CHAPTER III.
THREE characteristic poems were written by O'Reilly on the walls of his prison cell at this time: "The Irish Flag," a short patriotic outburst; "For Life," composed on hearing that his comrade Color-Sergeant McCarthy had received a life sentence, and "The Irish Soldiers," this last having a foot-note appended as follows:
"Written on the wall of my cell with a nail, July 17, 1866. Once an English soldier; now an Irish felon; and proud of the exchange."
Of the three poems, the second is the best, though all are so lacking in finish and strength that he wisely forebore including any of them in his published volumes. It begins with a strong stanza, suggestive of the poet's later and better work, but its merit may be said to end there.
Of all charges guilty! he knew it before;
But it's now read aloud in the scarlet-clad square,—
Formality's farce must be played out once more—
May it sink in the heart of his countrymen there!
After a short detention at Mountjoy, O'Reilly, McCarthy, and Chambers were marched through the streets, chained together by the arms, and shipped over to England, to begin their long term of suffering. They were at first confined in Pentonville, where they were allowed but one hour of exercise a day, the "exercise " consisting in pacing to and fro in a cell without a roof. The rest of the day they were locked up in their separate cells.
In a few days they were transferred to Millbank to undergo a term of solitary confinement, preliminary to the severe physical punishment ordained in their sentence. Every reader of Dickens remembers the description in his "American Notes," of the Eastern Penitentiary at Philadelphia, and its "Solitary System." It was the same system, in its absolute seclusion of the prisoner from his fellows, as that which prevailed in Millbank. All that Dickens says of the prison in Philadelphia applies equally to Millbank:
"I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore, I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating with myself, whether, if I had the power of saying 'Yes' or 'No,' I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where the terms of imprisonment were short; but now, I solemnly declare, that with no rewards or honors could I walk a happy man beneath the open sky by day, or lie me down upon my bed at night, with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, no matter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree."
The condemnation of the great novelist is sweeping, the words which I have italicized above showing that he did not measure the horror of the punishment by its duration. Self-satisfied reformers have pooh-poohed his verdict as that of a sentimentalist who had enjoyed no personal experience of the system. That their experience of it had been wholly impersonal also, made no difference in their judgment of its merits. Other supporters of the system have pointed triumphantly to the fact that the convict Charles Langheimer,—"Dickens's Dutchman," as he was called,—whom the author of the "Notes" had described dramatically among the victims of the system, served his sentence of five, years, and various other sentences afterwards, aggregating altogether some forty-two years, and died in prison at last at the age of seventy. He became such a confirmed jail-bird that on the expiration of one term of imprisonment, he would immediately commit some new theft, in order that he might be returned to his old quarters. Which is a complete demonstration of the value of the system, as a reformatory agent, in the eyes of its worshipers.
Happily we are not without the evidence of better authorities on the subject than either the humane novelist, who studied it as a mere visitor, or the poor debased and brutalized "Dutchman," whom it so successfully unfitted for a life of freedom. John Mitchell, the iron-willed patriot, whom no physical torture could subdue, confesses that when the door of his cell first closed on him, and he realized the full meaning of "solitary confinement," he flung himself upon his bed and "broke into a raging passion of tears—tears bitter and salt, but not of base lamentation for my own fate. The thoughts and feelings that have so shaken me for this once, language was never made to describe."
Michael Davitt says:
*****
A circumstance in connection with the situation of Millbank may (taken with what I have already said on that prison) give some faint idea of what confinement there really means. Westminster Tower clock is not far distant from the penitentiary, so that its every stroke is as distinctly heard in each cell as if it were situated in one of the prison yards. At each quarter of an hour, day and night, it chimes a bar of "Old Hundredth," and those solemn tones strike on the ears of the lonely listeners like the voice of some monster singing the funeral dirge of time.
