Jeanie Johnston Makes Her Way Up The East Coast
n 1848 it would cost you $5.50 to cross the Atlantic from Ireland on the sailing ship Jeanie Johnston. That fare represented half a year’s wages for an Irish laborer hoping to start a new life in America. Today, for $7.00 you can buy a ticket to visit the Jeanie Johnston replica, a floating museum, while it tours the east coast of North America. Below deck you can try to imagine what that two-month voyage in steerage was like for the 200 or more passengers. Entire families—or strangers—squeezed into bunks together or took turns sleeping. There were few comforts and no toilets. But sometimes there was a fiddler to brighten the darkness.
In making the journey to North America, the crew of the $15 million Jeanie Johnston replica has recreated the trip that more than two million Irish emigrants braved during the Great Famine that swept through Ireland in the mid-19th century. More than 2,500 of them came to the United States and Canada on the Jeanie Johnston between 1848 and 1855. And thanks to a caring captain and the ship’s doctor, there was never a loss of life onboard despite sickness and childbirth.
The original Jeanie Johnston was built in Quebec in 1847 and made her first voyage from Blennerville, near Tralee in 1848. After carrying the Irish to America, the ship returned to cargo service and in 1858 sunk after the crew was rescued. The replica was built at Blennerville by an international team of young people from Ireland (north and south), the United States, and Canada. They were supervised by shipwrights through FAS, the Irish training and employment agency.
The 2003 crossing took two months, about the same amount of time it took in the mid-19th century, when a transatlantic crossing was highly unpredictable and dangerous for the weary and malnourished Irish. Then, the crew had to steer with aid of a magnetic compass and two men were needed to hold the wheel in bad weather. A century and a half later, the weather can still be bad, but the new ship is safer with a steel hull and a modern navigation system.
“We left Ireland and sailed right into a 50-knot gale,” said First Mate Rob Matthews, a Brit and professional mariner for 29 years. “Then three days later we were in another one.” Most of the sail trainees were sick, according to Captain Tom McCarthy, who was in the Irish merchant navy, and who, like the original Jeanie Johnston captain, James Attridge, hails from Cork. Matthews said, “Some of these people have never been to sea in their life.” Laughing, he added, “And some may never go again.”
In addition to 15 professional crew, the 40 people on board included volunteer crew, and trainees. Half the trainees were disadvantaged Irish young people from 19 to 29, supported by the International Fund for Ireland (IFI).
“They were both Catholic and Protestant and they all got on just fine,” said Matthews, who believes in the importance of sail training. “You get some scruffy street kid from Belfast who never had a lesson in anything. For the first time he realizes there’s a reason for things. You have to pull that rope at a certain time because it needs to be done.”
The other trainees were older and paid as much as $3,500 to make the crossing. (The April-May Irish America has the story of 81-year-old crew member Tom Kindre.) The professional crew also included four women. Ironically, the Jeanie Johnston carried more young single women to America than any other emigrant ship. Listed on the passenger manifest as “spinster,” many between the ages of 16 and 30 found work as domestics in America.
It’s a Voyage into the Unknown
“Up aloft, that’s our engines,” said Captain McCarthy, who has been a professional mariner since he was 17. Safety is the captain’s first concern. “You never know what’s going to happen on a new ship,” he said. “It’s a voyage into the unknown.” McCarthy described the Jeanie Johnston as “a heavy ship. It sails like a tank.” He said he doesn’t send kids up in the rigging in a bad storm. He had no real accidents except for a couple of broken ribs perhaps.
Now 50, the personable McCarthy considers this work a young man’s game. “You have to be young and fearless.” Nevertheless, he keeps his hand in the game and was happy to be invited to head up the Jeanie Johnston crossing and American tour. “It was a great honor,” he said. He’s been master of six of these tall ships. When he’s not at sea, McCarthy works with his wife Breda in her furniture business.
In working her way up the east coast from Florida to Newfoundland, the Jeanie Johnston’s largest public turnout as of mid-July was in Port Jefferson on Long Island where 3,400 people came aboard in a single day. During her five-hour sail there from New York City she was accompanied through Long Island Sound by many private boats,
some with bagpipers blowing a tune into the night air. Previously, Bristol, a small Pennsylvania town on the Delaware
River had the biggest turnout.
