afterwards assigned to a Bunbury-Vasse road crew, working as as clerk and messenger; fell in love with Jessie, daughter of the Warder Henry Woodman; attempted suicide by cutting wrists, 27 Dec. 1868; planned his escape with Fr. Patrick MacCabe and a settler named James McGuire; deserted from his road-crew, 18 Feb. 1869, and suffered hardships in the dunes when the designated carrier, Vigilant, failed to spot his boat; finally escaped to America on board the Bedford whaler Gazelle, having been blackmailed by a ticket-of-leave man called Henderson (alias Martin Bowman), who secured his own passage on the whaler;

• Songs from the Southern Seas and other poems (Boston 1873).
• Songs, Legends and Ballads (Boston Pilot 1878).
• The Statues and the Block, and Other Poems (1881).
• In Bohemia: A Collection of Poems (1886).

• Moondyne: A Story from the Under-world (NY: Kennedy 1879) - digital copy, ed. Susan Ashton, available at CELT [ref. E850005-001; see details]
• The King’s Men (Scribner 1884); others,

• The Poetry and Song of Ireland, with biog. sketches (NY 1887).
• Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (Boston 1888).

• James Jeffry Roche, ed., John Boyle O’Reilly, His Life and Poems and Speeches; together with his complete poems and speeches, edited by Mrs John Boyle O’Reilly, introduced by James Cardinal Gibbons [Archbishop of Baltimore] (NY: Mershon Co. 1891), 790pp. [of which “Poems”, pp.429-710; Speeches, pp.711-790]. Note: The story of the Catalpa is given in Chap. IX.

• [Daniel Connolly,] John Boyle O’Reilly [Biogram No. 2] The Irish Monthly, XIV, (March 1886), pp.155-56,
• anon., notice in in The Nation (24 Nov. 1888).
• ‘John Boyle O’Reilly by a Friend’, in “Contributors Club” The Atlantic Monthly, 66, 396 (October 1890), pp. 572ff [see infra].
• A memorial of John Boyle O’Reilly from the city of Boston [... &c.] (Boston 1891), 67pp. [copy in Library of Congress].
• Edward A. Moseley, ‘John Boyle O’Reilly, The Man’, in Donahoe’s Magazine, 30, 3 (Sept. 1893), and Do. [rep.] (Boston: Donahoe’s Magazine Co. 1893), 103pp. [copy in Burns Library, Boston Coll.; former property of Helen Landreth].
• Count George Noble Plunkett, [obit.; q.t.], in Irish Monthly, 9 (1891), revised & reprinted in Ireland-American Review, 1 [1938].
• Charles S. O’Connor, ‘John Boyle O’Reilly’ [Centennial Address; 26 Nov. 1944] (1944), 14pp.
• Francis Russell, ‘John Boyle O’Reilly: A Forgotten Poet’, in Irish Writing, 28 (Sept. 1954), pp.51-60.
• William G. Scholfield, Seek for A Hero: The Story of John Boyle O’Reilly (NY: Kenedy 1956) 309pp.
• J. David Hogan, ‘The Fenian Tradition and its Power: John Boyle O’Reilly: A Gallant Figure’, in Sunday Press (21 April 1957), p.11 [with sequel the following week].
• John R. Betts, "The Negro and the New England Conscience in the Days of John Boyle O’Reilly," in Journal of Negro History, 51 (1966), pp.246–61.
• John R. Betts, “John Boyle O’Reilly and the American Paideia’, in Éire Ireland, 2 (1967), pp.36–37.
• Kevin T. Shanley, ‘John Boyle O’Reilly and Civil Rights’, in Éire-Ireland, 4, 3 (Autumn 1969), pp.55-81.
• Nollaig Ó Gadhra, John Boyle O’Reilly agus an glór Gael-Mheiriceánach (Baile Átha Cliath: Foilseacháin Náisiúinta Tta. 1976), 103pp.
• V. Nadanasabapathy, John Boyle O’Reilly: A Bibliography, including references to the “Catalpa” Incident (Murdoch UP 1976), 22pp.
• Con Costello, Botany Bay: The Story of the Convicts Transported from Ireland to Australia, 1791–1853 (Cork & Dublin: Mercier Press 1987) [q.pp.].
• A[anthony] G. Evans, A Fanatic Heart: A Life of John Boyle O’Reilly, 1844-1890, Boston: Northwestern UP 1997), xv, 280pp. [see review details]; James M. O’Toole Reviewed work(s): Fanatic Heart: A Life of John Boyle O’Reilly, 1844-1890 by A. G. Evans, The New England Quarterly, 73, 2 (Jun., 2000), pp.332-35
• Thomas Keneally, The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New (London: Chatto & Windus 1998), 540-42, et passim.
• Susanna M. Ashton, ‘O’Reilly and The Moondyne’, in History Ireland, 10, 1 (Spring 2002), pp.38–42.
• Ian Kenneally, From the Earth, A Cry: The Story of John Boyle O’Reilly (Cork: Collins Press 2011), 380pp., ill. [+16pp. photos.]

