Star of the Sea
About the Book
The international No. 1 bestseller
‘This is Joseph O’Connor’s best book. It is shocking, hilarious, beautifully written, and very, very clever’ Roddy Doyle
‘A terrific story … A stealthily gripping narrative’ Daily Telegraph
In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by injustice and natural disaster, the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York.
On board are hundreds of fleeing refugees. Among them are a maidservant with a devastating secret, bankrupt Lord Merridith and his family, an aspiring novelist, a maker of revolutionary ballads, all braving the Atlantic in search of a new home. All are connected more deeply than they can possibly know. But a camouflaged killer is stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution.
The twenty-six day journey will see many lives end, others begin afresh. In a spellbinding story of tragedy and healing, the further the ship sails towards the Promised Land, the more her passengers seem moored to a past which will never let them go.
‘A triumph … A spectacular breakthrough’ Sunday Times
‘His most substantial and impressive novel to date’ Irish Times
‘A masterful storyteller … A thrilling tale … O’Connor writes with nothing less than incandescent passion … Unfailingly gripping’ The Times
‘A modern masterpiece … The language is absolutely gorgeous’ Bob Geldof
Joseph O’Connor
STAR OF THE SEA
Farewell to Old Ireland
From Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization
Contents
Title
Cover
About the Book
Copyright
Dedication
Praise
About the Author
Also by Joseph O’Connor
Prologue
The Monster
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Epilogue
Sources & Acknowledgements
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446435786
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 2003
25 27 29 30 28 26 24
Copyright © Joseph O’Connor 2002
Joseph O’Connor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Secker & Warburg
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099469629
FOR ANNE-MARIE
AGAIN AND ALWAYS
[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence.
Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury, 1847
(Knighted, 1848, for overseeing famine relief)
England is truly a great public criminal. England! All England! … She must be punished; that punishment will, as I believe, come upon her by and through Ireland; and so Ireland will be avenged … The Atlantic ocean be never so deep as the hell which shall belch down on the oppressors of my race.
John Mitchel, Irish nationalist, 1856
THE MISSING LINK: A creature manifestly between the gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.
Punch magazine, London, 1862
Providence sent the potato blight but England made the Famine … We are sick of the canting talk of those who tell us that we must not blame the British people for the crimes of their rulers against Ireland. We do blame them.
James Connolly, co-leader of the Easter Rising
against British Rule, 1916
STAR OF THE SEA
Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin. He has written eleven widely acclaimed and best-selling books including the novels Cowboys and Indians, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, Desperadoes, The Salesman and, most recently, Redemption Falls. His work has been published in twenty-seven languages.
ALSO BY JOSEPH O’CONNOR
Fiction
Cowboys and Indians
Desperadoes
The Salesman
Inishowen
Redemption Falls
Short Stories/Novella
True Believers
The Comedian
Non-Fiction
Even the Olives are Bleeding: The Life and
Times of Charles Donnelly
The Secret World of the Irish Male
Sweet Liberty: Travels in Irish America
The Last of the Irish Males
Stage Plays
Red Roses and Petrol
The Weeping of Angels
True Believers (adaptation)
The Temptation of Christ, and the Woman
Taken in Adultery for Mysteries 2000
(version of the Chester Play Cycle)
Screenplays
A Stone of the Heart
The Long Way Home
Ailsa
Participation in Collaborative Works
Yeats is Dead! A Serial Novel by Fifteen Irish Writers
for Amnesty International (editor)
Finba
r’s Hotel (ed. Dermot Bolger)
PROLOGUE
FROM
AN AMERICAN ABROAD:
Notes of London and Ireland in 1847
by G. GRANTLEY DIXON
of the New York Times
A LIMITED,
Commemorative One-Hundredth Edition.
REVISED, UNEXPURGATED
and with Many New Inclusions.
THE MONSTER
A PREFACE; IN WHICH ARE SKETCHED CERTAIN RECOLLECTIONS OF THE STAR OF THE SEA; THE CONDITION OF HER PASSENGERS AND THE EVIL WHICH STALKED AMONG THEM.
All night long he would walk the ship, from bow to stern, from dusk until quarterlight, that sticklike limping man from Connemara with the drooping shoulders and ash-coloured clothes.
