Liam Nolan recounts an astounding act of bravery in a County Clare fishing village in 1907, when local fishermen put their own lives on the line to save the lives of shipwrecked French sailors.

 

Astounding acts of bravery by the impoverished fishermen of Quilty in County Clare took place in the coastal village in 1907. Their bravery projected the small community into world headlines, and prompted at least two individuals to memorialise in verse the place and its people.
This is part of Joseph Meade’s poem Quilty’s Heroes:
I sing of Quilty’s sons so brave
Poor toilers of the deep
Who, from the rage of seething sea,
The Leon’s crew did sweep.
The terms “seething sea” and “crew” are key words, as is “Leon”.They are clues to what this story is all about, particularly taking into account the fact that the Leon was a ship, a sailing ship.
An unidentified J.McD wrote the second poem I referred to. This is a sample from it:
See that stately clipper shattered
On the iron reefs of Clare,
O’er her rolls the Wrath of Neptune,
Hear the cries of wild despair.
And Louis Boutin, the French first mate of the French sailing ship Leon XIII, said, “I have been all over the world but never, never in my life, have I seen any action more heroic than the conduct of the Clare fishermen.”

Quilty is in the parish of Kilmurry Ibricane. In 1907 it was a village that had no church, but needed one and wanted one. The nearest church was three miles away. The problem was poverty. There were no funds available to build a church in Quilty, and the villagers were so poor they couldn’t afford the money.

The families of the community had “little bits of land”, and the men fished from currachs, wrestling from the sea whatever they were fortunate enough to catch — ling, mackerel, haddock, cod — to supplement the meagre earnings from harvested and dried seaweed, and cured fish.

About forty currachs fished out of Quilty that year. Currachs were native craft — small, light, open boats built of wickerwork over which tarred canvas was tightly stretched. The frail craft were propelled by rudimentary oars or paddles. Currachs were of most safe use in light breezes and calm seas.

One description of Quilty said it was “set in picturesque surroundings” with the Aran Islands on one side, Connemara behind, and the Cliffs of Moher on another side. “The Kerry mountains are visible in the distance.”
At the end of September and beginning of October 1907, a sea storm of unprecedented ferocity thundered in from the Atlantic onto Ireland’s west coast. It was the most violent storm in living memory, and it effectively slaughtered (however temporarily) the picturesqueness of Quilty Bay and Ireland’s western seaboard.

The five-year-old steel-hulled 3,000-ton fully rigged sailing ship Leon XIII out of Portland, Oregon, and headed for the Shannon Estuary, ran full tilt into the teeth of that storm. She was carrying a cargo of wheat destined for Bennatyne Mills in Limerick.

The ship had left Portland early in April, sailed 7,700 miles down the Pacific, and safely rounded turbulent Cape Horn. She then sailed north diagonally across the Atlantic for Ireland, another 8,300 miles.

The Leon had reached an area wherefrom to enter the Shannon Estuary, when the storm, hurricane winds and colossal crashing waves, burst on her, driving her north, off course, and into a sea area off Loop Head.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own