Titanic Tuesdays: Message in a Bottle

Those of you who have read Destined may recognize the following name, but if you haven’t read it yet, it won’t spoil anything. Jeremiah Burke is mentioned towards the end of the book, and his story given briefly. But because he interests me so much, I wanted to expand on it a little.

Jeremiah Burke (age 19) and his cousin, Nora Hegarty (age 18), from County Cork, Ireland, sailed on the Titanic in third class from Queenstown (now known as Cobh). Jeremiah was traveling to the United States to join two of his sisters who were already living there, while Nora was on her way to join a convent. They nearly avoided the tragedy, however, because their initial intent was to sail on another ship. According to his grandniece, Brid O’Flynn McSwiney, in an article from the Cork News, Jeremiah went to buy their tickets a month in advance, with the intent to sail on an earlier ship. But he knew the girl at the ticket counter, and she advised him to wait a few weeks for the Titanic. (An alternate account says Jeremiah’s mother bought the tickets.) Sadly, both he and Nora perished in the sinking. Their families waited for weeks afterwards for news, but never received any, and neither body was recovered (or at least, never identified).

Before heading off for the ship, Jeremiah’s mother gave him a holy water bottle filled with Lourdes water. In those days, this sort of thing was an important gift, something that would be treasured. Yet a year later, an off-duty Royal Irish Constabulary officer was walking his dog along the river near Cork Harbour, and spotted a bottle on the shore. It was an empty holy water bottle, and inside was the following note:

13/4/1912 from Titanic, Goodbye all: Burke of Glanmire, Co. Queenstown

Given the date, the message and the fact that the bottle was not something he would have tossed overboard on a whim, most came to the conclusion that Jeremiah wrote the message as the ship was sinking, put it in the bottle and threw it in the water. How it made it back to not only Ireland, but very near to where the Burke family lived, will always be a mystery. According to Brid, “Over the years people have suggested that he could have thrown it out at Cobh. He could have, but it’s unlikely that if your mother gave you a holy water bottle, you would fling it out there. The note was in blue pencil and in very distinctive handwriting. The bottle was something that his Mother had given him as a special memento - going to Lourdes at the time was huge thing - so it wouldn’t have been thrown away as a flippant action.” In a sad twist to the story, Jeremiah’s mother died shortly after the note was found.

An interesting note: in the same article, Brid mentions that while her grandfather (William, Jeremiah’s brother) never returned to Cobh (Queenstown), he would often visit a Titanic survivor, Eugene Daly, who remembered meeting Jeremiah on the tender that ferried them on board the ship. Eugene is also featured briefly in Destined: he is the third class man Apolline sees out on the stern of the ship, playing an Irish tune (“Erin’s Lament”) on his pipes as the ship leaves port at Queenstown.

You can see photos of Jeremiah and the his note in this article at thejournal.ie. Until recently, the bottle was in the possession of Nora Hegarty’s family while the letter was with Jeremiah’s, but it looks like the Burkes donated the letter to the Cobh Heritage Centre a few months ago.

There’s one more thing I can’t resist noting: if anyone watched the Curiosity special on the Discovery Channel a few months back entitled “What Sank Titanic?”, there is a brief allusion to this story at the end. Unfortunately, the special wasn’t quite as factual as I’d have liked, and among the errors and fictionalizations, Jeremiah’s note was attributed to a greaser from England named Frank Goree. In the documentary, Goree climbed up the ship’s dummy 4th funnel, finished off a bottle of liquor, then wrote the note, stuffed it in and chucked the bottle into the water. It made for a more dramatic picture, I’m sure, but since I knew the true story of that note, I can’t deny it bugged me a little that they gave Jeremiah’s story to someone else. They also got the time of the sinking wrong (they said she sunk at 2:02, not 2:20), which is hardly a minor detail! That said, it is a very interesting and enjoyable special, as long as you don’t expect 100% accuracy from it. Heck, even the James Cameron movie wasn’t 100% accurate (and neither is Destined for that matter. We all take small liberties when trying to entertain.). If you’d like to watch it, and have an hour and a half to spare, it’s on YouTube in HD.

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