Today is the 129 anniversary of the death of James Costigan, the first of my Irish ancestors to come to Canada. He seems to have arrived in 1850. He worked first as a labourer, then as a saloon keeper at 4 North Street. This was right on the waterfront. It was at a very rough 19th century commercial waterfront with all that entails. He later converted that business to a sailors' boarding house. Most of his income, however, derived from crimping, which was the illegal practice of inducing seaman to desert the ships they arrived on in order to serve on departing ships.
This is his tombstone.
If you try to remove the moss and lichens on the surface, the rock tends to come with it. It says he died on August 24, 1886. It also says he was a native of Bantry, Ireland.
There has always been a whiff of scandal associated with the man but I don't think many in the family knew that he was a crimp or what a crimp was. As a result, they tended to project their worst fears onto him. Most assumed the scandal was related to his dealings in liquor. I do have at least one (female) relative who is terrified I am going to end up proving he was running a whorehouse. I doubt that very much but it tells you something about how the Irish mind works.
What's more, I suspect that while crimping cannot be explained away, it is less of a scandal than we might imagine if properly understood. Like piracy, crimping can only exist when aided and abetted by governments that either 1) pass stupid laws that inadvertently make it more prosperous than it otherwise would have been or 2) corruptly look the other way because they think they benefit from the existence of the trade. I think Saint John did both in the 19th century.
There is also an Irish tendency to make history into "the past". What I mean is that there is a tendency in Irish families like mine to make every tale serve a moral purpose. The crimping trade served the family well until the age of steam came and made it unnecessary. Family fortunes declined after that. There was also a terrible decade of death between 1900 and 1910 that, as near as I can figure out killed off the entire family save for a few women. My suspicion is that they started telling a tale of the family's decline that put it to moral failures of James and his eldest son Denis rather than new technology.
By the time I came along, the family had successfully climbed it's way into the upper middle class and they no longer wanted to talk about the man or of the moral failures they used to attribute to him. That, I think, is why I and my siblings and cousins only picked up a whiff of scandal. The people who knew (my grandparents' generation) didn't want to open that door and the people who didn't (my parents' generation) were left to imagine what the scandal might be and they projected their worst fears into the vacuum.
I don't want to justify the way James and Denis made their living but I think it has a certain romance about it and I am not immune to romance.
This is his tombstone.
If you try to remove the moss and lichens on the surface, the rock tends to come with it. It says he died on August 24, 1886. It also says he was a native of Bantry, Ireland.
There has always been a whiff of scandal associated with the man but I don't think many in the family knew that he was a crimp or what a crimp was. As a result, they tended to project their worst fears onto him. Most assumed the scandal was related to his dealings in liquor. I do have at least one (female) relative who is terrified I am going to end up proving he was running a whorehouse. I doubt that very much but it tells you something about how the Irish mind works.
What's more, I suspect that while crimping cannot be explained away, it is less of a scandal than we might imagine if properly understood. Like piracy, crimping can only exist when aided and abetted by governments that either 1) pass stupid laws that inadvertently make it more prosperous than it otherwise would have been or 2) corruptly look the other way because they think they benefit from the existence of the trade. I think Saint John did both in the 19th century.
There is also an Irish tendency to make history into "the past". What I mean is that there is a tendency in Irish families like mine to make every tale serve a moral purpose. The crimping trade served the family well until the age of steam came and made it unnecessary. Family fortunes declined after that. There was also a terrible decade of death between 1900 and 1910 that, as near as I can figure out killed off the entire family save for a few women. My suspicion is that they started telling a tale of the family's decline that put it to moral failures of James and his eldest son Denis rather than new technology.
By the time I came along, the family had successfully climbed it's way into the upper middle class and they no longer wanted to talk about the man or of the moral failures they used to attribute to him. That, I think, is why I and my siblings and cousins only picked up a whiff of scandal. The people who knew (my grandparents' generation) didn't want to open that door and the people who didn't (my parents' generation) were left to imagine what the scandal might be and they projected their worst fears into the vacuum.
I don't want to justify the way James and Denis made their living but I think it has a certain romance about it and I am not immune to romance.
No comments:
Post a Comment