The Star of the Sea (64 page)

‘History happens in the first person but is written in the third. This is what makes history a completely useless art.’

David Merridith, from an essay written while an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, Michaelmas term, 1831, on the theme: ‘Why is History Useful?’

Here was a story of three or four people. The reader will know that there were many other stories. An investigation commissioned by the city fathers calculates that between May and September of that horrifying year, 101, 546 wretchedly poor immigrants entered the teeming port of New York. Of that number, 40,820 were Irish. It is not actually known how many lost their lives within sight of what they themselves often called ‘the Promised Land’. Some say the figure may be as high as two-thirds.

Many years have passed but some things have not changed. We still tell each other that we are lucky to be alive, when our being alive has almost nothing to do with luck, but with geography, pigmentation and international exchange rates. Perhaps this new century will see a new dispensation, or perhaps we will continue to allow the starvation of the luckless, and continue to call it an accident, not a working-out of logic.

1847. Marx’s
Poverty of Philosophy
. Verdi’s
Macbeth
. Boole’s
Calculus of Deductive Reasoning
. Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
. Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
. Ralph Emerson’s
Poems
. Engels’
Principles of Communism
. Quarter of a million starved in that year’s nowhere-land: nameless in the latitudes of hunger.

We First-Class passengers from the
Star of the Sea
were ferried into Manhattan on the evening of Saturday, 11 December, four days after the murder of David Merridith. As a gesture of apology for the inconvenience we had suffered, the Silver Star Shipping Line cancelled our bills and invited us to a champagne reception at an elegant hotel. It is the only time in my ninety-six years that I have heard a Methodist minister swear. Reverend Deedes said things to the Director that the latter will not have forgotten for a long time. Like many quiet people, he was remarkably courageous, Henry
Hudson Deedes of Lyme Regis in Dorset. He returned to the
Star
the following morning, and would be the last man to leave it, with the exception of the Captain.

Those in steerage had to remain on the ship for almost seven weeks, where they were regularly interviewed by parties of police and officials from the Office of Aliens. Having paid for their own passages in advance of the voyage, they received nothing whatsoever by way of compensation. Neither, I understand, were they given champagne.

In January a programme was commenced to clear the clogged port, which by now had become a floating factory for influenza; but the immigrants were still not permitted entry to Manhattan. Farm buildings and sheds on Long Island and Staten Island were leased as quarantine stations or clearance centres; but the fear of contagion so alarmed the neighbourhoods that many of the buildings were attacked and burned by the locals. A large plot of land on Ward’s Island in the harbour was leased by the city government as a secure place to hold immigrants while their applications were processed and their illnesses tended. Before long it had become a permanent facility, this windswept chunk of basalt on which the Atlantic beats like a hammer. It is perhaps a measure of the state of its inhabitants’ destitution that 10,308 articles of ‘basic clothing’ are listed as having been requested by them in one five-month period. Certainly it is a measure of the truer impulse of the New Yorker that those items, so pitifully needed, were provided so quickly.

By the time the
Star
’s survivors were permitted finally to come into Manhattan, every hospital, shelter and almshouse on the island had been overwhelmed. Anti-immigrant feeling was strong and growing. Thousands of new immigrants were simply paid by the authorities to get out of the city and move west. No doubt some were among the 80,000 native Irishmen who would fight for the Union in the Civil War. And others were among the 20,000 of their countrymen who would take up arms for the cause of the Confederacy; for the legal right of a freedom-loving white man to regard a black man as a commodity.

Some Irish earned fortunes and garnered power as a result. Others drifted into the ghettos and were feared and despised. Mary Duane might have been strong enough to endure such an existence,
but Mulvey would not have been, or so I believe. He had taken enough of being despised. His crimes were many but he was a scapegoat for more, and being despised had helped to ruin him. David Merridith’s ghetto was entirely of another kind; but he had borne more than his share of hatred, too.

What happened took place in 1847, an important anniversary in the history of fictions; when stories appeared in which people were starving, in which wives were jailed in attics and masters married servants. An evil time for the place these three violated people called home. A time when things were done – and other things not done – as a result of which more than a million would die; the slow, painful, unrecorded deaths of those who meant nothing to their lords.

What happened is one of the reasons they still die today. For the dead do not die in that tormented country, that heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds; so abused down the centuries by the powerful of the neighbouring island, as much by the powerful of its native own. And the poor of both islands died in their multitudes while the Yahweh of retributions vomited down his hymns. The flags flutter and the pulpits resound. At Ypres. In Dublin. At Gallipoli. In Belfast. The trumpets spew and the poor die. Yet they walk, the dead, and will always walk; not as ghosts, but as press-ganged soldiers, conscripted into a battle that is not of their making; their sufferings metaphorised, their very existence translated, their bones stewed into the sludge of propaganda. They do not even have names. They are simply: The Dead. You can make them mean anything you want them to mean.

That sometimes there must be struggle is not to be doubted. With which weapons it is fought remains the question; and who shall fight whom, and over which ground. For the poor of one tribe to slaughter the poor of the other, all in the name of a blood-soaked field in which the rich would happily bury them both alive at the precise moment it became profitable to do so: this is no fitting memorial to the landless of the past. But that is the making of another story. One, perhaps, which is yet to be written; with a more brotherly ending and a deal less horror.

