Free the Fremantle six

CL Dallat is gripped by Peter Stevens's account of how a group of Irish rebels staged a daring nautical escape from an Australian convict colony, The Voyage of the Catalpa

The Voyage of the Catalpa by Peter Stevens

by Peter Stevens
328pp, Weidenfeld, £14.99

"Ripping" maritime escapades have little place in Ireland's prolific liberation literature - with its contemplative prison journals, ballads of ambushes in lonely glens and dramas of gunfire on city streets - or indeed in Irish writing at large, a striking absence given a sea-faring tradition at least as enduring as that of its sea-girt, wave-ruling neighbour.

The sea journey was at the heart of early myth, the Celts being seafarers themselves well before the arrival of north African stylites, Norse long-boatmen, Norman colonisers, Barbary pirates and Armada survivors. In the early Christian period, Brendan the Navigator was discovering Iceland (or Newfoundland) when Hengist and Horsa were having difficulty locating Thanet. Irish seamen played a major role, too, in Britain's seagoing history, and the 19th century was to see such a vast tranche of the populace undertaking uncomfortably real journeys to the mythical blest lands in the west that persons of Irish extraction in partibus infidelis now outnumber the stay-at-homes by at least 10 to one.

Yet Ireland's copious cultural hoard over the past two or three centuries offers little sign of nautical engagement beyond a few storm-tossed shanties and occasional echoes of the sea's griefs in Lady Gregory's plays. To Joyce's Buck Mulligan it was, parodying Homer, "The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea", and Elizabeth Bowen's admission to being only truly at home on the Holyhead boat referred to the gulf between the two halves of her Anglo-Irish identity rather than to a love of the rough passage itself. Testimony to the horrors of forced or assisted migration in the notorious "coffin-ships" during the Great Hunger has, surprisingly, only begun to be heard through poets such as Eavan Boland and in Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea (reviewed in these pages on January 25).

Two exceptions are the works of Patrick O'Brian, whose square-rigged epics exhibit greater technical veracity than his claims to Irishness - at least since his death (although most Irish readers will already have found his Stephen Maturin an improbable Gael); and Erskine Childers' seminal spy novel Riddle of the Sands (Blofeld meets Swallows and Amazons). The fact that Childers was executed by a Free State government for irredentist republicanism (and that his son was to succeed De Valera as president of the republic) does not diminish the inherent Britishness of his fictionalised warning to Britain, in the voice of one "Carruthers of the FO", of the dangers of Germany's naval build-up in the Frisian Islands before the great war.

So Boston journalist Peter Stevens's yarn, set in 1875-76, with its beautifully specific Victorian subtitle (and it does exactly what it says on the cover) is destined to remain sui generis. But its very unlikeliness has much to say about the future course of Irish nationalism and its engagements with America.

With enough jib booms, keelsons and leg-of-mutton sails to satisfy a Forester (or O'Brian) fan, enough fitting out of whalers in New Bedford to match Melville and easily enough glowering resentments among the cabin-crazy crew of Scots, Portuguese and Malays to satisfy an enthusiast for Conrad's brooding insights, Stevens's narrative is essentially a cool historical record of the shift from the fervid nationalism of pikestaff rebels to a structured, military - and international - Fenianism.

The 1798 rebellion had proved the lessons of recent American and French revolutions inappropriate to Ireland, and the romantic Young Ireland "year-of-revolutions" escapade in 1848 had ended badly in a cabbage patch in County Tipperary. But 1860s nationalism could call on Irishmen who had served Britain in the Crimea, Afghanistan and the Punjab and some who had defended the Pope against Garibaldi at Spoleto. Up to 22,000 British soldiers had taken the Fenian oath (after "Fianna", the band of warriors in Celtic legend). More significantly, several hundred thousand Irish immigrants had been conscripted to the Union side in the American civil war. Many of these saw how military training and, for those still in uniform, arms could be annexed to their own hereditary cause.

