Death in Castletown Bearhaven, by military ambush, of Morty Sullivan, after O'Sullivan murders a prominent Anglo-Irish settler, Puxley, whom Sullivan believes is informing on his local campaign to recruit for the France's Irish brigade. (Subsequent history of the Puxleys is the subject of Daphne du Maurier's novel "Hungry Hill".)
O'Sullivan's body is dragged by boat from Bearhaven to Cork, and his head, once said to have been the handsomest in the French Army that defeated the English at Fontenoy, was displayed rotting on a spike for several years, at the county jail at Cork.
O'Sullivan's character was recreated in the late nineteenth century novel by British historian A.M. Froude, who portrays Sullivan and the remnants of his clan as semi-barbaric remnants of the old feudal order, brooding, reckless, mercurial adventurers who refuse to yield to the beneficial influence of the new chiefs of Dunboy, those god-fearing, Calvinist, British landlords who have come to Dunboy to spread new ideas of industry and commerce.Froude's novel, "Two Chiefs of Dunboy", revolves around the rivalry between Colonel Gerdes, the new English chief of Dunboy, whose service for the King in Scotland during the Jacobean revolt of 1745 has been rewarded by a grant of land in western Ireland. There, Gerdes has established the beginning of a fishing, agriculture, and most promising, a mining enterprise, raising capital for the enterprise by selling his slave holdings in the West Indies. Tenants of this progressive and kindly settler are portrayed as moody, sometimes lovable folk prone to distrustful bouts especially when piqued by the nervous ambitions of their self-proclaimed "chiefs" like Sullivan and his trouble-making relatives who continue to skulk around their native lands.
However great a civil threat Morty Oge O'Sullivan may have been perceived by the British, he was popular with the local people in the wild area where he lived; his nurse, on seeing his head forlornly displayed on a post at the Cork jail, is said to have penned a heartbroken Gaelic poem that ends with:
High spik'd on their jail! That cheek, in the summer sun, Ne'er shall grow warm; Nor that eye e'er catch light, But the flash of the storm!
O'Sullivan's son Murty carried on the tradition; he was killed at age 23 in a duel with his uncle Mark.