IT WAS A fine February morning in 1853 when the paddle steamer Queen Victoria left Liverpool for Dublin. On board were 87 passengers, 24 crew and one stewardess. Approaching the mouth of Dublin Bay in the early hours of February 15th, the ship was enveloped in a snowstorm and thick fog.
A course had been set from the Kish light for the Baily light at Howth. However, visibility was so poor that, when the steamer was some 20 yards from the Baily cliffs, and moving at nine knots, the lookout let a wild roar. It was too late – the bow was already on the rocks. Panic ensued, and about eight people managed to scramble ashore. Ship’s master Capt Church (first name unknown) ordered the engines to be put into reverse to try and run the vessel up on the North Bull. It was a fatal decision; the ship began to sink.
Some passengers clambered into a starboard-quarter lifeboat. It snapped from its davits due to the overload – dropping like a stone into the sea, and drowning all on board. The port lifeboat was found to be leaking, but a young boy is said to have used his finger to plug the gap. That lifeboat managed to reach shore, with brave oarsmen returning to save another five people clinging to the ship’s masts. Another 40 people were picked up by the crew of the steamer Roscommon. Accounts vary on the final toll, believed to be around 80 lives lost, including Capt Church.
The official government inquiry found Church to have been negligent, but it also excoriated the Dublin Port Authority for the inefficiency of its lighthouse service – a finding which contributed to the establishment of the Commissioners of Irish Lights 14 years later.
In 1983, divers with Marlin Sub Aqua Club found the Queen Victoria south of Baily, and its figurehead was given to the National Maritime Museum in Dún Laoghaire.
The sinking made headlines at the time, but no more so than in any winter during the 19th century. The previous November some 13 ships were wrecked off the Dublin and Louth coasts in one day. On the six weeks either side of New Year’s Day, 1854, some 17 ships were lost in the same coastal area, one the emigrant ship Tayleur on its maiden voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne. It was swept onto rocks off Lambay Island with the loss of up to 400 lives.
THERE ARE SOME 15,000 shipwrecks lying in Irish territorial waters, with at least 3,000 wrecked off counties Louth, Meath, Dublin and Wicklow. For the past decade, the Department of Environment’s underwater archaeology unit has been trying to quantify the full extent, resulting in the publication early next week by the Department of the Environment of a detailed inventory for east coast waters.
As its editor Karl Brady explains, it is not a definitive list. Most of the recorded wrecks in the desktop survey date from 1740. Before that, written sources rarely mentioned such incidents – perhaps because they were so commonplace – apart from the records of the Spanish Armada off the Irish coast in 1588.
The underwater archaeological team was originally established as a maritime survey unit by the National Monuments Service under the direction of Colin Breen. It undertook an initial survey of the entire coastline, which identified about 7,000 wrecks. About eight years ago, additional resources were allocated for research, an extension of the State’s county-by-county archaeological survey.
“We [started] by focusing on the east coast, and we bought a copy of the Lloyd’s List archive,” Brady says. The shipping news sheet, named after a London coffee house, was published three times a week from 1691 and is available on microfilm from the 1740s. It proved to be the most reliable source, although the researchers noted that the reporting of wrecks off the Irish coast during the 18th century wasn’t considered to be a priority. This was markedly so during wartime, when “reporting of naval engagements, piracy and privateering took precedence”.
Reports of Irish coast fatalities increased during the 19th century, reflecting a growth in shipping traffic and an investment by Lloyd’s List in Irish staff. The researchers describe as “pioneering” the work of the late maritime historian Dr John de Courcy Ireland and they drew on the work of Edward Bourke, Bridget and Richard Larn, authors of detailed shipwreck indices, and many local historians.
First-hand accounts were taken from fishermen, divers, archaeologists, coastal walkers and port authorities, and a limited amount of field-work was carried out. The cut-off date of 1946 for the inventory was selected to include wrecks from both World Wars.
Among the best known of these wartime casualties was the RMS Leinster, which was torpedoed by a German submarine near the Kish lighthouse in 1918 with the loss of 501 lives. The ship was one of four steamers, known as the “provinces”, owned by the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company.
Over 400 of the 771 on board were soldiers; 22 post office staff were sorting mail on the bow’s port side when a torpedo struck that part of the hull. The ship turned, in a bid to make it back to Dún Laoghaire, but a final torpedo hit the starboard side. Many were killed in the explosion, the ship listed to port and sank, bow first, in just 15 minutes. Some of those who made it to the lifeboats perished in heavy seas. Three ships in the area helped to pick up some of the 270 survivors. The inventory includes underwater photos and images of the wreck which show the ship partly buried in sand five miles east of the Kish.
THE ARCHIVE OUTLINES many incidents involving lifeboat responses, including the loss of the Kingstown lifeboat crew while attempting a rescue off Dún Laoghaire on Christmas Eve, 1895. In one case, a man took the train to Dublin to alert the dockland lifeboat when the brig Agnes foundered off Co Meath in December, 1853. There is also the fascinating tale of the Tomine, a Dutch ship attacked by pirates while anchored in Dublin Bay in early June, 1633. The Tomine crew managed to reach shore, but when companies of soldiers arrived from Dublin they would not attack the pirates.
One of the many heart-breaking accounts relates to the fate of the Mary Stoddard, driven ashore in Dundalk Bay, Co Louth, during a storm on April 6th, 1858. Capt Avery Hill and his cook, John Baptiste, tied some of the apprentices to the masts to prevent them falling overboard. Several rescue attempts failed, and by April 9th the cook and one apprentice had been washed overboard, and five more crew died.
Encountering horrible seas and a capsize, four of the lifeboat crew, including one of the ship’s masters, died in the rescue effort. Eventually, a coastguard boat reached the Mary Stoddard, taking off its captain and remaining six crew. In 1879, a monument was erected outside Dundalk cathedral, which commemorates the rescue attempt.
The Shipwreck Inventory of Ireland: Louth, Meath, Dublin and Wicklow, compiled by Karl Brady, is published by the National Monuments Service (€35)