New plans projected over a 20 year period will see the inner lands of Galway harbour developed into an attractive commercial and residential area, while reclaimed land from the sea will push out harbour facilities into deep water to accommodate shipping connections to European ports and elsewhere. It is a long over due and worthwhile plan, but it pales almost into insignificance compared to the vaulting ambitions the Galway merchants schemed in the mid 19th century.
Galway was the nearest point of embarkation to America for the growing transatlantic trade. Why not build the British/Irish transAtlantic port in Galway Bay (a deep-water location off Barna/ Furbo was the chosen site ), and bring every passenger to Galway in the comfort of the train, from Britain, Belfast, Dublin or where ever, and deposit them gently on board ship? It was a magnificent if somewhat awesome vision that promised untold wealth from the thousands of travellers then seeking a safe and quick passage to America. Less than a decade away from the ravages of the Great Famine the idea took hold of the citizens of the town , and filled everyone with a vision of wealth and prosperity. Of course travellers could stay a night or two in Galway, enjoy the shops and refreshment establishments; even, if time and tide allowed, a quick tour of Connemara. Such a plan would be sold as the quickest, cheapest, and most comfortable way to America; and the fastest transport for mail and cargo.
It was an idea which many people believed its time had come. From the mid 19th century migration to America from all over Europe was on a massive scale.* We are familiar with the stories of the ‘coffin ships’ where advantage was taken of poor migrants crowded into barely sea-worthy boats, but there were other more practical and direct vessels available for paying passengers. At the time iron steamships of over 500 toms were increasingly common, which offered a considerable shorter voyage (less than two weeks ), compared to a four week sail journey.
With the increasing demand for a passage to America competition was getting fierce . There was already a steam-ship route established between Galway and Halifax/New York, owned by the ambitious John Orrell Lever. His modest success to date must have irritated the ship owners of Liverpool who had the monopoly of the British route for that time. When they heard of Galway’s ambitions, and J Orwell Lever’s plans to charter as many as three ships to meet the expected new demand, the wily Liverpudlians must have looked with some anxiety towards the west of Ireland, and talked among themselves as to how they could protect their trade.
But such was the enthusiasm and impatience for the plan in Galway, that it was launched long before the magnificent new harbour was built, which was estimated would cost £152,000 , a vast sum of money at the time, but the business men involved naively believed the government would happily stump up the money. Lever, a wealthy ship owner, proposed that his beautiful steam ship, the Indian Empire, specially chartered for the service, would launch the new concept of the shortest route, and most comfortable, to America, by sailing into Galway Bay on June 16 1858.
The town went mad with excitement. A dinner for the great and good was organised. Lever would be the guest of honour, and there was to be a spectacular firework display at Eyre Square, admission 6d.
It was a ‘calm and clear on the near -midsummer night , Tuesday June 15 when the Indian Empire, with 86 hands on board, steamed majestically into Galway Bay. It took on board two pilots, Henry Burbridge and Patrick Wallace, and continued towards the harbour when, extraordinarily, it ran aground ‘hard and fast’ on the Margaretta Rock, the most obvious danger point in the large bay, surely known to all and sundry, especially experienced pilots.**
Immediately, among the cries of disbelief and astonishment, fears were expressed that the Liverpudlians, jealous of Galway’s plans, bribed the pilots to ram the Indian Empire, to make Galway Bay appear to be unsafe to sail from.
Michael Healy
I am reminded of this great story reading again Ray Burke’s excellent Joyce County - Galway and James Joyce ** where the author intriguingly explores the many influences that Joyce absorbed during his two visits to Galway. He came here, briefly in 1909, and more extensively in 1912. He hoped to defray the costs of his holiday with his wife and two children, by submitting articles to the Ill Piccolo della Sera, a well read newspaper of Trieste, where the Joyces lived. Of course, we are all aware of his wonderful Galway-born Nora Barnacle, his muse, lover, and eventual wife. The artist in him absorbed poor Nora body and soul, her physical and emotional influences as she grew from a girl into a womanhood, her family, language and landscape. Much of which reappears in his prodigious writings and poetry.
