As I said yesterday, today was a very busy day! Today I had the pleasure of visiting Cobh (formerly spelled and currently pronounced Cove), it was re-named to Queenstown for Queen Victoria during her visit in 1849, the name was then changed to Cobh in 1920 during the Irish War of Independence. A coastal city with a lot of history. I scheduled a walking tour here, otherwise I might have only gotten to experience Cork, which would’ve been a real shame as Cobh is delightful! I naturally started the day with a scone and a tea, I Googled the night before and found a place called Cuppacity. I also found a free parking spot, and when I read the warnings about it being at the top of a large hill I shrugged it off, I mean it’s FREE parking, a little hill never hurt anyone (famous last words). The “hill” was crazy large, when we were in Belfast our taxi driver warned us we might not like Derry because it was really hilly… let me tell you, the hills in Cobh make Derry look flat. But it was absolutely gorgeous, and an excellent workout, so I only complained a little to myself about having to walk up and down that hill twice…. anyway, back to breakfast. So I walked all the way down the hill to the town center to find Cuppacity, I walked past a cute little cafe because I was set on this place (lesson learned, next time I’m walking past a scone place to go to another scone place, I’m just going to stop at the first place) while the scone at Cuppacity was ok, it was probably my least favorite scone I’ve had so far… it had raisins in it… and that was the only option. Also they didn’t have cream, just pre-packaged butter, and while Irish butter is delectable and better than most other toppings, when you want clotted cream it’s just not the same.

So after the slight disappointment with breakfast (only slight, because even a disappointing scone is better than no scone). I made my way to the Heritage Center where the tour was to meet, I passed the Cobh Titanic Museum and remembered reading about that in one of my travel books, so I decided that if there was time after my walking tour I would pop in there for the tour, might as well complete the Titanic cycle :). I met up with my tour guide Kieran and two very nice people from the Netherlands who had just gotten off the cruise ship the Norwegian Dawn, apparently Cobh is a popular cruise ship destination (makes sense why it was the final stop for the Titanic). I overheard one of the shopkeepers say that the Norwegian Dawn was the 91st cruise of the season to dock in Cobh and there was one more expected before the end of the year. The tour was called the Rebel Walking Tour, I booked it through AirBnB, and it was excellent. We went through the tumultuous history of the city and walked around, it is very interesting how The Troubles and the Irish rebellion was such a country-wide movement that even one of the Southernmost cities was deeply involved. One of the most interesting stories to me was how the rebels in the city would obtain weapons. They made a habit of befriending soldiers who were nursing their beers (meaning they couldn’t afford another) and then they would ply them with alcohol and either 1) steal their weapon, 2) talk the soldier into giving them their weapon, or 3) buy the weapon from the soldier. Their preferred method was actually buying the weapon, so then the soldier would go flash the money around and other soldiers would want to sell them their weapons too. This worked out for both parties because it was very common for soldiers to get mugged by the rebels, so they could just tell their superior officers they were mugged.

At the start of the tour we learned about how the Irish republicans (the rebels) attempted to overthrow British rule with the help of the Germans. They planned the 1916 Easter Rebellion and some of the leaders went to Germany to try to recruit help from the POWs that the Germans captured (Irish citizens were fighting with the British Army). There were about 1200 Irish POWs but of those, only 55 signed up to help, which was very discouraging to the Germans who said that if they couldn’t even get their own people to fight then the Germans didn’t want to send their men to fight. They did however agree to send weapons, and a group of Germans (listed on the Roll of Honor above) volunteered to bring the weapons to Ireland. Unfortunately for the Irish (but fortunately for the rest of the world) the shipment of weapons that was supposed to arrive in Tralee on Easter Sunday for the Easter Rising, landed 24 hours early and no one knew to look for the weapons then, so the ship was spotted by a British ship and escorted to Cobh, the ship was sailing under the Norwegian flag to disguise it since Norway was a neutral country, but as it was being escorted into the Cobh harbor (fun fact: this is the second largest natural harbor in the world, second only to the Sydney harbor) the flags changed from Norwegian flags to German flags, and the British soldiers watched the ship starting to sink, having been scuttled by the crew.

