All Standing

The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, The Legendary Irish Famine Ship

Kathryn Miles

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781451610161
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

All Standing The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, the Legendary Irish Famine Ship recounts the journeys of this famous ship, her heroic crew, and the immigrants who were ferried between Ireland and North America. Spurred by a complex web of motivations—shame, familial obligation, and sometimes even greed—more than a million people attempted to flee the Irish famine. More than one hundred thousand of them would die aboard one of the five thousand aptly named “coffin ships.” But in the face of horrific losses, a small ship named the Jeanie Johnston never lost a passenger. Shipwright John Munn, community leader Nicholas Donovan, Captain James Attridge, Dr. Richard Blennerhassett, and the efforts of a remarkable crew allowed thousands of people to find safety and fortune throughout the United States and Canada.

Why did these individuals succeed when so many others failed? What prompted them to act, when so many people preferred to do nothing—or worse? Using newspaper accounts, rare archival documents, and her own experience sailing as an apprentice aboard the recently re-created Jeanie Johnston, Kathryn Miles tells the story of these extraordinary people and the revolutionary milieu in which they set sail. The tale of each individual is remarkable in and of itself; read collectively, their stories paint a unique portrait of bravery in the face of a new world order. Theirs is a story of ingenuity and even defiance, one that recounts a struggle to succeed, to shake the mantle of oppression and guilt, to endure in the face of unimaginable hardship. On more than one occasion, stewards of the ship would be accused of acting out of self-interest or greed. Nevertheless, what these men—and their ship—accomplished over the course of eleven voyages to North America was the stuff of legend.

Interwoven in their tale is the story of Nicholas Reilly, a baby boy born on the ship’s maiden voyage. The Reilly family climbed aboard the Jeanie Johnston in search of the American Dream. While they would find some version of that dream, it would not be without a struggle—one that would deposit Nicholas into a deeply controversial moment in American history. Against this backdrop, Miles weaves a thrilling, intimate narrative, chronicling the birth of a remarkable Irish-American family in the face of one of the planet’s greatest human rights atrocities.

1

The Gathering Storm

IT BEGAN in an instant. Across North America and Europe that spring, farmers went to sleep one evening, content that all was well in their fields, then awoke the next morning to find their entire crop ruined. The stories they told were as apocalyptic as they were consistent: a strange cloud of mist hanging over their fields, the overpowering stench of something rotten, beds of healthy potatoes turned into rivers of putrefied slime.

The summer of 1845 had been a foreboding season from the start, filled with uncharacteristic thunderstorms and heat waves, followed by pervasive and unrelenting fog. Under the cover of that ominous cloud, farmers in Pennsylvania and Maine first reported the destruction of their potato fields. They were soon joined by farmers in Belgium, then France, Germany, and Switzerland. Not long afterward, testimonials surfaced from the Channel Islands and England. Finally, the report everyone in Ireland feared: a worker in Dublin’s prestigious Botanical Gardens confirmed the telltale signs of blight there.¹ In less than a month, the disease would sweep across all of Ireland. In its wake, acre upon acre of potatoes, all in full bloom, suddenly withered and fell, scorched black as if they had been burned.

Farmers said it was the stench that first gave away the blight’s arrival. Over and over again, they described the smell of death, of tons of potatoes rotting just below the surface of the earth, a smell so potent it was said to have mass and to hang more heavily than the cloud of fog that threatened to suffocate the region. It was intolerable, enough to make even a passerby weep. Families, desperate to save any remaining potatoes, took to the fields with cloths tied around their mouths and noses but were forced to surrender their salvage projects after the reek became too noxious. Others hung their hopes on those potatoes already dug and stored in dry pits. But these too fell prey to the blight, leaving behind them oily puddles of decaying vegetable matter. With nothing left to do, an entire island of families sat on fencerows and stood beside their fields, wringing their hands and lamenting the great hunger that would soon be upon them all.

