OUR tour of Ireland continued today, but before we could check into our Cork hotel and explore the southern city we drove to the harbour-side settlement of Cobh to do a walking tour with a local historian.
Cobh – it’s pronounced Cove – is an important place in Irish history because, as our guide Michael Martin explained, it’s been ``visited, invaded, arrived at and departed from’’ for literally dozens of centuries.
In the years since 1000BC the Phoenicians, Celts, Normans, Vikings and British Navy have come and gone – some more peacefully than others – but it was an event that happened in 1912 that put this place on the map.
Cobh was the last place the Titanic stopped before pointing her bow towards New York and heading into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean, anchoring at the heads of Cork Harbour for 90 minutes on April 11 to take on passengers and mail.
Seven passengers disembarked that day, including Father Francis Brown who was the Jesuit priest that spent 24 hours on the ship as she travelled from Southampton to Cobh and took the only surviving photos of ship-board life on the inaugural voyage.
Cobh hasn’t changed much in the 99 years since Titanic visited, and today visitors can walk in the footsteps of the 123 souls that boarded the ship that afternoon when she was tied up in the mouth of the harbour just beyond Spike Island, and look at the view they saw as they headed out to the vessel.
The White Star office is still there (above left), as is the wooden wharf they stood on to climb down to the tenders (above right), and many of the buildings that line the front street are the guest houses those passengers spent their last night on land in.
The last person to get off Titanic as she steamed away from Cobh and the Irish coast was pilot John Cotter, and his house still stands in a cluster of colourful terraces on the side of a slope).
Cotter's house isn't far from the place you can stand to look through a break in the fence and see the gap in the land past Spike Island where Titanic anchored on April 11.
"After Jamestown was established in 1607 a steady stream of ships began to make the journey back and forth between Britain and the United States, and Cove Harbour was the last large safe port of call before they headed out into the Atlantic," historian Michael Martin explained as we walked.
"All the big cruise lines had an office here – White Star, Cunard, Holland American – and Cobh became the O’Hare Airport of yesteryear, it was the hub of trans-Atlantic traffic.
"More than half the immigrants who went to America during the Famine left from Cobh, and even some of the convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land went from here, so that history has endowed this place with a strong military, maritime and immigration history.
"Walking around Cobh it’s easy to peel back the layers of history."
As we walked along the Cobh’s main street Michael explained that the buildings in the bowl around the old wharf haven’t changed since 1912, and the only addition to the skyline is the steeple at the church on the hill above the town.
We strolled the same footpath the Titanic passengers walked along as they headed to the White Star office to check in for their journey – the first and second-class customers got to go inside, the steerage travellers were processed outside – and saw the memorial to those who died when the great ship sank.
Titanic isn’t the only doomed passenger ship with a link to Cobh – the Cunard vessel Lusitania sank off the Old Head of Kinsale, not far from Cork Harbour, when she was hit by the torpedo fired from a German U-boat on May 7, 1915.
The grand ship, which was making her 202nd trans-Atlantic crossing at the time, was near the end of her journey from New York to Liverpool when stalked by the submarine and she sank in just 18 minutes after the torpedo hit her starboard side.
Almost 2000 people died that day, with a band of brave Cobh mariners venturing out to rescue 700 passengers who managed to get away from the vessel before is disappeared below the surface, and the sinking of the civilian Cunard vessel was the event that bough the United States into the Great War.
There’s a monument to the Lusitania in Cobh’s town square, with the memorial celebrating the town’s fishermen and mariners who volunteered to brave the dangerous waters to rescue the survivors.