I find it completely fascinating that this one event very likely changed the entire course of history. If the weapons had made it safely to Tralee and been delivered to the hands of the IRA, the Irish would likely have had more of a fighting chance to win their revolution, and the British would’ve likely been forced to pull troops off the front lines fighting the Germans to send them to fight the Irish, giving the Germans more of a chance to win since they had recently signed a ceasefire with the Russians and were moving all of their troops to fight the British and the French. The US wouldn’t join the war until the next year, so if the Easter Rising had been a success, then Germany might’ve had a chance to win the war before the US joined. Of course that begs the question, if the Germans won WWI, would there have even been a WWII? Hitler probably would not have come to power if it weren’t for the German defeat in WWI. Of course there’s no way to know if anything would’ve actually changed, or if Germany would’ve just felt empowered to start invading other countries, it’s not even certain that Britain would’ve pulled her troops from the German front, maybe they would’ve just let Ireland go for the greater good. But it is a very interesting thing to think through, what would the world look like without WWII… without Pearl Harbor… what if WWI really was the war to end all wars.

Sorry for the tangent, as mentioned above, that colorful row of houses is the most photographed street in Cobh. the houses are known as the Deck of Cards, because of the way that they’re stacked, which resembles a house of cards. Our tour guide was nice enough to shoot some photos of us in front of the deck of cards. The little park we took the photos from has a little memorial in it dedicated to the men who signed the Irish Declaration of Independence.

After the walking tour I hopped over to the Titanic Museum for a tour. When you check-in you get a little boarding pass with a name on it, the name is one of the 123 passengers who boarded the Titanic from Cobh (Queenstown at the time). Of the 123 passengers, only 44 survived the sinking of the Titanic. Fortunately, in spite of being a Third Class passenger, my passenger, 16 year old Ellen Corr survived the sinking. She was on her way to New York to join her sisters who already lived there. She went on to live a long life and died at the age of 84 in 1980. While this museum is much smaller than the Titanic Museum in Belfast, it is very interesting tour and you get a picture of what life was like on the Titanic. Another really cool thing about this tour is that the tour is in the old White Star Line ticket office, so you’re literally walking in the steps that the passengers of the Titanic would’ve walked in. My favorite stories, which I actually heard from both the tour guide at the museum, and my walking tour guide, were about two gentlemen who actually made it off the ship. One was Father Francis Browne who received the ticket to travel from Southampton, England, to Queenstown, Ireland, as a gift from his uncle, Robert Browne, the Bishop of Cloyne who lived in Queenstown. Francis Browne made some wealthy friends in First Class aboard the ship, and they invited him to come to America with them, offering to pay his passage. He had to get permission from his Bishop (who happened to be his uncle Robert) so he telegraphed and told him of their offer, he received a one sentence reply “GET OFF THAT SHIP”. So he got off and survived, and not only did he survive, but his camera also came off with him, preserving the most complete and important collection of photographs of the Titanic. A lot of the scenes in the movie Titanic were based off of these photos. While this is an excellent story, my favorite story was by far about John Coffey, who was a stoker aboard the Titanic. He was from Cobh and when the Titanic docked there before heading out, he said he got a very bad feeling about the ship and wanted to get off. He told his boss he wasn’t feeling well and since they were docked in his home town he wanted to get off the ship, but his boss said he had signed a contract and wasn’t allowed to leave, so Coffey (along with some help from his friends onboard) stuffed himself in a mailbag and was offloaded from the ship with the mail. Therefore escaping a very likely death. I very much enjoyed this tour (well both tours) and recommend it if you’re in the area (and you should be if you come to Ireland because Cobh is definitely worth a visit!)

My only regret in Cobh is that I didn’t get a chance to get over to Spike Island. This was the prison colony for Cobh where people were sent for all sorts of crimes and were either kept there or sent to Australia from there. But alas, this was a day of part two tours and I had scheduled a tour of the Jameson Distillery just down the road in Midleton. This is where the actual distilling of Jameson takes place so I was excited for a more in depth tour than what we got in Dublin (don’t get me wrong, that tour was great, but there’s something about actually smelling the whiskey while it’s maturing in the barrels). I will say the tasting on this tour was slightly disappointing. If you’ll recall in Dublin we sampled three types of Jameson, the OG Jameson, Jameson Crested, and Jameson Black Barrel. On this tour we sampled Jameson, a Scotch (Johnny Walker), and an American Whiskey (Jack Daniels). It would be one thing if it were a game (like can you pick out the Jameson), but it was really just a “notice the differences” thing, and frankly if I wanted to sample Jack Daniels I wouldn’t go on a Jameson tour. Other than that though it was a very good tour, and I even purchased a bottle of Jameson Black Barrel that I got to pour directly from the barrel, and I got to sign a ledger and write a message to my future self. The ledger will be stored for 20 years so I can come back and visit it later.