The Star of the Sea (7 page)

The right to vote in the benighted motherland of democracy (in whose unelected “House of Lords” David Merridith contentedly burbles) is apportioned exclusively on wealth, not on citizenship. Indeed no Briton is actually a citizen, but a subject of Her Imperial Majesty. Nineteen of every twenty Britons have no vote whatsoever. The opinions of “the people” are of precisely no importance in that scepter’d isle of oligarchs which used to over-rule ourselves. How happy that we continue their quaint olde custom of the disenfranchisement of that half of our population which does not possess the capacity of growing a beard.

Recently Lord Kingscourt has cautioned in this newspaper: “everything about this Irish Famine is more complicated than it appears.” So it is. Unlike the legion of victims His Lordship enjoys the luxury of being alive to debate its complications.

Granted, the division of rustic Ireland into wealthy and completely destitute is not entirely accurate. There are small farmers and others whose meager resources put a blade’s width between themselves and the glorified Gaol called the workhouse. Many have even enough to purchase a coffin; though most do not, as Lord Kingscourt will see if he rises from his writing-desk and looks out his window. There is a great deal of unofficial sub-division of land among poor tenant families (for no rent, or very little), leading to massive over-cultivation of already exhausted soil and thereby more hardship and hunger. There
are also the abject poor, who own nothing at all. Lacking the eight dollars it would cost to emigrate (the price of a supper at Lord Kingscourt’s London club), or any possession they might sell in order to get it, they are dying in their tens and hundreds of thousands while we ask ourselves interestingly complicated questions. Quarter of a million have died this year alone. More than the combined entire populations of Florida, Iowa and Delaware.

Everything about the Famine is indeed complicated. Everything except the agonies of those who are its victims: the old, the young, the defenseless and the poor. Their labors have supplied a gracious leisure to the gentry of Ireland, who like their siblings in England languish in bed half the day. Their Lordships and Ladyships are so understandably weary. A look though the
Illustrated London News
for the last several years will reveal how hunts, balls, and other fatiguing diversions of elegant country living have merrily continued in disaster-struck Ireland, while the hungry have the temerity to die on the roadside.

To where might they turn for assistance now, these people cruelly abandoned by those who had squeezed them dry? To our esteemed colleagues in the British Fourth Estate, perhaps. Here is a recent editorial from the London
Times
(a publication in which Lord Kingscourt holds considerable shares): “We regard the potato blight as a blessing. When the Celts once cease to be potatophagi, they must become carnivorous. With the taste of meats will grow the appetite for them. With this will come steadiness, regularity and perseverance.”

An enforced scheme of mass emigration had been advocated in a recent number of the journal
Punch
(an anti-American rag whose editor has been a frequent guest in Lord Kingscourt’s own home). “We are confident, if this scheme was properly carried out, it would be the greatest boon to Ireland since SAINT PATRICK drove out the vermin.”

The exodus is indeed being undertaken now. Within the next thirty years, more Irish will live among us in America than live in the cruelly inequitable place where they were born to be regarded as an infestation.

It is not a calculated act of national murder, the distorted teachings of some notwithstanding. This is another matter on which Lord Kingscourt is quite correct. (Profound the consolation to a mother watching her children starve that their starvations have
not been calculated.) Neither has the Famine been brought upon the victims by idleness and stupidity (not their own, at any rate), despite the flagrantly hateful claims to that effect often made in the London newspapers now. Mr Punch is far from the only leering puppet to have likened the Irish to beasts and thugs. And such imbecilities are being repeated on all sides. Many an Irish clergyman is already tutoring his flock that an Englishman by definition is a godless degenerate, devoid of civilization, a bloodthirsty Pagan. Others are also girding for battle, a little more secretly if no less dangerously. A member of a revolutionary society in rural Galway (an evicted tenant of Lord Kingscourt himself) recently remarked to the present reporter:

“I despise the English as I despise Satan. They are filth. They were savages and idolaters when our people were saints. There will be a holy war in this country to put them out. All of them. I do not care tuppence how many centuries they are here, this is not their country; they have it by torture alone. They will be sent scurrying back to the cesspit they came from, the mongrel dogs and their bitches with them. Every one of the pack I slaughter, I will count as a blessing on my name.”

Many of us have true friends in Great Britain and Ireland, and all of us owe those countries a deal of our heritage. It is thus imperative that America exert whatever influence she may wield upon the London government at this terrible time. Otherwise the Famine will poison relations between the decent and moderate peoples of those islands for a century to come.

