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Irish America magazine - Aug/Sept '08 issue: The Global Irishman, In the Name of the Fada, Chicago and the Irish, Hannah’s Descendants, Roots: The Marvelous McDonaghs, Slainte: Dancing at Lughnasa, Review of Books, Ashley Davis - Finding Herself Through Her Past
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 Hannah’s
Descendants
In April 1849, a ship carrying Irish immigrants hit an iceberg in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence. John Kernaghan writes on the incident, and of plans
for a documentary as Quebec celebrates its 400th anniversary.
The crew of the barque Nicarague could scarcely credit their eyes when they
closed on the iceberg in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Some 120 Irish immigrants clung to a bit of frozen salvation, desperately
cold in their nightclothes after almost 18 hours on the ice that April night
in 1849.
The boat bringing them to the promise of a new life had sailed from Newry,
County Down on April 2 and until April 17, according to newspaper accounts
of the day, the passage had been fine. The 200 passengers were mostly from
the Forkhill area of Co. Armagh.
But the brig Hannah failed to skirt the pack ice on the harsh gulf. Its hull
was crushed by an iceberg
Passengers, jolted from their sleep, were bruised and cut in the scramble
off the ship. Others perished in the chilling waters, unable to gain the
ice, or were lost in rescue attempts.
Almost 160 years later, the Montreal documentary maker Gala Films is hoping
to include this remarkable incident in its survey of the Irish famine
migration to Canada. It is seeking descendants of those who survived the
sinking of the Hannah.
One of those descendants, Paddy Murphy, says the incident is laced with both
cowardice and courage. He notes accounts of the day which reported that the
Hannah crew and captain had departed in a lifeboat, leaving the boat’s
passengers exposed to the elements. All would have died had Captain Marshall
of the Nicarague not made his ship fast to the iceberg at great risk to
himself and his crew.
“‘No pen can describe the pitiable situation of the poor creatures,”
Marshall reported to the Armagh Guardian on June 4, 1849. “They were all but
naked, cut and bruised and frost-bitten. There were parents who had lost
their children, children with loss of parents. Many, in fact, were perfectly
insensible.”
 Three
other ships also pitched in to bring survivors through the ice floes to
Grosse Ile, the immigrant quarantine station in the St. Lawrence River.
Paddy Murphy’s great-great-grandparents John Murphy and his wife Bridget (McParland)
had already endured tragedy before setting out for Quebec in April, 1849. In
January of that year, their house had burned down and one of their children
had died in the blaze.
On the Hannah they had four of their children, and the two eldest were lost.
“The children went into the water and John went in after them. The story in
our family is that his hands were so badly frozen he couldn’t handle the
rope he’d taken to try to pull them to safety. He held the rope in his mouth
in the hope he’d find them and they could grab on. But he couldn’t save
them. He lost all his teeth as a result,” Paddy recounts.
“Rose, who was approximately three years old, fell in the water and was
rescued but did not speak for years because of the shock. Bernard, ‘Barney,’
aged two, also fell in the water but was pulled to safety by the wife of
Henry Grant who thought he was one of her own children.”
It was Barney’s son, Mike, who recounted the incident to Paddy on the
occasion of Paddy’s marriage to his wife Jane, in the summer of 1962.
 “Grandfather
Mike was delighted at the marriage because Jane’s maternal
great-great-grandfather Michael Coburn came from the same area in Forkhill,
County Armagh as the Murphys. He said we were two old Irish families
uniting. Michael Coburn had left Ireland in 1848, a year before the Hannah
disaster, and Grandfather Mike, whose mother, Ellen Bennett, was also from
Forkhill, told us about John Murphy coming over on a ship that hit an
iceberg, the many lives lost, and his father who was saved from the water.”
Paddy, who grew up in the township of North Crosby, south of Ottawa, where
many of the Hannah survivors settled to farm, went on to conduct his own
research into the shipwreck, and his findings later became the basis of a
book called A Famine Link: The Hannah, South Armagh to Ontario. The authors,
Kevin Murphy and Una Walsh, are members of the Mullaghbawn Community Centre
in Forkhill, South Armagh.
Clearly the story of the Hannah is a stirring tale that speaks to the times
and to the Irish in Quebec. It is estimated up to 40 percent of the
province’s citizens have Irish blood.
Gala Films is seeking descendants of the survivors who settled in Quebec,
Ontario and the United States, but particularly those who now live in
Quebec. (See sidebar for family names).
The story has a greater chance of coming to video life with a direct Quebec
link, says Gala Films’ Hugh John Murray.
“In order to get public funding from the Quebec government to make the
documentary, we need to find Quebec-based descendants,” he explained.
The documentary would explain the tragedy in the context of the famine-years
migration to Canada through Quebec City.
And with Quebec City celebrating its 400th birthday this year, its deep
Irish roots in the city and province are part of that observance.
Almost 100,000 Irish came to Canada in 1847 during the famine. And about
475,000 preceded them and spread across the province and through
intermarriage produced that aforementioned 40 percent estimate.
Even if, as some suspect, that estimate is high, most historians agree about
a third of the people in the province have Irish blood.
That is still remarkably high when measured against the 15 percent of people
who claim Irish heritage in the rest of Canada.
And there’s a simple answer for it. The Irish who survived harsh voyages
across the Atlantic – the voyage often took up to six weeks and longer,
depending on weather conditions – and landed on Quebec’s shores found it
much easier to marry into an existing society that was mostly Roman
Catholic. And families in Quebec were traditionally large.
While there were Irish Protestant pockets in Quebec City and Montreal, the
Catholics tended to quickly meld into Quebec life and families. And in the
most unique aspect of the haunting Irish diaspora – the dispersal of
millions from their homeland – some of these new Quebecers became
trilingual, mastering French on top of English and Gaelic.
