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Propelled by love of family, Bridget Butler and daughter Anne Corry, age sixteen, hatched a plan to be reunited with the rest of their kin. Bridget’s husband had died, and her children were the only family left in Killard, County Clare. As they looked out the grimy window of a boardinghouse room, rain bore down on what were once green hillsides, now plucked bare by the starving for their evening meal.

On January 11, 1849, armed with red-hot coal in a skillet, Bridget and Anne set fire to Mary Hickey’s house, down the lane from the dingy lodging they called home. Mother and daughter prayed they’d be caught, and their prayers were soon answered. Each received a sentence of seven years to Van Diemen’s Land.

A year earlier, Anne’s sister, Margaret, and her brothers, John and Patrick, had been arrested for stealing a sheep. Margaret was shipped out right away. While her brothers awaited sentencing, Patrick was found dead in Dublin’s Smithfield gaol. Not knowing they’d lost Patrick, Bridget and Anne boarded the ship Australasia to repeat the journey Margaret had made a year earlier. On March 27, 1849, they escaped the ravages of the potato famine. Every week spent on the Australasia brought mother and daughter closer to the chance for survival as a family. Just one day before their ship anchored, Bridget died from dysentery at age sixty, following several days of suffering from griping and purging.58 Happily, Anne found her sister, Margaret Quealy, who attended Anne’s wedding and the baptism of her children.59

Many stories were less outwardly dramatic than Bridget Butler’s and Anne Corry’s, though no less tragic. Bridget Mulligan was another country girl named after Ireland’s St. Bridget, a patron saint. Like many, she relied on otherworldly strengths to survive the hard times in County Cavan. Still suffering the famine’s aftershocks, Bridget was on her own at twenty-three and shared a small room with her “cara,” or best friend, Mary Rennicks.

Just four feet, seven inches tall, with a ruddy complexion covered in freckles,60 the diminutive lass with a squinting right eye didn’t look like a criminal, nor had she intended to become one. But in 1850, she made a big mistake. She and Mary Rennicks stole a one-gallon milk tin, a gown, and a white petticoat from Susan Brady. Each was summoned before the Court of County Cavan in the province of Ulster. Despite no prior record, both Bridget and Mary were sentenced to ten years in “parts beyond the seas.”

After Bridget was sent to an island smaller than Ireland, her Roman Catholic religion placed her in a tiny minority. Women from Ireland’s western counties also faced a language barrier. Many spoke only Gaelic and did not understand the commands given by their captors.61 Shipped in the final years of transportation, Bridget benefited from some improvements in shipboard captivity. “Perhaps the most important of these gave each convict a separate sleeping-berth place which could be converted in the daytime into seats and tables.”62

Although Elizabeth Fry passed away in 1845 at age sixty-five, the work in her final years also eased Bridget’s journey on the Blackfriar. By 1842, Mrs. Fry had lobbied successfully for the addition of matrons to the all-male ship crew. The Blackfriar sailed from Dublin with a cargo of 260 female convicts, 59 children, and 7 free settlers who booked passage on the barque. Though the prisoners were better supervised than those of earlier transports, barbaric medical practices had hardly changed at all. Surgeon Superintendent John Moody treated the insane on board with a straitjacket or a cold bucket of water, later reporting the results of his methods:

Under the head Hysterical Mania . . . a case is given by no means uncommon in female convict ships and in the Penitentiary in the Colony, caused no doubt in nervous temperaments by the heat of climate, indolent life. . . . Nothing appeared to have a better effect than a shower bath or a few buckets of water thrown over