Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘The passengers are treated as well as my men can hope to treat them. I must work within the constraints laid down by my owners.’

  ‘Your “owners”, Captain? And who might those be?’

  ‘I mean the owners of the ship. The Silver Star company.’

  Dixon nodded grimly, as though having expected the answer. He was the kind of radical, so Merridith assumed, who is secretly relieved that injustices exist; morality being so easily attainable by saying you found them outrageous.

  ‘He has a point, Lockwood,’ the Surgeon said. ‘Those people down in steerage aren’t Africans, after all.’

  ‘Nig-nogs are cleaner,’ the Mail Agent chuckled.

  The Surgeon’s sister emitted a hiccup of tipsy laughter. Her brother gave her an admonishing glance. Quickly she arranged her features into an expression of sorrow.

  ‘Treat a man like a savage and he’ll behave like one,’ Merridith said. His voice had a tremble that frightened him a little. ‘Anyone acquainted with Ireland should know that fact. Or Calcutta or Africa or anywhere else.’

  At the mention of Calcutta some of the company surreptitiously glanced at the Maharajah. But he was busy blowing on a spoonful of soup. A surprising thing to do, perhaps, given that the soup was already chilled.

  Grantley Dixon was staring at Lord Kingscourt now. ‘That’s rich, Merridith, coming from you. I don’t know how a member of your class can sleep at night.’

  ‘I sleep very well, I assure you, old thing. But then I always peruse your latest article immediately before retiring.’

  ‘I am aware that your Lordship has learned how to read. Since you wrote to my editor to complain about my work.’

  Merridith gave a low-lidded, disdainful grin. ‘Sometimes I even snore a little and keep my wife awake in bed.’

  ‘David, for heaven’s sake.’ Lady Kingscourt was blushing. ‘Such talk at the dining table.’

  ‘Quite a sight, the periodic eruption of Mount Dixon the Lesser. As for when your long-awaited novel finally delights us all by appearing, no doubt I shall find it as conducive to tranquillity as the rest of your effusions. I dare say I shall sleep like Endymion, then.’

  Dixon didn’t join in the round of uneasy laughter. ‘You keep your people in abject penury, or near it. Break their backs with work to pay for your position, then put them off the land with no compensation when it suits you.’

  ‘No tenant of mine has been put off the land without compensation.’

  ‘Because there’s hardly anyone left to put off it, since your father evicted half of his tenants. Consigned them to the workhouse or death on the roads.’

  ‘Dixon, please,’ said the Captain quietly.

  ‘How many of them are in Clifden Workhouse tonight, Lord Kingscourt? Spouses kept apart as a condition of entry. Children younger than your own torn from their parents to slave.’ He reached into the pocket of his tuxedo and pulled out a notebook. ‘Did you know they have names? Would you like me to list them? Ever once visited to read a bedtime story to them?’

  Merridith’s face felt as though it were sun-scorched. ‘Do not dare to impugn my father in my presence, sir. Never again. Do you understand me?’

  ‘David, calm down,’ his wife said quietly.

  ‘My father loved Ireland and fought for her freedom against the vicious scourge of Bonapartism. And I have used what you term “my position”, Mr Dixon, to make strenuous argument for reform of the workhouses. Which would not be there at all to offer what help they do were it not for the likes of my father.’

  Dixon gave a barely audible scoff. Merridith’s tone was becoming more strident.

  ‘I have spoken about the matter frequently, in the House of Lords and other places. But I shouldn’t suppose your readers would be interested in that. Rather tittle-tattle and muck-raking and simplistic caricatures.’

  ‘I represent the free press of America, Lord Kingscourt. I write as I find and I always will.’

  ‘Don’t delude yourself, sir. You represent nothing.’

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ the Captain sighed. ‘I implore you. We have a long voyage ahead, so let us leave aside our differences and remain good friends and companions together.’

  Silence settled over the discomfited company. It was as though an uninvited guest had sat down at the table but everyone was too embarrassed to mention the fact. A dribble of unenthusiastic applause sounded through the saloon as the harpist finished a sentimental Celtic melody. Dixon pushed his plate away desultorily and downed a glass of water in three quick gulps.

