In 1868 she published her debut romance, The Knave of Clubs. In 1877 she produced a book of poems, Spring Leaves, with one poem inspired by the suicide of her sister, who had been seduced and promptly jilted. Unfairly Won, which appeared in 1882, was a melodramatic romp with a spirited heroine written in what was described as “a masculine tone”. The 1884 hit, A Beggar on Horseback, was an amusing study of provincial society habits that sold 23,000 copies. The heroine, Bet, dies after her Fenian lover is killed by one of his own men.
Anyone for Tennis?
Thomas Vere St Leger Goold (1853–1909) won the first Irish Lawn Tennis Open Championship in 1878, beating C.D. Barry 8-6, 8-6 for the £20 prize. The same year, he got as far as the Wimbledon final but lost in straight sets – 6-4, 6-2, 6-2 – to Reverend John Thorneycroft Hartley, who had to race home to Yorkshire in between the semi-final and final to deliver his church sermon to his waiting congregation.
In August 1907, Goold and his French wife murdered a Danish woman, Emma Levin, in Monte Carlo. It seems she called at a bad time while they were having a squabble. They cut her up and put her in a suitcase. Then they put the case on the express train to Marseilles. Goold and his wife were convicted. He died a year later in Devil’s Island prison colony. He is the only Wimbledon finalist ever to be convicted of murder.
Sedentary Sports for All
If you couldn’t run, jump, throw things or people, or if you could barely move, you could have become a chess95 master. Jack Vard (1926–1998) could have been a contender in chess; instead he chose wrestling. In the 1937 Irish Championships of the Dublin Chess Club, ten-year-old Vard achieved the distinction, still unsurpassed, of being the only Irish person to draw two consecutive matches with two Russian masters: Alexander Alekhine, who was ranked in the world top ten, and the relatively unknown Kilkonoski. That was as near as we ever came to world domination in chess.
James Parke (1881–1946) might also have done something for Irish chess. He played for the Clones team in Co. Monaghan when he was nine, but then quit to concentrate on rugby. This may have been a rash decision because he won only twenty caps for Ireland. Revealing a tendency to quit, he quit rugby to play tennis. He won the Irish Doubles Championship five times, the men’s singles European Championship just once, and only a silver medal in the 1908 London Olympics, which was a particularly successful Olympics for Britain with so many Irish athletes on their team. He played in the Davis Cup and won just a single Wimbledon mixed doubles title in 1914. In 1913 American Lawn Tennis magazine described him as one of the top five players in the world: not the top player, mind you, but in the first five. But he quit tennis in 1914 for the army when the First World War broke out. And he quit that in 1918 when peace broke out.
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If Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) had been just a little better at sports he may not have become a writer. He was a promising athlete. At school he competed successfully in cricket, rugby, boxing and swimming. He represented Trinners in golf, cricket, chess and motor racing, proving that, even if you like books, you can still get out of the house now and again for exercise. Whatever about this writing business, what a loss to Irish sport – he could have been a famous racing-car driver.
5
The Unsinkable Irish: Explorers and Mariners on the Green Oceans
As an island people, we have an intimate relationship with the sea. The oceans have provided many Irish men and women with their identities as well as their livelihoods. Ireland has produced many admirals and vice-admirals for the British Navy when we weren’t allowed to have our own. In our history of seafaring there are numberless officers, captains, pirates, fishermen and fisherwomen, ship’s “surgeons”, hydrographers, cartographers, botanists, biologists, adventurers, polar explorers, boat builders and ship designers. Unlike many professions, piracy has always been an equal opportunity occupation in Ireland. Buccaneering96 has attracted notable female recruits. These women had to commence their careers by disguising themselves as boys through the simple ruse of cutting off their hair and wearing trousers. This was a small sacrifice to get a foot on the pirate ladder.
