August 31, 2019 • 24 mins
Today we revisit a 2015 episode about an international jailbreak! In the 1860s, a crew from the United States mounted a mission to Western Australia to rescue imprisoned members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood who had been imprisoned by Great Britain.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Recently, we put out a call for
episode suggestions on our Facebook page, and we specifically encouraged
topics from outside of North America and Europe because the
vast majority of suggestions already on the list fall into
those categories. We got a number of suggestions for episodes
that we had already done, and so we are returning
(00:23):
to one of them for today's classic. It's on the
Katapa Rescue from Australia's Fremantle Prison, So it actually connects
all of these There's there's North America, and there's Europe,
and also there's Australia. And that episode originally came out
on February second, and in this episode we say that
this was the only successful jailbreak from Fremantle. Although this
(00:46):
was repeated in a number of the sources that were
used for the episode, that is not correct. Other escapes
include Joseph John's a k a. Moon Dine Joe. His
multiple prison escapes include breaking out of Fremantle in eighteen
sixty seven and remaining at large for two years. So
enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(01:09):
production of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works, Hello, and
Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frowning. Today we're going to talk about a jailbreak,
which sounds like an inherently interesting and exciting and dramatic subject.
(01:29):
This was the rescue of six Irish prisoners who had
been convicted of crimes like treason and rebellion, and they
were part of an organization called the Irish Republican Brotherhood
also known as the Fenians. They had originally been sentenced
to death because they were military men. While serving in
the British Army, they had become part of a plot
to turn the army against itself and instead fight for
(01:51):
Irish independence. Now they were in prison for life, and
a Quaker man, finding this imprisoned imprisonment to be incredibly unjust,
lad a daring rescue party to get them out of jail.
So on this on its own, this already sounds pretty exciting.
But these prisoners had been convicted in Britain, and the
(02:15):
prison was in Western Australia, and the man who was
leading this crew of men on a whaling ship to
come and get them was from the United States. So
it's it's truly an international affair right, it's an intercontinental
uh experience and involving multiple hemispheres of the planet um.
(02:37):
And you know, to the person who recently said to us, please,
for the love of God, no more shipwrecks. There are
ships in the story, but fortunately none of them a wreck.
So I got nautical history and Irish history and Australian
history and British history all tied together along with a
nautical theme and a jailbreak. Hooray because also a listener
request from Joseph, I should say that part two, otherwise
(03:00):
never would have known about it. And this story takes
place in the eighteen sixties. We talked in our two
part episode on the Irish Potato Famine what life was
like in Ireland around this time. But here's a brief
recap for those who have not maybe heard those episodes.
The overwhelming majority of the Irish population was Catholic and
this continues to be true in the Republic of Ireland today.
(03:23):
The whole of Ireland had become part of Britain in
eighteen hundred under the British Acts of Union, and at
that point Ireland had gained representation in Parliament, but Catholics,
specifically were not permitted to be members of Parliament. So consequently,
while Ireland was part of Britain for the most part,
the Irish population, especially the Irish Catholic population, was basically disenfranchised.
(03:47):
And on top of that, Ireland itself was stricken with poverty.
Over generations, Irish families had lost their land to English landslords.
Many Irish farmers were paying exorbitant rent on what had
once been their own families land, and there was a
middleman between the farmer and the landlord, who also took
a cut of the profits along the way. This whole
(04:08):
landlord middleman tenant system put tenants at a severe disadvantage
and many were barely subsisting. And then there was the
Great Hunger, also known as the Great Famine or the
Irish Potato Famine. And we've devoted two episodes to this
in the past, and I'm going to recommend if you're
interested in this, please go listen to those, because we
are seriously seriously glossing over it here. Potatoes were Ireland's
(04:31):
staple crop, and so as crops failed, more than a
million people died of disease and hunger. About two million
people left Ireland in an effort to escape the famine,
and by eighteen fifty one, between twenty and twenty five
of the population of Ireland had either left or died,
Which brings us to the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the Fenians.
(04:54):
This was a secret society in Ireland and it was
devoted to achieving Irish independence from British rule by force.
The Fenians were sure independence would come only through an
armed rebellion. One of the leaders of this movement in
Ireland was John Devoy, who was actively recruiting Irish soldiers
who were serving in the British Army stationed in Ireland.
(05:17):
It's estimated that he recruited eighty thousand troops to this cause.
But an informer tipped off the British government to what
was going on. Devois was arrested, convicted of treason, and
sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. The British government
arrested as many Fenians as they could find in eighteen
sixty five and eighteen sixty six, charging them with conspiracy
(05:41):
and treason. Please arrests really strained and already overcrowded British
prison system. As we discussed in the Lady Guliana episode.
The British prisons had become severely overcrowded due to a
number of social and legal factors, and then after the
American colonies declared their independence, Britain no longer offload its
(06:01):
prisoners to the Americas as it had been doing so.
Britain had started using Australia for a penal colony instead.
