
“Whereas we have good reason to believe that we are indebted to one John Bapst, S. J., Catholic Priest, for the luxury of the present lawsuit now enjoyed by the School Committee of Ellsworth; therefore,
“Resolved — That should the same Bapst be found again upon Ellsworth soil, we manifest our gratitude for his kindly interference with our free schools, and attempts to banish the Bible therefrom, by procuring for him and trying on an entire suit of new clothes, such as cannot be found at the shops of any tailor, and that when thus apparelled, he be presented with a free ticket to leave Ellsworth upon the first railroad operation that may go into effect.”
It is a community which carries into practice that which it has professed, so the next time this poor old Father came to
[Plate: John Mitchel (Paris 1861)
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Ellsworth in the course of his missionary labours he was used as I have mentioned. The worst of all remains. An attempt was made to have seven of the assailants of the priest indicted before the grand jury of Hancock County, at Ellsworth; it failed, the bill was thrown out, nobody would know anything, witnesses all Know-Nothings; and, indeed, it is highly probable that several members of that grand jury had themselves helped to compose the mob.
Such things as these occurring from time to time were excessively exasperating, and, I confess, that my enthusiasm about my new country began to abate. Take another sample or two: — In the last ays of May, a fugitive slave from the South was arrested in Boston, and held by the proper authorities, to be returned to his master. A riot, or, rather an insurrection, at once arose, and raged in the streets and around the courthouse for some days. It was instigated notoriously by a clergyman and a few well-known political agitators, and its object, of course, was to resist the enforcement of the law. The United States Marshal called for troops in order to maintain the law and suppress rioters. Amongst the troops were two companies of Irish militia, and these at once became a special cause of horror and excitation to the Know-Nothing; and “Higher Law” rabble. They did their duty, however, kept the streets clear; saw the poor fugitive shipped off to his owner, I am happy to say no Irishman took any part in that riot except on the side of law. The Irish soldiers were not charged, then or afterwards, with having maltreated anyone, or having used the least violence more than was needful to execute their orders. One Irishman, named Batchelder, was one of the deputy-marshals on duty in the court-house; and the court-house doors were forced, and Batchelder was shot dead upon the stairs. So far the affair bore an Abolitionist, not a Know-Nothing aspect; but most Abolitionists were also Know-Nothings; and from that day the people of Boston were resolute to have revenge upon those Irish soldiers who had kept law and order in their streets and prevented the party of “Higher Law” from working its wicked will. In short, very soon after, public opinion compelled the Know-Nothing Governor of the State to disband and disarm all the Irish militia!
The very same thing was done in the State of Wisconsin;
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Irish military organisations were suppressed, without even the excuse that they had executed their orders in obedience to the law.
On the 4th of July, this year, at Framingham, in Massachusetts, by way of celebrating Independence Day, the population solemnly burned the Constitution of the United States; on the same day, or within one week, three Catholic Churches were wrecked in New England. Whether all this meant Know-Nothing or Abolition fury, it signifies little now to enquire and determine. The Irish were hated, both as Catholics who disliked common schools, and as law-abiding men who would not burn the Constitution, but, on the contrary, would turn out and enforce its provisions. Hard times those, for my poor countrymen in America! I confess that I often found myself in a rage. There seemed to be developing in this people a spirit of lawlessness and brigandage, and how long such a country might be tenable I had doubts.
In the meantime some invitations which I received from various cities of the South tempted me to escape a little while from New York and visit that horrible slave-driving country, where I had not yet my well-stocked plantation.* The good Southerners it appears had admired my audacity in declaring for negro slavery, though I had not been conscious of any act of daring at all. So I had a warm invitation from the Mayor and Council of the famous city of Richmond in Virginia. They desired to feast me there. I made up my mind to quit the feverish atmosphere of New York and breathe the air of the mountain woods.
[The Journal describes Mitchel’s visit to Virginia, and incidentally contains this reflection on Washington: “No more respectable man than this George Washington ever rose to power or fame in any nation. Not a great genius, if you like, but there is something greater than genius: Stainless good faith, inflexible justice, a modesty and moderation which in such a position as his was sublime; a large and generous patriotism; a brave calm soul that could steadily review the perils which must beset the new country, and, seeing them,
*A jocose allusion to the passage in Mitchel’s public letter to James Haughton in which he wrote: “We for our part wish we had a good plantation, well-stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama.” This passage used to be hysterically quoted by the Abolitionist press.
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warned his countrymen against them: pray God they may heed him. At any rate I take off my hat reverently before the trees of Mount Vernon. ”It resumes: — ]
THE RELEASE OF SMITH O’BRIEN
June 3rd, 1854. — Returned to Brooklyn, and to my work on the Citizen. The news coming in from Europe twice or thrice a week is provoking. All the efforts of England and France are directed to the great end of confining and hemming in the war against Russia far away in the East, on the mouths of the Danube and within the sealed orifices of the Black and Baltic Seas; and even there to make it as small and tame a war as possible. In fact, although great allied fleets are occupying these two seas, the only service they have yet done is re-opening the slave trade in white girls from the Caucasus; a trade which the Russians had wholly stopped to the great injury of Moslem Zenanas. And, although large armies have long since arrived in Turkey, they have lain quite idle, while the Turkish army alone, under Omar Pasha, has bravely fought the Russians at every step of their advance towards the Danube. It will not, I fear, be a general European war this time; and as Russia, too, evidently can do nothing towards aiding our Irish insurrection, I have lost my interest in that war, save the general interest I feel in anything which may lead to the discomfiture and humiliation of England on any land or water.
It gives pleasure, also, to the well-regulated mind to perceive that public opinion in the United States is fast coming round to the Russian side. But this, after all, is but a speculative, contingent and conditional public opinion, conditional upon success; and why should it be otherwise? Americans have nothing at stake in the matter. One cannot see that they need care whether Russia succeeds in taking possession of Constantinople this time, or has to wait till the next time the Eastern question comes up. No matter; the cause of the allies is somewhat at a discount here; the high moral professions of England in undertaking this war begin to be understood: and this is my business. While I can hold a pen, it must forever be my most sacred duty to expose and turn inside out the hateful cant of that diabolical Power.
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It has been mentioned that immediately after our arrival here our friend, Pat. J. Smyth, set forth on a new expedition to Van Diemen’s Land for the purpose of procuring the escape of Smith O’Brien. His experience in this kind of service had proved that it was practicable; and he knew that O’Brien would, on the next occasion, willingly adopt the same course which had been found effectual before; namely, surrender himself in the Police-office, withdrawing his parole by that act; and then suffering himself to be rescued and carried off. Money was supplied to Smyth for the needful expenses of the enterprise by the committee in New York which had charge of an Irish Revolutionary fund. He started first by way of Ireland and England, designing to take passage in one of the great Australian steamships from thence. It seems he took no trouble to conceal his mission; which, in fact, became known immediately to the enemy’s Government; and he had not long started on his voyage when Lord Palmerston announced in Parliament that Her Majesty was about to “pardon” Mr. Smith O’Brien. This announcement was made about the 1st of March last (1854), and the moment it appeared on this side of the Atlantic it was evident to those who understood the tricks of the English Government that a cheat was meant. The old Minister, with the air of frank bonhomie, which no rogue knew better how to assume, first praised Mr. O’Brien for having “acted as a gentleman” in observing his parole (as if his comrades had not done the same), stated that he (O’Brien) was now to be “permitted to apply for the means” of gaining his pardon and his liberty — that is to say, would get a pardon if he would beg for a pardon by written petition; such being the routine in such cases. But Lord Palmerston knew that Mr. O’Brien would never beg a pardon, and that therefore this gracious clemency would do him no good.
The motif of the cheat was also plain enough: first, it was believed highly probable that P. J. Smyth would accomplish his purpose to carry Mr. O’Brien to the United States; and next, the Government found it very hard just then to procure recruits for the army in Ireland. That service was becoming extremely odious there, and I am happy to say has been growing more and more hateful ever since. It was known that the liberation of
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O’Brien — or even the treacherous promise of his liberation — would be received as a great “boon” by our too warm-hearted and credulous people, and might make the work of recruiting-sergeants easier. In fact, so much at a loss was the enemy for men at that moment that English agents were even commissioned to recruit American citizens in the United States, in breach of American laws; an attempt which was promptly checked, though not punished in so condign a manner as it ought to have been. In short, the Ministers, to “make capital” in Ireland for recruiting purposes, determined to talk of pardoning O’Brien, but not to do it if they could find any excuse. Remark, too, that this preliminary announcement of Lord Palmerston said not one word about John Martin and Kevin O’Doherty, who were O’Brien’s comrades, held as prisoners under the same conditions with him, and who had been prisoners to their own word only, as well as he; but with this difference, that whereas he had been only two years a prisoner on parole, they had both been four years in this situation. It is scarcely worth while to point out, in the case of a person like Lord Palmerston, that the reason assigned for liberating O’Brien — namely, that he had acted as a gentleman in keeping his parole — was therefore an untruth. The others had done so just twice as long, and there was no hint of pardoning them at all.
In the meantime liberator Smyth was doubling the Cape, and tearing through the Indian Ocean, with a very deliberate head and a very resolute heart. He had scarcely arrived at Melbourne, when he was overtaken by the Parliamentary report containing Palmerston’s announcement; and although he probably understood very well that it was intended as a fraud, yet it stayed his operation for a while. Mr. O’Brien never believed that the Government would really require of hinj to beg for pardon like a real convict, and was willing to abide the issue of this noble “clemency.” Smyth waited.
He waited for months, having a very shrewd suspicion that the “Government” would so offer their pardon that it could not be accepted, and that his own agency would have to come in at last. In fact, there was unaccountable delay. In Ireland people could make nothing of it. Mr. O’Brien’s family prepared to meet him on the Continent, for he was not to be permitted
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to set foot on Irish ground; but still he came not. He, on his side, together with Martin and O’Doherty, had been told they were to be pardoned, and made ready to sail; but were coldly informed by the local Government that there was no pardon for them yet. In fact, every steamer brought out fresh instructions; and our noble “Government” was puzzled. It went to their hearts to release these gentlemen without some word or sign of contrition; and this it was well known could not be accorded. The public feeling in Ireland was a good deal excited by the delay; one cause of this excitement being the exposure made by the New York Citizen of the treacherous scheme of the Minister to attract Irish recruits under a false pretence. In fact it was feared that not much progress could be made in conciliating the Irish, unless these prisoners should be actually and freely released without conditions or formalities. So the final instructions were at length despatched — to let those three gentlemen go. This was in July. At once there were demonstrations of respect and good-will towards the late prisoners on the part of the colonists of all nationalities. When they arrived at Launceston, on their way to Melbourne, the inhabitants presented them with an address and offered them a banquet, which they declined. On arrival, however, at the great city of Melbourne, the enthusiastic desire to greet them and welcome them back to freedom could not be resisted, and a grand banquet was organised.
Truly it might be supposed that the British Government had its appetite for political prisoners spoiled by this time. They do not agree with its constitution. O’Brien and his friends took care not to leave their penal colonies even, without showing plainly in what spirit they receive the gracious clemency of their Queen. At this great Melbourne feast, Mr. O’Brien, on the first public occasion he is allowed, even before he quits the British Colonies, and while yet under the shadow of the Union Jack, reasserts the principles and vindicates the cause that inspired him to contend for the liberties and the lives of his countrymen, in the Senate, “and if needful in the field.” He repels the mean attempt (base and false as he knows it to be) to conciliate his good humour, and at least purchase his silence by praising him at the expense of his comrades. He gives the coward,
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Palmerston, the lie direct. He scorns the idea of solicitation for anything — to the mortal enemies of his oppressed country. In especial he rejects and repudiates all complimentary allusions of the minister to himself; and sets down his heel upon that hateful calumny — that Meagher, MacManus and this present writer, had broken our parole in leaving the island of bondage. Certainly not much was gained by the British Government in the whole affair of these “traitors” of ‘48; yet still we see that there is a craving to chain up the hands that write, and gag the mouths that speak, of Ireland’s right against England’s wrong.
The Virginian Address
June 24th. — I am on my way to Virginia in fulfilment of my promise to make an oration at the University Commencement. Received at the station by the presidents of the literary societies, and by old Doctor Gessner Harrison, President of the Board of Professors, to whose house I am at once conducted. The Annual Commencement here is always a kind of fete; the parents and friends of the students generally assemble in this holiday season to witness the ceremonies and to accompany their young friends to their homes: and as the University is quite thriving this year, with four hundred students and more, there is a large concourse of fashionable folk in Charlottesville and its neighbourhood. The weather is lovely, and the country in Albemarle County blooming like some great pleasure-ground; but the old pasture fields are blushing with the wild red strawberries which are especially fine and abundant in Virginia.
The day came, the 28th. “Entering the stately Rotunda, under its colonnade of Corinthian pillars, and passing through a large octagonal hall, we enter the new and handsome building in the rear. Its benches are already crowded, mostly with ladies in bright summer costumes; the atmosphere is perfumed by a hundred bouquets and cooled by the fluttering of five hundred fans. At the upper end is a handsome carpeted platform, already occupied by professors, by State examiners, and other notabilities. At the other end is a gallery accommodating a fine band, brought especially from Baltimore, which makes some music in the intervals of the business.
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Classes are called up; the names of students entitled to degrees are announced, and the students come up, one by one, to receive their due documents, sometimes accompanied by words of special praise and honour, which make the youths blush, but call forth a murmur of applause, and the general clapping of little gloved hands.
And this, then, is an University commencement. How different from those! I remember once, of a certain wintry morning — it was the Easter Commencement at Trinity College — where, in one of the great blank quadrangles, about a hundred and fifty students, in funereal black gowns, were clustered in front of a great, dismal, iron-grated entrance, in the portico of the “theatre.” Presently a procession of Fellows, also in trailing black robes, passed slowly through us, with their eyes on the . ground; the iron gates were solemnly flung open, and all entered the noble hall, yet dim with the mist of night and cold as the nave of St. Patrick’s. When all were seated according to their classes, the grim Fellows went around slowly, administering certain oaths in Latin, in a low voice, and with a demeanour perfectly stony. That was all; it was all over in an hour, and we were directed to call at the porter’s lodge for the parchment testimonium of our degrees. We came out with a feeling of depression, and shivering with mere cold. No gala gathering of friends there — no music, no flowers nor fans, nor bright eyes raining influence!
Which is the better system — the Dublin or the Charlottesville one? I mean better in an academic point of view; for which is the pleasanter no one need doubt. Well, the degrees are awarded, and an address made by the President. After some music from the band my time came, and I was nervous, for I saw very well my audience was a critical one — some of the foremost Virginians were upon that platform — and I knew that I was going to shock some of the current and accepted opinions of our times. The address was on “Progress in the Nineteenth Century,” and the drift of it was to show that there is no progress at all; that is, making men wiser, happier, or better than they were thirty centuries ago; but admitting, also, that they are no worse, no more foolish, no more wretched than they were at that period and ever since. Of course, gas, steam,
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printing press, upholstering, and magnetic telegraphs could not be denied; but they were put aside as altogether irrelevant to the inquiry. I could see that those around, how courteously soever they listened, and even sometimes applauded, did not in their own hearts assent to my conclusions. That over, and more than due applause given, two or three representative students, who had just graduated, delivered very eloquent speeches. Then, after music, and more music, the assembly began to break up. There were introductions and polite greetings, next — after some walking in the grounds — a quiet dinner at Dr. Harrison’s where I had the pleasure of meeting two or three of the professors.
Next day but one I determined to proceed homeward by a road new to me; in short to cross the Blue Ridge by a railway to Staunton, and thence go down the valley of the Shenandoah, by Winchester to Harper’s Ferry. Four of the students whose home lay beyond the mountains were to start with me. First, however, I had to pass another day at the University, and spent the evening at the house of one of the professors, where I met old Andrew Stevenson, former Minister to London, who once took it into his head to challenge O’Connell. O’Connell was not at that time a fighting man, but one of his sons offered himself as a substitute; a proposal which was declined. Mr. Stevenson is a very loquacious old gentleman; talks well, but too much [he has died since].
This visit to the Virginia University has been to me a very great pleasure as well as a high honour. The weather has been charming, the people all kind. It forms a bright picture which I hang up in the chambers of my memory, framed with gold and wreathed with flowers. After some friendly farewells we are off, my four companions and myself, and it happened that one of these students was named Grattan, Irish by descent; and he had actually the thin aquiline nose, the eye and the jaw of the other Grattan whom you wot of. He said his father’s people were of that family, but how near of kin he knew not. *
We soon get among i:he hills, the radices of the Blue Ridge,
which we have to cross by Rockfish gap, a depression in the
* In 1869 when the Grattan statue in College Green, Dublin, was projected, Mitchel contributed the proceeds of some of his lectures to its erection.
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range where it is not more than 1,500 feet above the sea. I snuff with delight the keen air of the forest-covered hills, laden with the odours of tannin and terebinth.
Irish Organisations in America
August, 1854. — Again at work upon the Citizen in New York. Of course this journal was not undertaken without certain definite purposes. One purpose was to advocate and maintain the full rights of Irish adopted citizens to all the privileges and powers which purport to be conferred upon them by the Act of Naturalisation; and here we are met by this new and violent outbreak of Native-Americanism, whose aim is avowedly to deprive them of those powers and privileges both as foreigners and as Catholics. Another of our purposes was to make clear and plain to naturalised Irishmen themselves what their rights are as American citizens, and what they may lawfully and conscientiously do in the direction of liberating their native country from British dominion — a dear and cherished aspiration with them in the past, as it must be in the future; and here sdso we were met by a very general discouragement and apathy, resulting from the many futile associations which have existed here since 1848 — revolutionary societies for Ireland, under various successive names — most of them appealing for subscriptions in money, as if some immediate or early attack were in contemplation upon the British power. The money subscriptions had all been lost, squandered, sometimes stolen, by persons purporting to be treasurers and secretaries, and it soon became evident that the vast mass of our people here were shy of such organisations, although as zealous as ever to give of their substance and of their blood in the good cause of Ireland, if only they could see their way. Many of these were tired and disgusted by the mere delay — continual payments of money to one society or another, and nothing done or begun. For our people are enthusiastic, fiery, impatient, eager for quick results, and willingly lend an ear to sanguine promises. They saw there was on this Continent a mighty Irish power; they knew that one hundred thousand Irishmen would joyfully spring to arms if they could but get within reach of the tyrants who oppressed
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their kinsmen at home; and now, instead of seeing any chance of getting across the Atlantic with arms in their hands, what they did see was an enormous migration, or rather flight, of their friends and kindred across the same Atlantic — but the wrong way. On the quays of New York, in the year 1854, as many as thirty thousand Irish were landed within one month, so sweeping was the effect of the British policy of extirpation.
