1 “BE TRUE TO YOUR WORK, YOUR WORD, AND YOUR FRIEND.”

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

1. This quotation is all over the internet, attributed to Henry David Thoreau. Not only was it not written by Thoreau but instead by John Boyle O’Reilly (convict photograph above), but also, it is not quite accurate. What he had actually written in his problematic and very forgettable poem “Rules of the Road” does not seem all that Thoreauvian:

For peace do not hope — to be just you must break it; Still work for the minute and not for the year; When honor comes to you, be ready to take it; But reach not to seize it before it is near. Be silent and safe — silence never betrays you; Be true to your word and your work and your friend; Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you, Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY

1844

June 28, Friday: John Boyle O’Reilly was born into a well-to-do Irish family at what once had been Dowth Castle, a 12th-Century fortress near Drogheda. His mother was a close relative of the John Allen who had been a key participant in an 1803 Irish uprising.

Frederick Douglass’s schedule called for him to speak in Methuen before the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society — but his actual whereabouts and activities on this day remain a mystery: Lampe, Gregory P. FREDERICK DOUGLASS: FREEDOM’S VOICE, 1818-1845. East Lansing MI: Michigan State UP, 1998, page 251: Douglass’ activities from mid-June to the end of July are difficult to determine. Neither the Liberator nor the National Anti-Slavery Standard advertised any of his lectures or documented his participation in any antislavery meetings during this period. According to Blassingame, ed. DOUGLASS PAPERS, SERIES ONE, 1:xciii, on 28 June Douglass attended the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society meeting in Methuen, Massachusetts. However, Douglass’ name does not appear in the minutes of the meeting, published in the Liberator, 12 July 1844, 111, and it is probable that he was not in attendance. Douglass was invited to attend an antislavery meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, from 26 to 29 July, but there is no indication of his presence in the accounts of the proceedings published in the Liberator, 27 September 1844, 153.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

John Boyle O’Reilly “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

June: While working as an apprentice at an Irish newspaper, John Boyle O’Reilly enrolled in the 11th Lancashire Rifle Volunteers. He would receive military training.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Boyle O’Reilly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

Completion of serial publication of William Allingham’s verse novel LAURENCE BLOOMFIELD IN IRELAND, which dealt with land-relations in a manner sympathetic to the tenants, during the previous year and this year in Fraser’s Magazine. His landlord hero, upon taking charge of his estate, dismissed his bailiff for cruelty and burned the bailiff’s list of Ribbonmen, halting evictions and instituting fair dealing. Despite this fair treatment of the peasants, this kindly landlord was unable to prevent them from taking their revenge on the former bailiff. This novel, when it would be published in book form, would win him the appreciation of George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Ford Madox Brown.

The founding of the “Irish People” newspaper.

Upon his return to Ireland at the completion of his military service with the 11th Lancashire Rifle Volunteers, John Boyle O’Reilly enlisted with the 10th Hussars in Dublin.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Boyle O’Reilly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1865

William Dickes and Company won a prize in Dublin.

The arrest, and escape, of James Stephens, founder of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The editors of the “Irish People” publication were arrested. At some point during this year John Boyle O’Reilly joined the “Fenians,” which is to say, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He would recruit for them, bringing in before his capture by the British authorities perhaps 80 new members sworn to secrecy and violence as tools of resistance to British rule.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Late in the year: The British authorities struck again against the “Fenian” movement of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood. Among those arrested was their recruiter John Boyle O’Reilly. He would be sentenced to transportation into a 20-year period of penal servitude (after initially having been marked for execution).

Professor William Henry Harvey became seriously ill.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Boyle O’Reilly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1867

The Fenian rising in Ireland failed due to English spies. William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien were publicly hanged for the murder of a policeman. There was an attendance of perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 persons at this hanging. The three would become known in the resistance as “the Manchester martyrs” and their images would be distributed within the three leaves of a shamrock.

After serving nearly two years in English prisons, John Boyle O’Reilly was put aboard the Hougoumont for transportation to a prison on the west coast of Australia (this voyage by the Hougoumont would turn out to be the final convict ship transport to Australia’s western coast).