Oft in the lonely watches of the night has it reminded me of the number of strokes I was doomed to listen to, and of how slowly those minutes were creeping along! The weird chant of Westminster clock will ever haunt my memory, and recall that period of my imprisonment when I first had to implore Divine Providence to preserve my reason and save me from the madness which seemed inevitable, through mental and corporal tortures combined.
That human reason should give way under such adverse influences is not, I think, to be wondered at and many a still living wreck of manhood can refer to the silent system of Millbank and its pernicious surroundings as the cause of his debilitated mind.
It was here that Edward Duffy died, and where Eickard Burke and Martin Hanly Carey were for a time oblivious of their sufferings from temporary insanity, and where Daniel Reddin was paralyzed. It was here where Thomas Ahem first showed symptoms of madness, and was put in dark cells and strait-Jacket for a "test" as to the reality of these symptoms.Davitt further avers that during all his confinement at Millbank, —
Corporal Thomas Chambers says:
The cells, in which poor Chambers complained he was not allowed to walk about, were not spacious, being nine or ten feet long by about eight feet wide, with stone floors, bare walls, and, for sole furniture, a bedstead of three planks a few inches from the floor, and a water bucket which had to serve as a chair when the prisoner was at work picking oakum or coir. There was no fire; walking in the cells was prohibited; and the scanty bed-clothing barely sufficed to keep the occupant from freezing. An hour's exercise in the yard was allowed every day, the only other variation of the monotonous regime being the daily work of washing and scrubbing his cell, which each prisoner had to do immediately on getting up.
The food was in keeping with the lodgings; sufficient to sustain life, but nothing more.
The severest punishment of Millbank was the silence and solitude, almost unbearable to anybody whose mind was not exceptionally strong or exceptionally stolid. O'Reilly had the blessing and the curse of genius, an active, vivid imagination. He found solace in his thoughts and in the pages of "The Imitation of Christ," which he was allowed to read; but he endured many hours of the keenest anguish. At times his mind was abnormally active; he felt an exaltation of the soul such as an anchorite knows; he had ecstatic visions. Again, his vigorous physical nature asserted itself, and he yearned for freedom, as the healthy, natural man must ever do in confinement.
But he had made up his mind, on entering the prison, to conquer circumstances, to preserve his brain and body sound, and to bear with patience the ills which he could not escape. He took an interest in studying the fellow prisoners with whom he was forbidden to hold the slightest intercourse. The prohibition did not always avail, for human ingenuity can ever circumvent the most rigid of rules. The political convicts in the early days of their imprisonment in Arbor Hill had devised a rude system of telegraphy by tapping on the iron pipes running through all the cells. It was a slow and cumbrous device, but time was then of the least importance to them. There were also occasional chances of exchanging a whisper as they filed to prayers, or meals, or marched in the hour of daily exercise.
Among O'Reilly's MSS. is the following fragment, written several years ago—a curious study of prison life from the inside:
I was a convict in an English prison four years ago, and, before the impressions then received are weakened or rubbed out by time, it may be of interest to recall a few reminiscences. First, let me remove all fears of those who are thinking that, where they least expect it, they have fallen among thieves. I was not in the true sense of the word a criminal, although classed with them and treated precisely the same as they were. My offense against the law was political. I had been a soldier in a cavalry regiment, and had been convicted of being a republican and trying to make other men the same; and so, in the winter of 1867, it came about that I occupied Cell 32, in Pentagon 5, Millbank prison, London, on the iron-barred door of which cell hung a small white card bearing this inscription, "John Boyle O'Reilly, 20 years."
Some people would think it strange that I should still regard that cell—in which I spent nearly a year of solitary confinement—with affection; but it is true. Man is a domestic animal, and to a prisoner, with "20 years" on his door, the cell is Home. I look back with fond regard to a great many cells and a great many prisons in England and Australia, which are associated to my mind in a way not to be wholly understood by any one but myself. And if ever I should go back to England (which is doubtful, for I escaped from prison in Australia in 1869, and so permanently ended the 20 years), the first place I would visit would be one of the old prisons. Remember, my name and many a passing thought are scratched and written on many a small place within those cells which I perfectly well recollect, and it would be a great treat to go back some day and read them. And then, during the time I was in prison, I got acquainted with thousands of professional criminals, old and young, who will be the occupants of the English jails for the next twenty years; and I confess it would be of great interest to me to go back and walk the corridor with all the brimming respectability of a visitor, and stop when I saw a face I knew of old, and observe how time and villainy had dealt with it.