By this point, though, there was only one place left
in Australia where Britain was sending new prisoners, and this
was Swan River Colony on Australia's western coast, which housed
Fremantle Prison. Fremantle was supposed to be impenetrable, but it
(06:24):
wasn't really the building itself that earned it that reputation.
Although the conditions at the prison were very severe and poor,
it was the surrounding area that made it seem impossible
to escape. It was located on an in an expanse
of desolate, dry landscape, and anyone who tried to escape
would either have to go deeper into the outback or
to the coast, where the waters were widely reported to
(06:47):
be invested with sharks. As the arrests of Fenians continued,
Britain started sending them to Freemantle prison and in October
of eighteen sixty seven, the Huguemont, which was the last
ship to carry prisoners from Britain to Australia, left Portland
carrying two and eighty convicts, and of those, sixty two
of them were Fenians, and they arrived in Fremantle in
(07:10):
January of eighteen sixty eight. Although some of the Fenian
prisoners above aboard the Huguamot were civilians and would eventually
be pardoned, twelve of them had been members of the
military and had been sentenced for life. Seven of those
twelve had actually originally been sentenced to death, but Queen
Victoria had eventually commuted their sentences to lifetime transportation, along
(07:33):
with the branding of the letter D for Deserter on
their chests. And one of these prisoners actually became a
key player in planning the jailbreak that we're talking about
today after he had escaped himself. But we can hop
into that whole story after we have a brief word
from a sponsor, if that's cool with Tracy, sure thing.
(08:00):
So to get back to the events in Australia, one
of the Fenians who had been sent to Fremantle prison
was a man named John Boyle O'Reilly, but after arriving
at Fremantle, he was later transferred to another prison in Bunbury,
which was south of Fremantle. In eighteen sixty nine, he
escaped from that second prison with the help of a
Catholic priest. Then he was able to win the sympathies
(08:23):
of Irish colonists in the area and board a whaler
that was bound for America. Once he got to the
United States, O'Riley, who had been the assistant editor of
the newspaper that the convicts had made for themselves on
the way to Australia, became an editor of the Boston Pilot.
I love that they made a newsletter for themselves. They did,
(08:44):
and the whole thing was eventually released as like a
bound book for people to read. I'm I'm not sure
if you could find it online, but probably you can.
On the one hand, I'm like, wow, that takes so
much like dedication, And on the other, I'm like, did
they have anything else to do the voyage? Maybe it
was just a time killer, but I do not know.
But not long after that, Devoi, the one who had
(09:07):
been sentenced to hard labor for recruiting Irish soldiers was
exiled to America. He eventually went to work for the
New York Herald and he became involved in a secret
society called the Claude Neguel, which was sort of an
offshoot of the Fenian Brotherhood. In eighteen seventy four, one
of the Fenian prisoners named James Wilson wrote a letter
(09:27):
to John Devoy at the newspaper. This letter included the
much quoted passage, remember this is a voice from the tomb,
or is this not a living tomb? In the tomb,
it is only a man's body that is good for worms.
But in this living tomb, the canker worm of care
enters the very soul. Devoi started to feel increasingly guilty
(09:50):
about the Fenians still in Fremantle, after all, he'd been
the one recruiting them all. He hatched a plan, in
conjunction with O'Reilly and other members of his society, to
rescue the rest of the military Fenians from Fremantle, and
they would secure a ship, go to Australia and get
the men out. At first, o'riley's plan was to lease
(10:12):
a ship, but eventually they decided to buy one. Instead,
he sought donations and one man mortgaged his house, and
eventually they were able to buy the whaling ship Catalpa.
The ship's captain was George S. Anthony, who was kind
of an unlikely ally, especially considering how long and dangerous
the mission was going to be. He had no connections
(10:33):
to the Fenians or to the clon Neguyo he was.
He was not Irish short Catholic. He was actually a Quaker,
and he took the home in his own words, because
it was the right thing to do. People focus on
this a lot like Irish people and Catholic people were
receiving so much discrimination at the time that it was
(10:53):
really shocking that this person, who had absolutely no ties
to them whatsoever, took this on. Anthony had to keep
the real mission secret from the rest of the crew
for two reasons. One was the risk of the British
finding out what they were up to. The more people
who knew, the greater it was that somebody was going
to accidentally or deliberately spill the beans. The other was
(11:14):
that they were going to have to operate as an
ordinary whaling vessel along the way because the proceeds from
their whaling work were supposed to offset the cost of
the rescue mission. Captain Anthony and the Catalpa departed from
New Bedford, Massachusetts, in April of eighteen seventy, and they
were to reach Fremantle in January. They had a bit
(11:34):
of good luck along the way by total coincidence. Not
long after the catap A rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
it encountered another ship called the Ocean Beauty, which was
captained by a man named Cosins, who had been the
master of the Huguemont. Cosin's still had the charts that
he had used while carrying convicts to Fremantle, and he
gave those starts to Captain Anthony. However, despite that one
(11:59):
stroke of good fortune, most of their luck was actually
pretty bad. Uh some of Anthony's navigation equipment turned out
to be faulty, and then the whaling part of the
voyage went terribly meaning that they were not able to
recoup the expenses of the mission with the proceeds from
whaling that they had planned for. And the weather was
often against them, and at one supply stops six of
(12:20):
the crew actually deserted. They wound up missing the mark
for their arrival in Australia by almost four months. As
all of this was going on, there was a whole
other part of the plan happening in Australia while Captain
Anthony and his crew were on the way, and we're
going to talk about that part of it after a
very forward from a sponsor. As Captain Anthony and his
(12:49):
crew were on their way to Australia to Fenian agents
were orchestrating a whole other arm of this scheme. Thomas
Desmond and John Breslin set sailed for Australia at about
the same time as Captain Anthony and the Katapa left Massachusetts.
