284 WHALING 



By the time set for the RebelHon, fifteen hundred British 

 soldiers were enhsted as revolutionists. 



But the plot was discovered and, on the charge of ''having, at 

 Dublin, in January, 1866, come to the knowledge of an in- 

 tended mutiny in Her Majesty's Forces in Ireland, and not 

 giving information of said mutiny to his commanding officer," 

 O'Reilly and several other conspirators were arrested, court- 

 martialed, and sentenced to death. This sentence was com- 

 muted to life imprisonment and, after a series of prisons under 

 whose horrors two of the Fenians died, the little group remain- 

 ing were sentenced to penal servitude in Australia and were 

 carried thither in the prison ship Hougoumont. 



There, in the penal colony at Fremantle, they were set to 

 work making a road through the almost impenetrable bush. 

 O'Reilly was a quiet and law-abiding prisoner and in the 

 course of his first year there he even earned by good behaviour 

 a certain degree of liberty. But existence in the colony was 

 nevertheless intolerable, and he determined to escape into the 

 bush — a wild scheme, for a runaway was almost sure to be 

 captured, and if he did by the grace of God evade the trained 

 native trackers, he faced death from thirst and starvation. A 

 prisoner at Fremantle dwelt, with singular literalness, between 

 the Devil and the deep sea. 



One day in the late fall, he confided his plan to Father Mc- 

 Cabe, the one priest in all that hundred-mile parish of con- 

 victs and ticket-of -leave men. 



"It is an excellent way to commit suicide," the father re- 

 plied. ''Don't think of that again. Let me think out a plan 

 for you." 



For months O'Reilly waited and at last in despair he deter- 

 mined to try his own efforts; then in December a man named 

 Macguire appeared at work near the colony, with a secret 

 message from Father McCabe. In February the whalers used 

 to touch at Bunbury and the good priest had arranged with 

 Captain Archilaus Baker of the barque Vigilant of New Bedford 

 to take O'Reilly on board, provided he would get himself outside 

 the three-mile limit. 



