The Orange County Register, March 17th, 2007
It was an impossible plan – a suicide mission. Nevertheless, the conspirators came to the old warehouse and to the young sea captain they hoped would change the course of Irish-American history.
Jerry O’Keefe played his part. Dressed in somber black, he and his band of fellow Irishmen laid out the top-secret assignment: sail a whaling bark more than 8,000 miles, lie to the crew about the destination and the purpose, risk mutiny when that mission – to rescue a band of convicts in a remote British penal colony – becomes clear and live to tell the tale.
“We were trying to convince the captain of the ship to participate,” O’Keefe says. “He was apprehensive: What was he getting himself into? He wasn’t even Irish.
“It was our job to convince him it was going to be a piece of cake,” O’Keefe says. “Which, of course, it wasn’t.”
That night in the warehouse, however, the luck of the Irish held. The captain of the ship, George Smith Anthony, agreed to the strange task. One of the great seafaring adventures of American history began.
The name of the ship was the Catalpa.
That name may be forgotten today. But to O’Keefe – a retired Anaheim police officer and Orange County’s unofficial ambassador of all things Irish – the 19th-century voyage of the Catalpa is one of Irish-America’s proudest moments.
O’Keefe, 61, re-enacted the role of an Irish-American backer of the plot in a documentary called “The Wild Geese of Fremantle Prison,” set for release this summer. Producer Mark Day has created other films with Irish themes. That’s how he met O’Keefe.
Day finished the documentary “The San Patricios” in 1996. The film told the story of Irish soldiers in the United States Army who defected to Mexico during the Mexican-American war. (A feature film on the same subject, “One Man’s Hero,” followed in 1999 and starred Tom Berenger.)
“The San Patricios” garnered Day an invitation by then Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo to help lay a plaque in Mexico City’s Plaza San Jacinto in honor of Mexico’s “Irish.”
O’Keefe, then the national director of The Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish-Catholic fraternal organization, attended as well.
O’Keefe was already a fixture at Irish events on both sides of the Atlantic – marching in nationalist parades, picketing British consulates, joining the Emerald Society, an Irish policing organization, and indulging in the occasional bit of Irish malarkey. (He once garnered 9,000 signatures on a petition to change Orange County’s name to Green County.)
His love of Ireland began as a child at the knees of his Irish mother, who read tea leaves in their Lincoln Avenue home and taught him Catholic prayers in pre-Vatican II Latin.
His decision to join the Anaheim Police Department was spurred in part by the Irish-American police officers who came to the school where he worked as a security guard and teased him into becoming a “real” cop.
In Mexico, O’Keefe came to represent Catholic Irish-Americans. In Day he found a fellow enthusiast of Irish history, and a friendship was born.
Years later, Day and O’Keefe bumped into each other in the Dublin, Ireland, airport. What was Day up to? O’Keefe asked.
The Catalpa, Day replied.
O’Keefe, an Irish history major at Cal State Fullerton, instantly got the reference.
The Catalpa rescue was the product of the outrage that Irish people on both sides of the Atlantic felt about the 1870s imprisonment of a small group of Irish revolutionaries in Fremantle prison, a British penal colony in Australia. Led by Irish nationalists, a rescue plot was hatched.
Across the United States, struggling Irish immigrants dug into their pockets for the $17,000 needed to buy a three-masted whaling bark, the Catalpa. The plan called for sailing the vessel from New Bedford, Mass., all the way to Australia to rescue the prisoners.
“This is why the Catalpa story is a story of solidarity,” says Day. “They loved their heroes, the men who sacrificed their lives in the wake of the French and American revolutions to free Ireland. People put out the word to anyone who was Irish to give money. People gave up their mortgages to save them.”
Almost immediately things went awry. The ship’s chronometer broke. Much of the crew deserted in the Azores islands. A storm destroyed the Catalpa’s foremast.
When the vessel finally reached Australia after more than a year on the high seas, crew members sneaked onshore and snatched the prosowners while the British garrison was distracted by a sailing regatta. But a fierce storm prevented the crew’s rowboat from returning to the ship. Delayed a half-mile offshore, the escapees were discovered.
A chase ensued. A British steamship drew near, firing a warning shot and demanding the surrender of the prisoners. Ignoring the cannons pointed directly at him, Anthony, the captain, motioned to the American flag flying from his mast and declared that any attack on his vessel would be construed as an act of war on the United States.
The declaration cost Anthony his career. The Royal Navy issued a warrant for his arrest that barred him from sailing in international waters.
But the Catalpa rescued its crew and kept sailing. The British steamship ran out of fuel and turned back. And when the ship entered New York Harbor carrying its “Fenian” heroes, Irish-American communities across the United States exploded in riotous celebration.
For O’Keefe, the voyage of the Catalpa was “a great adventure yarn” – an Odyssey-like seafaring quest of long odds and epic battles with both the elements and men’s fear.
“When Mark told me the idea, I thought it was great,” O’Keefe recalls. “I told him I’d be happy to play a part.”
Along with two other Orange County Hibernians – Anaheim police officer Jeff Gallagher and Fullerton resident Tim Weston – O’Keefe traveled to San Diego in January to re-enact a scene in a Boston warehouse in which a young American sea captain named George Smith Anthony agreed to take on the risky mission.
“It felt great,” O’Keefe says of his role. “I could envision being there. I was sorry I wasn’t there.”
“The Wild Geese of Fremantle Prison” – a reference to the Irish geese that migrate south each year – is in postproduction.
Day hopes to finish it by June and offer it to film festivans and public television stations in the United States and abroad.
Both he and O’Keefe hope the film will reawaken a moment of Irish pride and recall to hazy memories heroes capable of inspiring all Americans.
“As a man born in Ireland, I definitely felt the part,” O’Keefe says. “My take on it was that (the rescuers) thought it was a great adventure, and if we pull it off, my God, we will have really done something.”
Mr. ireland: Jerry O’Keefe has been involved in Irish political causes, Irish-American organizations and a documentary about a daring attempt to rescue Irish prisoners.
