John Mitchel

Level 3

Terry Fitzgerald on 2nd March 2023

John Mitchel is the subject of Tom Keneally's 2022 novel 'Fanatic Heart'.

Level 59

greg petersen on 29th September 2017

Mitchel was at first transported to Ireland Island, Bermuda. It was here that the Royal Navy utilised convict labour to create a dockyard and naval base, the prisoners included many Irish rebels and were housed offshore on hulks. Many of these prisoners died of disease but Mitchel having survived this was sent for the remainder of his sentence to Van Diemen's Land. He became a pro-slavery advocate in the United States and is attributed to this quote, "We deny that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful correction. We wish we had a good plantation well-stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama." A fellow Young Irelander Rebel Michael Davitt, in 1898 on a visit to his former place of imprisonment in Tasmania after more than forty years as a free man after rereading Mitchel's Mitchel's 'Jail Journal' while expressing praise for Mitchel's condemnation and defiance of British rule, was taken aback by the book's , "Appalling narrowness of spirit and lamentable want of fairness towards friends as well as foes." He went on to say, "The injustice and harshness of his sentiments as expressed in his book towards the unfortunates who had sinned against the rights of that property that he had himself so eloquently denounced__after reading all this in the land in which Hobart, Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour prisons had existed, I almost regretted having opened the Jail Journal again".

Level 42

Tim Flynn on 22nd May 2013

Escaped from Tasmania and made his way back to Ireland via the US