The Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  Every true-hearted Irishman will bow his head at utterance of ‘Black 47’, most heinous year of that evil era wherein two millions of our countrymen were martyred by starvation; when the old foe, fearful of Ireland’s steel, murdered with the weapon of the coward instead. Every modest woman and girl of Ireland will storm the gates of Paradise with supplications to Our Blessed Mother. O! darkest epoch. How Satan must have delighted to see the Catholic children of Erin decimated like slaves in their own fair land; banished as the Hebrews by the crimes of cultish Pharaoh.

  Some comradely dispute has existed between the editors and the sagacious old greybeards of the Chicago Irish Music Club concerning its true age and provenance; but it is evident to any reasonable man that the ballad hails from the ancient bloody times of resistance, when priest and people stood fast together against alien murder and rapine. Not for the first time and neither the last! if the editors know anything about their countrymen’s mettle. Hatred can be a holy and a cleansing thing. Please the Lord of Heaven it will not be long before the pallid countenance of violated Mother Ireland is restored to former comeliness by the red wine of vengeance.

  This fine lament was heard sung on that vessel of martyrs by a patriotic boy of about six years. Mary bless him! It is best given very slowly and without accompaniment of any kind, having careful respect to the decorum of the words, and is therefore not suitable for group singing or rallies.

  Come all ye native Galway boys and listen to my song;

  It’s of the tyrant Saxon and the cause of Erin’s wrong;

  The maker of our troubles, and the breaker of our bones;

  To keep him up he keeps us down, and grinds us on the stones.

  Their taxes and their terrors, boys, they have us nearly dead;

  They drink their cup of bloodshed up, they rob our daily bread;

  False princes of perdition black, indifferent to our groans;

  How long more should we stand aside and let them steal our homes?

  The same true gang, they did us hang, they poisoned Eoghan O’Neill;

  And sent their hireling cowards, boys, our Mother-land to steal.

  The blood be frozen in their veins, their hearts be withered up!

  Who robbed the best, and left the rest, the blackened bitter crop.

  Is this the land of Sarsfield, boys, the bower of brave Wolfe Tone?

  O heroes loyal of Ireland’s soil, where fell the seeds they’ve sown?

  Where are they now, who took the vow, that Erin should be free?

  In blood and smoke, they smote the yoke of Saxon slavery.

  Then come, true native Connaught men, wherever you may be.

  A bright new crop is growing up, the flower of liberty.

  We’ll tend it till it harvests, and they’ll ne’er more break our bones;

  For we’ll slash them down and lift us up, and smash them on the stones.

  Cuchulainn, Maeve, those valiant brave, the holy throng of yore,

  Who warred with heathen Albion, boys, flinched not in battle’s roar;

  To fight, to die; Saint Patrick high; the Lords of ancient Tara,

  As one cry out, from North to South –

  “REVENGE FOR CONNEMARA!”

  EPILOGUE

  THE HAUNTED MAN

  ‘History happens in the first person but is written in the third. This is what makes history a completely useless art.’

  David Merridith, from an essay written while an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, Michaelmas term, 1831, on the theme: ‘Why is History Useful?’

  Here was a story of three or four people. The reader will know that there were many other stories. An investigation commissioned by the city fathers calculates that between May and September of that horrifying year, 101, 546 wretchedly poor immigrants entered the teeming port of New York. Of that number, 40,820 were Irish. It is not actually known how many lost their lives within sight of what they themselves often called ‘the Promised Land’. Some say the figure may be as high as two-thirds.

  Many years have passed but some things have not changed. We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation and international exchange rates. Perhaps this new century will see a new dispensation, or perhaps we will continue to allow the starvation of the luckless, and continue to call it an accident, not a working-out of logic.

  1847. Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy. Verdi’s Macbeth. Boole’s Calculus of Deductive Reasoning. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Ralph Emerson’s Poems. Engels’ Principles of Communism. Quarter of a million starved in that year’s nowhere-land: nameless in the latitudes of hunger.