The two men sailed from California, though, and they were
supposed to arrive in Australia well ahead of the Catalpa,
(13:09):
and Breslin actually gets most of the glory here. He
basically orchestrated a long con in which he posed as
a wealthy American investor so he could gain access to
the prison and make contact with the Fenian prisoners. Working
under the pseudonym James Collins, Breslin scouted out the prison,
He met with officials under the guise of hiring prisoners
(13:31):
as cheap labor, He also made friends with an ex
con who had access to the prison and could bury
messages back and forth. He got a sense of how
things were run, in which tasks the prisoners were assigned to,
because some of them gave them a legitimate reason to
be outside of the prison walls. What he found was
that the security in the prison itself was not actually
(13:52):
all that tight. The prison relied on this completely inhospitable
landscape surrounding it to do most of the security work
for them. Anthony's multi month delay caused a number of
problems on Breslin's side of things. The longer he ran
this con, the more likely he was to be discovered,
and the prison kept changing the work assignments of the
(14:14):
prisoners to be rescued, which was up ending his plans
for getting them out, and Phenians in Australia started concocting
their own escape plan, but Breslin found out about it
and he was able to convince them to just join
his effort instead. And throughout there was this worry that
the Katapa had been sunk along the way and was
just not coming at all. The most alarming development in
(14:37):
this whole multi month con was the sudden arrival of
two irishmen who started asking strange questions about the prisoners.
Everyone who was involved in the Australia side of the
plot was terrified that they were British spies, that somehow
word had gotten out about what they were doing, and
that the British had seen had sent someone to to
figure out what's happening. It turned out, though, that they
(14:58):
had also gotten letters from Penie and prisoners asking for help,
and they were there to provide that help. These two
men wound up being tasked with cutting the telegraph wires
leading out of Fremantle on the morning at the jailbreak. Finally,
in April, Anthony and the Catalpa made it to Australia
and he and Breslin set the date for the jailbreak
(15:20):
as Easter Monday, April seventeen. It was traditional for many
of the prison officials to go to Purse that day
for a regatta, so everyone hoped that security would be
even more lax than normal, and they sent a message
to the prisoners that this would be their one and
only shot. On the morning of Easter Monday, Thomas Dara,
(15:40):
Thomas Hassett, Robert Cranston, Martin Hogan, Michael Harrington, and James
Wilson slipped away from the prison. Two of them had
actually been assigned work to do that day that was
outside of the prison walls, and the other four had,
one way or another bluffed their way past the guards,
who apparently never considered that they might have escaping because
(16:01):
that thought was just so foreign too them. The men
who became known as the Fremantle Six, actually left a
seventh man named Jeffrey Roach behind because he had earlier
tried to get a reduced sentence for himself in exchange
for cooperating with the British, which the remainder of his
Athenian cohorts did not approve of, and so the six
(16:24):
men headed for the road, where Breslyn and Desmond met
them in carriages and raced off for rocking him twenty
miles away, where Anthony was waiting with Catalpa's whale boat.
Basically it was a little rowboat. Unfortunately, while he was
waiting around with this rowboat, Anthony had drawn the attention
of a local who became suspicious that something weird was
(16:45):
going on, and when six prisoners and two other men
appeared on the shore, this local man went to get help.
At this point, the prison authorities knew that the jailbreak
had happened and a search was in progress, even though
the downed tele telegraph wires meant they hadn't been able
to raise the alarm elsewhere. Once all nine of the
men were in the whale boat and they were rowing
(17:07):
to meet the Katapa, Breslin read this note, then sealed
it in a waterproof package and threw it towards shore
to His Excellency, the British Governor of Western Australia. This
is to certify that I have this day released from
the clemency of her most Gracious Majesty Victoria, Queen of
Great Britain, etcetera, etcetera. Six irishmen condemned to imprisonment for
(17:31):
life by the enlightened and magnanimous Government of Great Britain,
for having been guilty of the atrocious and unpardonable crimes
known to the unenlightened portion of my portion of mankind
as love of country and hatred of tyranny, for the
act of Irish assurance. My birth and my blood being
my full sufficient warrant, allow me to add that I
(17:55):
take my leave now. I've only to say a few cells,
I've emptied a cell in its way. I have the
honor and pleasure to bid you good day from all
future acquaintance. Excuse me, I pray in the service of
my country John J. Breslin. And we do not know
if this letter made it to the governor. The text
that we actually have for reference is from an account
(18:17):
that Breslin wrote about the escape. So, but after that,
the whole thing once again almost fell apart. The men
in the whale boat could see a steamer which was
the Georgette, apparently searching for them in the water, and
as they rode towards the Catalpa, a storm blew in
This overcrowded whale boat was in danger of sinking, and
(18:39):
they had to bail row and try not to capsize.
