After the Battering Ram: The Voyage Down Under

When news of the Derryveagh evictions reached Sydney, there was great consternation and concern for the victims. Archdeacon McEncroe bean fundraising in Sydney and a member of the Victorian Parliament, named Michal O’Grady, was prminent in the Melbounred fund-raising. The agend in Donegal made arrangemets fro free passages for the young men and women from Derryveagh, and consequently in January 1862, a total of 150 sponsored passengers, embarked from Portsmouth on the ‘Abyssinian.’ It would be easy to say a this state that the journey took 114 days, that there were 7 deaths during th voyage and 3 births. But the reader may be interested in a dseciption of the yourney that was uderakin by these men and women, remembering that it may have benen in all probablility the firstjourney any of them had ever made outside their own immediate neighbourhood. At this stage, too, it may be of interest to state of of all those who left, there is no record that any of them ever returned and even now, 127 years later, only one descendant has come back to Derryveagh.

May McClintock
After the Battering Ram
1988