A Royal Navy vessel sinks in calm weather along the Irish coast with the loss of most of the crew, along a route it had travelled many times before.
HMS Wasp, pictured in 1880.
On September 21st, 1884, HMS Wasp set out from the harbour in Westport, County Mayo, on Ireland’s western coast. It was bound for Inishtrahull island, the most northerly of the many small islands that flank the country’s Atlantic seaboard. The Royal Navy gunboat had sailed the route many times in its short career as a commissioned ship of the line. Most of the journeys it had undertaken since 1881 had been relief missions to the islands, and it had even visited Inishtrahull in 1883 to deliver much needed seed potatoes for the island’s struggling inhabitants.
Wasp’s mission in September 1884 was not a humanitarian one, however. Her orders were to proceed north from Westport and dock at Moville, on the shores of Lough Swilly in Donegal. There, she was to pick up a number of bailiffs. HMS Wasp was then to sail on to Inishtrahull, directly north of Lough Swilly. The bailiffs would then do their job—in this case, evict a number of islanders who were in arrears on their rent. It seems that, even though the people who lived on Inishtrahull were going through hard times in the 1880s, the patience of their distant landlord had finally worn thin.
HMS Wasp would not make it to Inishtrahull. In fact, she would not even make it to Moville. In calm weather, on a route that the crew of the vessel were very accustomed to, she would wreck off the coast of Tory island within 24 hours of departing from Westport and sink with the loss of all but six crew members. And despite a Royal Navy inquest ruling that the wreck had been accidental and there was no indication of either foul play or incompetence on the part of the crew, there were many who believed that the sinking of HMS Wasp was no accident. In their opinion, the ship had been placed under a curse and was doomed from the start.
The latter half of the 19th-century was a politically tumultuous period in Ireland. The Great Famine of the 1840s had decimated the country’s population through starvation and emigration, and left a legacy of anti-British feeling which—arguably—persists to the modern day. To make a bad situation worse for the tenant farmers who made up the majority of the country’s population, rents for small hold farms were exorbitant and there was little protection from eviction. Ireland’s landlord class—part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant elite—were often absentee landlords who used excessive rents to finance their expensive lives in England.
Against such a backdrop, it is unsurprising that the period from the 1860s to the early 1900s is often known in Irish history as the Land Wars, with the 1880s being a particularly restless decade. In response to the heavy-handed evictions of tenant framers carried out by the police (the RIC) on behalf of the landlords, grassroot political pressure groups such as the Land League emerged to pursue tenants’ rights. The Land League helped to organise non-violent resistance to evictions, including massive non-payment of rents and boycotting—the process by which anybody who interacted with an evicting landlord or their agents was ostracised both socially and economically. Such tactics worked well, especially in a rural environment where isolation often posed a real threat to survival.
But there were others at the time who had no qualms about pursuing less peaceful means of advancing the cause of tenant farmers. Agrarian secret societies had begun to spring up in the previous century, but throughout the 1800s they flourished. Groups such as the Defenders organised nightly raids on landlords and their cronies in remote rural areas. These rural groups were encouraged, infiltrated and sometimes taken over completely by the Fenians, the forerunners of republican paramilitaries of more modern times. The Fenians wanted a complete break with Britain, and viewed the Land Wars as the perfect opportunity to promote that agenda.
James Stephens was a founding member of the Fenian movement. The group advocated violent resistance to British rule in Ireland, and provided future revolutionaries and paramilitaries with a template.
It was in this political climate that HMS Wasp set sail from Westport, bound for Inishtrahull. The inhabitants of the island were in serious arrears in 1884, but they could hardly be blamed. Making a living off the land on the barren islands strewn along Ireland’s coasts was hard enough, but the sea often offered little in the way of prosperity either. The people on the much larger Tory island knew this too. But Tory also had a large Fenian contingent among the population, including the elected king of the island—a man called Heggarty—who was intent on resisting any evictions that might be attempted to redress the £2000 debt claimed by their landlord. Word had mistakenly reached Tory island that HMS Wasp was on its way to unload bailiffs to carry out evictions there, and Heggarty was not about to let that happen.
Since the defeat of the first Irish republican movement, the United Irishmen, in 1798, strategists for the various groups that urged a violent break with Britain began to focus less on open battlefield warfare and more on insurgency tactics. The Fenians—despite attempting an open rebellion in the 1860s—also largely adopted this strategy. The Fenians were the first Irish group to plant bombs in England, for instance, and one of their more daring plans even included taking Canada hostage in order to force a British withdrawal from Ireland. But king Heggarty of Tory island knew that armed resistance to an eviction attempt would be fatal for all of the Fenians on the island, and most likely for any known collaborators too. How then could the people of Tory protect themselves from HMS Wasp, presumably on its way to dispossess them? For Heggarty, there was a secret weapon that hadn’t yet been used: the island’s ancient cursing stones.