A million will surely die as a result of this Famine. If something is not urgently done to help the poor, thousands more will die in its hideous aftermath: by the blade, the bomb, the bayonet, and the bullet. A number of Noble Lords might even be among them, which would of course be a very unfortunate development. The letters pages of many American newspapers would be profoundly impoverished by their utter extermination.

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I am sorry that the priest put such a hard penance on you. You will have to come to the country where there’s love and liberty. It agrees very well with me. You would not think I have any beaux, but I have a good many. I got half a dozen now. I have become quite a Yankee, and if I was at home the boys would be all around me. I believe I have got no more to say.

Letter from Mary Brown to her cousin in Wexford

T
HE
FOURTH
EVENING OF THE
V
OYAGE: IN WHICH AN ACCOUNT OF THE
P
LOTTING OF THE
M
URDERER IS GIVEN; HIS
CRUEL INTENTIONS
AND
MERCILESS CUNNING.

17°22′
W;
51°05′
N
— 5.15
P.M.
—

The killer Pius Mulvey walked the drenched foredeck, his dead foot dragging like a sack of screws. The sea was knife-grey, flecked with eddies of blackness. Dusk was creeping down on the fourth day out of Cobh. A thin crescent moon like a broken piece of fingernail was visible through the rolling, charcoal clouds, some in the middle distance pouring bright streams of sleet.

Mulvey was in pain. Already his legs were aching. His knuckles and fingertips were smoulders of cold. Like a hag’s poison, the spirit-murdering chill of wet clothes against wet skin.

For several days after they had left Cobh, herring gulls and guillemots had screeched in the wake of the
Star
, whirling and swooping, diving at the billows, alighting in screechy unison on the deck rails. Some of the men of steerage would try to snare them on baited hooks, more sustenance in the rivalry underlying the effort than in the fishy, cordlike meat yielded by the astounded prey. Cormorants and puffins had been seen skimming the whitecaps, even when Ireland had receded from view; inhabitants of the rocky and long-abandoned islands that stretched away from the south-west coast like ink-blots splashed by a careless cartographer. There were no birds now. Now there was nothing.

Except the ceaseless groans and heart-stopping creaks of the ship. The alarming ruffle of the unstiffening sails. The bawling of the
sailors when the wind rushed down from the north. The crying of children. The roars of the men. The cacophonous music they made at night, the maudlin songs of love and vengeance, the strangled blaring of uillean pipes. The screeches of the animals caged on the deck. The endless chirrup of the chattering women, the younger ones especially.

What would New York be like? What kind of clothes did they wear in New York? What kind of animals were in the zoo in New York? What kind of food? What kind of music? Were Chinamen truly yellow? Were Indians red? Was it true that black men had larger what-you-knows than Christian ones? Did American women reveal their bosoms in public? Often, in the days of his youth especially, Mulvey had thought going to sea would be a silent existence; a life in which a man might well escape his past. In fact it was like being in the Hell he deserved. As for his past, it was attached to him like a mooring rope. The further the ship travelled, the more he felt its pull.

He could not be around the women, especially the younger ones. Partly because it pained him to see their emaciated faces: their lightless eyes and skeletal arms. The awfulness of their hope, the way it was burned into them: a brand of absolute dispossession. He would walk the ship all night to avoid them, and sleep all day to avoid the men.

The men were mainly evicted farmers from Connaught and West Cork, beggared spalpeens from Carlow and Waterford; a cooper, some farriers, a horse-knacker from Kerry; a couple of Galway fishermen who had managed to sell their nets. The poorest of the poor had been left on the dockside to die, having neither the money to purchase a ticket nor the strength to beg a mercy of those who might.

And the men suffered from seasickness more than the women did. Mulvey couldn’t understand it but it seemed to be true. Two fishermen from near Leenaun got seasick more than anyone. They had lived on the high cliffs of Delphi Hill, trapping for crabs and lobsters in the deepwaters of Killary. Neither had been further out to sea in his life. They joked of being landlocked, these two ludicrously handsome brothers. They talked about themselves in the ironic third person, as though they found their own impotence and fear amusing.
The fishermen that never went to sea
.

It saddened the murderer to see them play-acting with the girls, wrestling each other, running races on the deck in their stocking feet. Even their kindness was somehow saddening. They were never done offering their rations to the children of steerage; singing patriotic ballads when their comrades were low. The younger one would die soon; that much was clear. There was desperation in his gaiety. He couldn’t last.

Mulvey knew about hunger, its deceptions and strategies: its trick of letting you think you weren’t hungry and then suddenly hammering into you like a wild-eyed, shrieking robber. He had known it in Connemara, on the roads of England. All his life it had shadowed him, a sneaking spy. But now it was limping the decks alongside him. He could almost hear its siren laugh and smell its stinking breath.