John Boyle O'Reilly(1844–1890)

John Boyle O'Reilly was born at the small thatched schoolmaster's cottage at Dowth, on the north bank of the Boyne river near the Brú na Bóinne passage-tomb complex of County Meath, on 28 June 1844, third son of William David O'Reilly, the Dowth National School master, and Eliza Boyle. The household was small lower-middle-class Catholic Meath of the post-Famine 1840s: the father was the National School master under the post-Stanley-Letter National School system that had been introduced in 1831, the family lived in the small schoolmaster's cottage adjacent to the Dowth National School building, and the boys were schooled at home from the early years through to twelve. The small father's classical-literary library (the Cicero, Virgil, Horace, the Walter Scott, the Thomas Moore Irish-Melodies, the late-Romantic English poetry of Shelley, Keats and Byron) was the foundational reading of the early life.

He was apprenticed at eleven in 1855 to a Drogheda printer of the *Drogheda Argus* small Catholic-Liberal weekly newspaper, moved to Preston in England in 1859 at fifteen to work on the *Preston Guardian* (the Lancashire Liberal weekly that ran on a post-1855-Newspaper-Stamp-Act Catholic-Liberal political position), and at nineteen in 1863 enlisted in the British 10th Hussars cavalry regiment at Dublin under the instruction of the Irish Republican Brotherhood organiser James Stephens. The small Stephens-IRB strategy of the 1860s period was to insert small IRB sleeper agents into the British army garrisons across Ireland on the intention of producing the future rising's military-defection-of-the-garrisons foundation; O'Reilly was one of about fifteen thousand small IRB members enlisted across the Irish-British-garrison battalions across the 1864 to 1865 period.

The small Irish-Constabulary infiltration of the Stephens-IRB Irish-Brigade conspiracy in early 1866 broke the movement. The small Dublin Castle authorities arrested about eighty of the Irish-Brigade officer-leadership and about two hundred of the sleeper-rank-and-file across the February-and-March 1866 period; O'Reilly was arrested at the Island Bridge Barracks in Dublin on 14 February 1866 at twenty-one. He was court-martialled at the Royal Barracks Dublin in early July 1866 on the charge of treasonable conspiracy to spread mutiny among Her Majesty's Forces, was found guilty, and was sentenced to death by firing-squad. The small sentence was commuted to twenty years' penal servitude on the Carlton-Russell-Cabinet recommendation, was confirmed on 9 July 1866, and the sentence was served first at the Mountjoy Prison Dublin, then at the Pentonville Prison London, and finally at the Dartmoor Prison Princetown across the 1866 to 1867 period.

He was transported to Western Australia aboard the convict ship *Hougoumont* on 12 October 1867, the final small convict-ship transport that the British government sent to the Australian colonies. The small *Hougoumont* arrived at Fremantle on 9 January 1868 with sixty-two Fenian political prisoners and about three hundred small ordinary convict prisoners; the Fenian sixty-two were dispersed across the Western Australian convict-establishment work-camps. O'Reilly was sent to the Bunbury convict-road-camp in the south-west small jarrah-forest country to work on the Bunbury-to-Vasse small overland-road construction. He served small penal servitude at the Bunbury camp from January 1868 to 18 February 1869, the day on which he escaped from the Bunbury camp on a pre-arranged extraction by the American whaling-captain James Gifford of the whaling-ship *Vigilant*.

The small extraction failed (the *Vigilant* never made the rendezvous), but a second small American whaler *Gazelle* under the Captain David Gifford arrived at the rendezvous bay on 2 March 1869 and took him aboard. The small *Gazelle* sailed for the American Atlantic-whaling-grounds via the Indonesian archipelago and the Cape of Good Hope, reached the American port of New Bedford, Massachusetts on 23 November 1869 after a eight-month transit. O'Reilly settled at small Boston in early 1870, took the junior-reporter post at the *Boston Pilot* small Catholic-Irish-American weekly newspaper in late 1870, was promoted to editor at the *Pilot* on the 1876 retirement of the previous editor Patrick Donahoe, and ran the *Pilot* as the Catholic-Irish-American newspaper of the post-Civil-War American period for the remaining fourteen years of his life. The small *Pilot* under his editorship reached a national American Irish-Catholic circulation of about a hundred and forty thousand copies a week, was the dominant voice of the American-Irish-Catholic political-and-cultural establishment of the 1880s decade, and ran across the period the O'Reilly editorial-line on Catholic-Anglo-American cultural reconciliation, Irish-American political-engagement, and small American-Black-and-Indian civil-rights-and-emancipation positions.

The small Catalpa rescue of 1876 was the political-organising senior event of his Boston career. He planned the operation across the 1873 to 1875 period with the Clan na Gael leadership at New York and the Fenian Brotherhood at Boston: the American whaling-vessel *Catalpa* under the Captain George Anthony was bought by the Clan na Gael at New Bedford in 1875, sailed for Western Australia in April 1875, lay off Fremantle through the February-and-March 1876 period waiting on the extraction signal, and on 17 April 1876 picked up the six remaining Fenian prisoners (James Wilson, Martin Hogan, Robert Cranston, Thomas Hassett, Michael Harrington and Thomas Darragh) who had escaped from the Fremantle Convict Establishment that morning on a pre-arranged extraction. The small *Catalpa* sailed for the United States across the four-month transit and landed the six Fenian rescues at small New York on 19 August 1876. The small Catalpa rescue was the Irish-American Fenian-political event of the American 1870s and was, in the public Irish-American-political memory of the period, the foundation event of the Clan na Gael organisation's small post-1876 reputation. He died of a accidental overdose of chloral hydrate (a sleeping-medication of the period) at his small summer house at Hull, Massachusetts on 10 August 1890, forty-six years old. He is buried at the Holyhood Cemetery, Brookline, Massachusetts under a public-subscription memorial. The Reilly name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Ó Raghallaigh* (descendant of Raghallach, the medieval Cavan-and-Meath surname of the medieval *Uí Bhriúin* family of the east-Connacht-and-Brefnian frontier country); he carried the Dowth-schoolmaster's-son variant of it through the Fenian-Hussars-transportation-Catalpa-Boston small Irish-Catholic-American political-and-journalistic foundation career.