Coffin Ship. The Wreck of the Brig St John

THERE is an old saying that a picture tells a story better than a thousand words, and it is true of James O’Mahoney’s harrowing illustration of the Great Famine.

Just one of the Cork artist’s many graphic images recalling that turning point in Irish history, it is re-printed in the Coffin Ship – The Wreck of the Brig St John, written by archaeologist and historian, William Henry.

Taken from a series of drawings commissioned by the Illustrated London News in 1847, many of which are reproduced in this, the latest in a long line of books on the famine, it depicts a forlorn scene on the road to Cahera, in Co Cork. An emaciated girl forages for potatoes, a starving boy beside her, while, in the background, a woman bends in the desperate search for food.

Redolent of famine scenes throughout the country, the picture seems to reek of the foul stench of potato blight. It bears out Mahoney’s observation that “neither pen nor pencil could ever portray the misery and horror, at this moment, to be witnessed in Skibbereen”.

Walking in the artist’s footsteps, Henry describes the appalling poverty, disease and starvation along the west coast and details the harsh evictions of the time. Through painstaking research, he puts names and faces on the passengers of the Brig St John, and gives the reader an insight into the awful conditions on board the ill-fated vessel that carried 143 souls.

The deprivations on the two-master were typical of the hardship endured by tens of thousands of people borne in coffin ships to North America. Crammed between the decks, many succumbed to disease, suffocated, or were lost in shipwrecks.

By retracing the course of the ship in 1849, he puts the spotlight on the plight of thousands of hopeful emigrants who never made it to the New World during the mass exodus from Ireland, when a million people left in the hope of a better life.

Sailing out of Galway for Boston, the brig went down in sight of land during a raging October storm, off the coast of Massachusetts in 1849. Abandoned by the ship’s treacherous captain, that any passengers survived was astonishing.

As the author’s long list of acknowledgements testifies, echoes of the tragic story still reverberate in Ireland’s folk memory, particularly in the Connemara Gaeltacht.

Author of numerous books, including children’s stories, how Henry came to write the Coffin Ship is a serendipitous tale.

Following a nightmarish dream, in which he saw dead passengers thrown overboard from a coffin ship, he was contacted separately by Kathleen Barry and by John Bhaba Jaick O’Congaola, from Lettermullen, who has a lifelong interest in the disaster.

By sheer coincidence, they pressed him to write the story of the St John. In a curious sense, as he puts it, “this book ... chose me”.

It will be of interest to the student and the general reader. By focusing on the fate of the passengers of the St John, the author brings a human scale to the tragedy of Ireland’s great famine.

A timely publication, it coincides with the first National Famine Memorial Day in honour of the 1.5m people who either perished, or emigrated from Ireland between 1845-1851. Appropriately, the first commemoration service was held in Skibbereen.

The death toll there was 28,000, more than 8,000 sailed for America in coffin ships, and 10,000 famine victims are buried in a mass grave.