All through the night as the men in the whale
boat were trying to keep themselves alive, the Georgette found
the Catalpa, but the first mate left in charge while
Anthony was away, would not allow them to board. They
eventually ran low on fuel and they had to return
to shore not long after sunrise on Tuesday the eighteen
(19:04):
So at this point they've been out of the jail
for about twenty four hours. The men in the whale
boat spotted the Catalpa, but as they made their way
towards the ship, the Georgette spotted them too, so they
in their little rowboat had to race a steamer to
the Catalpa, trying to get to the Catalpa before the
Georgette could get to them, and they made it, but
(19:26):
luck was still kind of playing against them. The wind
stopped and once the men were aboard, they couldn't go
any further. They were becalmed, and the Georgette returned, and
it had in the meantime acquired a cannon and it
fired a warning shot. The escaped prisoners armed themselves, mostly
with harpoons, and Captain Anthony, who ran up an American flag,
(19:49):
called to the Georgette, that's the American flag. I am
on the high seas. My flag protects me. If you
fire on this ship, you fire on the American flag.
The colonial police aboard the Georgette had been ordered not
to cause an international incident, and so they waited for
a while, essentially at a stalemate, with the Georgette trying
(20:09):
to nudge the becalmed Catalpa back into Australian waters. It
did not work, and finally the wind picked up, blowing
the Catalpa out to sea. The Georgette followed for a
while before finally heading back to Fremantle. There are all
these accounts of when the wind picked up. It's like
swung the rigging of the Catalpa around, narrowly missing the Georgette. Uh.
(20:34):
I'm not sure if this is a movie, but like
the Sinking of the Spive, it should be. Captain Anthony
and the escaped men arrived in New York on August nineteen,
four months after escaping from the prison. They were met
with just a raucous celebration among New York's Irish community.
The reception of this news in Britain was a lot
(20:56):
less positive though. Britain was livid and accused the unded
States of harboring terrorists, and this story fueled Irish nationalists
and the movement for Irish independence. And that is a
whole additional series of other stories culminating in the creation
of the Irish Free State and later the Republic of Ireland.
(21:17):
We have some detail about what happened to the rescuers
after this was over. O'Riley was a poet and a writer,
and he died in ninety at the age of forty six.
Desmond and Breslin became part of the Irish Republican Brotherhood
in America, and Desmond eventually also became Sheriff of San Francisco.
John Devois continued to be active in the Colon Niguel
(21:39):
and active in the struggle for Irish independence from America.
He did eventually get to return to Ireland towards the
end of his life. The Catalpa returned to service as
a whaling ship and it was eventually used to carry Cole.
The rescue mission was Captain Anthony's last sea voyage, and
he unfortunately died of pneumonia. Much less is known about
(22:02):
the later fates of the Fremantle six, except that by
all accounts they were broken men after their time in
Fremantle prison. The few Fenians left in Fremantle after the
jailbreak later wound up being pardoned. This was the only
successful prison break from Fremantle. Remember, John Boyle O'Reilly's escape
was from a different prison, and it became a highly
(22:24):
celebrated event. One ballad became so popular and so controversial
that it was officially banned in Western Australia, and as
of it still was. The ballad starts out a noble
whale ship and commander called the Catalpa, they say, came
out to Western Australia and took six poor Fenians away.
So come all, you screw orders and jailers remember Perth
(22:47):
Regatta Day. Take care of the rest of your Fenians
or Yankees will steal them away. And Fremantle Prison closed
on November eight. I'm glad Joseph asked for this story
me too. Um, Like, there are lots of sources about this.
There's a whole book about it that there is a
Secrets of the Dead episode on PBS called The Irish
(23:10):
Escape all about it, So there are lots of resources
about it. But still I had not really heard about
it before. And apparently, even though it sparked a whole
surge of Irish nationalism at the time, by the time
the Republic of Ireland actually gained its independence from Britain,
this part of the story had been kind of maybe
(23:32):
not forgotten, but it wasn't so much in the limelight anymore.
