(Dublin, Ireland)
Something I wanted to visit when Grant and I were here last winter was the Jeanie Johnston Famine Museum which is on a 19th Century wooden ship. Because it was closed during that season, I was happy to be able to visit it on this trip during the summer. You would think I would have had my fill of clipper ships during the Riverfest, but the history I learned was worth the visit.
During the Great Famine of 1845 – 1849, over 1 million Irish died of starvation and about 1 million emmigrated out of the country to Australia, Canada, and the United States. This may be why there are so many people claiming to be of Irish ancestry in the U.S. (Honolulu even blocks off a whole street during its annual St. Patrick’s Day festivities). During this time, ship travel was the main mode of transportation and unfortunately, many of these ships came to be known as “coffin ships” because of the amount of deadly risk people undertook to make this overcrowded journey in the suffocating spaces of these boat cabins.
The Jeanie Johnston has a happier story, as no one ever died on one of its 16 journeys. This is because the owners of the ship were careful not to overcrowd her with passengers and also due to the ship’s highly competent doctor, Richard Blennerhassett, who has even been credited with helping a young Irish woman deliver a baby boy in the middle of the Atlantic. The woman was so grateful to the crew of the ship that she named her baby after each one of the crew members. The baby literally has about 16 middle names.
The tour starts with a showing of the ship. Then the tour guide takes you below deck where the passengers would have stayed in tight quarters, sometime with whole families sleeping arm to arm horizontally on a tiny bed the size of a single. To make the journey come alive, our guide talked about what the journey would have been like as well as real stories of families and people who made the journey to New York. There are also wax figures representing real people in the ship’s past.
On the ship’s final journey, A merchant had bought the Jeanie Johnston and piled the ship with lumber. Or should I say over-piled. During the trip back to Ireland, out in the ocean, she started to slowly sink. The ship’s crew survived by climbing up the mast onto the crow’s-nest as the hull of the ship had completely submerged. They were rescued on the 9th day by a passing Dutch ship, the Sophie Elizabeth. So even with its final journey, the ship didn’t survive but the crew members did. Needless to say, the Jeanie Johnston now sitting on the River Liffey is a replica.
We had a good time on this tour and learned a lot. We walked in without having pre-bought tickets. I liked that our tour guide didn’t hold anything back and was pretty direct about the fact that the famine wasn’t just about the potato blight that had caused the crop to fail, but that it had been exacerbated by, among other things, the Penal codes – a set of laws that had been imposed by the English. So while millions of Irish starved during the famine, Ireland had exported a large amount of food overseas at a time when that food could have helped the Irish people at home.
One thing I did note, is that I was excited to see this museum after having seen it on a Rick Steve’s travel episode. But during the episode, it seemed like they had live actors playing the historical figures of the ship. Unfortunately, the live actors have been replaced by wax figures.
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