In the mid-19th century, this island played a small but significant role in a vast and often brutal system of imperial incarceration. It was here, in the shadow of Dockyard and under the unrelenting Caribbean sun, that Irish revolutionary John Mitchel was held in chains—an unwilling passenger in the British Empire’s convict transportation network. His searing account of this experience, Jail Journal, is not only a landmark in Irish political writing but also a forgotten chapter in Bermuda’s colonial past.
While John Mitchel was imprisoned in Bermuda in 1848, the British authorities were acutely aware of his status as a high-profile Irish nationalist and feared he could become the target of a rescue operation by sympathisers abroad. The growing Irish-American population in the United States, many of whom closely followed Mitchel’s writings and regarded him as a hero of the Young Ireland movement, posed a potential threat. Rumours circulated that Irish nationalist groups in New York or Boston might attempt a daring liberation across the Atlantic. In response, the British Colonial Government took the matter seriously and implemented enhanced security measures to prevent any such attempt.
The Bermuda Garrison, including detachments of the British Army and the local militia that would later evolve into the Bermuda Regiment, heightened their vigilance. Mitchel was held aboard the Dromedary hulk, anchored in the heavily fortified waters near the Royal Naval Dockyard, under round-the-clock surveillance. Armed guards were stationed onshore and aboard the hulk, patrol boats scanned the harbour, and any visiting vessels were thoroughly inspected. Mitchel was allowed limited communication, and mail was monitored to intercept any coded messages. These measures reflected Britain’s broader anxiety over Irish revolutionary networks and its determination to ensure that Bermuda, remote but not unreachable, would not become the stage for an international act of defiance.
Mitchel’s arrival in Bermuda in 1848 was the result of a collision between revolutionary zeal and imperial authority. Convicted of treason-felony for publishing The United Irishman, a radical newspaper advocating for Irish independence, he was sentenced to 14 years of transportation. He was first held in a floating prison hulk off the Royal Naval Dockyard—a symbol of a larger transformation in penal philosophy that had been underway since the 18th century.
The Enlightenment: From Progress to Penal Crisis
Paradoxically, Mitchel’s imprisonment in Bermuda was the product of Enlightenment ideals.
During the 17th and early 18th centuries, Europe’s justice systems relied heavily on public spectacles of punishment—hangings, floggings, and mutilations—meant to terrorise the masses and preserve order. But by the mid-18th century, Enlightenment thinkers such as Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham began to challenge these practices. They called for more rational, humane forms of justice. Punishment, they argued, should aim not at revenge but at reform.
The result was a dramatic shift: public executions declined, and incarceration rose as the preferred method of punishment. New prisons were built across Britain and Ireland. Yet as these institutions multiplied, so too did the number of people they confined. Within a few decades, the reformist vision gave way to crisis. Overcrowded, disease-ridden, and poorly managed, the prisons of the 19th century became a social and logistical nightmare.
To relieve the pressure, Britain turned to its empire.
Convict transportation—once focused primarily on North America and later Australia—was extended to imperial outposts like Bermuda. The Royal Naval Dockyard became not just a military base, but a labor site for hundreds of convicts who quarried limestone, built fortifications, and lived aboard decaying prison hulks anchored offshore.
It was aboard one such hulk, the Dromedary, that John Mitchel began writing Jail Journal. His diary, serialised in an Irish-American newspaper and later published in book form, is a piercing indictment of British colonial rule, but also an invaluable account of life inside the empire’s machinery of punishment.
Mitchel described Bermuda with both disdain and reluctant awe: “This is certainly a beautiful prison,” he wrote, noting the island’s radiant skies and surrounding seas. But beauty quickly gave way to brutality. He recounted scenes of convict labor under armed guard, the cries of men suffering from yellow fever, and the alienation of exile. “The prisoners here,” he noted, “work like beasts, but are treated worse.”
Revolutionary Hero—or White Supremacist?
Yet Mitchel’s legacy is far from uncomplicated.
While he remains a celebrated figure in Irish nationalist history for his unwavering defiance of British rule, his later political career in the United States reveals a darker truth: Mitchel was an unapologetic supporter of slavery and white supremacy.
After escaping from Van Diemen’s Land (modern-day Tasmania) and making his way to America, Mitchel became a newspaper editor once again—this time championing the Southern Confederacy. In his writings, he defended the institution of slavery, denounced abolitionists, and aligned himself with the most reactionary forces in the antebellum South.
“The Almighty,” he wrote in one infamous editorial, “has made the Negro to serve.” For Mitchel, the enslavement of Africans was not merely an economic reality—it was a moral and natural good. His views were extreme even by the standards of the American South at the time.
This contradiction—between the freedom fighter who opposed British tyranny and the ideologue who endorsed racial slavery—has led to deep re-evaluations of his place in Irish and global history. In recent years, statues and memorials to Mitchel have sparked public debate in both Ireland and the United States, as scholars and activists push to acknowledge the full complexity of his legacy.
A Mirror to Empire
For Bermudians, Jail Journal remains a powerful document—not just of Mitchel’s own journey, but of our island’s role within a global web of punishment and power. His account helps reveal the hidden histories of Dockyard and the convict hulks that once floated in Bermuda’s calm harbours. But his later life also challenges us to look critically at who we commemorate and why.
John Mitchel was a man of deep conviction and razor-sharp intellect, but he was also shaped—and deeply warped—by the racial ideologies of his time. His story is a reminder that the fight for freedom in one context does not automatically translate to justice in another. The same man who resisted empire with his pen and body also used those same tools to uphold another, equally violent system.
Today, as Bermuda reckons with its own colonial history and the legacies of systemic injustice, Jail Journal offers both a window and a warning: that resistance must always be tempered by reflection, and that heroes, like nations, are rarely unblemished.
