The Boy From Ballyclerahan
Trapped in a life of servitude to brutal English landlords, eighteen-year-old Patrick MacGormain dreamed of a different life, one where his choices were his own. Struggling after losing their father to consumption, he is gutted when their mother dies just a year later in a deliberate house fire, leaving Pat and his sister alone.
With little to hold him, he traveled to Waterford, securing work as a cabin boy on the schooner Fanny, an overcrowded passenger hauler bound for Newfoundland. Early in the voyage, he befriends a dwarf of sharp wit and noble birth on a different path, the charismatic-but often underestimated-Edward Comerford.
Amidst disease, starvation, and mutiny, they crossed a dangerous Atlantic, peppered with American raiders and Napoleon's frigates, on a vessel that would become one of the first "coffin ships." Hardly the bastion of democracy they envisioned, they seemed to have traded one land of persecution for another: the "New World" following the old.
Based on true events.
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