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

John Boyle O’Reilly “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1868

January 9, Thursday: Arriving in Fremantle on the western coast of Australia, John Boyle O’Reilly was initially housed at the Convict Establishment (this has become ). He would be there only a month before being further transferred to Bunbury to join a convict gang that was improving the road between Bunbury and Vasse. At Bunbury the warder, Henry Woodman, would make him a probationary convict constable.

December 27, Sunday: John Boyle O’Reilly slashed his arm. He was, however, discovered in a faint before bleeding out, by another convict. The local Catholic priest, Father Patrick McCabe, would hearten him by promising that he would help arrange for his escape from this prison colony. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY

1869

February 18, Thursday: John Boyle O’Reilly sneaked away from his inmate duties to link up with a party of Irish settlers from the town of Dardanup. They rode to the Collie River, where a rowboat was waiting, and rowed out the Leschenault Inlet, turning north along the ocean coast, traveled about a dozen miles, and concealed themselves among the dunes. They were to await the American whaling ship Vigilant, which Father Patrick McCabe had arranged would take him on board when it sailed from its Bunbury anchorage.

February 19, Friday: John Boyle O’Reilly and the party of Irish settlers with the rowboat who were helping him to escape sighted the American whaling ship Vigilant as it sailed north along the coast after having departed from its anchorage at Bunbury, and began to row out toward it. The Vigilant sailed on, not acknowledging the rowboat or its agreement. The party returned to hiding among the dunes while an attempt was made to make a similar arrangement with some other vessel.

March 2: After several weeks of hiding among the dunes, a fresh arrangement was made by the local Catholic priest, Father Patrick McCabe, with the skipper of the American whaler Gazelle, and when it met up with John Boyle O’Reilly waiting in the rowboat three miles out to sea, he was taken on board. Another convict, James Bowman, had heard of the intended escape and, by threatening disclosure of the plot, had managed to attach himself to this escape. He also was taken aboard. The Gazelle’s captain had agreed only to take O’Reilly, and only as far as Java, but weather conditions prevented passage through the Sunda Strait and so the vessel wound up dropping anchor to obtain a supply of fresh water at Roderique (now Rodrigues). There the vessel was immediately boarded by a British magistrate and a contingent of police, for they had been informed that they had taken aboard an escaped British convict along the western coast of Australia. The crew concealed O’Reilly but offered up Bowman, who had made himself unpopular. Then a jump-overboard suicide story was arranged by the crew for O’Reilly, while he hid in a ship locker until the vessel was again out of British jurisdiction.

July 29, Thursday: Since the American whaler Gazelle’s next port of call after Rodrigues was to be the island of Saint Helena (where British authorities could be anticipated to be waiting for him), when the vessel on the high seas on this day hailed the American cargo vessel Sapphire, the escaping Irish prisoner John Boyle O’Reilly changed ships.

October 13, Wednesday: When the American cargo vessel Sapphire arrived at Liverpool, escaped Irish convict John Boyle O’Reilly made his way along the harbor to another American ship, the Bombay.

The Willard Asylum, the 1st state hospital for patients with chronic mental illness, was opened at Ovid, New York. (Other states would establish similar institutions in the hope of lowering the cost of care for chronic patients. The practice of segregating chronic patients into separate hospitals, controversial among psychiatrists and offensive to the patients’ relatives, would by the turn of the century be abandoned.)2 PSYCHOLOGY

2. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November 23, Tuesday: The American vessel Bombay arrived at Philadelphia and the escaped transported Irish convict John Boyle O’Reilly made contact with other Irishmen in America, who of course greeted him with open arms. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1870

After his arrival at Philadelphia John Boyle O’Reilly had been put to work as a reporter for the newspaper The Pilot, published in Boston. He covered the Fenian convention in New-York followed by the disastrous 3d Fenian invasion of Canada. This experienced reversed his attitude toward militant violence as a tool for the independence of Ireland, and thereafter he would pursue independence through an agenda to raise the status of the Irish people, and their self-esteem. His writings would be well received and he would rise to the editorship of The Pilot.

