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August 2010 The Catalpa Rescue In 1858, the Fenian brotherhood was founded in America and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Ireland to work for Irish independence. Britain declared membership in that organization a crime punishable by deportation to her penal colony in Freemantle, Australia. Seldom in history can one find a story to rival the adventure that brought embarrassment to England and freedom to six Fenians who had been sentenced to that harsh penal colony for life. It all began in 1871, when John Devoy, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, and other Fenians were released from prison in England on a general amnesty forced by public pressure after the Devon Commission authenticated the prisoner's claims of cruelty and torture. Under terms of the amnesty however, the released Fenians were banished from Ireland; so they headed for America. In New York they joined Clan na Gael, a branch of the Fenian movement. At the same time, IRB man Thomas McCarthy Fennell arrived in New York in exile after a term at Freemantle, with terrible stories of those Fenians still imprisoned there. Fennell suggested a plan to liberate the prisoners still incarcerated there when, in 1873, Devoy received a letter from James Wilson, an IRB man still in Freemantle urging his liberation. Fennell and Devoy brought Fennell’s plan to John Boyle O’Reilly, who had escaped Freemantle in 1869. He advised stealth rather than force, and the three presented their plan to the Clan in 1873. At a Baltimore convention the following year, the plan was accepted and fund-raising initiated. As funds trickled in, Devoy and O'Reilly secured a sailing vessel named Catalpa at New Bedford, Mass. and outfitted her as a cargo ship bound for western Australia. On April 27, 1875, the ship set sail with only one Fenian on board. The rest of the rescue party sailed from San Francisco in September and arrived in Freemantle in November. Posing as officials on a tour of inspection, the Fenian leaders were given VIP treatment and taken on a tour of the prison facility by the Superintendent. It was on this tour that they made contact with the Fenian prisoners and arranged the escape. Catalpa arrived early in 1876 but the scheduled rescue had to be postponed because of the arrival of new prisoners aboard a British gunboat. Catalpa was put in for minor repairs, in order to justify her delay in port, and the rescue was rescheduled for Easter Monday morning, April 17, 1876. On that morning, two rescue parties, each with horse and cart, left the city in different directions but bound for a prearranged rendezvous. The prisoners put their part of the plan in motion: prisoner Robert Granston approached a guard with a note from the Superintendent requesting prisoners James Wilson and Michael Harrington for a work detail at the Governor's House. They were released and headed for the rendezvous. Prisoners Thomas Hassett and Thomas Darragh headed in the same direction as if going to work. They were joined by prisoner Martin Hogan who made an excuse for a brief absence to the guard of his work detail. The good behavior of these men had given them a trustee status and this fact, coupled with the fact that escape from this isolated prison was considered all but impossible, accounted for the lack of security. Not long after the prisoners had fled the confines of the prison, their escape was discovered and the race was on to flee the pursuing authorities. At 10:30 AM, the prisoners met the rescue party, got into a waiting whale boat and rowed out toward Catalpa which had not been allowed to sail near the prison. When only two miles off shore, they spotted mounted police ride up to the spot where they had disembarked and take the horses and carts used by the rescue party. The Fenians continued rowing at a back-breaking pace for seven hours until heavy seas blew up about 5:30 PM - they were still almost 15 miles from Catalpa. They rode out the storm until morning when they spotted the British ship, Georgette, steaming out of Freemantle toward Catalpa. The authorities on Georgette did not spot the prisoners as they lay silently in the water but they ordered Catalpa on her way. As Georgette steamed back to Freemantle, the prisoners leaped to action and struggled off in the wake of Catalpa. Fearing that Catalpa was unaware of their presence the prisoners decided to risk discovery and wave to signal Catalpa before she sailed away. The gamble worked for Catalpa suddenly altered her course and headed for the whaleboat, but a police cutter also spotted the prisoners and steamed toward them as well. The game was up and it was only a question of who would reach them first. Catalpa won the race and the prisoners and their rescue party scrambled aboard. The police cutter signaled Georgette which returned flying a man-of-war flag. The Captain of Catalpa, knowing his ship was no match for the speed and armament of the British vessel, raised the American flag and waited. After a night of accusation and denial, threat and counterthreat, Georgette fired across the bow of Catalpa at 8:30 AM on the morning of April 19. The Captain of Catalpa shouted to Georgette, "If you fire on this ship, you fire on the American flag," and ordered his crew to ready themselves for a fight to the finish. The Captain of Georgette, fearing an international incident, lingered awhile and slowly steamed away. When word reached O’Reilly, he released the news to the press. It was received with celebrations in America and Ireland and anger in England. A purge of prison officials in Freemantle followed as, in August, 1876, six patriotic Irishmen sailed into New York Harbor in the good ship Catalpa as a result of Irish daring and Yankee grit. Were there Irish slaves? The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white. From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland's population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain's solution was to auction them off as well. During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers. Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They'll come up with terms like "Indentured Servants" to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle. As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts. African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master's free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude. In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new "mulatto" slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed "forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale." In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company. England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat. There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on it's own to end it's participation in Satan's highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery. But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they've got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened. None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot. http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html |
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