Sit right back and I'll tell the tale, the tale of a fateful trip

After many years of searching barely-legible ship passenger lists, I have finally found the vessel that brought my mother's ancestors to this country from Ireland: the S.S. England of the National Steam Navigation Company.

And, thanks to fellow enthusiast/researcher Joe Miller, I have been able to find out a lot about the ship.

For instance, she was built by the Palmer brothers of Jarrow-on-Tyne, England, with a gross tonnage of 3,308, measuring 375.5 by 42.5 feet. She had an iron hull, one smokestack, and three masts. Her screw propulsion system allowed her to ply the North Atlantic at the dizzying speed of 10 knots.

The Palmers launched her 24 June 1865, and she made her maiden voyage for the National Line on 7 February 1866. Her home port was Liverpool, and her regular route for the next thirty years included a brief stop at Queenstown, Ireland, before reaching her final destination in New York City.

She could handle 80 first-class passengers. But, my Gleeson ancestors were among the 800 poor souls crammed into steerage. Fortunately, they arrived in New York without incident on 18 May 1867.

Joe Miller's ancestors were not so lucky. They sailed the previous spring, and had to be briefly quarantined off the coast of Nova Scotia due to a cholera outbreak. Such were the perils of transatlantic immigration in the 19th Century, I suppose.

Anyway, the England continued to chug between Britain and New York for three decades with only a brief interruption from 1867-1868, when Queen Victoria drafted her to serve as a troop transport in an almost-forgotten war against Abyssinia.

Sadly, she was scrapped in 1896. But, thanks to people like Joe Miller, her memory survives. And, I'm using a link from his website to order a replica of a contemporary print.