A large stone gate house with two turrets. Three soldiers in white helmets stand at attention and a horse and cart is beside them.

A dramatic Easter

The Fenians' escape from Fremantle

On the jetty was assembled an excited crowd eager for the news; the predominant feeling among the majority was a hope that the prisoners had got clear away.
Fremantle Herald, 22 April 1876

Easter 1876 in Fremantle was very exciting. The escape of six Fenian prisoners aboard an American whaler, chased by a police vessel and a steamship filled with armed guards, gripped the small Swan River Colony over three days. Four months later they sailed into New York harbour to become national heroes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Convicts arrived in Fremantle between 1850 and 1868. 9,721 convicts were transported to Western Australia on 43 convict ship voyages. The Colony asked for convicts who were male, were not political prisoners, and had not been convicted of serious crimes. The British government honoured the request up until the very last convict ship, the Hougoumont, arrived with 62 Irish Fenians on board.

Opinions in the colony were divided – the Colonial authorities and many residents were worried the new convicts would bring a new level of crime and political violence. But many others were supportive of the Irish political struggle and sympathetic to the convicts themselves.

The support was helped by the fact that many of the Fenians were literate, which was unusual for the convicts brought into Western Australia up to that point. They wrote letters and kept memoirs that survive to this day, and even produced a shipboard newspaper, The Wild Goose.

The Fenians’ stories, and the tale of the dramatic Catalpa escape, are still celebrated today in Festivals and artistic works.

ARRIVALS. January 10. Ship Hougoumont, 875 tons, W. Cozens, Master, from London. Passengers - Dr. Smith, Surgeon Superintendent; Mr. Williams, Religious Instructor; Mr. Young, Reverend Bernard DeLaney; 4 warders and wives, and 9 children, 44 pensioners, 18 wives, and 25 children, 279 male convicts. Cargo - 14 bales Commissariat Stores, etc.

Listing of the Hougoumont's arrival from The Perth Gazette and West Australian Times, 17 Jan 1868.
Credit: National Library of Australia

Portraits of the Fenian prisoners and rescuers surrounding a drawing of the Catalpa at sail.

'The Catalpa, the rescuers and the rescued.' San Francisco c.1876.
Credit: The Jay T. Last Collection of Graphic Arts and Social History, Huntington Digital Library, priJLC_MAR_002605

A three-masted ship at dock. A cart and many barrels are on the dock.

The Catalpa in dock. Note the whale-oil barrels in the foreground.
Credit: American Center, State Library of Western Australia, BA452

Fremantle Prison gatehouse, c.1900. A horse and cart was a common form of transport for the Prison’s surgeon and chaplain, as well as visitors and deliveries to the Prison, up until the 1920s.
Fremantle Prison