Why and how this blight appeared remained a maddening mystery. Botanists hired by the British government to investigate returned to London defeated and without a clue; there was no reasonable explanation for the scourge and no solution. Some people claimed it was witchcraft. Others swore they had seen bands of warring fairies flying overhead and cursing the crop. What else, after all, could so dramatically and instantaneously destroy more than two million acres of healthy tubers? Still other people called it the canker, a treacherous and immoral disease. Pathologists in the United States contended that the putrefaction must have been caused by a gross atmospheric disturbance.² More than one leading botanist of the day argued that this plague must have been sent by God and thus was beyond the scope of human correction.³

Using the lens of modern biology, it’s easy to see why any of these explanations seemed plausible. Phytophthora infestans, the fungus-like microorganism responsible for the destruction of the potato, is a tricky being. The pathogen releases millions of tiny spores that are easily carried in the wind for several miles, thus blanketing an entire region. There they remain all but dormant, just waiting for the right amount of temperate moisture. When those conditions appear in the form of cool rain and humidity, both of which were in great abundance in 1845, the spores spring to life, migrating across plant surfaces, leeching water, and leaving cyst-like lesions in their wake. These lesions and the rot they create take hold of potato plants, compromising their systems and leaving them susceptible to secondary infection. Meanwhile the spores begin to germinate, sending forth veins of fungus that quickly erupt and force the collapse of the plant’s cellulose. A seriously infected plant often dies within a day or two.

Present-day botanists agree that there are few pathogens quite as destructive as Phytophthora infestans. In fact one hundred years after the Irish Potato Famine, the blight’s continued virulence prompted a series of nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, to consider utilizing it as a biological weapon. The United States, at least, would have pursued that course, had the country not suspended its biological weapons program in 1969.

These facts might have resonated with Daniel Reilly, who in 1845 was a young famer working his fields in the west of Ireland. That autumn, he watched, awestruck, as many of the fields surrounding his house fell into ruin. But even had he known the full extent of the organism he was battling, Daniel would surely not have taken much comfort in that knowledge. Nor would he have appreciated the irony in scientists’ later theory that Phytophthora infestans followed the same course as the potato itself, coming to Ireland first by way of the eastern United States and, before that, the hills of Central and South America.

It certainly wouldn’t have mattered to Daniel that those same scientists now hypothesize that the hills in Central and South America contained blight-infected bat and seabird guano, which was shipped to places like Philadelphia as fertilizer to ensure healthy crops. Or that the same cargo ships that carried the guano to the United States then brought timber, grain, and tiny, insidious, potato-loving spores to Europe. In his twenty-six years, Daniel had never seen a bat and didn’t have many opportunities to observe seabirds or timber ships in his native Ballybeggan, a small farming community just outside the city of Tralee and nearly seven miles from the ocean. Seven miles might very well be seven hundred for a nineteenth-century Irish farmer, particularly one who had just become a husband and father-to-be and thus found the bulk of his energy focused on maintaining his small cottage and ten acres of land.

Remaining focused, however, was becoming increasingly difficult for Daniel. All around him, people were beginning to go hungry. And if continental Europe was any indication, conditions were about to get much worse. In France, poor farmers resorted to eating cats and dogs. In the Netherlands, mothers fed their wailing children bread made out of straw and sawdust, hoping to fill their aching bellies and ease their suffering.

By the spring of 1846, it was clear that Ireland was in the midst of a catastrophic famine that eclipsed even the suffering of continental Europe—and no place was harder hit than Daniel’s native County Kerry. He watched helplessly as people began bleeding their livestock to make black porridge. When the animals became too weak, they were killed and eaten. Families pawned all of their household goods, followed by their hair and then the shirts off their backs. Soon the pawn offices were overflowing with clothes, utensils, and tools, none of which the impoverished residents could afford to buy.

When the local magistrate was summoned to a widow’s house upon the accusation that she had taken a few half-rotten potatoes from a nearby field, he discovered that they had been added to a stew composed primarily of the remains of the family dog. Horrified, he delivered both the widow and her stewpot to the judge. Once in the courtroom, she broke down and admitted that she and her children had gone without food for two days before she made the decision to kill and cook the pet. The judge was so moved by her tale that he gave her money from his own pocket.⁴

Not everyone was so lucky.