I had been in prison about eight months—all the time in solitary confinement—before I was brought "cheek by jowl" with the regular criminals. I confess I had a fear of the first plunge into the sea of villainous association; but my army experience rendered the immersion easier for me than for many others who had been dragged to confinement from the purity of a happy home. I was in separate confinement in Millbank, and I suppose it is necessary to explain, for the benefit of those who never had the good fortune to live in a prison, that separate confinement means that the convict so sentenced is to be shut up in his cell with light work, sewing or picking coir, and to have one hour's exercise per day, which consists in walking in single file, with long distances between the prisoners, around the exercise yard, and then turning an immense crank, which pumps water into the corridors. The men stood at this crank facing each other, and the man facing me was a perfect type of the brutal English jail-bird. I had noticed the fellow in the chapel for three mornings previously, but this was the first day I had taken the regular exercise.
He was a man about thirty-five years of age, with a yellowish-white, corpse-like face, one of those faces on which whiskers never grow, and only a few long hairs in place of a mustache. Of course he, was closely shaven, but I felt that that was the nature of his whiskers when "outside." I had noticed, sitting behind this man as I did in chapel, almost directly in the rear of him, that I could see his eyes. He had a narrow, straight face, and there was a deep scoop, as it were, taken out of each bone where the forehead joined the cheek, and through this scoop I saw the eye from behind even more clearly than when standing in front of the man, for his brows overhung in a most forbidding way.
We had marched, Indian file, from our cells on my first morning's exercise, and had taken about three circuits of the yard when the officer shouted in a harsh, unfriendly tone, the prison order,—"Halt 1 File on to crank. No. 1."
No. 1 turned toward the center of the yard, where ran the series of cranks arranged with one handle for two men facing each other. When I got to my place I was face to face with the Corpse-man, and when he turned his head sideways, I saw his left eye through the scoop in his cheekbone. The officers stood behind me. There were three of them to the gang of twenty men, and their duty was to watch so that no communication took place between the prisoners. I felt that the Corpse-man wanted to talk to me, but he kept his hidden eyes on the officers behind me and turned the crank without the movement of a muscle of his face. Presently, I heard a whisper, "Mate," and I knew it must be he who spoke, although still not a muscle seemed to move. I looked at him and waited. He said again in the same mysterious manner: "Mate, what's your sentence?"Millbank, which O'Reilly in his "Moondyne" calls "a hideous hive of order and commonplace severity, where the flooding sunlight is a derision," was more terrible to a man of his nature, in its grim regularity, than the old-fashioned dungeon. It was pulled down in 1875.
On the expiration of their term of solitary confinement, in April, 1867, O'Reilly, Sergeant McCarthy, and Corporal Chambers were sent to work with common criminals in the prison brickyards at Chatham. They were chained together, as before, and marched through the streets for the delectation of the populace. At Chatham they occupied cells known as "end cells," which receive ventilation from the hall only, where the sanitary arrangements of the prison are situated. The ordinary cells are ventilated from the outside.
Here O'Reilly and two others attempted to escape, and, being recaptured, were put on bread and water for a month, and, after that, chained together and sent to Portsmouth. They were put into gangs, with the worst wretches, to do the hardest of work. They had to wheel brick for machines. Each machine will make a great many in an hour, and their time and numbers were so arranged that from morning till night they could rest only when the machine did. In Portsmouth he again attempted to escape; but failed, and got thirty days more on bread and water.
