Achill Sound.1 | 14th. Nov./47
Dear Sir,
I received this day two post office orders from you, one for £5 and the other for two shillings – for Mr Roberts,2 and would feel grateful to you for his address – as I would wish to mention to him some of the movements here. I am sorry to inform you that 28 of the Achill fishermen partially under my charge were drowned on the night of the 8th inst.3
Yours faithfully, | Robt. Rowd Savage.4
RI MS JT/1/TYP/11/3857
LT Transcript Only
Achill Sound: a village on the western coast of Ireland.
Mr Roberts: not identified. Possibly a relative of Margaret Roberts Ginty. It is not clear why Tyndall sent post office orders for Mr Roberts through Savage.
drowned on the night of the 8th inst.: the fishermen drowned on the night of 8 November 1847. From ‘The Storm and Loss of Life on the West Coast’, Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 18 November 1847, p. 1: ‘Monday the 8th November, will be a memorable day to the inhabitants of the sea coast in the county of Mayo … A company of fishermen on the island of Achill, at Bowford, were preparing to go out with their nets, and two boats and three curraghs had got upon the waters, when the tempest rushed upon them … Nineteen persons were lost ... The fishermen belonging to Mr. R. Savage, who was from home were making some repairs in their nets, and had the storm delayed another half hour, they too would have been sharers in these dreadful perils’. The source of the discrepancy between the newspaper's death count and Savage's account is unclear.
Robt. Rowd Savage: Robert R. Savage, a fisherman and member of the coastguard at Achill Sound in County Mayo, Ireland. H. E. Hatton, The Largest Amount of Good: Quaker Relief in Ireland (Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), p. 135.
Please cite as “Tyndall0338,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 3 May 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0338