  We First-Class passengers from the Star of the Sea were ferried into Manhattan on the evening of Saturday, 11 December, four days after the murder of David Merridith. As a gesture of apology for the inconvenience we had suffered, the Silver Star Shipping Line cancelled our bills and invited us to a champagne reception at an elegant hotel. It is the only time in my ninety-six years that I have heard a Methodist minister swear. Reverend Deedes said things to the Director that the latter will not have forgotten for a long time. Like many quiet people, he was remarkably courageous, Henry Hudson Deedes of Lyme Regis in Dorset. He returned to the Star the following morning, and would be the last man to leave it, with the exception of the Captain.

  Those in steerage had to remain on the ship for almost seven weeks, where they were regularly interviewed by parties of police and officials from the Office of Aliens. Having paid for their own passages in advance of the voyage, they received nothing whatsoever by way of compensation. Neither, I understand, were they given champagne.

  In January a programme was commenced to clear the clogged port, which by now had become a floating factory for influenza; but the immigrants were still not permitted entry to Manhattan. Farm buildings and sheds on Long Island and Staten Island were leased as quarantine stations or clearance centres; but the fear of contagion so alarmed the neighbourhoods that many of the buildings were attacked and burned by the locals. A large plot of land on Ward’s Island in the harbour was leased by the city government as a secure place to hold immigrants while their applications were processed and their illnesses tended. Before long it had become a permanent facility, this windswept chunk of basalt on which the Atlantic beats like a hammer. It is perhaps a measure of the state of its inhabitants’ destitution that 10,308 articles of ‘basic clothing’ are listed as having been requested by them in one five-month period. Certainly it is a measure of the truer impulse of the New Yorker that those items, so pitifully needed, were provided so quickly.

  By the time the Star’s survivors were permitted finally to come into Manhattan, every hospital, shelter and almshouse on the island had been overwhelmed. Anti-immigrant feeling was strong and growing. Thousands of new immigrants were simply paid by the authorities to get out of the city and move west. No doubt some were among the 80,000 native Irishmen who would fight for the Union in the Civil War. And others were among the 20,000 of their countrymen who would take up arms for the cause of the Confederacy; for the legal right of a freedom-loving white man to regard a black man as a commodity.

  Some Irish earned fortunes and garnered power as a result. Others drifted into the ghettos and were feared and despised. Mary Duane might have been strong enough to endure such an existence, but Mulvey would not have been, or so I believe. He had taken enough of being despised. His crimes were many but he was a scapegoat for more, and being despised had helped to ruin him. David Merridith’s ghetto was entirely of another kind; but he had borne more than his share of hatred, too.

  What happened took place in 1847, an important anniversary in the history of fictions; when stories appeared in which people were starving, in which wives were jailed in attics and masters married servants. An evil time for the place these three violated people called home. A time when things were done – and other things not done – as a re
sult of which more than a million would die; the slow, painful, unrecorded deaths of those who meant nothing to their lords.

  What happened is one of the reasons they still die today. For the dead do not die in that tormented country, that heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds; so abused down the centuries by the powerful of the neighbouring island, as much by the powerful of its native own. And the poor of both islands died in their multitudes while the Yahweh of retributions vomited down his hymns. The flags flutter and the pulpits resound. At Ypres. In Dublin. At Gallipoli. In Belfast. The trumpets spew and the poor die. Yet they walk, the dead, and will always walk; not as ghosts, but as press-ganged soldiers, conscripted into a battle that is not of their making; their sufferings metaphorised, their very existence translated, their bones stewed into the sludge of propaganda. They do not even have names. They are simply: The Dead. You can make them mean anything you want them to mean.

  That sometimes there must be struggle is not to be doubted. With which weapons it is fought remains the question; and who shall fight whom, and over which ground. For the poor of one tribe to slaughter the poor of the other, all in the name of a blood-soaked field in which the rich would happily bury them both alive at the precise moment it became profitable to do so: this is no fitting memorial to the landless of the past. But that is the making of another story. One, perhaps, which is yet to be written; with a more brotherly ending and a deal less horror.

