No Fighting Chance-Ireland's Lady of the Lake Disaster of 1833

Preface

While researching a shipwreck that occurred off the east coast of the United States in 1854, I came upon repeated references to the Lady of the Lake disaster of 1833. Momentarily intrigued, I printed out some of the references, tucked them away in a future research binder, and resumed my work on the 1854 shipwreck.

Although that project was moving along, going forward with the occasional dead-ends and chance discoveries typical of such research, something kept nudging me back to the Lady of the Lake.

I understood that an earlier incident might pose much greater research challenges; in that era, even a difference of only 21 years might be significant. So, I decided to invest one week to see how much material on the Lady of the Lake was available, and whether I would be interested in pursuing the story further.

During this preliminary period I was pleased to find a number of accounts of the disaster. But some were confusing, and many conflicted with one another; I couldn’t quite reconcile them. This made me only more curious; and before I knew it, I was shelving my original project for the Lady of the Lake.

Two things struck me about the Lady of the Lake disaster—the great loss of life and the dearth of recognition given the incident today. Nowhere could I find a listing of the victims, nor any memorials to them or of the event. There was only a terse entry for the sinking in a Wikipedia List of shipwrecks in 1833, so I decided to create a separate Wiki page for the Lady with the little material I had.

But once it was completed, the new Wiki page seemed insignificant and insufficient to acknowledge such an awful event. Then and there, I decided to piece together all I could of the full story.

To me, gathering disparate information is the most exciting part of writing. Eyewitness accounts of the disaster, recorded in contemporary newspapers, provide much of the information recounted here. However, I was also able to obtain historical insights from newspaper advertisements from the period and from shipping reports detailing the Lady of the Lake’s comings and goings over her very short life.

But the most important part of the story concerns the individuals who lost their lives in the dawning hours of May 11, 1833. Finding their names, and telling their stories, was paramount.

Initially, the only passenger listing I discovered had been provided by a surviving passenger who relied on memory alone. He would recall a certain family surname, and that it had had six members—no first names or ages given. Although his listing was remarkably extensive, accounting for about 100 victims, its accuracy is of course suspect. As in so many maritime disasters, the ship’s manifest ended up on the ocean floor.

The search for an accurate list was on. After many months of false leads and dead-ends, I happened upon what appeared at first to be a duplicated newspaper account of an interview of Captain Grant, the commander of the Lady of the Lake. Suspecting that it merely repeated information I had already seen, I was about to move on to another potential source when I noticed what appeared to be additional content at the bottom of the article. And lo and behold, the entire official listing of passengers met my eyes, including their full names and their ages as of 1833. All that was missing was their place of origin. Nevertheless, merging the survivor’s recollected roster of about 100 passengers with this more official listing yielded what I believe is the most complete and accurate listing of the casualties available to date.

To better understand the historical context of the disaster, I also researched events in Ireland (from where the ship sailed on its final voyage) in the spring of 1833. In my readings, I came upon a curious obituary, that of a bare-fisted fighter, Simon Byrne. He died at age 28, in the ring, while representing Ireland in the battle for the heavyweight-boxing crown of England.

And then I learned that young Byrne had met his death in the longest prizefight in history—some 99 rounds, over 3 hours.

Rather than dismiss Byrne’s story as an interesting but unrelated tangent, I decided to include it alongside the Lady of the Lake narrative, linking the tragic parallels of the maritime disaster and the doomed prizefighter.

Seeking to understand the origin of the ill-fated ship’s odd name, I learned that The Lady of the Lake was a lengthy narrative poem inspired by elements of Arthurian legend and written by Sir Walter Scott in 1810, about twenty years prior to the vessel’s launching. Because many passages from the poem seem to portend the ship’s fate, each chapter begins with a brief excerpt.

Writing this book was not an end in itself. Instead, I hope it was just a beginning. I believe I have compiled the names of all parties to the Lady of the Lake disaster, but I do not have their individual narratives.

I hope that future readers and researchers will contribute the details of all of the victims, so that their stories can be rediscovered. I invite all to participate and to provide information. Please contact me at ThomasGClark.net help complete the narratives of the lost passengers, and thus give them their due recognition.

Introduction

In the spring of 1833, twin calamities struck the very soul of Ireland: the sinking of the passenger brig the Lady of the Lake and the death of the prizefighter Simon Byrne.

In the first event, the lives of 200 passengers were lost. Although their names would too quickly pass into obscurity, the disaster would have devastating consequences for the families whose loved ones perished in the frigid North Atlantic. The passengers of the Lady of the Lake were Irish emigrants who had chosen (or had no choice but) to leave their homeland in search of a new start in Canada. Because of one man, they never reached their destination.

As that tragedy unfolded, another took place that would affect a far greater number of Irish citizens, although not to the same personal depth. This other misfortune involved the death of but a single person, yet his name was widely known and is noted even today.