See also Betsy Grey, “John Boyle O’Reilly: Forgotten Fenian - Did the World Break his Heart?” [MA thesis] (Bath Spa 2004), 88pp.

 It was hard to hearken the tale they told,
That Boyle O’Reilly was dead and cold,
In his golden prime, in his country’s need
Of each noble word and each worthy deed.

We loved him truly and well and long,
Who only knew him by word and song;
But around the feet of one motherland
Brethren see quickly and soon understand.

[ ‘The time has arrived when the interests of our country require from us, as priests and as Irishmen, a public pronouncement on the vital question of Home Rule. ... We suggest the holding of an aggregate meeting in Dublin, of the representatives of all interested in this great question — and they are the entire people, without dis-, tinction of creed or class — for the purpose of placing, by constitutional means, on a broad and definite basis, the nation's demand for the restoration of its plundered rights. — Extract from the Declaration of the Bishop and Priests of the Diocese of Cloyne, made on Sept. 15th, 1873.’ ]

You have waited, Priests of Ireland, until the hour was late;
You have stood with folded arms until ’twas asked— Why do they wait?
By the fever and the famine you have seen your flocks grow thin,
Till the whisper hissed through Ireland that your silence was a sin.
You have looked with tearless eyes on fleets of exile-laden ships,
And the hands that stretched toward Ireland brought no tremor to your lips;

[...]

Ask not class or creed : let " Ireland ! " be the talismanic word
[...]

Priest to priest, to sound the summons — and the answer, man to man;
With the people round the standard, and the prelates in the van.
Let the hearts of Ireland’s hoping keep this golden rule of Cloyne
Till the Orange fades from Derry and the shadow from the Boyne.
Let the words be carried outward till the farthest lands they reach! “After Christ, their country’s freedom do the Irish prelates preach!”

See full text in Gill’s Irish Reciter: A Selection of Gems from Ireland’s Modern Literature, ed. J. J. O’Kelly [Seán Ó Ceallaigh] (Dublin: M. H. Gill 1905), pp.220-23 [available at Internet Archive - online]. Note: The prefixed material is to be found in the Gill anthology.

It is sweet to rejoice for a day —
For a day that is reached at last!
It is well for wanderers in new lands,
Slow climbers towards a lofty mountain pass,
Yearning with hearts and eyes strained ever upward,
To pause and rest on the summit —
To stand between two limitless outlooks —
Behind them, a winding path through familiar pains and ventures;
Before them, the streams unbridged and the vales untravelled.

[...]

Exile is God’s alchemy! Nations He forms like metals —
Mixing their strength and their tenderness;
Tempering pride with shame and victory with affliction;
Meting their courage, their faith, and their fortitude —
Timing their genesis to the world’s needs!