Stevens traces both the sudden expansion of Fenianism and its nadir as Scotland Yard and Dublin Castle, on intelligence supplied by informers and provocateurs, swooped on the army within. His story concerns particularly the "military Fenians", rebels in British uniform, who were singularly punished: the last antipodean transportees, they were refused remission even after civilian co-conspirators were released.

The service records of the six rebels (and a seventh, John Boyle O'Reilly) are related, although the frequently cited motive for taking the king's shilling - namely, access to free training in the use of arms which would later be of service to Ireland - may well have occurred to some in retrospect. O'Reilly's escape in 1869 with the help of, predictably, a local priest and, unexpectedly, an American whaling boat, took him to an American east coast seething with well-organised and well-financed Fenianism.

The competence and idealism of the movement's political wing, Clan na Gael, offers a useful corrective to Scorsese's primordial vision of inchoate Irish (and native Manhattanite) 1860s thugs in Gangs of New York. It is a simple matter for O'Reilly to repay his own luck in having found a contingent and complaisant whaler by using Clan funds to charter a New Bedford ship whose master, Captain George Smith Anthony, is initially one of only two men aboard who know of the ship's secret mission.

Meanwhile two other Fenians set off for Fremantle, passing themselves off as prospective investors and playing on the emerging state's welcome to organise the landward end of the escape. One of this advance party gets the daughter of a local hotelkeeper pregnant, although the author is keen to stress - in deference perhaps to the famed chivalry of Irish Catholic rebels - that the couple had actually fallen in love and that Breslin/"Collins" always intended to have her follow him to the US after her confinement (and indeed left sufficient funds for her to do so).

The journey and its tensions, the passing of secret messages to the prisoners and the eventual escape with the Catalpa's whaleboat struggling against inevitable odds, hidden reefs and broadsides from a British navy steamer is a classic tale of daring. The clincher, however, is neither Captain Anthony's seamanship nor the escapees' bravery, but the stars and stripes. Once outside territorial waters, the British ship cannot fire on a vessel under the American flag; and despite howls of protest from London, American popular opinion - uncomfortable with Britain's naval might since 1775 and 1812, and angry at Britain's support for the Confederacy during the civil war - remained on the side of the escapees.

In some ways the character of John Boyle O'Reilly is a gift to the narrator. A classic hero, he not only travels halfway round the world and risks his own hard-won freedom for his comrades, but brings along a carpenter and timber to build shipboard cabins for the escapees, and writes poetry en route. Best known for his convict novel Moondyne, O'Reilly was later involved with ex-Christian-Brother John Holland in inventing a wooden submarine, the Fenian Ram, to defeat Britain's naval might. (Ironically, Holland eventually sold his designs to both British and American navies.) Much of the delight of Stevens's tale is in its stress on ingenuity rather than old-fashioned heroism. And one of the consequent ironies is Disraeli's public refusal to consider clemency a week after the men had actually escaped: word had not reached London as the Fenians had taken the precaution of cutting the Australia-Java telegraph cable.

But many aspects of the story are, sadly, all too familiar. The chronic British vacillation over whether Irish rebels are or are not political prisoners is an issue with strident echoes in our time, and O'Reilly's message that clemency would have disarmed rebel militancy has only begun to be heard a century later. The internal strife among the rebels (including a near-mutiny against their saviour, Captain Anthony) and the reliance of both sides on informers and double-agents are equally characteristic of more recent Irish "troubles". In a tightly written book, carefully balanced between gripping adventure and serious history, Stevens has given his characters enough humanity to involve the reader in their exploits and dilemmas, while avoiding the pull of Irish sentiment and republican rhetoric.

· CL Dallat's most recent collection of poems is Morning Star (Lagan Press)

What did you think?


Find books to review, discuss, buy

Today's best video

Latest books added to lists |

Top stories in this section

Top videos

Most popular

Today in pictures