Also known as the “Silver Ship”. On her maiden voyage, she went down near Galley Head. There are many tales of the silver treasure on board. Our story is of the bravery of the rescue teams from Dirk, Rosscarbery and Millcove. These men fearlessly put their own lives at great risk as they faced near-impossible odds to pluck eight terror-stricken sailors from the jaws of death.
A tale of bravery and sadness. … …
On the afternoon of the 20th of February, 1914, there being what was described
as a somewhat unsteady breeze from S.S.W., with a force of 4 to 5, misty
showers of short duration, and a moderate sea, the coastguards on duty at Bar
of Lough, between 2.30 and 3 o’clock, sighted a vessel between the Saltees Island
and the Keragh Islands, on the port tack. Recognising that the stranger was in a
perilous position, the signals J.D (“You are standing into danger”) were hoisted,
but apparently without any response being made.
‘Drowned like rats’ The torpedoing of Arandora Star off the Donegal Coast, 2 July 1940 Michael Kennedy (difp at iol.ie) This paper is a revised version of ‘Men that came in with the sea’ which appeared in History Ireland in 2008. A PDF version of this article is available: click here The torpedoing…
Morven Disaster. December, 1906. The Morven was bound from Portland, Oregon to Liverpool with a cargo of about three thousand tons of grain for the Messrs Bannatyne. The place where the wreck occurred is a little promontory locally known as “Horse Island”. The Morven was a splendid four masted ship of 2000 tons built about…
Paddy O’Sullivan 19 November 2009 The Dunworley Slave Ship: Amity 1701 The history of slavery is probably as old as that of mankind itself. Hundreds of thousands of slaves built such classical civilisations as Greece, Egypt and Rome. Viking Dublin was a major slave trading port in its heyday. However, for the purposes of this…
The Last Voyage of theM.V. Plassy by Michael Kirwan Originally published in the Winter 2010 edition of the Limerick Journal The 8th March, 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the grounding of the M.V. Plassy on the Finnis Rock, Inisheer Island, County Galway. The ship is shown on the opening credits of the well-known TV…
The Demerary has survived in memory in the Kilmore area because of a tomb at Cill Park, Cullenstown. Moreover there were tales of treasure recovered after the wreck related by storytellers in more recent years. In truth the Demerary was wrecked twice on the Irish Coast having been abandoned as lost on the Arklow bank some years before her eventual demise. Richard Roche & Oscar Merne say in their book on the Saltees “The two barren islets are best remembered as the scene of the several shipwrecks. Here in 1819 the Demerary carrying gold bullion was wrecked and sank
ABANDONED SHIP GAVE BIRTH TO IRISH SHIPPING’S WARTIME FLEET This article was first published in the Sunday Express on 19 February 1967. It was reprinted in the Winter 2004 edition of Iris na Mara On the broad chest of the Atlantic the tramp steamer was at first only a speck to the German bomber crew.…
An account of the events of the night of 21st November 1991 Austin Gill, A.B., M.V. Kilkenny. The events of that night are still very vivid in my mind after more than 20 years although I often forget things that happened last week. To start my account I will give you a little…
The Mystery of the Titanic
She was the largest ship in the world at the time
She was proclaimed unsinkable
She collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage.
2011 is the fiftieth anniversary of the successful raising of the almost intact early seventeenth- century Swedish warship Vasa from the mud at the bottom of Stockholm Harbour. It represents one of the greatest maritime archaeological recoveries ever carried out. After the salvage of the ship in 1961, it was conserved and restored and can be seen in a specially built museum where it has attracted millions of visitors over the years.
THE WANDERER AT KINGSTOWN By Cormac F. Lowth The great manmade harbour of Dun Laoghaire, formerly Kingstown, was conceived and built as a harbour of refuge for sailing ships in distress in Dublin Bay and although it fulfilled this function reasonably well for many decades after completion, it quickly became a harbour of…
History of the SS Lochgarry
One of Ireland’s most Popular Recreational Diving Wrecks
The Lady Nelson – Shipwrecked 14th October 1809 By James Robinson M.Phil. On 14th October 1809, The Lady Nelson, Captain Bernard Wade, was shipwrecked on a voyage from Oporto to Liverpool, off the Skelligs, Co. Kerry. The 200 tonne vessel contained a cargo of wine and fruit. 25 souls perished in the disaster. The Freeman’s…
A postage stamp was issued in 1974 to mark the 150th anniversary of the RNLI. This depiction of the rescue of the crew of the Daunt Lightship by the Ballycotton lifeboat RNLB Mary Stanford was chosen as the image to be represented on that postage stamp – Oil painting by B. F. Gribble Career Name:…
Old Dublin society talk Pearse St Library at 7.30. pm on Wed 21st Nov 2007. The sinking of the Rochdale and the Prince of Wales. Edward J Bourke Napoleonic wars From the time of the French revolution in 1789 to Waterloo in 1815 there was nearly constant war between Britain and France. The battle of…
The MV Kerlogue is regarded as a exemplar of neutral Irish ships during WW2. She was very small. 142 feet in length. She was almost sunk by a German mine. She was dive-bombed by the RAF. She rescued the Wild Rose of Liverpool. She rescued 168 crewmen from the Z72 and its escort.
M.V.BOLIVAR was making her way across the Irish Sea on the morning of Tuesday, March 4th, bound for Dublin Port with a badly needed cargo of grain and other essential items. Like many another fine ship before her, although Dublin Bay was in sight, the BOLIVAR would never reach that port and would leave her bones in the sands of that treacherous graveyard of ships that spans the entrance to Dublin Bay waiting to ensnare the unwary, the Kish Bank.
“Hey Mister. Will ya bring us back a parrot”. That, according to Dublin comedians and wits of the fifties, recalling the last glory years of the Guinness barges on the River Liffey, was the regular cry of Dublin jackeens perched precariously on the city’s famous Halfpenny Bridge to the elegantly dressed barge captains in their dark blue corduroys and shiny peaked caps as they passed underneath.
Mostly the captains used to ignore them, for privilege was theirs, the privilege of being established characters of Dublin of that time, pillars of the community, men with an urgent job to do in getting Dublin’s primary export safely over a Liffey mile to the ships that would carry it to the furthest ends of the world.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
