JEANIE JOHNSTON
(Photograph Frank Duffy)
The weather on the morning of Thursday July 3, 2003, in New York Harbor, was what the Irish called a "soft rain" when the replica barque JEANIE JOHNSTON passed the Statue of Liberty She was on twenty city port tour of the East Coast of the United States and Canada, staring in Florida, stopping for a twelve day visit to lower Manhattan, North Cove, Battery Park City. The ship represented the 19th century fleet that brought the victims of the Great Irish Famine in the 1840s to America and Canada.
It was one of the darkest parts of Irish 19th century history when a blight killed the potato crop, the principal part of the Irish diet. The population was faced with two choices, starve or emigrate to America or Canada.. Many of the landowner gentry had little food to export or feed the tenant farmers and paid their fare for the Atlantic crossing.
JEANIE JOHNSTON was built in a specially constructed shipyard in County Kerry, Tralee, Ireland and cost some $17 million. The designer was Fred M. Walker, Chief Naval Architect with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The all wood hull, 148-feet long, three mast barque, carries a crew of 17, has a diesel engine and is built to conform to present day international safety standards. The master of the ship is Captain Tom McCarthy, who was in command of the Irish sail trainer ASGARD for nine years. Below decks on the ship is a museum setting, built to show how passengers were carried 150 years ago..
Although the JEANIE JOHNSTON was a millennium project it fell behind schedule and set sail for West Palm Beach, Florida in February of 2003. She has been touring ports on the Atlantic seaboard, including Quebec City where the original ship was built, and will finish up at St. John’s Newfoundland in October 20, 2003, before returning to Ireland.
Francis J. Duffy