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They know who New Bedford whaler George S. Anthony is in Dublin. And they certainly know who he is in Fremantle, Australia. Even in New York City, this leader of one of the seminal events in the centuries-long Irish struggle for independence from Great Britain is well known among some of the large Irish diaspora.
But George Anthony, an unassuming Quaker descended from America’s founding families, is little known in his own hometown some 150 years after he pulled off one of the most daring rescues of political prisoners in world history.
Yes, there is an inauspicious monument to “The Rescue of Six Fenians” in front of the downtown New Bedford Registry of Deeds building of all places. Anthony’s name, among others, is noted on it. The simple stone slab commemorates the voyage of the whaling ship Catalpa, which under Anthony’s captainship journeyed to the remotest corner of the world in order to free six Irish soldiers whom Britain had imprisoned in Western Australia. Their only crime? Supporting the 19th century Irish resistance as members of the Fenian movement.
In the mid-19th century, the Fenians sought to end 700 years of British colonization of Ireland. In America, the Fenians-related organization, The Fenian Brotherhood, played a role in both the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence.
After the British sent many Fenians — both civilians and Irish soldiers in the British military — to Fremantle Prison, they eventually, under international pressure, released all but a handful of military men. Those men were considered traitors and they remained nine years in the legendarily harsh conditions at Fremantle.
One of the remaining six who were eventually rescued, James Wilson, smuggled a plaintive letter to New York journalist and fellow Fenian John Devoy. Wilson asked that the American Irish immigrants not let their brother Fenians rot in the far-off Australian prison. The Irish brethren rose to the occasion and eventually hatched the Catalpa rescue plan.
All of this is mostly lost to the majority of modern-day New Bedforders, however.
With the exception of Anthony’s devoted great-grandson Jim Ryan, the mindful members of the New Bedford branch of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, and scattered members of the third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation Irish-Americans who call Greater New Bedford home, the role of this great New Bedford man who did so much for the Irish resistance has largely drifted from the city’s consciousness. He has certainly been less a focus for honoring in recent decades than other important city heroes like Prince Henry the Navigator and the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.
But the story of the Catalpa Rescue — led by this quiet Yankee who had virtually no connection to the Irish rebels other than his Quaker devotion to justice and fair play — is one of the great demonstrations of selfless service in American, Irish and even Australian history.
It was so inspirational to the Irish struggle for independence that none other than Éamon de Valera ,one of the dominant political leaders when Ireland first won its independence, went out of his way to lay a wreath on Anthony’s grave in Rural Cemetery in New Bedford when he toured the United States in 1920.
Last month, Jim Ryan traveled to Fremantle, Australia, where there were extensive celebrations at the once notorious Fremantle Prison — initially a prison established in Australia for British convicts — commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Catalpa Rescue.
The rescue was instigated by Devoy and his Boston contemporary, John Boyle O’Reilly, who himself had earlier escaped the Fremantle Prison aboard a different New Bedford whaler, the Gazelle. New Bedford night police chief Henry Hathaway had been a crew member on the Gazelle when O’Reilly had escaped, and he put the Fenians in touch with New Bedford whaling agent John T. Richardson, who eventually led them to his son-in-law, George Anthony.
Why Anthony accepted the highly risky job of rescuing the Fenians and how he executed the astonishing Catalpa rescue is a subject of much debate.
Though a seasoned whaler, Anthony had never been higher than a first mate on a whaling ship when he became the Catalpa captain. A quiet man, devoted to family and Quaker values, he might have seen the voyage as a way to make his family more secure, according to Peter Stevens book “The Voyage of the Catalpa.” It could have paid him more than 10 or 15 years wages at a local factory where he was employed.
Stevens noted that it may have also quenched Anthony’s acknowledged desire to go back to sea. But both the Fenians at the time of the voyage and historians since that time have agreed that Anthony, 31 years old and recently wed with a wife and young child, in the end did it simply because it was the right thing to do. He is a great example of the noble Yankee Quakers who dominated so much of New Bedford’s early history.
“I can only imagine what a moral, decent upright man Anthony was,” Stevens told an April 17 gathering at New Bedford’s Seamen’s Bethel celebrating the 150th anniversary of the rescue. “Sometimes the quietest ones are also the toughest.”
Not only did Anthony, with nerves of steel, outflank the authorities in Australia, along with the help of onshore Fenians led by John James Breslin and Thomas Desmond, he put his personal safety on the line by commanding the row boats that transported the prisoners to the Catalpa, which was waiting 10 miles offshore in international waters after the escape. Had Anthony been captured, he would have certainly ended up in the Fremantle prison himself.
It was also Anthony who endured an astonishing 28-hour “row” in a whaling boat back to the ship through a violent storm and angry threats from the British authorities chasing them.
The climactic moment came when the police superintendent aboard a well-armed steamship chasing them, the SS Georgette, demanded to come aboard the Catalpa. That’s the point at which Anthony raised the American flag and told the Brits they would be attacking the United States in international waters if they took arms against it. The Georgette eventually backed off.
Mayor Jon Mitchell traveled to New York City a few weeks back for that city’s celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Catalpa escape. The six Fenians were delivered to New York after the voyage back from Australia.
In New York, Mayor Mitchell received on behalf of the city, a replica of the 37-star American flag that Anthony had raised to the highest mast of the ship to put off the police authorities from boarding the Catalpa.
It’s a more-than-amazing story and I’m not even telling you all the ins and outs. As Mitchell pointed out, it’s a big studio movie just waiting to be made.
“This is a story of heroism that speaks to the values that we all wish to emulate,” the mayor said at the Bethel celebration on April 17. George Anthony was someone with a strong sense of justice, he said, who was willing to take risks in service to others.
The mayor related that Anthony’s aid of the Irish reminds him of what Franklin Roosevelt described as the country’s “righteous fight” on behalf of freedom in World War II.
“It says something about who we are as Americans,” he said. “It would have been hard to imagine anybody but an American captain and an American whaleship being able to pull off something so audacious and so skillfully as well.”
But it was not all awards and rewards during Anthony’s life.
Anthony could never go back to sea after the Catalpa voyage. The British Navy still controlled much of the ocean in the late 19th century and he was a criminal in their eyes. He also did no whaling on the return trip while trying to deliver the prisoners to America, so he made little money from the voyage. The prisoners had argued vociferously and successfully to him that to extend the voyage by doing more whaling was to risk the British discovering the ship.
Anthony spent the rest of his life working quietly at the old Morse Twist Drill factory in the South End until he received a government appointment as a customs inspector. By the time he died, the Catalpa voyage was little talked about in the city, although a local obituary lauded him as one of those noble quiet men who rose to a great moment of public service when called to it.
Jim Ryan, since he discovered as a teenager the story of his great-grandfather, has documented much of the life and memories of George Anthony.
He says that as an adult he grew to appreciate the memorabilia he first found in the storage boxes in his family’s attic. He appreciated what a great man his great-grandfather was, and how important was his role in standing up for a people’s desire to be free.
Among the items he received from the Catalpa box was an obituary written in an unknown New Bedford newspaper at the time of Anthony’s death in 1913. It perfectly described the quiet, principled man who sacrificed so much for the righteous cause of the Irish.
It said: “The episode of which Captain Anthony was the central, notable figure was the great opportunity of his life, and that he acquitted himself splendidly was due to what he was. Had his experience never come to him, his outward life might have been greatly different, but the man would have been the same man, high-minded, courageous and modest.”
Jack Spillane is a New Bedford Light news and opinion columnist. You can contact Jack at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
