Since Father McCabe had not seen anyone make good a convict escape, he was now engaged in planning a unique and perilous event. An impetuous plan would ruin his own position in Western Australia but would destroy what was left of John Boyle O'Reilly. James Maguire, a young Irish settler to whom McCabe turned for help, would remember later that, "Boyle, poor Boyle, cried and cried in desperation for help." Maguire was a farmer from a place named Dardanup, inland from Bunbury. Thirty-four years old, he was a justice of the peace and chairman of the Dardanup Road Board. His brother was the Dardanup postmaster.
As O'Reilly, on an errand to Bunbury in the new year of 1869, crossed the Bunbury racecourse, he heard a coo-ee! from the edge of the bush, and saw a sturdy man, axe on shoulder, emerge from scrub. It was Maguire, who had been given a contract to clear some land. He said to O'Reilly, "I'm a friend of Father Mac's", and as proof of bona fides, he handed over a card bearing the handwriting of McCabe. It was expected, Maguire said, that a number of American whalers would touch at Bunbury in February. Maguire pledged, "You'll be a free man in February, as sure as my name is Maguire." But O'Reilly was suspicious of such bluster.
In the ferocious Western Australian summer, O'Reilly dealt badly with the anguish of delay. But while the prince was visiting Perth and Fremantle in February 1869, a woodcutter friend of Maguire's met O'Reilly on the edge of the convict camp and casually stated that three American whaling barks had arrived at Bunbury. For O'Reilly, amongst huge forests of gum and jarrah, native mahogany trees, and beneath that massive, blazing sky, the anticipation of any resolution to his suffering, welcome escape or welcome death, was an itch in the blood.
At Spencer's Hotel in Bunbury, Father McCabe had met and, for a small sum, made an agreement with Capt Anthony Baker, commander of the Yankee barque, Vigilant. Baker would take O'Reilly abroad if O'Reilly met up with the ship outside Australian waters. Capt Baker would cruise Vigilant up and down the coast north of Bunbury for three days and keep a lookout for the escapee.
At the Koagulup camp, on the appointed night for Maguire to aid O'Reilly's escape, February 18th, 1869, the prisoner wrote a letter to his father, telling him that he had hopes now of a getaway to the US. The eve-of-escape letter must have been given to Jessie (daughter of warder Henry Woodman, with whom O'Reilly conducted a brief and hopeless affair) or Maguire for posting, for it was published two months later in Irish newspapers.
At seven o'clock that evening Woodman made his rounds and looked in at all the convicts in their slab timber huts. He would declare that he saw O'Reilly sitting in his bark hovel. Soon after Woodman passed, a convict visited O'Reilly to borrow some tobacco, and remained chatting a little while. Alone again, at eight o'clock, O'Reilly changed into the clothes and boots a supporter - apparently Jessie - had got for him, put out his light, and headed off for the rendezvous in the bush. He had a great advantage in his civilian-style footwear, since convict boots had a broad-arrow pattern of nails in the sole to make it easy for trackers to find any absconder. A few hundred yards into the bush he found he was being followed by a convict sawyer. Whoever it was, he acted with nobility. "Are you off?" the man asked. "I knew you meant it. I saw you talking to Maguire a month ago, and I knew it all." O'Reilly was expecting to be urged or threatened to let the sawyer join in, but instead the man held out his hand and said: "God speed you. I'll put them on the wrong scent tomorrow."
Near an abandoned convict station on the Vasse Road, O'Reilly was to lie in the bush until he heard someone approach whistling the first bars of Patrick's Day. Half an hour passed before Maguire and two friends rode up, leading a horse for O'Reilly. The party was made up of Maguire's cousin and a man O'Reilly later called M---. This discretion was from regard for the man's situation in Western Australia. After some hours' ride northeast, they reached the Collie River and a long inlet, the Leschenault Estuary, stretching north, protected from the Indian Ocean by a long, low coastal strip of land where M--- worked. John Boyle O'Reilly and his party met up with three more friends waiting near Bunbury. These new men were "Mickie Mackie", a shoemaker from Bunbury, and Mark Lyons, both Irishmen. The third was an English ticket-of-leave man and former burglar named Joseph Buswell, whose fishing boat would now be used. The old British lag Buswell had in his day been one of those demons of the convict deck to whom the Fenians had felt superior.
The party dragged the boat through the mud to reach the water. M- refused to get aboard - he had promised his wife not to go in the boat. Maguire's cousin yelled, "All right, to home to your wife!", which O'Reilly thought rather harsh treatment for a man who had already taken risks for the sake of someone he did not know.
ONCE out of the lagoon, creeping past Bunbury through the relatively narrow heads of the port into the Indian Ocean, they bent vigorously to the oars in open sea. At sunrise only the tops of the sandhills of Mowenup could be seen by O'Reilly, and the boat lay off them waiting for the Vigilant to put out from Bunbury. But by early afternoon, Vigilant had not appeared, and did not seem to be putting out at all that day. Ravenous and extremely thirsty, O'Reilly's party ran the boat ashore through strong surf, pulling it up high on an enormous length of beach.
Maguire, O'Reilly and the others wandered for hours through the dry swamps searching for water, even films of moisture beneath the bark of paperbark trees. Mark Lyons eventually located a slab hut where his brother-in-law, Jackson, lived remotely, overseeing a herd of water buffalo. Maguire thought it too dangerous to take O'Reilly to Jackson's, so the party left him in a screen of paperbarks, where he dealt with his thirst by eating a raw possum he had dragged from a hollow tree. He made a bed for himself in the sand dunes out of the boughs of the snake-, ant-, and centipede-repelling peppermint tree.
Next morning his party of abettors was back, and at about one o'clock one of them who had been in the dunes on lookout with a telescope came running down the beach with news of having sighted Vigilant. The Buswell fishing boat was run out immediately through the surf, and O'Reilly and the party rowed to intercept the whaler. Maguire fixed a white shirt on top of the oar, and the entire party, O'Reilly included, roared and shouted. But the Vigilant, though obviously on search, passed them by, disappearing into haze.
O'Reilly's disappointment as they landed him that night was of course savage, but Maguire decided to introduce the charming escapee to Mr and Mrs Jackson. Before Maguire left, he took trouble to reassure devastated O'Reilly that missing Vigilant was not the end. He guaranteed to be back within a week with new arrangements. This seemed to constitute a promise in which O'Reilly put childlike trust. The escapee's three Irish companions and the Englishman Buswell now put out in the surf again and rowed back to Bunbury, leaving O'Reilly in the limbo of the dunes.
As Maguire found out back in Bunbury, Vigilant had been a day late in coming up the coast because a convict named Thompson had absconded from Bunbury the same night as O'Reilly's escape. He had been spotted by the daughter of principal warden Woodrow walking through town after curfew, and so the water police descended on Vigilant. The whaler was so crowded with whale-oil casks, lumber and provisions that sub-inspector Timperley complained to Capt Baker that one of his warders, who had crawled into narrow spaces to probe for escapees with a wire prong, was not able to crawl out again. Thompson was not discovered abroad, but, as Timperley returned to his office, "I received a report that No 9843 John O'Reilly had absconded from the Vasse road party . . . I may also state that this same prisoner attempted suicide on the 27th of December last by cutting the veins in his arm." By then Vigilant was clearing the harbour under full sail, and Woodrow and Timperley believed O'Reilly to be aboard.