After 109 days and 13,000 miles, the Hive was only one day away from Sydney town when disaster struck.
It was the night of December 10th, 1835, and things looked ominous for the 250 Irish convicts and 29 soldiers (many of whom were also Irish) on board.
Up until that point it had been an uneventful journey. There had been no extreme weather, no attempted mutinies and those seeking medical attention were just as likely to be soldiers as prisoners.
There had been one death on the journey; that of a young Limerick man called Michael Desmond. But the ship’s surgeon, Dr Anthony Donoghoe, blamed it on pulmonary disease caused by being an apprentice glassblower.
And now, hours from their destination, Capt John Thomas Nutting was drunk and ignoring warnings that the ship was about to be beached. Chief Officer Edward Canney tried to convince the officer of the watch to trim the sails, but he refused, with fear of disobeying the captain outweighing any doubt he may have had.
“The confusion and terror at this time is not to be described,” one of the passengers later wrote.
Wreck Bay
Not for nothing did the area subsequently come to be known as Wreck Bay.
But, guided to safety by local Aboriginal fishermen, all on board were rescued. There were no fatalities.
Irish-Australian author Babette Smith writes in her book The Luck of the Irish (Allen & Unwin), that they arrived when the so-called slave colony was at its height, ruled by the lash and the chain gang.
She discovered that some of the soldiers had wives and children with them and some of the prisoners – through bribing the ship’s mate – had sons hidden among the crew.
"First of all I got the ship's indent for the Hive, and that lists all the prisoners, their ages, whether they could read or write and where they were tried and so on. That gives you an awful lot of basic detail. They're easier to track than people like officers or members of the ship's crew," Smith says.
She researched the story in Ireland as well as Australia. “I wanted to read every available newspaper. I knew the court records had been destroyed [during the Civil War], but I thought that, as in Australian newspapers, you can gain a tremendous amount of information about the convict’s crimes,” she says.
After making it to shore alive the prisoners could have tried to escape, or overwhelm the guards. But they did not.
It was not fear that stopped them. Bar a few notable exceptions, these men were not rural innocents transported to Australia for minor transgressions. Maurice Leehy from Co Kerry, for instance, was on board for his part in a "savage atrocity". The Kerry Evening Post reported the judge telling how the victims had "their brains . . . beaten out while struggling in the deep water of the river".
James McCabe, a Protestant from Co Monaghan, was convicted of “malicious assault” for his part in sectarian clashes during an Orange Order parade.
There were six sets of brothers among the prisoners, suggesting that for them crime was a family business.
Smith says the reason the convicts did not run “boils down to the fact they wanted to be in Australia”.
By that point Sydney, with all its temptations and attendant lawlessness, was seen as an unsuitable place to confine convicts. As much as possible they were sent to the bush to work off their time on farms.
The men from the Hive were distributed far and wide throughout New South Wales, but the most fortunate were sent to the Illawarra region, where the land was so fertile it could produce two crops of potatoes a year. When their sentence was up, the men mostly chose to stay there and the area became a stronghold of Irish Catholicism.
Convicts
Many of the convicts and their descendants travelled far beyond potato farming. After he got his ticket of leave, James Dalton became a carter, transporting goods between towns in western New South Wales. He then opened a small store in the town of Orange. When the gold rush took off he opened a pub and brought his sons out as migrants. One, Thomas, became mayor of Orange and represented the town in the state parliament.
Most famously of all, a convict on the Hive called Lawrence Durack was the ancestor of the Olympic swimming champion Fanny Durack who, in the late 1910s, held every women's swimming world record up to a mile.