Like many 19th century Irish immigrants, Thomas McCarthy Fennell arrived in the United States to start a new life. Unlike other Irishmen, however, Fennell arrived on America’s West coast by ship. He was a thirty year old ex-convict recently discharged from an Australian prison. As a condition of release he could not return to his native land. His crime? Treason, or as the Crown’s trial judge put it, “compassing” against Queen Victoria. In the tumultuous 1860s Fennell organized Fenians – Irish and Irish-American Nationalists who sought by force to rid Ireland of Britain’s dominance. He fought and was wounded in the 1867 Uprising, hardly a footnote in history, yet England’s great Prime Minister, Gladstone, would refer to it as “the first streak of dawn.” And indeed it added to the foundation that would eventually lead to the Republic of Ireland. Fennell was transported to Australia on the last prison ship dispatched there by Britain, the Hougoumont, a converted merchant vessel. On board for three months with 280 other convicts, Fennell and a small group of Fenians including John Boyle O’Reilly and John Sarsfield Casey (The Galtee Boy) stayed together. They prayed, sang and entertained each other. They even published a weekly newspaper. Fennell was in Western Australia, a colony that wanted convict labor, for over three years; first at Fremantle Prison and then on a chain gang. Pardoned in 1871 by Victoria, he made his way to America where he eventually settled in Elmira, New York. He remained active in the movement and was the one to propose the famous Catalpa Rescue of 1876. This is the true story of Fennell’s incarceration, in his own words. Here he describes the humiliations and horrors of being a political prisoner thrown in with murderers, rapists and other criminals of the worst kind. He recounts floggings, daily strip searches and death at sea. Yet he and his fellow Fenians triumphed in the end, and Fennell would write his story. Now, Fennell’s 70,000 word manuscript is available to the public for the first time. Articles by Walter McGrath and Matthew Bermingham accompany the text, along with other supplementary information, extensive footnotes, photographs and illustrations. What’s being said about this book - “With a useful introductory essay, the editorial annotations, a good selection of illustrations, a selection of Fenian poetry and a number of articles to provide context, Fennell and King have made a valuable contribution to Western Australian history." H.A. Willis, The West Australian “You are to be congratulated on the high standard of the edition. It will be an important addition to the National Library’s collection.” Noel Kissane, Keeper of the Manuscripts National Library of Ireland “To have a record of daily life in the Prison during the 19th century and in such detail – is of inestimable value to us.” Rob Besford,Fremantle Prison, WA "This voyage is of additional significance as it brought the last shipload of convicts to the Australian penal settlement." The Irish Times “I’d like to compliment you on bringing such a wonderful new source of Fenian biography to light so expertly.” Keith Amos, author of The Fenians In Australia “I am pleased to add this to our collection as it will be extremely useful for research on the Fenians. There are so few first hand accounts of convict/Fenian life, making this all the more important.” David Whiteford, The Battye Library, Australia “Marie King and Philip Fennell have combined their efforts to provide historical context and then present the purest form of these memoirs.” John Benson, Pawling News Chronicle

The incredible true story of one of the most extraordinary and inspirational prison breaks in Australian history. New York, 1874. Members of the Clan-na-Gael - agitators for Irish freedom from the English yoke - hatch a daring plan to free six Irish political prisoners from the most remote prison in the British Empire, Fremantle Prison in Western Australia. Under the guise of a whale hunt, Captain Anthony sets sail on the Catalpa to rescue the men from the stone walls of this hell on Earth known to the inmates as a 'living tomb'. What follows is one of history's most stirring sagas that splices Irish, American, British and Australian history together in its climactic moment. For Ireland, who had suffered English occupation for 700 years, a successful escape was an inspirational call to arms. For America, it was a chance to slap back at Britain for their support of the South in the Civil War; for England, a humiliation. And for a young Australia, still not sure if it was Great Britain in the South Seas or worthy of being an independent country in its own right, it was proof that Great Britain was not unbeatable. Told with FitzSimons' trademark combination of arresting history and storytelling verve, The Catalpa Rescue is a tale of courage and cunning, the fight for independence and the triumph of good men, against all odds.

The story of John Devoy’s 1876 Catalpa rescue is a tale of heroism, creativity, and the triumph of independent spirit in pursuit of freedom. The daily log on board the whaling ship Catalpa begins with the typical recount of a crew intact and a spirit unfettered, but such quiet words deceive the truth of the audacious enterprise that came to be known as one of the most important rescues in Irish American history. John Devoy’s men rescued six Irish political prisoners from the Australian coast, allowing millions of fellow Irishmen and American-Fenians, many of whom secretly financed the dangerous plot, to draw courage from the newly exiled prisoners. Philip Fennell and Marie King tell the story from John Devoy’s own records and the ship's logbooks. John Devoy's Catalpa Expedition includes an introduction by Terry Golway and the personal diaries, letters, and reports from John Devoy and his men.

This is a book about readers on the move in the age of Victorian empire. It examines the libraries and reading habits of five reading constituencies from the long nineteenth century: shipboard emigrants, Australian convicts, Scottish settlers, polar explorers, and troops in the First World War. What was the role of reading in extreme circumstances? How were new meanings made under strange skies? How was reading connected with mobile communities in an age of expansion? Uncovering a vast range of sources from the period, from diaries, periodicals, and literary culture, Bill Bell reveals some remarkable and unanticipated insights into the way that reading operated within and upon the British Empire for over a century.

Between 1850 and 1868, approximately 10,000 British convicts were transported to Western Australia, in one of the final phases of global penal transportation. The arrival of these men utterly transformed the small Swan River Colony, bringing capital, labour, population influx, and contact with the outside world. Yet their contribution has been downplayed in Western Australian history, outweighed by a sense of shame that the first free Australian colony requested voluntary conversion to penal status in order to survive. This book, based on the author’s PhD research in archaeology, investigates the lives of convicts transported to Western Australia, and in particular, how their presence in the colony served as a form of modernity, fundamentally transforming it in the process. It focuses on the use of the administrative category of the ticket-of-leave to allow convict labour to be used throughout the colony. As such, the text examines the impact of the convict system on regional areas of Western Australia concentrating on the Eastern District communities of Guildford, Toodyay and York, and the convicts who worked there. Using archaeological data from three convict depots, supported by a range of other data sources such as historical documents, genealogical information and oral histories, the nature of convict life in the regions is teased out. In the process, the unique nature of the Western Australian penal colony is demonstrated and the contribution of convicts to the history of the state explored.

Ireland’s Great Famine in Irish-American History: Enshrining a Fateful Memory offers a new, concise interpretation of the history of the Irish in America. Author and distinguished professor Mary Kelly’s book is the first synthesized volume to track Ireland’s Great Famine within America’s immigrant history, and to consider the impact of the Famine on Irish ethnic identity between the mid-1800s and the end of the twentieth century. Moving beyond traditional emphases on Irish-American cornerstones such as church, party, and education, the book maps the Famine’s legacy over a century and a half of settlement and assimilation. This is the first attempt to contextualize a painful memory that has endured fitfully, and unquestionably, throughout Irish-American historical experience.

This collection of essays is published in association with the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland; subjects examined include philologists and universities inIreland and Germany; Fenianism; mass literacy; Irish reactions to the Franco-Prussianwar, 1870-1.