Ship of rumours – An Irishwoman’s Diary on the ‘Indian Empire’ grounding that inspired James Joyce

On a calm,clear night with a full moon over a glimmering sea, a second officer on board a large steamship roared a warning.

“That’s a buoy!”

One of two pilots who had boarded off the Aran islands replied: “That’s impossible . . . it must be a boat!”

Maybe 90 seconds later, the Indian Empire struck the Santa Marguerita rock – the only marked hazard on the shipping channel into Galway. Had the ship's captain Edwin Courteney not cut speed moments before, the vessel could have broken in two with substantial loss of life.

There had been much excitement about the arrival of the 74m (245ft) wooden-hulled ship from England’s Southampton on June 16th, 1858, with a firework display planned for that same week. The “splendid steamship”, as local press called it, had been chartered for a new passenger service to New York that would have boosted Galway’s status as a transatlantic port.

The vessel was refloated on the tide, and the two pilots, Henry Burbridge and Patrick Wallace, were arrested and charged.

A large crowd gathered outside the offices of the Galway Harbour Commissioners, which held an emergency session.

The word was about that there was malice afoot.

Harbour archives

By now, the ship’s grounding had created something of a national stir – a mid-19th century media storm that RTÉ chief news editor Ray Burke has recently researched. Perusing harbour archives at NUI Galway, he discovered no record of the emergency meeting.

"Much indignation was expressed at the conduct of the pilots when the occurrence became known here," read a report in the Galway Mercury. There was a "general impression" that "it was done through design, and that the pilots were bribed". Wallace was "hooted by an excited mob and had to take refuge in the police barracks or he would be roughly handled", it said.

The Galway Vindicator and Connaught Advertiser was similarly forthright, warning that the cause of "this malodorous business shall come out sooner or later and then we shall find that Liverpool gold was brought to bear on the transaction". Only the Tuam Herald took a measured tone, Burke found, with its leader writer stating that it was "not fair to prejudge" without a rigid inquiry and evidence.

A “bundle of letters”, some “postmarked from Liverpool” were found in a police search of the pilots’ accommodation. At the subsequent trial, Capt Courteney explained how the rock had been clearly marked on the admiralty chart. He would have seen the warning buoy himself to port if the “pilot Wallace” had not directed him to divert his night glasses over the starboard bow.

In a sensational twist, pilot Wallace died suddenly while out on bail. The press picked up on claims that he had been strangled or poisoned, and the inquest into his death was adjourned to allow for his stomach contents to be analysed. Although the inquest verdict found death from "natural causes and by the visitation of God", the rumours continued to abound and the damage was done. A repaired Indian Empire continued to ply the transatlantic route, but the British government subsequently turned down a request by a Galway delegation for a new breakwater and pier.

Almost half a century later, the "palmoil" or bribes possibly paid by rival Liverpool interests in the controversy were to surface in James Joyce's Ulysses. The ship's grounding on June 16th was too tempting for a Bloomsday creator to pass up, but the references – by Dalkey schoolmaster Garrett Deasy, and during the visit to a cabmen's shelter by Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus – are "deliberately inaccurate", Ray Burke notes.

Still, Joyce left a question mark. The author would have an inside track on Galway’s ambitious port plans. Michael Healy, maternal uncle of his wife Nora Barnacle, was a customs inspector and receiver of wrecks.

Nora Barnacle

It’s one of many Galway- Joyce connections which Burke has traced for his new book – the primary source being Nora Barnacle, whose life, former lovers, inner thoughts, would provide rich pickings for her partner’s work. Her former boyfriend Willie Mulvagh became Molly Bloom’s first lover, Harry Mulvey. And when Joyce wrote of Cissy Caffrey who “dressed up in her father’s suit and hat” and the “burned cork moustache” to take a smoke on Sandymount’s Tritonville Road, he wouldn’t have gone too far for that bit of inspiration.

As Barnacle’s friend Mary O’Halloran once explained, rambling about in men’s clothes was the only way young mid-19th-century Galway girls could find a bit of freedom at night.

Joyce County: Galway and James Joyce by Ray Burke is due to be published shortly by Currach Press and will be available in all good bookshops, particularly compass point west (currach.ie).