February 2, 2015 • 28 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. Today we're going to talk about a jailbreak,
which sounds like an inherently interesting and exciting and dramatic subject.
(00:23):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:09):
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.
(01:31):
And you know, to the person who recently said to us, please,
for the love of God, no more shipwrecks. There are
ships in this story, but fortunately none of them wreck.
So I've got nautical history and Irish history and Australian
history and British history all tied together along with a
nautical theme and a jail break. Hooray because also a
listener request from Joseph, I should say that part two,
(01:53):
otherwise I 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
(02:16):
of Ireland today. 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,
(02:40):
was basically disenfranchised. And on top of that, Ireland itself
was stricken with poverty. Over generations, Irish families had lost
their land to English landlords. 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.
(03:02):
This whole 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
(03:25):
were Ireland's 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 of the population of Ireland had either left or died.
Which brings us to the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the Fenians.
(03:49):
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 million. 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.
(04:11):
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
(04:35):
and treason. These arrests really strained and already overcrowded British
prison system. As we discussed in the Lady Giuliana 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 could no longer offload
(04:55):
its 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
(05:19):
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
(05:41):
be invested with sharks. As the arrests of Fenians continued,
Britain started sending them to Fremantle 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 eight convicts and of those, sixty two of
them were Fenians, and they arrived in Fremantle in January
(06:05):
of eighteen sixty eight. Although some of the Fenian prisoners
above aboard the Huguemot 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 with the
(06:28):
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. Our sponsor today
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you'll get ten percent off your first purchase. So to
get back to the events in Australia, one of the
Fenians who had been sent to Fremantle Prison was a
(08:18):
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 of Irish
colonists in the area and board a whaler that was
(08:39):
bound for America. Once he got to the United States, O'Reilly,
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, and the
whole thing was eventually released as like a bound book
(09:00):
for people to read. I'm on, 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 on the voyage? Maybe it
was just a time killer, but I do not know.
But not long after that, Devoi, the one who had
been sentenced to hard labor for recruiting Irish soldiers, was
(09:22):
exiled to America. He eventually went to work for the
New York Herald, and he became involved in a secret
society called the Claude Miguel, 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
to John Devoy at the newspaper. This letter included the
(09:43):
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. Devo Away started to feel increasingly
guilty about the Fenians still in Fremantle. After all, he'd
(10:06):
been the one recruiting them all. He hatched a plan
in conjunction with O'Reilly and other members of his secret
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 a ship, but eventually they decided to buy
(10:26):
one instead. He thought donations and one man mortgaged his house,
and eventually they were able to buy the whaling ship Katalpa.
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
to the Fenians or to the clon Neguyo he was.
(10:48):
He was not Irish or 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
really shocking that this person, who had absolutely no ties
(11:08):
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
that they were going to have to operate as an
ordinary whaling vessel along the way, because the proceeds from
(11:31):
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
of good luck along the way by total coincidence. Not
long after the Catalpa A rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
(11:52):
it encountered another ship called the Ocean Beauty, which was
captained by a man named Cosens, who had been the
master of the Hugo Month Cousins 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 stroke of good fortune, most of their luck was
(12:13):
actually pretty bad. 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
the crew actually deserted. They wound up missing the mark
(12:35):
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
crew were on their way to Australia to Feenian agents
(12:56):
were orchestrating a whole other arm of this scheme. Thomas
des And 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. And Breslin actually gets most of the glory here.