“What have ye brought to our Nation-building, Sons of the Gael?
What is your burden or guerdon from old Inisfail?
[...]
What have ye brought from Erin your hapless land could spare?
Her tears, defeats, and miseries? Are these, indeed, your share?
Are the mother’s caoine and the bean sidhe’s cry your music for our song?
Have ye joined our feast with a withered wreath and a memory of wrong?
With a broken sword and treason-flag from your Banba of the seas?
O, where in our House of Triumph shall hang such gifts as these?”

[...]

“I send you in cradle and bosom, wise brain and eloquent tongue,
Whose crowns shall engild my crowning, whose songs for me shall be sung.
O, flowers unblown, from lonely fields, my daughters with hearts aglow,
With pulses warm with sympathies, with bosoms pure as snow —
I smile through tears as the clouds unroll — my widening river that runs!
My lost ones grown in radiant growth — proud mothers of free-born sons!
My seed of sacrifice ripens apace! The Tyrant’s cure is disease:
My strength that was dead like forest is spread beyond the distant seas!”

“It is well, aye well, old Erin! The sons you give to me
Are symbolled long in flag and song — your Sunburst on the Sea!
All mine by the chrism of Freedom, still yours by their love’s belief;
And truest to me shall the tenderest be in a suffering mother’s grief.
Their loss is the change of the wave to the cloud, of the dew to the river and main;
Their hope shall persist through the sea, and the mist, and thy streams shall be filled again.
As the smolt of the salmon go down to the sea, and as surely come back to the river,
Their love shall be yours while your sorrow endures, for God guardeth His Right for ever![”]

See full-text copy - as attached.

The Pilot, America’s oldest Catholic newspaper, was established in September 1829 by Bishop Benedict J. Fenwick, who saw the need for the “publication of a newspaper in which the doctrines of the Holy Catholic Church ... may be truly explained and moderately but firmly defended,” he wrote in the first edition of the newspaper. Its purpose, as was also stated in that first edition, was to defend the “crying calumnies and gross misrepresentations which in this section of the country have been so long, so unsparingly, so cruelly heaped upon the Church.”

Beginning as The Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel, the newspaper’s name was changed several times in it’s first seven years.   The Jesuit, The United States Catholic Intelligencer, The Literary and Catholic Sentinel and several combinations of those names.

In 1834, unhappy with the paper’s progress, Bishop Fenwick sold the publication to two lay men — Henry Devereux, the publisher, and Patrick Donahoe, an employee who quickly became the newspaper’s sole proprietor and editor. By 1836, Donahoe changed the title of the paper to The Boston Pilot, both as a tribute to the Dublin Pilot newspaper, and, as Donahoe himself wrote in a prospectus, “to suggest that we would do our best to “pilot’ our readers through rough waters, the rocks of doubt or the quicksands of error.”

Although the newspaper began with modest circulation, readership of The Boston Pilot steadily increased, in 1854 boasting over 1.5 million subscribers worldwide.In 1858, the newspaper’s Old English nameplate “The Pilot” appeared for the first time, under the editorship of Father Joseph M. Finotti, along with the motto, “Be just and fear not, let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy God’s, thy Country’s and Truth’s.”

However, the history of the newspaper was not without its setbacks. The Pilot offices burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1872 and then twice more at new locations — all within one month. In the wake of these fires, editor John Boyle O’Reilly penned an editorial saying, “When a fire comes to Boston nowadays, it comes looking for its friend The Pilot.  It is evident that the fire has a rare appreciation of a good newspaper.”

Isnsurance companies’ failure to cover the losses from the fires, coupled with the failure of the bank and publishing house, prompted Donahoe to sell The Pilot. In 1876 Archbishop John J. Williams, Boston’s first archbishop, purchased a three-fourths interest in The Pilot. The remaining share was bought by O’Reilly. Fourteen years later, Donahoe once again purchased the newspaper and resumed its management until his death in 1891. In 1908, Cardinal William H. O’Connell bought The Pilot from the Donahoe family and made it the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston.