REVIEWER: Graham Seal

Denis Cashman was one of the Fenians – members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood – transported to the Swan River aboard the Hougoumont in 1867. The best-known member of this group of over sixty men is John Boyle O'Reilly, whose sensational escape and subsequent literary career have made him into something of a latter-day hero.

Cashman –a Waterford man - and many of the other Fenians aboard the Hougoumont had been involved in one of the many Irish plots against the English oppression of their land. The plots involved Irish members of the British Army as well as civilians like Cashman. Although the plot was foiled before being implemented, those involved received heavy sentences. Convicted of felony treason, Cashman was to spend seven years in penal servitude.

Against this background Charles Sullivan III, who is Professor of English at the University of East Carolina, has edited the diary Cashman wrote aboard ship, together with his poetry and that of his Fenian co-transports. Sullivan was able to do this through a donation of Cashman's papers to his university library, followed by extensive additional research in America and Ireland.

This is, then, a work of scholarship on a perennially fascinating aspect of English-Irish-American and Australian history that also involves O'Reilly's escape and the later escape of other Fenians by American whaleships. The emphasis in this book is on the voyage out to Western Australia and the ways in which Cashman used the genre of the diary to deal with his personal adjustments to political prisoner. For this aspect of the book Sullivan uses Andrew Hassam's Sailing to Australia: Shipboard diaries by nineteenth-century British emigrants as a benchmark for his own analysis of the similar, but significantly different, diary of a transported felon.

Sullivan also discusses Cashman's verse and song writing, as well as the similar compositions of other Fenians who between them developed a ship's newspaper to help pass the time and give their literary effusions some outlet. The newspaper was named The Wild Goose, an allusion to the name given to the Irish patriots of an earlier era forced to flee Ireland by English persecution. Despite this title, the seven issues of the paper carried little of an explicitly political nature, though Sullivan identifies a few oblique political references here and there. Whatever its purpose, the Wild Goose became so popular aboard the Hougoumont that Cashman had to handwrite numerous additional copies for the ship's officers.

As well as the newspaper, the evening singing sessions conducted by the Fenians helped keep up their spirits. These consisted mostly of sentimental Irish songs and traditional ballads and airs, the latter being the most popular of all, according to Cashman, who was prevailed upon to write copies of the lyrics out for other prisoners. Although there was little overtly political in The Wild Goose, these singsongs did provide the opportunity for the occasional expression of subversive sentiment. As one of the programs preserved in Cashman's diary indicates, a classic rebel song, 'The Rising of the Moon', was sung on at least one such occasion.

Cashman spent only a few years in the Swan River. As he had not been involved in any direct violence and was not a military man, he was pardoned in 1869, sailing to America where he was happily reunited with his family. O'Reilly, who had been in the army, did not receive a pardon and was rescued that year, while other members of the group famously escaped aboard the Catalpa in 1874.

As well as these literary considerations, the diary and accompanying materials provide an insight into the attitudes and lives of the period, especially in relation to life aboard a convict ship. Because they were political prisoners, Cashman and the other Fenians had their own section of the ship separate from the common criminals – who Cashman described – possibly later - as 'the greatest ruffians, and most notorious robbers in England'. Despite their situation, the Fenians clearly did not consider themselves common criminals, nor did the British government, as the issuing of pardons from 1869 indicates.