Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  I know from many years that this is a sign of their deepest dread.

  I lay down in my quarters, intending to rest me for a moment, but fell into a deep and very troubled sleep. And I dreamed I saw the ship as from a terrible height, its body crying out for mercy to the Queen of High Heaven.

  1 Captain Lockwood is alluding to the tragedy at Grosse Ile in the summer of 1847, when the Quarantine Station on the St Lawrence river was overwhelmed by an enormous number of sick and hungry immigrants, many from Ireland. Thousands died; Quebec and Montreal suffered devastating fever epidemics. By the time of the Star’s voyage, the river was in fact closed to all shipping and the authorities had at least begun to gain control of the crisis; but clearly, from the above, terrible accounts of what had happened must still have been circulating among travellers. – GGD.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Saturday, 27 November, 1847

  The Twentieth Day

  50°10.07′W; 43°07.01′N

  O

  Earth

  unsown.

  Ora pro nobis.

  Fountain Sealed.

  Ora pro nobis. Adam’s

  Deliverance. Ora pro nobis.

  Advocate of Eve. Ora pro nobis.

  Aqueduct of Grace. Ora pro nobis.

  Bride of the Canticle. Ora pro nobis.

  Fleece of Heaven’s Rain. Ora pro nobis.

  Eastern Gate. Ora pro nobis. Flower of

  Jesse’s Root. Ora pro nobis. Undug Well.

  Ora pro nobis. Wedded to God. Ora pro

  nobis. Lily Among Thorns. Ora pro nobis.

  Rose Ever Flowering. Ora pro nobis. Garden

  Enclosed. Ora pro nobis. Workshop of the

  Incarnation. Ora pro nobis. House of Gold.

  Ora pro nobis. Joseph’s Wife. Ora pro nobis.

  Unploughed Meadow. Ora pro nobis. Tower

  of Ivory. Ora pro nobis. Throne of God. Ora

  pro nobis. Undefiled. Ora pro nobis. Maid

  Clothed in Sunlight. Ora pro nobis. Throne

  of Redemption. Ora pro nobis. Surpassing

  the Seraphim. Ora pro nobis. Treasurehouse

  of Sanctity. Ora pro nobis. Surpassing Eden’s

  Meadows. Ora pro nobis. Mirror of Purity.

  Ora pro nobis. Cathedral Unassailable. Ora

  pro nobis. Spotless Dove. Ora pro nobis.

  Vessel of Devotion. Ora pro nobis. Font

  of Virginity. Ora pro nobis. Virgin Most

  Pure. Ora pro nobis. Unlearned in the

  Ways of Eve. Ora pro nobis. Victor

  over the Serpent. Ora pro nobis.

  Hope of the Exiles. Ora pro nobis.

  Citadel of David. Ora pro nobis.

  Queen of Africa. Ora pro nobis.

  Sisterly Mother. Ora pro nobis.

  Mary Immaculate Star of the Sea.

  Ora pro nobis. Ora pro nobis.

  Mea maxima culpa.

  Ora pro nobis.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  THE DENUNCIATION

  IN WHICH A DOCUMENT UNCOVERED BY AGENTS OF THE AUTHOR IS IMPARTED TO THE READER

  (WHO WILL SEE WHAT IT MEANS).

  HER IMPERIAL MAJESTY’S ASSIZES:

  EXHIBIT 7B/A/111

  April 1847,

  Galway,

  to the cptn of the els-be liable men.

  my name is Mary D**** and i am of a good family. i was marrid to N******* M***** of A’nagcraomha for near thirteen year and five months until he destroyed his own life and the life of our infant daughter A**** M*** M***** on christmas eve 1845 by drowning.

  i am handing this to a certain man who i know will have knowledge of who to give it to. god send you get it for it needs to be got.

  i am going to america shortly and will never come home again so i want to say what follows and hope ye and yeer men act on it. i know people in this christian county of hypocrites do be slightin about me and spreading slurry and gossip on my name and i am going away so i do not give ‘that’ what is said no more but here is the truth and the full of it.

