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  CONTENTS

  Map

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue

  1. The Gathering Storm

  2. A Great Hunger

  3. Ships, Colonies, and Commerce

  4. Dominion

  5. Phoenix Rising

  6. Ship’s Fever

  7. Discord on Downing Street

  8. Visitations from a Vengeful God

  9. A Course for Disaster

  10. Pestilence and Plague

  11. An Audacious Plan

  12. Signing On

  13. The People’s Physician

  14. Fare Thee Well

  Silver Creek, Michigan, February 25, 1879

  15. At Sea

  16. Dead Reckoning

  17. Quarantine

  18. Passing Customs

  Fergus Falls, Minnesota, May 1885

  19. Adrift

  20. Clearances

  21. Crossing the Bar

  22. No Irish Need Apply

  23. Royal Visit

  24. Steaming Ahead

  25. Liberty?

  Fergus Falls, Minnesota, August 26, 1885

  26. The Rising Tide

  27. Departures

  28. Storm Season

  Minneapolis, Minnesota, December 1886

  29. That Deadly Angel

  April 1900

  30. Down with the Ship

  31. The Final Test

  Minneapolis, Minnesota, February 8, 1904

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About Kathryn Miles

  Notes

  Index

  For Colin

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  James Attridge: captain of the Jeanie Johnston

  Henry Blennerhassett: longtime physician around Tralee, Ireland, and medical supervisor for famine relief there

  Richard Blennerhassett: Henry’s son and ship’s doctor for the Jeanie Johnston

  Thomas Campion: Attridge’s first mate

  Sir Edward Denny: member of the landed gentry who controls much of the town of Tralee

  Nicholas Donovan: Tralee’s leading importer/exporter and owner of the Jeanie Johnston. His wife is Katherine Murphy Donovan.

  George Mellis Douglas: physician and medical superintendent at the Grosse Île quarantine station in Quebec

  Henry Grey, Third Earl Grey: British colonial secretary from 1846 to 1852

  John Munn: shipwright and builder of the Jeanie Johnston

  James K. O’Brien: bar owner and gamester. Brother-in-law of Nicholas Reilly and husband of Harriet Bunberry O’Brien

  Daniel and Margaret Reilly: farming couple aboard the Jeanie’s first voyage. Nicholas’s parents

  Nicholas Reilly: born aboard the Jeanie Johnston, eventually marries Cecilia Bunberry Reilly

  John Russell: prime minister of England from 1846 to 1852 and then again from 1865 to 1866

  Charles Trevelyan: assistant secretary to HM Treasury and responsible for administering famine relief

  Edward Twisleton: chief commissioner of Poor Laws for Ireland from 1845 to 1849

  All standing: 1) To be equipped or rigged. 2) To turn in fully clothed; at the ready. 3) To be brought to anchor, at a full stop. (The Sailor’s Word Book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms)

  PROLOGUE

  Fergus Falls, Minnesota

  Friday, August 27, 1883

  On most evenings, a steady stream of patrons crossed the Red River footbridge to have a drink at James K. O’Brien’s saloon. But not that night.

  The Sullivan Troupe’s Irish Revue was in town for one night only, and everybody who was anybody already had a ticket. That meant business was slow at O’Brien’s Saloon in the Grand Hotel. All evening its lone bartender, Nicholas Reilly, stood at his post between the shelves of spirits and the glistening new bar, watching as residents of Fergus Falls paraded up Lincoln Avenue, dressed for the show in their Sunday best.

  Two blocks away, Nicholas’s wife, Cecilia, tended to their two young children, William and Helen. Somewhere on a floor above him, Nicholas’s younger brother, Eugene, was settling into one of the small rooms O’Brien set aside for borders. It was a good night to be inside.

  A steady and unexpectedly cold rain dotted the saloon windows and puddled in the street, but the townspeople seemed impervious. The Sullivan Troupe’s vaudeville act was the biggest event to visit the Red River Valley; no one worth his salt was willing to miss it, even if doing so meant ruining a taffeta dress. All of Fergus Falls, it seemed, had suddenly contracted a whopping case of Irish fever.

  Twenty-five years had passed since the Great Hunger had claimed the lives of a million Irish people and forced a million more onto North America’s shores, forever marking the famine as one of the greatest human rights atrocities in recorded history. Since that time the United States had formed a complicated relationship with its new Irish brethren, based alternately on pity, curiosity, contempt, and, most often, a thorny combination of all three. The Sullivan Revue capitalized on that complexity, promising an evening of historic lectures, romantic ballads, and side-splitting satire.