Dressing for all Weathers
Grace O’Malley (c.1530–c.1603) pretended to be a boy to get to sea. She was the only legitimate child of Dubhdarra O’Malley, Lord of Murrish, Co. Mayo. While Dubhdarra had a natural son, Domhnall the Pipe O’Malley, he desperately wanted a legitimate son but had to make the most of the handicap of having only a daughter. Ideally he would have wanted to marry her off to an influential man, but Grace had other ideas.
When her father refused to take her on a voyage to Spain when she was a child, she cut off her hair to pass herself off as a boy and went with him. This is how she got her nickname “Grainne Mhaol”, meaning “Grace the Bald”. She loved card games, which also earned her the nickname “Grainne na gCearbhach” or “Grace of the Gamblers”.
O’Malley did like men, a lot. She married Domhnall O’Flaherty in about 1546. They had two sons and a daughter together. Domhnall liked to fight, a lot. While hunting, he was ambushed and killed by the Joyces, a clan who had long been on his comprehensive list of enemies. Having run Domhnall through, they believed that they could then take his castle because only a mere woman, O’Malley, defended it. But she beat off their attack.
Now in charge of the clan, O’Malley moved her headquarters to Clare Island, which she made the centre of her pirate activities. She soon had a new boyfriend – a sailor who had been shipwrecked on the island. He may have thought he was the luckiest castaway in history but that thought wouldn’t have lasted long. One of O’Malley’s many other enemy clans, the MacMahons, killed him just to upset her. She got revenge by killing them in turn in an ambush on Cahir Island. She seized the MacMahon castle of Doona, earning a new nickname, “Dark Lady of Doona”. In fairness, this alias showed a greater poetic flair on the part of the busy local nicknaming committee than exemplified by the previous “Grace the Bald”.
She then married Richard Burke in around 1566. They had a son, “Tibbot of the Ships”. O’Malley sailed with Burke to secure her reputation of being the “most feared pirate on the west coast”. I have no idea who the most feared pirate on the east coast might have been. I don’t even know how they measured fear indicators back then. Did someone literally risk life and limb going from castle to castle with a clipboard? But she definitely wore the trousers, if not the hair, in that relationship.
The authorities unsuccessfully laid siege to her castle in 1574. The Lord Deputy, Sir Henry Sidney, with his son Sir Philip Sidney, was given a tour of Galway Bay on her pirate ships. She even charged them for the tour, kicking off the tourist industry in the West of Ireland. To spread a little fear on the east coast, she sailed to Howth in Dublin, kidnapping and ransoming back the son of the Lord of Howth.
In 1576, one of her many local rivals, Gerald Fitzgerald, captured O’Malley off the coast of Limerick and imprisoned her for eighteen months in his dingy castle dungeon before transferring her to the English in Dublin. She was released when she promised she would reform. Back in the west, she refused to support a Fitzgerald rebellion against the English. The eighteen months in Fitzgerald’s dungeon could have had some impact on her decision. He might have thought of that before locking her up, but this was a time when we know for certain that people changed their alliances more often than their underwear.
O’Malley worked her way back into the confidence of the English to the extent that, by October 1582, she and her husband, Richard Burke, were the celebrity couple at a gathering of the who-was-who of Connaught. That was the apotheosis of her buccaneering career. Nicholas Malby, the provincial governor, really liked her, a lot. When tax collectors turned up looking for arrears, she got them drunk and gave them 300 cows to keep them happy while she sweet-talked Malby into cancelling her debts, which he did. Malby died in 1584 and his replacement, Sir Richard Bingham, didn’t like her at all. Her husband Richard also died that year, unexpect
edly of natural causes.
O’Malley quickly got into trouble by helping members of the Burke clan, her in-laws, to escape after they had a fight with Bingham’s forces. Bingham sent his brother, Captain John Bingham, to arrest her in June 1584. He did not treat her nicely. He tied her up with a coarse rope and hauled her off to his brother who threatened to hang her. However, when her stepson, Richard Burke, offered his own son as an exchange hostage for her, she was free again. Then, in July, Bingham’s men murdered her son Murtagh.
