An old friend on the Tuskar

Photo Damien Mcaleenan

In early July 1851, a man called Mr Leslie, who was apparently the superintendent for the boring of the tunnel under the barracks, for the Great Southern and Western Railway Company - whatever that meant - purchased a diminutive little screw steamer called Witch. The boat, with a registered weight of only eight tons, had been built in Bristol and was intended to ply a coastal trade around the villages near Queenstown (Cobh) in Cork harbour.

On 11th July, the Witch left Bristol in the hands of Mr Leslie and three seamen and that evening put into Swansea. The following morning, she left Swansea and reached Milford harbour. The next morning, the 13th, she left Milford with the intention of crossing over the Irish Sea but, upon sighting the coastline, a gale sprang up and they decided to head for Waterford.

The wind however, which was coming from the northwest, had other ideas and blew her away from the harbour mouth back towards the Tuskar Rock off the southeastern point of Ireland. Perceiving the danger, the principal keeper of the 34 metres-tall lighthouse thereon, signalled the crew to run in under the lee of the rock, as the sea rose higher and higher. 

Tuskar c 1908 (photo National Library of Ireland)

The crew succeeded in this and the keeper managed to pass a rope to the boat. Thus they held on for two hours. The seas several times washed right over the boat and eventually she began to fill with water. As the pumps had become choked with coal and she was doomed, the four men decided to abandon her. They ran her in as close to the shore as they could and then each made a daring leap overboard. By some providential intervention, the keeper and his assistant managed to pluck each of them out of the angry sea and hauled them up to safety, at great peril to themselves. Just as the last man was rescued, the Witch struck and immediately went to pieces before their eyes. Alas for Mr Leslie, she was not insured but the compensation lay in the fact that all men were saved.

The name of the assistant keeper was not recorded by the Cork Constitution which was credited with the stirring story. It may well have been Edward, or Edouard, Lezarde, the Frenchman, whom we know was on the Tuskar in 1849. But fortunately, we know the name of the principal keeper - Thomas McKenna - the heroic and romantic Maidens lover who had eloped with Mary Redmond one night in 1839 when the pair were living at the North and South Maidens off the coast of Antrim.


Tuskar c. 1905 (photo the National Library of Ireland)

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