Fact or Fiction – Ottoman Sultan Sent Ships to Aid Irish Famine 1847 | Season 6 – Episode 28

As we celebrate the legacy of Saint Patrick this week on Ireland Made – Stories of Irish Transport, we reflect on a remarkable story that combines fact and fiction and is deeply rooted in the folklore of Drogheda, County Louth. In 1847, Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid I made a sizeable cash donation of £1,000 (€150,000) for famine relief for the people of Ireland. Popular folklore in County Louth further holds that he went on to secretly dispatch three cargo ships to the port of Drogheda in May of that year, carrying food, medicine and seed to aid the Irish people.

FACT OR FICTION 

Our aim in this feature article is to separate the facts from the folklore that surrounds this well-known account. To bring together some of the verifiable details behind the story, we collaborated with the Deniz Müzesi Komutanlığı (Istanbul Naval Museum Command) and its affiliated institution the Türk Deniz Kuvvetleri Komutanlığı (Turkish Naval Forces Command).

THE GREAT FAMINE

From 1845 to 1852 was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland, striking hardest in the western and southern regions. The immediate cause was the spread across Europe of potato blight, the fungus Phytophthora infestans, which destroyed the crop on which many rural families depended. Seemingly unstoppable, the disease wiped out one third of the harvest that was practically the sole source of nourishment for more than three million of Ireland’s lower classes. This over reliance on the potato compounded the crisis. Contemporary estimates suggested that the average Irish male consumed about forty five potatoes a day, an average woman about thirty six and an average child around fifteen. On the eve of the famine Ireland’s population stood at about 8.5 million. During the crisis around one million people died and more than one million emigrated. Throughout this period, food continued to be exported from Ireland, then under British rule, a practice that would later become a source of significant political controversy. 

Despite the perceived indifference of the British authorities, the benevolent Ottoman Empire did not remain indifferent. In 1847, the most severe year of the famine, remembered as Black ’47, it has been suggested by Tom Verde, writing in Aramco World, that an Irish physician from Cork, Justin Washington McCarthy, who had served for more than a decade at the Ottoman court, appealed to Sultan Abdulmejid I to send aid to his starving countrymen.

THE HUMANITARIAN SULTAN

The thirty first Ottoman Sultan, Abdülmedjid I, was twenty four years old in 1847. Having come to the throne at sixteen, he reigned from 1839 to 1861 and ruled a vast empire stretching from Morocco across North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia.

Moved by the entreaties of Dr McCarthy, Abdülmedjid resolved to make a humanitarian gift 

and it is widely recorded that he had originally intended to donate £10,000, worth €1.5 million today but was advised by the English Ambassador, Lord Cowley, to reduce the sum, as Queen Victoria had eventually contributed £2,000 and a larger donation from a foreign sovereign may have risked placing her contribution in a lesser light. The Sultan’s contribution was therefore set at £1,000 worth €150,000 today. In the years that followed and amid continuing hardship across Ireland, sections of the Irish press would come to refer to Queen Victoria as “the Famine Queen.”

Interestingly, the Sultan’s donated sum may have been higher. According to Ahmet Öǧreten, assistant professor of history at Kastamonu University, an Ottoman archive document records a donation of 1,000 Turkish lira, not £1,000. The document refers to “Mosyo O’Brien,” possibly Sir Lucius O’Brien, who presented the Irish letter of thanks. At an 1847 exchange rate of £1.20 to one Ottoman lira, this equates to £1,200, or approximately €180,000 in today’s terms.

Research conducted by naval historians Hacer Bulgurcuoğlu and Müge Kiliçkaya Çölmekçi of the Istanbul Naval Museum Command, a number of contemporary documents relating to the Sultan’s donation have been identified.

The first document, located in the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey’s State Archives, records a thank-you visit on April 1st 1847 to the Sublime Porte (the central government and office of the Grand Vizier) by Stratford Canning the British Ambassador. The visit was made specifically to thank Sultan Abdülmecit on behalf of the British nation for the aid sent to Ireland. The ambassador was received only at the office of the Grand Vizier and was not granted an audience with the Sultan. During the visit he stated that Britain would formally express its gratitude to the Sultan in person at a suitable time, adding that for now they had conveyed the British government’s great gratitude indirectly.