In this decade a patent-medicine craze in the US would reach a peak. However, in the British Isles, ether came to be scheduled under the Poisons Act, limiting its sale to qualified pharmacists. All ether imports into Ireland –where there was a significant substance abuse problem– were banned. Since most of the emerald island’s ether supply had been being imported from England and Scotland, within months imports fell off by 80% — and apparently without causing very much illicit home manufacturing.

Prime Minister Gladstone’s 1st Land Reform Bill was at this point bringing hope to Irish hearts.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

John Boyle O’Reilly “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1872

Work ceased at Fort Niagara with only the land front completed. Even then the new gun positions were not armed, and the walls had become obsolescent by the time of their completion. The fact that work was carried even to this point was probably due to another period of border tension. The threat of British involvement in the Civil War had soon disappeared as Confederate fortunes had declined. With the end of hostilities, however, large numbers of discharged veteran Union soldiers of Irish birth had become involved in the Fenian movement. Their new goal was independence for their Irish homeland of origin. One scheme to achieve this had come to be the invasion and conquest of British Canada as a blow against the British Empire and as a bargaining chip to use among other bargaining chips to gain self-determination for Ireland.

John Boyle O’Reilly got married with Mary Murphy, who was writing for the Young Crusader under the pen name Agnes Smiley. This couple would produce four daughters, Mollie, Eliza, Agnes, and Blanid O’Reilly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1873

John Boyle O’Reilly’s initial book of poetry, SONGS FROM THE SOUTHERN Seas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1875

In Ireland, Parnell was elected for Meath.

There remained at this point six military Fenians still confined at Fremantle Prison on the western coast of Australia. John Devoy sought John Boyle O’Reilly’s advice on how Clan na Gael might best effect their rescue, and O’Reilly suggested that the group simply purchase an American whaling vessel and send it under the cover of legitimate business to the port of Fremantle. This recommended rescue plan would be implemented, and would be successful.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

John Boyle O’Reilly “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1878

John Boyle O’Reilly’s book of poetry, SONGS, LEGENDS AND BALLADS.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) pointed out, in the course of his A HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY that would appear in eight volumes between this year and 1882, that the people of the English Pale in Northern Ireland had begun during the Tudor and Stuart periods to “look upon the Irish as later colonists looked upon the Red Indians.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1879

In Ireland, there was a famine scare. The Land League was founded by Davitt. The Land War started. From this year into 1882, Parnell would be encouraging the boycott of repressive landlords.

John Boyle O’Reilly’s novel MOONDYNE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY

1881

John Boyle O’Reilly’s book of poetry, THE STATUES IN THE BLOCK. Second Land Act. American based Clan na Gael raises funds to support the Land League fight against rack rents, unfair evictions and absentee landlords in Ireland. Parnell was arrested and jailed for supporting the tenants in the “Land Wars.” The English historian Edward A. Freeman (1823-1892), making a visit to the United States of America, commented that we’d be able create a “grand land” here this side of the pond, “if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY

1882

Kilmainham treaty; Parnell released; Land War ended. Murder of Chief Secretary for Ireland.

John Boyle O’Reilly’s SONGS, LEGENDS, AND BALLADS. On the following screen is a poem from pages 44- 45, that contains a line that has often inaccurately on the internet been attributed to Henry David Thoreau: HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY

1886

John Boyle O’Reilly’s book of poetry, IN BOHEMIA.

In Ireland, the 1st Home Rule bill. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1888

The “Parnell Letters” published in the previous year were being challenged as malicious forgeries. IRELAND

John Boyle O’Reilly’s THE ETHICS OF BOXING AND MANLY SPORT. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY

1890

August 10, Sunday: Early in the morning the body of John Boyle O’Reilly was found. His demise had been due to an overdose of his wife’s sleeping medication, chloral hydrate. Although it would be put out that he had died of heart failure, the death certificate would cite “accidental poisoning” and the police would not discount the possibility that this had been a suicide or worse. Thomas Wentworth Higginson would speak at the memorial service.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project John Boyle O’Reilly HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: December 3, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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