For millions of Irish, Cobh (pronounced Cove) or Queenstown
as it was then known, was the exit point for a better life in America,
Australia, the UK, Argentina, New Zealand…or Canada.
So - we find Cobh to be a town steeped in history with
plenty to discover. It is also an
attractive town,
Cobh is a day trip from Cork and we have travelled down here
by train. After lunch we walk across to
the Titanic experience, situated in the original offices of the White Star Line
and the place where the
As we enter the Titanic experience each of us are given a
postcard with the name of a passenger. I
am a 40-year old woman, Mary Bourke. At
the end of this experience, I will discover if I survived…
As a traveller and migrant myself, I can connect with the
sense of anticipation that Mary must have felt on boarding. I was 25 when I left home for America to
further my studies. I had never been on
an airplane before and this would have been Mary’s first voyage. This personal touch is already bringing alive
to me the real story of the Titanic.
Most of us know the facts of the Titanic. We’ve watched countless documentaries and
seen the movie. In 1912, she was the
largest passenger steamship afloat. Together
with her two sister ships, the Titanic was constructed in Belfast in what was
then the largest shipbuilding yard in the world. It took 3 years for her to be constructed and
cost the equivalent of $7.5 million!
About fifteen thousand men worked on her construction and many ended up with hearing problems due to the incredible din made when hammering rivets. The photos of these ships being constructed side by side are amazing and as an engineer I can appreciate that it was designed using the most advanced technology at the time. I love the photos from the design offices and can feel the sense of achievement the engineers must have felt when completing those drawings. While Titanic did not have enough lifeboats for all the passengers on board, she had more than was required by the regulations of the time, which was only based on the tonnage of the ship. The Titanic was required to have sixteen lifeboats on board – she had twenty. In the words of her captain;
“I cannot imagine any
condition which would caused a modern ship to founder …… Shipbuilding has gone
beyond that…”
On 14th April 1912, just over 100 years ago, she
hit an iceberg. Having watched the movie I already have a
sense of the horror, the sheer panic that must have prevailed when her
passengers eventually realised what was happening. How does a ship that was meant to be
unsinkable, go down? Well, five of her
watertight compartments breached during that collision with the iceberg!
There were 123 mostly third class Irish passengers who boarded
the ship at Cork and a total of 2,228 passengers and crew when she sailed from Cobh. Only
705 of these people survived in what was one of the greatest peacetime maritime
disasters. While there were certainly
not enough lifeboats for all those aboard, many of the lifeboats that were
launched were under capacity. It is distressing
to learn there were 400 places on the lifeboats that remained empty. Those who were lucky enough to be in a boat
were terrified that those in the water might cause them to capsize while
scrambling to get aboard so they quietly moved away from the Titanic despite
the pleas and shouts for help from the desperate passengers in the water
begging to be saved. I still remember
that scene from the movie and it is all the more poignant when I discover the
personal stories and the fate of so many…
I listen to the story of a lady on one of the lifeboats as
it is retold in one of the audio-visual displays. She had just watched the Titanic go down with
her husband still on it and so was obviously grieving. Some time later, a survivor in the water
begged to come aboard their boat. No one
on her boat was prepared to let him on but she persuaded them to do so. In the dark of the night, they could not see
his face but when dawn broke she recognised the man she had saved to be her
husband who she had feared dead. It is a
spine tingling story and there were hundreds such as this…many with unhappy
endings.
We hear of 3 sailors who missed the boat because they were
still in the pub having one Guinness too many.
We hear about the Irish sailor who boarded in England as a stoker but jumped
ship at Cobh. He later claimed he had a
feeling that something would go wrong with this voyage but most believe he was
just homesick. We read the message in a
bottle that 19 year-old Jeremiah who had boarded at Cork threw in the water as
the ship went down. Both he and his
cousin Nora perished on their way to a better life in America. Jeremiah wrote his goodbye message in the bottle
filled with Holy Water that his mother had given him just before he boarded. Then there was the story of Margaret Rice who
perished with her 5 young children on her way back to America. She was in steerage and many people in third
class did not survive the sinking, partly because they were prevented from
getting to the lifeboats till those in first and second class had left. Your station in society had governed every
facet of life in those days, which is why a huge proportion of the women who
died in this tragedy were those in third class. I am intrigued by the story of Milvina Dean
who had been the youngest passenger at just 2-month old. Her family had meant to board another vessel
but fate decided otherwise. She lost her
dad in the sinking and didn’t learn she was a passenger on the Titanic till she
was 8 years old. She was the longest
surviving passenger on board and lived to be 96! I love reading the letters that had been mailed
from Cobh to far ever places, that once again bring alive the experiences and
dreams of those aboard.
A visit to the Heritage Centre brought alive the stories of
the early Irish immigrants escaping the famine and the hardships of life and
was in stark comparison to life aboard the Titanic. The Titanic was a luxury ship and even those
who were travelling third class were doing so in relative luxury when compared
to the ‘coffin ships’ that had preceded them.
Many of the earlier emigrants travelled in incredibly poor conditions,
forced to bring aboard their own meagre food supplies (of which they didn’t
have much to begin with) while already suffering from disease and starvation. The conditions were appalling and more than
30% died at sea and were thrown overboard in must have been a horrendous
experience. We listen to the sound of wind
howling and waves lashing against the boats and get a sense of how terrifying
that voyage must have been. It was
Hobson’s choice for many but if they made it, it was certainly a chance to give
themselves and their families a shot at life.
I think I would have taken my chances…
The stories are harsh and it is inevitable that I am
reminded of the migrants who still come in boats to Australia today. Some
of them are economic refuges but others are escaping the ravages of war. All of them have dreams of a better life and the courage to seek it and
yet we lock them up in detention centres, treating them like criminals for not
following procedures.
I realise how different my own migrant story is and am
hugely thankful. Mary Bourke did not
survive the collision. Being a female in
steerage meant she had a far smaller chance of getting on a lifeboat than her
counterparts in first and second-class. The
statistics speak for themselves, despite the ‘women and children’ first
policy. Only 4 of the 123 females in
first class perished and 3 of these were by choice. 15 of the 93 in second class and 81 of the 179
in third class were lost at sea. Mary
Bourke was one of them.
“Be careful to leave
your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are
better than the wealth of the ignorant”.
Epictetus
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