Living in unfamiliar surroundings, away from the places and people she knew, Bridget now endured a different type of suffering – that of loneliness, home sickness and distress at the rumours that were being put around about her. Within a few months she was writing plaintively to her family: ‘Dear Father and Mother, don’t you know it is not the case, and why do you let it torment you.’2 She was referring to the rumours which, she believed, were put out by the priests in Achill that Bridget had left the island because she had misconducted herself and had given birth to an illegitimate child in Dublin. She was anxious to hear from home and asked plaintively why her mother had not answered her letter when she had sent her a pound.
An unhappy marriage, poor health and an early death followed. Bridget Lavelle’s was a fractured life, a microcosm of the distress caused by the collision of opposing dogmas and an innocent victim of sectarian warfare. Bridget’s story is compelling in its very human desire to seek out a perceived better life which results in a rupturing of the ties of family and community and ends in isolation and tragedy. The individual and family stories of ‘going over’ to the Achill Mission would haunt an island people for generations to come.
***
In the depths of that same winter, a strange scene took place in Dugort when an Atlantic gale appeared as if it would drive the waves to the height of Slievemore itself. If Edward Nangle had relied largely, up to this stage, on scriptural schooling and preaching as the principal tools of his missionary work, he was now about to add another weapon to his armoury, signalled by the arrival of a novel cargo on the shores of north Achill. A printing press was safely delivered ashore, despite the lack of a local pier, and Achill witnessed the incongruous sight of children carrying parts of the equipment from shore to colony. Edward described the scenes in his journal.
Tuesday:
The hooker, with our printing press on board, came into the bay. It blew so hard that we could not land the cargo. The men on board the boat had much difficulty in mooring her: having secured her as best they could, they took to the small boat and, at the peril of their lives made for the shore, leaving the hooker to the mercy of the wind and waves. We expected that she would have broken from her moorings; however, her cable held fast, and towards evening the gale subsided, so that they were able to bring her out of the bay into harbour.
A 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