When next day Timperley spoke to Woodman, O'Reilly's warder at Koagulup, Woodman said he had spoken to O'Reilly at 10.30 p.m. or so, warning him as night watchman to keep a lookout on a bushfire that was burning close to the camp. In saying so, Woodman was either lying or mistaken. And if lying, was he doing it to save O'Reilly or to be quit of his potentially tragic love for Jessie?
In any case, Timperley reasoned that if Woodman was right, O'Reilly would have been unable to get to Vigilant before it sailed. He had the sand dunes around Bunbury searched, and found not O'Reilly but Thompson. He also boarded two other Yankee whalers in port, Gazelle and Classic, to offer them each £5 in reward for catching O'Reilly on board. As for local people, "I am . . . certain", he warned, "that many would assist a Fenian warned, "that many would assist a Fenian who would not stir hand or foot for an ordinary prisoner of the Crown".
Supt Hare of Perth, a Galway Orangeman enraged at Fenian escape, would become dissatisfied with Timperley's contradictory bulletins to headquarters, particularly a new one suggesting that O'Reilly must have got away on the Vigilant, and asked petulantly, "Is any horse missing in the neighbourhood, for O'Reilly was a cavalry soldier?" Perhaps, pleaded Timperley, O'Reilly was boarded on Vigilant after the whaler left by Joseph Buswell, who had been under suspicion of similar attempts in the past. All this argument and multiplicity of searches helped O'Reilly.
O'Reilly, tormented by the possibility that the Vigilant might still be making inshore searches, had, about February 21st, found an old dory half buried in sand. He dug it free, re-floated it, and rowed out at dusk to try to encounter the whaler. Seeing nothing, he returned to shore, killed some possums and kangaroo rats in the dunes and skinned them, and in early light took again to sea with the meat wrapped in a cloth and towed behind him in the water.
All day he searched, hoping the northerly current would sweep him within view of the lingering whale ship. He suffered a great deal from the sun, and the possum and kangaroo-rat meat was taken by sharks. In the afternoon he did sight a ship, almost certainly Vigilant, but again it tacked away. Later, in America, O'Reilly accepted Capt Baker's explanation that neither Buswell's larger fishing boat nor the dory had been seen by lookouts. The fact that Baker was still looking for him on February 21st was in itself testimony to the trouble this Yankee whaler would take to fulfil his arrangement.
Baker's thoroughness was in part explained by the bitter memories Massachusetts whalers retained of British-built Confederate raiders. Added to this was the New England passion for liberty, a value second only to Scripture in moral authority. It had found concrete expression in the abolition movement, and Baker tried to give it moral expression on the Western Australian coast.
O'Reilly remained at sea that night, sleeping in the bottom of his dory, and returned exhausted to shore the next day. As a recluse of the dunes and the peppermint groves, he was now underpinned by the tenous mercy of wild colonials and old lags. But he was cheered by the arrival by boat of Maguire, Mickie Mackie, and the previously much-abused M---.
Maguire brought a letter from Father McCabe, whose certitude - McCabe asked O'Reilly to remember him when he was long escaped and safe - revived O'Reilly. McCabe told him that a new arrangement had been made with a Capt David R. Gifford of the barque Gazelle of New Bedford, Massachusetts, due to sail from Bunbury the next day, and willing to take O'Reilly on board. Gifford had agreed to take O'Reilly only as far as Java, and Father McCabe had paid him £10 for that. It would become apparent that the money was not paramount.
The next morning, February 27th, O'Reilly said goodbye to the Jacksons, who had kept faith with him through their reflex hatred of authority as it existed in the penal colony. At first light Maguire's crew of four or five, with O'Reilly and Henderson/Bowman, rowed out through the surf to intercept the path of Gazelle. O'Reilly must have felt mounting disappointment as afternoon came without a sighting. It was towards evening that they saw the whaler, and this time there were no near misses. Gazelle hailed them, specifically using O'Reilly's name.
Buswell's boat pulled alongside Gazelle, and after O'Reilly climbed up on to the outboard shelf where whale-oil casks were lashed, he was helped over the gunnels by a young Yankee officer, the third mate, Henry C. Hathaway, who would become a lifelong friend. Now O'Reilly was welcomed aboard by Capt Gifford. He was told he would be given accommodation aft. Martin Henderson was given quarters in the foc'sle with the crew.
While O'Reilly was still shaking hands with Capt Gifford and the officers of Gazelle, Maguire stood up in his rowboat and called, "God bless you; don't forget us, and don't mention our names until you know it's all over." Seeing these men distanced now by water, about to row back to their colonial existence, their Australian futures, O'Reilly wept.
The Serpentine Publishing Co (Pty) Ltd 1998. Extracted from The Great Shame: a Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New by Thomas Keneally, published by Chatto and Windus (£25 in UK)