(13:17):
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
as cheap labor. He also made friends with an ex
(13:38):
con who had access to the prison and could ferry
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
all that tight. The prison rely on this completely inhospitable
(14:01):
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
prisoners to be rescued, which was up ending his plans
(14:22):
for getting them out. Athenians 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
Katappa had been sunk along the way and was just
not coming at all. The most alarming development in this
whole multi month con was the sudden arrival of two
(14:45):
irishmen who started asking strange questions about the prisoners. Everyone
who was involved in the Australia side of this 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 had
also gotten letters from Fenie and prisoners asking for help,
(15:06):
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 of the jailbreak. Finally,
in April, Anthony and the Catalpa made it to Australia
and he and Breslin set the date for the jailbreak
as Easter Monday, April seventeen. It was traditional for many
(15:28):
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,
Thomas Hassett, Robert Crampston, Martin Hogan, Michael Harrington, and James
(15:49):
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, passed the guards,
who apparently never considered that they might have been escaping
because that thought was just so farignto them. The men
who became known as the Fremantle Six actually left a
(16:13):
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
men headed for the road, where Breslyn and Desmond met
them in carriages and raced off for rocking him twenty
(16:35):
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
going on, and when six prisoners and two other men
appeared on the shore, this local man went to get help.
(16:56):
At this point the prison authorities knew that the jailbreak
had happened. Then 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
to meet the Katapa, Breslin read this note, then sealed
it in a waterproof package and threw it towards shore
(17:20):
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
life by the enlightened and Magnanimous Government of Great Britain,
(17:40):
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
take my now. I've only to say a few cells,
(18:02):
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
that Breslin wrote about the escape. So but after that
(18:28):
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
they had to bail row and try not to capsize.
All through the night, as the men in the whale
(18:50):
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
so at this point they've been out of the jail
for about twenty four hours. The men in the whale
(19:13):
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
luck was still kind of playing against them. The wind
(19:34):
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,
called to the Georgette, that's the American flag. I am
(19:57):
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
to nudge the becalmed Catalpa back into Australian waters. It
(20:18):
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.
(20:38):
I'm not sure if this is a movie, but like
the Sinking of the Spot, 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
(21:00):
less positive, though. Britain was livid and accused the United
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.
(21:21):
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 Devoi continued to be active in the Colon Niguel
(21:43):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:29):
celebrated event. One ballad became so popular and so controversial
that it was officially banned in Western Australia and as
it still was. The ballad starts out a noble whale
shipping commander called the Catalpa they say, came out to
Western Australia and took six poor Fenians away. So come all,
(22:50):
you screw orders and jailers remember Perth Regatta Day. Take
care of the rest of your Fenians or Yankees will
steal them away. And Fremantle Prison closed on November eighth
of I'm glad Joseph asked for this story me too. Um, Like,
(23:11):
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 Escape that's 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
(23:32):
of Ireland actually gained its independence from Britain. This part
of the story had been kind of maybe 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. Do you also have a thought of
listener mail for us? I do. This is from Ron.
(23:53):
It's from our update to the Franklin Expedition podcast that
we did during Unearthed season uh this year slash end,
and it's one of those letters that I'm really excited
to get because it includes all kinds of stuff that
I would have loved to have gotten into during the episode,
but we did not have enough times who included all,
So Ron says Hi, Holly and Tracy. I listened to
(24:16):
your podcast with some interest as I live in Nunavut,
the Canadian territory where the events of the Franklin Expedition
took place. I wanted to add a few notes to
your account, which helped to illustrate some of the lessons
of the expedition. One one of the most important lessons
of the story is that the explorers did not adopt
the techniques and equipment of the local Inuit people. As
(24:37):
a result, when their food ran out, they were unable
to cope with the local environment. In contrast, John Ray,
one of the men whose travels helped to reveal the
fate of the Franklin Expedition, adopted the clothing and survival
techniques of the local Inuit by speaking with the local
people and traveling with them and learning their culture, and
he was able to piece together the story of Franklin's ships.
(24:59):
One of the story is promoted by Lady Franklin and
sadly people like Charles Dickens, was that the expedition's crew
had been attacked and murdered by the local Innuit people.
The belief at the time was that the indigenous people
were not to be trusted, and this was part of
why they quote needed to be civilized by white Europeans.