He and his companions were next removed in chains to Dartmoor—a place that has associations with American history. There, on April 6, 1815, occurred the infamous massacre of American prisoners, shot down by their guards because of an imaginary plot to break jail. Dartmoor is the worst of all the English prisons. Only a man of the strongest constitution can hope to survive the rigorous climate and unremitting hard labor of the dreary prison, planted in the middle of the bleak Devonshire moor. Two of the Irish convicts died of the hardships and cruelties there endured by them. McCarthy and Chambers underwent twelve years of torture in this and other prisons. They were released in 1878; the former to die in the arms of his friends within a few days; the latter, less fortunate, to drag out eleven years of broken health and unceasing pain. Both had been typical specimens of manly strength when they exchanged the British uniform for the convict's garb. O'Reilly, little given to talk of his own sufferings, could not restrain his indignation when speaking of the studied brutality inflicted upon his comrades. Writing of Chambers's death, which occurred on December 2, 1888, he thus recalls the Dartmoor days:
O'Reilly paints the same dark picture again in a fictitious work, whose most striking feature is the truthful sketch of prison life contributed by the ex-convict.
In 1884, in conjunction with Robert Grant, Fred. J. Stimson ("J. S. Dale"), and John T. Wheelwright, he wrote the clever, prophetical novel entitled, "The King's men: a Tale of To-morrow." It was a story of the reign of George the Fifth," and of the coming century. There was plenty of humor, and a good deal of wisdom disguised as humor, in the extravagant pictures drawn by the four young authors. George the Fifth had fled from his rebellious subjects and taken refuge in America. The French republic, "over seventy years old," and the commonwealths of Germany, thirty-three years old, the aristocratic republic of Russia, and the other democratic governments of the world were prosperous, as the British republic, also, had been under "0'Donovan Rourke, the first president, and his two famous ministers, Jonathan Sims and Richard Lincoln." Some belated royalists plotted to overthrow the republic and restore the monarchy. Their conspiracy came to naught, and they were sent into penal servitude. O'Reilly thus sketches the fate of the conspirators:
The convicts were sent to Dartmoor Prison, which is graphically described by its old inmate. The picture is accurate, barring the slight poetical license appropriate to a fiction of the future:
On this morning the dark walls dripped with the weeping atmosphere, and the voice of the huge prison bell in the main yard sounded distant and strange, like a storm-bell in a fog at sea.
Through the thick drizzle of the early morning the convicts were marched in gangs to their daily tasks; some to build new walls within the prison precincts, some to break stone in the round yard, encircled by enormous iron railings fifteen feet high, some to the great kitchen of the prison, and to the different workshops. About one third of the prisoners marched outside the walls by the lower entrance; for the prison stands on a hill, at the foot of which stretches the most forsaken and grisly waste in all Dartmoor.
The task of the convicts for two hundred years had been the reclamation of this wide waste, which was called "The Farm." The French prisoners of war, taken in the Napoleonic wars that ended with Waterloo, had dug trenches to drain the waste. The American prisoners of the War of 1812 had laid roadways through the marsh. The Irish rebels of six generations had toiled in the tear-scalded footsteps of the French and American captives. And all the time the main or "stock" supply of English criminals, numbering usually about four hundred men, had spent their weary years in toiling and broiling at "The Farm."
Standing at the lower gate of the prison, from which a steep road descended to the marsh looking over "The Farm," it was hard to see anything like a fair return for such continued and patient labor. Deep trenches filled with claret-colored water drained innumerable patches of sickly vegetation. About a hundred stunted fruit trees and as many bedraggled haystacks were all that broke the surface line.
To the left of the gate, on the sloping side of the hill, was a quadrangular space of about thirty by twenty yards, round which was built a low wall of evidently great antiquity. The few courses of stones were huge granite bowlders and slabs torn and rolled from the hillside. There was no gateway or break in the square; to enter the inclosure one must climb over the wall, which was easy enough to do.