  As the only professional reporter on the ship where Lord Kingscourt was murdered, my articles were in demand all over the world. Everywhere, in fact, except at the New York Tribune, where my editor dismissed me for ‘egalitarian sympathies’. There were offers for books; essays; lecture tours. In addition, on the founding of the New York Times in ’51, I accepted the position of ‘Senior Contributing Columnist’: the title a piece of hogwash roughly translatable as ‘wildly overpaid late-sleeper’. Never again would I have to rely on the blood money garnered by my ancestors’ crimes. What happened also removed the label of adulteress from his wife; a badge she had never been happy to wear. It sounds callous to say that his death gave me a kind of freedom, but it would be less than fully honest to allow that fact to remain unacknowledged. Perhaps I was wrong to write about what happened; perhaps I had no other choice than to do so. Certainly any newspaperman would have done the same thing; and at least I tried to do so fairly.

  My series on the Monster of Newgate for the Bentley’s Miscellany was reprinted in my collection An American Abroad, first published by my late friend Cautley Newby in 1849, along with my account of the Star and its passengers, and some notes on a tour of parts of Connemara. I had insisted three short stories were also included, but no reviewer mentioned them, whether to praise or discommend. A polite silence seemed to hang around them, somehow. From future editions they were quietly removed. Newby never alluded to their disappearance and neither did I. The feeling was that of a sleepwalker who has awoken to find himself at a funeral and must creep away quickly before anyone mentions he wasn’t invited. Those three mediocre and justly forgotten short stories were the only fictional writings I was ever to publish.

  We argued a lot, Newby and I, regarding the book’s tide. I wanted to call it ‘Reflections on the Irish Famine’; Newby pleaded strongly for ‘Confessions of a Fiend’. ‘An American Abroad’ was an attempt at a compromise; rather a cowardly one, we both felt. On the cover of the second edition was printed, as well as the title, a small sub-line reading: ‘Monstrous Revelations’. By the time of the fourth edition the sub-line had grown. By the time of the tenth it dwarfed the title. And by the time of the twentieth edition, the volume’s actual name could barely be seen without the aid of a magnifying glass.*

  That short section of the book dealing with the Monster of Newgate was of course the most widely reviewed and read. More than that, it seemed to beguile the public’s imagination. The appearance of the book created a whole new audience for the monster. Stories of his doings – almost always heavily fictionalised – appeared in every kind of English publication, from ha’penny magazines to pornographic paperbacks, from Punch and The Tomahawk to the Catholic Herald. It became fashionable to attend society fancy-dress evenings costumed as the monster, or even – incredibly – as one of his now multiple victims. At one point there were two different versions of his life playing in London theatres. Soon the monster was to be subjected to the final indignity. That horror among horrors. A musical.

  The monster now entered the vernacular of politics. The Irish parliamentarian Mr Charles Parnell, who bravely led the poor of his country towards some variety of liberation, was on one occasion described in the House of Commons as ‘little better than the Monster of Newgate’. Reminders were often given that Daniel O’Connell, M.P., an earlier exponent of a form of emancipation, had named the mass gatherings he organised throughout the Irish countryside not rallies or assemblies, but ‘Monster Meetings’. Such a baptism now became a matter for frequent discussion in the watering holes and salons of the powers-that-were. The grotesque cartoons depicting the Irish poor in the English journals began to change. Always previously portraying them as foolish and drunken, now they more frequently showed murderers. Ape-like. Fiendish. Bestial. Untamed. How we draw the enemy, what we fear about the self. Every time I saw one, I saw the Monster of Newgate, whose grim reputation I had done so much to diffuse.

  Throughout it all, I had to ask myself was it worth it: to go in disguise into this kingdom of lies. To use the shocking story of the Monster of Newgate to tell another more important and still more shocking story. For many years I convinced myself this was morally acceptable: the ends at least arguably justifying the means. Now, of course, I am not so certain. When we are young these things appear so simple. But they are not simple. They never were.

