The Catalpa Expedition/Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI

BANISHMENT TO AUSTRALIA

After being convicted of mutiny in her Majesty's forces in Ireland, the men spent weary months in hideous English prisons. One day the keys rattled in the dungeon doors; they were marched out in double irons, chained together with a bright, strong chain. They were taken aboard the convict ship Hougoumont, where the chains were knocked off and they were ordered below.

There were sixty-three political prisoners on the Hougoumont, and they were the first sent out to Australia since the Irish uprising in 1848. They were likewise the last ever sent to the colony. Of these prisoners fifteen had been soldiers, and they were placed with the criminals in the fore part of the ship at night, although they were permitted to spend the days with the political prisoners.

Of the horrors of a convict ship experience it is unnecessary to say more than to quote O'Reilly, who was one of the unfortunate company on the Hougoumont.

"Only those who have stood within the bars," says he, "and heard the din of devils and the appalling sounds of despair, blended in a diapason that made every hatch-mouth a vent of hell, can imagine the horrors of the hold of a convict ship."

Strapped to the foremast was the black gaff with its horrid apparatus for tricing unruly men up for flogging, and above, tied around the foremast, ever before their eyes, was a new hempen halter, "which swung mutineers and murderers out over the hissing sea to eternity."

Every night the exiles, Catholic and Protestant, joined in a prayer which ran as follows:—

"God, who art the arbiter of the destiny of nations and who rulest the world in thy great wisdom, look down, we beseech thee, from thy holy place on the sufferings of our poor country. Scatter her enemies, Lord, and confound their evil projects. Hear us, God, hear the earnest cry of our people, and give them strength and fortitude to dare and suffer in their holy cause. Send her help, Lord, from thy holy place. And from Zion protect her. Amen."

The Hougoumont reached Freemantle, after a dreary voyage, at three o'clock on the morning of January 10, 1868. "Her passengers could see," writes James Jeffrey Roche in his "Life of O'Reilly," "high above the little town and the woodland about it, the great white stone prison which represents Freemantle's reason for existence. It was 'The Establishment;' that is to say the government; that is to say, the advanced guard of Christian civilization in the wild bush. The native beauty of the place is marred by the straggling

THE JAIL AT FREEMANTLE, WHERE THE PRISONERS WERE CONFINED

irregularity of the town, as it is blighted by the sight and defiled by the touch of the great criminal establishment."

Then the convicts heard the appalling code of rules, with the penalty for violation, which was usually death; and then they were assigned to the road parties, and from daylight to dark, in the heat which made the cockatoos in the trees motionless and the parrots silent, they blazed their way through the Australian bush and forest.

The present was made horrid by the companionship of desperate and degraded men, "the poison flower of civilization's corruption," and the future seemed hopeless.

Meanwhile James Wilson sent out an appeal for rescue. He sent it to John Devoy in America.