Rebellion broke out but, once more, she didn’t join. Instead, she fled to Ulster. When peace was restored, she returned to Connaught and offered her son Tibbot of the Ships as a hostage to Bingham as a guarantee of her good conduct. But her belligerent in-laws, the Burkes, rebelled again in 1589 when they killed John Browne, the sheriff of Mayo, leading to rebellion in Mayo and North Galway. O’Malley supported the Burkes and used her ships to ferry in Scottish mercenaries. However, Richard Burke agreed beneficial terms for himself in 1590, leaving the others, including O’Malley, to fight on. She plundered the Aran Islands. There must have been something worth plundering there back then because there isn’t now; she probably took everything that was worth taking. She then came to terms with Bingham.
In 1591 she fought Scottish marauders, probably the mercenaries she had recruited. Mercenaries were always a bit of a double-edged sword, especially if they hadn’t been paid, which they hadn’t been in this instance. But by now Bingham was sinking O’Malley’s ships with his own fleet. Bingham arrested both Tibbot of the Ships and her natural brother “Domhnall the Pipe” and announced that he was going to hang them. O’Malley was so upset that she travelled to London to get an audience with Elizabeth I, who was also bald but not as part of a disguise, and plead for their lives. In September 1593 she was summoned to Greenwich Castle where she persuaded Elizabeth to investigate Bingham’s bad behaviour. Some accounts of this meeting tell us that O’Malley spent most of the time trying to prove that she was actually more posh than Elizabeth. Bingham wisely released his two prisoners. But their feud continued.
As O’Malley got older, her judgement for an advantageous alliance faded. We must also assume that her hair grew back at some stage. In 1594, when the countrywide rebellion against English rule led by the O’Neill clan broke out, she sided against the rebels. They rewarded her choice by invading her lands and devastating them. While pillage was something that every landowner could expect every dozen or so years, she never regained her former glory. She continued to try to be a pirate but with ever-declining success – it was a young woman’s career. When she died, she was buried on her pirate headquarters, Clare Island.
Like Grace O’Malley, Anne Bonny (1698?–1782) disguised herself as a boy to become a pirate and meet like-minded potential partners. As the illegitimate daughter of a Cork attorney, her father dressed her as a boy from her infancy. It was disgraceful enough for him that his child was illegitimate without the extra stigma of her being a girl. He took her to Charles Town (now Charleston), South Carolina where he acquired a substantial plantation, I assume from practising lengthy litigations in Cork.
Bonny established her reputation early, as the daughter of an Irish attorney, by stabbing her English maid to death. She wasn’t imprisoned for the crime because her father was an attorney and the victim was just the maid after all. In 1718, when she married a poor sailor named James Bonny, her father threw her out of the house. The pair moved to the Bahamas. There she met the pirate leader Calico Jack. She immediately threw over her new husband and eloped with Jack. Dressed as a man, she raided the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola.
In 1720, Jack’s gang of buccaneers was captured while raiding in a stolen sloop. They were all hanged except for Bonny and another female pirate, Mary Read, who was also disguised as a man. The women claimed clemency on the grounds of being pregnant. Read died in gaol, while Bonny’s father got her released after she gave birth to Calico Jack’s second son. She returned to Charles Town to lead a quiet life. She married a local man, and they had eight children together. She died peacefully in bed aged eighty-four.
Night Raid
Technology has made the world a smaller place. That is a bad thing. No longer can we just sail away over the horizon and into the unknown because, with Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, we can always tell where we are to within 7.9 to 12 inches; worse, we can always be found. We could easily find our friends, neighbours and relatives if pirates kidnapped them, which wasn’t the case in the seventeenth century.
Just before dawn in June 1631, an elite Turkish troop of pirates from Algiers, led by Captain Murat Rais, stormed the village of Baltimore in West Cork. William Harris and a tiny force of survivors fired muskets and loudly beat a drum, producing the impression in the darkness that a large rescue force was coming down the hill to defend the village. Hearing this racket, the Turkish Janissaries retreated to their boat. However, they had succeeded in capturing over a hundred of the villagers and carrying them off into slavery in North Africa.