It has been mentioned that shortly after my arrival in this country I had joined one of these revolutionary societies. The men who formed it meant well. Many of them were devoted and self-sacrificing, and would have certainly hailed and welcomed a chance of trying conclusions with the enemy, in arms, upon Irish ground. But this organisation soon broke up. It did not collect nor ask for subscriptions in money; and, therefore, as nobody was enabled to “make a living” by it, and as the same fatal impossibility of action was too obvious here again, men became lukewarm. For my own part, when I saw that the war with Russia was going to be confined to the East — that Russia herself, as the Russian Minister explained to me, could not help us at all, and that France was in fast alliance with our enemy, I knew that no opportunity for Ireland would arise this year, and, therefore, quietly withdrew from the organisation. Too plain that a better opportunity must be waited for.
Another and more general purpose of the Citizen was to lay before our Irish-Americans, from week to week, the true nature of British policy in Europe, in America, and in Ireland, and to refute and expose the treacherous representations of all these things which were constantly put forward by the English Press, and too often adopted upon trust by that of the United States. If nothing decisive could just yet be done, still a clear understanding of that atrocious British policy, in its minutest details, would prepare the minds and hearts of our people to act the more zealously when the day of action came.
The Controversy with Archbishop Hughes
A great controversy existed that year concerning the temporal sovereignty of the Pope, who had lately been reinstated in his dominions by French arms. Now, the conductors of the Citizen were Democrats, chiefly with a view to the destinies of Ireland,
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because it was plain that the British dominion once overthrown, there was nothing possible for Ireland, except a Republic, which might, as in France, take the form of a military monarchy, and perhaps with much advantage. At any rate, the Citizen had loudly affirmed the right of the people to abolish its existing government and to substitute another; and agreed that if the people of the Roman States were dissatisfied with their form of government, they had the same right which other people had to change it — peaceably if they could, violently if they must.
I have since had reason to think that we had been considerably misled by English “Liberal,” French, and American representatives as to the feelings of the Roman people; and it was not they who were eager for revolution, but the Mazzinis, Garibaldis, and Gavazzis, and the grasping power of Sardinia, that were moving hell and earth to abolish the Papacy, both spiritual and civil. It gives me pleasure now that during all that year of editing upon the Citizen I never spoke of those Italian agitators save with abhorrence and contempt; and if once, in the former part of my Journal (Jail Journal), I alluded to them with something like respect, it was in ignorance of their actual doings during the five years of my imprisonment at the world’s end.
However, the doctrine of the Citizen, that the Romans had a right to change the government of Rome, scandalised a great many of the Catholic clergy of the United States, and Archbishop Hughes came out and scathed us in the newspapers. I am not patient of ecclesiastical censure; and replied, perhaps too bitterly; and more than once. It was an unfortunate controversy for me, and for the purposes and objects of the Citizen, inasmuch as most of the readers of that paper, those indeed to whom it was mainly addressed, were just the flocks of this very prelate and of the rest of the Catholic clergy. Independently, however, of the effect of the dispute upon the fortunes of the Citizen, I do admit, now, after fifteen years that I would if I could erase from the page and from all men’s memory, about three-fourths of what I then wrote and published to the address of Archbishop Hughes. This I say not by way of atonement to his memory — for he deserved harsh usage and could stand it and repay it — but by way of justice to myself only.
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At Stonington
It is flagrant summer weather; more intense heat here in New York than I have ever experienced in any other country, even in the Tropics. In Tahiti, in Cuba, I have never seen the thermometer stand higher than 87 in the shade. Here 97 is common enough and 92 Fahrenheit a very usual summer heat. We cast about for some place at the seaside, and there is no great city in the world having so many and so beautiful sea-bathing retreats within easy reach. Generally, however, these places are occupied by vast hotels or public boarding-houses, where people live in crowds, as New Yorkers delight to live, and where the main occupation of the women is dressing, that of the men lounging, smoking with their heels on a balcony rail, with occasionally a boating or fishing party. There are nowhere hereabouts quiet cottages by the seaside which you can rent for the season, where you can live as at home and wear what you please — such as I remember at Warrenpoint and Newcastle and Bundoran. At last we selected a place in Connecticut called Stonington; whereto Mr. Dillon’s family and our own betook ourselves, taking passage in an enormous steam-vessel, quite as huge as any line-of-battle ship, two or three of which rush every evening through the “East River” and Long Island Sound, bound to various points in Connecticut and Rhode Island, making connection with lines of railway to Boston.
This Stonington is situated on a narrow strip of land running out southwards into the sea; there are several quiet streets of private houses all built of wood and painted white; the streets shaded as usual by trees. It is a place of intensely puritanical aspect, and anything more dreary than a Sunday in Stonington (Sabbath they call it) cannot well be conceived. People go with a grim and mortified aspect to their various conventicles; march back again to their houses, where every window-blind is strictly closed. No creature is on the streets; nobody looks out of any window. They never issue out for a ramble or for a drive on Sunday evening; and I believe that if a piano were heard in one of those wooden houses rattling out “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” or if there were a sound of dancing feet, the inhabitants would be in as great commotion as they were when
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a British fleet opened its broadsides. For Stonington has its place in history; and its boast is that a British squadron did actually bombard it in August, 1814, and that although several houses were knocked to pieces nobody was hurt. They had also traditions here that some stout-hearted Stonington people did respond to the English broadsides by certain shots from two or three old cannon they had, and, even, that one shot did strike an English ship in the hull. At all events, the English having done all the mischief they could, made no landing but hauled off. It was only one of many similar brutalities perpetrated upon unprotected coast towns and villages by the British in that last war; and the families along Chesapeake Bay will long remember, and hand down in tradition, the black story of men-of-war’s boats, crowded with armed ruffians who came up and robbed their storehouses and wine-cellars, carried off chickens, stole their negroes, insulted the women, burned the houses, and sailed away. No people on earth is so perfect in that species of warfare as our Anglo-Saxon brethren; a fact which the desolated Finland villages, harried in the late Russian war, can attest. Stonington, however, on the occasion in question, made so stout a show of resistance that the British hearts of oak thought it would not pay to come ashore.
“Anglo-Saxonism” in New York
New York, 1854. — The English and French armies having, after long delay, at last ventured on an invasion of the Crimea, and beaten an opposing force on the Alma River — what is this we read in vast capital letters on all street corners? — “Fall of Sebastopol!” Irresistible English and French armies have marched straight upon the city and its fortifications; the city is taken; all the great line of fortifications, together with the Russian fleet, destroyed; Russian army annihilated. Prince Menschikoff a prisoner, and the war ended in a rapture of triumph! For all this, to be sure, there was not even the slightest shadow of foundation. It was, on the very face of it, a wild canard, intended to operate upon the money market; yet the startling story ning over the whole earth. The American newspapers, finding that the English ones pretended to believe in that grand
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event, did themselves most implicitly believe it, commented on it with much Anglo-Saxon complacency, and caused stocks to rise and fall in Wall Street. Nothing has ever caused in London such a paroxysm of idiotic joy. Great meeting at once, with Lord Mayor to preside. “First of all,” cried his lordship, “I call for three cheers for the Queen!” “The Czar Nicholas,” said the London Times, “has fallen from his high estate, his armies are scattered to the wind, his ships seized or sunk, his forts and arsenals blown about his ears! “Here is the rapture of the London Daily News — reproduced here in every newspaper: —
“Let the reader fancy to himself the roaring and reverberation of all this artillery in a space of three miles long. Let him fancy in addition, the thundering broadsides from the allied fleets off the mouth of the harbour. Let him add to this the noise and clamour of the assault and defence of the North Fort on the heights immediately behind the Double Battery; and, after its fall, of the artillery, Minie rifles, and platoon firing of the allied troops. To all this let him again add the noise of explosions, now of a fort, now of a man-of-war. Let him conceive the hollow of the harbour thus filled with smoke and flame, resounding with the deep roar of artillery and the pattering of firearms, the sohd earth shaking with the reverberation of the rent and tormented atmosphere. And, last of all, let him imagine, in the midst of this artificial volcanic eruption, masses of human beings interchanging sabre blows and bayonet thrusts, closing in death-grapples, panting with exhaustion, fevered with quenchless thirst, writhing in mortal agony. Of the Russians, eighteen thousand are said to have been killed in this man-made hell. How many of the allies have fallen is still unknown.”
In fact, for a few days New York was very much inclined to vote itself an Anglo-Saxon city, for our worthy people here do shift and veer somewhat in their ethnological affiliations, and although as a general rule, Anglo-Saxon enough, yet they become more intensely British in sympathy — feel, as it were, the Saxon fibres throbbing more strongly whenever our transatlantic brethren have some mighty success. Of all the newspapers in the United States, the Citizen was the only one which instantly
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pointed out the necessary and obvious falsehood of this monstrous canard. In truth, I do always take a saturnine pleasure in ripping up any bag of gas and letting its contents escape into the atmosphere. But nobody minded me for three or four days; everyone was dancing an insane war-dance. However, four days after the grand news came another steamer — the sublime drama of the “Fall of Sebastopol” had vanished. Not only had Sebastopol not fallen, but it was manifest that Prince Menschikoff did not apprehend anything of the sort. The city holds a Russian army, another Russian army is outside, and it is clear that the English and French allies must prepare to winter in the mud. Still there is not the least sign of this gracious war spreading over Europe, and I lose all interest in a petty little siege in Crim Tartary.
New York and the Irish Political Prisoners
October 25th. — At last we have certain news of the release of Mr. Smith O’Brien and his comrades from their imprisonment. I have received a letter from John Martin, dated Paris, October 3rd. Here is one extract: —
“I left Melbourne, in company with O’Brien, in the steamer Norma, on the 26th July. Contrary to the anticipations of both O’Brien and myself, the ‘pardon’ was not attended by any conditions whatever. We had nothing to do, except on the appearance of the notice in the Gazette, go away at our: pleasure. No forms to sign, no applications to make — nothing whatever to do in the matter. You are probably aware that the ‘ pardons ‘ themselves did not reach the Tasmanian Government until five or six weeks after the news of the announcement by the British Minister in the British Parliament.”
So after Lord Palmerston’s announcement — ( “It is the intention of her Majesty’s Government to advise the Crown to extend to Mr. Smith O’Brien an act of clemency, and to allow him to apply for the means of placing himself at liberty”) — after that announcement, some six weeks after, her Majesty’s Government changed its mind, and let Mr. O’Brien and his friends go free without applying for the means, etc.
It seems, also, that this was contrary to the anticipations of the exiles themselves, who were acquainted with the
[Plate:] MS letter from Mitchel to W. S. O’Brien addressed from Knoxville, Tenn., Oct 28th: ‘I had a very satisfactory explanation with Stephens …’
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usual routine, and were, of course, resolved never to comply with it.
The whole truth of this matter is that Lord Palmerston, an excessively cunning old intriguer, had intended to make our friends an illusory offer of pardon, and, on their refusing it (with the conditions) had intended to turn his candid countenance to all mankind and say — “Behold! these headstrong convicts will not accept their gracious Sovereign’s pardon! “But his lordship became convinced that his predetermined trick was watched, had been already exposed, and would be mercilessly exhibited to the world. Besides, he knew that P. J. Smyth was then in Van Diemen’s Land, and would be sure to rescue O’Brien at last, if any further paltering took place about his release. So, at length, after six weeks’ delay, ministers made up their mind to put on the false pretence of doing a generous action — for which our friends take care to say they do not thank Her Majesty or her advisers.
December 14th. — New York, feeling less Anglo-Saxon than it was a few weeks ago, is bestirring itself to do honour to Smith O’Brien and his associates, Messrs. Martin and O’Doherty, on the occasion of their release. A requisition has been extensively signed by prominent citizens, headed by the names of Jacob A. Westervelt, Mayor; A. C. Kingsland, Ex-Mayor; Fernando Wood, Mayor elect; and exhibiting such other names as Robert Emmet, Thomas Addis Emmet, Charles O’Connor, Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, and others well known, calling a great meeting at the Tabernacle to adopt and transmit an address to Mr. O’Brien, “expressive of admiration for bis lofty integrity,” and all the rest of it. On this occasion I am in high good-humour — forbear even to intimate that all the parade is only to make capital for certain politicians with the multitude of Irish voters. What if it be so? Is it not gratifying that the said politicians know they can make their capital with our people only by sympathising with rebels and affronting the English Government? Accordingly I accept in gracious-wise this New York demonstration, and treat of it in the Citizen thus: —
“It is no mere Irish movement, this spontaneous impulse of the people to do honour to a brave and good man. The
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requisition proceeded from the Chief Magistrate, and from some of the most notable citizens of New York, and arose from the same honest impulse that made even the colonists of Van Diemen’s Land and the citizens of Melbourne (all British subjects themselves, and more or less ‘loyal’) rise as one man to congratulate him and his worthy associates on their release, and to give expression to that spontaneous instinctive admiration for heroic constancy in adversity and a stainless character, which is bounded by no latitude nor longitude, religion or nationality.
“Neither is it a movement of American politicians to buy ‘ Irish votes.’ The elections are over. O’Brien is not to come to America; is no way likely to be of the slightest service to any one of the struggling parties. Even the very Know-Nothings are in good humour; for this is a question of paying honour to a foreigner who has the good taste to know his own place — namely, the other side of the Atlantic.
“Over this meeting and address there rests no shadow of a cloud. No selfish or partisan design can be supposed to pollute it. The men of a great American city, who have eyes to see and hearts to appreciate what is good and noble, stretch forth their hands in hearty greeting across the sea, to welcome to freedom and home the illustrious though unfortunate champion of an oppressed land. Six years he has been counted among the felonious off-scourings of British gaols; but the citizens of New York (who do not happen to be a packed jury of the Queen of England) assure him of their esteem and admiration, and with the same breath virtually fling back the foul name of felon and traitor in the teeth of his enemies.
“There is an additional significance in the proceeding, inasmuch as the liberation of O’Brien was really decreed and accomplished in New York, not in London. It was because they knew the indefatigable agent of the New York Irish Directory had just returned to his mission in Australia, bound to rescue O’Brien out of the hands of his gaolers by force — that it occurred to the prudent British Government to make a virtue of necessity and release him. The very next mail steamer after Mr. Smyth sailed carried out to Australia the preliminary announcement of their insolent ‘pardon.’
O’Brien and his associates, however, not only did not pur-
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chase their freedom by the smallest semblance of submission, or hint of contrition, but took the very earliest public occasion, even while still in the power of British officials, to repel the treacherous compliment offered him by the Government at the expense of his friends and late associates — and further to inform them distinctly that he did not thank them for ‘ pardon. ’
“Whatever may become of the cause of Ireland, here at least is one other reversal of a fictitious jury’s fraudulent verdict — one other emphatic contradiction by the voice of freemen to the loud British falsehood that has dared to call an Irish Rebel Felon.”
The old “Tabernacle” crowded to its utmost capacity, with a vast and enthusiastic assemblage, consisting mainly of Irishmen, but with a large admixture of native citizens. A platform thronged with well-known faces, on whose successive appearance deafening cheers arise. The proceedings were already half over when the fine face and grey hair of Robert Emmet were first recognised in this group. He was unwell, and had dragged himself from his bed to participate in the tribute of respect to his noble countryman. When this fine old man, who had shared as a boy, the captivity of his father, Thomas Addis Emmet, at Fort George, was recognised by the multitude, one tempestuous peal of applause seemed to rend the walls of the building.
When the applause had subsided, Mr. Robert Emmet moved the adoption of the Address. He said :—
“I regret that I am not in a condition to respond to the enthusiasm with which you have received me this evening. I feared very much, until within the last half hour, that it would not have been in my power to have presented myself before you; and let me assure you that it required some effort to do it — an effort, however, which the strong desire that I had to be present on an occasion when the object was to express the feelings entertained by the Irish population of the city to their renowned compatriot, William Smith O’Brien, rendered imperative. I should never have forgiven myself, fellow-citizens, if I had not made that effort, because I feel that my past life, and my past history, and the traditions of my family (tremendous cheering, prolonged for several minutes) are intimately connected with aspirations for Irish freedom (renewed cheers). I say.
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gentlemen, that those feelings and that conscientiousness compelled me to make an effort to be here. I felt it was my duty to be present upon any occasion when the name of Smith O’Brien was to be received with honour by his countrymen, and when a proper tribute was to be paid to him for the sufferings which he has endured in the cause of our common country (cheers). I well recollect, fellow-citizens, the last occasion upon which we met in this very building, and it was not the only occasion when we met for the purpose of giving a helping hand to that cause in which he has suffered (hear, hear, and cheers). Whatever may have been the fate of that cause — however disastrous its results may have been — we have the satisfaction of knowing that we did our duty at the time (applause). And I thank God, fellow-citizens, that I have lived long enough to see those noble martyrs to liberty who have suffered from the fatal result of that cause in Ireland, to see them disenthralled, and the majority of them amongst us at this moment (cheers). I trust, fellow-citizens, without knowing what Smith O’Brien’s views may be with regard to his future career — what part of the world he intends to cast his lot in — I trust one of the effects of this meeting, and the address that you have heard this evening, will be to induce him, at all events, to pay us a visit here (loud cheers). I trust before I die to be able to take that honest man and patriot by the hand.”
I will not inflict on my readers the address itself, which was extremely cordial. It ended with these two paragraphs, intended to include in the congratulations of the city those worthy comrades of O’Brien who were released along with him: —
“You will receive, sir, these assurances of respect and admiration with feelings no less pleasurable than those with which they have been offered. At the same time, we are sensible that the satisfaction they are likely to afford would be lessened were the companions who shared your captivity, and who, with you, retrace their steps to a happier fortune, to be forgotten. It is a grateful task we entrust to you, when we beg that in our name you will greet your gallant friends in terms of the proudest commendation.
“Their efforts, aspirations, sacrifices, in the cause of Irish freedom are intimately known, and the recollection of them
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will not quickly perish in a country which, itself the great school and model of them, has been taught to admire in others the virtues which ennoble equally the martjrs as well as the heroes of a revolution.”
