Ouzel Galley - The Ouzel Galley in History and Literature

The Ouzel Galley in History and Literature

No contemporary accounts of the Ouzel Galley’s adventures survive. The earliest reliable reference is found in Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh’s History of Dublin (1818): “Early in the year 1700, the case of a ship in the port of Dublin excited much controversy and legal perplexity, without being drawn to a satisfactory conclusion.”

In 1876 the story was made the subject of a novel by the prolific but little-known writer W. H. G. Kingston: The Ouzel Galley, or Notes From an Old Sea Dog. In this book, the Ouzel is indeed commandeered by pirates - but in the Caribbean, not North Africa. And when she returns to Dublin there is no booty in her hold. Kingston is known to have visited Dublin in 1856 and 1857, and was a cousin of Sir John K. James, a long-standing member of the Ouzel Galley Society, so it is quite possible that he was privy to “the secret history” of the vessel. Furthermore, Sir John died in 1875, one year before the appearance of Kingston’s novel, which has led some historians to speculate that Kingston had agreed not to publish his account while Sir John was still alive precisely because his scandalous account contains much that is true.

In 1904 C. Litton Falkiner mentioned “piratical spoils” among the Ouzel’s cargo in his Illustrations of Irish History and Topography.

James Joyce alludes to the Ouzel Galley in his final work Finnegans Wake (1939): “or carried of cloud from land of locust, in ouzel galley borne....”

In 1940 another novelisation of the story appeared by the Irish surgeon, George Aloysius Little. The Ouzel Galley does draw on earlier accounts of the ship, but it is as much a flight of fancy as it is an historical novel.