| Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaelogical Society, 1969, volume LXXIV Convict Ship Newspaper, The Wild Goose, Re-discovered By Walter McGrath Introductory Two years ago I contributed an article(1) to the Cork Holly Bough on the voyage from England to Australia, in October 1867-January 1868, of the British convict ship, Hougoumont, bearing to exile those Fenians who had been selected from the prisons at Dartmoor, Pentonville, Chatham, Millbank, Portsmouth and Portland for transportation to the penal settlement at Fremantle, Western Australia. The article was based on general and local (Cork) research in Fenianism, supplemented by information from the earlier published accounts of the voyage (most of them brief) appearing in such works as:—J.J. Roche, Life, Poems and Speeches of John Boyle O’Reilly; Z.W. Pease, The Catalpa Expedition; T. J. Kiernan, The Irish Exiles in Australia; W.J. Laubenstein, The Emerald Whaler; Seán Ó Lúing, Freemantle Mission; C. Bateson, The Convict Ships. In that article I was rash enough to cast doubts on the possibility at this juncture of compiling a full roll call of the 62 Fenians on board the Hougoumont. Little did I know then that Mr. Gerald P. Fitzgerald,(2) Australian-born son of a County Limmerick Fenian, had been for some years engaged in most thorough research into the subject of the Fenians in Australia. Although residing in Melbourne he has travelled on a number of occasions across the continent to Fremantle to work for several weeks on the 19th century prison records there and at nearby Perth, and he has painstakingly compiled a vast amount of information about the 62 Fenian prisoners, including their names (checked with the Public Record Office in London), their prison numbers and the dates when they left the colony. Here is the full list of prisoners, which I give with grateful acknowledgement to Mr. Fitzgerald: Jeremiah Aher, Thomas Baines, Daniel Bradley, Hugh Brophy, John Sarsfield Casey (“The Galtee Boy”), Denis B. Cashman, Michael Cody, George F. Connolly, Robert Cranston, Thomas Bowler Cullinane, David Cummins, Thomas Daly, Thomas Darragh, Thomas Delaney, John Donoghue, Patrick Doran, Simon Downey, Thomas Duggan, Patrick Dunne; Thomas Mc C. Fennell, Maurice Fitzgibbon, James Flood, John Flood, Thomas Fogarty, John Foley, William Foley, Laurence and Luke Fullam (brothers), Eugene Geary, John Goulding (Golden), Michael Harrington, Thomas Henry Hassett, Denis Hennessy, Martin Hogan, David Joyce; Cornelius Dwyer Keane, James Kearney, Patrick Keating, James Keilly, John Edward Kelly, John Kenealy, Patrick Killeen, Patrick Leahy, Eugene Lombard, John Lynch, James McCoy, Morgan McSweeney, Robert Maye, Michael Moore, Bartholomew Moriarty; Joseph Noonan, Michael Noonan, Jeremiah O’Donovan, Cornelius O’Mahony, John Boyle O’Reilly, Patrick Riordan, James Reilly, John Sheehan, John Shine, Patrick Wall, John Bennett Walsh, James Wilson. Over 20 of them were from Cork or had close associations with Cork. They included several who had taken part in the Rising of March 1867; others who had been imprisoned since the police sweeps of 1865; and 17 (including John Boyle O’Reilly) who were known as the “military Fenians” because they had been serving in the British army when convicted of taking the I.R.B. oath or of otherwise helping Fenianism. (One of these was John Lynch of Bandon, a private in the Fifth Dragoon Guards, who is not to be confused with the better-known Cork city Fenian of that name who had died in Woking prison hospital, Surrey, in June 1866.(3) Three of the Co. Corkmen on board had originally been sentenced to death, their sentence later being commuted to penal servitude for life. Those three were David Joyce and Thomas Bowler Cullinane of Ballymacoda, two Irish speakers, who had raided Knockadoon-Warren coastguard houses under Peter O’Neill Crowley on the night of the Rising; and John Edward (Ned) Kelly, a Kinsale born Protestant who had been with O’Neill Crowley at the fatal affray at Kilclooney on March 31, 1867. Several others were also under life sentence, while the sentences of the rest ranged from 20 years to five years. All had endured extreme prison suffering before transportation. The rigid discipline of British jails was, however, relaxed on board the Hougoumont, and the Fenians were fortunate in that they had a friendly chaplain, Fr. Bernard Delaney of Dublin, travelling