Other associates of Mr. O’Brien were present — Meagher, O’Gorman, Doheny, Dillon, and the present writer. We were there to enjoy the scene, not to take part in it; but were all called upon imperatively by the audience — obliged, in short, to come to the front to say a few hearty words.
On the whole, I must admit, though hard to please, the occasion was one of immingled gratification. We knew well how these words of cheer, coming from the grand free city of New York, would soothe the spirit of the brave and impenitent rebel.
Retirement from “The Citizen”
It was almost the last public event in this city with which I was to have any concern for some time. This month of December the Citizen is one year old. In that time I have had much and delightful intercourse with those old friends whom I had known intimately in Ireland, and who were afterwards fain to shelter under the Stars and Stripes. Most of them lived in the city itself, others were scattered far and wide over the Union. Williams, once known as “Shamrock,” was Professor of Greek in a Jesuits’ College at Mobile, and during this year I did not see him, though we afterwards met in New Orleans. Joseph Brenan was in New Orleans, labouring as a joumalist. He came to New York and contributed a little to the Citizen; but my poor friend was almost blind, and after some months returned to the South. Of all old associates I had most eager desire to see once more the face of Thomas Devin Reilly. He was in Washington, and within the first three months of my residence here I was several times hindered in plans to go and visit him, when one day, early in March of this year, came news of his sudden death. The restless, fiery, noble life was extinguished in a moment, without any known disease, at thirty years of age.
Eyesight fails me for the hard work of a newspaper. I determine to seek retirement somewhere far away in the wooded Mountains of the interior; give up the Citizen bodily to John
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M’Clenahan, pass another Polar winter in Brooklyn, and on a certain spring day, after taking leave of my friends, find myself, with all my household, on board the steamship Nashville, bound for Charleston, from whence we were to penetrate the interior as far as the shady valleys of East Tennessee. Here new scenes and a new kind of life awaits us.
Miles Byrne
From this period the Journal deals mainly with Mitchel’s life in the United States, and with his attitude towards its public, questions. In 1859, when he paid his first visit to France, in the expectation of an outbreak of war between France and England he met the gallant Miles Byrne, one of the insurgent leaders in Wexford, in 1798, and then a retired Colonel of the French army, and a warm friendship subsisted between them. “In the Rue , close by the Champs Elysee,” Mitchel writes under date of October, 1859, “dwells Miles Byrne, one of the noblest specimens of our countrymen — a warlike relic of New Ross and of Oulart — now an officer i of the French army.” . . . “Alas!” he writes later, “since that day I have stood by his bier in the church of St. Philip de Roule.”
Marshal MacMahon
The Franco-Austrian war of 1859 raised the military reputation of Marshal MacMahon to the first degree, and gave him a world renown. Nationalist Ireland subscribed and presented him with a sword of honour, and Mitchel participated in the presentation. Under date of September, 1860, he writes in his Joximal: —
Two delegates arrive from Ireland, charged to present a sword of honour to Marshal MacMahon. They £ire Dr. Sigerson and Mr. T. D. Sullivan; with them is associated Mr. Leonard, and they courteously invite me to make one of the party. The Marshal is now at Chalons, where 40,000 men have been under canvas all the summer; and after some negotiations with his staff officers, Sunday is appointed for our interview. Early in the morning we start by the Strasburg railroad; our party being also somewhat sanctified by the presence of Father Dempsey from Dublin. [Bearing the case containing the treasure, we swept up the rich vale of Maone, past Meaux and the grey cathedral towers of Bossuet, and into the Epemay station, where everyone breakfasts, seeing that Epemay is a
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famous centre of the champagne trade. At last we arrived in the old town of Chalons. [About two o’clock we reach certain low buildings which turn out to be the Marshal’s headquarters at Mourmelon. [Mass is over, and the troops have just been dismissed from their Sunday morning’s church parade. A sentry brings out an officer; the officer brings a higher officer, an aide to the Marshal, who ushers us into a small plain building, where we find a most modest reception-room. Several officers of rank are in the room, who all know the purport of our visit, and inform us the Marshal was expecting us. Within a minute or two he enters, a middle-sized man, with grey hair and moustache. His Chief-of-Staff introduces us all by name, whereupon Mr. Leonard, being the best French orator of our party, takes up the sheathed sword with its sword-belt and makes a short and feeling address. Then, holding it near the point, he presents its hilt to the Marshal. The honest resolute face of the latter bore marks of real emotion as he received it, and shortly, in a somewhat husky voice, he expressed his sense of the honour that had been done him by the people of his fathers. Lastly, he said he should ever cherish the gift of his Irish kinsmen and would transmit it to his young son, Patrick. After this, the blade was drawn and duly admired, and its Irish inscription explained. [The Marshal conversed a little with each of us in turn; and, then rising, said his brother-in-law, the young Due de Castries, was to place himself at our disposition and show us the camp until dinner time.
In the evening about six o’clock we were again at headquarters, when a brilliant company soon arrived on horseback, the Marshal galloping at their head. When they dismounted, the Marshal presented us to General Sutton de Clonard, General Dillon and several other officers of high rank, all covered with crosses and orders. He told us he had invited specially for that day officers of Irish extraction. Then they had all to inspect the sword, and they said many nice and pleasant things about it until dinner was announced, which took place in a separate building, beautifully decorated with flowers, and having ‘in the centre a magnificent bouquet sent specially by the Duchess. After dinner we all repaired to the Marshal’s rooms and smoked. We were very cordially invited to stay for a review of the troops the next
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day, and elegant tents had been provided for our lodging. General Sutton offered to mount me for the review, and pressed me to stay; but we all thought it best to return to Paris. The whole proceeding, on the part of the Marshal and his officers, was exceedingly gracious and in very good taste.
Mitchel’s Children
Mitchel’s family consisted of three sons and three daughters. His eldest and youngest sons were slain and his remaining son was severely wounded in the American Civil War. His eldest daughter, Henrietta, died in the same period. She had joined the Catholic Church, and her fervent piety and sweet disposition caused her death to be lamented as the passing of a saint by the nuns of her community. His daughter, Isabella, also became a Catholic and married Dr. Sloane. His daughter, Minnie, married Colonel Page of the Confederate Army. In his Journal of January, 1861, Mitchel narrates the circumstances attending his daughter, Henrietta’s, change of religion: —
Our eldest daughter, Henrietta, has this winter become a Catholic. It was no new whim on her part, for long since, while we were living at Washington, she had formed the same wish very strongly, influenced partly, as I suppose, by her intimacy with two young ladies of a Maryland Catholic family, who were our next-door neighbours. I knew also that she was greatly influenced by her very strong Irish feeling, and had a kind of sentiment that one cannot be thoroughly Irish without being Catholic. For that time, however, we had objected to any decided and public step being taken in this direction. She was too young to have duly studied the question and to know her own mind thoroughly; but I said that if, after two or three years, she should still entertain the same wish, I would not utter one word to dissuade her. Since our arrival in France she had been placed at school in the Convent of Sacre Coeur, and has become greatly attached to one of the good ladies of that house, Madame D, a very excellent and accomplished woman.
This condition of things was not calculated to abate her Catholic zeal; and, in short, the time came when my poor daughter declared that she must be a Catholic, could not live without being a Catholic. I did not think her parents had the right, and indeed they had not the disposition, to cross her wish any farther. So, on a certain day, she and another young lady
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were to be baptised in the chapel of the Convent. The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Moilot, heard of it and wrote to the Reverend Mother of the House to the effect that, as several conversions of Protestant pupils, which had lately taken place in the convents had given rise to imputations of undue influence, and conversion by surprise, as it were, and had afterwards given umbrage to the relatives, he should require that, before any further step was taken, I should be asked for a written consent. Madame D showed me the letter, and I instantly wrote the required consent. For this acquiescence I was most earnestly blamed by some of my connections in the north of Ireland, who wrote to me urging that I ought to exert my authority to stop such an apostacy. What would they have me do? Shut up my daughter in her room and give her the Westminster Confession to read! How should I like this usage myself? Here was a girl of nineteen, full of intelligence and spirit, gentle and affectionate, who had never given her father or mother one moment’s uneasiness upon her account, deliberately declaring that she desired to embrace the ancient faith of her forefathers. In short, I believe that I acted aright. For the short remainder of her days she lived a devout Catholic; and so she died. She lies buried in the Cemetery of Mount [sic] Parnasse.
Mitchel and Victor Hugo
Under date of February, 1862, Mitchel enters this comment and estimate of Hugo: —
This Victor Hugo is running crazy, but with a most mischievous craze; for with all his perversity of moral sentiment, the man has often an eloquence of convulsive and epileptic strength, and in the whirl of his stark madness he sometimes gives a ringing sentence that smites like a forge-hammer. This spasmodic eloquence, I suppose, must be the secret of his power; for though he has a vivid imagination there is nothing beautiful in it. His imagination revels in filth, ugliness, loathsomeness, physical and moral. Enough of Victor Hugo.
Mitchel and Fenianism
Mitchel’s sympathies were naturally with the object of Fenianism, but his direct connection with the Fenian movement lasted for but a short period. Writing in his Journal at New
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York in November, 1865, he details the circumstances under which he joined the Fenian organisation:
Since I arrived in New York I have also been making inquiries with regard to the Fenian organisation. It has become very extensive, and the language of Andrew Johnson to the deputation of that body respecting my release leads me to think that the United States Government may really contemplate the policy of permitting, or at least conniving at any enterprise the Irish-Americans may undertake. All through the war they have been buoyed up by this hope, and have been directly encouraged to entertain it — that when the South should be effectually subdued they would be let loose upon England. The Fenian organisation had spread like wildfire through the army, and there are now many thousands of disbanded soldiers who would desire nothing in the world so much as the chance of embarking on board a few transport ships for the shores of Ireland. I must say that my countrymen, with their enthusiastic and credulous nature, have had every excuse for falling into this delusion, if delusion it be. The bitter feeling of humiliation throughout the land of having been obliged by English menaces to restore Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, the ferocious language held against England both in Congress and in the Press on account of the fitting out of Confederate cruisers in British ports, and the consequent widely-spread destruction of American shipping; all this made it natural to believe that the Washington Government might be perfectly willing to use such a powerful and zealous force as these mustered-out Irish soldiers, and might look on while they worked their will. I have anxiously endeavoured to get some idea of the real strength, in men and money, which would be available for such an enterprise; and that strength is undoubtedly very great. Ireland, too, is as deeply disaffected as ever; and with the certainty of being joined at once by large forces of the peasantry, I should never hesitate to land in Ireland with but five thousand of these American veterans and arms for thirty or forty thousand more. In short, I became excited like the rest. I saw the chiefs of the Organisation here, Roberts, O’Mahony, etc., and also a body called the “Senate “composed of men from other towns, some of whom I had known before, and who all seemed hopeful and resolute.
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There was no sign of any interruption to their designs on the part of the Government; the preparations were well known, and the intention not concealed; yet no proclamation had been issued to stop these proceedings.
For myself I had been in almost total ignorance of all this till the present moment. Shut up in the Southern States during the war, and afterwards immured so many months, still more closely in a fortress of State, I had no opportunity of watching the progress of the Organisation; and when it broke upon me here, it loomed large and imposing. In short, if this gallant game is to be set afoot I must have a share in it; and when I was informed that its leaders here wished me to go to Paris as its agent for the safe transmission of funds to Ireland — a thing which had been attended with much loss through the interceptions of the enemy’s Government — I accepted the mission, joined the Organisation, started for Richmond to see my family and make some arrangements for them during my absence; and here I am now (loth Nov.) about to start for France on board l’Europe, one of the French line of steamships for Brest and Havre.
A brief residence in Paris sufficed to bring Mitchel many a disillusionment. He found that among the rank and file, the sincere and disinterested supporters of the Organisation, there was an exaggerated conception of the actual position of the movement both in Ireland and America. Soon the American Organisation, which it was believed in Ireland could almost dictate terms to the American Government, if necessary, got hopelessly sundered. In Ireland itself the Organisation was far from being in the efficient state in which it had been represented to be. In January, 1866, Mitchel writes: —
Letters from Father John Kenyon and others in Ireland upon whom I relied kept me more fully informed about matters in that country than I could hope to be through other channels. I had also repeated letters from Mr. Stephens, who had escaped from Richmond prison, and was then living secretly in Dublin; but I do not think it right to print these letters or any part of them. It is enough to say that the piece of duty which I had undertaken had come to be done in a perfunctory kind of manner, though with the utmost exactitude, and as it occupied but little time, I applied myself to other matters. A weekly letter to
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the New York News; some study in the great libraries, and visits to certain acquaintances and friends, whom I had known during former residences in Paris, filled up my lonely time.
One damp and dismal evening I entered my lodging about eight o’clock, intending to have the wood fire lighted in my small salon, and to read. I opened the door with my key, and was surprised to find my rooms already flaring with light; a fire blazing on the hearth, and a candle burning on the table. Two ladies and a gentleman rose on my entrance. I took off my hat, and bowed and stared: the dazzle of light and my own defect of eyesight prevented me from recognising anyone. At last both ladies laughed, and then I knew — it was my two sisters and my brother William who had come over to visit me. Needless to say that this enlivened the dull hours and days for awhile.
Spies have been hovering round me here; and some of the men who come over to me from Ireland say they think they have even recognised Irish detectives near the gateway of this house. It is highly probable, and to me altogether indifferent, but for the consideration that many of my messengers to Ireland may be dogged, followed to England, and there arrested with the money of the Irish Republic on their persons. This makes a good deal of caution needful in receiving and sending away the messengers.
March, 1866. — At last the evident attention of spies became a little provoking to me.
His prompt and summary disposal of those “spies of Lord Cowley, the English ambassador,” and the assurance given him by M. Pitri, private secretary to the Emperor, and Préfet of Police, that he would be relieved of their attentions, is told in his Journal — after which, in April of the same year, he writes:
If some unexpected event does not detain me I might as well return home soon. It is quite out of the question to open any kind of negotiation with the Emperor or his Ministers. While France is at peace with England, they would not even listen; and the attempt might even embarrass my movements in this country, which are now quite free. Indeed the Private Secretary of the Emperor, M. Pietri, who is also Prdfet of Police, told me
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the Government was disposed to be very friendly towards me, and even appreciated my reserve, in so cautiously abstaining from any effort which might lead to questions and explanations between the two Governments. This is all very well, but it leaves me in a position of utter nullity. Our worthy friends in New York (who thought the American Government were going to let them become belligerents, with the United States for a base of operations against England) have evidently supposed that I might arrange matters with the Emperor of the French so as to occupy France as a revolutionary workshop in the cause of Ireland; and on the 17th of February last I actually received by express from New York a large package which I found to consist of “Bonds of the Irish Republic” and a letter along with them from “Headquarters,” requesting me to “have them sold m France.”
Later, disheartened by dissensions in the United States, and convinced that nothing in the way of armed revolt in Ireland could succeed while England was at peace with the Great Powers, Mitchel determined to sever his connection with Fenianism, of which he wrote, June, 1866: —
In short, the thing is at an end for all good purposes, and an Irish cause must embody itself in other and stronger forms. That cause can never die; but too plainly it has been damaged, both in force and reputation, by the senseless bursting up of the Organisation in the United States. And, perhaps, it could only burst up and go to pieces. There has been no opportunity to do anything against our enemy — while she is at peace with the world. A wave, when it comes against the cliff, can but break into foam and froth. To end the record of my connection with “Fenianism,” I may mention that on the 22nd of June I wrote to Stephens, then at the head of the fragmentary Organisation in New York, informing him that I would no longer take charge of funds intended for Ireland; that if any drafts or bills had been already sent to me, and were then on their way at the time of the receipt of this letter, I should take care of such funds, as usual: but nothing more — suggesting at the same time that as Mr. E. O’Leary was then in Paris, the brother of John O’Leary, he might be charged with the money business for the future,
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Mitchel at the Irish College
In September, 1866, Mitchel’s two closest friends, John Martin and Father Kenyon, P. P., of Templederry, in Tipperary, visited him in Paris, and during Father Kenyon’s stay, Mitchel visited the Irish College in Paris with him, for the first time. In the Journal he thus describes the visit:
John Martin and Father Kenyon have come to Paris and have taken up their abode in the same house where I reside. [The worthy priest of Templederry is now very frail, and has had several narrow escapes for his life lately; but is as gay and jovial and witty as ever. Over these pleasant days in Paris impends a kind of shadow. We three, old friends, when we part this time, will probably never meet again, all together;* and this unspoken thought saddens a little our gayest moments. A curious incident befel one day, which I must mention, to my own credit and glorification. Father John and I were on our way homeward, and had arrived in the open place of the Pantheon, when he said to me, “I am going to call on Dr. Lynch, President of the Irish College — come with me.” I tried to excuse myself, said I had never been in the Irish College, and rather thought Dr. Lynch considered me a dangerous and ultra-revolutionary character — that, in fact, I had better not put the President’s politeness to too severe a test, by presenting myself before him. Father John would hear no excuse. “I am going,” said he, “you can come where I do, perhaps.” “Yes, anywhere, bring me where you choose,” We turned into the narrow Irish Street [(ue des Irlandais), one side of which is occupied by the massive building of the Irish College, with the tricolour flag over its great entrance gate; for this is a Government institution. The door was opened for us by a fine Tipperary man, nearly seven feet in stature, who spoke French like an angel, and took our card; we waiting in an ante-chamber within the gate. Presently he came back, smiling cordially, and said he was desired to bring us up to Dr. Lynch’s parlour. Passing through the port cochere we had a glimpse of the interior quadrangle, with some shady trees and patches of grass. The reverend President received us with the utmost courtesy; and after some conversation, he
♦The presentiment was fulfilled. Mitchel and Father Kenyon never jnet again, the latter dying in Tipperary in 1869.
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conducted us through the great public rooms of the institution, lecture-room, library and so forth, and exhibited a complete set of the Nation newspaper, bound in green folio volumes, the gift of Colonel Byrne. We took our leave, and the President escorted us down the great staircase and into the broad port cochere, where a scene awaited us, which neither Dr. Lynch nor we had expected. It appears the tall Tipperary man who took our cards had communicated the names of the visitors; it happened to be the hour for walking and recreation, when all the inmates of the college were in the garden, and when we descended the last step of the staircase and issued into the broad passage, we found all the students and all the professors ranged in two dense lines on either side; a very fine-looking crowd of young Irishmen, representing every county and barony in the island, and all destined for the Priesthood in their own country. When I made my appearance by the side of Dr. Lynch, three cheers, loud, long and hearty, burst from the crowd; cheers such as that quiet quarter has not often heard, ringing through the peaceful region of Sainte Genevieve and causing the Sergents de ville in distant streets to prick up their ears. As Father Kenyon and I passed between these ranks, the cheer was renewed with wild energy..
