One of the earliest and most popular editors of the Catholic newspaper, The Boston Pilot, was an escaped “convict.” John Boyle O’Reilly (1844-90) was unjustly sentenced in 1867, by the English, to twenty-three years of penal servitude in Australia for his anti-British activism as a member of the Irish Fenians. He escaped the captivity “Down Under” through the efforts of a priest who took pity on him. The good father convinced the captain of an American whaling ship to give harbor to O’Reilly. After being transferred between four ships to escape the police, who were searching for him in various British colonial outposts, he arrived in Philadephia in 1869, finally settling in Boston a year later. Having had journalistic experience in Ireland prior to his arrest, O’Reilly found work as a reporter for Boston’s diocesan newspaper. For his first assignment, editor Patrick Donohue sent him back to Philadelphia to cover the Fenian convention. Due to several failures of this patriotic group to reclaim their country, the writer renounced militancy altogether. He launched a campaign to raise the hopes and aspirations of the Irish people through education and Catholic culture. Because the immigrants had suffered so much in their homeland and were now facing extreme poverty in America, O’Reilly focused on restoring a sense of optimism to the Irish through the cultivation of self-worth and self-confidence. He proclaimed his views through his prolific writing, his lecture tours, and his articles in the Pilot. His views were well received by Boston’s booming Irish-born population. The paper’s readership grew exponentially quickly reaching a circulation that was nationwide. Soon the spirited writer took over the editorial department, eventually becoming part-owner. “Never do anything as a journalist that you would not do as a gentleman” was his motto.
Known mainly for his poetry, O’Reilly published his first anthology, Songs from the Southern Seas, in 1873. Over the next fifteen years, another three collections would follow. His poetry was extremely popular in his day, but his best known poem, The Cry of the Dreamer, being highly introspective, was for a more philosophic audience.
With all of this O’Reilly never abandoned the Fenians, managing, in 1875, with the help of John Devoy, to pull off a rescue of six Fenians who, like himself, escaped their penal incarceration at the Freemantel prison in Australia. His remaining years were spent wrestling with ill health and insomnia. He died in 1890. He was only forty-six.