  when i was nineteen yrs i was promisd to one p**s M***** of A’nagcraomha, only brother of N******* M***** that was once the priest. and as i live, no man ever knew me before that time. the same p**s M***** put me in a certain way and then jaunced off with himself to my great distress. he betrayd me. i was put out of my house by my father for the shame of it and for a time had to go the roads but then i livd with my brother in law and my sister in screeb. and him that ruined me the jolly roving ploughboy.

  his brother N******* was a priest in **** *****. when he heard the condition i was afterbeen put in he came down to see me and said he was very sorry over it and ashamd of his brothers low roguery and falseness to myself. he said he would leave off being a priest and wed me and rare my child if i would have him. at the first i said i would not but he insistd he would do it and did not want any lanna sired by a M***** to be a bastard itself and the mother disgracd. i said it would be wrong for him to do it an it wasnt gods will but he wouldnt be said about leavin off being a priest and he did do that anyway and kept in at me. we were lawfull marrid in the chapel at C**** (my home village) on the ninth of july 1832 and i went up to tully to live with him on his peoples land.

  my child was deliverd lifeless a month after (RIP) but we were afterbeen marrid by then and nothing to be done to cancel it out neither in law nor religion.

  N******* M***** was an honest and sober man but we did not live as man and wife for many years. it was partly that my husband was oftentimes not well and feeble enough in himself and partly that the natural feelings were not there between us. there was sometimes unhappiness between us in the house over it but sometimes there was not. in the end of it i went to a priest Father Fagan and my sister about it and they said i was not been fair be my husband to deny him what was right and also there would be nobody for to carry on his land an we had no issue. we began to live as man and wife then. in 1843 i learnd that i was expecting an event and our child was born in janary 1844. we were quiet enough together at that time. my husband had a great longin to be a father and was the gentlest ever and loving kind. he had me destroyed with flowers and combs, the ribbons he got me would go around the world. he was like a woman itself with the child. he could not do enough for the child so he couldnt. those that call him madman or fool are not one bit fair to him. he was never that way until driven it by the cruelty of another.

  in september of 1844 his brother p**s M***** came back from wherever he was and began into torturin us. though he was after abandonin me and had no right on me at all he was seethin jealous now. the first thing he done was come back onto our land and say the half of it was his own in law and custom and he couldnt be put off it or he would tell the county we were after robbing him of his homeland and blacken us. he wrote a letter to cmmndr blake and said he was entitled to be on the land and would be able to pay a better rent for it than we could ourselves. he put up a cabin for himself on the land and would not go away from it. every time i came out of the house he would be stood there and he looking at me in a certain way improper and looking hateful at his own brother and the innocent child. he would come up and look in through the window of our house at night and i undressing myself. his face would come up at the window. one time i saw him watching in at us when my husband and myself were together in a natural way. all the unhappiness came back in to the house. he killed a cow belongen to us i believe. he thrished up our potato beds and ruind them. he tore down a haggard my husband made and a wall he made to bounden our plot of the land from his own half of it. there was no piece for us. when his brother my husband was off away at his work he would come up on me and say he still desird me and loved me in soft words. he is the same coaxing liar and false deceiver he always was before with a coying tongue but a black heart. he would talk the rain out of wetting him so he would.

  once and once only when my husband was away from the house and we were not getting on well together i was weak which i will rue all my days and gave into h
im p**s M***** i mean to my shame. he gave me whiskey first. he said he would help me with a sup for the child if i did it and he would leave off from sneaping my husband. it is my own fault and sin what i did but also he took an advantage of the feeling that was between us before as young people. afterward he tortured me for it and said he could gain me any time he wanted. he broke my life on me, bad scran to that creepin judas.

  he was forever saying he would tell my husband about it. he spoke improperly to me about it. some things he did i cannot even say them. he would wait until he knew my husband was there and then make sighs as those which happen between a woman and her man at certain times and he lairing at me. once he took certain womans garments of mine off the gorse where they were drying and waited until my husband was coming up the boreen to pull them out his pocket. he skithered about the townland and told the neighbours my child was not the lawful breed of my husband at all but a tinkers bastard or an englishmans. as true as i live that is a lie what he said. my husband and himself had a fight over it. my husband nearly put him into his grave for himself and it is only the pity he didnt.

