The Emerald Whaler

The voyage of the Catalpa is one of history's unadorned gifts to adventure story writers. It began in 1875 when a group of wild American-Irish hired a three-masted whaler to sail from New Bedford to Western Australia. The aim of the expedition was nothing less than the `Invasion' of Fremantle to release some Irish patriots transported to the colony ten years before after the failure of the 1865 rising. Against all the odds, it succeeded...