few days after the boat again came into the bay, and her cargo was safely landed. It was an interesting sight to the children of some of the converts carrying the lighter parts of the printing press up to the Settlement, where they were to be used for the emancipation of others from the ignorance and bondage from which they had been delivered. We were indebted for this gift to some friends in London and York.3
The printing press enabled Edward Nangle to publish a monthly journal, the Achill Missionary Herald and Western Witness, which, arguably, was his most important instrument in sustaining his Achill enterprise by promulgating the narrative around the colony and eliciting financial support from benefactors, largely in mainland Britain.4 At a time when mass communications had not yet exploded, Edward had the technology and tools to drive a propaganda machine to propagate the message of a reforming west-of-Ireland mission. It could be compared in its impact to that of the internet, enabling the story of a bold Atlantic-island endeavour to go viral in its reach and become spectacular in its haul of financial support. The outlet of the monthly publication would whip up Edward Nangle’s frenetic outpourings against Catholicism and its doctrines. Intriguingly, the acts of writing and editing in voluminous quantities may, arguably, have had a calming effect on his turbulent personality.
***
That winter saw Neason Adams and his wife, Isabella, move to Achill in December 1835, ahead of plan due to a Nangle family crisis, before their colony home was yet ready for occupation. While Neason brought crucial medical and administrative skills, Isabella brought a lightness of being and humour to their new colony home.
On their first day on the island, Isabella cast a rueful eye over her new surroundings and her husband’s makeshift surgery as she sat writing a letter to a friend, close to an open window to allow the escape of smoke from a hearth filled with wet sods. It was pointless to dust as everywhere was immediately covered with a film of ashes. Dr Adams’ medical supplies were gathered in a window recess on the small stairs and a little press was ‘full of medicine, which was sent as a present from one of the Medical Halls in Dublin’.
A new assistant missionary, Mr Baylee, was expected to arrive shortly with his wife and children and Isabella mischievously wondered how the Baylee family could be occupied in a house which already accommodated many other needs. Two of the rooms had been converted into a printing office, two of the scripture readers used the house as their home, as did the Lendrum family. Isabella described the situation with a mix of giddiness and hilarity: ‘I asked the other morning if two sorrowful-looking sheep, which I saw at the door, had been in the garden all night.’
She was told that they were in Mr Baylee’s parlour.
‘Where were the oats threshed?’
In Mr Baylee’s parlour.
‘Where is the old grey mare kept? And the pet eagle?’
In Mr Baylee’s parlour.
‘Where is the Sunday-school held?’
In Mr Baylee’s parlour.5
It was a far cry from their comfortable home and surgery at St Stephen’s Green in Dublin and a dramatic change in their personal situation. The circumstances that caused the doctor and his wife to rush to Achill in the dead of night provides an insight into the emerging instability within the Nangle family.
It was December and a pregnant Eliza was at Dugort with their three daughters while Edward was travelling in England on preaching and fundraising work. One of the children fell ill, an illness which, Edward later condescendingly wrote, ‘a mother’s anxiety exaggerated into a dangerous one’. As the nearest medical services were in Castlebar, over thirty miles away, a distraught Eliza wrote to Dr Adams in Dublin describing the child’s symptoms and pleading for medicine and advice by return post. A messenger was dispatched and asked to remain in Newport until the return mail car brought Dr Adams’ reply. Four days elapsed before the messenger returned with the news that the doctor and his wife were travelling by mail coach from Dublin to Westport, a journey of eighteen hours, and would soon reach the colony.
‘I have often heard my dear wife say that she felt ashamed for having brought her friends on so long a journey by giving expression to what proved to be a groundless apprehension’, wrote Edward many years later.6 His words reveal little sympathy or patience with his wife’s anxieties and little appreciation of the difficulties for a mother and her young family experiencing winter hardship in a wild, isolated place amid a hostile community.
Edward’s absence from home on speaking and fundraising engagements in the winter months, often over the Christmas period, became a regular occurrence. The reasons for this pattern of travel are unclear. Perhaps he judged it to be the optimum time for raising much-needed funds for his mission across England. Perhaps the severe Achill conditions in the dead of winter aggravated his own fragile state in a form of seasonal affective disorder. Perhaps he could not cope with Eliza’s own anxiety and deepening distress and needed to escape.
Eliza’s agitated message to Neason and Isabella Adams was a cry for help and the couple responded with compassion and alacrity. On seeing conditions on the island, and possibly observing Eliza’s worried state and the pressures on the family, Dr Adams returned to Dublin, disposed of his house and medical practice at St Stephen’s Green and settled permanently with his wife at Dugort. Neason and Isabella Adams were then in their late fifties and, for the remainder of their lives, they would dedicate themselves to supporting the Nangle family and ministering to the needs of the Achill people. Their light shone most brightly when the Great Famine hit and the islanders would speak of their charity and humanity: ‘Dr Adams was a good man.’7 Chatty, chirpy Isabella would have to give up her work at the infant school in later years when paralysis took away her powers of speech. On her death she shared, for a period, a mountain grave at Slievemore with the Nangle dead.
Eliza Nangle may well have faced into the New Year, 1836, with an improved disposition given the welcome company and support of her Adams friends. The January storms that unroofed some houses at the colony soon passed. Spring days followed with new plantings at the Dugort farm and house gardens, and she looked forward to the arrival of a new child.
On 11 July 1836, a baby boy was born. He was named Edward Neason Nangle after his father and Dr Adams. The baby was fragile and lived for just six weeks. Which was the harder? To lose a baby at birth before it uttered a cry, or to watch a delicate infant for forty days grow steadily weaker until finally it breathed its last? Was the pain lessened by holding an infant close hour after hour and day after day? Both experiences were traumatic and the latest tragedy brought a deterioration in Eliza’s wellbeing. Edward Neason Nangle died on 23 August 1836 and was buried next to his infant brother in the mountain earth.
It was two years into Edward Nangle’s Achill ministry and there was a growing unease about his tactics within the Protestant establishment. In the summer of 1836, an evangelical English clergyman touring Ireland raised his concerns about the Achill enterprise. Like Jane Franklin, he believed that Edward Nangle was mistaken to treat the beliefs of his Catholic fellowmen with contempt, arguing that there was nothing to be gained by outraging the feelings of Catholics through ridicule. He was unimpressed with Nangle’s abusive language and terms of contempt for Catholic practices, urging that it was far better to treat one’s adversaries with kindness, gravity and respect. The touring clergyman could see that Edward Nangle was grappling in a robust way with a stronghold of superstition and with an aggressive Catholic clergy led by John MacHale, but he urged that a vigorous ministry was best combined with a Christian benevolence.8
Sometime afterwards, another Protestant clergyman would address the issue of Edward Nangle’s controversial methods, asking – on a visit to the colony – whether a gentler and less offensive approach to the superstitions and doctrines of Catholicism might be preferable.9