The 1912 visit was the first, and only time, that Nora and Joyce, with Georgio, and Lucia, enjoyed a holiday together here. They stayed in Michael Healy’s house (Nora’s maternal uncle ) at 18 Dominick Street for four weeks, between mid-July and mid-August, a very short distance from Nora’s mother’s home at 4 Bowling Green. While here Joyce sailed to the Aran Islands, cycled to Oughterard, took the train to Clifden, went rowing on the Corrib, and attended the Galway Races.
Ray Burke tells us that Michael Healy was the Barnacle family member to whom Joyce was closest. He was quite unperturbed that Joyce and Nora were unmarried at the time (in fact they were together for 27 years before they were married ), and wrote to them regularly, even sending them money from time to time. He had a soft spot for Nora. Although most children ran barefoot through the streets, when she was a child he bought her boots.
Healy was a highly respected and successful man. He rose to the position of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Custom and Excise, and also Receiver of Wrecks. It is very probable, having seen Joyce’s interest in journalism, that he would have told him the intriguing ins and outs of the mid 19th century aspiration for the major transatlantic port on Galway Bay.
At the time Joyce was frustrated that he had still to find a publisher for his finished collection of short stories, Dubliners. Up to then he relied on teaching and his articles to various publications for a very modest income. While in Galway he wrote two lengthy feature articles on the Aran Islands and Galway city.
Joyce told the story of Galway’s ambitious project where ‘a large proportion of the goods and passengers which were now landed at Liverpool would in future come to Galway and proceed directly to London, via Dublin and Holyhead. ‘The old decaying city would rise once again. Wealth and vital energy would flow through the New World through this new artery into blood-drained Ireland’. ***
Liverpool interests
The grounding of the Indian Empire on the Margaretta Rock was a far more serious psychological blow to the transatlantic project than a physical one. At high tide, two and a half hours later, Captain Courtney, who had immediately resumed control from the pilots, re-floated the ship. He brought her outside the port, and dropped anchor.
The pilots and crew were immediately summoned before an emergency meeting o f the Galway Harbour Commissioners. An overflow crowd squeezed into the room to observe the hearing. The Galway Mercury thundered: ‘Much indignation was expressed at the conduct of the pilots’.... ‘The general impression was that it was done through design, and that the pilots were bribed’. Wallace (one of the pilots ) was hooted by an excited mob, and had to take refuge in the police barracks or he would have been roughly handled. ‘The same newspaper suggested that bribes had been paid by ‘certain Liverpool interests’.
Dates and coincidences , however, were very important to Joyce. June 16 would have immediately struck a chord with him as June 16 1904 was the day that he and Nora enjoyed their first romantic assignation now widely celebrated as Bloomsday. In his novel Ulysses , regarded as one of humanities great master pieces, Joyce pays Nora the most eloquent tribute by recounting the ramblings and observations of Leopold Bloom as he moves through Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, on June 16 1904.
The story intrigued him: Ask her captain, he advised them, how much palmoil the British Government gave them for that day’s work. - Ulysses (16;876 )
Next Week: The plot thickens....
NOTES: * New York was the principal entry port to the US. The city’s first immigration centre was at Castle Garden - near the Battery at the southern end of Manhattan. More than eight million immigrants, of all nationalities, passed through Castle Garden before it closed on April 18 1890. It was replaced by the Ellis Island Centre where it processed more than 12 million emigrants over the following 62 years. From Ireland alone, between 1850 - 1913 more than 4.5 million men and women left for a new life in America.
**The Margaretta Rock, 1.75 miles southwest of Mutton Island lighthouse, can be clearly seen from Blackrock and Knocknacarra at very low tide. Its unlit buoy is clearly visible in daylight from Salthill and Grattan Road . Its fog horn was familiar to city dwellers until it was decommissioned in 1977. It is named after a British warship, HMS Margaretta which ran aground on it 90 years before the Indian Empire did likewise.
*** From The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran, By James Joyce, from Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, Edited by Kevin Barry, Oxford University Press, published 2000.
For today’s story I am indebted to Joyce County - Galway and James Joyce, By Ray Burke, published by Currach Press, Dublin, 2016, on sale €20.
Listen to Tom Kenny and Ronnie O'Gorman elaborating on topics they have covered in this week's paper and much more in this week's Old Galway Diary Podcast.
