ABSTRACT
“The brig St. John, from Galway, Ireland, laden with emigrants, was wrecked on Sunday morning.” So writes Henry David Thoreau in “The Shipwreck,” an essay about his American encounter with the Irish Famine. It takes place in 1849 in Cohasset, eight years after and eighty miles away from Frederick Douglass’s debut speech. Thoreau’s dispassionate meditation on the St. John tragedy is in keeping with the Emersonian tradition that John Carlos Rowe calls “aesthetic dissent”; that is, “the romantic idealist assumption that rigorous reflection on the processes of thought and representation constitutes in itself a critique of social reality and effects a transformation of the naïve realism that confuses truth with social convention”. With regard to the nearly 2 million Irish who sailed to North America in the Famine years, many of whom were from the subaltern class, the answer is a resounding “no.” Only two “eyewitness” accounts of such crossings appear to exist, both of highly questionable origins.