As Father John and I passed out together, and along the short rue des Irlandais, tears sprang in his eyes, and for a minute he was silent; then, “God bless the boys,” he said, “God bless the boys, anyhow; they’re always right.”
We passed several days in and around Paris, we three, but with an occasional sad feeling that the three, John Kenyon, John Martin, and John Mitchel, might probably never meet again.
Napoleon’s Irish Legion
In the Journal of 1866 Mitchel wrote: —
I shall soon have been a year absent from home, and may soon, perhaps, return without much danger of being arrested by the reconstructionists* without any charge against me. My time here, notwithstanding the short visit of my friends,
* The reference is to Mitchel’s American home and his imprisonment by the Federal Government softer the defeat of the Southern Confederacy.
has on the whole passed heavily enough. Yet I had again a few pleasant days down upon the coast of Normandie, where another old friend (erst Nicaragua) is living with his family he has a house at Bemieras-sur-Mer, one of a long line of coast villages; and within two miles is Courseulles, where John Leonard has his summer cottage. I often go to Mrs. Byrne, the widow of my admirable old friend, Miles Byrne, once of Oulart Hill, then of the Irish Legion, more lately chef de battalion in the regular army; but for many years before his death in retirement. I may mention how he came to be in the regular service though a foreigner. When by the Vienna treaties, at the close of the great Napoleonic wars, it was stipulated that France should disband her Irish Legion, this was at first done quite abruptly and harshly; and the officers of the Legion were ordered off to live under a kind of surveillance in various towns of France; but by degrees those of them who happened to command some influence, or who were favourably known for gallant service, received commissions in regiments of the line at their old grade, and were undistinguishable amongst French officers, except by those who knew their history. No Irish Legion however, was ever known in France again, nor will there be, unless — in certain contingencies. Mrs. Byrne has just published the fine old hero’s personal recollections of his life and services, all written by himself in his latter days, and deeply interesting to his countrymen, though told with the simplicity of a soldier. The work is brought out both in French and English; and Mrs. Byrne has been so kind as to present me with a copy of each.
Mitchel’s Final Departure from France
Mitchel left France finally at the close of 1866 and returned to the United States where all but a few weeks of the remainder of his life was spent:
I prepare myself to quit France once more and return to America — this is home — if, indeed, a man deprived of his own country can ever be said to have a home again in this world. Your exile becomes restless, and, finding himself in one hemisphere, thinks he ought to be in the other. Three times I have crossed over to France, returned twice to the United States, an4 am now to return the third time. After all, there dwells
[Plate: John Mitchel (The last portrait, 1875)
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my household, and one cannot live forever astride upon the Atlantic Ocean. There is charming autumnal weather now in France, which I enjoy in an unquiet kind of way. Profitons de nos derniers beaux jours. I go to pay my last visits to certain friends, French and Irish, to the family of Bramet at Choisy, to the Bayers in Paris, and the ladies kiss me on both cheeks, and send kind messages to my family; to the good Pere Hogan at the seminary of St. Sulpice; to M. Marie-Martin and his wife, at whose pleasant house I have often visited; to my friends the Leonards, now returned from their sea-bathing, and to the worthy and admirable Mr. Doherty, aged, white-haired, yet still young in heart; also to the grave of my daughter Henrietta in the cemetery of Mount [sic] Parnasse, whither I carry a lauriertin (what we call laurustinas), in a large pot, and place it on the tombstone, and Adieu!
The journey to Brest and voyage to New York are described, and the “Journal” concludes:
Again, the heights of Nevisink, Sandy Hook, and Staten Island with its villages and villas. Thirteen years ago I closed another Journal on entering this harbour of New York — then for the first time — and here once more I cast anchor.
27
APPENDICES
I. The Famine Year
[In June, 1847, Mitchel sat down to write for the Nation a review of “Irish Guide Books” and out of the memories they awakened was begotten by the existent horror of the Famine — this, the most beautiful, and terrible article that has ever come from the pen of an Irish journalist. In it the John Mitchel of 1848 has his birth.]
Again, the great sun stands high at noon above the greenest island that hes within its ken on all the broad zodiac road he travels, and his glory, “like God’s own head,” will soon blaze forth from the solstitial tower. Once more, also — even in this June month of the rueful year — the trees have clothed themselves in their wonted pomp of leafy umbrage, and the warm air is trembling with the music of ten thousand singing-birds, and the great all-nourishing earth has arrayed herself in robes of glorious green — the greener for all the dead she has laid to rest within her bosom.
What! alive and so bold, O Earth I
Art thou not over bold?
What I leapest thou forth as of old.
In the light of thy morning mirth?
Why, we thought that the end of the world was at hand; we never looked to see a bright, genial summer, a bright, rigorous winter again. To one who has been pent up for months, labouring with brain and heart in the panic-stricken city, haunted by the shadow of death, and has heard from afar the low, wailing moan gi his patient, perishing brothers borne in upon every gale, black visions of the night might well come swarming; to hii dulled eye a pall might visibly spread itself over the empyrean, to his weary ear the cope of Heaven might ring from pole to pole with a muffled peal of Doom. Can such swinkt labourer believe that days will ever be wholesome any more, or nights ambrosial as they were wont to be? — for is not the sun in sick eclipse and like to die, and hangs there not upon the corner of the moon a vaporous drop profound, shedding plague and blight and the blackness of darkness over all the world?
Not so, heavy-laden labourer in the seed-field of time. Sow diligently what grain thou hast to sow, nothing doubting; for,
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indeed, there shall be hereafter, as of old, genial showers and ripening suns, and harvests shall whiten, and there shall verily be living men to reap them, be it with sword or sickle. The sun is not yet turned into darkness, nor the moon into blood; neither is the abomination of desolation spoken of by Jeremy the Prophet yet altogether come to pass. Heaven and earth grow not old, as thou and thy plans and projects and speculations will all most assuredly do. Here have you been gnawing your heart all winter about the “state of the country,” about a Railway Bill, about small rating districts, or about large; casting about for means to maintain your own paltry position; or else, perhaps, devising schemes, poor devil! for the regeneration of your country, and dreaming that in your own peculiar committee, clique, confederacy, caucus, council, conclave, or cabal, lay Ireland’s last and only hope! — until you are nearly past hope yourself — until foul shadows are creeping over your light of life, and insanity is knocking at your parietal bone. Apparently you will be driven to this alternative — to commit suicide, or else, with a desperate rush, to fly into the country, leaving the spirits of evil and the whole rout of hell at the first running stream.
We advise the latter course; all the powers of nature enforce and conjure to it; every blushing evening woos thee westward; every blue morning sends its Favonian airs to search thee out in thy study and fan thy cheek, and tell thee over what soft, whispering woods; what bank of breathing field flowers; what heathery hills fragrant with bog myrtle and all the flora of the moors: what tracks of corn and waving meadows they have wandered before they came to mix with the foul city atmosphere, dim with coal smoke and the breath of multitudinous scoundreldom. On such blue morning, to us, lying wistfully dreaming with eyes wide open, rises many a vision of scenes that we know to be at this moment enacting themselves in far-off lonely glens we wot of. Ah! there is a green nook, high up amidst the foldings of certain granite mountains, forty leagues off an( more, and there is gurgling through it, murmuring and flashing in the sun, a little stream clear as crystal — the mystic song of it, the gushing freshness of it, are even now streaming cool through our adust and too cineritious brain; and, clearly as if present in the body, we seek the grey rock that hangs over one of its shallow pools, where the sun rays are broken by the dancing water into a network of tremulous golden light upon the pure sand that forms its basin; and close by, with quivering leaves and slender stem of silver, waves a solitary birch-tree; and the mountains stand solemn around, and by the heather-bells that are breaking from their sheaths everywhere under your steps, you know that soon a mantle of richest imperial purple will be
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spread over their mighty shoulders and envelop them to the very feet. Lie down upon the emerald sward that banks this little pool, and gaze and listen. Through one gorge that breaks the mountain pass to the right hand, you see a vast cultivated plain, with trees and fields and whitened houses, stretching away into the purple distance, studded here and there with lakes that gleam like mirrors of polished silver. Look to the left, through another deep valley, and — lo! the blue Western Sea! And aloft over all, over land and sea, over plain and mountain, rock and river, go slowly floating the broad shadows of clouds, rising slowly from the south, borne in the lap of the soft, south wind, slowly climbing the blue dome by the meridian line, crossing the path of the sun, nimbus after nimbus, cirrus and cumulus, and every other cloud after his cloud, each flinging his mighty shadow on the passes, and then majestically melting off northward. What battalions and broad-winged hosts of clouds are these! Here have we lain but two hours, and there have been continually looming upward from behind the wind, continually sailing downward beyond the northern horizon, such wondrous drifts and piled up mountain of vapour: as would shed another Noachian deluge and quench the stars if the floodgates were once let loose and the windows of heaven opened, yet this fragrant, soft-blowing southern gale bears them up bravely on its invisible pinions and softly winnows them on their destined way. They have a mission; they are going to build themselves up, somewhere over the Hebrides, into a huge, many-towered Cumulostratus; and to-morrow or the day after will come down in thunder and storm and hissing sheets of grey rain, sweeping the Sound of Mull with their trailing skirt, and making the billows of Corrievrechan seethe and roar around his cliffs and caves. Ben Cruachan, with his head wrapped in thick night, will send down Awe River in raging spate, in a tumult of tawny foam, and Morven shall echo through all his groaning woods.
But one cannot be everywhere at once. We are not now among the Western Isles, buffeting a summer storm in the Sound of Mull; but here in this green nook, among our own Irish granite mountains, at our feet the clear, poppling water, over our head the birch leaves quivering in the warm June air; and the far-off sea smooth and blue as a burnished sapphire. Let the cloud-hosts go and fulfil their destiny; and let us, with open eye and ear and soul, gaze and listen. Not only are mysterious splendours around us, but mysterious song gushes forth above us and beneath us. In this little brook alone what a scale of notes! from where the first faint tinkle of it is heard far up as it gushes from the heart of the mountain, down through countless cascades and pools and gurgling rapids, swelling
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and growing till it passes our grassy couch and goes on its murmuring way singing to the sea; but it is only one of the instruments. Hark! the eloquent wind that comes sighing up the valley and whispering with the wavering fern! And at intervals comes from above or beneath, you know not which, the sullen croak of a solitary raven, without whose hoarse bass you never find nature’s mountain symphony complete; and we defy you to say why the obscene fowl sits there and croaks upon his grey stone for half a day, unless it is that nature puts him in requisition to make up her orchestra, as the evil beast ought to be proud to do. And hark again! the loud hum of innumerable insects, first begotten of the Sun, that flit among the green heather stalks and sing all their summer life through — and then, if you listen beyond all that, you hear, faintly at first as the weird murmur in a wreathed shell, but swelling till it almost overwhelms all the other sounds, the mighty voice of the distant sea. For it is a peculiarity ever of this earth-music that you can separate every tone of it, untwist every strand of its linked sweetness, and listen to that and dwell upon it by itself. You may shut your senses to all save that far-off ocean murmur until it fills your ear as with the roar and rush of ten thousand tempests, and you can hear the strong billows charging against every beaked promontory from pole to pole; or you may listen to the multitudinous insect hum till it booms painfully upon your ear-drum, and you know that here is the mighty hymn or spiritual song of life, as it surges ever upward from the abyss; louder, louder, it booms into your brain — oh, heaven! it is the ground-tone of that thunder-song wherein the earth goes singing in her orbit among the stars. Yes, such and so grand are the separate parts of this harmony; but blend them all and consider what a diapason! Cathedral organs of all stops, and instruments of thousand strings, and add extra additional keys to your pianofortes, and sweetest silver flutes, and the voices of men and of angels; all these, look you, all these, and the prima donnas of all sublunary operas, and the thrills of a hundred Swedish Nightingales, have not the compass nor the flexibility, nor the pathos, nor the loudness, nor the sweetness required for the execution of this wondrous symphony among the hills.
Loud as from numbers without number, sweet,
As of blest voices uttering joy.
Loud and high as the hallelujahs of choiring angels — yet, withal, what a trance of Silence? Here in this mountain dell, all the while we lie, breathes around such a solemn overpowering stillness, that the rustle of an unfolding heath-bell, too near breaks it offensively; and if you linger near enough — by heaven! you can hear the throb of your own pulse. For, indeed, the
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divine silence is also a potent instrument of that eternal harmony, and bears melodious part.
“Such concord is in heaven I “Yea, and on the earth, too, if only we — we who call ourselves the beauty of the world and paragon of animals — did not mar it. Out of a man’s hezirt proceedeth evil thoughts; out of his mouth come revilings and bitterness and evil-speaking. In us, and not elsewhere, lies the fatal note that jars all the harmonies of the universe, and makes them like sweet bells jangled out of tune. Who will show us a way to escape from ourselves and from one another? Even, you, reader, whom we have invited up into this mountain, we begin to abhor you in our soul; you are transfigured before us; your eyes are become as the eyes of an evil demon, and now we know that this gushing stream of living water could not in a life-time wash away the iniquity from the chambers of thine heart; the arch-chemist sun could not burn it out of thee. For know, reader, thou hast a devil; it were better thy mother had not borne thee; and almost we are impelled to mm-der thee where thou liest.
“Poor human nature! Poor human nature! “So men are accustomed to cry out when there is talk of any meanness or weakness committed, especially by themselves; and they seem to make no doubt that if we could only get rid of our poor human nature we should get on much more happily. Yet human nature is not the worst element that enters into our composition — there is also a large diabolical ingredient — also, if we would admit it, a vast mixture of the brute, especially the donkey nature — and then, also, on the other hand, some irradiation of the godlike, and by that only is mankind redeemed.
For the sake whereof we forgive thee, comrade, and will forbear to do thee a mischief upon the present occasion. But note well how the very thought of all these discords has silenced, or made inaudible to us, all these choral songs of earth and sky. We listen, but there is silence — mere common silence; it is no use crying Encore! either the performers are dumb or we are stone deaf. Moreover, as evening comes on, the grass and heath grow somewhat damp, and one may get cold in his human nature. Rise, then, and we shall show you the way through the mountain to seaward, where we shall come down upon a little cluster of seven or eight cabins, in one of which cabins, two summers ago, we supped sumptuously on potatoes and salt with the decent man who lives there, and the black-eyed woman of the house and five small children. We had a hearty welcome though the fare was poor; and as we toasted our potatoes in the greeshaugh, our ears drank in the honey-sweet tones of the well-beloved Gaelic. If it were only to hear, though you did not understand, mothers and children talking together in their own blessed
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Irish, you ought to betake you to the mountains every summer. The sound of it is venerable, majestic, almost sacred. You hear in it the tramp of the clans, ithe judgment of the Brehons, the song of bards. There is no name for “modem enlightenment” in Irish, no word corresponding with the “masses,” or with “reproductive labour”; in short, the “nineteenth century” would not know itself, could not express itself in Irish. For the which, let all men bless the brave old tongue, and pfay that it may never fall silent by the hills and streams of holy Ireland — never until long after the great nineteenth century of centuries, with its “enlightenment” and its “paupers,” shall be classed in its true category the darkest of all the Dark Ages.
As we come down towards the roots of the mountain, you may feel, loading the evening air, the heavy balm of hawthorn blossoms; here are whole thickets of white-mantled hawthorn, every mystic tree (save us all from fairy thrall!) smothered with snow-white and showing like branching coral in the South Pacific. And be it remembered that never in Ireland, since the last of her chiefs sailed away from her, did that fairy tree burst into such luxuriant beauty and fragrance as this very year. The evening, too, is delicious; the golden sun has deepened into crimson, over the sleeping sea, as we draw near the hospitable cottages; almost you might dream that you beheld a vision of the Connacht of the thirteenth century; for that —
The clime, indeed, is a clime to praise,
The clime is Erin’s, the green and bland;
And this is the time — these be the days —
Of Cathal Mor of the Wine-Red Hand —
Cathal Mor, in whose days both land and sea were fruitful, and the yeanlings of the flocks were doubled, and the horses champed yellow wheat in the mangers.
But why do we not see the smoke curling from those lowly chimneys? And surely we ought by this time to scent the well-known aroma of the turf-fires. But what (may Heaven be about us this night) — what reeking breath of hell is this oppressing the air, heavier and more loathsome than the smell of death rising from the fresh carnage of a battlefield. Oh, misery! had we forgotten that this was the Famine Year? And we are here in the midst of those thousand Golgothas that border our island with a ring oi death from Cork Harbour all round to Lough Foyle. There is no need of inquiries here — no need of words; the history of this little society is plain before us. Yet we go forward, though with sick hearts and swimming eyes, to examine the Place of Skulls nearer. There is a horrible silence; grass grows before the doors; we fear to look into any door, though they are all open or off the hinges; for we fear to see yellow
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chapless skeletons grinning there; but our footfalls rouse two lean dogs, that run from us with doleful howling, and we know by the felon-gleam in the wolfish eyes how they have lived after their masters died. We walk amidst the houses of the dead, and out at the other side of the cluster, and there is not one where we dare to enter. We stop before the threshold of our host of two years ago, put our head, with eyes shut, inside the door-jamb, and say, with shaking voice, “God save all here!” — No answer — ghastly silence, and a mouldy stench, as from the mouth of burial-vaults. Ah! they are dead! they are dead! the strong man and the fair, dark-eyed woman and the little ones, with their liquid Gaelic accents that melted into music for us two years ago; they shrunk and withered together until their voices dwindled to a rueful gibbering, and they hardly knew one another’s faces; but. their horrid eyes scowled on each other with a cannibal glare. We know the whole story — the father was on a “public work,” and earned the sixth part of what would have maintained his family, which was not always paid him; but still it kept them half alive for three months, and so instead of dying in December they died in March. And the agonies of those three months who can tell? — the poor wife wasting and weeping over her stricken children; the heavy-laden weary man, with black night thickening around him — thickening within him — feeling his own arm shrink and his step totter with the cruel hunger that gnaws away his life, and knowing too surely that all this will soon be over. And he has grown a rogue, too, on those public works; with roguery and lying about him, roguery and lying above him, he has begun to say in his heart that there is no God; from a poor but honest farmer he has sunk down into a swindling, sturdy beggar; for him there is nothing firm or stable; the pillars of the world are rocking around him; “the sun to him is dark and silent, as the moon when she deserts the night.” Even ferocity or thirst for vengeance he can never feel again; for the very blood of him is starved into a thin, chill serum, and if you prick him he will not bleed. Now he can totter forth no longer, and he stays at home to die. But his darling wife is dear to him no longer; alas! and alas! there is a dull, stupid malice in their looks: they forget that they had five children, all dead weeks ago, and flung coffinless into shallow graves — nay, in the frenzy of their despair they would rend one another for the last morsel in that house of doom; and at last, in misty dreams of drivelling idiocy, they die utter strangers.
