Ireland part three - Cork and Cobh    

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look for Cork and Cobh on the SE coast

On the drive from Kilarney to Cobh, our next overnight stop, we parked and had a short walk in downtown Cork, Ireland's second City, after Dublin.

It was a grey and lightly rainy day. Our two hour visit included an enjoyable lunch stop. Wow, this far north on the planet & the restaurant had perfect avocado !   

note - you can enlarge any part of a picture by left-clicking in and then out again.

	Cork's historic downtown		adding color to the trees		old brewery		River Lee
				on the historic trail
	heavenly bureaucracy		gargoyles with suckling pigs		doorway to the best kept secrets?		or to the dungeon
		very old pub, see note below		still usable		a police station >
	street scene		Cork color combo
		red on red		the Red Abbey since the 800s		memorial to an ancient place of worship
	umm?		John Calvin		Catholic shrine		apparent neglect
		narrow streets in Cork		Cork at high noon		good lunch place
	County Cork hurling territory

note - this pub from 1698 claims to be the first licensed Pub in Ireland, but on this trip we found other contenders.

On a historical note, the engraved plaque might suggest that the Dukes of Wellington & Marlborough shared a pint here, but that was not possible, since they lived a hundred years apart.   

We arrived in Cobh ("Cove") at our B&B in late afternoon, and after checking in went for a walk into town. We found a sleepy downtown with no other tourists around, and enjoyed a quiet waterside dinner. Cobh is an atmospheric old port town. 

The harbor is not all that deep and huge ships like the Titanic could not enter the harbor & they relied on smaller ships to ferry passengers & baggage out to the mother ship and back.  

We stayed here only one night. We're in County Cork now so red & white Hurling flags were prominent.

	the driver blew the horn & waved		um, in case you run into the bridge...		looks like a protected harbor		a quiet evening in Cobh
		a port with a lot of history		White Star Lines		even more grey
	center city Cobh		red & white banners for County Cork hurling

note - all water shown from here on out - in Ireland - is part of the Irish Sea (except for the river at Waterford). 

We slept in a bit at the B&B and had a luxurious 9:30 am breakfast. At 11 am we met our guide, Adeen, in center-city, who took us on a historic walking tour for about an hour, ending at a local Pub, where all of us had a small sample of (draft) Guinness stout. 

We learned that this town when known as Queenstown had an illustrious history as a British Naval port. In Queen Victoria's reign (early 1900s) she graciously allowed the name to be changed back to the Irish name of Cobh.  

As previously stated, in the decades following the tragic Irish Potato Famine (1840s) more than a million Irish left the country, and they all emigrated out via the port of Cobh, or from Liverpool, across the Irish Sea from each other.      

	the B&B		a British Admiral built the house in the 1860s		breakfast room
		our host		the Admiral built the house next door for his son		old British Navy barracks
	huge retaining walls		bolted together		HMS Titanic		we missed the Centennial by a year
		Cobh history		design derived from a Frank Browne photo (note 1)		divers heading out
	only a few more days until the final hurling match				a curragh
		flowers on a grey day				we met docent Adeen about 11 am
	local history walking tour		Lusitania Memorial, note 2		a local tragedy (sorry - out of focus)
			she was a great tour guide

note 1 - Father Frank Browne (1880-1960), was a Catholic priest residing at Cobh, who was given permission by the Bishop of Cobh to pursue an interest in photography (around 1905) and as a result, Father Frank did a lot of traveling in Ireland, using every Jesuit gathering (or other) opportunity to see new scenery & get new photos,

In 1912, he received approval to document the maiden voyage of HMS Titanic from Liverpool to Cobh. (Titanic was built in Belfast, Northern Ireland)

Once the ship reached Cobh, he asked to be allowed to go onto New York, but his Bishop refused, mainly due to cost. On his short voyage from Liverpool (which is across the Irish Sea from Dublin), Father Browne took numerous photos of the (doomed) passengers, in their ordinary daily activities, like kids playing or adults smoking and sipping drinks, lounging on the outside decks. 

For years afterwards, due to Titanic's enduring fame, Father Browne toured Ireland's small towns and presented his slides to spellbound audiences. He eventually published three sizeable books of photos containing his entire life's work, one dedicated to the Titanic photos. 

When we were there, I didn't know that Cobh has a Father Browne photo Museum next door to the Titanic museum (this is a 2017 note).      

note 2 - Cobh was the main port from which small, private vessels were launched to rescue the survivors of the passenger ship RMS Lusitania, having been sunk by a German U-Boat, in May, 1915.  The ship was headed for Liverpool, but the ship went down only 11 miles SE of Cobh. 

The Lusitania went down fast, due to a "second explosion" that followed shortly after the single torpedo blast. At subsequent Parliamentary hearings in London, the ship's design team said a single torpedo could NOT have sunk the ship, because of its multi-bulkhead compartments, and the mysterious second blast had to be the cause of the ship sinking so quickly.    

Historians assumed that the US military must have been clandestinely shipping battlefield ordnance to the UK, on a passenger boat. But the US military vehemently denied this, saying they would never put the public at risk. Since anecdotal evidence from survivors about the second explosion was overwhelming, historians were left with no other explanation, so for the last one hundred years, the assumption has been that the Lusitania was carrying military ordnance. 

An underwater assessment was made in 1993 by preeminent Oceanographer Robert Ballard, the man who who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985.  Ballard took his team of explorers & robots to the Lusitania wreckage site, where they came to a different conclusion. 

After finding chunks of coal, scattered on the sea bed, Ballard's team theorized that the torpedo's initial impact ripped open the ship at one of the starboard coal bunkers, nearly empty at the end of a transatlantic crossing. "The violent impact kicked up clouds of coal dust, which when mixed with oxygen and touched by fire, becomes an explosive combination. The resulting blast, the reported second explosion, ripped open the starboard side of the hull and doomed the ship". 

As for the idea that Lusitania might have been carrying military ordinance, Ballard writes that although the ship was lying on her starboard side (where the torpedo had impacted) "the angle of Lusitania's hull made it possible for Homer (their smallest robot) to slip under the bow and determine that the forward hold magazine was completely intact. Whatever had caused the second explosion had not been stored there". 

The unfortunate outcome for the passengers was that the ship sunk in only 18 minutes, and 1,143 people perished while 760 survived. The town of Cobh suddenly found itself hosting traumatized or injured survivors, and a hastily arranged hospital environment sprung up. One can only wonder at the resilience of the local community to absorb this huge health care crisis, in modern terms.      

After leaving Cobh (about 2 pm) we had a rainy 90 minute drive to Tramore, another small coastal town, where the story of tragic endings for sea-faring passengers continues. 

go to next page Ireland part 4, Tramore & Waterford

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Postscript - Lusitania info and quotes comes from the following books by Robert D. Ballard:

The Lost Ships of Robert Ballard, 2005, Thunder Bay Press, San Diego, Ca. 

Into the Deep, 2021, National Geographic Partners, LLC. 

Additional historical note - why did local boaters respond to the sinking of the Lusitania ? Only a month or more prior to the Lusitania sinking, the British Navy announced to all shipping companies that they would no longer escort passenger or any other vessels.  In addition, if any kind of vessel was hit by a German sub, the British Navy would not respond. The reason for this policy change was that the German U-boats had started picking off Navy rescue ships that arrived to help.  

Most of the info about the sinking of the Lusitania (not related to R. Ballard's exploration) comes from the book Dead Wake, by Eric Larsen, 2015, Transworld Publishing, London. This is a "can't put it down" book by a master storyteller. (2019 note)