This theme of superiority and racism is a very sad
part of the expeditions story and should still resonate with
(25:22):
us today. Two. John Ray's contribution to our knowledge of
the fate of the expedition should not be underestimated. As
mentioned above, Ray was a strong advocate for the Innuit
people and tried to convey the British Admiralty and the
public that the expedition had been lost due to its
own incompetence and arrogance, and not the the treachery of
(25:43):
the Innuit people. A very good account of this can
be seen in the Canadian film Passages three. One of
the items being sought after by the archaeologists are the
logs for the expedition. While you might not expect them
to be preserved, it was the practice of the Royal
Navy at the time to keep these documents in a
sealed brass cylinder. As the cylinder can be found in
(26:03):
the wreck, it will provide valuable information on events during
the voyage. For you did mention this in your podcast,
but it cannot be stressed enough that the wreck of
the Arabis was located not through technology, but through the
accounts provided by the Inuit people of what happened to
the ships. The racism displayed by Europeans in the nineteenth
century persisted into the twentieth century. People reading Inuit accounts
(26:26):
of the rex did not believe what they were told. Again,
this is incredibly sad and it should give us all
pause to consider the way Europeans have treated local people
all over the world. And then he goes on to
give a suggestion for a future episode. And those are
all the bits of this that I wanted to read today.
So thank you so much Ron for sending this email.
(26:48):
Uh that a lot of these are bits that came
up during the research, but the especially because that episode
was essentially an update to something that had happened before,
we were a little limited on time, so I'm glad
we got to talk about it today. Yeah. Uh, if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other episode, where a history podcast at how stuff
works dot com, or Facebook is Facebook dot com slash
(27:10):
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(27:32):
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(27:54):
So you can do all that and a whole lot
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history dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics, because that how stuff works dot com. E
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. Today we're going to talk about a jailbreak,
which sounds like an inherently interesting and exciting and dramatic subject.
(00:23):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:09):
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.
(01:31):
And you know, to the person who recently said to us, please,
for the love of God, no more shipwrecks. There are
ships in this story, but fortunately none of them wreck.
So I've got nautical history and Irish history and Australian
history and British history all tied together along with a
nautical theme and a jail break. Hooray because also a
listener request from Joseph, I should say that part two,
(01:53):
otherwise I 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
(02:16):
of Ireland today. 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,
(02:40):
was basically disenfranchised. And on top of that, Ireland itself
was stricken with poverty. Over generations, Irish families had lost
their land to English landlords. 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.
(03:02):
This whole 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
(03:25):
were Ireland's 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 of the population of Ireland had either left or died.
Which brings us to the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the Fenians.
(03:49):
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 million. 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.
(04:11):
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
(04:35):
and treason. These arrests really strained and already overcrowded British
prison system. As we discussed in the Lady Giuliana 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 could no longer offload
(04:55):
its 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
(05:19):
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
(05:41):
be invested with sharks. As the arrests of Fenians continued,
Britain started sending them to Fremantle 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 eight convicts and of those, sixty two of
them were Fenians, and they arrived in Fremantle in January
(06:05):
of eighteen sixty eight. Although some of the Fenian prisoners
above aboard the Huguemot 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 with the
(06:28):
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. Our sponsor today
(06:49):
is squar Space, which isn't easy to use intuitive drag
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whole year. So if you use the offer code history,
you'll get ten percent off your first purchase. So to
get back to the events in Australia, one of the
Fenians who had been sent to Fremantle Prison was a
(08:18):
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 of Irish
colonists in the area and board a whaler that was
(08:39):
bound for America. Once he got to the United States, O'Reilly,
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, and the
whole thing was eventually released as like a bound book
(09:00):
for people to read. I'm on, 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 on the voyage? Maybe it
was just a time killer, but I do not know.
But not long after that, Devoi, the one who had
been sentenced to hard labor for recruiting Irish soldiers, was
(09:22):
exiled to America. He eventually went to work for the
New York Herald, and he became involved in a secret
society called the Claude Miguel, 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
to John Devoy at the newspaper. This letter included the
(09:43):
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. Devo Away started to feel increasingly
guilty about the Fenians still in Fremantle. After all, he'd
(10:06):
been the one recruiting them all. He hatched a plan
in conjunction with O'Reilly and other members of his secret
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 a ship, but eventually they decided to buy
(10:26):
one instead. He thought donations and one man mortgaged his house,
and eventually they were able to buy the whaling ship Katalpa.
