Ninety-two died in ten minutes off West Cork, and Ireland finally listened

At dinner that evening, the passengers congratulated the officers on a safe crossing in difficult weather. Within a few hours, the ship was in pieces on the rocks of Calf Island, and only 18 of the 110 people aboard were still alive.

The Stephen Whitney had left New York for Liverpool on Monday, October 18, 1847, with a stop scheduled in to Cork Harbour. She was a packet ship in Robert Kermit’s Red Star Line, named after the wealthy New York merchant who had invested in her.

The 1,034-ton vessel carried 76 passengers and a crew of 34. Her cargo included 1,000 bales of cotton, 10,000 bushels of corn, 600 boxes of cheese, 1,000 barrels of flour, and twenty boxes of clocks.

Many aboard were Irish. The Irish Examiner, citing the Cork Constitution, reported that large numbers had emigrated during the famine winter of 1846 and 1847 and were sailing home again, their hopes of settling in America unfulfilled.

For 23 days, nothing went wrong.

A light in the wrong place

On Wednesday, November 10, as the ship rounded Mizen Head, the weather turned hazy, and the wind began to strengthen. The haze thickened into fog. The crew reduced sail and stopped to take depth soundings.

The main light guiding ships along that stretch of coastline sat on Cape Clear (est. 1818). Mariners had complained for years that its position high on a clifftop meant it was regularly swallowed by mist and fog.

Cape Clear, County Cork.

Captain Charles W. Popham, a man in his 50s who was originally from Cork, could not pick it out at all.

He and his officers appear to have mistaken a light at Crookhaven for the Old Head of Kinsale. In reality, the ship was off Brow Head. Believing he was approaching Cork Harbour, Popham adjusted course and steered back into danger.

Ten minutes

Just before 10pm, the wind reached gale force, and a shout went up from the lookout. “Breakers ahead”, as the Echo recounted in its Maritime Cork series, was the most frightening cry a sailor could hear. echolive

The ship’s stern struck the western tip of Calf Island in Roaringwater Bay. Recoiling, she smashed broadside against the rocks, struck a third time, and began to break apart.

In less than ten minutes, 92 people were dead. Some were thrown overboard. Others saw bales of cotton washing out of the ruptured hold, mistook them for rocks in the darkness, climbed onto them, and drowned.

Popham was killed when he was dashed against the cliffs while trying to swim ashore. Among the other victims was a local man, Joseph Cleburn of Bandon.

A small group of survivors, including William Smith, a sailor from Baltimore, Maryland, with 17 years at sea, were washed onto the rock by a heavy swell. They crawled upward in the dark until they felt grass underfoot and found a cottage.

The family inside had no turf or wood. They burned their own straw through the night to keep the survivors warm and used what food they had to feed them.

Another survivor, a motherless boy named Patrick Patterson from Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, was so consumed with guilt at failing to save his drowning father that he had to be restrained from throwing himself off the cliffs.

The next morning, a revenue boat searching the water between Crookhaven, Schull, and Baltimore passed through what witnesses described as a sea of wood; the ship ground into fragments by the tide.

Bodies came ashore over the following days. A child at Roaringwater Bay. A richly dressed woman wearing three gold rings. A sailor with one shoe, thrown up on the rocks at Calf Island.

Most of the dead were never named. The ship kept records only of passengers who occupied cabins, not of those traveling in steerage.

The rock that answered

Fastnet, off County Cork.

One crew member blamed the catastrophe squarely on the state of the lights along the southern coastline. “The whole of the south-west coast requires to be properly lighted”, he said, in an account published by the Irish Examiner.

That same year, responsibility for Ireland’s lighthouses, lightships, buoys, and beacons passed to the Commissioners of Irish Lights. A review of navigation lights along the Cork coast followed, and the Cape Clear light was condemned in favor of a tower built out on the sea itself.

Work on Fastnet Rock began in 1853, and the light first shone on January 1, 1854. Designed by George Halpin, it stood roughly 91 feet tall, about 4.5 miles southwest of Cape Clear, and cost £17,390.

Irish emigrants sailing for America gave it the name it still carries. The Fastnet was the last piece of Ireland they would ever see, which is why it became known as the Teardrop of Ireland.

It was built because 92 people, many of them Irish and almost all of them nameless in the records, died in the dark a few miles away.