The sailors, the watchmen, the lurkers near the wheelhouse would glance from their conversations or their solitary work and see him shifting through the vaporous darkness; cautiously, furtively, always alone, his left foot dragging as though hefting an anchor. A billycock hat was crumpled on his head, a ragged scarf wound around his chin and throat; his tattered military greatcoat so utterly dirty it was impossible to imagine it ever having been clean.
He moved with a deliberation that was almost ceremonial, a curious strain of threadbare stateliness: as a king in a story in disguise among his lessers. His arms were very long, his eyes needle-bright. Frequently he had a look of bewilderment or foreboding, as though his life had come to a point that was beyond explication or was drawing ever closer to such a point now.
His mournful face was disfigured with scars, cross-hatched with the blemishes of some affliction much exacerbated by his bouts of furious scratching. Though slender in build, made like a feather-weight, he seemed to carry an indescribable burden. Neither was it a matter of his deformity alone – a distorted foot in a brick of a wooden clog which was stamped or branded with a capital M – but the air of anguished expectancy he bore; the perpetually frightened watchfulness of the abused child.
He was one of those men who attract great attention by making a great effort to attract none. Often, although they could not explain it, the sailors had a sense of his presence before seeing him. It became their amusement to wager on his whereabouts at a given hour. ‘Ten bells’ meant down by the starboard pigpens. Quarter after eleven found him up at the scuttlebutt where by day the destitute women of steerage prepared what little food they had – but even by the third night out of Liverpool the contest had lost its power to kill the time. He walked the ship as though following a rite. Up. Down. Across. Back. Stem. Port. Stern. Starboard. Materialising with the stars, stealing below with the sunrise, he came to be known among the ship’s nocturnal denizens as ‘the Ghost’.
Never did he engage the sailors in conversation. The night-stragglers, also, he completely eschewed. Not even after midnight would he speak to another, when anyone still above boards would talk to anyone else; when the dark, wet deck of the Star of the Sea saw a fellowship seldom apparent by daylight. Gates were left open at night on the ship; rules relaxed or quite ignored. It was illusory, of course, this witching hour democracy; darkness seeming to obliterate station or creed, or at least level them down to a point where they were not worth acknowledging. An acknowledgement in itself, perhaps, of the axiomatic powerlessness of being at sea.
At night one sensed the ship as absurdly out of its element, a creaking, leaking, incompetent concoction of oak and pitch and nails and faith, bobbing on a wilderness of viciously black water which could explode at the slightest provocation. People spoke quietly on the decks after dark, as though fearful of awakening the ocean to savagery. Or one pictured the Star as a colossal beast of burden, its rib-timbers straining as though they might burst; flailed by an overlord into one last persecution, the hulk half dead already and we passengers its parasites. But the metaphor is not a good one for not all of us were parasites. Those of us who were would not have admitted it.
Below us the depths which could only be imagined, the gorges and canyons of that unfathomed continent: above us the death-black bowl of the sky. Wind pounded down in an outrage of screams from what even the most sceptical mariner was careful to term ‘the heavens’. And the breakers thrashed and battered our shelter; like wind made flesh, incarnate and animate, a derision of the hubris of those who had dared to invade them. Yet there was an all but religious tranquillity among those who walked the decks at night: the angrier the sea, the icier the rain, the more palpable the solidarity among those withstanding them together. An admiral might chat to a frightened cabin boy, a hungry man of steerage to a sleepless Earl. One night a prisoner, a maddened violent Galwayman, was brought from the lock-up to take his doleful exercise. Even he was included in this communion of the somnambulant, quietly conversing and sharing a cup of rum with a Methodist minister from Lyme Regis in England who had never tasted rum before but had often preached its evils. (Together they were observed kneeling on the quarterdeck and quietly singing ‘Abide With Me’.)
New things were possible in this Republic of night-time. But the Ghost showed no interest in possibility, or novelty. He was immune; a crag in the vastness surrounding him. Prometheus in rags, awaiting the avid birds. He stood by the mainmast watching the Atlantic as though expecting it to freeze over or bubble with blood.
