Rhyme and reason — Alison Healy on Longfellow’s Wreck of the Hesperus

Who among us has not felt like the wreck of the Hesperus at some point in our lives? As expressions go, it’s hard to beat. Looking like the wreck of the Hesperus is more than looking a bit shook, or bedraggled. It’s akin to looking like you have just been dragged through a bush backwards – except it’s marginally worse. Perhaps it’s closer to being dragged through a whin bush backwards, which was an accusation often levelled at us as children when we arrived home after some particularly boisterous play.
But how did the wreck of an obscure US boat gain such a foothold in our lexicon? And was the Hesperus even wrecked? If you have spent many dark nights of the soul contemplating these questions, then fear not, you have come to the right place.
Fans of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow will know that The Wreck of Hesperus was one of his best-known poems, and a staple on the US school curriculum. Incidentally, at 5 foot 9 inches, Longfellow was not a particularly long fellow, but his writing definitely had longevity. Some of his phrases that we still use today include “ships that pass in the night” and “into every life, some rain must fall”. But I digress.
His poem tells the tale of a skipper who took his young daughter out to sea in a schooner called the Hesperus. The hubristic captain ignored the advice of an old sailor who warned that a hurricane was coming. When he realised the sailor was right, the skipper tied his daughter to the mast to keep her safe. However, the boat was wrecked when it hit the reef of Norman’s Woe. They all died, and when his daughter’s body was discovered, she was still tied to the mast.
The poet said he wrote the poem about the Hesperus after a hurricane lashed the coast of Massachusetts on December 15th, 1839. He read an article in a local paper detailing how 20 boats were sent crashing onto a reef and 17 bodies were washed ashore. Among the dead was a woman who had been tied to the windlass bitts (pair of posts). Writing in his diary two days after the storm, he used a bit of poetic licence and said 20 bodies had been found, and incorrectly noted that the Hesperus had been one of the boats.
In fact, the schooner, which had been moored in Boston harbour had survived unscathed, apart from losing her bowsprit, which sounds painful, but not fatal. After reading the news in the Morning Post, he declared to his diary: “I must write a ballad upon this” and then he did, in an annoyingly quick fashion. “It hardly cost me an effort. It did not come into my mind by lines, but by stanzas,” he later wrote.
The poem appeared in print a few weeks later on January 10th, 1840. But it would be another 85 years before the truth behind the Hesperus emerged. In May 1925, the New York Times carried the scoop which revealed that the schooner was not wrecked at all, and showed how the poet had mixed up his boats. But you know the adage about a lie getting halfway across the world before the truth has put his boots on? The damage had been done and generations of American schoolchildren grew up believing that the Hesperus was wrecked.
And more than a century after the boat was not wrecked, we are still telling each other that we look like the wreck of the Hesperus. After depositing our emigrants State-side, the wind must have blown the expression back to our shores. But there is an Irish connection with another Hesperus – long before Longfellow dipped his quill in ink and told that story.
The other Hesperus was a ship that sailed from Belfast to New York in July 1820, and we know about it thanks to the sterling work by the voluntary group, the Immigrant Ships Transcribers’ Guild (immigrantships.net). These good people have been transcribing lists of passengers from immigrant ships and providing them free online since 1998 and are always looking for volunteers to help with the work. Their records show that the Hesperus carried 32 passengers across the Atlantic Ocean on that trip. All but two were Irish, and they ranged in age from one-year-old Eliza Simpson to 72-year-old farmer Hugh McDermoth, who might have been McDermott had his accent been understood.
Happily, this Hesperus was not wrecked by a storm and the records show that they all arrived alive. Mind you, after several weeks at sea, they might have looked like the wreck of the Hesperus when they disembarked.