Two boys found gleaning discarded seed potatoes were seized by a bailiff and marched back to his home, where he chained them both to a cow stake outside his barn. Their mother learned of her children’s fate and rushed to the bailiff’s house, where she pleaded with the bailiff’s wife. Fearing for her own well-being, his wife refused to help. The widow returned home and summoned all her remaining strength into an incantation and curse. Those close to him say that the bailiff was immediately stricken with a pain so agonizing it forced him to the ground, where he writhed in torture for a few hours and then died.⁵ Not far from him, another local man met his end not with a curse but with a spade used to bludgeon him to death after he was discovered stealing a turnip from another man’s field.

 • • •

Like other residents in and around Tralee, Daniel Reilly received these reports with growing concern. He too had lost his potato crop, and he walked his remaining acres daily, looking for signs that the disease was spreading. A multigenerational farmer, Daniel had been born in this lowland; since childhood he had worked the same dense soil cultivated by his father and grandfather. Now he had his own family—and it was growing.

Despite the ribbing they would endure for their choice of days, Daniel Reilly and Margaret Foran were married on April Fool’s Day 1845. His brother, Eugene, stood as best man. Margaret, just seventeen at the time, came with her friend Joanna O’Sullivan and her brother John. The daughter of a steward in a nearby town, Margaret brought with her a modest dowry.

Although he was ten years Margaret’s senior, Daniel nevertheless had little experience with women. They were both no doubt surprised to discover that Margaret was pregnant less than two months after their wedding. She took it with the same good-natured humor with which she embraced most things. Daniel wanted to do the same, but he couldn’t help but feel troubled by the ominous signs that Ireland was about to undergo a massive agricultural crisis.

There had been lean times before—even entire crop failures—but none as dire as this one. It was as if the entire island, usually flush with delicate purple blossoms and dense green foliage, had been poisoned. What was left was as barren as the depth of any winter. Daniel may not have known any more than the botanists about why this was happening, but he surely knew it was dire. And without seed potatoes, the following year would no doubt be even worse.

Such was the sentiment at every family dinner and local gathering, where conversation was filled with little other than the failed potato crop. The collective worry was present everywhere, perhaps best exemplified by a letter Daniel’s cousin James Prendergast wrote to relatives in America:

Unless some such measures be taken to provide against next year greater fears are entertained for the coming than the present season. The Potatoe crop is much worse than the last. The disease that was not perceived until September, and even December in other places last year is now complained of throughout the Country. It is felt more severely as we have not the fourth part of last years produc [sic] even diseased. We expect good measures from the British parliament this year but we mus [sic] wait to know the issue.⁶

James Prendergast and Daniel Reilly were not waiting alone. Mindful that Ireland was on the brink of disaster, even the English press demanded action. The London Times called on Parliament to intervene immediately in order to “prevent, as much as possible, the horrors, the high prices, and extortion of a famine.”⁷ Petitions from local governments throughout Ireland’s west foretold indescribable suffering and destruction. Given the reports of violence and the befuddled botanists still without a solution, the implications of these petitions and the suffering they predicted now seemed all too imminent.

And so those in power took action, but it was far from what people like Daniel had hoped. Britain’s Queen Victoria, just twenty-six years old and still adjusting to her new life as a monarch, canceled her first scheduled visit to Ireland, citing concerns for her own safety as justification; her Conservative Parliament, led by Robert Peel, was also in no hurry to visit its beleaguered neighbor. However, a series of relief depots was established in the hopes of averting mass starvation; and in an effort to make grain more accessible, Parliament threatened to ban brewing on the island entirely. Concerned that these measures might not be enough to keep mortality figures in check, Prime Minister Peel also arranged to secretly import cornmeal from America, a decision that would soon cost him his political career, as those in Britain were already critical of any attempt to assist the Irish at state expense. Meanwhile resident Quakers convened at a coffee shop in Dublin, where they spearheaded what would become some of the most heroic attempts to keep the Irish people alive. They soon dispersed about the country, arriving in places like Daniel Reilly’s town of Tralee to establish soup kitchens to feed the destitute. With their somber black suits and foreign-sounding speech, the Friends seemed as alien as the queen herself might have, had she made her scheduled visit.

