In 1847, During the Great Hunger, the Brig Exmouth left Derry (Londonderry) for Quebec. Rather than sailing west across the Atlantic, a gale blew her east and she was wrecked on the island of Islay, off the coast of Scotland. The passengers were, mainly, small farmers and tradesmen with their families. There were only three survivors. 248 were lost.
On 16 March 1942, U-753 stopped the Irish Willow, While they waited on instructions from Berlin, whether or not to sink her, they shared schnapps to honour St Patrick
The Tayleur is known as the first Titanic. Sixty years before the Titanic, this White Star liner, technically the most advanced for her age. was lost on her maiden voyage. The design of “clipper ships” had reached its zenith. Tayleur incorporated innovations of its time. She was built of steel rather than wood (the misaligned compass was a factor in her loss) This article discusses her dimension and construction.
On 14th October 1809, The Lady Nelson, Captain Bernard Wade, was shipwrecked on a voyage from Oporto to Liverpool, off the Skelligs, Co. Kerry. The 200 tonne vessel contained a cargo of wine and fruit. 25 souls perished in the disaster.
The troopship Rival was lost off Connemara. 432 drowned. A forgotten wreck, no folk memory survives, probably because this happened in 1832 shortly before the Famine. The famine was so great a disaster that this disaster, the loss of the Rival, was erased from memory
The AID with a valuable cargo of Roman sculptures sank at Killiney. This tells of Lord Cloncurry, his life and the loss of the AID
The Plassy is the wreck shown in the opening sequence of Fr Ted. Behind it is a real story of a heroic rescue.
2011 is the fiftieth anniversary of the successful raising of the almost intact early seventeenth- century Swedish warship Vasa from the mud at the bottom of Stockholm Harbour. It represents one of the greatest maritime archaeological recoveries ever carried out. After the salvage of the ship in 1961, it was conserved and restored and can be seen in a specially built museum where it has attracted millions of visitors over the years.
The history of slavery is probably as old as that of mankind itself. Hundreds of thousands of slaves built such classical civilisations as Greece, Egypt and Rome. Viking Dublin was a major slave trading port in its heyday. However, for the purposes of this story I will deal only with the transatlantic slave trade whereby from twelve to twenty million African slaves were transported to the Americas over a span of four hundred years.
