in the Scottish Highlands and into his hands came the recently published Historical Sketches of the Native Irish by the Scottish Baptist Minister, Christopher Anderson. Over two decades, Anderson had made a detailed survey of the state of the Irish language, with a particular interest in Ireland’s coastal islands, and Historical Sketches was the fruit of this work. Reading the book induced a conversion-style experience in the classic evangelical mode for Edward, and directed his interest towards the evangelisation of the Irish-speaking people in the west.
Christopher Anderson could not speak Irish but had developed an enthusiastic appreciation for the native Irish culture and language, and came to the view that enlightenment should be brought to the Irish people through the medium of their own native tongue. The use of the Irish language, he believed, would ‘operate like the insertion of a leaven’ to lead the destitute people of the west of Ireland towards the truth and towards a better life.13 Christopher Anderson’s book had a profound life-changing effect on the frail, recuperating Edward. It was like the final piece of a jigsaw that was building piece by piece in his imagination, providing the lifelong spark for his future life’s work. He would credit his reading of Historical Sketches with the origins of the Achill Mission.
A quarter of a century afterwards, when William Krause and Christopher Anderson died within weeks of one another, Edward reflected on the profound influence of two very dissimilar men on his life: Krause, ‘cold and reserved’, Anderson ‘affectionate, bland and open-hearted’.14 The pair provided him with the intellectual foundations for his daunting Achill project.
A vision was taking shape in Edward Nangle’s imagination, a vision that took seed among the drumlin hills of County Cavan and was motivated by a premillennial urgency and a belief in the biblical prophecy that the Lord’s coming was imminent. He would build nothing less than an exemplary Christian colony in the most deprived and remote location on Ireland’s west coast. It would be an oasis of civilisation in the midst of superstition and squalor. He could see it in his mind’s eye: neat, orderly houses with vegetable gardens and whitewashed walls; a community conducting itself with piety, sobriety and industry; scriptural schools buzzing with the laughter of children; the people learning the Bible, the source of all truth, in their native tongue; and a people transformed beyond all recognition.
It was a daring and ambitious concept. Could Edward Nangle’s ambition possibly be realised and, if so, where?
CHAPTER TWO
The Most Destitute Spot
in Ireland
‘The state of society is now completely unhinged.’ These were the stark words of a young Catholic bishop in a letter to the British Prime Minister, Earl Grey, on west-of-Ireland conditions in 1831. John MacHale raged about the plight of the peasantry: the weather had wreaked havoc on the potato crop – what were the people to do? If the evangelical view in Cavan blamed Catholicism, popery and the clergy for the country’s ills, the Catholic prelate had a different take on the root cause of Ireland’s distress: there was something rotten, he asserted, at the heart of the land system in the country.
Famine and cholera were sweeping across the western counties, the public roads were crowded with thousands toiling for a wretched pittance of six or seven pence worth of meal for an entire family, while women and children thronged into depots seeking provisions. How could hundreds in Ballina cry out for food while, at the same time, the town was busy with the bustle of corn traders, and the public road crowded with vehicles bearing away food for export? It was a scandal, fumed the cleric, ‘a famine in the midst of plenty’.1
In the three decades since the formation of the Union, Britain had flourished: it was a time of growth, industrialisation, capitalism, free trade and urbanisation, and Irish agriculture fed this economic expansion with a remarkable increase in Irish food exports. But Ireland itself was becoming progressively more chaotic: the population swelled, potato cultivation intensified, and farm holdings fragmented into a patchwork of plots with the chronic subdivision of small holdings. In the west, the decline in living standards for many ‘was both dangerous and rapid’, with a large subsistence underclass virtually dependent on a single crop: the potato.2
The Mayo Constitution newspaper reported that there was a ‘mass of human misery to be found throughout a vast district of the west of Ireland’. For whole communities around Clew Bay there were ‘no potatoes, no oatmeal, a failure of fisheries, no price to be got for kelp, no public or private markets for goods, no means of earning daily wages, no resident gentry landlords, no food but seaweed, and the small fishes that can be picked up along the strand’.3
In the midst of this chaos, Edward Nangle headed west on a relief mission.
***
The Atlantic waves tossed the boat dangerously close to the cliffs.
The clergyman crept from his berth on the Nottingham steamer, his stomach churning, as the sea frothed all around in a sheet of white foam.4 It was near sunset, on a Wednesday evening in July 1831, and the sky glowed red like a hot furnace. He struggled to keep his footing on deck as the storm winds gusted furiously and the gigantic cliffs on Achill Island’s western coast loomed overhead on the boat’s lee side – Croaghaun, where the power of the Atlantic waves had chiselled away the rock face. This was Edward Nangle’s first sighting of Achill Island in its wild and terrifying magnificence.
His pregnant wife, Eliza, was sheltered below deck, perhaps regretting her decision to travel as her body convulsed with sea sickness. Her thoughts must often have turned to their one-year-old daughter, Frances, left behind in Dublin in the care of her family. She had shown a steely determination in accompanying and supporting her husband, a single-mindedness and selflessness that would be a feature of their married life. The boat carried a cargo of Indian meal to provide some relief for the communities of the west in their dire need.
The Nottingham creaked and groaned at every seam as she plunged into successive gullies between the waves and Croaghaun cliffs. As one fearful surge of Atlantic waters succeeded the next, it must have seemed as if the steamer would never again rise from the depths. Edward watched Captain Biddy stalking the deck, knowing he had a calculation to make: should he protect the vessel by throwing some of the cargo of meal overboard or hold tight in the hope of reaching the calmer waters of Clew Bay? The captain waited, never once leaving the steamer’s deck as the red sky faded on the western horizon.
When Edward and Eliza married three years earlier, he was still in recovery after the earlier disintegration of his health in County Cavan. In hindsight, their early married years at Elm Cottage, Monkstown, must have appeared idyllic, with pleasant musical evenings and violin renditions of Haydn and Mozart by Edward at their Dublin cottage. It would be a short-lived period of tranquillity in their married life.
There is a sense that an artist’s soul struggled beneath the surface of Edward’s personality, with glimmers of an enthusiastic musician, an eager watercolourist, a writer of soaring lyrical prose and a man awestruck by nature’s beauty. This aesthetic would reveal a deficit on his part in later years with little evident appreciation of the native culture of the people he ministered to in contrast, for instance, to Christopher Anderson’s regard for the native Celtic culture.
A watercolour, possibly by Edward, of Eliza with two of their daughters a few years into their marriage shows her looking downwards in a diffident, reserved way, the image reflecting the norms for the virtuous woman of the times. Her husband described her as a woman of ‘few words’, a trait that contrasted with his own tendency towards extravagant verbal propensity as words poured in torrents from his mouth and pen.5 These differing temperaments would become a factor in their diverging responses to future adverse circumstances. It was as if his verbal fluency acted as a type of therapy for Edward in times of stress, while Eliza’s taciturn disposition caused her to bury accumulating suffering deep within.
Mercifully,