Between first bell and two bells most would slip away; many alone but some together, for tolerances flowered under night’s kind cover; nature and loneliness bedfellows in the dark. From three until first light, little happened on deck. It rose and it fell. It climbed. It plunged. Even the animals slept in their cages: pigs and chickens, sheep and geese. The clang of the watch-bell would sometimes puncture the ceaseless and numbing susurration of the sea. A sailor might sing shanties to keep himself awake: he and a comrade might tell stories to each other. From down in the lock-up the madman was intermittently heard, yelping like a wounded dog or threatening to brain the other prisoner with a handspike. (There was, at that time, no other prisoner.) A couple might be glimpsed in the shadowed alleyway formed by the aft wall of the wheelhouse and the base of the funnel. Still he would stand, that man from Connemara, gazing out at the awesome darkness; facing like a figurehead into the sleet, until the webs of the rigging emerged from the murk, so black against the reddening sky of dawn.
Just before sunrise on the third morning, a seaman approached to offer him a pan of coffee. Beadlets of ice had formed on his face, on the back of his coat and the brim of his hat. He did not accept the benevolence nor even acknowledge it. ‘As poor as a pox-doctor’s clerk,’ the Mate remarked, watching him shuffle silently away.
The sailors sometimes wondered if the Ghost’s nightly ritual was a religious observance or exotic self-punishment, such as the Catholics of Ireland were whispered to favour. A mortification, perhaps, for some unspeakable transgression, or ransom for the souls ablaze in Purgatory. They believed strange things, these Aboriginal Irish, and a mariner whose profession took him among them might expect to witness strange behaviour. They talked in a nonchalant, matter-of-fact manner about miracles; saintly apparitions; statues that bled. Hell was as real as the city of Liverpool, Paradise as mappable as Manhattan Island. Their prayers were like spells or voodoo incantations. Maybe the Ghost was a holy man: one of their gurus.
Among his own tribe, too, he evoked confusion. The refugees would hear him opening the hatch, hobbling down the ladder and into the gloom of candles; his hair wild, his clothes sodden, his glazen eyes like those of a half-dead mackerel. They knew it was dawn when they saw him coming, but he seemed to bring below the stinging cold of the night. Darkness clung around him, a cloak of many folds. If there was noise, as there often was even at dawn – a huddle of men colloguing, a woman deliriously chanting the Mysteries – his arrival would cause much of it to die. They watched as he shivered the length of the cabin, as he dragged himself down through the bundles and baskets, flaccid with exhaustion, dripping and coughing, a battered puppet whose strings had been cut. He would peel the drenched coat from his shudde
ring torso, fold it and roll it to the shape of a bolster and slump in his blanket to sleep.
No matter the happening, he would sleep all the day. Invulnerable to the noises of babies or seasickness, to the quarrels and tears and fighting and gaming that made up the clatter of life below decks, to the roars and oaths and wooings and ragings, he would lie on the boards like a corpse. Mice scuttled over him; he never gave a twitch; roaches ran under the collar of his semmit. About him the children would canter or puke, men would scrape fiddles or bellow or argue, women would haggle for a little spare food (for food was this waterborne dominion’s only currency, its disbursement a matter of fevered speculation). From the heart of the din came the groans of the sick, rising like prayers from their paltry bunks; the sick and the healthy sleeping side by side, the tormented moans and fearful invocations mingling with the buzzing of the innumerable flies.
The line for the only two water closets in steerage formed directly past the coffin lid of squalid floor that the Ghost had silently claimed as his berth. One lavatory was cracked, the other clogged and overflowing; the cubicles infested with legions of hissing rats. By seven in the morning the ammoniac stench, constant as the cold and the cries of steerage, would have invaded that floating dungeon with savage force, would be filling it up like an erupting spirit. The stink had an almost corporeal presence; it felt like something you could grasp in gluey fistfuls. Rotten food, rotten flesh, rotten fruit of rotting bowels, you smelt it on your clothes, your hair, your hands; on the glass you drank from and the bread you ate. Tobacco smoke, vomit, stale perspiration, mildewed clothes, filthy blankets and rotgut whiskey.
The portholes intended to ventilate steerage would be thrown open in an attempt to quell the astounding putrescent reek. But if anything, the breeze seemed only to make it worse, blowing it into the hollows and alcoves. Saltwater would be sluiced over the boards twice a week, but even the freshwater stank of diarrhoea and had to be laced with vinegar before it could be faced. The malicious fetor oozed its way around steerage, a steaming, noxious, nauseating vapour that stung the eyes and inflamed the nostrils. But that choking effluvium of death and abandonment was not baneful enough to wake the Ghost.