Oh! Pity and Terror! what a tragedy is here — deeper, darker than any bloody tragedy ever enacted under the sun, with all its dripping daggers and sceptred palls. Who will compare the fate of men burned at the stake, or cut down in battle — men
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with high hearts and the pride of life in their veins, and an eye to look up to heaven, or to defy the slayer to his face — who will compare it with this?
* * i * *
No shelter here to-night, then: and here we are far on in the night, still gazing on the hideous ruin. O Batho! a man might gaze and think on such a scene, till curses breed about his heart of hearts, and the hysterica passio swells in his throat.
But we have twelve miles to walk along the coast before we reach our inn; so come along with us and we will tell you as we walk together in the shadows of the night
II. The Mitchel-Duffy Controversy
In the appendix to his “League of the North and South” (1896) Sir Charles Gavan Duffy republishes part of the reply he made to Mitchel’s strictures on him in the “Jail Journal,” stating that, “I am entitled that the facts of the case which his (Mitchel’s) brilliant book will keep long in memory should be accurately known.” To Duffy’s “Letter to John Mitchel” written (1854) on the first publication of the “Jail Journal,” Mitchel wrote a fierce reply which Duffy reprinted in the Nation and criticised. Those who are curious to read in its entirety the controversy between Mitchel and Duffy will find it set out in full in the Nation of April and May, 1854. Two commentaries from Michael Joseph Barry and Terence Bellew MacManus appear in the issues of Mitchel’s Citizen in the later months of the same year. The controversy had a very unfortunate effect on the political fortunes of both men, for Duffy’s charges against Mitchel were eagerly seized upon by the Yankee press, to which Mitchel was at the time in opposition, to depreciate him, whilst Mitchel’s charges against Duffy were utilised by the venal press and party Duffy was then opposing in Ireland to discredit him. In regard to the articles “The Tocsin of Ireland,” and “The Casus Belli,” which Mitchel was led to believe Duffy had written and on his trial evaded responsibility for, Mitchel was partly misled. The article Mitchel had in mind evidently was “Jacta Alea Est,” written by Miss Elgee, afterwards Lady Wilde, in the suppressed issue of the Nation. Miss Elgee wrote both to the counsel for the defence and the counsel for the prosecution avowing the authorship, and the counsel for Duffy raised technical objections to the proof of the authorship of the “Tocsin of Ireland,” and to Duffy’s responsibility for articles which appeared while he was in prison.
The principle of calling evidence as to his private character on Duffy’s trial is open to censure, but prior to Duffy’s doing so another Young Ireland leader had acted similarly and no adverse
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criticism had been excited in Ireland by the fact. It must be remembered that the Government and the Government press had systematically tried to blacken the character of the Young Irelanders in order to excite public feeling against them, that for this purpose an infamous journalist named Birch had been employed and paid several thousand pounds (see the actions of Birch versus Somerville and Birch versus the Freeman’s Journal, 1851, in which the vile transaction was acknowledged by the principals) and that some of the Young Irelanders believed it, therefore, necessary to refute libels which had gained a certain currency in the country. As to the memorial, and Sir Lucius O’Brien, Duffy repudiated O’Brien’s action and denied that any promise was made or implied on his behalf. Duffy did not disown the memorial — a proceeding he justified by the precedent of colleagues in the Leadership of Young Ireland. The justification cannot be sustained. He also emphatically denied the charge that it was through him O’Brien was induced to attempt an insurrection in Tipperary. Finally, justice to Duffy’s memory demands it to be made known what was not known to Mitchel at the time he wrote his comments in the “Jail Journal” that the Government offered to release Duffy if he would formally plead “Guilty” and that Duffy rejected the offer.
This unhappy controversy has echoed down even to our own time, and it would be unjust for any editor of the “Jail Journal” to issue a new edition without setting down the facts. Stung by what Mitchel wrote, Duffy in his “Letter” accused Mitchel of having broken his parole in escaping from Van Diemen’s Land. This charge, the most galling which could have been made against a man of Mitchel’s high honour, and which was repudiated at once by all the Young Ireland leaders, many of whom on other points sympathised with Duffy rather than with Mitchel, and approved of the policy of the revived Nation, sundered Mitchel from Duffy for ever — it rendered reconciliation impossible.
The origin of the bitter breach between Mitchel and Duffy was not, however, in this controversy, nor their opposing views on policy in 1848. In the beginning of 1848 Duffy excised from a report in the Nation of one of Mitchel’s speeches at the Confederation several passages which he considered seditious, an action which Mitchel strongly resented, and there seems to have arisen a belief in Mitchel’s mind that Duffy was secretly planning to drive him out of the Confederation. Whether this belief was true or untrue, it is now impossible with certainty to assert. But it is indisputable that the two men in the Young Ireland Leadership in 1848 whom it was most profitable to the British Government of that day to sow animosity between were John Mitchel and Gavan Duffy. To it, the one was the
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most dangerous man of action, the other the most astute opponent. Apart from honest partisans, there were some few in the groups surrounding the two patriots whose honesty may be reasonably suspected, and that one at least of these men fanned misunderstanding between Mitchel and Duffy is fairly certain.
Frederick Lucas, the one Englishman in the history of Ireland in the nineteenth century who honestly and completely identified himself with the cause of Ireland — a man of cool judgment and penetrating insight into character, and who was the personal friend of both Mitchel and Duffy, has left on record his judgment of both. Mitchel he declared to be the bravest man he ever knew — supremely unselfish, sincere and modest. Duffy he estimates, next to Mitchel, the ablest man in the movement, of a character not so strong in action, but courageous, steadfast, unselfish, and sincere. His estimate is a true one. To Gavan Duffy, Ireland not only owes the foundation of the Nation, but the revival of some spark of national life in the years immediately following the Famine and the destruction of Young Ireland. To Mitchel modem Ireland owes an inspiration without which her farmers might still be serfs and her nationhood bartered for West-Britonism. His indomitable spirit and haughty manhood raised again out of carcasses and ashes a defiant Irish Nation. No country has a nobler and more gallant figure in its pantheon than John Mitchel; Ireland has had few men who served her more honestly than Duffy. Mitchel will always be first in the love of his countrymen, but the common name of patriot is the meed of both men.
III. The Cape and Mitchel
A deputation of the residents of Capetown waited on their Government on behalf of the people of the Cape during the quarantine of the Neptune, requesting that Mitchel be permitted to land there as a free settler. The Government declined — in this matter of course it was not free to act. Mitchel does not seem to have been aware of the request of the Cape people for his release and residence amongst them when he was compiling and, later, publishing the “Jail Journal.”
The Neptune convict ship in which he was interned was of 643 tons register, commanded by John Henderson. The two bashful officers were Lieutenant Melvin and Ensign Manners of the 91st Regiment. They commanded a guard of forty-seven men.
IV. The Cuban Filibusters
In August, 1850, General Narciso Lopez, at the head of 450 men, led a second expedition which he had organised in the
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United States to Cuba. He contrived to successfully evade the Spanish and American warships, which the respective governments, suspecting his intention, placed on watch between the American mainland and the island, and on the 12th of August disembarked at Cabano, forty miles west of Havana. The would-be liberators of Cuba were, however, badly received by the people, none of whom joined their standard, and many of whom took active part with the Spanish Government against them. Some skirmishes took place between the filibusters and the garrison, and in the end the former broke up into small parties which eventually surrendered or were captured. Lopez was among the latter. He was publicly executed, declaring “I die for my beloved Cuba.” Colonel Crittenden, an American, nephew of the Attorney-General of the United States, was one of Lopez’s lieutenants in the expedition. After a fight against two battalions of infantry and a company of horse, which he sustained for some time with only a hundred men, he attempted to escape from the island with his surviving followers, but was captured and shot together with them, about fifty in all, on the i6th of September, 1850 at the Castle of Atares.
V. Mitchel County, Iowa
The Legislature of Iowa, which had previously named two of the counties of the State after Emmet and Davis, named two others after Mitchel and Smith O’Brien, subsequent to 1848. Mitchel County is in the northern part of Iowa, bordering on Minnesota. Its area is 480 square miles and in 1900 the population was 15,000.
[Plate:] A Tipperary Eviction in 1848
Contemporaries Mentioned in the Jail Journal
Ainsworth, Harrison (1805-1882). — The author of the most indigestible “historical novels “extant in English. The chapters in his “Rookwood” describing the highwayman Tnrpin’s mythical ride to York are so far superior to all else in his writings that suspicion has attached to their authorship, and Dr. Maginn was named as the real writer. Ainsworth, however, always maintained that the chapters were of his own composing. Ainsworth before he turned novelist was a publisher.
Akhbar Khan (1823-1847). — A son of Dost Mahommed, who turned the tables on the English after they dethroned his father, and compelled them to flee from Cabul through the Khyber Pass wherein they were annihilated. His energy and courage eventually led to the restoration of his father with the assent of England.
Albert, Prince (1819-1861). — Husband of the late Queen Victoria. His dislike to Ireland was expressed in the blundering phrase, “The Irish are as little deserving of sympathy as the Poles.”
Alexander, James Edward, Capt. (1803-1885). — Explored in South Africa and South America in the interests of England, and was the chief agent in spoiling the Egyptians of Cleopatra’s Needle and setting it on the Thames Embankment. For these and other services to civilisation he was promoted to the rank of General in the British army.
Antisell, Dr. — One of the younger members of the Confederation in 1848. On the suppression of Mitchel’s United Irishman, he took part in editing the Tribune, which he supplied the funds to found. After the failure of the insurrection he went to the United States, where he became distinguished as a scientist. Among his writings is a fascinating and valuable work urging the re-afforestation of Ireland.
Balfe, John Donnellan. — A member of the Repeal Association and afterwards of the Irish Confederation. He came from the Midlands, and was subsequently accused of having been ejn
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ployed there by the Government to foment faction fighting. He acquired the confidence of the Irish of Liverpool and issued for a short time a journal, Peter Carroll’s Register, in which he enunciated semi-socialist doctrines. In 1848 the Young Ireland leaders received information which led them to exclude him from the Confederation. In July, 1848, he appeared in Tipperary on Government service and pointed out Smith O’Brien at Thurles to O’Brien’s captors. He was rewarded with a grant of land in Tasmania, a Government post there, and a magistracy. “A man,” wrote Mitchel, “eminently qualified for an office of trust and emolument under the British Government.”
Barry, Michael Joseph (1817-1889). — Barry was a prominent member of the group which surrounded Davis. He edited the “Songs of Ireland” in the “Library of Ireland. ”His song, the “Flag of Green,” written to the tune of “O’Connell’s March,” was very popular in the Young Ireland period, and retains popularity still. After the failure of 1848 Barry avowed he had lost all belief in the future of Ireland as a nation, and counselled the country to accept the fate of an English Province and make the best of matters. The country did not take his advice, but his colleagues, while condemning it, did not question his sincerity. He afterwards edited the Cork Southern Reporter, and later became a Dublin Police Magistrate. In this capacity when the prosecution spoke of a prisoner charged before him as “wearing a republican hat,” he said he presumed that that was a hat without a crown.
Baudin, Charles (1784-1857). — French Vice-Admiral, who like Nelson had but one arm, the other having perished fighting the English. He served under Napoleon bat declined service under the restored Bourbons. After the accession of Louis Philippe he returned to sea and won a reputation which France honoured by raising him to the high distinction of Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.
Blanc, Louis (1813-1880). — Bom in Spain of a French father and a Corsican mother. He leaped into fame by his publication of the work “Organisation du Travail “in 1840, and became one of the provisional Government of France after the dethroning of Louis Philippe. His speculative opinions were mostly wrong, but his character was brave and honourable.
Bonaparte, Louis (1808-1873). — Nephew of the Great Napoleon. After the revolution of 1848 he was returned to the Chamber of Deputies, and the glamour of his name, the belief that he was a man of peace, and the unpopularity of General Cavaignac, led to his election as President of the French
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Republic, from which post he ascended, via the Coup d’Etat and the Plebescite, to the Imperial Throne in 1852. In 1859 he was on the verge of war with England, and for some years he was regarded as the chief enemy of England in Europe.
“Bourdeaux-Berri-Bourbon.” — Grandson of Charles X. and legitimate heir to the French throne. He was set aside after the July Revolution in favour of the Duke of Orleans (Louis Philippe).
Brenan, Joseph (1829-1857). — The youngest of the Young Irelanders prominently connected with the events of 1848. He came to Dublin from Cork in 1848 to join Mitchel on the United Irishman and after its suppression wrote for the Felon. He was arrested and kept in jail for nine months. On his release he joined the staff of the Irishman, and aided Fintan Lalor in an unsuccessful scheme for an insurrection in 1849. After its failure he emigrated to America where he settled in New Orleans and married the sister of his colleague, John Savage, to whom he addressed his beautiful verses “Come to me, Dearest. ”Blindness overtook him some years before his death.
Butt, Isaac (1813-1879). — At the period of the “Jail Journal,” Isaac Butt was the intellectual leader of Irish Unionism, but his sympathies had always been national. His association with the Young Irelanders, and later, his defence of the Fenian prisoners, impelled him towards the adoption of the rejected “Federalism” of 1843 as a middle course between nationalism and political unionism, which he put forward under the new name, now famous, of “Home Rule.” He edited the Dublin University Magazine in pre-Young Ireland days, and as Professor of Political Economy in Trinity College at the beginning of the Young Ireland period delivered the most lucid and sensible lectures on that subject ever given in an Irish University.
Buxton, Sir Fowell (1785-1845). — The benevolent brewer who succeeded Wilberforce in the leadership of the anti-slaveholding section in the English House of Commons and was made a baronet for his virtues.
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881). — At the time Mitchel wrote, Carlyle was in the zenith of his popularity, which had blazed on his publication of the “French Revolution.” In his works relating to historical events he never permitted facts to control his theories. He prophesied that Mitchel would be hanged, but he remarked they could never hang the immortal part of him.
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Chambers, Robert (1802-1871). — A prolific” popular “instructor. He established Chamber’s Journal in 1832.
Changarnier, Nicholas (1793-1860). — The most brilliant general France possessed in the Kabyle campaign. Under the Second Republic he commanded the National Guard and opposed Louis Napoleon’s bid for an imperial crown. On the establishment of the Second Empire he voluntarily went into exile.
Clarendon, Earl of (1800-1870). — George Wilham Villiers, fourth earl. His public life was spent in diplomatic intrigue. He was sent in 1827 by the English Government to Ireland to secretly negotiate a bargain over Catholic Emancipation. In 1847 e was appointed Lord Lieutenant, caused arms to be supplied to the Orangemen, and subsidised James Birch, editor of the World newspaper, to print foul charges against the moral characters of the Young Ireland leaders. He also caused the anonymous issue of “warnings” to merchants £md others that the Young Irelanders were “Jacobins.” “His highest claim to renown,” says an enthusiastic biographer, “is his conduct as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.”
Cochrane, Admiral (1775-1860). — Afterwards tenth Earl of Dundonald. After a distinguished career in the British Navy he entered politics and was continually in conflict with the Ministry. Eventually he was expelled from Parliament and the navy on a false charge of corruption. He entered successively the Chilian, Brazilian, and Greek services in the struggles of those countries for political independence. In 1831 he was reinstated in the British Navy, and ceased from troubling to a great extent. Cochrane more than half a century before he came into Mitchel’s life, nearly ended Wolfe Tone’s career in Irish politics. On the 20th of July, 1795, Cochrane, together with Captains Rose and Woods, stopped, off Newfoundland, the ship in which Wolfe Tone and his family were sailing to the United States. They boarded the vessel, and, “after treating us with the greatest insolence,” writes Tone in his Diary, “both officers and sailors, they pressed every one of our hands, save one, and near fifty of my unfortunate fellow-passengers, who were most of them flying to America to avoid the tyranny [sic] of a bad government, and who thus most unexpectedly fell under the severest tyranny, one of them at least, which exists. As I was in a jacket and trousers, one of the lieutenants ordered me into the boat as a fit man to serve the king, and it was only the screams of my wife and sister which induced him to desist. It would have been a pretty termination to my adventures if I had been pressed and sent on board a*man-of-war. The insolence of these tyrants as well to myself as to my poor fellow passengers in whose fate a fellow
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ship in misfortune had interested me, I have not since forgotten and I never will. At length after detaining us two days, during which they rummaged us at least twenty times, they suffered us to proceed.”
Dana, Richard Henry (1815-1882). — An American barrister and journalist who cured his sight and his love of the Sea by embarking as a hand before the mast and aiding in working his ship around the Horn to California. His “Two Years before the Mast,” which has since been translated into nearly every language in Europe could not for a long time find a publisher willing to risk its issue.
Denison, Sir Wm. (1804-1871). — Brother of Evelyn Denison, Speaker of the British Parliament, and subsequently Viscount Ossington. After his career in Australasia Denison governed in India, where he opposed the establishment of legislative councils in the Indian “Provinces” and native representation.
Dickens, Charles (1812-1870). — At the period of the “Jail Journal” some of Dickens’ best work — “David Copperfield” and “Bleak House,” for instance — was still undone. Dickens had no liking for the Irish people.
Dillon, John Blake [1816-1866). — With Davis and Duffy one of the three founders of the Nation, to which, however, his literary assistance was not great, his temperament being on the indolent side. He was one of the majority in opposition to Mitchel’s policy in the Confederation in 1848, but he afterwards took part in the outbreak and commanded the insurgents at Killenaule. On his return to Ireland he entered both the Corporation and the British Parliament. His opposition to Fenianism, and his advocacy of an Irish-Radical alliance subjected him to much adverse criticism, but his honesty of character was recognised by all. Mitchel described him as a man who was all wrong on almost every question but nevertheless better than most people who were all right.
