On the Move: Body and Spirit

Dublin to Philadelphia: Perilous Journey
by Ann M. Harrington, BVM

The life-changing decision of the first BVM members to leave Ireland in order to serve Irish immigrants in Philadelphia meant arduous days of travel lay ahead. BVM tradition tells us that it was Eliza Kelly's father who bought the tickets for the women, and that they did not have to travel in steerage.

Like so much of our early history, the sisters' departure from Ireland comes in two versions. In Pulcheria McGuire's Annals, Eliza Kelly's father and Margaret Mann's father accompany the sisters to the Dublin wharf to see them off, while Lambertina Doran's In the Early Days records that the men accompanied the travelers to Liverpool, a more likely scenario.

They boarded a ship with three square-rigged masts, and while waiting to depart, probably enjoyed listening to the music and watching the dancing between decks. They set sail from Liverpool on the Cassander piloted by Captain Stephen Davenport on Thursday, July 18, 1833.

As steam tugs pulled the ship along an inland waterway towards the sea, the music stopped and passengers looked back at family, well wishers and spectators. The roll call of passengers and search for stowaways occurred at this time, and it depended on shipping line policy whether or not the names of passengers in steerage made the passenger list. Ill passengers and stowaways, if noted, were sent back on the tugs.

BVM history indicates that the crossing was a rough one. While there are no records of the trip provided by the founding members, somewhat contemporary accounts give keen insights into the nature of crossing the Atlantic. In 1811, a young woman who left from Liverpool for New York writes: “I never imagined…what a voyage across the Atlantic was!...This day six weeks we left Liverpool, and I may say I never had one day's good health since that time.”

She speaks of her three weeks of seasickness as “most dreadful!” At one point, she says, “The ship was lying quite on her side, the waves now dashing over her, sometimes she would get between two of these great mountains of water that you would be almost sure would swallow her, then rise to the top and plunge in a sea of foam.”1

The diary of William Brady, great-grandfather of BVM Rose Mary Meyer (Sebastian) records yet another experience in 1849. He describes a “very rough sea, which causes heavy sea-sickness to come upon every passenger on board (with few exceptions)…” He mentions as well that six passengers died and were buried at sea.

The Cassander encountered a hurricane not too far from New York. Pulcheria writes: “The good ship reared and plunged as it rose and fell with mountains of seething waters.” (21) After weathering that storm, passengers on board learned that the ship had sprung a leak. It took some hours of work to repair the vessel, and the ship arrived safely in New York harbor on Saturday, August 31, 1833.

It was not until Monday, September 2 that the first BVMs were able to disembark. Well known is the story of their money being dropped accidentally into the harbor waters, leaving them virtually penniless. To add to their ominous beginnings in the United States, the priest who was to meet them, Patrick Costello, did not show up.

After a brief respite in New York, the sisters ventured on to Philadelphia, a trip that took five to six hours when Charles Dickens made it in 1842. They first went by ferry to the Jersey Shore, then by stagecoach to the train line newly completed that year. Dickens gives us some image of the railroad cars.
He writes:

There are not first and second class carriages as with us; but there is a gentlemen's car and a ladies car: the main distinction between which is that in the first, everybody smokes; and in the second, nobody does…There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell.

The cars are like shabby omnibuses, but larger: holding thirty, forty, fifty, people. The seats, instead of stretching from end to end, are placed crosswise. Each seat holds two persons. There is long row of them on each side of the caravan, a narrow passage up the middle, and a door at both ends. In the centre of the carriage there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal; which is for the most part red-hot. It is insufferably close; and you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other object you many happen to look at, like the ghost of smoke.2

At the Delaware River, the women boarded a steamer. We rely again on Dickens for a description. The steamer has

“half a pony power…[The] cabin…fitted with common sash-windows like an ordinary dwelling house. These windows had bright-red curtains, too, hung on slack strings across the lower panes; so that it looked like the parlour of a Liliputian [sic] public-house, which had got afloat in a flood or some other water accident, and was drifting nobody knew where…we all kept the middle of the deck, lest the boat should unexpectedly tip over.”3

Mary Frances and her companions arrived at the harbor in Philadelphia, within walking distance of St. Joseph 's church, where they believed St. Joseph himself had directed them. Through Margaret McDonagh, an active member of the parish, they met Terence James Donaghoe, the former pastor of St. Joseph 's Church, and began a new chapter in their lives, never to see their home country again.

Endnotes:

“Mary Cumming,” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 5, eds. Angela Bourke et al. New York : New York University Press, 2002, 574.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes and Pictures from Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62.
Ibid, 73-74.

About the author: Ann M. Harrington, BVM (St. Remi) is on the faculty of Loyola University, Chicago, Ill., and author of Creating Community: Mary Frances Clarke and Her Companions (Dubuque: Mount Carmel Press, 2004).