The Catalpa Pursuit: the afternoon the Georgette went to war

Eight months before she was wrecked at Calgardup Bay, the SS Georgette spent two days as a warship. She was a 337-ton coastal mail steamer with a single black funnel, and for those two days she carried a twelve-pounder gun on her deck, fifty armed pensioners in her accommodation, and orders to intercept an American whaleship on the high seas.

She failed. The failure is the reason the only known contemporary image of her exists at all.

What the Georgette was sent after

On 17 April 1876, six Irish republican prisoners walked out of the convict establishment at Fremantle and did not come back. They were James Wilson, Robert Cranston, Michael Harrington, Thomas Hassett, Martin Hogan and Thomas Darragh — Fenians, in the language of the colony, military prisoners transported for their part in the republican movement in Ireland.

The escape had been organised for months and funded from America. Two agents of Clan na Gael, John Breslin and Tom Desmond, had arrived in the colony under false names. Breslin made himself agreeable to the prison's superintendent, Joseph Doonan, passed messages to the prisoners, arranged horses, and chose a working-party day for the break. The men were rowed out from the beach at Rockingham to a whaleboat, and the whaleboat pulled for the open sea, where the American whaleship Catalpa of New Bedford was standing off under sail.

The Catalpa was a three-masted bark of 202 tons, ninety feet long. She had been bought for $5,500 in 1875 by the Clan na Gael agent James Reynolds and fitted out to look like exactly what she claimed to be. Of the twenty-three men aboard, only her master George Anthony, his first mate Samuel Smith, and the carpenter Dennis Duggan knew why she had sailed to Western Australia.

Commissioned as a war vessel

Word reached Fremantle within hours. The Water Police boat went out first, sighted the Catalpa, and could do nothing about her.

The colonial authorities then took the Georgette, which happened to be lying in the Roads between mail runs. The Argus of 7 June 1876 recorded that she was "commissioned as a war vessel by the authorities" — a phrase worth pausing on, because she was a subsidised mail packet with two passenger cabins and a ladies' saloon. A twelve-pounder was mounted on her deck. Fifty men of the Enrolled Pensioner Force embarked under Major Finnerty. Mr Stone, the Superintendent of Water Police, took operational command.

She left Fremantle at nine that night and by daybreak had made about thirty miles south-west of Rottnest. She found the Catalpa the following morning and Stone hailed her, demanding the right to come aboard. The answer he received has survived in the record more or less intact:

Don't know, got no instructions, but guess you'd better not, any how.

What nobody aboard the Georgette knew was that the whaleboat carrying the six escaped men was hidden under the sand hills the whole time, unseen, waiting. The Georgette was running short of coal. She broke off and went back to Fremantle, to the considerable annoyance of the Governor.

The second encounter

Coaled and re-stored, with an Armstrong twelve-pounder now properly mounted, she put to sea again before midnight and found the Catalpa a second time. By then the six men were aboard.

Stone fired a warning shot under the whaleship's stern, then a second across her bow. Anthony's response was to run the United States flag up to his peak. Stone gave him fifteen minutes to hand over the Fenians and threatened to fire into the barque and disable her. Anthony gave the reply that went into every subsequent account:

I do not care what you do; I am on the high seas, and that flag protects me.

Major Finnerty — "the fiery old Major", as the Argus had it — wanted to fire anyway. Stone refused, and his reasoning is the most interesting thing about the whole episode.

Only four years earlier, in 1872, Britain had paid the United States £3 million in gold in settlement of the Alabama claims: compensation for having allowed Confederate commerce raiders to be built and fitted out in British yards during the American Civil War. The precedent was recent, expensive, and precisely on point. To fire into a flagged American vessel in international waters, on a claim of right that was tenuous at best, was to invite a diplomatic incident that no Superintendent of Water Police had the authority to start.

So the Georgette let her go. She returned to Fremantle empty-handed and landed what the Irish press would enjoy calling her sea-sick warriors. The six men reached New York, were received as heroes, and lived out their lives in the United States. Their escape became part of the founding mythology of Irish-American republicanism and is still sung about.

What it cost the ship

The immediate aftermath was farce. Joseph Doonan, the prison superintendent, resigned in disgrace and some weeks later attempted to take his own life with a bread knife at his own breakfast table. He survived. The cannon was unshipped, the pensioners went ashore, and the colonial mails — disrupted for weeks by the requisition of the only steamer running the route — resumed.

But the episode did lasting damage to the Georgette, and this is the part usually left out. Her limitations had been demonstrated in front of the entire Australian press. She had been too slow, too short of coal, and too lightly armed to do the job, and papers from Melbourne to Geelong described her as "a small steamer which usually takes the mail." The description was accurate and, in its way, fatal. By August 1876 the colonial government had begun advertising for a vessel to replace her.

That process was still running when she sailed on her last voyage. On 28 November 1876 — the day before she left Fremantle for the final time — the Western Australian Times reported that the Commissioner of Crown Lands was travelling out by the outgoing mail, authorised to negotiate for her replacement. Three days later she was on the bottom off Calgardup Bay.

A footnote about her name

There is one detail that reads oddly in hindsight. The Lloyd's Register hull survey form completed at Dumbarton in November 1872 carries a correction in the space for the vessel's name. Buccaneer is struck out, and Georgette is written over it in the same hand. Somewhere between the laying of her keel and the completion of her survey, her first owner changed his mind.

No record survives of why. But on the morning of 19 April 1876, with an Armstrong gun on her deck and fifty armed men aboard, chasing a whaleship across the Indian Ocean, the Buccaneer would have been the better name for the occasion.

The only picture of her

No photograph of the SS Georgette is known to exist. The Scottish Built Ships archive has none; the yard that built her left no drawing office records when it folded. What survives of her appearance is a midship section submitted to Lloyd's Register, a watercolour painted from research by the maritime heritage artist Ross Shardlow, and one contemporary image.

That image is a hand-coloured lithograph published in 1876 by E. N. Russell, titled Bark Catalpa of New Bedford, police boat, ship's boat and British ship Georgette. It is held by the Royal Museums Greenwich as object PAH0582. The Georgette is on the right of the composition, at sea under steam, with the police boat to her left, the ship's boat that carried the escapees in the centre, and the Catalpa in full sail.

It exists because she lost. Had the pursuit ended any other way, there would be no contemporary picture of the ship at all — only a set of registry dimensions and a cross-section through her hull.

The story is still being performed

The Catalpa escape has not faded the way the wreck has. In 2026 the Perth company Theatre 180 staged Catalpa: Flight to Freedom, written by Stuart Halusz and Myles Pollard in collaboration with the WA Museum, and toured it through regional Western Australia to full houses. Audiences who already knew how it ended still leaned forward.

The Georgette is a supporting character in that story — the ship that was sent and came back without them. Eight months later she became the subject of a different one.