The Greatest Escape? Frank McNally on one man’s mission to make a movie about the Catalpa Rescue

Better known to posterity as James Wilson, he was born in 1836 as a McNally (no relation to the diarist). He was still a McNally when growing up a teenager in Newry. Unfortunately, by age 17, he had the assault of a police officer to that name.

So when he joined the British army in 1853, to avoid arrest, he adopted a more anglified pseudonym. Under that, he soldiered in India for a time before going native again and joining the Fenians in 1864.

A year later, he deserted the army in advance of the expected uprising. When the British, well informed as usual, swooped to pre-empt the insurrection, “Wilson” and other military rebels qualified for harsh treatment. His sentence was death, commuted to transportation and penal servitude for life.

But this turbulent man of action would go down in history for, of all things, writing a letter. He was nine years into his sentence at Fremantle in Western Australia, worn down by work and despairing of release, when he wrote to the Fenian leader John Devoy, by then a journalist in New York.

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In a detail sure to appeal to the recipient, Wilson even gave the letter a headline: “A Voice from the Tomb”. The result, eventually, was what historian Joe Lee has called “one of the great escapes in world history”.

Devoy was a receptive reader. Like most civilian prisoners of the aborted rising, he had been released early to enjoy a new life, albeit in exile. He felt guilty that the military recruits he and others had persuaded to join the Fenians were still languishing in the grim conditions Wilson described.

So, through the Clann na Gael organisation of Irish republicans in the US, he raised thousands of dollars for a rescue attempt and entrusted another journalist, Boston-based John Boyle O’Reilly – who had been transported on the same ship as Wilson but later escaped – to buy a ship.

A former whaler, Catalpa was now in merchant service. But as an elaborate cover for the escape plan, it was re-rigged for whaling purposes and, under the captaincy of the American George Anthony, spent much of the year 1875 catching actual whales in the Atlantic before, in November, setting sail for Australia.

An undercover Fenian, John J Breslin, was meanwhile preparing the ground in Fremantle, posing as an empire enthusiast and investor while liaising with Wilson and scoping out the prison. The jail itself was impregnable, he concluded. But crucially, the Fenian prisoners were by now engaged in daily work projects outside.

And so it came to pass that, on April 17th, 1876, Wilson and five others absconded from a labouring party, were picked up by Breslin’s horse traps, and raced 12 miles to the coast where a rowboat awaited.

They rowed overnight, surviving a severe storm, to reach Catalpa next morning. But a British steamer soon reached it too, with a 12-pound gun against which the whaler was defenceless.

In the tense face-off that ensued, a warning shot was fired. Then Captain Anthony hoisted the US flag and dared the pursuers, on the centenary of the American Revolution, to risk an international incident. The British backed down. The “Catalpa Six” sailed to New York and glory.

Despite his prison ordeal, McNally aka Wilson went on to live long enough as a free man then in 1920, still in New York, he met Éamon de Valera during his US tour to secure support for an Irish Republic.

Devoy lived even longer. Having become the dominant Irish-American leader on foot of the escape, he was a focus of political pilgrimage for every visiting nationalist leader thereafter. A supporter of the 1921 Treaty, he lived to see and, in 1924, visit the Irish Free State.

The Catalpa’s is a rollicking story, told by among other people Donal O’Kelly in an award-winning 1995 play. Now, in the run-up to the 150th anniversary in 2026, my regular correspondent Frank MacGabhann wants to make a film about it. He already has a screenplay. All he needs to make the project a reality is the small matter of funding.

Brooklyn-born but long resident in Ireland, MacGabhann has a personal link to the story. When the then 82-year-old Devoy, half blind and hard of hearing, needed a place to live in his final years, Clan na Gael arranged for him to be put up in the apartment of Frank’s grand-aunts Alice and Lily, originally from Castleblayney but then resident on West 107th Street, Manhattan.

There the old Fenian wrote his memoirs, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, in a chair subsequently bequeathed to Frank. A chair of Irish Studies (as it were), this is now a sought-after piece of furniture in America. Film plans aside, however, it is among Frank’s other ambitions that the chair will end up on display in Devoy’s native Kildare.