As the only professional reporter on the ship where Lord Kingscourt was murdered, my articles were in demand all over the world. Everywhere, in fact, except at the
New York Tribune
, where my editor dismissed me for ‘egalitarian sympathies’. There were offers for books; essays; lecture tours. In addition, on the founding of the
New York Times
in ’51, I accepted the position of ‘Senior Contributing Columnist’: the title a piece of hogwash roughly translatable as ‘wildly overpaid late-sleeper’. Never again would I have to rely on the blood money garnered by my ancestors’ crimes. What happened also removed the label of adulteress from his wife; a badge she had never been happy to wear. It sounds callous to say that his death gave me a kind of freedom, but it would be less than fully honest to allow that fact to remain unacknowledged. Perhaps I was wrong to write about what happened; perhaps I had no other choice than to do so. Certainly any newspaperman would have done the same thing; and at least I tried to do so fairly.

My series on the Monster of Newgate for the
Bentley’s Miscellany
was reprinted in my collection
An American Abroad
, first published by my late friend Cautley Newby in 1849, along with my account of the
Star
and its passengers, and some notes on a tour of parts of Connemara. I had insisted three short stories were also included, but no reviewer mentioned them, whether to praise or discommend. A polite silence seemed to hang around them, somehow. From future editions they were quietly removed. Newby never alluded to their disappearance and neither did I. The feeling was that of a sleepwalker who has awoken to find himself at a funeral and must creep away quickly before anyone mentions he wasn’t invited. Those three mediocre and justly forgotten short stories were the only fictional writings I was ever to publish.

We argued a lot, Newby and I, regarding the book’s tide. I wanted to call it ‘Reflections on the Irish Famine’; Newby pleaded strongly for ‘Confessions of a Fiend’. ‘An American Abroad’ was an attempt at a compromise; rather a cowardly one, we both felt. On the cover of the second edition was printed, as well as the title, a small sub-line reading: ‘Monstrous Revelations’. By the time of the fourth edition the sub-line had grown. By the time of the tenth it dwarfed the title. And by the time of the twentieth edition, the
volume’s actual name could barely be seen without the aid of a magnifying glass.
^*

That short section of the book dealing with the Monster of Newgate was of course the most widely reviewed and read. More than that, it seemed to beguile the public’s imagination. The appearance of the book created a whole new audience for the monster. Stories of his doings – almost always heavily fictionalised – appeared in every kind of English publication, from ha’penny magazines to pornographic paperbacks, from
Punch
and
The Tomahawk
to the
Catholic Herald
. It became fashionable to attend society fancy-dress evenings costumed as the monster, or even – incredibly – as one of his now multiple victims. At one point there were two different versions of his life playing in London theatres. Soon the monster was to be subjected to the final indignity. That horror among horrors. A musical.

The monster now entered the vernacular of politics. The Irish parliamentarian Mr Charles Parnell, who bravely led the poor of his country towards some variety of liberation, was on one occasion described in the House of Commons as ‘little better than the Monster of Newgate’. Reminders were often given that Daniel O’Connell, M.P., an earlier exponent of a form of emancipation, had named the mass gatherings he organised throughout the Irish countryside not rallies or assemblies, but ‘Monster Meetings’. Such a baptism now became a matter for frequent discussion in the watering holes and salons of the powers-that-were. The grotesque cartoons depicting the Irish poor in the English journals began to change. Always previously portraying them as foolish and drunken, now they more frequently showed murderers. Ape-like. Fiendish. Bestial. Untamed. How we draw the enemy, what we fear about the
self. Every time I saw one, I saw the Monster of Newgate, whose grim reputation I had done so much to diffuse.

Throughout it all, I had to ask myself was it worth it: to go in disguise into this kingdom of lies. To use the shocking story of the Monster of Newgate to tell another more important and still more shocking story. For many years I convinced myself this was morally acceptable: the ends at least arguably justifying the means. Now, of course, I am not so certain. When we are young these things appear so simple. But they are not simple. They never were.

I was told that the book brought to the attention of some of the reading public the sufferings being endured in Ireland at the time of the Great Famine; but if so, it did little to end those sufferings. It was not the last famine in Ireland by any means, still less in that complicated work of penny-dreadful fiction entitled the British Empire. Modest amounts of money were sometimes gathered by readers and their families. A few farthings, a sixpence, very occasionally a shilling. Generally any monies we received were from women or the poor, though perhaps oddly (and perhaps not) we sometimes received subscriptions from serving British soldiers, particularly those in India. Newby and I established a small trust to administer the funds, the much-maligned (and much-envied) Mr Dickens becoming for a while our excellent chairman. Initially there were high-flown aims of spending what was available on teaching the children of Connemara to read. It was Dickens who snapped that a dead child does not read. He and I quarrelled violently at what I saw as his easy philistinism, and sadly we were never to speak again. The loss was mine, as was the error. He was absolutely correct to argue as he did; politically, morally and in every other sense, that the money ought to be spent on food, not poetry. I should have remembered that his own childhood had been haunted by hunger and terror, whereas mine had not – at least not by my own. If, perhaps, it saved one single life, the book was not an utter waste of everybody’s time.