It was one of those stories that was rediscovered again
a little more recently Thank you so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email
address or a Facebook you are l or something similar
over the course of today's episode, since it is from
(23:54):
the archive that might be out of date now, you
can email us at history podcast at how stuff Works
dot com, and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to
our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
(24:15):
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts. For my
Heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. Recently, we put out a call for
episode suggestions on our Facebook page, and we specifically encouraged
topics from outside of North America and Europe because the
vast majority of suggestions already on the list fall into
those categories. We got a number of suggestions for episodes
that we had already done, and so we are returning
(00:23):
to one of them for today's classic. It's on the
Katapa Rescue from Australia's Fremantle Prison, So it actually connects
all of these There's there's North America, and there's Europe,
and also there's Australia. And that episode originally came out
on February second, and in this episode we say that
this was the only successful jailbreak from Fremantle. Although this
(00:46):
was repeated in a number of the sources that were
used for the episode, that is not correct. Other escapes
include Joseph John's a k a. Moon Dine Joe. His
multiple prison escapes include breaking out of Fremantle in eighteen
sixty seven and remaining at large for two years. So
enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(01:09):
production of I Heart Radios, How Stuff Works, Hello, and
Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frowning. Today we're going to talk about a jailbreak,
which sounds like an inherently interesting and exciting and dramatic subject.
(01:29):
This was the rescue of six Irish prisoners who had
been convicted of crimes like treason and rebellion, and they
were part of an organization called the Irish Republican Brotherhood
also known as the Fenians. They had originally been sentenced
to death because they were military men. While serving in
the British Army, they had become part of a plot
to turn the army against itself and instead fight for
(01:51):
Irish independence. Now they were in prison for life, and
a Quaker man, finding this imprisoned imprisonment to be incredibly unjust,
lad a daring rescue party to get them out of jail.
So on this on its own, this already sounds pretty exciting.
But these prisoners had been convicted in Britain, and the
(02:15):
prison was in Western Australia, and the man who was
leading this crew of men on a whaling ship to
come and get them was from the United States. So
it's it's truly an international affair right, it's an intercontinental
uh experience and involving multiple hemispheres of the planet um.
(02:37):
And you know, to the person who recently said to us, please,
for the love of God, no more shipwrecks. There are
ships in the story, but fortunately none of them a wreck.
So I got nautical history and Irish history and Australian
history and British history all tied together along with a
nautical theme and a jailbreak. Hooray because also a listener
request from Joseph, I should say that part two, otherwise
(03:00):
never would have known about it. And this story takes
place in the eighteen sixties. We talked in our two
part episode on the Irish Potato Famine what life was
like in Ireland around this time. But here's a brief
recap for those who have not maybe heard those episodes.
The overwhelming majority of the Irish population was Catholic and
this continues to be true in the Republic of Ireland today.
(03:23):
The whole of Ireland had become part of Britain in
eighteen hundred under the British Acts of Union, and at
that point Ireland had gained representation in Parliament, but Catholics,
specifically were not permitted to be members of Parliament. So consequently,
while Ireland was part of Britain for the most part,
the Irish population, especially the Irish Catholic population, was basically disenfranchised.
(03:47):
And on top of that, Ireland itself was stricken with poverty.
Over generations, Irish families had lost their land to English landslords.
Many Irish farmers were paying exorbitant rent on what had
once been their own families land, and there was a
middleman between the farmer and the landlord, who also took
a cut of the profits along the way. This whole
(04:08):
landlord middleman tenant system put tenants at a severe disadvantage
and many were barely subsisting. And then there was the
Great Hunger, also known as the Great Famine or the
Irish Potato Famine. And we've devoted two episodes to this
in the past, and I'm going to recommend if you're
interested in this, please go listen to those, because we
are seriously seriously glossing over it here. Potatoes were Ireland's
(04:31):
staple crop, and so as crops failed, more than a
million people died of disease and hunger. About two million
people left Ireland in an effort to escape the famine,
and by eighteen fifty one, between twenty and twenty five
of the population of Ireland had either left or died,
Which brings us to the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the Fenians.
(04:54):
This was a secret society in Ireland and it was
devoted to achieving Irish independence from British rule by force.
The Fenians were sure independence would come only through an
armed rebellion. One of the leaders of this movement in
Ireland was John Devoy, who was actively recruiting Irish soldiers
who were serving in the British Army stationed in Ireland.
(05:17):
It's estimated that he recruited eighty thousand troops to this cause.
But an informer tipped off the British government to what
was going on. Devois was arrested, convicted of treason, and
sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. The British government
arrested as many Fenians as they could find in eighteen
sixty five and eighteen sixty six, charging them with conspiracy
(05:41):
and treason. Please arrests really strained and already overcrowded British
prison system. As we discussed in the Lady Guliana episode.
The British prisons had become severely overcrowded due to a
number of social and legal factors, and then after the
American colonies declared their independence, Britain no longer offload its
(06:01):
prisoners to the Americas as it had been doing so.
Britain had started using Australia for a penal colony instead.