“We tied up at the dock which was at the end of the main street,” said Captain McCarthy. “During the four days, 9,000 visitors turned out.” The ship and crew were greeted by brass bands, a church mass, and picnics with town residents.
Pittsburgh Couple Finds Ancestors Are in the Same Boat
On their first date ten years ago in a French restaurant in Pittsburgh, John Kudlik and Susan Showalter, both part Irish, discovered they had something in common. John, a historian, is the great-great-grandson of Daniel Dowd, a farmer who came to America on the Jeanie Johnston in 1849. When he told Susan his family was from a town in Country Kerry called Ballymacelligot, she said, “You’re not going to believe this, but it is the ancestral home of the Babbingtons,” her mother’s family.
Kudlik is a professor of Medieval European history at the Community College of Alleghany and an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Showalter was a professor of child psychology and now develops programs for at-risk teens.
Showalter described her husband as a man who “lives and breathes history.” In his early teens, Kudlik used to talk with his great-grandmother’s brother, a man who lived into his eighties. “We had a big photo album of tintypes and he’d identify each person and tell stories about them.”
Kudlik learned that Daniel Dowd was born sometime around 1810 to 1815 near Castlemaine, County Kerry. His first wife, Julia Cahill, bore him two sons, John, from whom Kudlik is descended, and Patrick. After Julia died, Daniel married Margaret (Peg), who bore five or six children. Both were 29 when they left Tralee on the Jeanie Johnston with six-month-old Mary. The older sons would follow them later.
Dowd operated a thriving dairy in Washington, D.C. and had a 150-acre farm in Maryland. (Both buildings are still standing.) He became an American citizen in 1856 and according to oral family history, supplied milk to the Union Army during the Civil War. Dowd died of tuberculosis in 1869 and despite being unable to read or write, left a detailed will which survives in the Washington, D.C. archives. This helped Kudlik trace the family.
John Dowd worked for the Pennsylvania railroad in Pittsburgh and died in 1912. His half -brother Morris (Margaret’s son) enlisted in the army in 1876, fought in the Indian Wars under General Miles Nelson, and won two silver medals. Kudlik’s mother told him that Morris never mentioned his army life and he died a poor man during the Great Depression. Kudlik speculates that perhaps he sold the medals for money.
After Kudlik and Showalter were married, she was researching County Kerry on the Internet one day and she yelled down the stairs to him about the replica of the Jeanie Johnston, under construction in Blennerville, near Tralee. They decided to go and see it in 1999. While chatting with the ship’s carpenters and other workers, Kudlik mentioned that he was descended from someone who came over on the original boat. According to Showalter, they were whisked off to Tralee to meet historian Helen O’Carroll, who was thrilled to meet someone with historic information.
At this point, Showalter did not know her own connection to the Jeanie Johnston, but when she mentioned the Babbingtons, the historian “spun around in her chair and pulled out a file.” O’Carroll showed them a log book found under the floor boards of a pub in Tralee. It listed five Babbingtons (who lived on Castleisland) among the crew members on a crossing in April, 1854.
For John Kudlik’s 60th birthday this year, his family gave him a three-day sail as a trainee on the Jeanie Johnston from Baltimore to Philadelphia. As part of the crew, which rotated jobs, Kudlik was doing a little bit of everything.
“I was a bit shy of climbing into the rigging,” he said, “but I enjoyed all the other work.” Late one night they hit a big squall in Delaware Bay as they neared Philadelphia and the wind pushed the boat hard. Then they were hit by sheets of rain. “The crew was up the rigging in a flash to bring the sails in before they were torn to shreds.” To Kudlik’s romantic sense this was like being part of Moby Dick or Billy Budd. “It was exhilarating,” he said, but admitted he was apprehensive.
Showalter and the other family members, including her mother, Margaret Babbington, toured the tiny ship in Baltimore. Afterwards, Babbington said, “I think I would have stayed in Ireland and starved to death.”
- By Marian Betancourt
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