During the Famine years, 5000 Atlantic crossings were made to bring 1 million Irish emigrants to America.  Many cargo ships brought relief supplies in the opposite direction; one of these deserves special mention.

In 1846, the second year of the Famine, America was blessed with a bountiful harvest.  While American Quakers and other groups were busy organizing relief efforts, Vice President Dallas held a public meeting in Washington to urge every town and city throughout the land to help the starving Irish.  Goods were transported by land and water toll-free, packages labeled Irish Aid were carried free of charge by the railroads.  Despite the war then raging with Mexico, Congress voted that two of its 6 warships be de-armed, refitted as cargo ships and made available to the aid effort.

One of these ships was the USS Jamestown, named for the Virginia settlement that was named for the English monarch James I.  As the baptized son of Mary Queen of Scots, James I was first King of Scotland and then King of England after Elizabeth I named him her successor.  He epitomized the new Tudor England – Protestant, but born of Catholic stock.

Three weeks after Congress authorized the Jamestown’s refitting for civilian purposes, it sailed into Boston Harbor to be loaded on St. Patrick’s Day by dock workers who’d waived their salaries to outfit the sloop with $36,000 worth of food aid.  The crossing to Ireland took 15 days.  Upon their arrival in Cork City, Captain Robert Forbes and his crew were met by a band.  Forbes was given a brief tour of the city by the local priest, Father Mathew.  Only a few feet from the dock, Forbes writes of seeing “a Valley of the Shadow of death.  I saw enough in five minutes to horrify me.  Some called for water to Father Mathew and others for a dying blessing…hundreds begging for which I can readily conceive would be refused by well-bred pigs in America.”

Take a moment to think about that St. Patrick’s Day at Boston Harbor; about two Houses of Congress designating that a warship be refitted to feed the hungry; about what James I (who ordered Sir Walter Raleigh executed to appease Catholic Spain) would think of the warship that bore his name.  Imagine what the inhabitants of Cork City felt when they saw the Jamestown come into view – the utter majesty of it, the hope that surged if only for a brief time.