AustLit

Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing

James F. O'Connell (1808-1854) was an Irish sailor and entertainer. His travel narrative A Residence of Eleven Years in New Holland and the Caroline Islands traces his historically unverifiable travels in New South Wales and the Caroline Islands (especially Ponape) in the 1820s and 30s; the 1972 edition is an edited reprint of the 1836 original, includes a foreward by editor Saul H. Riesenberg, with a forward by series editor Maude. The foreword acknowledges the importance of accounts such as O'Connell's, while Riesenberg’s introduction provides an analysis of O'Connell's edited adventures. O’Connell paints a picture of a a picaresque journey around the Australian colonies and the Pacific, with his this "as told to" narrative used to promote his subsequent theatrical career as one of the first tattooed men in an American circus. However, in his introduction, Riesenberg casts doubt on many of the details that O'Connell confidently asserts, suggesting that he was probably an escaped convict attempting to obscure his past. The first few chapters detail O’Connell’s time in Australia, where he claimed to have met notable colonial personages ("King" Bungaree and John Oxley), and commented on both formal and informal aspects of the convict system, providing a very general description of the country, the Aboriginal populations, penal settlements, and colonial society. The next section narrates O'Connell's shipwreck on Ponape, detailing his tattooing, his marriage to the daughter of a chief, ethnographic descriptions of the Ponapean way of life, descriptions of the islands, and his eventual escape. He then details his further experiences, including detention in a Manilla prison, and his travels through Macao, Canton, Peking, and Constantinople to Halifax, and then New York. The Editor's preface to the first edition (1836) provided a sensational introduction, hinting that the book may be interesting but exaggerated: "when he was first introduced to us, the incredulity which is, sooner or later, the gift of connection with the world, induced us to be very suspicious; but continued and frequent conversations with him, in which, assisted by others, we repeated trivial questions, and invariably received the same answers, soon disarmed us of all suspicion" (p. 49).