By this point, though, there was only one place left
in Australia where Britain was sending new prisoners, and this
was Swan River Colony on Australia's western coast, which housed
Fremantle Prison. Fremantle was supposed to be impenetrable, but it
(06:24):
wasn't really the building itself that earned it that reputation.
Although the conditions at the prison were very severe and poor,
it was the surrounding area that made it seem impossible
to escape. It was located on an in an expanse
of desolate, dry landscape, and anyone who tried to escape
would either have to go deeper into the outback or
to the coast, where the waters were widely reported to
(06:47):
be invested with sharks. As the arrests of Fenians continued,
Britain started sending them to Freemantle prison and in October
of eighteen sixty seven, the Huguemont, which was the last
ship to carry prisoners from Britain to Australia, left Portland
carrying two and eighty convicts, and of those, sixty two
of them were Fenians, and they arrived in Fremantle in
(07:10):
January of eighteen sixty eight. Although some of the Fenian
prisoners above aboard the Huguamot were civilians and would eventually
be pardoned, twelve of them had been members of the
military and had been sentenced for life. Seven of those
twelve had actually originally been sentenced to death, but Queen
Victoria had eventually commuted their sentences to lifetime transportation, along
(07:33):
with the branding of the letter D for Deserter on
their chests. And one of these prisoners actually became a
key player in planning the jailbreak that we're talking about
today after he had escaped himself. But we can hop
into that whole story after we have a brief word
from a sponsor, if that's cool with Tracy, sure thing.
(08:00):
So to get back to the events in Australia, one
of the Fenians who had been sent to Fremantle prison
was a man named John Boyle O'Reilly, but after arriving
at Fremantle, he was later transferred to another prison in Bunbury,
which was south of Fremantle. In eighteen sixty nine, he
escaped from that second prison with the help of a
Catholic priest. Then he was able to win the sympathies
(08:23):
of Irish colonists in the area and board a whaler
that was bound for America. Once he got to the
United States, O'Riley, who had been the assistant editor of
the newspaper that the convicts had made for themselves on
the way to Australia, became an editor of the Boston Pilot.
I love that they made a newsletter for themselves. They did,
(08:44):
and the whole thing was eventually released as like a
bound book for people to read. I'm I'm not sure
if you could find it online, but probably you can.
On the one hand, I'm like, wow, that takes so
much like dedication, And on the other, I'm like, did
they have anything else to do the voyage? Maybe it
was just a time killer, but I do not know.
But not long after that, Devoi, the one who had
(09:07):
been sentenced to hard labor for recruiting Irish soldiers was
exiled to America. He eventually went to work for the
New York Herald and he became involved in a secret
society called the Claude Neguel, which was sort of an
offshoot of the Fenian Brotherhood. In eighteen seventy four, one
of the Fenian prisoners named James Wilson wrote a letter
(09:27):
to John Devoy at the newspaper. This letter included the
much quoted passage, remember this is a voice from the tomb,
or is this not a living tomb? In the tomb,
it is only a man's body that is good for worms.
But in this living tomb, the canker worm of care
enters the very soul. Devoi started to feel increasingly guilty
(09:50):
about the Fenians still in Fremantle, after all, he'd been
the one recruiting them all. He hatched a plan, in
conjunction with O'Reilly and other members of his society, to
rescue the rest of the military Fenians from Fremantle, and
they would secure a ship, go to Australia and get
the men out. At first, o'riley's plan was to lease
(10:12):
a ship, but eventually they decided to buy one. Instead,
he sought donations and one man mortgaged his house, and
eventually they were able to buy the whaling ship Catalpa.
The ship's captain was George S. Anthony, who was kind
of an unlikely ally, especially considering how long and dangerous
the mission was going to be. He had no connections
(10:33):
to the Fenians or to the clon Neguyo he was.
He was not Irish short Catholic. He was actually a Quaker,
and he took the home in his own words, because
it was the right thing to do. People focus on
this a lot like Irish people and Catholic people were
receiving so much discrimination at the time that it was
(10:53):
really shocking that this person, who had absolutely no ties
to them whatsoever, took this on. Anthony had to keep
the real mission secret from the rest of the crew
for two reasons. One was the risk of the British
finding out what they were up to. The more people
who knew, the greater it was that somebody was going
to accidentally or deliberately spill the beans. The other was
(11:14):
that they were going to have to operate as an
ordinary whaling vessel along the way because the proceeds from
their whaling work were supposed to offset the cost of
the rescue mission. Captain Anthony and the Catalpa departed from
New Bedford, Massachusetts, in April of eighteen seventy, and they
were to reach Fremantle in January. They had a bit
(11:34):
of good luck along the way by total coincidence. Not
long after the catap A rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
it encountered another ship called the Ocean Beauty, which was
captained by a man named Cosins, who had been the
master of the Huguemont. Cosin's still had the charts that
he had used while carrying convicts to Fremantle, and he
gave those starts to Captain Anthony. However, despite that one
(11:59):
stroke of good fortune, most of their luck was actually
pretty bad. Uh some of Anthony's navigation equipment turned out
to be faulty, and then the whaling part of the
voyage went terribly meaning that they were not able to
recoup the expenses of the mission with the proceeds from
whaling that they had planned for. And the weather was
often against them, and at one supply stops six of
(12:20):
the crew actually deserted. They wound up missing the mark
for their arrival in Australia by almost four months. As
all of this was going on, there was a whole
other part of the plan happening in Australia while Captain
Anthony and his crew were on the way, and we're
going to talk about that part of it after a
very forward from a sponsor. As Captain Anthony and his
(12:49):
crew were on their way to Australia to Fenian agents
were orchestrating a whole other arm of this scheme. Thomas
Desmond and John Breslin set sailed for Australia at about
the same time as Captain Anthony and the Katapa left Massachusetts.