  I was told that the book brought to the attention of some of the reading public the sufferings being endured in Ireland at the time of the Great Famine; but if so, it did little to end those sufferings. It was not the last famine in Ireland by any means, still less in that complicated work of penny-dreadful fiction entitled the British Empire. Modest amounts of money were sometimes gathered by readers and their families. A few farthings, a sixpence, very occasionally a shilling. Generally any monies we received were from women or the poor, though perhaps oddly (and perhaps not) we sometimes received subscriptions from serving British soldiers, particularly those in India. Newby and I established a small trust to administer the funds, the much-maligned (and much-envied) Mr Dickens becoming for a while our excellent chairman. Initially there were high-flown aims of spending what was available on teaching the children of Connemara to read. It was Dickens who snapped that a dead child does not read. He and I quarrelled violently at what I saw as his easy philistinism, and sadly we were never to speak again. The loss was mine, as was the error. He was absolutely correct to argue as he did; politically, morally and in every other sense, that the money ought to be spent on food, not poetry. I should have remembered that his own childhood had been haunted by hunger and terror, whereas mine had not – at least not by my own. If, perhaps, it saved one single life, the book was not an utter waste of everybody’s time.

  Small but not entirely worthless reforms were put in place in the British penal system as an extremely indirect result of the book’s success. Prisoners were given less humiliating work. The number of family visits was raised. Questions began to be asked of the ‘solitary incarceration’ practised at certain of Queen Victoria’s prisons, but it was not to be ended for many years. No doubt these things would have happened anyway, and while I am glad they did, and salute their true authors, I would not be fully honest if I said altruism was my only motive, nor perhaps even my main one if it comes to that. I was a newspaperman. I wanted the story.

  David Merridith was quite right to gibe at me as he used to. I think perhaps I wanted to be admired. It is such a brutalising thing, our need for admiration. How very wonderful to have learned that it fades with age.

  Seamus
Meadowes was arrested for Merridith’s murder but found not guilty in a unanimous verdict. I myself was called as a minor witness for the defence and testified that the accused had not composed the death note found in the First-Class quarters. I knew it for a fact and explained how I knew it. At that time Seamus Meadowes could neither read nor write, a fact he had confided with a bizarre kind of pride on the morning I had tried to interview him.

  I was not invited to suggest another suspect for the murder; nor did I volunteer to do so. I had promised anonymity to Pius Mulvey and like any honourable journalist I intended to keep my promise. I answered every question, told no lies and was congratulated by the judge for the economy of my evidence.

  The trial was a cause célèbre in Irish New York and the publicity made the defendant a hero to many. He made an unsuccessful attempt at a professional boxing career, entered the Police Department and then political life; first as an enforcer for Boss ‘Honey’ Maguire, then as fundraiser, election agent and finally candidate. As ‘Southpaw Jimmy Meadows, the working-man’s champ’,2 he was elected eleven times to the East Bronx ward and was only narrowly defeated for Mayor in 1882, a result he always blamed on the inadequate numeracy of his henchmen rather than any desire of the electorate. The vicissitudes of democracy he regarded as a minor inconvenience. Often enough, when they tallied up his votes, the total equalled the number of registered voters in the entire constituency; and on two famous occasions actually exceeded it. (‘A man should exercise his rights as often as possible,’ he used to say cryptically. ‘Ain’t that what America’s all about?’)

  Two years later he was arraigned for fraud, having been discovered taking the written examination required of aspiring New York postmen, under the name of an illiterate constituent to whom he had promised a job. (The trial was abandoned when the main prosecution witness mysteriously fell out a window and broke his jaw.) Meadows was re-elected the following year, his already monumental majority increased by a third. ‘They don’t count my ballots, boys, they weigh ’em,’ he remarked to reporters. He died very peacefully, aged one hundred and one, in the neo-Regency mansion he had somehow managed to acquire on a lifetime of public representative’s wages.