Inside the square was a rough heap of granite, a cairn, gray with lichens, in the center of which stood, or rather leaned, a tall, square block of granite, like a dolmen. So great was the age of this strange obelisk that the lichens had encrusted it to the top. The stone had once stood upright; but it now leaned toward the marsh, the cairn having slowly yielded on the lower side.
*****
Geoffrey, who had been employed in the office of the Governor of the prison, and who had, on hearing this old monument was to be repaired, volunteered on behalf of the three others to do the work, now told the story of the old monument as he had learned it from the prison records which he had been transcribing:
"In the wars of the Great Napoleon," Geoffrey said, "the French prisoners captured by England were confined in hulks on the seacoast till the hulks overflowed. Then this prison was built, and filled with unfortunate Frenchmen. In 1813 the young republic of America went to war with England, and hundreds of American captives were added to the Frenchmen. During the years of their confinement scores of these poor fellows died, and one day the Americans mutinied, and then other scores were shot down in the main yard. This field was the graveyard of those prisoners, and here the strangers slept for over half a century, till their bones were washed out of the hillside by the rainstorms. There happened to be in Dartmoor at that time a party of Irish rebels, and they asked permission to collect the bones and bury them securely. The Irishmen raised this cairn and obelisk to the Americans and Frenchmen, and now, after another hundred years, we are sent to repair their loving testimonial."
"It is an interesting story," said Featherstone.
"A sad story for old men," said the Duke.
"A brave story for boys," said Mr. Sydney; "I could lift this obelisk itself for sympathy."
They went on, working and chatting in low tones, till an exclamation from Sydney made them look up. Sydney was on top of the cairn, scraping the lichens from the obelisk. The moss was hard to cut, and had formed a crust, layer on layer, half an inch in thickness.
"What is it, my dear Sydney? " asked the Duke.
"An inscription!" cried Sydney, scraping away. "An inscription nearly a hundred years old. I have uncovered the year—see, 1867."
"Ay," said Geoffrey, "that was the year the Irish were here."
Featherstone had gone to Sydney's assistance, and with the aid of a sharp flint soon uncovered the whole inscription. It ran thus:
Sacred to the Memory of the
FRENCH AND AMERICAN PRISONERS
OF WAR,
Who died in Dartmoor Prison during the
Years 1811-16.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
There is no fiction in this last incident. O'Reilly and his fellow-prisoners actually erected such a cairn over the bones of the massacred Americans, which the prison pigs were rooting up.
Again he recalls his Dartmoor life in the letter from "James Sydney," one of the royalist prisoners, who remains behind in Dartmoor after his comrades have escaped. The letter reads:
Few who read this light and good-humored complaint of the imaginary royalist conspirator can have conceived any idea of the horrors actually endured and silently forgiven by its victim. I would gladly dismiss the painful story, but other pens have told it all; and the world that knew John Boyle O'Reilly as the refined, courtly gentleman and the magnanimous Christian, should know also in what a rough school he learned to be gentle—through what cruel tortures he learned to be merciful.
If Dartmoor had been deliberately chosen and systematically conducted as an engine of torture, it could not have better served its purpose of breaking body and mind, heart and soul. The prison cells were of iron, seven feet long by four feet wide, and a little over seven feet high: ventilated by an opening of two or three inches at the bottom of the door, some of them having a few holes for the escape of foul air at the top of the cell walls. They were oppressively warm in summer, and dismally cold in winter.
"Fresh" air came from the corridors, whence also came the only light enjoyed by the inmates, through a pane of thick, semi-opaque glass.
The food was so bad that only starving men, such as they were, could stomach it. It was often too filthy even for their appetites. "It was quite a common occurrence in Dartmoor," says Michael Davitt, "for men to be reported and punished for eating candles, boot-oil, and other repulsive, articles; but, notwithstanding that a highly offensive smell is purposely given to prison candles to prevent their being eaten instead of burnt, men are driven by a system of half-starvation into animal-like voracity, and anything that a dog could eat is nowise repugnant to their taste. I have even seen men eating—" but the heart sickens at the relation of what Mr. Davitt has seen, and we cannot but think with horror of such a degradation being set before such men as these,—before any creature made in God's image and likeness.