The two men sailed from California, though, and they were
supposed to arrive in Australia well ahead of the Catalpa,
(13:09):
and Breslin actually gets most of the glory here. He
basically orchestrated a long con in which he posed as
a wealthy American investor so he could gain access to
the prison and make contact with the Fenian prisoners. Working
under the pseudonym James Collins, Breslin scouted out the prison,
He met with officials under the guise of hiring prisoners
(13:31):
as cheap labor, He also made friends with an ex
con who had access to the prison and could bury
messages back and forth. He got a sense of how
things were run, in which tasks the prisoners were assigned to,
because some of them gave them a legitimate reason to
be outside of the prison walls. What he found was
that the security in the prison itself was not actually
(13:52):
all that tight. The prison relied on this completely inhospitable
landscape surrounding it to do most of the security work
for them. Anthony's multi month delay caused a number of
problems on Breslin's side of things. The longer he ran
this con, the more likely he was to be discovered,
and the prison kept changing the work assignments of the
(14:14):
prisoners to be rescued, which was up ending his plans
for getting them out, and Phenians in Australia started concocting
their own escape plan, but Breslin found out about it
and he was able to convince them to just join
his effort instead. And throughout there was this worry that
the Katapa had been sunk along the way and was
just not coming at all. The most alarming development in
(14:37):
this whole multi month con was the sudden arrival of
two irishmen who started asking strange questions about the prisoners.
Everyone who was involved in the Australia side of the
plot was terrified that they were British spies, that somehow
word had gotten out about what they were doing, and
that the British had seen had sent someone to to
figure out what's happening. It turned out, though, that they
(14:58):
had also gotten letters from Penie and prisoners asking for help,
and they were there to provide that help. These two
men wound up being tasked with cutting the telegraph wires
leading out of Fremantle on the morning at the jailbreak. Finally,
in April, Anthony and the Catalpa made it to Australia
and he and Breslin set the date for the jailbreak
(15:20):
as Easter Monday, April seventeen. It was traditional for many
of the prison officials to go to Purse that day
for a regatta, so everyone hoped that security would be
even more lax than normal, and they sent a message
to the prisoners that this would be their one and
only shot. On the morning of Easter Monday, Thomas Dara,
(15:40):
Thomas Hassett, Robert Cranston, Martin Hogan, Michael Harrington, and James
Wilson slipped away from the prison. Two of them had
actually been assigned work to do that day that was
outside of the prison walls, and the other four had,
one way or another bluffed their way past the guards,
who apparently never considered that they might have escaping because
(16:01):
that thought was just so foreign too them. The men
who became known as the Fremantle Six, actually left a
seventh man named Jeffrey Roach behind because he had earlier
tried to get a reduced sentence for himself in exchange
for cooperating with the British, which the remainder of his
Athenian cohorts did not approve of, and so the six
(16:24):
men headed for the road, where Breslyn and Desmond met
them in carriages and raced off for rocking him twenty
miles away, where Anthony was waiting with Catalpa's whale boat.
Basically it was a little rowboat. Unfortunately, while he was
waiting around with this rowboat, Anthony had drawn the attention
of a local who became suspicious that something weird was
(16:45):
going on, and when six prisoners and two other men
appeared on the shore, this local man went to get help.
At this point, the prison authorities knew that the jailbreak
had happened and a search was in progress, even though
the downed tele telegraph wires meant they hadn't been able
to raise the alarm elsewhere. Once all nine of the
men were in the whale boat and they were rowing
(17:07):
to meet the Katapa, Breslin read this note, then sealed
it in a waterproof package and threw it towards shore
to His Excellency, the British Governor of Western Australia. This
is to certify that I have this day released from
the clemency of her most Gracious Majesty Victoria, Queen of
Great Britain, etcetera, etcetera. Six irishmen condemned to imprisonment for
(17:31):
life by the enlightened and magnanimous Government of Great Britain,
for having been guilty of the atrocious and unpardonable crimes
known to the unenlightened portion of my portion of mankind
as love of country and hatred of tyranny, for the
act of Irish assurance. My birth and my blood being
my full sufficient warrant, allow me to add that I
(17:55):
take my leave now. I've only to say a few cells,
I've emptied a cell in its way. I have the
honor and pleasure to bid you good day from all
future acquaintance. Excuse me, I pray in the service of
my country John J. Breslin. And we do not know
if this letter made it to the governor. The text
that we actually have for reference is from an account
(18:17):
that Breslin wrote about the escape. So, but after that,
the whole thing once again almost fell apart. The men
in the whale boat could see a steamer which was
the Georgette, apparently searching for them in the water, and
as they rode towards the Catalpa, a storm blew in
This overcrowded whale boat was in danger of sinking, and
(18:39):
they had to bail row and try not to capsize.
