Kinsale, Aug. 24th, 1841.
My dear Father
This moment I’m after reading your letter.1 I lose no time in sending off the second moiety.2 I’m glad to hear that Mr Conwill intends writing to us as my correspondence is rather limited lately. The news you sent me respecting my mother’s illness is a cause of sorrow and pleasure to me – sorrow to find that the old complaint has not yet forsaken her and joy to find that she has once more overcome it. May she always thus triumph over her enemies, tho’ I believe the number to be very few. Father Matthew3 was indeed a poor resort in such an emergency I’m afraid that even the magic wand or demoniac incantation of a Hohenlohe4 would fail to affect the stubborn complaint.
I took a lovely row out to the mouth of the harbour yesterday evening. I was invited to the trip. You see I have made acquaintances in Kinsale tho’ short I’m in it. There were six or seven of us together. We had a beautiful gig and four oars, and with these we made her skim the water in good style. We had a fine view of Charles Fort.5 We ceased for a moment while it frowned on our track, to view the thundering tubes6 that peer thro’ its gaping portholes. We tugged on a little farther, the liquid plain was severed with the quickness of a sea bird, but soon the wound was healed and nothing marked our track save a line of foam that ever announces in calm water the furrow of a keel. Suddenly all eyes were directed towards the shore; between us and it an immense porpoise was rolling about. We pulled towards him and came quite close. Here we had an opportunity of viewing his antic7 gambols. Sometimes he would pitch his huge body completely over water, and at others he’d rear himself and seem if I may compare great things with small to awkwardly imitate the gambols of a kitten. I have seen hundreds of them in Youghal harbour but I was never so near one of them before. It was just merely to fill the page that I have described this. A little narrative must supply the place of more important matter. I could however fill half a dozen sheets if I were to recount to you the many little incidents that have occurred even since I came here. I intended to go to see Bandon8 one of these days. I was told the other day that Dean Bernard preached in a church about 3 miles from this a few Sundays ago. It’s within a few minutes of 9 o’clock this is the hour the post office closes so I must conclude
Your affectionate son | John Tyndall
RI MS JT/1/10/3238
LT Transcript Only
your letter: letter missing.
the second moiety: ‘the second halves of two thirty shillings notes’; see letter 0089.
Father Matthew: Theobald Mathew (1790–1856), a Capuchin priest known as the ‘Apostle of Temperance’, who delivered lectures throughout Ireland urging his audience to take the pledge of abstinence.
Hohenlohe: Prince Alexander Leopold Franz Emmerich of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst (1794–1849), a German priest who reputedly effected a series of miracle cures in Ireland in 1823–4. See C. Connolly, ‘Prince Hohenlohe’s Miracles: Supernaturalism and the Irish Public Sphere’, in D. Duff and C. Jones (eds), Ireland, Scotland and the Romantic Aesthetic (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 236–57.
Charles Fort: the star-shaped fort that overlooks the mouth of the River Bandon and the entrance to Kinsale.
thundering tubes: cannon.
antic: bizarre (OED).
Bandon: a town on the River Bandon, about 7 miles north-west of Kinsale.
Please cite as “Tyndall0086,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 29 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0086