Packet Ship Patrick Henry Emigrants’ Passage and New Beginnings
Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!
bourgeault-horan antiquarians, via invaluable.com, p.d.
After a month at sea, Michael turned three years old as he and his family—his parents and three sisters—sailed passed Nantucket, bound for New York. Three days later, on the sunny afternoon of 27 July 1847, they arrived at Pier 20 on the East River in lower Manhattan. His infant sister survived the crossing but would not live much past her first birthday. Michael would marry, father a son and five daughters, and shoe horses in Philadelphia into the early twentieth century.
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by Michael Carolan
Michael Carolan (1844–1906), the author’s great-great-grandfather, emigrated with his family to the United States from Ireland in 1847 aboard the Patrick Henry. THE SHIP The 159-foot Patrick Henry was launched in 1839 from the New York shipbuilding firm Brown & Bell, partners who would build one of the first true clippers five years later. She was built for service as a packet. Predecessors to the twentieth-century ocean liner, packet ships initially carried mail between England and Europe; the scope of their activity broadened to carrying
ny morning herald
cargo and passengers, and their routes were eventually expanded across the Atlantic to the United States. As the information superhighway of the era, the early packet runs gave the American colonies the name of their first successful daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet.
author’s collection
M
y great-great-grandfather was two years old the year he came to America, and consequently particularly vulnerable to the epidemics that spread in cargo holds of ships like the Patrick Henry, the threemasted full-rigged ship in which he sailed 175 years ago. The other refugees on his Atlantic crossing hoped for better times, to be sure, full of more promise than the lives they left behind in Ireland that summer, in the year remembered as Black ’47. Disease, starvation, and England’s disastrous response to the crisis would send a million people to their deaths and two million more on odysseys of immigration, such as the one my family began on the ship Patrick Henry.
Advertisement in the New York Morning Herald for the newly built Patrick Henry, 6 November 1839. The Patrick Henry was seven years old when she carried my ancestors to the United States. Designed at the height of the packet industry, the ship became known for her fast passages across the Atlantic and consistent sailing schedule. Named for the American politician, orator, and Founding Father, the ship had room for forty firstclass passengers and “one thousand tons of merchandise,” and featured “the full-length figure of the Virginian for her figurehead.” Said to cost $90,000 (more than $2.5 million today), she was purchased by Grinnell, Minturn & Co., one of nineteenth-century America’s largest shipping empires, which later acquired the famous extreme clipper Flying Cloud, arguably the greatest (and fastest) clipper ship ever built. The Patrick Henry was “built of the very best materials, including live oak, African oak, elm, &c.,” according to a lengthy review published in a Liverpool newspaper in November 1839. “[With] a handsome figurehead and decorated stern, [she] looks fine The American Packet Ship Patrick Henry Off the Cliffs of Dover by Philip John Ouless (1817–1885), oil on canvas, 26 3/4 x 37 1/2 inches. In 1858, late in the clipper’s career, Ouless, a celebrated marine artist from Jersey, made preliminary sketches of the Patrick Henry under sail and completed the painting the following year. SEA HISTORY 176, AUTUMN 2021