On-line Journal of Research on Irish Maritime History

At a time when the death penalty was a hot topic, Dennis Collins justifiably protested, to attract the King’s attention, he threw a pebble. That was, legally speaking, high treason, requiring the death penalty. Read the details and consequences here

The Plassy is the wreck shown in the opening sequence of Fr Ted. Behind it is a real story of a heroic rescue.

The Irish Poplar was the first ship acquired by Irish Shipping Ltd. She imported white wheat flour.

How Ireland’s Mercantile Marine fared during WWII by Frank Forde, author of ‘The Long Watch’, the standard work on this subject

The ferocity of the First World War evokes names like the Somme, Verdun, Paschendale and Mons and maybe Jutland or Coronel. It may therefore be a surprise to realise that the First World War equivalent of the battle of the Atlantic was fought vigorously of the Coast of West Cork. That such a significant front is all but forgotten is no surprise because the Irish rarely turned their eyes seaward except to judge the weather for agriculture.

Early in 1999, Chief Petty Officer Owen O’Keeffe of the Irish Naval Service was visiting Old Church Cemetery near Cobh, County Cork. The purpose of his visit was to do some research on U S Navy graves dating back to the First World War. In the course of his search for the American graves, Owen O’Keeffe came across five particular graves which had like headstones. The graves were very neglected and overgrown and the headstones which were in the form of crosses were moss covered.

The repeated claims that America declared against Germany during WW1 because her citizens and ships had been attacked by German U-boats is not accurate. Though the U-boats were restrained as a result of American diplomatic protests, America did not enter the war at that time and when they did, it was for different reasons. This has not been the first nor the last time that war was pursued for reasons that were not stated. This type of media management has of course reached heights of a totally new sophistication today.

Firstly I’d like to look at Howth Head LOP in the general context of the Coast Watching Service and talk about what the service was and how the Howth post operated within that structure. Then I’d like to focus on the post in day-to-day operation during a particular period of the Second World War, a period usually ignored by historians of the Battle of the Atlantic.

This paper is an early version of the introduction to the Guarding Neutral Ireland:
the coastwatching service and military intelligence 1939-45 (Four Courts Press, 2008)

Eddie Bourke Dainty The early years of the Irish Free State from January 1922 were a time of turmoil after the war of Independence ceased with the Truce in July 1921. The British army commenced their withdrawal and the Free…

More than seven decades after their dangerous enterprise came to an end Dun Laoghaire families with close links to the sea gathered in late September to honour the hobblers.

“The who? ” asked one local teenager when told by a friend that he intended to be present at the dedication in Dun Laoghaire harbour of a compelling monument to the men who years ago guided ships to harbour before the arrival of the Dublin Port pilots.

February 1861 will be remembered not only for the loss of a great many ships around Dublin Bay but also for the death of a heroic man, who, with some of his companions, attempted to save the lives of some members of shipwrecked crews in Kingstown. This was Captain John McNeil Boyd of the guard-ship H. M. S. AJAX.

One thousand men of the Irish Legion landed on Venezuela’s Margarita Island in August 1819, after a 4,500-mile sea voyage from Dublin. These soldiers of fortune, many of them recently demobilized veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, now sought fame and adventure in the armies of South America’s Liberator, Simon Bolivar. In the years 1819 and 1820, more than 2,100 Irish soldiers reached Venezuela as members of organized Irish regiments.

A great inventor and businessman. Actually born in Scotland, he was accused of being Irish, which he never denied. When he was 15 years old he left Scotland for Dublin to start his apprenticeship. Despite prejudice he was very successful

Irish Seamen John Delap Apparently born in Kerry most of what we know about Delap comes from Royal Navy and Russian navy records. In September 1714, Delap came to the notice of Peter the Great when he was aboard Peter…

Robert Gibbings, An Irish Artist Underwater By Cormac F. LowthFirst published in SUBSEA, the quarterly journal of the Irish Underwater Council, Autumn 2007. Nowadays we tend to take the imagery produced underwater, mostly by digital photography, very much for granted.…

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We are all used to hearing weather forecasts on radio or television predicting ‘Wind Force So-and- So’. How many realise that the inventor of the Wind-Scale was born and brought up in Ireland, and did here some of the scientific experiments which place him among the greatest contributors anywhere at any time to the development of the marine sciences?