Those who had managed to wake up and run to safety in the dark discovered in the dull dawn light that their families, friends, enemies and neighbours alike had vanished without trace. The raid was opportune for a minority in Baltimore who had been fed up with their mothers, spouses or children, and had been contemplating a change. For the majority, it was devastating. They had to live on in the village never knowing what happened to their families. Only two of those who were taken ever saw their homes in Baltimore again.
According to one count, 107 people from the village were stuffed into the pirate ship to be taken into slavery in Algiers. The official report into the raid claimed there were 109 captives, of whom 89 were women and children. William Gunter’s wife and seven sons were taken. John Harris lost his wife, mother and three children. Robert Chimor’s wife and four children vanished. John Hackett, a fisherman from Dungarvan, had been seized by the Turks and forced to pilot them into Baltimore. He was tried and hanged by the authorities within eight months of the raid. He was the approved scapegoat for official neglect and corruption further up the social ladder. Those higher-ups couldn’t be hanged because they were too posh and had access to attorneys. In other words, it was natural justice.
By 18 February 1634, forty of the captives had either died or converted to Islam in a process known as “turning Turk”. Back home in Baltimore, conversion to Islam was regarded as an existential change on a par with being dead. One woman, we don’t know her name, had been ransomed early through the intermediary Mr Job Frogmartino from Livorno in Italy. The average ransom demanded was £200 per person. This was equivalent to about ten years’ pay, which those left behind in Baltimore would have found difficult to raise, most especially those who had lost eight family members, like William Gunter.
However, for those of an optimistic nature who were taken into slavery, it was possible to have a positive outlook on the raid. Algiers had a better climate than Baltimore, Islamic medicine was far more advanced than its European counterpart, and the diet was more varied and healthy. There were also many opportunities for marriage, and professional advancement in light house work and harem duties for co-operative slaves. What was there to complain about compared to wet and windy West Cork? In Algiers there were brothels, military coups, taverns, plagues, festivals and earthquakes to distract a slave from the daily routine. There was nothing like that in Baltimore, except maybe the plagues.
In 1645, fourteen years after the raid, Englishman Edmond Cason97 was sent as an envoy to Algiers to try to redeem the Baltimore slaves. By then, the volume of European slaves taken had reached embarrassing proportions. Cason sailed in the Honour with a load of cash. However, a storm drove his ship into Gibraltar Bay where it caught fire and was captured. Most of the ransom money was taken. But Cason was tenacious. He was the kind of person you would like to be rescuing you. He was the equivalent of the elite special forces today. He transferred to the Diamond wit
h the small amount of money that the raiders missed. However, the Diamond was wrecked at Cadiz, and the rest of the money was lost. Maybe Cason wasn’t the ideal rescuer after all.
The following year, fifteen years after the Baltimore raid, Cason sailed again for Algeria to free the English and Irish slaves, this time on the Charles. I wonder if the crew was nervous. But back then crews must have always been nervous because ships frequently sank.
Cason arrived safely in Algiers, which probably surprised him as much as the to-be-rescued slaves. The Pasha, or local high-ranking official of the Turkish Empire, reasonably claimed that he couldn’t hand over the slaves because they didn’t belong to him; having been sold on, they belonged to their new owners. However, the Pasha had helpful records of the sale prices so the new owners could be fairly compensated.
The haggling, so beloved by the locals, commenced in earnest. It was like trying to buy 500 carpets in one go. Cason eventually agreed to pay only cost price for each slave. But, naturally, the slave owners exaggerated both their cost prices and expenses incurred in running repairs and improvements. Cason agreed a reduction in the levy on the bulk purchase price of the slaves. Understandably, there was also a form of Value Added Tax on the sale of slaves because they were a luxury item. For example, he had to pay export duties of $31 per slave, attractively down from $50. To add to Cason’s complicated calculations, prices were quoted in several currencies.
Poet, Madman, Scoundrel Page 15