The work was hard enough at best. It was wantonly made more repulsive by the inhumanity of the jailers; and the jailers did not act without authority. The putrefying bones—refuse of the prison—had to be pounded into dust; and the place chosen for this offensive work was a shed on the brink of the prison cesspool. The floor of the "boneshed," as it was called, was some three feet below the outside ground, and on a level with the noisome cesspool. The stench of this work-room and the foul air of the cells, combined with the bad and insufficient food, tended to undermine the health of the wretched prisoners; for, observe, they were set to work on the wet moors outside, during the cold winter, and in the foul bone-shed during the stifling summer days! Siberia may have sharper tortures, but none more revolting in cold, deliberate cruelty, than those of Dartmoor.
There was other work, plenty of it, in the Dartmoor institution, delving, building, and toiling in various ways. The men were not allowed to be idle as long as they were able to lift a hand or foot. When Davitt came out of Dartmoor, having entered prison a healthy man of normal weight, he weighed 122 pounds. "Not, I think," he says, "a proper weight for a man six feet high and at the age of thirty-one."
McCarthy came out to die, and Chambers to linger a wreck for the remainder of his wasted life.
In short, the political prisoners were systematically subjected to harsher treatment than the hardened criminals with whom they were associated; and this was done as a fixed policy of the Government, to make treason odious. Being men of natural refinement, they felt more keenly than the common felon the indignity of having to strip and be searched four times a day; and, as they were unwise enough to show this reluctance, the coarse warders of the prison took an especial delight in inflicting it upon them.
O'Reilly was a "good" prisoner; that is, he took care to save himself as far as possible from the indignities of his condition by paying strict obedience to the prison rules; but he never despaired of effecting his escape, nor neglected any promising opportunity to that end. During his Dartmoor term he made his third break for freedom.
The authorities were accustomed to station sentries at certain elevated points on the moor, to watch the drain-cutting parties of prisoners, and to signal the approach of a fog which they could see rolling in from seaward. Upon the signals being given, the warders would summon the working parties in the drains and gather them all within the prison walls. O'Reilly was working in a gang of drain-diggers in charge of one Captain Hodges. With him was another Fenian ex-soldier, Michael Lavin, who tells an interesting story of his comrade's desperate break for liberty. O'Reilly had secretly made himself a suit of clothes from one of the coarse sheets with which each prisoner was supplied, skillfully arranging his bundle of bedding so that the sheet was not missed. He told Lavin one day that he had made up his mind to escape. Accordingly, on the first appearance of an opportune fog, he hid himself in the drain when his fellow-prisoners obeyed the warders' summons to return to the prison yard. Before his absence was discovered he had made his way well out of the bounds. Search was immediately instituted, but he evaded pursuit during two days and nights.
Once he was so closely followed that he took refuge on the top of an old house, and lay concealed behind the smoke-stack until the guards had gone by. Thence he dropped into a dyke communicating with the river, intending at nightfall to swim the latter in the hope of making his way to the seacoast. For a long time he lay thus hidden, holding to the bank by one hand, while the guards patrolled overhead without perceiving him. An officer stationed some distance off closely watched the place with a field-glass. His suspicions were aroused by perceiving a ripple on the water, and he communicated with the guards, who thereupon discovered the fugitive and brought him back to prison. For this offense he was given twenty-eight days in the punishment cells, his only nourishment being bread and water, save on every fourth day, when full rations were served. During all the time of his flight he had not eaten an ounce of food.
