 |
| The Mersey River at the Liverpool docks. Credit: "Merchantmen-at-Arms: The British Merchants' Service in the War" by David W. Bone, 1919. Illustrator: Muirhead Bone. |
Baba, Unsinkable, 1915
Short creative nonfiction by Michael Shay `
A young Irishman looks up at the mighty S.S. Cameronia, unsinkable. He is my grandfather, father to Anna my mother and Baba to me. I hung the name on him, my toddler-self trying to say Papa I guess. Grandfather “Baba,” all his belongings in a canvas sack, leaves the Liverpool docks and walks the gangplank to the ship’s deck and down to steerage.
This motherless boy is bound for America. He left Roscommon at 12, three years before, cast out by his stepmother, his mother dead at childbirth, father a wayward drunk, older brother and sister already in America. Roamed Dublin streets. Peelers grabbed up boys and sent them to England and the mines. Donkey boy, he was, guiding the animals that hauled the coal. Later, he grew so big, they handed the Irish boy a shovel and lamp. He and the boys replaced the men being pulled from the mines and sent to trenches along the Somme.
He saved his wages and walked to Liverpool. Along the way, he found a picture postcard of Lusitania and claimed her as his ship. Such a ship. Unsinkable. He waited at the dock with rootless boys, farm families fresh from the dirt. They waited and waited for Lusitania. Heard the news it was sunk. Now he’ll never get to the States. He had saved enough for passage and spending money. He got in the queue for another ticket. The clerk announced that too had been sunk. He waited for the next, the stalwart S.S. Cameronia. Unsinkable.
Grandpa boarded Cameronia on a late May afternoon, 1915. The ship was five years old. Spiffy little vessel, so said the Anchor Line of Great Britain, flew the flag, built in Glasgow. 10,963 gross tons, 515 feet long, 62 feet wide. Top speed 17 knots. Two masts and two funnels, steel hull with four decks. Carried 1,700 passengers, 250 in first class, 450 in second class, and 1,000 with Grandfather in third class. Port of departure: Liverpool. Port of arrival: New York City. Arrived with all hands June 7, 1915.
America, at last. Almost two years later, grandfather lived with his brother’s family on the South Side. Worked on the Chicago El with his brother. He swept out the cars, picked up the trash, a man now. It was April; spring slowly arriving. Wilson declared war. Grandfather was stateless, an invisible man. Undraftable.
On April 15, 1917, just a week after America declared war, the unsinkable Cameronia, loaded with 3,000 English troops, was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean. Survivors rescued by destroyers Nemesis and Rifleman. Its final moments were recreated by mariner David W. Bone who had a fine name for a historian.
This prose writer shall construct a poem of his words, his exact words, now sailing in history's public domain:
We are little more than clear of
the settling fore-end when the last
buoyant breath of Cameronia
is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat
to
the debarking of the last man.
There is no further life in her.
Evenly,
steadily, as we had seen her leave the
launching ways at Meadowside, she
goes down.
Grandfather lived to 90. Died abed 1990 in Denver, Banshees in the burbs. Never again crossed the ocean. Or flew it, no yearning to return to Ireland or England. Preferred his growing American family. Loved his grandkids and ice cream that he first tasted on crowded New York City streets. Baba the Irishman, motherless child, donkey boy, train car sweeper, postman, family man, ice cream man, blessed, lucky.
 | |
Loss of a Liner, 1917. Credit:
|