  ‘Perhaps we shall postpone the political discussion until later in the evening when the ladies have retired,’ the Captain said, forcing a laugh. ‘Now. More wine, anyone?’

  ‘I have done all I can to improve the situation of those in the workhouses,’ Merridith said, trying to keep his tone steady. ‘I have lobbied, for example, to relax the conditions for admission. But this is a very difficult question.’ He allowed himself to meet Dixon’s now unmeasurable gaze. ‘Perhaps you and I can have a talk about it on another occasion.’ He added once more: ‘it’s a difficult question.’

  ‘It certainly is,’ Merridith’s wife said suddenly. ‘Unless strict conditions are imposed they take advantage of the help offered them, David. The conditions should be a great deal stricter, if anything.’

  ‘That is not the case, dear, as I have told you previously.’

  ‘I believe it is,’ she calmly continued.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Merridith. ‘And I have corrected you on this question before.’

  ‘Otherwise we merely encourage that same idleness and dependency which have only led to their present misfortune.’

  Merridith found his anger rising again. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll be given lectures on idleness by your good self, Laura. Damned, I say. Do you hear me now?’

  The Captain put down his cutlery and gazed bleakly at his plate. At the next table the Methodist minister turned to give an owlish stare. Dixon and the Mail Agent sat very still. The Surgeon and his sister bowed their heads. The Maharajah continued quietly eating his soup, a soft whistle through his teeth as he blew on it.

  ‘Permit me to apologise,’ Lady Kingscourt said hoarsely. ‘I am feeling a little unwell this evening. I believe I shall go to take some air.’

  Laura Merridith rose stiffly from the table, dabbing her lips and hands with a napkin. The men half-stood and bowed as she went, all except her husband and Maharajah Ranjitsinji. The Maharajah never bowed.

  He removed his spectacles, breathed carefully on to the lenses and began wiping them scrupulously on the hem of his golden scarf.

  The Captain waved over one of the stewards. ‘Go after the Countess,’ he quickly muttered. ‘Make sure she stays behind the First-Class gates.’

  The man nodded his understanding and left the saloon.

  ‘Natives restless, are they?’ the Mail Agent smirked.

  Josias Lockwood made no reply.

  ‘Tell me something, Captain,’ said the Maharajah with a perplexed frown. Everyone at the table gaped at him now. It was as though they had forgotten he was capable of speech.

  ‘That pretty young lady who is at present playing the harp?’

  The Captain gave an embarrassed look.

  ‘You shall enlighten me, I know, if I am speaking in error.’

  ‘Your Highness?’

  ‘But isn’t she actually … the Second Engineer?’

  Everyone turned or stretched to stare. The harpist’s hands were sweeping across the loom of strings, weaving a climax of ardent arpeggios.

  ‘By the holy powers,’ said the Mail Agent uneasily.

  The Surgeon’s sister made an attempt at laughter. But when nobody joined in, she suddenly stopped.

  ‘It didn’t seem right to have a man,’ the Captain murmured. ‘We do like to keep up appearances on the Star.’

  CHAPTER III

  THE CAUSE

  IN WHICH THE AUTHOR GIVES HIS FRANK ACCOUNT OF CERTAIN CON
TROVERSIAL AND CALAMITOUS EVENTS IN IRELAND; AND DEFENDS HIMSELF AGAINST DENIGRATION BY A CERTAIN LORD.

  THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE,

  WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 10, 1847

  TODAY’S TALKING-POINT

  WHY IS THERE A FAMINE IN IRELAND?

  by Our London Bureau Assistant,

  Mr. G.G. Dixon.

  The present reporter demands to respond to the letter lately printed in this newspaper from a correspondent who signs himself “David Merridith of Galway” but who is also known as Lord Kingscourt of Cashel and Carna, on the subject of the Irish Famine.

  The Apocalypse now raging through the Irish countryside has been detonated by the fearful conspiracy of four Death Riders. Natural disaster, crushing poverty, the utter dependency of the poor on one susceptible crop, and the utter indolence of their Lords and Masters; by the same terrible forces which wreak famine everywhere among the destitute. It is not “an accident” but an inevitable consequence. What but evil could sprout from such pestilent soil?