Four months were spent by O'Reilly in this dismal prison-house. Then came the welcome order of transfer to Portland, preparatory to transportation beyond the seas. While any change from the living hell of Dartmoor could not but be welcome to its inmates, the decree of transportation did not apply to all of the Irish convicts. McCarthy and Chambers were doomed to fret their souls away under the great and petty tortures of their English dungeons. For O'Reilly there was the boon of banishment to the furthest end of the earth, an inhospitable wilderness; and separation, probably forever, from the land of his birth and love, from the comrades whom a community of suffering had endeared to him. But it was a boon, for it was a change, and any change was welcome to one in such a plight as his. In an interview, published a few years ago, he thus told of how the good news came to him:
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FACSIMILE LETTER WRITTEN IN PRISON—ORIGINAL IN POSSESSION OF
MRS. MERRY OF LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND.
Australia! the ship! Another chance for the old dreams; and the wild thought was wilder than ever, and not half so stealthy. Down the corridor came the footsteps again. The keys rattled, doors opened, and in five minutes we had double irons on our arms, and were chained together by a bright, strong chain. We did not look into each other's faces; we had learned to know what the others were thinking of without speaking. We had a long ride to the railway station, in a villainous Dartmoor conveyance, and then a long ride in the railway cars to Portland. It was late at night when we arrived there, and got out of harness. The ceremony of receiving convicts from another prison is amusing and "racy of the soil." To give an idea of it, it is enough to say that every article of clothing which a prisoner wears must at once go back to the prison whence he came. It may be an hour, or two, or more, before a single article is drawn from the stores of the receiving prison,—during which time the felon is supremely primitive. To the prison officials this seems highly amusing; but to me, looking at it with the convict's eye and feelings, the point of the joke was rather obscure.
Next day we went to exercise, not to work. We joined a party of twenty of our countrymen, who had arrived in Portland one day before us. They had come from Ireland—had only been in prison for a few months. They had news for us. One of them, an old friend, told me he had left my brother in prison in Ireland, waiting trial as a Fenian.[1] Many others got news just as cheering. A week passed away. Then came the old routine,—old to us, but new and terrible to the men from Ireland,—double irons and chains. This time there were twenty men on each chain, the political prisoners separate from the criminals.
"Forward there!" and we dragged each other to the esplanade of the prison. It was a gala day,—a grand parade of the convicts. They were drawn up in line,—a horrible and insulting libel on an army,—and the governor, and the doctors of the prison and ship reviewed them. There were two or three lounging in the prison yard that day, who, I remember well, looked strangely out of place there. They had honest, bronzed faces and careless sailor's dress,—the mates and boatswain of the Hougoumont, who had come ashore to superintend the embarkation.
The review was over. The troops—Heaven forgive me!—formed in columns of chains, and marched to the steamer which was waiting to convey them to the transport. Our chain was in the extreme rear. Just as we reached the gangway to go on board, a woman's piercing shriek rose up from the crowd on the wharf; a young girl rushed wildly out, and threw herself, weeping and sobbing, on the breast of a man in our chain, poor Thomas Dunne. She was his sister. She had come from Dublin to see him before he sailed away. They would not let her see him in prison, so she had come there to see him in his chains. Oh! may God keep me from ever seeing another scene like that which we all stood still to gaze at; even the merciless officials for a moment hesitated to interfere. Poor Dunne could only stoop his head and kiss his sister—his arms were chained; and that loving, heart-broken girl, worn out by grief, clung to his arms and his chains, as they dragged her away; and when she saw him pushed rudely to the gangway, she raised her voice in a wild cry: "Oh, God! oh, God!" as if reproaching Him who willed such things to pass. From the steamer's deck we saw her still watching tirelessly, and we tried to say words of comfort to that brother—her brother and ours. He knew she was alone, and had no friends in wide England. Thank God, he is a free man now in a free country!
The steamer backed her paddles alongside the high ship and we went on board, the criminals having gone first. Our chains were knocked off on the soldier-lined decks, and we were ordered to go below. The sides of the main hatchway were composed of massive iron bars, and, as we went down, the prisoners within clutched the bars and looked eagerly through, hoping, perhaps, to see a familiar face. As I stood in that hatchway, looking at the wretches glaring out, I realized more than ever before the terrible truth that a convict ship is a floating hell. The forward hold was dark, save the yellow light of a few ship's lamps. There were 320 criminal convicts in there, and the sickening thought occurred to us, are our friends in there among them? There swelled up a hideous diapason from that crowd of wretches; the usual prison restraint was removed, and the reaction was at its fiercest pitch.