  when the blight came on the crop the summer forelast he would not help us. he himself was all right because he had money go leór2 he was after getting on his travels some way and i think he is a thieving weasel anyway who never has want of money or finery or maybe he is a landlords lackey in secret or a castle bloodhound. i would put no slyness nor trickery past that fox so i wouldnt. he is the jesus Christ of trickery, it is said by some of the people that he is a driver-out-man or a bailiff in secret. he had food in rakes when my eanling was hungry, to some he says he is a liable man and to others a friend of landlords and sheriffs. he will tell any lie. he will swear a hole in a skillet if he thinks it will put money in his way. we were evicted by cmndr blakes agent in Ottober 1845 for not paying of the rent, a driver-man came down from Galway with fifteen peelers to bate us out of it. they bet my husband in front of myself and his own child while his brother watched. they laddered him. all the while they milled him the driver-man was saying do you see this now, M*****. do you see this you dirty scullions pig. here is a bating you will never forget not so long as you live. isn’t that right now. answer me pig. and they made him say yes that was right, and that he was a pig, and would not lay off of him till he did say that. he was never the same after the bating he got that time, it was hag-seeds they were, not natural men. they broke him that day.

  we could pay nothing owing to the blight and to p**s M***** killing our cow. blake would not allow us credit but put us out on the road itself. it was p**s M***** took over our land then and he breakin his smig laughing at us as we were put out. we went down to rossaveel and lived in a scalp my husband dug above in the woods, myself and my husband and my infant wean in dirt while p**s M***** took our rightful land and he lording it. he is still up there now like the king of england.

  he was spat on and thrun stones at by the people at his own brothers funeral and shunned but not one of them did a screed to help me.

  it was hard times I had after my husband and child died. it was the workhouse for me until i coulden thole it no more. i went all the road to dublin and lost another child on the way. i had to beg in the street for nigh on a year and do what no woman should ever have to do in that place. i am now a nanny and am going to america. i am working as a nanny for the family of Lord and Lady ********* . i will never come back to galway again an i live to a hundred. there is no use in galway for a decent woman.

  everything said by the people about p**s M***** is true. i denounce him as a land robber, a seducer and a blackguard. he is after harryin his own brother and my only child into a grave and i would like something done on him by you and yeer men. i know well ye have done it to others before. 3 ye will know him because he has a camath4 way of walking having only one foot and a wooden one marken M (for murderer, it might as well be). any fate in store for him he deserves it. while a cullion the ilk of himself is allowed to do what he will it is no wonder but the people are put down so low in these times. i do not know how so called irish men can allow it.

  that the child of my womb be in hell this day if i am after telling word of a lie here. it’s one foot he has and a gun-stone for his heart.

  the dogs of Connamara know the truth of what i say.

  i denounce him every way i can, the blackest craven cur that ever wore shoe leather and rotted the land of galway by his walking on it.

  god send he die in screams of shame

  Mary M***** (nee D****)

  Do not wait ingloriously for the famine to sweep you off – if you must die, die gloriously; serve your country by your death, and shed aroud your names the halo of a patriot’s fame. Go; choose out in all the island two million trees, and thereupon go and hang yourselves.

  John Mitchel, ‘To the Surplus Population of Ireland’ 1847

  1 Document discovered five years after the voyage by detective employed in Dublin by GGD. Fair copy. Original lost. Entered in prosecution evidence at Galway assizes, 6 June 1849. ‘Being in the matter of the trial of James O’Neill labourer, formerly of Kilbreekan nr. Rosmuck (evicted), alias “Captain Moonlight” or “Captain Dark” of an agitational society, namely “The Hibernian Men”, “Hibernian Defenders”, “Liable Men” or “Else-Be-Liables”; on charges of Destruction of Property, Common Assault, Assault on a Constable, Conspiracy to Murder, Inciting or Suborning another Person to Murder and Membership of a Named and Prohibited Organisation. Document found by constables in a search of the shelter of the accused on Hayes’s Island.” (He was hanged in Galway Barracks on 9 August 1849. Two of his sons were later transported for life to Botany Bay for membership of ‘The Irish Republican Brotherhood’ or ‘Fenians’.) Names excised by the Court Reporter.

