Convict Days

   Welcome to the Wannaskan Almanac for Friday.

    On this day in 1788, the first shipload of convicts arrived at Botany Bay in eastern Australia to establish a penal colony. Previously, Britain had cleared its prisons by sending convicts to the American Colonies, but after the Revolutionary War (1775-83), Britain had to find another outlet.
   Most of these "convicts" had been imprisoned for petty crimes. You could be sentenced to years in prison for stealing a trinket. There was also a fair number of murderers and rapists as well as political prisoners aboard the ships.
   James Cook, the British explorer, had visited Botany Bay back in 1770 and declared it the perfect place for a penal colony.  But it turned out the bay was too shallow, drinking water too scare, the soil too hard, and even the trees broke the axes of the convicts. A few days later, everyone moved up the coast to what was to become the city of Sydney.
   Over the next 80 years, about 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia, and it's estimated twenty percent of the current Australian population has convict roots. Once this was a reason for shame. Nowadays it's a point of pride.
    As time went on, the growing population of non-convict, immigrant settlers began complaining to the mother country that they did not want or need any more convicts. So Britain started sending the overflow of its prisons to Western Australia, where there were few settlers. The very last convict ship, the Hougoumont, arrived in Freemantle in 1868
     Aboard this ship was 24 year old  James Boyle O'Reilly, an Irish political prisoner who has a particular interest for me. O'Reilly was born in County Meath north of Dublin. He received a good early education and at age 13 apprenticed at a local newspaper. At age 19 he joined the Fenians, a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of British rule in Ireland. This activity got him a place on the Hougoumont with a 20 year sentence.
   Once in Australia O'Reilly was set to work as part of a convict work gang building roads. One day the gang was ordered to cut down a huge eucalyptus tree. O'Reilly refused. This could have led to trouble, but the warden's wife heard of it and the road was curved around the tree.
   The warden's wife befriended O'Reilly and he was given better jobs and more freedom. This led to  his meeting with a Catholic priest who helped O'Reilly escape on an American whaling ship. Several months later he arrived in Boston where he started giving lectures. Shortly thereafter he became a reporter for the Catholic newspaper in Boston.
    O'Reilly had a successful career as an editor, poet and novelist. He married and had four daughters, and was wealthy enough to buy a summer home in the seaside town of Hull, where my parents home is located. He began having health problems and died in his summer home in 1890 at the age of 46. In 1913 the Town of Hull bought his home and it is now the public library.