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
to the Fenians or to the clon Neguyo he was.
(10:48):
He was not Irish or 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
really shocking that this person, who had absolutely no ties
(11:08):
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
that they were going to have to operate as an
ordinary whaling vessel along the way, because the proceeds from
(11:31):
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
of good luck along the way by total coincidence. Not
long after the Catalpa A rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
(11:52):
it encountered another ship called the Ocean Beauty, which was
captained by a man named Cosens, who had been the
master of the Hugo Month Cousins 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 stroke of good fortune, most of their luck was
(12:13):
actually pretty bad. 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
the crew actually deserted. They wound up missing the mark
(12:35):
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
crew were on their way to Australia to Feenian agents
(12:56):
were orchestrating a whole other arm of this scheme. Thomas
des And 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. And Breslin actually gets most of the glory here.
(13:17):
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
as cheap labor. He also made friends with an ex
(13:38):
con who had access to the prison and could ferry
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
all that tight. The prison rely on this completely inhospitable
(14:01):
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
prisoners to be rescued, which was up ending his plans
(14:22):
for getting them out. Athenians 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
Katappa had been sunk along the way and was just
not coming at all. The most alarming development in this
whole multi month con was the sudden arrival of two
(14:45):
irishmen who started asking strange questions about the prisoners. Everyone
who was involved in the Australia side of this 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 had
also gotten letters from Fenie and prisoners asking for help,
(15:06):
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 of the jailbreak. Finally,
in April, Anthony and the Catalpa made it to Australia
and he and Breslin set the date for the jailbreak
as Easter Monday, April seventeen. It was traditional for many
(15:28):
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,
Thomas Hassett, Robert Crampston, Martin Hogan, Michael Harrington, and James
(15:49):
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, passed the guards,
who apparently never considered that they might have been escaping
because that thought was just so farignto them. The men
who became known as the Fremantle Six actually left a
(16:13):
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
men headed for the road, where Breslyn and Desmond met
them in carriages and raced off for rocking him twenty
(16:35):
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
going on, and when six prisoners and two other men
appeared on the shore, this local man went to get help.
(16:56):
At this point the prison authorities knew that the jailbreak
had happened. Then 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
to meet the Katapa, Breslin read this note, then sealed
it in a waterproof package and threw it towards shore
(17:20):
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
life by the enlightened and Magnanimous Government of Great Britain,
(17:40):
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
take my now. I've only to say a few cells,
(18:02):
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
that Breslin wrote about the escape. So but after that
(18:28):
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
they had to bail row and try not to capsize.
All through the night, as the men in the whale
(18:50):
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
so at this point they've been out of the jail
for about twenty four hours. The men in the whale
(19:13):
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
luck was still kind of playing against them. The wind
(19:34):
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,
called to the Georgette, that's the American flag. I am
(19:57):
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
to nudge the becalmed Catalpa back into Australian waters. It
(20:18):
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.
(20:38):
I'm not sure if this is a movie, but like
the Sinking of the Spot, 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
(21:00):
less positive, though. Britain was livid and accused the United
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.
(21:21):
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 Devoi continued to be active in the Colon Niguel
(21:43):
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
(22:06):
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
(22:29):
celebrated event. One ballad became so popular and so controversial
that it was officially banned in Western Australia and as
it still was. The ballad starts out a noble whale
shipping commander called the Catalpa they say, came out to
Western Australia and took six poor Fenians away. So come all,
(22:50):
you screw orders and jailers remember Perth Regatta Day. Take
care of the rest of your Fenians or Yankees will
steal them away. And Fremantle Prison closed on November eighth
of I'm glad Joseph asked for this story me too. Um, Like,
(23:11):
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 Escape that's 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
(23:32):
of Ireland actually gained its independence from Britain. This part
of the story had been kind of maybe 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. Do you also have a thought of
listener mail for us? I do. This is from Ron.
