We left young John Hogan in Liverpool a week (and 175 years) ago. After his arrival from Dublin, he walked the docks and scanned the ships waiting for cargo and preparing to sail. There among them was the Forfarshire, on which he had already engaged his passage to New Orleans. The sight of it was a let-down:
She was a wide, large, dirty, heavy-looking ship. Her sails were anything but snow white, with plenty of pitch and tar splashed on her decks, bulwarks, and rigging; besides, she looked very deep in the water, and near her, on the wharf, there was a whole cargo yet waiting to be stowed in her between decks. I was greatly discouraged, and still more so when I had learned, upon inquiry; that the Forfarshire was a slow ship, her usual voyages between Liverpool and New Orleans being from seven to nine weeks.
Time to rethink that plan. He went to the office of the shipping line where he had his ticket and inquired (politely, of course) as to the possibility of changing his plan. Unlike today’s reservation system, they were amenable to the change (no change fees or separate charges) and recommended another of their ships:
“…the Berlin, an American clipper ship, commanded by Captain Smith, a Boston Yankee. The Berlin is a good ship and a fast sailor.”
This is a public domain image of a three masted clipper ship. I could not find an image of the Berlin itself.
Clipper ships were the sleek, fast, nimble ships of the era, plying the trade routes to China and India and the Americas. Pirates loved them too. They were three-masted vessels (though rarely four-masted) and were fully square-rigged on all masts. Speedy contemporary vessels with other sail plans, such as barques, were also sometimes called clippers. They dominated the seas in the middle third of the nineteenth century, before being phased out by the advent of more modern iron-hulled sailing ships, which eventually gave way to steamships.
Wikipedia has a long list of ships but the Berlin was not among them. Newspapers.com had no mention of the arrival of the Berlin in New Orleans that I could find. Nor did Hogan name the Boston company that owned the two ships. Better researchers than I could probably dig this information out!
Hogan does not mention how he passed his time in Liverpool for the week between the two launch dates, other than one activity, watching the Forfarshire up anchor and head to sea:
The Forfarshire sailed on her appointed day, November 1st. When I saw her leaving port, her dirty sails unloosed in the wind, I considered myself fortunate to be waiting for the Berlin.
John Hogan’s account of crossing the Atlantic is remarkable in its detail. Somewhere in the archives there may be a journal of his early years. It’s hard to imagine he could recall with such detail the days of passage, the sightings of land (the Azores, the Bahamas, weather and climate changes, the change in the night skies), the speed and course of the ship without some personal record. As they rounded the tip of the Florida peninsula, Hogan noted this: “The course we had sailed from Abaco to Key West … was about 300 miles. Time, from 6 P. M. Friday to 10 A. M. Monday, 40 hours; average sailing per hour, 7 ½ miles.”
In later years as Bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, he published a small book, Nautical Distances and How to Compute Them for the Use of Schools, dedicated to Teddy Roosevelt. It is a small book, a copy of which is in the archives of the diocese. Interestingly, amazon.com has a listing for this book (published 120 years ago – 1903)… currently listed as unavailable.
At this point, he was one month from Liverpool and nearing New Orleans, his first destination.
Bishop Hogan recounted his childhood memories and his voyage to America and to the priesthood in Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir, written in 1898 and published in 1907. Our companion volume to Mystery of the Irish Wilderness contains both those memoirs plus additional biographical information I was able to learn from the archives of both the Kansas City-St. Joseph and St. Louis dioceses.
On the Mission in Missouri and Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir is available on our website for $10.50, postage paid at www.beautifulozarks.com Companion volume, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness, is also available for $9.50, postpaid.