In both instances, death came quite unexpectedly. Hours before their passing, none of the victims would have expected that day to be their last.

This latter event shocked the psyche of the entire country as a literal one-two punch claimed a national hero. The initial news was depressing enough: it was reported that Simon Byrne had gone down to defeat in a bare-fisted match with his taunting English rival, James Deaf’un Burke. But when further news followed that Byrne had died from his injuries, Ireland was plunged into mourning.

At first glance, these unrelated events would seem to have little in common; but in tandem, they captured the sense of Ireland’s state of affairs in 1833 and, as it would happen, its direction going forward.

Simon Byrne’s final boxing match took place in a level field in England on May 30th, 1833, before an eager crowd numbering in the thousands. Witnesses to the fight furnished round-by-round accounts of the punishing blows the fighters exchanged. Their reports largely corroborated each other and documented the event for posterity.

By stark contrast, the emigrant ship Lady of the Lake had sunk a thousand miles away in icy North Atlantic waters off Newfoundland, far from unbiased witnesses who could provide clear and objective accounts of the actions and events of May 11th 1833.

Whatever these events share in time and national memory, the central story is about the character of two men. One would carry the honor of Ireland into the boxing ring and, with supreme strength and endurance, battle through the longest recorded professional fight in history. Although mortally wounded, he would courageously fight a private battle to preserve the honor of his homeland and his personal legacy. That battle ended with his death two days later.

The other man, responsible for the safe passage of over two hundred passengers and crew, would shirk those duties. His behavior contributed directly to the deaths of over 200 Irish emigrants. The ship’s captain sought only to save his own skin.

The horrific circumstances of both events were memorialized in melancholy poems, one of which was eventually converted into a popular ballad that lives on even today.

For the boxer at least, the record is known. Yet for the victims of the shipwreck, the real stories of the people on board—the heroes and the cowards, the wise and the foolhardy, the proud and the humble—have been lost through the ages.

This book tells the story of the Lady of the Lake disaster, in which 200 souls vanished beneath the ocean surface. The people who perished represented the many who were destitute in Ireland at the time. These were not merchants, traveling to expand their business endeavors, but entire families pulling up roots from their homeland. They were young and idealistic, hard-working and optimistic, independent and self-reliant.

All that stood between them and their aspirations was the safe passage to a new home on the other side of the Atlantic. Therefore, for one last time, these individuals depended on others to perform their duties with due competence, which was not—or should not have been—a lot to ask.

This book, most importantly, is an effort to retell the story from their perspective and so restore their voices, which have been lost for almost two centuries.

Their motivations for leaving home, their aspirations for a new life in Canada, their fears, and their apprehensions are reconstructed from letters, contemporary newspaper accounts, and other primary-source documents.

This is their story, a story that has gone untold since 1833 and deserves to be heard.

First Fair Wind

Time rolls his ceaseless course. The race of yore,

who danced our infancy upon their knee,

And told our marveling boyhood legends store

Of their strange ventures happed by land or sea,

How are they blotted from the things that be!

How few, all weak and withered of their force,

Wait on the verge of dark eternity,

Like stranded wrecks, the tide returning hoarse,

To sweep them from out sight! Time rolls his

ceaseless course.

Lady of the Lake , Canto III

On the 11th of May, in lat. 46.50. N., and long 47.10. W., at five a.m. at steering compass W.S.W., we fell in with several pieces of ice; at eight a.m., the ice getting closer, I judged it prudent to haul the ship out of the eastward, under easy sail, to avoid it. While endeavoring to pass between two large pieces, a tongue under water in the ice struck our starboard bow, and stove it entirely in. We immediately wore the ship round, expecting to get the leak out of the water, but did not succeed. i

So begins Commander John Grant’s portrayal of the loss of his ship Lady of the Lake in May 1833—a disaster reported worldwide that would become known a century later as the little Titanic because of the similarities between the two great incidents.

Captain Grant made his statement immediately upon his arrival in Quebec City, Canada, about 10 days after the sinking. His statement continues at length, describing the difficult conditions the survivors hazarded and the valiant efforts he made to save as many passengers as possible.

According to Grant’s report, there were only fifteen survivors–himself, his crew of three, and eleven very grateful passengers. He estimated, however, that 215 passengers and eight crewmembers perished in the frigid waters off Newfoundland.

Grant’s account conveyed the sense that that the survival of his small party of fifteen was indeed remarkable and his own actions bordered modestly on the heroic.

But in the ensuing days and weeks, much more information came to light. Unbeknownst to Grant, approximately two-dozen other survivors, both passengers and crew, were rescued in separate boats by various other ships across a wide swath of the North Atlantic.

Their individual and collective accounts of the disaster—specifically, of Grant’s behavior and the cause of the encounter with the iceberg—presented