  Everyone was on their way to the show that night, and yet, oddly, Jim O’Brien—the saloon’s owner and Fergus Falls’ most prominent Irish resident—was nowhere to be found. His absence was inexplicable to most people in town, but not to the saloon’s young bartender. Nicholas was growing accustomed to O’Brien’s mysterious disappearances, although that didn’t make him overly comfortable with them. Truth be told, Nicholas wasn’t comfortable with much about his brother-in-law.

  Since opening that summer, O’Brien’s Saloon had become the unofficial epicenter of town activity; on most nights, a never-ending chorus of shouted drink orders added to the din already created by well-used billiard tables and one of the only full-size pianos in town. Nicholas liked the frenetic pace required to keep up with all the activity, and the bar was doing well—that much was obvious every night when he emptied the cash register before crossing the street to join Cecilia in the cramped apartment they shared with Jim and his family. But even with the overflowing till, Nicholas was hard-pressed to account for the purchase of this massive brick hotel. And then there was the inexplicably large stack of money and whiskey bonds in the saloon’s brand-new safe, which was almost as enormous as Jim O’Brien himself.

  Nicholas knew he would have to get to the bottom of these puzzles—and that the future of his family would no doubt be better without Jim O’Brien in it. But tonight his thoughts, like those of his fellow towns-people, were all about Ireland. As he watched people hurrying toward the theater, he cast his mind back to a place he never really knew.

  Hardly any of the passersby bothered to look inside the saloon’s rain-smeared windows. Even fewer paused for a pint before heading to the show. That was really too bad. Had anyone stopped long enough to chat with the young man standing behind the bar, they would have been treated to a story worth far more than the admission being paid at Gray’s Hall.

  Nicholas, after all, was more Irish than the Sullivans and O’Briens put together. However, as he was always quick to explain, he wasn’t really from there. Nicholas Reilly was born at sea, and he made a point of stating that fact on every document, governmental or otherwise, that asked for his place of birth. He also listed his legal name as Nicholas Johnston Reilly on such papers, but that was really just for convenience’s sake. His full name, he liked to say, was Nichol
as Richard James Thomas William John Gabriel Carls Michael John Alexander Trabaret Archibald Cornelius Hugh Arthur Edward Johnston Reilly, so named for the owner, doctor, and crew of the Jeanie Johnston, the legendary famine ship on which Nicholas was born thirty years earlier.

  That he was born on Easter Sunday, the very day the vessel was scheduled to embark from County Kerry on her first refugee voyage, was noteworthy enough. That he and his family survived the arduous journey that followed was nothing short of astounding. Mortality rates on the aptly named coffin ships could be as high as 70 percent.

  Not so on the Jeanie Johnston. Beginning with the much publicized announcement of Nicholas’s birth, this little square-rigged barque was known far and wide as a charmed ship—the only coffin ship, in fact, to keep all of her passengers alive. And with each of her eleven successful trips to North America, the reputation of this vessel continued to grow. Soon it was said around the world that to sail aboard the Jeanie Johnston was to survive despite crushing odds.

  Aboard the Jeanie Johnston, these odds would spur people like the Reillys and their crew to travel thousands of miles from home in search of a new beginning. These odds would demand that they risk their lives at every turn. More than once it would force them to flout naval law and invite arrest—or worse. And yet the sterling record of the barque and her occupants would stand, their mythology building with each subsequent year, eventually making them luminary figures in one of the most calamitous moments in history.

  The epic story of survival on the Jeanie, and how Nicholas Richard James Thomas William John Gabriel Carls Michael John Alexander Trabaret Archibald Cornelius Hugh Arthur Edward Johnston Reilly came to be born on it, was a story so fantastic that not even the world-renowned Sullivan Troupe Irish Review dared tackle it. It would take over a century of study and discussion prompted by marine architects, naval historians, and the leaders of nations to tease out the story of Nicholas and his namesake vessel. In the intervening years, many refugees who sailed aboard would call the Jeanie miraculous and her builder, owner, and crew saviors. Historians would puzzle over why this ship—and this ship alone—managed to keep all of her passengers alive. Medical and nautical officials would study and eventually revolutionize sailing procedures as a result of her accomplishment. Critics would accuse the men most closely associated with the ship of capitalizing on misery, of exploiting those desperate to travel by charging astronomical passage fees, of being no better than human traffickers. They would speculate about the demons and guilt driving the vessel’s historic course. And yet, for all that, they would all agree on one crucial truth: the story of the Jeanie Johnston is indisputably the stuff of legend.

  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 s
even 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.