Even in cases where Irish orphans were taken in by French-Canadian families,
the Irish names were often preserved either as surnames or Christian names.
That’s why you’ll see names like O’Neill Marois. Or Emile Nelligan, famous
as the ‘national’ poet of Quebec.
Quebec Irish historian Marianna O’Gallagher notes, moreover, that Irish
names might have been made French over time. For instance, singer Celine
Dion might be the descendant of a Dillon.
There are also romantic and possibly solid theories about the earliest Irish
presence in Quebec, notions that Irish monks visited islands in the Gulf of
St. Lawrence around the time in the mid-1500s when Irish fishermen were
apparently working seas off Newfoundland.
The explosion of immigration to Canada from 1825 to 1850 shows 60 percent
were Irish. There was more misery than glory in the passage and in the early
years in Quebec. That misery strained the ability of immigration and medical
authorities when the potato famine hit Ireland in the mid-1840s and
desperate farmers scratched together passage for families on overcrowded
boats to North America.
They lived in wretched conditions and rode rocking seas. Diseases like
cholera and typhus flourished. So Grosse Ile, a rocky outcrop downstream
from Quebec City, became the first Canadian shoreline for four decades of
Irish immigration. The quarantine station is now a Parks Canada national
historic site, a bucolic spot with the haunting counterpart of a Celtic
cross commanding a cliff overlooking the river and a moving memorial naming
the poor newcomers who never made it off the island alive.
Tour boats from Quebec City offer daily outings to Grosse Ile in spring and
summer, a combination of bracing river voyage and sobering tour through
reenactments of how authorities processed the masses.
The numbers wrought by Ireland’s famine, often called The Great Hunger, were
staggering. The famine hit its depths in 1847 when 100,000 people, six out
of seven of them Irish, headed for Quebec. Some 5,000 died at sea or while
waiting offshore of Grosse Ile as the overmatched facility verged on anarchy
due to some 12,000 inhabitants, many badly ill.
When the count was taken later, 5,424 died on the island and thousands more
died in Quebec City, Montreal and Kingston. For those who survived, tragedy
or travail often caught up with them later.
It was mainly Irish who dug the Lachine Canal at Montreal and the Rideau
Canal to Ottawa. And it was mostly Irish who died due to typhus and malaria.
Even so, as you follow the often-tragic trail of Irishmen and Irishwomen
down the St. Lawrence, you see the roots of Celtic culture setting down in a
new land. The Irish reel fused into the work of Quebec musicians and dancers
and lives on still in the work of groups like Les Cowboys Fringants.
Also, there is a line of thinking in political science circles that it was
Irishmen who provided an important bridge between the French and English on
the way to Canada’s Confederation in 1867.
Concordia University’s Irish Studies program in Montreal examines this and
other contributions to Canada. Robert Baldwin, son of an Ulsterman, was able
to forge a Liberal alliance with Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine to get
French-Canadian support for responsible government. And a native of Cork,
Francis Hinks, nurtured the partnership to take the national railway sea to
sea.
But the most colorful Irish-Canadian was Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a brilliant
orator and the only federal Canadian politician ever assassinated. He had
escaped Ireland with a price on his head for fomenting rebellion and landed
in Boston to establish a newspaper pandering to Irish sentiments.
But he grew impatient with lack of movement in government circles to improve
the lot of his countrymen and moved to Canada, where he believed Irishmen
would get a better deal. McGee was soon elected to Parliament but his
political career was marked by differing results: success in fathering
Confederation but vicious opposition to his distaste for secret societies
like the Fenians.
 McGee
believed that Canada represented the best chance for Irish people of both
religions to coexist peacefully and argued that the improving condition of
his countrymen would be lost if they backed an American-led radical
movement. He was thrown out of the St. Patrick’s Society of Montreal as a
result and his life was threatened.
Still, he prevailed, winning re-election in 1867, Canada’s Confederation
year. But the founding father was dogged by extremists and near midnight
April 7, 1868, just shy of his 43rd birthday, he was gunned down as he
turned the key to his apartment.
Historian Bill Davis wrote “he made precious contributions to his adopted
country,” easing “the religious and racial strife that had threatened to
tear the country apart.”
You can raise a glass to his memory in the building where he died, D’Arcy
McGee’s Irish Pub on Sparks Street in Ottawa, as well as retrace his
killer’s steps to the gallows. Patrick James Whelan, a rabid critic of
McGee, was hanged in the last public display of its kind in Ottawa, Feb. 11,
1869.
The old Ottawa jail is now a hostel and some inhabitants have claimed to see
his ghost over time.
McGee’s dream, offered in a stirring speech seven years before Canada’s
Confederation, was prescient.“I see in the not remote distance one great
nationality, bound like the shield of Achilles by the blue rim of ocean. I
see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its internal
affairs, but all bound together by free institutions, free intercourse, free
commerce.”
 A
partial list of Hannah survivors
• William Tadford (wife and child)
• Michael McGill (wife and 2 children)
• Owen McCourt (wife)
• Patrick McGuirk (wife and 2 children)
• Joseph Kerr (wife and 2 children)
• John Delany (wife and sister
• William Henderson (wife and 4 children)
• Henry Grant (wife)
• William Wood
• Eliza Blackstock
• Samuel Henderson
• Edward Nugent
• Edward McElhern (wife and child)
• Patrick McGrory (wife and 3 children)
• Eliza Perdue; Jane Thompson (sister)
• Mary Anne Brantford
• Peter Bennett
• James McKeough (wife)
• Patrick McGinn
• John Tuft (son)
• Andrew Kelly
• Joseph Murphy (sister and child)
• Catherine Hart
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