(23:53):
It's from our update to the Franklin Expedition podcast that
we did during Unearthed season uh this year slash end,
and it's one of those letters that I'm really excited
to get because it includes all kinds of stuff that
I would have loved to have gotten into during the episode,
but we did not have enough times who included all,
So Ron says Hi, Holly and Tracy. I listened to
(24:16):
your podcast with some interest as I live in Nunavut,
the Canadian territory where the events of the Franklin Expedition
took place. I wanted to add a few notes to
your account, which helped to illustrate some of the lessons
of the expedition. One one of the most important lessons
of the story is that the explorers did not adopt
the techniques and equipment of the local Inuit people. As
(24:37):
a result, when their food ran out, they were unable
to cope with the local environment. In contrast, John Ray,
one of the men whose travels helped to reveal the
fate of the Franklin Expedition, adopted the clothing and survival
techniques of the local Inuit by speaking with the local
people and traveling with them and learning their culture, and
he was able to piece together the story of Franklin's ships.
(24:59):
One of the story is promoted by Lady Franklin and
sadly people like Charles Dickens, was that the expedition's crew
had been attacked and murdered by the local Innuit people.
The belief at the time was that the indigenous people
were not to be trusted, and this was part of
why they quote needed to be civilized by white Europeans.
This theme of superiority and racism is a very sad
part of the expeditions story and should still resonate with
(25:22):
us today. Two. John Ray's contribution to our knowledge of
the fate of the expedition should not be underestimated. As
mentioned above, Ray was a strong advocate for the Innuit
people and tried to convey the British Admiralty and the
public that the expedition had been lost due to its
own incompetence and arrogance, and not the the treachery of
(25:43):
the Innuit people. A very good account of this can
be seen in the Canadian film Passages three. One of
the items being sought after by the archaeologists are the
logs for the expedition. While you might not expect them
to be preserved, it was the practice of the Royal
Navy at the time to keep these documents in a
sealed brass cylinder. As the cylinder can be found in
(26:03):
the wreck, it will provide valuable information on events during
the voyage. For you did mention this in your podcast,
but it cannot be stressed enough that the wreck of
the Arabis was located not through technology, but through the
accounts provided by the Inuit people of what happened to
the ships. The racism displayed by Europeans in the nineteenth
century persisted into the twentieth century. People reading Inuit accounts
(26:26):
of the rex did not believe what they were told. Again,
this is incredibly sad and it should give us all
pause to consider the way Europeans have treated local people
all over the world. And then he goes on to
give a suggestion for a future episode. And those are
all the bits of this that I wanted to read today.
So thank you so much Ron for sending this email.
(26:48):
Uh that a lot of these are bits that came
up during the research, but the especially because that episode
was essentially an update to something that had happened before,
we were a little limited on time, so I'm glad
we got to talk about it today. Yeah. Uh, if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other episode, where a history podcast at how stuff
works dot com, or Facebook is Facebook dot com slash
(27:10):
miss industry, and our Twitter is miss in History. Our
tumbler is miss Industry dot tumbler dot com, and or
on also on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed
in History. We have a spreadshirt store full of shirts
and other fun things. It isn't miss in History dot
spreadshirt dot com. And if you'd like to learn a
little more about something related to what we've talked about today,
(27:32):
you can come to our parent company's website that is
how stuff Works dot com, and you will learn about
another supposedly impenetrable prison, Alcatraz. If you put Alcatraz into
the search bar and find how Alcatraz worked. You can
also come to our website, which is miss in history
dot com to find show notes and uh blog posts
and an archive of every single episode we have ever done.
(27:54):
So you can do all that and a whole lot
more at how stuff works dot com or miss in
history dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics, because that how stuff works dot com. E
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