Druid Theatre Company is reviving Dion Boucicault’s classic play, The Shaughraun, for this year’s Arts Festival. Its first Galway performance, in December 1876, followed sold-out runs on Broadway and in London’s West End. Though set in rural Sligo, The Shaughraun became associated with Galway, and specifically with Claddagh.
As the touring company prepared for a week of performances in Black’s Hotel, Eyre Square, in 1876, a real life drama was unfolding in the Atlantic, one with echoes of Boucicault’s plot.
Under the headline ‘Three Shaughrauns’, the New York Herald described a calamity that befell Claddagh skipper, Michael Moran, and his crew. Newspapers in Ireland, Britain and elsewhere ran the story, and the misfortunes of the Claddagh ‘shaughrauns’ were reported extensively.
It should be explained that the Irish word, ‘seachránaí’ means ‘wanderer’. An expression ‘on the shaughraun’ was common in Hiberno-English until recently, even cropping up in James Joyce’s Ulysses. For these Claddaghmen, of course, their wanderings were unintentional.
A ‘perfect hurricane’
The story began on November 13, 1876, when the St Patrick, a Claddagh fishing vessel of the leath-bhád class, put to sea. Onboard were Michael Moran, his elderly father Patrick, his even more elderly uncle John, and a newly-married neighbour, Michael Smyth, recruited at the last minute.
By Michael Moran’s account, St Patrick was enveloped in fog near Slyne Head, before ‘a perfect hurricane’ carried it out to sea. A fourth day storm-struck was spent bailing out the vessel, after which all fell asleep, starving and exhausted. In the morning, John Moran was missing, presumably washed overboard overnight.
That same morning, the hapless survivors were taken aboard a 200 ton cargo vessel, the Bjørkvin, named for its home port of Bergen, bound for Hampton Roads. It put the Claddaghmen ashore at Norfolk, Virginia; Captain Peder Olsen directing his guests to the city’s British vice-consul.
‘Voyagers from beyond the grave’
Back in Claddagh, the men were given up for dead. Galway newspapers reported first on a ‘missing crew’, and subsequently that the men were waked, with effigies created for a funeral rite.
Newspaper accounts of the wake invested it with fresh meaning when it transpired that three of the four were alive. For a Melbourne paper, The Advocate, they were ‘Voyagers from beyond the grave’. In Boucicault’s Shaughraun (spoiler alert ), the character Conn fakes his own death, and secretly attends his own wake and funeral. The fact that the Morans and Smyth had likewise survived after their own funerals underlined their status as ‘shaughrauns’.
Claddagh circumstances
If the composition of the crew – with two elderly men – was a likely contributory factor in the loss of the St Patrick, it reflected wider circumstances in Claddagh. A Fisheries Commissioners’ report of 1868 noted the decline in the number and size of Claddagh vessels since the Famine. The visiting Commissioner noted that the majority of the fishermen seemed ‘old’, and that many of the younger men were away, fishing off Baltimore, Maryland.
Both Michael and Patrick Moran had previously been in the United States. Patrick spent a few years fishing the Hudson estuary at Fort Lee, New Jersey. Michael had travelled further afield, as a crewman on the notorious Confederate vessel, CSS Shenandoah, during the American Civil War.
Return and rumour
From Virginia, the three were taken to New York aboard the steamship, Old Dominion, arriving on January 11, 1877, four weeks after departing Claddagh. They were interviewed by the Boston Pilot, while the British consul arranged for their return home. Landing in Queenstown (Cobh ), they reached Galway by train on Saturday, February 3 – twelve weeks after their departure.
No record was found of their welcome, but rumour spread these ‘shaughrauns’ had become rich.
Michael Moran wrote to contradict a report in the Galway Express that they had received £200, the proceeds of a benefit concert in New York. The only sum they received, he insisted, was £7 from the Mayor of Cork. Having lost his boat, he continued, he was struggling to support his aged father, and his young family.
There was further misfortune. Ten weeks after returning, Michael Moran died of a heart attack. He was 50. His father, already visibly feeble to a Boston journalist, outlived him by a year before expiring in the Galway workhouse. There was bad news also for Michael Smyth, when his 19-year-old bride, Margaret, was diagnosed with TB. She died in January, 1878.
Smyth married again, and would live a fulfilling life into his 80s in Fairhill, working as a docker and ship’s pilot. His grandson, named Michael Smyth after him, was a long-time Labour councillor, who served as Mayor of Galway in 1971/72.
There are many other direct descendants of the crew of the ill-fated St Patrick still living in the city and county, Morans as well as Smyths.
Dr John Cunningham is an Associate Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Galway.
