04/03/2026
In September 1884, HMS Wasp attempted to aid in an eviction on an impoverished island off Co. Donegal.
It was a mission that ended in disaster
Built for a princely £50,000 four years earlier, the 450-ton vessel was equipped with two 64-pounder rifled cannons.
On this occasion, fifty-six crewmen were aboard on their way to the tiny island of Inishtrahull, Ireland’s most northerly inhabited point.
The island was desperately poor and had a population of just fifty people at the time (It would be completely depopulated by the 1920s).
Nevertheless, the landlord, Robert Bateson Harvey, informed authorities that he was owed a cumulative £76 in rent and it was decreed that three families would be evicted.
HMS Wasp was chosen as the ship to enforce the order and it duly left Westport, Co. Mayo where it had been berthed.
The conditions were somewhat windy but visibility was clear on the morning of Monday 22 September, 1884.
Many of the senior offices were asleep and it was later reported that the fire had gone out on the ship and it was being powered by sail alone rather than steam.
Unusually, it was decided to sail east of Tory Island, between it and the mainland, rather than going around it as would have been more common for a large vessel. This would prove a fatal mistake.
Some time after 3am, an alarmed crew member pointed out that the vessel appeared to be too close to the north end of Tory Island.
An effort to change direction was attempted but proved too slow and the ship struck a rock just forty yards north of the lighthouse.
The initial impact broke the hull in two and water began to flow in immediately at an alarming rate.
As the crewmen attempted to get into the lifeboats, disaster struck when the boat again collided with rock. The boat was submerged in just fifteen minutes and all the crew ended up in the sea.
Although they were within sight of land, just six managed to make their way onto nearby jagged rocks while fifty others perished in the Atlantic waters.
The survivors struggled up the cliff edge and made their way to the lighthouse.
Fatigued and suffering from shock, they were well treated but forced to stay on Tory for four nights as boats could not be sent out to rescue them from the mainland due to the terrible weather conditions.
The six men were eventually brought to the mainland by a navy frigate HMS Valiant, another notorious evicting gunboat, when weather conditions were more favourable.
Over the following weeks, about forty bodies washed on shore, most on Tory Island. Many were initially interred there, although later exhumed due to there being no Protestant consecrated ground on the island.
Although a later inquiry into the sinking of HMS Wasp placed no blame on any one person, it did state that the sinking had been the result of negligence and poor navigation. And it seems doubtless that these played a role.
There were other theories, however.
An oft-repeated tale was that the islanders had believed that the vessel was coming to conduct evictions on Tory Island, something which caused them to turn off the light of the lighthouse, an act which disorientated the navigators on the Wasp.
Whether or not this is true, the ship would not have been welcomed. As The Donegal News reported in 1914:
‘The Tory islanders pay no rates or taxes, maintaining that they have no roads, no dispensary or resident medical practitioner. Woe betide the bailiff who dare set foot on Tory.’
A more fantastical story stated that the local people had turned the ancient cursing stone on their island, Cloch na Mallacht, to curse the ship.
Regardless of the cause of the catastrophe, the question of why the ship was off the coast of Donegal at all that night is worth considering.
The Porcupine, a newspaper from Liverpool, wrote of the tragedy:
‘It seems that the main reason the Wasp left her place of safety to brave the storm was in order that she might convey an evicting party to Inishtrahull.
It is horrible to think that fifty strong men, men who might at a pinch protect their country, have sacrificed their lives on a mission so dishonouring.
So long as Irish landlords can keep yachts and spend the season in London, they can well afford to pay their own lawyers’ bill, without you and I sending our ships of war to evict their tenants and save their expenses.'
Pictured is the sinking of HMS Wasp, taken from the Illustrated London News.
