Historians differ and books die. Without a hint of gallows humour, Bob Reece writes that the subject matter of James Kelly's new book is suspect: it was common practice in Dublin and London "for the fabricated 'last speeches' of condemned prisoners to be either printed and sold as broadsheets or (more commonly in Dublin) declaimed by ballad singers and other street performers".
Kelly, head of the history department at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University, acknowledges that "sham speeches" were published with increasing frequency in the 1720s, as competition among publishers was intense. None the less, his well-documented introduction supports the authenticity of the speeches he uncovered in Irish, British and American libraries. A strong public interest in crime narratives meant there was a market for the sensational. Broadsheets of "last speeches" flourished at the same time as broadsides relaying crime and trial reports. They declined as newspaper coverage improved during the mid-18th century.
Underlining the barbarity of the era, Edward Fox, aged 14, was executed for "picking the Pocket of one Madam of 10 Pound". He made no speech. On a visit to Dublin in 1787, the prison reformer John Howard found the Kilmainham prisoners "all drunk at 11 a.m."
In his new book, Reece, associate professor of history at Murdoch University in western Australia, moves with bewildering speed from colonised to colonial Ireland. He mentions "white slaves" - Irish Catholics banished to the West Indies after the Cromwellian conquest - and then writes about "Ireland's transportation laws". The removal of offenders to the American colonies was interrupted by the Revolution of 1775. Henceforth, with the US unwilling to see transatlantic transportation renewed, Britain and its Irish satellite had to find an alternative dumping ground for their burgeoning prison population. Voyage of the Hougoumont is the story of Thomas McCarthy Fennell, a Clare Fenian sentenced to 10 years' penal servitude for his part in the attack on Kilbaha coastguard station in 1867.
It is a work of Irish-American family piety. If "family members described the 70,000-word document as weighty reading", why publish it in full, without correcting the awful spelling and syntax? There is more to editing a document than transcribing it.
Fennell was one of 62 transported Fenians. This voyage is of additional significance as it brought the last shipload of convicts to the Australian penal settlements. Among the 300 convicts were England's most daring law breakers, the Fenian Denis Cashman recalled in 1882. "There were college-bred men, swell mobsmen, murderers and burglars."
Coincidentally, Cashman's Hougoumont journal has just been published by Wolfhound Press as Fenian Diary.
The Irish political prisoners were given separate quarters and relatively well treated. During the 89-day voyage, they organised concerts, which included readings by John Boyle O'Reilly from the Wild Goose, a manuscript newspaper compiled by literary Fenians. Fennell's narrative - written perhaps 30 years later when he was ensconced as a saloon-keeper in Elmira, New York - reflects the egoism of victimisation. He barely mentions the Wild Goose, which he found "too profound". (Photocopies of this historical document can be consulted in the National Library, Dublin, and Cork County Library; the original is in Sydney.)
On the other hand, Fennell contributed to the Catalpa rescue. He was among those sent to the US under an 1871 amnesty, which did not include Fenian prisoners who had been members of the British army. On his suggestion, they were picked up off an Australian penal colony on Easter Monday 1876 by the Catalpa, a Yankee whaler commissioned by Clan na Gael.
Brendan ╙ Cathaoir is a historian and Irish Times journalist