  2 Irish: ‘to sufficiency’. Origin of the English word ‘galore’ – GGD

  3 This phrase underlined and initialled by the Crown Prosecutor’s Office, Dublin Castle.

  4 ‘Camath’: possibly a mis-spelling of a dialect word for limping, or a conflation of ‘cam’, Irish for ‘crooked’, and ‘gyamyath’, Shelta cant, meaning ‘lame’. – GGD

  CHAPTER XXIX

  THE LOST STRANGERS

  TREATING OF THE TWENTY-SECOND DAY OF THE VOYAGE; IN WHICH A GRIM DISCOVERY IS RECORDED BY THE CAPTAIN; (WITH A SOMBRE REFLECTION ON THOSE WHO MUST LEAVE THEIR LANDS; AND OTHER MATTERS TOUCHING THE CHARACTER OF THE IRISH PEOPLE).

  Monday, 29 November, 1847

  Four days remaining at sea

  LONG: 54°02.11′W. LAT: 44°10.12′N. ACTUAL GREENWICH STANDARD TIME: 03.28 a.m. (30 November). ADJUSTED SHIP TIME: 11.52 p.m. (29 November). WIND DIR. & SPEED: S.S.W. Force 7 (last night Force 9). SEAS: Still heaping severely. HEADING: N.W. (315°). PRECIPITATION & REMARKS: Driving rain most of the day. Fogbank to north

  ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’ Jer. 8: 22

  Last night four of the steerage passengers died; and this morning they were buried according to the rite of the sea, RIP. Their names: Owen Hannafin, Eileen Bulger, Patrick John Nash and Sarah Boland; all four of the county of Cork in Ireland.

  This day was made a dreadful discovery.

  The bowsprit mast had snapped in the storm of last night and its rigging had become entangled in the chains at the waterline. Bosun Abernathy had rope-climbed down the hull with some of his crew when he saw a very large infestation of monstrous rats which had congregated in the sewerage-gulley channel leading from the First-Class quarters: an aperture of perhaps four feet in diameter.

  Thinking to discover the source of the odour on the ship of late, he approached with some of the men to make an investigation. A piteously sorry sight was soon met.

  The badly decayed remains of a youth and a girl were lying in the drainway; side by side, still enfolded in each other’s embrace. Surgeon Mangan was called to pronounce death. The lad was about seventeen yrs; the girl perhaps fifteen. The girl had been several months with child.

  I confess there are bitter tears in my eyes, even as I
set down these words.

  Nobody is unaccounted for on the Manifest of Passengers; so it must be assumed that these poor frightened people had been concealed there ever since we left Cork; or Heaven help them, even Liverpool. They must have climbed down the chains and got into the culvert, thinking to hide themselves there until we arrived at New York. As Leeson pointed up, the very many extra passengers we took on at the Cove are making us lie much deeper than is usual in the water.

  A number of children were playing on the deck and I ordered them sent below.

  We took them out and gave them a Christian rite as best we could; but they had nothing at all by which we might even discover their names. Many of the men were extremely distressed, even those who have seen many hard things at sea. I myself was overcome as I attempted to say the words and had to be helped by the men. Reverend Henry Deedes also assisted me and said a simple prayer. ‘That these children of God; of Ireland or England; each of whom was child of a mother, and each of whom was beloved of the other, may find their safe home in the arms of the Saviour.’ Afterwards the men and I sang a hymn. But it was very hard to sing anything today.

  How I thought of my own dear wife and our beloved children; wishing I had them about me now. How I reflected that every little quarrel of married life may be ascribed to the very contiguity which that state brings, such as which exists between coterminous realms. And – most painful – how I thought of my own treasured grandson and wished I could embrace him for even an instant.

  For me to leave my own happy situation and away to sea is such a painful thing; even after all these many years. What anguish, then, must be endured by those on board who will never again in this life see their loved ones who must remain behind? The man who will never more go walking in the evening in his home town with his brother, quietly reflecting together on the matters of the day. Or the girl who must bid farewell to respected parents whom she knows to be too poorly to countenance such an arduous voyage. The happy young couple who must part from one another and the father parted from his wife and children, to travel into America by himself where the means only exist to pay for one passage. To wander alone among strangers, they risk all.