Such a din of diabolical sounds no man ever heard. We hesitated before entering the low-barred door to the hold, unwilling to plunge into the seething den. As we stood thus, a tall, gaunt man pushed his way through the criminal crowd to the door. He stood within, and, stretching out his arms, said: "Come, we are waiting for you." I did not know the face; I knew the voice. It was my old friend and comrade, Keating.
"We followed him through the crowd to a door leading amidships from the criminal part of the ship. This door was opened by another gaunt man within, and we entered. Then the door was closed and we were with our friends—our brothers. Great God! what a scene that was, and how vividly it arises to my mind now!The sixty-three political prisoners on the Hougoumont were the first lot that had been sent to Australia since the Irish uprising of 1848, nor have any others been sent since her voyage. Of these prisoners some fifteen had been soldiers and were, therefore, classed and placed among the criminals. This would have been a greater hardship but for the fact that some of the soldiers in the ship's guard belonged to regiments in which certain of the prisoners had served, and, with comrade sympathy, alleviated their lot as far as possible.
All but one or two of the guards were friendly to the ex-soldiers, who were allowed to occupy the quarters of the political prisoners by day, but forced to pass the night with the criminals in the forepart of the ship. O'Reilly was made an exception, through the good-nature of the guards, who always allowed him, though against the rules, to sling his hammock in the compartment on the lower deck below the cabin, where the political prisoners slept. He received many kindnesses also from the ship's chaplain. Father Delaney, who furnished the paper and writing materials for a remarkable periodical entitled "The Wild Goose." The name had a significance for Irishmen. The soldiers of Sarsfield, who took service in the French and other foreign armies on the failure of their country's effort for liberty, were called "The Wild Geese." Many a sad or stirring song has told the story of their exile, and their valor. "The Wild Goose" was edited by John Boyle O'Reilly, John Flood, Denis B. Cashman, and J. Edward O' Kelly. It was a weekly publication, Mr. Cashman writing the ornamental heading entwined with shamrocks, and the various sub-heads, as well as contributing to its contents. Saturday was publishing day. On Sunday afternoon O'Reilly read it aloud to his comrades as they sat around their berths below decks. In its columns first appeared his stirring narrative poem, "The Flying Dutchman," written off the Cape of Good Hope. "We published published seven weekly numbers of it," he says. "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 as they listened with blazing eyes to Davis's 'Fontenoy,' or the 'Clansman's Wild Address to Shane's Head'! Ah, that is another of the grand picture memories that come only to those who deal with life's stern realities!"
Every night the exiles. Catholic and Protestant, for there were men of both faiths in their ranks, joined in one prayer, which ran as follows:
"O 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, O Lord, and confound their evil projects. Hear us, O 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, O Lord! from Thy holy place. And from Zion protect her. Amen."
But if the political prisoners were able to forget their misery for a time in this way, there was no such surcease for the seething mass of crime that peopled the forward hold.
"Only those," says O'Reilly in "Moondyne," "who have stood within the bars, 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."
The punishment cell was seldom empty; its occupants as they looked through its bars at the deck "saw, strapped to the foremast, a black gaff or spar with iron rings, which, when the spar was lowered horizontally, corresponded to rings screwed into the deck. This was the triangle, where the unruly convicts were triced up and flogged every morning. Above this triangle, tied round the foremast, was a new and very fine hempen rope, leading away to the end of the foreyard. This was the ultimate appeal, the law's last terrible engine—the halter—which swung mutineers and murderers out over the hissing sea to eternity."
- ↑ This brother was William, the eldest of the family; he died ere John had made his escape.