  Anyone with the Oxford education Lord Kingscourt has received – paid for in full by his family’s tenants – must be presumed to know this fact. As with every deadly Famine, it has been preceded by many another. (Fourteen in the last thirty years in the case of Ireland, and a cataclysmic blight in the middle-18th century.) The spark for this tinderbox was the appearance two years ago of a fungal canker that annihilates the potato, the staple food of the Irish poor. The name of the disease is not known.

  The name of the economic system within which the catastrophe is occurring is very well known indeed. It is called “The Free Market” and is widely reverenced. Like David Merridith of Galway it also has an alias. Many criminals do, and most aristocrats. Its nom de guerre is “Laissez-Faire”; which preaches that the lust for profit may regulate everything: including who should live and who should die.

  This is the Freedom which permits Irish food merchants to quadruple their prices in hunger-struck areas; which allows cargoes of unblighted produce to be carted by Irish ranchers under armed protection to Dublin and London while their countrymen starve in the putrid fields. (There is notably little Famine in the dining rooms of Dublin’s wealthy, neither at the palace of My Lord Archbishop.)

  No other manifestation of humanity may be allowed to intervene in these magnificent workings of Freedom. Not man’s Imagination, which gave us the glories of the Renaissance. Neither his desire for Liberty which gave us America. Not his natural Sympathy to his suffering brother, but the grind of the Profit-Engine, first and last.

  This is not an exaggeration. The contention that the one task required of the unemployed aristocracy might be to prevent those on whom it leeches from starving to death, is considered bizarre by My Lords of England and Ireland. Indeed it is de rigueur to chastise the poor for their poverty while regarding one’s own riches as a matter of Divine entitlement. Those who toil the hardest possess the least wealth; those who do nothing but eat have the most.

  It is a matter of record that a great number of the powerful who are permitting the decimation of the Irish poor are British; and also that many are Irish themselves. Of those who are British much has been written already, but of those who are Irish, not nearly enough. Some have found it convenient to blame “Britain” for such a decimation; though it is not “Britain” which is inflicting it, nor “Ireland” which is suffering it. What is happening is more sophisticated but no less brutal.

  Most of the British establishment abjures responsibility, while millions of those they rule in Ireland are left to the cruellest destruction in a long, cruel history; all the while many of the better-off Irish with whom the victims share nationality (if not much else) quietly look the other way. As Lord Kingscourt contends, in his memorable phrase: “Hunger kills the poor. It does not ask their flag.” Doubtless if the Famine were laying waste to Yorkshire the government’s response would be less dismally ineffective. But if anyone truly believes that the Right Honorable Lord John Russell (the British Prime Minister, the 1st Earl Russell, the Viscount Amberley of Amberley, the Viscount of Ardsalla, the third son of His Grace the 6th Duke of Bedford) would raise the tax on his Lordly “chums” in order to succor the famished of Leeds, he needs to have his butler run him a long cold bath.

  Food has indeed been sent by the Russell government, as Lord Kingscourt’s recent epistle so proudly maintains. But too often it has been woefully insufficient in some way; poorly planned, poorly organized, poorly distributed, inadequate in quality to the point of uselessness; in the wrong places at the wrong times; far too little and far too late. And his many Irish admirers – the very many indeed – must share the culpability with Lord Russell and his government.

  Numerous Irish farmers of the richer class have done absolutely nothing to assist the hungry; indeed they have greatly augmented their wealth by fencing in holdings deserted by the poor. An army of landlords who claim to love Ireland’s people have in fact evicted thousands from their inherited fiefdoms. Lord Kingscourt’s own family is one such gang. He says he is “an Irishman, born and bred in Galway.” One wonders if he says it in his usual home at Chelsea.

  It is maintained that “the people of Britain” are to blame for the Famine because they have supported governments that exert themselves so feebly to assist. This is measurably incorrect. Literally not one of the wealthless class of that kingdom has ever voted for the corrupt regime that is worsening the sufferings of Ireland’s hungry. The evidence is simple. The people have no vote.

