Sir, - In your issue of May 25th you published two items reflecting the recently growing (and most welcome) popular movement to redeem, for today's and future generations, people of Irish birth or descent whose careers added significantly to the sum total of human knowledge. One item referred to the celebrated restored Irish College in Paris, the other to an association organising the rescue of the names of distinguished Irish citizens of the past whose achievements have been forgotten.
May I please, on behalf of the Maritime Institute, propose the names of two remarkable Irish seamen of the 19th century celebrated elsewhere but forgotten at home?
Admiral Mackau (McCoy) was educated at the Irish College in Paris where he became a close friend of Napoleon's brother Jerome with whom he joined the French navy in 1805. In the 1840s Mackau, well known for his pride in his Galway ancestry, became Minister for Marine in France, and French maritime historians are virtually unanimous that he was not only the most efficient but also the most humane Minister of the Marine that France has ever had.
Contemporary with Mackau was Edward Bransfield from Ballinacurra, Co Cork, who was conscripted as an ordinary seaman into the British navy and proved such a skilled navigator that, though not a commissioned officer, he was given the command of a chartered ship when part of a post-Napoleonic War expedition exploring off the South American coast and in it he discovered and charted the south Shetland Isles and sailed further south to be the first person known to have sighted the Antarctic Continent.
The British post office is generously commemorating Bransfield next year with a stamp and is urgently seeking a portrait or sketch of him. - Yours, etc.,
John deCourcy Ireland, Dalkey, Co Dublin.