All through the night as the men in the whale
boat were trying to keep themselves alive, the Georgette found
the Catalpa, but the first mate left in charge while
Anthony was away, would not allow them to board. They
eventually ran low on fuel and they had to return
to shore not long after sunrise on Tuesday the eighteen
(19:04):
So at this point they've been out of the jail
for about twenty four hours. The men in the whale
boat spotted the Catalpa, but as they made their way
towards the ship, the Georgette spotted them too, so they
in their little rowboat had to race a steamer to
the Catalpa, trying to get to the Catalpa before the
Georgette could get to them, and they made it, but
(19:26):
luck was still kind of playing against them. The wind
stopped and once the men were aboard, they couldn't go
any further. They were becalmed, and the Georgette returned, and
it had in the meantime acquired a cannon and it
fired a warning shot. The escaped prisoners armed themselves, mostly
with harpoons, and Captain Anthony, who ran up an American flag,
(19:49):
called to the Georgette, that's the American flag. I am
on the high seas. My flag protects me. If you
fire on this ship, you fire on the American flag.
The colonial police aboard the Georgette had been ordered not
to cause an international incident, and so they waited for
a while, essentially at a stalemate, with the Georgette trying
(20:09):
to nudge the becalmed Catalpa back into Australian waters. It
did not work, and finally the wind picked up, blowing
the Catalpa out to sea. The Georgette followed for a
while before finally heading back to Fremantle. There are all
these accounts of when the wind picked up. It's like
swung the rigging of the Catalpa around, narrowly missing the Georgette. Uh.
(20:34):
I'm not sure if this is a movie, but like
the Sinking of the Spive, it should be. Captain Anthony
and the escaped men arrived in New York on August nineteen,
four months after escaping from the prison. They were met
with just a raucous celebration among New York's Irish community.
The reception of this news in Britain was a lot
(20:56):
less positive though. Britain was livid and accused the unded
States of harboring terrorists, and this story fueled Irish nationalists
and the movement for Irish independence. And that is a
whole additional series of other stories culminating in the creation
of the Irish Free State and later the Republic of Ireland.
(21:17):
We have some detail about what happened to the rescuers
after this was over. O'Riley was a poet and a writer,
and he died in ninety at the age of forty six.
Desmond and Breslin became part of the Irish Republican Brotherhood
in America, and Desmond eventually also became Sheriff of San Francisco.
John Devois continued to be active in the Colon Niguel
(21:39):
and active in the struggle for Irish independence from America.
He did eventually get to return to Ireland towards the
end of his life. The Catalpa returned to service as
a whaling ship and it was eventually used to carry Cole.
The rescue mission was Captain Anthony's last sea voyage, and
he unfortunately died of pneumonia. Much less is known about
(22:02):
the later fates of the Fremantle six, except that by
all accounts they were broken men after their time in
Fremantle prison. The few Fenians left in Fremantle after the
jailbreak later wound up being pardoned. This was the only
successful prison break from Fremantle. Remember, John Boyle O'Reilly's escape
was from a different prison, and it became a highly
(22:24):
celebrated event. One ballad became so popular and so controversial
that it was officially banned in Western Australia, and as
of it still was. The ballad starts out a noble
whale ship and commander called the Catalpa, they say, came
out to Western Australia and took six poor Fenians away.
So come all, you screw orders and jailers remember Perth
(22:47):
Regatta Day. Take care of the rest of your Fenians
or Yankees will steal them away. And Fremantle Prison closed
on November eight. I'm glad Joseph asked for this story
me too. Um, Like, there are lots of sources about this.
There's a whole book about it that there is a
Secrets of the Dead episode on PBS called The Irish
(23:10):
Escape all about it, So there are lots of resources
about it. But still I had not really heard about
it before. And apparently, even though it sparked a whole
surge of Irish nationalism at the time, by the time
the Republic of Ireland actually gained its independence from Britain,
this part of the story had been kind of maybe
(23:32):
not forgotten, but it wasn't so much in the limelight anymore.
It was one of those stories that was rediscovered again
a little more recently Thank you so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email
address or a Facebook you are l or something similar
over the course of today's episode, since it is from
(23:54):
the archive that might be out of date now, you
can email us at history podcast at how stuff Works
dot com, and you can find us all over social
media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to
our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart
Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff
(24:15):
you Missed in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts. For my
Heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.