Cursing stones are a well-known pre-Christian relic in Ireland and the rest of Europe. Sometimes known as godstones or bullauns, they usually come in the form of rocks placed in bowl-like recesses in bigger boulders. They are believed to have offered prehistoric communities a sense of security—that they had some supernatural means of fending off attacks from outsiders. The long process of Christianization in Europe succeeded in removing the cursing stones themselves from most recesses, while blessed water was left in their place in order to retain the sites’ sacred aspect.
On Tory island, however, not only one but two cursing stone sites had survived up to 1884. One was simply called the Cursing Stone and was situated at the north of the island. The other was located at a site referred to as the Church of the Seven—where local legend has it that the bodies of six men and one woman were interred after a shipwreck. (When locals stopped by the grave the following day, they were shocked to discover the corpse of the woman lying in the open again; they took this to mean that none of the male sailors was her husband, and reburied her elsewhere.)
Saint Brigid’s stones, from Blacklion in County Cavan, Ireland. The stones can be used either for cursing or for blessing.
St Brigid's stone, Blacklion Co. Cavan
Nobody knows which one of these stones Heggarty and a band of his followers made their way to on either the 21st or 22nd of September, 1884, nor what specific curse was uttered. It seems likely that, as the elected king of the island, it would have fallen to Heggarty himself to do the honours. It is also reasonable to assume that at least some of the rituals surrounding the cursing stones were known to some of the islanders present at the time. This was a serious thing, after all; the cursing stones were treated with respect and fear by the islanders, and their use in this fashion was unprecedented.
But we do know that a curse was places, and it was a huge risk for Heggarty. If his curse didn’t work, most of the islanders would (he believed) be evicted; if it succeeded, he would have used pagan magic to harm or kill Christian sailors and bailiffs—many of whom were his own countrymen. For a leader of poor, tenant farmers who were also devout Catholics, these were high stakes indeed.
HMS Wasp, in the meantime, had been making her way steadily up Ireland’s western coast, and her commanding officer had made a couple of decisions which the later naval inquest would highlight as odd, if not entirely unheard of. The first of these was that the ship was moving entirely under sail, even though it was capable of being steamed. There is no way of knowing why this decision was taken. Perhaps the weather was calm, although a combination of steam and sail was still the safest way to navigate the wild Atlantic coast. Whatever the reason, the boiler of HMS Wasp was inactive that evening. The second, more curious decision is that the senior crew of the gunboat had apparently decided to retire to bed soon after dinner was served, leaving sole command of the vessel to junior crewmen.
It was probably this unusual turn of events which would prove fatal for HMS Wasp. Although the route was a well-known one for the Royal Navy in general, younger and less experienced personnel may not have been aware that the best course to take around Tory island was via the Atlantic ocean to the west, giving the island itself a wide berth. Instead, they steered a course between the island and the mainland. This strait of water contains a vast array of barely concealed, narrow rocks lurking beneath the surface of the waves. At about 3.55 AM, one of these collided with the hull and Wasp started to take on water rapidly. It took about 15 minutes for the ship to sink, with the loss of 52 members of the crew. The senior officers drowned in their bunks.
Six survivors managed to escape by climbing the rigging of the ship, then struggling through the choppy waters to the shore of Tory island. They were soon found by some of the islanders, who gave them shelter for the four days that it took for HMS Valiant to reach the island and retrieve them.
An aerial view of Tory island.
It must have been a strange, tense few days on Tory island after the sinking of HMS Wasp. For all the islanders knew, the people that they had rescued had been sent to evict them. From a modern perspective, it is fascinating to speculate as to what conversations were held between the locals and the surviving crew members. Did the sailors set the record straight, informing the islanders that their destination had been the island of Inishtrahull all along? Did anyone let slip the fact that an ancient cursing ritual had been enacted, directed at HMS Wasp and her crew? It could be argued that, even if it had, the more rationally-minded among both the islanders and surviving crew would have dismissed it as a coincidence. But if it was a coincidence, it was an extraordinary one.
We do know that Heggarty boasted about wrecking HMS Wasp, even while the remaining crew were still present on the island. News of this soon reached the only person on Tory who could rival the king in terms of local power: the parish priest. Father O’Donnell was sympathetic to the Fenian philosophy, and supported those on the island who had refused to pay their rents. He believed that the system was unjust and the poor had a right to non-violent protest. But he drew the line at pagan cursing rituals. It is said that once he heard of Heggarty’s curse, he immediately cast the stones into the sea. They were never seen again.
The Royal Navy or the bailiffs of the RIC probably never gave any credence to stories of cursing stones. A later inquest into the sinking concluded that there was nobody to blame for the incident, and the case was closed. HMS Wasp was later salvaged, and sold for scrap. In the end, no evictions took place either on Tory island or Inishtrahull. Who knows, perhaps Heggarty’s curse worked after all?
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