The contrast between Victoria’s and Daniel’s experience of the blight is too telling to be ignored. Like the monarch, Daniel was also twenty-six, and he too had a young family. But unlike his new queen, Daniel also had a front-row seat to the misery that was about to irrevocably change the destiny of a people. He saw his neighbors, hat in hand, begging for the opportunity to break stone in exchange for bread. He stood helpless as the land turned into poison. But he arrived at the very same conclusion drawn by Victoria—a conclusion as simple as it was true, and perhaps all the more so given the disparate people who arrived at it: this was no time to be in Ireland.

To avoid the blight and its fate, to ensure the safety of his own family, Daniel knew he had but one choice: to get them aboard one of the very same cargo ships that had delivered this scourge to his island, reversing the course of both the potato and the blight back across the Atlantic, where the Reillys could escape the suffering and the authority of Britain’s crown and forge a new life deep in America’s heartland. All that remained was to figure out how.

2

A Great Hunger

THE IRELAND Daniel Reilly sought to escape was marked by dramatic transition. Once a densely wooded island populated by the Celts and Vikings, it had since been converted into a hinterland colony by its neighbor, England. Under the reign of Elizabeth I, Ireland, still a heavily forested island, had served as a timber nursery for a growing Imperial Navy. Once its innumerable trees were exhausted, the newly pastoral landscape was designated the breadbasket for a growing empire. Oatmeal, wheat, and flax were grown on arable acreage. Pigs, cows, and sheep grazed patchy grassland. They, along with the grain, were raised by a few small-scale farmers almost exclusively for English consumption. What was left—the rocky soil of the north, the boggy lowlands of the south, the inhospitable cliffs of the west—was frocked with potatoes. Collectively these potato fields dominated the face of Irish agriculture and diet.

First introduced as an inexpensive ground cover, potatoes soon proved an effective means of feeding people. Prior to the blight’s arrival, they were everywhere. Frustrated by the tuber’s abundance, peasant farmers would stack potatoes like firewood at the edge of their fields. They would fill ditches with the excess crop and light it on fire. And, of course, they would eat them. On the eve of the famine, the average Irish adult was eating about fourteen pounds of potatoes a day, approximately thirty contemporary baking potatoes. But unlike our modern-day supermarket spuds, these potatoes were remarkably nutrient rich, lacking only protein and vitamin D, both of which could be ably sourced with a glass of buttermilk a day. Though undoubtedly monotonous, this diet was also remarkably healthy, so much so, in fact, that at the time of the famine, Irish people were taller than many of their European contemporaries and had a longer lifespan and lower infant mortality.

As far as the British government was concerned, these were no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Map
• Cast of Characters
• Prologue
• Chapter 1. The Gathering Storm
• Chapter 2. A Great Hunger
• Chapter 3. Ships, Colonies, and Commerce
• Chapter 4. Dominion
• Chapter 5. Phoenix Rising
• Chapter 6. Ship’s Fever
• Chapter 7. Discord on Downing Street
• Chapter 8. Visitations from a Vengeful God
• Chapter 9. A Course for Disaster
• Chapter 10. Pestilence and Plague
• Chapter 11. An Audacious Plan
• Chapter 12. Signing On
• Chapter 13. The People’s Physician
• Chapter 14. Fare Thee Well
• Chapter Silver Creek, Michigan, February 25, 1879
• Chapter 15. At Sea
• Chapter 16. Dead Reckoning
• Chapter 17. Quarantine
• Chapter 18. Passing Customs
• Fergus Falls, Minnesota, May 1885
• Chapter 19. Adrift
• Chapter 20. Clearances
• Chapter 21. Crossing the Bar
• Chapter 22. No Irish Need Apply
• Chapter 23. Royal Visit
• Chapter 24. Steaming Ahead
• Chapter 25. Liberty?
• Fergus Falls, Minnesota, August 26, 1885
• Chapter 26. The Rising Tide
• Chapter 27. Departures
• Chapter 28. Storm Season
• Minneapolis, Minnesota, December 1886
• Chapter 29. That Deadly Angel
• April 1900
• Chapter 30. Down with the Ship
• Chapter 31. The Final Test
• Minneapolis, Minnesota, February 8, 1904
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About Kathryn Miles
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright