Soldier, Fenian, and patriot: Recounting the life Cork's Ricard O’Sullivan Burke
When Ricard was a small boy — youngest of 12 children — his family was evicted from their home in Clounyreague, Kinneigh, West Cork, where he was born in 1838.
This was perhaps because his father Denis supported Chartist agitator Feargus O’Connor. According to his father, the eviction was responsible for “the ruin of our fortunes, the scattering of our family”.
Three of his brothers and a sister emigrated to England. The remainder of the family moved to nearby Dunmanway, where Ricard attended the Model School and became a monitor. He showed great talent in sketching, and developed an interest in national literature: “I read of the treachery of Irishmen at the passing of the Treaty of Union”, he wrote in his autobiography.
“[His] life was happy enough, but too tranquil” until — in 1853, when he was 15 — a couple of friends, farmers’ sons, encouraged him to “throw down his musty books”, and join the South Cork Light Infantry Militia.
Burke was stationed in Bandon, then Kinsale, and finally Limerick, where he was promoted to corporal. However, he hated the militia set-up and deserted after an officer hit him across the face for not addressing an envelope “correctly”.
Ricard boarded a steamer for Liverpool, but fearing arrest for desertion, he decided to leave England at the first opportunity, and after a month in London, sailed as a steerage passenger to America.
He was exchanging “a land that could never be other than hateful” for the country that he had dreamt of, “my ideal of free government — the refuge of my race”.
After five weeks, Burke arrived in New York, where he took any odd jobs that came his way. A sea captain paid him $100 to paint a portrait based on a photograph and was so pleased with his work that he offered the strong young man employment on his ship, the Georgette.
On board, Burke fulfilled almost every imaginable position, from “green hand”, able seaman, and clerk, to “leader of the orchestra”, dispenser of medicines, and general man of all work.
From 1856-58, he travelled extensively. On his first voyage, he sailed down the east coast of America to Honduras.
In a second expedition, he went in search of “the country where the streets are paved with gold, the roofs tiled with pancakes, and the rivers run red-wine”.
The carefree life at sea in warships, surveying vessels, coasters and whalers suited him. He was happy:
“I was seeing the world and I was acquiring some useful knowledge — a mastery of seamanship… an idea of astronomy, and a fluency in the Spanish language”.
Off the coast of northern California, he and other crewmates jumped ship to seek their fortune in the goldmines of Sonora. Burke led a band of sailors hundreds of miles northward. But as each day passed, their number dwindled, until only three were left.
Then he moved to southern California.
After an elderly Englishman, Icarus Taunton, nursed him through rheumatic fever, he commented: “I do not like the English nation, cannot, never did; but for individual Englishmen, I have much respect”.
Burke brushed with death again once he reached South America. In Chile, he was given poisoned red wine to drink, and he encountered an Irish colony defending itself against “unfriendly” Indians. Later, he was shipwrecked off the coast of Peru.
Further voyages took him to China, Japan, the South Pacific Islands, and the Arctic Circle.
Returning to New York, he was asked whether he had made his fortune. He replied: “I did not devote those years to money-making, but rather to sight-seeing”.
An ardent anti-slaver, Burke joined the Unionists in the American Civil War (1861-65).
He fought in many of the major battles, reaching the rank of colonel, and surviving “without a scratch”.
After leaving the army, a New York publishing house employed him as a bookkeeper.
In 1867, he joined the Fenian Brotherhood. The burly six-footer impressed the editor of the Gaelic American, John Devoy, who spoke of him as “by long odds the most remarkable man the Fenian movement produced and also one of the ablest”.
Fenian leader Thomas J Kelly chose Burke as his deputy and sent him to England to co-ordinate a series of uprisings. Here he ran a subterfuge business in Birmingham as a cover for an arms store.
After a failed raid on Chester Castle, he returned to Ireland to organise a revolt in Waterford on March 5. When only 50 men showed up, and still fewer in Tipperary, he sent them all home.
In Sligo, Burke posed as Mr Walters, an American artist on holiday, and hired a fishing boat to keep watch for a ship bringing the Fenians 8,000 rifles from the US. The Erin’s Hope arrived two months late, and its cargo was sent back to New York.
Returning to England, on September 18, he helped plan the rescue of Thomas J Kelly and Timothy Deasy from a police van in Manchester. A police sergeant was killed during the raid.
Burke escaped from the scene but was later arrested for arms procurement, and sent to the Clerkenwell House of Detention. There he started his autobiography, Christmas Holidays in Prison.
Two audacious attempts were made to rescue him. On December 12, a barrow with a beer cask packed with gunpowder was placed against the prison wall. A fuse was lit three times but sputtered out. The following day, the barrel was positioned beside the wall again. This time it exploded. But Burke and Casey were in their cells on the other side of the building.
On April 28, 1868, Burke’s trial began at the Old Bailey. On the third day, the jury returned a guilty verdict in less than 20 minutes. Sentenced to 14 years for treason-felony, Burke was confined in Newgate Prison, before being transferred to Millbank, then to Chatham, Kent.
While at Chatham, he accused a doctor of trying to poison him with mercury. He became so ill that his death was hourly expected, and the Catholic chaplain gave him the last rites. Karl Marx interrupted a meeting of the First International to announce his reported death.
On December 10, 1869, Burke was transferred to Woking Invalid Prison, Surrey, where a fellow inmate described him as “emaciated and demented”. After a year in Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, his brother Richard took him home to Coachford, Co Cork, to convalesce. Within two years, Burke had recovered. In 1873, he returned to US and worked as a War Department clerk, spoke at Irish-American conventions, and arranged Charles Stewart Parnell’s American tour.
In 1881, aged 43, Ricard met and eloped with 20-year-old Nora Sheehy from Fort Wayne, Indiana. They married and had two children.
Burke’s later years were dedicated to various engineering projects. He helped construct a 800-mile railway between Laredo, Texas, and Mexico City, via Monterey; was employed as assistant city engineer in Omaha, Nebraska; supervised the sewers in Chicago; and assisted another Irishman, John Philip Holland, to build the first submarine.
Following a stroke, Ricard O’Sullivan Burke died in Chicago in 1922, aged 84, and lies buried in Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery.
