This book tells the story of John Boyle O'Reilly, from his birth in Drogheda, Ireland to his death in Massachusetts, USA. He was well educated (his father was Headmaster of the local school which helped) and he was very Irish, although English was probably his "mother tongue". He was well polished, mainly as a cavalryman in the English Army's famed 10th Hussars, and then hardened in prisons and a Convict Ship in which he was transported to Western Australia and escaped to America, where he organised the rescue and escape of the remaining six convicts whose crime, like his, was to have joined an Irish Secret Society, the Fenians, dedicated to the struggle for Ireland's freedom from English rule. In America also he worked tirelessly for as an activist for the rights of African-Americans and Indigenous Americans, whose plight seemed to him so like that of the Irish in Ireland. Over the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Irish and black communities had developed a deep antagonism towards one another, mainly the result of competition for employment as Irish and black labourers clashed in cities across the US. Worse, in his mind, was the reaction of Americans to Irish immigrants during those decades, engendered largely by the physical state of the Famine victims who had arrived by the thousand. And in his spare time he was a serious and in his day much respected poet. Against that background we see what English prison life was like in the later nineteenth century, especially the notorious Dartmoor prison. We experience life on a Convict Ship of that era. We look at the Great Famine in Ireland and how it affected the people there. We go whaling, and see life and people in late 19th century America. And from Chapter 2 onwards all this is told through the eyes of our protagonist, John Boyle O'Reliiy

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