Travelling from Philadelphia to Pomeroy, County Tyrone, in September 1905, Patrick McCartan jotted down his impressions in a letter to Joseph McGarrity. This commenced a lengthy correspondence that ensured the Clan na Gael leader was kept up to date with the progress of advanced nationalism and Fenianism. The familiarity with which McCartan wrote suggested close friendship and something of the relationship between mentor and protégé. McCartan was McGarrity's man in Ireland, providing a record of events that cut through the obfuscation of nationalist propaganda to reveal the manoeuvrings of separatist factions beneath. This opening letter revealed all the impetuous ebullience of youth with a pen in its hand – ‘Personally I feel like a fighting cock’ – not least in his tendency to extrapolate general conclusions from personal experience. On board the Umbria McCartan worked his way through the essential separatist reading of the moment: Arthur Griffith's The Resurrection of Hungary, John O'Leary's Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, and a copy of the Gaelic American. As was typical of his generation's scepticism for the doings of their Fenian forebears, he was unimpressed by O'Leary's lofty ambivalence. ‘I can't see as yet where he did anything himself worth talking of. He thinks a whole lot but as yet he does not seem to put his thoughts into action.’ McCartan continued his journey. No copy of United Irishman was to be found at any railway station between Cork and Dublin, though in Cork he was offered William O'Brien's The Irish People.