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:--
"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."
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 irregularity of the
town, as it is blighted by the sight and defiled by the touch of the
great criminal establishment."
[Illustration: THE JAIL AT FREEMANTLE, WHERE THE PRISONERS WERE
CONFINED]
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.