to Australia with them. This shipment of convicts (280 of them) from Britain to the Antipodes was the first since Young Ireland days, 19 years before, and was destined to be the last. All the published accounts of the voyage mention that the Fenians produced a hand-written newspaper or journal, which they called The Wild Goose. The paper and ink for it were procured by Fr. Delaney and seven weekly issues appeared, culminating in a double-size Christmas number. Saturday was publication day, and the Fenians would look forward to coming together in one of the holds and having the contents of the paper read aloud to them by John Flood, who was chief editor, or John Boyle O’Reilly, his assistant. O’Reilly later wrote(4): “We published seven weekly numbers of it. Amid the dim glare of the lamp, the men at night would group strangely on extemporized seats. The yellow light fell down on the dark forms, throwing a ghastly glare on the pale faces of the men . . .” Corkman Eugen Lombard (a baker of Cornmarket Street), who had been captured by Lancers from Mallow on the slopes of Bottle Hill after the attack on Ballyknockane police barracks on the morning of the Rising (March 6), wrote home to his parents some time after his arrival at Fremantle, under date January 22, 1868, as follows:(5) “We enjoyed a tolerable passage and arrived here on the 9th of January, making the voyage in 89 days. Really I was heartily sick of life on board ship, the journey was so long. I managed one way or other to while away the time. Myself and my exiled friends lived very agreeably during the passage. We were kept separate from other prisoners and placed in a good part of the ship nearly amidships. We published a written newspaper on board, entitled “The Wild Goose”. I was a copyist on it and it was edited by J. Flood, he that was tried with Capt. McCafferty. Eight (sic) copies of it appeared. Only half the voyage was over when ‘twas thought of. It was our greatest delight to have a read of it . . . I wrote a diary of the voyage; it will occupy about 30 sheets of letter-paper when properly transcribed. I have it entered as private property here and as soon as I will be let out of prison I shall prepare a copy of it and send it home to you. It will entertain you much and will give you a real idea of what a voyage of 14,000 miles is, and also a sketch of my own life on board ship . . . There are extracts from six copies of “The Wild Goose” in it. I could never have written it if not for a kind friend on board that supplied me with paper. The Galtee Boy wrote another one . . .” Exactly a century after Eugene Lombard had penned these lines, the original manuscript of The Wild Goose (of which some copies had been made at the end of the voyage) was given into the custody of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, New South Wales, by Mrs. Sheelagh Johnson, grand-daughter of John Flood. By coincidence, at that time (late 1967 and early 1968) three people in Australia were engaged in research in Fenian history. They were Mr. G. P. Fitzgerald, already mentioned; Rev. John Senan Moynihan, diocesan archivist, Perth, better known in Ireland as Father Senan, former editor of the Capuchin Annual, and Mrs. Alan Queale of Brisbane, a well known writer on Irish-Australian affairs. My own article in the Cork Holly Bough was followed within a month by a series of three in the Melbourne Advocate by Fr. Moynihan, all marking the 100th anniversary of the voyage of the Hougoumont and, in the case of the Advocate series, marking, too, the centenary of the ending of the utilisation by Britain of Western Australia as a penal colony. In their correspondence with one another the three widely-separated researches, in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane, speculated as to the possibility of a copy of the Fenians’ convict ship publication being extant, little suspecting that at that very time the editor’s grand-daughter (who had held it for 20 years) was about to deposit the original in the Library of New South Wales—the repository of the greatest collection of manuscripts in Australia. It was to Mr. Queale that the news was first broken—in a chance communication from the Mitchell Deputy Librarian who mentioned that they had recently come into possession of a 64 page Irish handwritten newspaper called The Wild Goose continued. |
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