Doheny Michael (1805-1861). — Most of the Young Ireland leaders were University men — springing from the landed, mercantile and professional classes. Doheny was one of the exceptions. He was the son of very poor parents, and he was practically self-taught. At the bar, to which, overcoming great obstacles, he was called he won a fairly distinguished place and great popularity amongst the people of the South. In the Confederation in 1848 he opposed Mitchel’s policy, but subsequently took part in the Rising and evaded capture after its failure. In the “Felon’s Track” he gives a vivid picture of 1848 in
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Ireland. In America he practised at the bar and became one of the founders of the Fenian Movement.
Dost Mahommed (1800-1860). — The wisest and bravest of the Ameers of Afghanistan in centuries. He raised his country to so high a pitch that if swift redress did not follow on the infliction of a wrong the people asked: “Is Dost Mahommed dead?” England, apprehensive of the strength to which he was raising Afghanistan and failing by a series of insults to force him to make war upon her made war upon him and drove him into Bokhara whence he unsuccessfully made an attempt to regain his throne by force of arms. He then surrendered, but the exploits of his son Akhbar Khan led to the acquiescence of the English Government in his restoration to the throne.
Douglas, Stephen Arnold (1813-1861). — Senator for Illinois, and advocate of the doctrine that each State should be free to decide for itself whether it would maintain or abolish slaveholding. He defeated Abraham Lincoln in 1858 for the representation of Illinois. After the outbreak of the Civil War, however, he supported the North.
Duff-Gordon, Lady (1821-1869). — In addition to the “Amber Witch” Lady Duff-Gordon published many other felicitous translations and wrote a series of interesting “Letters from Egypt,” where she died.
Duffy, Charles Gavan (1816-1903). — Duffy, who had been the editor of the Belfast Vindicator provided money for the establishment of the Nation, which was his personal property. When, in 1847, his views and Mitchel’s began to diverge, their friendship remained uninterrupted, but in 1848 the estrangement widened and Duffy’s actions that year led to bitter controversy between Mitchel and himself. After the debacle Duffy restarted the Nation, and helped to found a Tenant-Right movement which the “Catholic” movement led by Sadlier and Keogh, destroyed. Duffy then quitted Ireland and entered Australian politics, becoming Prime Minister of Victoria in 1871. Two years later he was knighted.
Dumas, Alexander (1802-1871). — Dumas was not a pure white man. His father. General Dumas, was a full-blooded negro in appearance, the offspring of a white father and a negro Mother. Mitchel’s reference to the novelist as a “creature” is probably from this cause.
Dundas, Admiral (1785-1862). — Sir James Whitley Deans Dundas, who commanded the British Fleet in the Baltic in 1807 and made an exceedingly poor display during the Crimean War. He was, however, then over seventy years of age.
APPENDICES 439
Elliott, Capt. Chas. (1801-1875). — Afterwards Admiral Sir Chas. Elliott. Elliott, carrying out the instructions of his Government, blockaded Canton when the Chinese Government attempted to stop the smuggling of opium by British merchants into China, and exacted a ransom of a million and a quarter from the inhabitants on threat of storming and sacking the city. He was disavowed by his Government, in order to “save its face” and sent to the West Indies as a “punishment” but later he was rewarded with a title and made an admiral.
Fitzwilliam, Lord (1786-1857). — Son of the Earl Fitzwilliam who was Viceroy of Ireland in 1795, and one of the “Free Trade” Leaders.
Frazer, James Baillie (1783-1856). — Author of many books of romance and travel, mostly rubbish.
French, Henry Sneyd. — High Sheriff of Dublin in 1848. Although the Catholics were two to one on the jury list he arranged a panel for Mitchel’s trial, on which five-sixths were Protestants, and the one-sixth Catholics were placed at the end of the panel. Before the trial came on, Wheeler the Chief Clerk and Monahan, brother to the Attorney-General — a Catholic — who had assisted in rigging the panel were sent out of the country. When the jury was called the Crown challenged every Catholic who answered his name — sixteen in all — and twenty-three Protestants who were men of independent character. The jury sworn consisted of Englishmen, Orangemen and Castle tradesmen. They were: — John Whitty (Foreman), tailor, College Green; Wm. Fletcher, saddler, Bolton Street; Robert Thomas, draper, Redmond’s Hill; Frederick Rambaut, wine merchant. Upper Dorset Street; Wm. Mansfield, dressing-case maker, Grafton Street; Halwood Clarke, hosier, Mary Street and Jervis Street; Richard Yoakely, china warehouseman, Grafton Street; Edward Rothwell, boot-seller. Upper Ormond Quay; Jason Sherwood, plumber, etc. . North Earl Street; Thomas Bridgeford, seedsman, Sackville Street: Wm. Horatio Nelson, miniature painter, Grafton Street, and John Collier.
Whitty, the foreman of the jury, was a zealous minor Unionist politician. The Government rewarded him for his services as a juryman by appointing him to the Australasian Bench at £800 per annum. Mansfield was an Englishman who had opened a shop in Grafton Street, Dublin, and was selling out to return to England at the time. Sherwood, Halwell Clarke, and Yoakley were of English origin.
Garibaldi, Guiseppe (1807-1882). — Originally a sailor, his share in the active opposition to the Austrian occupation of
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Italy made him a fugitive to South America, where in Brazil and, later on, Montevideo, he fought against the Dictator Rosas. He returned to Italy in 1848 and took a leading part in the desultory wars which culminated in the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy. In 1870 he fought with the French against the Prussians.
Gavazzi, Alessandro, Father (1809-1885). — A Barnabite, who after the French occupation of Rome toured Great Britain, Ireland and America delivering lectures against the Vatican. His lectures aroused bitter feeling between Catholics and Protestants in many places. He took part later with Garibaldi in his Sicilian expedition.
Gray, Sir John (1815-1875). — Son of John Gray of Claremorris. Practised in Dublin as a doctor and acquired ownership of the Freeman’s Journal, which he conducted on cautious nationalist lines in 1848. He was on the outskirts of the Young Ireland Movement, but never of it. He afterwards sat in the British Parliament for Kilkenny and was an active member of the Dublin Corporation. He worked with success towards the disestablishment of the Irish Church and the introduction of the Vartry Water supply into Dublin. For these services he received a monetary testimonial in his life time and a marble statue after his death.
Grey, Earl (1802-1894). — Henry Grey, third earl, English Colonial Secretary in Russell’s ministry from 1846 to 1852. He was so principled that he refused the under-secretaryship for the Colonies in an administration which would not immediately free the slaves, but he accepted a higher post in its stead.
Grey, Sir George (1792-1882). — English Home Secretary in Russell’s and Palmerston’s administrations, and Colonial Secretary in that of Aberdeen. Under pressure from the Colonies, alarmed by the Cape revolt against felony being shot on its shores, he changed the punishment of transportation abroad into one of penal servitude at home.
Hall, Capt. Wm. (1797-1878). — Nicknamed “Nemesis Hall” from the fact that he commanded the Nemesis steam-war vessel, steam-war vessels then being novel — with remarkable success in the Chinese Opium War and from the other fact of the existence of a second Captain Wm. Hall. He subsequently served in the Crimean War. He was a brave and ingenious sailor and died Admiral Sir William Hall. Captain Basil Hall with whom he was anxious Mitchel should not confound him, has a description in his travels in the country of the Creek Indians of a game which is practically identical with hurling.
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Hudson, Geo. (1800-1871). — The “Railway King,” a Yorkshire draper, M. P. for Sunderland, and Mayor of York. His dealings in railways created a gambling mania in England, which worshipped him for some years as a demi-god — the English aristocracy, with Queen Victoria’s husband at their head, crowding his receptions. Thousands were eventually ruined by his practices, yet although he had been guilty of falsification and fraud, he not only was not prosecuted but remained a British legislator until 1859.
Hugo, Victor (1802-1884). — In the forties of the last century, Hugo strongly advocated a Franco-German Alliance against England and Russia, and Louis Phillippe thought seriously on the subject. These and other political writings of Hugo, Mitchel approved, but Hugo’s novels and poems, reeking with sentimentalism he detested. There is a curious Irish character introduced very effectively by Hugo in the course of his description of the storm at sea in “L’Homme qui Rit.”
Jerrold, Douglas (1803-1857). — Author of “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures,” which caused him to be regarded by his countrymen as a humorist.
Jones, Ernest (1819-1869). — An English lawyer and Chartist leader, imprisoned two years on a charge of sedition. Jones wrote several novels and some verse. He was a sincere man, too idealistic to be appreciated by most of those whose cause he championed. His son is at present a Liberal member of the English Parliament.
Keightley, Thomas (1789-1872). — An Irishman, author of numerous alleged histories of no value whatever. He received a civil list pension in 1867.
Ken YON, Father John [18 — 1869). — Parish Priest of Templederry in Tipperary. He was a man of vigorous intellect and character, equally strong in friendship and dislike. O’Connell he detested, Mitchel he loved. His life was menaced by the Limerick mob in 1847 when he appeared on the hustings in opposition to John O’Connell. He defiantly declared that so long as he lived there would be one citizen of Limerick to stand up and denounce place-hunting. He again faced the Limerick mob a few years later in opposition to the Earl of Arundel, son of the Duke of Norfolk, who was elected for the city.
Kossuth, Louis (1804-1894). — Minister of Finance in the Hungarian Government, restored chiefly through his exertions
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in 1848. When Austria treacherously attacked Hungary in that year, Kossuth took charge of the national defences. When Austria called in the Russians, Kossuth replied by a decree separating Hungary and Austria. After the defeat of his country he fled to Turkey and thence visited France, England, and Russia seeking political aid. When Austria had restored Hungarian independence he (1884) announced his allegiance to the Crown.
Lamartine, Alphonse de (1790-1869). — Lamartine was so ardent a supporter of the Bourbons that he would not stay in France under Napoleon. Under Louis XVIII., Charles X. and Louis Philippe he spent his years between literature and politics. In 1848 he was chosen at the Head of the Republic, and disappointed both his countrymen and the Young Irelanders who had hoped for French assistance. Lamartine was married to an Englishwoman and was all his life responsive to English influence.
Lander, Richard Lemon (1804-1834). — Killed by natives while exploring the Niger in the interests of the Liverpool merchants, and regarded in England as a martyr in the cause of civilisation.
Lansdowne, Lord (1780-1863). — The third marquis. Lord President of the Council in Russell’s English Ministry, 1846-52.
Lefroy, Baron (1776-1869). — Thomas Langlois Lefroy, of Carrickglass, Longford. He sat in the British Parliament as representative for Trinity while Mitchel was a student there. Subsequent to 1848 he was promoted to the Lord Chief Justiceship, which, although he had become senile, he refused to resign, until 1866. Lever introduces him in his novel, “Roland Cashel.”
Leonard, J. P. — An Irish Professor, resident in Paris, who accompanied the deputation from Ireland to Lamartine in 1848 to congratulate the French Republic. Mr. Leonard spent the greater part of his life in France, and acted as Paris correspondent of the Nation during many years.
Louis Philippe (1773-1850). — Son of Philippe Egalite and half-brother of Pamela, wife of Lord Edward Fitzgerald. He was heir to the French throne of Charles X. until the imexpected birth of the Duke of Bordeaux. Through Lafayette’s support, however, he was chosen “Citizen King” after the revolution which expelled Charles. His reign was troubled by English intrigue which had a share in his deposition in 1848.
APPENDICES, 443
Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1800-1859). — Afterwards Lord Macaulay. A brilliant and unscrupulous writer on behalf of the English Whig Party, which bestowed large rewards upon him. He carried the art of suppressio veri and misrepresentation of history to a height which has been never surpassed save by Froude. Except his “Lays of Ancient Rome” and Ballads there is nothing he has written worthy of preservation.
MacManus, Terence Bellew (1823-1860). — MacManus, in a chivalrous band was one of the most chivalrous. He was in business in Liverpool in 1848, earning an income of £1,000 a year, and he threw it up to come over to Ireland and join in the insurrection. His ideas of what constituted warfare were practical and had he had his way the rising might have attained respectable dimensions. After his capture, condemnation to death and subsequent transportation, he escaped to San Francisco, where he died in 1860. The organisers of the Fenian Movement, then in its infancy, arranged a funeral procession across America to Ireland and the “MacManus Funeral” in Dublin gave that movement its first real impetus,
M’Clenahan, John (1816-18 —). — The ablest of the provincial journalists who supported the Young Irelanders. M’Clenahan was editor of the Limerick Reporter, and in June, 1844, urged the arming of the nation as the true method of forcing Repeal of the Union. The article was formally and strongly condemned by O’Connell and the Repeal Association. After the failure of the insurreclion of 1848, M’Clenahan went to the Unted States, and acted as sub-editor of Mitchel’s Citizen.
Marcet, Mrs. (1787-1858). — A Swiss lady whose popular instruction-manuals were highly esteemed in England.
Mangan, James Clarence (1803-1849). — Mangan, the first of the poets of the Young Ireland period, took no active part in Irish politics, but his sympathies were with Mitchel’s policy. He lived and died in poverty, always declining to write for English magazines, “never caring that there was a British public to please.” Mitchel made a collection of his poems and published them in America with an introduction, which is one of the finest of Mitchel’s writings.
Martin, John (1812-1875). — Brother-in-law to Mitchel, whose sister Henritta he married. Martin was the proprietor of a small estate at Loughorne in Down, and with a temperament averse from political life he entered it only as a duty to his country. After his release from prison he returned to Ireland, and in later years took part in the Home Rule movement. He sat for Meath, and declared himself inclined in favour of the Home Rule members not attending the British Parliament, but as
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sembling in Dublin. The death of Mitchel affected him so deeply that he died nine days afterwards.
Martin, Marie. — A French journalist of the first rank, who was chief writer on the Constitutionnel. Martin, at Mitchel’s suggestion and on information supplied by Mitchel, wrote a series of articles in that journal on “Liberty of the Press in Ireland” in which he contrasted the liberty permitted to the anti-imperialistic and Republican press of France under the Empire, with the manner in which the Irish press was gagged and intimidated under the English Government.
Mazzini, Guiseppe (1808-1872). — Founder of the La Giovini Italia Movement. The British Government opened his correspondence which passed through its post office, and communicated it to the King of Naples, who was thus enabled to arrest the Bandiera brothers and put them to death. His followers in later years fell away from him, condemning him as an impracticable idealist.
Meagher, Thomas Francis (1823-:867). — Son of a Waterford merchant who represented the city in the British Parliament as an O’Connellite. His speech in Conciliation Hall declining to “stigmatise the sword,” was used as a pretext by John O’Connell to force the Young Irelanders out of the official Movement. After quitting Conciliation Hall, O’Brien, Mitchel, Meagher, Duffy and others established the Irish Confederation — a body whose object was Repeal of the Union, and which worked on constitutional lines, but upheld the right of Ireland in the last resort to use physical force. Meagher was one of the majority who opposed Mitchel’s policy in the Confederation in 1848. He afterwards took part in the attempted insurrection, was captured and sentenced to death. The sentence was subsequently altered to transportation. He escaped from Tasmania to the United States where he engaged in journalism and law. In the Civil War he served on the Northern side and attained the rank of Brigadier-General of the Irish Brigade. In 1867, when Acting-Governor of Montana, he was, as it was then supposed, accidentally drowned. As this book is going through the press the American papers report that a man named Miller has confessed on his death-bed that he murdered Meagher.
Montague, John (1797-1853). — Montague had served in Van Dieman’s Land under Sir John Franklin who suspended him from office.
O’Brien, Sir Timothy (1787-1862). — Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1849, when on the occasion of his presenting an address of welcome to Queen Victoria he was created a baronet. He was a wealthy publican carrying on business in Patrick Street, Dublin.
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O’Brien, Wm. Smith (1803-1864). — Noble and fearless in character. Smith O’Brien was the most unfitted man in Ireland to lead an insurrection. Originally a Conservative in politics, his appreciation, after years of experience in the British Parliament, of the hopelessness of securing any measure of Justice for Ireland from it, converted him to Repeal, and the Famine policy of the Government in 1848 drove him into insurrection. He was condemned to death and subsequently transported. After his release he visited Poland and America, where he was received with great distinction. He died in 1864. His father, Sir Lucius O’Brien, when member of the Irish Parliament, advocated the building of an Irish Navy. Had his advice been followed there would have been no Act of Union to deplore.
O’Connell, John (1810-1858), — The third son and chief political assistant of Daniel O’Connell. He was a man of small ability and mean mind. After the final collapse of the Repeal Association he received a post from the British Government.
O’Doherty, Kevin Izod (1823-1895). — The son of a Dublin solicitor. He was instrumental in founding the Irish Tribune to preach Mitchel’s policy after the conviction of Mitchel. Indicted for treason-felony he was convicted and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. After his release he settled in Australia where he acquired fortune as a physician and fame as a politician. In 1885 he left Australia to re-enter Irish politics, and sat for a couple of years as a Parnellite member of the English Parliament. He returned to Australia in 1888, and failing to regain his former practise as a physician, died in comparative poverty. His wife, “Eva” of the Nation lived until 1908.
O’Donoghue, Patrick (18 — 1854). — O’Donoghue was one of the minor members of the Confederation, He left Dublin, where he was employed as a law clerk, and joined O’Brien in Tipperary on the eve of the insurrection. After its failure he was arrested and sentenced to death and eventually transported. He died rather suddenly in New York.
O’ Gorman, Richard (1826 -1900). — Son of a leading Dublin merchant, Richard O’Gorman, of the Woollen Hall, Merchant’s Quay. O’Gorman took an active and exciting part in the Rising, and afterwards escaped to France, whence he proceeded to Constantinople, and thence, later, to New York, where he became a Judge of the Superior Court.
O’Leary, John (1830-1907). — Son of a prosperous Tipperary shopkeeper. He was educated in Carlow and Trinity College, and designed for the law, but he declined the Bar wheu he
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discovered it was necessary to take an Oath of Allegiance. In 1848 he took part in some skirmishes in Tipperary, and was arrested and imprisoned for a short period. Later, he became prominently identified with the Fenian movement, although he was never a sworn member of the Fenian organisation. He acted as the editor of the Fenian organ the Irish People during its existence. After its suppression in 1865 he was sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude — nine of which he spent in English prisons. The remainder of his sentence was commuted to banishm. ent. In 1885 he returned to Ireland, ancj raised considerable hostility by his frank condemnation of the methods of the National League and the Parliamentary Party, but he exerted a large influence on the younger literary men and turned the sjmpathies of many of them nationwards.