  The right to vote in the benighted motherland of democracy (in whose unelected “House of Lords” David Merridith contentedly burbles) is apportioned exclusively on wealth, not on citizenship. Indeed no Briton is actually a citizen, but a subject of Her Imperial Majesty. Nineteen of every twenty Britons have no vote whatsoever. The opinions of “the people” are of precisely no importance in that scepter’d isle of oligarchs which used to over-rule ourselves. How happy that we continue their quaint olde custom of the disenfranchisement of that half of our population which does not possess the capacity of growing a beard.

  Recently Lord Kingscourt has cautioned in this newspaper: “everything about this Irish Famine is more complicated than it appears.” So it is. Unlike the legion of victims His Lordship enjoys the luxury of being alive to debate its complications.

  Granted, the division of rustic Ireland into wealthy and completely destitute is not entirely accurate. There are small farmers and others whose meager resources put a blade’s width between themselves and the glorified Gaol called the workhouse. Many have even enough to purchase a coffin; though most do not, as Lord Kingscourt will see if he rises from his writing-desk and looks out his window. There is a great deal of unofficial sub-division of land among poor tenant families (for no rent, or very little), leading to massive over-cultivation of already exhausted soil and thereby more hardship and hunger. There are also the abject poor, who own nothing at all. Lacking the eight dollars it would cost to emigrate (the price of a supper at Lord Kingscourt’s London club), or any possession they might sell in order to get it, they are dying in their tens and hundreds of thousands while we ask ourselves interestingly complicated questions. Quarter of a million have died this year alone. More than the combined entire populations of Florida, Iowa and Delaware.

  Everything about the Famine is indeed complicated. Everything except the agonies of those who are its victims: the old, the young, the defenseless and the poor. Their labors have supplied a gracious leisure to the gentry of Ireland, who like their siblings in England languish in bed half the day. Their Lordships and Ladyships are so understandably weary. A look though the Illustrated London News for the last several years will reveal how hunts, balls, and other fatiguing diversions of elegant country living have merrily continued in disaster-struck Ireland, while the hungry have the temerity to die on the roadside.

  To where might they turn for assistance now, these people cruelly abandoned by those who had squeezed them dry? To our esteemed colleagues in the British Fo
urth Estate, perhaps. Here is a recent editorial from the London Times (a publication in which Lord Kingscourt holds considerable shares): “We regard the potato blight as a blessing. When the Celts once cease to be potatophagi, they must become carnivorous. With the taste of meats will grow the appetite for them. With this will come steadiness, regularity and perseverance.”

  An enforced scheme of mass emigration had been advocated in a recent number of the journal Punch (an anti-American rag whose editor has been a frequent guest in Lord Kingscourt’s own home). “We are confident, if this scheme was properly carried out, it would be the greatest boon to Ireland since SAINT PATRICK drove out the vermin.”

  The exodus is indeed being undertaken now. Within the next thirty years, more Irish will live among us in America than live in the cruelly inequitable place where they were born to be regarded as an infestation.

  It is not a calculated act of national murder, the distorted teachings of some notwithstanding. This is another matter on which Lord Kingscourt is quite correct. (Profound the consolation to a mother watching her children starve that their starvations have not been calculated.) Neither has the Famine been brought upon the victims by idleness and stupidity (not their own, at any rate), despite the flagrantly hateful claims to that effect often made in the London newspapers now. Mr Punch is far from the only leering puppet to have likened the Irish to beasts and thugs. And such imbecilities are being repeated on all sides. Many an Irish clergyman is already tutoring his flock that an Englishman by definition is a godless degenerate, devoid of civilization, a bloodthirsty Pagan. Others are also girding for battle, a little more secretly if no less dangerously. A member of a revolutionary society in rural Galway (an evicted tenant of Lord Kingscourt himself) recently remarked to the present reporter:

  “I despise the English as I despise Satan. They are filth. They were savages and idolaters when our people were saints. There will be a holy war in this country to put them out. All of them. I do not care tuppence how many centuries they are here, this is not their country; they have it by torture alone. They will be sent scurrying back to the cesspit they came from, the mongrel dogs and their bitches with them. Every one of the pack I slaughter, I will count as a blessing on my name.”