Nine months later (July 29th, 1849), the brig "Swift" sailed from Kingstown harbour, bearing O'Brien, Meagher, M'Manus, and O'Donoghue into exile. In the month of November the vessel reached Hobart Town, where "tickets of leave" were offered to those gentlemen on condition of their residing each one within a certain district marked out for him, and giving their parole to make no attempt at escape while in possession of the ticket. Messrs. Meagher, M'Manus, and O'Donoghue accepted these terms; Mr. O'Brien refused them, and was consequently sent to an island off the coast called Maria Island, where he was placed in strict custody and treated with great severity. The news of the indignities and the sufferings to which he was subjected, outraged the feelings of the Irish people in the neighbouring country, and ere long his sympathisers in Tasmania laid a plan for his escape. They hired a vessel to lie off the coast on a particular day, and send a boat on shore to take off the prisoner, who had been informed of the plot, and had arranged to be in waiting for his deliverers. This design would unquestionably have succeeded but for the treachery of the captain of the ship, who, before sailing to the appointed spot, had given the government information of the intended escape and the manner of it. What occurred on the arrival of the vessel we shall relate in the words of Mr. Mitchel, who tells the story in his "Jail Journal" as he heard it from Mr. O'Brien himself: "At last as he wandered on the shore and had almost given up all hope of the schooner, the schooner hove in sight. To give time for her approach he walked into the woods for a space, that he might not alarm his guardian constable by his attention to her movements. Again he sauntered down towards the point with apparent carelessness, but with a beating heart. San Francisco was to be his first destination; and beyond that golden gate lay the great world, and home, and children, and an honourable life. The boat was coming, manned by three men; and he stepped proudly and resolutely to meet them on the shore. To be sure there was, somewhere behind him, one miserable constable with his miserable musket, but he had no doubt of being able to dispose of that difficulty with the aid of his allies, the boatmen. The boat could not get quite close to the beach, because they had to run her into a kind of cove where the water was calm and unencumbered with large tangled weeds. O'Brien, when he reached the beach, plunged into the water to prevent delay, and struggled through the thick matted seaweed to the boat. The water was deeper than he expected, and when he came to the boat he needed the aid of the boatmen to climb over the gunwale. Instead of giving him this aid the rascals allowed him to flounder there, and kept looking to the shore, where the constable had by this time appeared with his musket. The moment he showed himself, the three boatmen cried out