O’Mahony, John (1816-1877). — A gentleman farmer, of Kilbeheny, Limerick, his lands forming part of the former possessions of the O’Mahonys, confiscated to the Kingstons. O’Mahony was educated at Cork and at Trinity College, and was a good Greek, Latin, and Irish scholar. He was a member of the Repeal Association, which he left with the Young Irelanders. In 1848 he joined Smith O’Brien in Tipperary, and after the dispersal of O’Brien’s followers at Ballingarry, O’Mahony attempted to rekindle a second insurrection. On its failure he fled to France, whence later he proceeded to America, where, in conjuntion with Doheny and Stephens, he founded the Fenian Brotherhood. He died in poverty in New York in February, 1877. His translation of Keating’s “History of Ireland” was declared by Dr. Henthorn Todd to be the best one published.
Oudinot, Charles Nicholas (1791-1863). — Second Duke of Reggio. Son of the first Duke, one of Napoleon’s marshals. Oudinot was in command of the French army sent to Rome in 1849 to restore Pope Pius IX.
Pinnock, Wm. (1782-1842). — A voluminous compiler of handbooks of “popular instruction.” His son, W. H. Pinnock, followed in his father’s footsteps.
PoMARE, Queen (1822-1877). — Aimata, Queen of Tahiti. This hapless monarch was used as a catspaw by the English against the French, who retorted by annexing her dominions.
Porter, William (1805-1880). — Born at Newtown, Limavady, and called to the Irish Bar in 1831. He emigrated to the Cape where he became Attorney-General. He declined the Chief Justiceship, the Premiership and a Knighthood. On his retirement the Cape Legislature, to mark the esteem in which it held
APPENDICES 447
him, voted him a pension the equivalent of his full salary. He transferred one-half to the Cape University of which he was the first chancellor. He returned to Ireland and died in Belfast. His nephew. Sir Andrew Porter, was Master of the Rolls in Ireland until a few years ago.
Reilly, Thomas Devin (1823-1854). — The son of a Monaghan solicitor. Reilly was a student at Trinity College at the time of the foundation of the Nation and became an enthusiastic follower of Davis. In the Confederation in 1848 he was one of the few prominent Young Irelanders in the minority with Mitchel. He escaped from Ireland after the outbreak, and devoted himself to the object of embroiling England and America in war. His last act when he was told he was dying was to drink to the “Freedom of Ireland.”
Reynolds, Admiral Barrington (1786-1861). — In command of the naval forces at the Cape and on the West Coast of Africa from 1848 to 1852.
Roberts, Col. W. E. — In 1865 the Fenian organisation in America changed its constitution, depriving John O’Mahony of much of his power as Head-Centre, and creating a body named the “Senate,” of which Roberts, a merchant, was named President. This practically caused the splitting-up of the organisation, Roberts becoming leader of one section which attempted an invasion of Canada. He died but two or three yeais since.
Robinson, William Erigena (1814-1890). — A Tyrone man who emigrated to America in 1836. He sat in the United States Congress as a Democrat. To him is due the forced abandonment of the claim of England “Once a British subject always a British subject.”
Roche, Edmund Burke (1815-1874). — Repeal Member of the British Parliament for Cork County. Later, he became a useful Government supporter and was created Baron Fermoy.
Rollin, Ledru, Alexandre (1808-1874). — Minister of the Interior in the Republican Government of France in 1848. His views were Extreme Left, and he wielded enormous influence amongst the artisans, prior to the revolution. Louis Napoleon, however, superseded him in popular affection, and after a futile attempt at insurrection, Ledru Rollin fled from France. He returned in 1870, and was a member of the Chamber of Deputies at the time of his death. He was present at the Tara meeting in 1843, and advised O’Connell against such gatherings, his argument being that great hostings of unarmed men in an enslaved country tended not to rouse a spirit of independence
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in the people, but to accentuate distrust in their own power to resist armed tyranny.
Runjeet Singh (1780-1839). — Maharajah of the Punjab. His army, taught by French officers, was so formidable that it secured his dominions from all interference by the British who admitted that “Law and order” reigned therein. After his death divisions were fomented in the Punjab, which was thereafter invaded by the British and annexed.
Russell, Lord John (1792-1878). — Son of the Duke of Bedford. Premier of England 1846-51, and again on the death of Palmerston 1865. He was the Minister chiefly responsible for the “Famine Policy” in Ireland. His father purchased him property in the County Meath, including most of Tara Hill, and erected for him a mansion on the Boyne, an architectural horror.
Savage, John (1828-1888). — Son* of a prosperous Dublin shopkeeper. After the suppression of Mitchel’s United Irishman, Savage helped to found the Irish Tribune. He took part in the insurrection and afterwards escaped to America. In the Civil War he fought on the Federal side, and later, took a leading part in the Fenian movement. In 1875 the Degree of LL. D. was conferred on him by the Fordham College for his literary eminence. “Shane’s Head” is the best known of his poems.
Shah Soojah (1781-1842). — The ostensible reason for the invasion of Afghanistan in 1838 by the British was to “restore” Shah Soojah to the throne. When they evacuated Cabul they left the unfortunate puppet behind to his fate.
Smyth, P. J. (1826-1885). — One of the youngest members of the Irish Confederation, the son of a wealthy tanner in Dublin. He was educated with Thomas Francis Meagher at Clongowes, and participated in the insurrection. After the failure he escaped in disguise to America where he planned the escape of the Young Ireland leaders from Van Diemen’s Land. He returned to Ireland in 1856 and took a prominent part in politics, but he did not identify himself with the Fenian movement. During the Franco-Prussian war he organised an Irish Ambulance to aid France — a service which the French Government acknowledged by creating him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1871 he was elected M. P. for Westmeath, and advocated Repeal in the British Parliament. In 1880 he was elected for Tipperary. He bitterly opposed the methods of the Land League and his last years were clouded by controversy and poverty. After
After the Eviction
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his retirement from Parliament he was appointed Secretary of the Irish Loan Reproductive Fund, and his acceptance of this quasi-government office exposed him to severe criticism. A few weeks after his appointment he died, January, 1885.
Smith, Sir Harry (1788-1860). — Served England in South America and Europe during the Napoleonic wars. Afterwards on the battlefields of India and Africa. His harrying of the Boers, and his defeat of them at Boomplatz, where they offered resistance, led to many crossing the Vaal River and founding a new State in the wilderness — the “Transvaal” — afterwards destined to avenge Boomplatz and win a world-wide fame. Harrismith in Natal is named after him, and Ladysmith after his wife.
Stephens, James (1825-1901). — Stephens was a railway engineer at the time of the outbreak in 1848, during which he acted as Smith O’Brien’s aide-de-camp. He received a bullet-wound at Ballingarry, and was supposed to have been killed — obituary notices being published of him in the Kilkenny papers. He permitted the belief of his death to prevail as a cloak for a daring scheme to capture the British Prime Minister, and hold him as a hostage. The scheme miscarried, and Stephens reached France in disguise, where, with O’Mahony, he formed the design of the Fenian movement, and returning to Ireland travelled all through it survejling the ground for the conspiracy. Dissensions arose in the Fenian movement after the end of the American Civil War, which Stephens calmed by promising insurrection in 1865 — at the time he was counting on England being embroiled in war over the Danish question. England, however, declined to go to war on behalf of Denmark, which had been led to believe she would do so, and Stephens postponed, the insurrection. His authority after this, dwindled; and the Government struck a decisive blow at Fenianism by the arrest of its leaders in 1865. Stephens escaped, but his failure to redeem his promise to unfurl the banner of armed revolt in Ireland in 1866 caused his deposition and his formal denunciation as a traitor — which he certainly was not. He realised the impossibility of a successful insurrection in Ireland whilst England was not engaged in a war with one of the Great Powers, but he had built so far on such a war that he made extravagant promises which his followers believed, and which, when he was unable to redeem them, caused a large section to think he had deliberately played them false. After his fall Stephens removed to Paris where he lived in penury for many years. A few years before his death he returned to Ireland, and died at Blackrock, Co. Dublin.
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Urquhart, David (1805-1877). — A Scotsman, for some time in the English diplomatic service and afterwards a member of the English Parliament, in which capacity his impatience of party restraint and his views on foreign policy considerably embarrassed English Governments. He possessed the confidence of the Turks, and was removed from Constantinople by the British Ambassador as a menace to the peace of Europe. In conjunction with Anstey he attempted unsuccessfully to have Lord Palmerston impeached. He married an Irish lady and frequently visited this country. To him is due the institution of the Turkish Bath in Ireland.
Verner, Col. — Sir Wm. Verner, member for Armagh County in the British Parliament, 1846-1852.
Walsh, Edward (1805-1850). — The most Gaelic ot the poets of the Nation. He translated many of the Jacobite and popular Irish songs into English. No complete collection of his poems has ever been made. His “Irish War Song” was superbly rendered at the Feis Ceoil in 1899 with full choir and organ.
Whately, Archbishop (1787-1863). — An Englishman, appointed Archbishop of Dublin in 1841. He was chiefly responsible for the National Education system, and he strongly opposed outdoor relief for the famine victims in 1847.
Whiteside, James (1804-1876). — The last of the great orators at the Irish Bar. He defended the State prisoners in 1848. On the enforced resignation of Lefroy he was made Lord Chief Justice. His political views were described as “National Orangeism.”
Williams, Richard D’Alton (1822-1862). — “Shamrock” of the Nation, a true poet and a true humorist. In his case the Government failed to pack the jury properly and he was acquitted. He afterwards settled in Mobile, U. S. A., where he was professor of Belles Lettres in the Jesuit University. Mitchel had a high opinion of him both as a man and a poet.
Wilson, John — “Christopher North” — (1785-1854). — A great literary genius, largely misspent in the service of Party. His writings made Blackwood’s Magazine famous. For them — and in particular for the “Noctes” — Mitchel had a profound admiration.
Wingrove, Henry Edward (1798-18 —). — Entered the British Navy in 1812, and became commander in 1846. In 1847 he was appointed to the Scourge, sloop-of-war, “420 horsepower “: — then one of the first steam vessels in that navy.
Mitchel’s Escape
The following letter was written to Mr. “Miller” by Mitchel from Hobart Town: —
My Dear Baker,
As I have still, unluckily, some leisure to spend in Van Diemen’s Land, I sit down to give you an account of myself since I parted from you at Spring Lawn. No doubt you will be interested to hear of the after-fortunes of your protege and brother. The Burkes brought me successfully to Launceston, where we arrived between six and seven o’clock. I was very tired, and counted upon going at once on board the Clarence and sleeping in my berth. . However, when our friends came up to Mr. Butler’s, they told me that Saunders strongly dissuaded me from going on board at Launceston, and from subjecting myself to official eyes at Georgetown. So he advised that I should go down the river that same night (Tuesday) in a boat, and board him near the lighthouse, after he had passed the clearing officer. The night was wild, wet, and stormy; nevertheless the indefatigable Edward Dease procured a boat and we went down about eleven o’clock, and embarked, Dease, Connellan, and myself with three boatmen. Winds against, but tide with us. Before dawn, arrived at Barrett’s, knocked him up, breakfasted, put his boat in requisition, and he, very kindly, offered to come down to Georgetown with us. About three o’clock we arrived opposite Georgetown. Barrett put me ashore on the west bank along with Connellan, in order that he might go over to Georgetown and show himself, and assign various causes of his expedition “to take the down off.” Saunders’ arrangement had been to make it dusk before getting down to Lagoon Bay, and as the process of clearance always occupies an hour-and-a-half in Bryan’s Bay our plan was that as soon as the Clarence should be boarded by the police-boat, Barrett should come across again from Georgetown, take me up at Kelso (to which I was to walk), and then pull down to the Heads so as to be in the steamer’s track. Now, sir, this project seemed to us all a very good plot indeed; but the devil himself, with infernal ingenuity contributed to spoil it. For the devil had put it into the head of his friend the clearing-officer, to go up to Launceston himself the day before, and he was actually coming down to Georgetown
452 JAIL JOURNAL
on board the Clarence; and to save time . he carried on his inspection all the time, still prompted by the devil, and so when the police-boat came off, he had nothing to do but drop into her, and the steamer held on her way without an instant’s stoppage. Thus it happened that by the time Barrett’s boat had come over to Kelso for me, and I had got into her, the steamer was down just inside the Lighthouse point. Then she lay to a short time, perhaps a quarter of an hour; but our boat not appearing she put on the steam again and was out of the Heads and away. Dan Burke was on board the Clarence, and he says the captain kept a sharp lookout for us with a glass and that he saw Barrett’s boat going over to Kelso, but of course he could not understand that movement, and when he did not see her coming out from Kelso again immediately he concluded that something had gone wrong and that he would not be justified in remaining any longer. Yet one other half hour would have brought us within hail of him, and it was not yet dusk. In fact all our boat’s motions were clearly visible from Georgetown, so that I really think he was bound to lie-to till dusk, remembering that we could not have anticipated the unusual circumstance of the steamer passing Georgetown without a moment’s delay for clearing. I am unwilling to blame Captain Saunders, and Dan Burke (who came on shore with the pilot) says that Captain Saunders, in his opinion, did what he had engaged to do, and was most anxious to get me on board. So I blame nobody except, as aforesaid, the devil.
Well, sir, we all came up that night to Barrett’s. I then determined to push on to Launceston the same night, to go straight to Hobart Town by the next night’s mail. About twelve o’clock at midnight, therefore, we took to our first boat again, bade adieu to Mr. Barrett, and set sail. It was Wednesday last, and, if you remember, it blew a gale. Our boat was one of the watermen’s little boats and a mere eggshell. We were twice run aground on sandbanks, and the boat nearly filled; at last, in a severe squall, we were obliged (to avoid swamping) to run the boat ashore, haul her up, and sit down to spend the night. It rained horribly — we had all been, hours before, wet to the bones; we could hardly make a fire, but at length accomplished it and stayed there five hours, all sulky, wet, sleepy, savage. Daylight came at last. The devil himself cannot keep the sun from rising; and in short we got to Launceston, but not as we had counted upon, in the dark. It was eleven o’clock, forenoon, &c. Dan Burke and I walked through the streets coolly and quietly, to Father Butler’s. That night there was no inside place to be had in the mail, so I had to stay till Friday night, and then, rigged in a clerical coat with standing collar, narrow white piuslin band round my neck and
APPENDICES 453
broad hat, I took my seat in the coach. I wish you had seen how the reverend men, Fathers Butler and Maguire, laughed as they dressed me and how truly venerable I looked. Connellan came with me, but here again the devil wanted to play the devil with me, for he put into the coach, as a fellow-passenger, Mr. Edward MacDowell, a lawyer, a man who had seen me once and talked with me, and who is said to be one of the sharpest fellows in Demon’s Land. My cue, therefore, was silence and reserve. He introduced the subject of religion, asked me questions about my bishop, quoted Latin; but I was sly, shy, quite Jesuitical, and I have no doubt he was entirely disgusted with my manners. But he did not, I am certain, suspect who I was. To shorten my long story I am here all safe and secret, living in a house two miles down the Sandy Bay Road, and can see, as I write, the brig Emma, that is to carry me off next Saturday. What is especially amusing, my wife and children are coming down this week to sail by the same Emma, so we shall land in Sydney together, and together sail for San Francisco or Panama. No difficulty is anticipated in getting me on board here, if the enemy only continue to be mystified for six days longer. However, I will keep this letter to the last moment and let it not be posted to you until the day after I have sailed. I have been thus minute in my history because I do really believe that you and your kind wife take an interest in my fortunes. Sometimes I have regretted that I did not stay, when I was at Spring Lawn, as William Baker I might, by this time, have been on board the Wave. As it is, I have undoubtedly run far greater risks, and my risks are not yet over. Still all looks well at present, and I am not given to despondency. I have been for three days the Rev. Mr. Blake — two days before that I was the Rev. Mr. MacNamara (whose name you may see in the papers as one of the passengers by the Clarence) and now, since last night, I am Mr. Wright, supercargo of a ship shortly to sail. I don’t know what my alias will be next week. But under whatever name I may skulk out of these colonies, be assured that I shall always remember with delight and gratitude the pleasant days I spent with you, and the true kindness of Mrs. Baker and all your family. Conveying most respectful regards to Mrs. Baker and the young ladies.
Believe me,
My dear Baker, Your warm and grateful friend,
JOHN MITCHEL.
Alias Johnston, alias Baker, alias MacNamara, alias Blake, alias Wright.
INDEX HOMINUM
Adam, 67.
Aeschylus, 107, 134.
Ainsworth, Harrison, 71, 433
Akbar Khan, 103, 438.
Albert, Prince, 203, 433, 441.
Alexander, Captain, 106, 433.
Allison, Mr. 265. Antisell, Dr., 367, 433.
Anderson, Adam, xxxi.
Anne, Queen, xxix.
Archimedes, 30.
Aristophanes, 88.
Aristotle, 20, 30.
Atkins of Waterpark, Captain (Inspector], II, 12.
Avezzana, General, 356.
Bacon, Lord, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31. Baker, Mr. ( “Mr. Miller”), 325, 326,
327, 328, 329, 451, 453Balfe, John Donnellan, 264, 265, 433,
434Balue, Cardinal, 47.
Bance, Captain, 217.
Bandiera, Brothers, 356.
Bapst, Father, 384.
Barry, Michael Joseph, 207, 428, 434.
Barrett, Mr. 330, 331, 332, 333, 451, 452.
Barrot, Camille Hyacinthe, Odilon,
148. Baudin, Admiral, 23, 434.
Bayers, the, 417.
Beck, Adrian, 211.
Beech, Mrs. 259.
Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, xi.
Beccaria, Cesare, 72, 124.
Belzoni, Giovanni, 61.
Bern, General, 201, 205.
Bentham, Jeremy, 25.
Berkeley, Bishop, xxxii, 33.
Bemardi, Major, 46.
Birch, James, xlii, xliii, 429, 436.
Blake, Bishop, 129. Blanc, Louis, 356, 434.
Blanqui, Louis Auguste, xliii.
Bonnefin, M.,-341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347
Bonnivard, Francois, 47.
Bourdeaux, Henri Duc de (Comte deChambord), 19, 435.
Bramets, the, 417.
Brenan, Joseph, 208, 405, 435.
Brock, Dr. 260, 270.
Brougham, Lord, 30.
Brown, Captain, 337, 339.
Brown, Dr. Thomas, 121.
