Captain Kearney...or Vine

When I finished writing about the six wives of Captain Kearney, I more or less thought I had uncovered all the surprises this man had to offer. There were unanswered questions - like why could I not find his entry into Australia, or how he met his first wife Elizabeth Gilpin, or how Mary Reeves Rainsford found out about his death - but I thought I had a handle on the man. I was wrong.

When I was writing up the stories of his wives, I happened to re-examine a document I have read dozens of times. It is a NSW Police Gazette and stated that Richard Adderley Kearney had been released from prison after his bigamy charge - he served 9 months of a twelve month hard labour sentence in Darlinghurst Prison. I had read this document dozens of times. I had quoted it. I had analysed it. And yet, this time, I saw something I had never noticed before. Beneath his name: “alias Vine.”

NSW Police Gazette, 1879

In all the hundreds of hours I had put into researching this man, no single other document had ever mentioned an alias. My first association with the word “alias” is deception - a false name meant to obscure identity. And whilst that is certainly true, it is important to contextualise it. In the nineteenth-century maritime world, aliases often served a more practical purpose. Sailors moved between jurisdictions faster than records could follow them, and names were less stable than ships, ports, or bodies. An alias could be a tool: used to work, to move, and then quietly abandoned once it had done its job.

I decided to try and search for this Vine version of my 2x great grandfather. My first attempt was searching for Richard Vine. That got me absolutely nowhere. So I pivoted. I just searched for a "Vine" born in Cork, circa 1848, appearing in Australia records. The very first entry is a prison record for a James Vine, born in Cork in 1848. Arriving in Australia in 1868 on board....the Medusa. 

James Vine - entry into Darlinghurst Prison 1868
 

The prison record doesn't say what James did. But luckily Trove had the answers for me. First, on the 12th of Feb 1868 "James Vine a seaman of the ship Medusa was sent to gaol for one week for being absent from his ship without leave. 

Then on the 29th Feb 1868 James Vine is once again sent to prison for eight weeks for disobedience. He was, it seems, already establishing a pattern.

So now we have a seaman who worked on the ship we know Richard Adderley Kearney arrived on, in the same year Richard arrived, and who was repeatedly in trouble with authorities. He was sent to the same prison that Richard would later be sent to, where, upon his release, the authorities would note that his alias was Vine.

But I still wanted a final confirmation. And one came that managed to wrap an earlier mystery too. 

Remember way back when I was writing about Elizabeth Gilpin and I could not figure out how she could have met and married Richard five days after arriving in Sydney on the Windsor Castle in 1871? Well, she didn't. 

The Windsor Castle manifest lists a James B. Vine, Able Seaman, aged 23 alongside Miss Gilpin. 

Windsor Castle manifest, May 1871

So there you have it. For whatever reason, Richard had been using the alias James Vine in his early years in Australia. He only seemed to use it up until he married Elizabeth Gilpin. I can find no records of James Vine seaman born in Cork after this time. 

The precise reason Richard adopted this alias can’t be proven, but the evidence points strongly in one direction. When I was trawling through the Kew Archives I found a very exciting document. It is a British Naval contract from June 1863 enrolling Richard Kearney into the British Navy for a period of ten years from the date of January 24, 1864 (his birthday the next year.) It is signed by his parents and even though the photocopy is cut off you can see clearly George Mu....(his stepfather George Mullis) and Elizabeth Kea(....) his mother, seemingly using Kearney here to connect her to her son Richard. Annoyingly, this file has no later service details. But it does have Richard's signature, which looks almost the same as it does years later on his many marriage certificates. 

Consent for Richard's period of service, signed by Elizabeth Kearney (nee Adderley) and George Mullis

Now, if you have skipped ahead with and done the maths, Richard appears in Australia in 1868 as James Vine - well before his 10 year term could possibly be up. 

The ship he arrived on, the Medusa came into Australia from the Philippines. It was decidedly not a British Naval Vessel. The evidence leaves only two realistic possibilities: desertion or early discharge. No service completion record exists. What I don't know is whether James Vine was a real person who Richard borrowed a name from, or if he was a total fabrication. Richard always liked some level of truth in his lies - weaving together truth about his naval career with grandiose exaggeration about being a "master mariner". There's no way to know how much of James Vine was invention and how much might contain a grain of truth.

The last mention of James Vine is in the 1871 Windsor Castle manifest. By the time he married Elizabeth Gilpin in Sydney, he had dumped the James Vine identity. Like all his other marriages, Richard used his full name "Richard Adderley Kearney" and his aspirational occupation "Master Mariner" on the certificate. Perhaps with this identity concretely established through matrimony, he shed James Vine like a suit that had grown too small. 

Richard shows us that identity in early colonial Australia was fluid - that people could, and did, change who they were when it was convenient. But even in an era of loose record keeping and shifting identities, the truth could catch up with you. In Richard's case it was a throwaway line on a release bulletin that unravelled a 130 year old mystery.