Paddy O’Sullivan traces the history of the Italian salvage company, Sorima, and describes its successful Ludgate operation off the Galley Head in 1934-35   On 19 May 1922, the ageing P&O liner, Egypt, departed from Tilbury, bound for Marseille and…

Irish ships were neutral during the war. The Kerlogue story is interesting as she was attacked by both sides and she rescued both sides

These troop ships were lost on their way to the Napoleonic Wars. Over 400 bodies washed up on an urban shore. Allegations that they were trapped below while the crew escaped. This sad incident was an impetus to the construction of Dún Laoghaire Harbour

2011 is the fiftieth anniversary of the successful raising of the almost intact early seventeenth- century Swedish warship Vasa from the mud at the bottom of Stockholm Harbour. It represents one of the greatest maritime archaeological recoveries ever carried out. After the salvage of the ship in 1961, it was conserved and restored and can be seen in a specially built museum where it has attracted millions of visitors over the years.

The torpedoing of the Blue Star Line’s 15,000-ton luxury liner Arandora Star off Bloody Foreland, Donegal on 2 July 1940 is one of the hidden histories of Second World War Ireland. Though the sinking was reported in the local press in Mayo and Donegal, where it is still remembered, it never made it into the national consciousness due to wartime censorship.

The history of slavery is probably as old as that of mankind itself. Hundreds of thousands of slaves built such classical civilisations as Greece, Egypt and Rome. Viking Dublin was a major slave trading port in its heyday. However, for the purposes of this story I will deal only with the transatlantic slave trade whereby from twelve to twenty million African slaves were transported to the Americas over a span of four hundred years.

Mexican Silver Dollars at Galley Head, recovered from the cargo of the Crescent City

An account of the events of the night of 21st November 1991 Austin Gill, A.B., M.V. Kilkenny. The events of that night are still very vivid in my mind after more than 20 years although I often forget things that…

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The salvage of the valuable cargo of the Moyalla is the tale of triumph of a skilled first time salvor over the might of a large professional salvage company. It is a remarkable story of early scuba diving in Ireland and typical of salvage undertaken in the 1950s.

The Mystery of the Titanic

She was the largest ship in the world at the time
She was proclaimed unsinkable
She collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage.

History of the SS Lochgarry
One of Ireland’s most Popular Recreational Diving Wrecks

“The two barren islets are best remembered as the scene of the several shipwrecks. Here in 1819 the Demerary carrying gold bullion was wrecked and sank. One of her passengers, a Scotsman named Hugh Monro Robertson and sixteen members of the crew were washed ashore at Cullenstown and buried in the ancient graveyard in the Cill Park near Cullenstown Castle. Monroe’s is the only tombstone there now as one of the pillars from the memorial over the sailors’ grave was used as a weight on a harrow by a local farmer. To this day it is said that traces of gold dust from the Demerary’s strong room are found on the sand of the Keeraghs”

It is often said that there is too much ‘rubbish’ information on the web. To be sure, there is rubbish but there’s rubbish everywhere. There is certainly not so much that the internet should not be used for research. This would of course be foolish. Like all libraries of information, one must discriminate and discard and hone, until you arrive at what you believe to be the nearest to accurate you can reasonably achieve.

In attempting to give an account of the East India Company at Dundaniel and especially their iron works, it has been necessary, in the absence of information, to study other Irish and English iron smelters for the same period and then try to reconstruct what must have taken place at Dundaniel.

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This article offers no conclusions or answers, and is only designed to record some unusual archaeological features within a beautiful bay, which seem to have been forgotten and their use gone unrecorded. One wonders, just how old they are? Suggestions please.

While there were few diving inventors or innovators in Ireland, it is remarkable that many of the early diving pioneers worked around the Irish coast. Local entrepreneurs and salvors were quick to exploit the invention of the helmet in the early 19th century and rapidly took on salvage work on their own account.

Notes on Shipbuilding on the Liffey

During the First world war a shortage of steel developed as replacements were being built for the huge tonnage sunk by submarines. Steel was prioritised for construction of warships. Late in the war the USA envisaged a fleet of concrete ships but few were completed before the war ended.

The Morven was bound from Portland, Oregon to Liverpool with a cargo of about three thousand tons of grain for the Messrs Bannatyne. The place where the wreck occurred is a little promontory locally known as “Horse Island”.

The Plassy is the wreck shown in the opening sequence of Fr Ted. Behind it is a real story of a heroic rescue.

The Country had been in the grip of freezing conditions for the entire month of February 1947 with snowstorms, and accompanying snowdrifts, which blanketed the countryside and made all movement extremely difficult. Power failures were frequent and added to the general misery. It was against this background that the M.V.BOLIVAR was making her way across the Irish Sea on the morning of Tuesday, March 4th, bound for Dublin Port with a badly needed cargo of grain and other essential items. Like many another fine ship before her, although Dublin Bay was in sight, the BOLIVAR would never reach that port and would leave her bones in the sands of that treacherous graveyard of ships that spans the entrance to Dublin Bay waiting to ensnare the unwary, the Kish Bank.