Bruce, James, 61.
Bryant, Wm. Cullen, 401.
Burke, Edmund, xxix.
Burkes, the, 316, 320, 326, 328, 329, 332, 333, 341, 452.
Burnes, Sir Alexander, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106.
Butler, Father, 333, 334, 451, 452, 453
Butt, Isaac, 74, 435.
Buxton, Sir Fowell, 159, 160, 161, 435
Byrne, Col. Miles, 406, 416.
Byrne, Mrs. Miles, 416.
Byron, Lord, 205.
Cabet, Etienne, xliii.
Carlyle, Thomas, 86, 119, 121, 204, 435
Carleton, Wm., 129.
Cavaignac, General, 117, 356.
Chambers, Robert, 168, 436.
Changamier, General, 210, 436.
Charlemagne, 82.
Clarendon, Earl of, xli, xlii, xliii, xliv, xlv, 3, 9, 13, 54, 58, 59, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 92, 115, 116, 129, 144, 202, 217, 243, 436.
Clarke, Rev. Mr., 237.
Clive, Lord, 21, 22.
Clonard, General Sutton de, 407.
Cobbett, William, xxxiv, xliii, 82, 378.
Cochrane, Admiral (Lord Dundonald),
34, 35, 38, 45, 54, 96, 97, 136, 436.
Columbus, 30.
Connellan, Corry, xlii.
Connells, the, 271, 272, 305, 307.
Cooper (a shepherd), 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 277.
Connellan, Mr. 329, 330, 331, 332, 334, 335, 336, 337, 341, 455, 456
INDEX HOMlNUM
Cony, Mr., 296, 297.
Cowper, Wm., 97.
Cowley, Lord, 412.
Cox, Sir Richard, xxxii.
Crampton, Philip, 97.
Crichton, Captain, 64.
Crittenden, Colonel, 339, 431.
Cromwell, Oliver, xxvii.
D’Abrantes, Duchesse, 47.
D’Aguila, Don Juan, 220.
Daedalus, . 30.
Dalzell, General Thomas, 64.
Dana, Richard, 19, 437.
Darcy, Mr., of Clifden, xxxix.
David, King, 89.
Davis, Captain, 349.
Davis, Chief Constable, 257.
Davis, Police-Magistrate, 304, 305,
308, 309, 310, 311, 317, 336.
Davis, Thomas, 431, 447.
Dease, Edward, 328, 329, 331, 332, 451
Dees, Dr., 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 150, 152, 155, 176, 178, 180, 181, 189.
Delatude, 47.
Dempsey, Father, 407.
Denison, Sir William, 225, 260, 261, 264, 265, 282, 284, 285, 316, 325, 437
Demey the Guard, 55.
De Vos, Petrus Jacobus, 183.
Devon, Lord, xxxvii, xxxviii,
Diaz, Bartolomeo, 133.
Dickens, Charles, 71, 289, 437.
Dillon, General, 407.
Dillon, John Blake, 7, 37, 78, 242,
350, 370, 397. 405, 437
Doheny, Michael, 73, 78, 350, 367, 405. 437. 446
Doherty, Mr., 417.
Dost Mahommed, 438.
Douglas, Senator, 293, 438.
Dowsley, Mr., 156, 160, i6i.
Duff-Gordon, Lady, 19, 438.
Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 37, 58, 73, 128, 129, 130, 144, 145, 146, 201, 202, 207, 219, 297, 428, 429, 438.
Dumas, Alexandre (père), 71, 438.
Dundas, Admiral, 137, 138, 438
Ebden, Mr., 194. Egan, Tom, 274, 275.
Elizabeth, Queen, xxvii.
Ellis, Captain, 268, 269.
Elliott, Captain, 35, 43, 45, 60, 95, 109, 110, III, 115, 125, 142, 143, 439.
Elwood, Thomas, 64.
Emmet, Thomas Addis (jun.), 401-.
Emmet, Thomas Addis, 403.
Emmet Robert (jun), 403, 404.
Enmet, Robert, 431.
Eugenie, Empress, 345.
“Eva” (Mrs. Kevin Izod O’Doherty).
254Evelyn, John, 64. Ezekiel, 357.
Fairbairn, J. J., 192, 194, 197, 198, 199, 215
Falstaff, Sir John, 10, 11.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 135. Fitzwilliam, Earl, 59, 439. Foley, Mr., 320.
Folgar, the Know-Nothing, 381.
Francis, Joseph, Emperor, 148, 206.
Frazer, J. B., 61, 439.
Frederick, William IV. (of Prussia), 132. F
rederick the Great, 125.
Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 221.
French, Henry Sneyd, 48, 203, 243, 439.
Fulham Bernard, 207, 208.
Galen, 97.
Galileo, 30.
Garibaldi, General, 288, 356, 396, 439.
Garrett (a convict), 165, 166, 167,
Gavazzi, Father, 380, 396, 440.
Gellius, Aulis, 62.
George L, xxix.
George II., xxix.
George III., xxix, 81.
George IV., xxix, xxxvi.
Gholab Singh, 206.
Gibbon, Edward, 64, 121, 231.
Gibson, Dr., 214, 224, 225, 226.
Gifford, William, 64.
Gluckman the daguerreotypist, 55.
Goethe, Wolfgang, 113, 114.
Gorgey, General, 201.
Gough, Lord, 131.
Grace, Mr., 9, 10, 12, 13, 14.
Grattan, Henry, 393.
Gray, Sir John, 75, 440.
Gray, Bishop, 189, 190.
Gray (a forger), 265.
Greeley, Horace, 401.
Grey, Earl, 139, 175, 181, 182, 183, 188, 192, 195, 200, 204, 210, 216, 217, 218, 220, 226, 351, 440.
Grey, Sir George, xlii, 36, 115, 157, 440.
Gunn, Police-Magistrate, 256, 257, 259.
Hallam, Henry, ii.
Hall, Captain Basil, 3.
Hall, Dr., 43, 44, 45, 46, 108, 109, 110, 115, 118, 125, 126, 130, 131, 167,
Hall, Captain, ( “Nemesis,”) 2, 3, 441.
Hampton, Comptroller General, 226, 236, 240, 241.
Harrison, Dr. Gessner, 391, 392, 393
Haughton, James, 386.
Hawarden, Lord, 321.
Heber, Bishop, 104.
Henderson, Captain, 148, 149, 158, 185, 186, 188, 214, 224, 430.
Henn, Sergeant, 115.
Hipparchus, 20.
Hire, Superintendent, 39, 54, 95, 118, 125
Hogan, Pere, 417.
Holmes, Robert, xlvi.
Holly, Mr., 296.
Homer, 64.
Horace, 134.
Howard, John, 72, 124.
Howells, John, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316.
Hudson, George, 167, 441.
Hugo, Victor, 356, 409, 441.
Hughes, Archbishop, 395, 396.
Hollins, Captain Geo., 352 (note).
Humboldt, Baron von, 154, 155.
Jacob, 107.
James I. (of England), 46.
James I. (of Scotland), 47.
James H. (of England), xxviii.
Jefferson, Thomas, xii. 288,
Jehoiachim, King, 47.
Jeremiah, 87.
Jerome, St., 63.
Jerrold, Douglas, 71, 72, 441.
Job, 67.
Johnson, President, 410.
Jones, Ernest, 57, 58, 441.
Judge, Rev. Mr., 214.
Keightley, Thomas, 119, 441.
Kemmis, William (Crown Solicitor), 57
Kenyon, Father, 56, 411, 414, 415,
441. Keogh, Judge, xlv, 438.
Kepler, 30.
Kermode, Mr., 266, 275.
Kossuth, Louis, xv, 148, 205, 279, 280, 288, 289, 296, 355, 356, 441.
Kingsland, Mayor, 401.
Lake, General, xxxiii.
Lalor, James Fintan, 435.
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 78, 79.
Lambert, Mayor, 369, 370.
Lander, Richard, 107.
Lansdowne, Marquis of, 138.
La Perouse, Comte de, 225.
Laubscher, Wentzel, 211.
Ledru-Rollin, M., xliii, 35, 356,
447. Lefroy, Baron, i, 10, 48, 450.
Leonard, J. P., 406, 407, 416, 417.
Lilly, Mr., 322.
Livy, 44.
Lockhart, M. P., Mr., 137.
Lopez, Narcisso, 354, 359, 430, 431.
Louis XL, 47. Louis XIV., 206.
Louis-Philippe, 79, 81, 157, 434,
441. Lucas, Charles, xxix.
Lucas, Frederick, 430.
Lyell, Sir Charles, 206.
Lynch, Very Rev. Dr., 414, 415.
Macaulay, Lord, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27. 28, 30, 31, 128.
MacDowell, Mr., 334, 335, 453.
MacMahon, Marshal, 406, 407, 408.
MacManus, Terence Bellew, 72, 74, 118, 155, 177, 216, 236, 246, 256, 260, 269 (note), 270, 273, 349, 350,
391, 428. MacNamaras, the, 305, 318. 324, 339, 340, 341. 342.
Magee, John, 141.
Maginn, Dr. 433.
Maguire, Father, 452.
Mangan, James Clarence, 248.
Maning, Mr., 347.
Man in the Iron Mask, the, 49.
Marcet, Mrs., 20.
Marie-Martin, M., 417.
Martin, Captain, 341.
Martin, John, xl, 7, 8, 36, 37, 56, 58, 68, 69, 70, 71, 155, 156, 177, 191, 203, 216, 223, 226, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 238, 241, 242, 244, 245, 249, 252, 259, 260, 277, 278, 279, 290, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 303, 304, 305, 336, 340, 341 » 389, 390, 400, 401, 414. 415
Martin, Mrs. John (Miss Henrietta Mitchel), 412.
Mason and Slidell, 410.
Mathew, Father, 129.
Mazzini. Guiseppe, 147, 288, 356, 396.
M’Clenahan, John, 376, 405.
458
INDEX HOMINUM
Meagher, Thomas Francis, xli, xliii, xlv, xlvi, 7, 58, 72, 74, 118, 155, 156, 177, 216, 223, 226, 229, 231, 234. 235, 237, 246, 260, 270, 273, 274. 275, 280, 303, 314, 350, 363, 367, 375, 376, 391, 405, 448
Meagher, Mrs. Thomas Francis, 274.
Meer Roostum Khan, 100.
Memes, Dr., 97.
Milton, John, 20, 210.
Miller, Alexander, 196.
Mitchel, Henrietta (jun.), 408, 409, 417.
— Isabella, 408,
— James, 309, 408.
— John (jun.), 309, 408.
— Rev. John, 3, 134.
— William, 54, 77, 161, 363, 412.
— William (jun.), 408.
— Mrs., I, 4, 57, 125, 250, 255, 259, 260, 262, 263, 266, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277, 278, 319, 333, 337, 339, 34°, 34i, 362.
— Mrs. (sen.), 4, 363.
M’Kenzies, the, 238, 239.
Mohammed, 114, 357.
Moilot, Cardinal, 409.
Molyneux, William, xxix.
Montague, John, Earl of Sandwich, 20.
Monahan, Chief Justice, xli.
Montague, John, 198.
Moore, Thomas, 34, 289.
Morkel, H. J., 212.
Moses, xii, 72.
Mountjoy. Lord, xxvii.
MuUer, Wolfgarg, 248.
Musgrave, Judge, 216.
Napier, Admiral, 378.
Napier, Sir Charles, 99.
Napoleon III., 117, 148, 157, 279, 290, 296, 412, 413, 434, 435, 436, 447
Newport, Sir John, xxxiv.
Newton, Sir Isaac, 20.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv.
Nicholas, Czar, 148, 355, 358, 371, 399.
Nolan, Mrs., 170, 173.
Norden, Benjamin, 196, 198, 199.
Norfolk, Duke of, 441.
“North Christopher” (Professor Wilson), 111, 410.
Northumberland, Earl of, 46.
Oberea, Queen, 347.
O’Brien, Sir Lurius (grandfather of Smith O’Brien), 429.
O’Brien, Sir Lucius (brother of Smith O’Brien), 144.
— Sir Timothy, 203.
— William Smith, xliii, xlv, 37, 58, 72, 74, 118, 129, 146, 155, 156, 177, 216, 223, 225, 226, 236, 240, 241, 245, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 281, 300, 301, 302, 337, 340, 371, 388, 389, 390, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 429, 431, 434, 445, 446
O’Connor, Mr. Charles, 401.
O’Connell, Daniel, xxxv, xxxvii, xl, 5, 88, 140, 141, 217 (note), 292, 393, 441, 447
— John, 76, 88, 219, 441.
O’Doherty, Mrs., Kevin Izod, 254.
O’Doherty, Kevin Izod, 58, 73, 115, 116, 155, 177, 191, 203, 216, 226, 229, 231, 234, 235, 238, 244, 249, 251, 253, 254, 259, 281, 300, 301, 335, 389, 390, 445.
O’Donnell, Red Hugh, 299. O’Donoghue, Patrick, 72, 74, 118, 155, 177, 216, 227, 445.
O’Gorman, Richard (jun.), 7, 37, 73, 78, 242, 356, 405, 445.
O’Higgins, General Bernardo, 34.
O’Keeffe, Mr., 318, 320, 321, 322, 323, 325, 326.
O’Leary, John, 413, 445.
O’Leary, E., 413.
O’Mahony, Sean, 410, 445, 446, 447, 449.
Omar Pasha, 387,
O’Mara, Mr., 320, 323.
O’Neill, Sean, xiii.
Orr, “Angel Gabriel,” 381.
Oudinot, Marshal, 210, 446. Ovid, 15, 44.
Page, Colonel, 408.
Pages, Governor, 345.
Palmerston, Lord, 3diii, 201, 288, 388, 389, 390, 391, 400, 401. 450.
Parnell, Charles Stewart, x, xiii.
Paul, St., xii.
Pedro, Dom, II., 158, 161.
Peel, Sir Robert, xxxv.
Pellico Silvio, xvi, 47.
Pichler, Madame, 97.
Pietri, M., 412, 413.
Pinnock, William, 20, 446.
Plato, 25, 26, 27, 97, 107.
Pliny, 49, 141.
Pindar, 352 (note).
Pomare, Queen, 8, 345, 348, 446.
Ponsonby, Spencer, xliii.
INDEX HOMINUM 459
Pooler, Mr., 256, 257, 258.
Porter, William, 190, 192, 193, 215,216, 446.
Prior, Thomas, xxxii.
Pythagoras, 20, 26.
Rabelais, Francois, 97, 202.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 47.
Reids, the, 242, 244, 282, 283, 284, 285, 307
Reilly, Thomas Devin, 7, 8, 36, 37, 73, 78, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 303, 350, 405, 447
Reilly, Mrs. T. Devin, 292.
Reynolds, Admiral, 178, 447.
Richter, Jean Paul, 24, 170.
Roberts, W. E., 411, 447.
Robertson, Rev. Mr., 243.
Robinson, M. P., Mr. G. R., 137.
— W. E., 294, 447.
Roche, Edmund Burke (Lord Fermoy) 36, 447
Roden, Earl of, 208, 219.
Romilly, Sir Samuel, 124.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 64.
Runjeet Singh, 98,101, 102, 448.
Russell, Dr., 61.
— Lord John, xlv, 58, 60, 92, 166, 217, 448, 449Mr., 232, 309, 310, 315.
Sadlier, John, 438.
Salt, Henry, 61.
Sandberg, Rev. Mr., 191.
San Martin, General Jose de, 3.
Saunders, Romulus, 297.
Saunders, Captain, 328, 329, 331 332, 451, 452, 453
Savage, John, 376, 435, 448.
Scott, Sir Walter, 62, 97, 125.
Shakespeare, William, 10, 97.
Shoojah, Shah, loi, 103, 448.
Sigerson, Dr. George, 406.
Sims, Job, 314, 315, 316.
Slade, Admiral, 373.
Sloane, Dr., 408.
Smith, Sir Harry, 140, 175, 178, 180, 184, 189, 190, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198, 199, 204, 213, 215, 216, 220, 449
Smuts, J. J. L., 192, 194, 200.
Smyth, Patrick Joseph, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309. 310, 3”, 312, 316, 317, 318, 327. 328, 336, 337, 338, 341, 358, 359, 367, 371, 388, 389, 402, 416, 448, 449.
Sobieski, King John, 97.
Socrates, 52.
Somerville, Sir William, xlii, 429.
Standford, Captain, 196.
Stephens, James, 411, 413, 446, 449.
Stevenson, Andrew, 393.
Stewart, Dr., 176.
Rev. Mr., 149, 152, 164, 189, 196, 197.
Stockl, Baron, 378, 379, 395.
Stuart, Lord Dudley, 288.
Sullivan, T. D., 406.
Sutherland, Thomas, 192, 198.
Swift, Jonathan, x, xiii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxii, 64, 282, 379.
Tasman, Abel, 223,
Tasso, 47.
Taylor, President, 295.
Thom, Alexander, xli.
Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 436.
Trehouart, Admiral, 23.
Tumour, Lieutenant, Commander of the Shearwater, 8, 9.
Tubal-cain, 30.
Uhland, Ludwig, 121. Urquhart, David, 289, 450.
Verner, M. P., Sir William, 157, 450.
Victoria, Queen, xlvi, 6, 15, 38, 59, 66, 103, 126, 129, 132, 155, 202 203, 258, 268, 270, 286, 399, 402.
Virgil, 227.
Walpole, Sir Robert, 20, 33.
Walsh, Edward, 11, 12, 450.
Waller, Edmund, 34.
Warner, Dr., 37, 43, 126, 127.
Washington, George, xii, 387.
Watson, Admiral, 22.
Watt, James, 26.
Wellington, Duke of, xxxv.
Westervelt, Mayor, 401.
Whateley, Archbishop, 76, 77, 83, 450
Whiteside, Chief Justice, 75, 450.
Whitty, John, 439.
Wilde, Lady, 428.
Wilkes, Lieutenant, 344 (note).
William III., King (England), xxviii, xxix, xxx, 128, 149, 384.
William IV., 101, 102.
Williams, Richard D’Alton, 58, 73,
115, 118, 405, 450
Wingrove, Captain, 14, 17, 34, 35, 38, 39, 136, 137, 138, 142, 143, 450.
Wood, Mayor, 401.
Zemaun, Shah, 101.
Zimmerman, 218.
Zoolfkhar, Shah, 98.
Printed by M. H. Gill & Son, Ltd., 50 Upper O’Connell Street, Dublin.
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