 The second document identified by the naval historians concerns a supplementary letter written by the British Ambassador in Istanbul regarding a message sent by the Queen of England on 25 May 1847, which was submitted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for presentation to the Sultan.

The letter states that the financial aid sent by the Sultan was received with surprise, gratitude and great satisfaction by both the Queen and the British government, and expressed hope for continued close cooperation between the two states.

The final document located by the historians is a colourful, highly stylised vellum manuscript, decorated with shamrock and heather motifs, resembling a treaty rather than a simple letter of thanks. It concerns a message of gratitude sent to Sultan Abdülmecit by a large number of Irish gentry, thanking him for the £1,000 in aid given to the Irish people. The letter was carried to Istanbul by a man possibly named Sir Lucius O’Brien. Accompanied by embassy translators, he was granted an in-person audience with the Sultan and personally presented the document on Saturday, 26th May 1849. 

The letter presented to the Sultan by the Irish gentry contains the following words:

“To His Majesty Sultan Abdülmecit Han of the Turkish Empire;

A copy of this letter is also held in the National Library of Ireland. 

Our submission to Your Majesty,

Below are the signatures of the Irish noblemen, gentlemen and natives. In return for the generous benevolence and concern you have recently shown toward the suffering people of Ireland, we respectfully present our deepest gratitude and dare to thank Your Majesty with our most sincere respect for the £1,000 pound contribution made to meet the needs and alleviate the suffering of the Irish people. May God protect our country from all harm.”

“It deprived us of food; thus, a famine befell our people such as no civilized nation has ever experienced. In this time of hardship, the Irish, afflicted by this disaster, were forced to seek the aid of other countries less affected by the calamity, in order to save themselves and their families from starvation. Your Majesty responded to our plea, and in doing so, you set a valuable example to other great nations of Europe in helping suffering people. This timely and helpful assistance saved many from ruin. On behalf of the Irish people, we ask permission to express our deepest hopes that the vast lands that have accepted your sovereignty and joined in your blessings will not suffer the famine and suffering that has been our unfortunate fate.”

Other contributions from within the Ottoman Empire included a general collection taken up in Constantinople, amounting to £733, or approximately €110,000 in today’s terms, organised by the local chapter of the Conference of St Vincent de Paul. In 1847, further donations came from across the world, including contributions from street sweepers in India, while the Choctaw Native American people collected $170 for the people of Ireland, equivalent to around €6,000 today.

NOT UPSETTING QUEEN VICTORIA

From the research shared with us by the Turkish researchers, official records clearly show that Sultan Abdülmecit made a substantial cash donation to the Irish people through the British Embassy in Istanbul and his generosity was widely reported, with The Nenagh Guardian declaring “Irish Distress—Turkish Sympathy” on April 21st 1847, alongside coverage in The Times and the London Morning Post that same month. 

Interestingly the cash donation did not appear in Takvim-i Vekayi (Calendar of Events), the official Ottoman newspaper of the time, nor in the (Journal of the News), a publication founded by William Churchill that reported on domestic and foreign politics, trade and culture. 

Could it be that as Abdülmecit was prevented from donating his originally intended £10,000 so as not to upstage Queen Victoria, it is therefore plausible that as a humanitarian he still wished to do more for the starving people of Ireland, but without causing offence to the British, whose support he needed against Russian aggression in the Crimea and he may have secretly dispatched three cargo ships laden with aid as was reported in May 1847.

Neither the Turkish State Archives nor the Irish National Archives, nor the surviving shipping records for Drogheda Port from that period, provide confirmation of any shipment of famine relief provisions from the Ottoman Empire to Ireland.

However, contemporary local newspapers including the Drogheda Argus and the Drogheda Conservative carried reports between May 10th and 14th 1847 describing the arrival of three ships carrying relief supplies at Drogheda Port. Research by Irish historian Brendan Matthews, based on these newspaper reports, suggests that two foreign ships arriving from Thessaloniki and sailing up the River Boyne carried food to famine-stricken Drogheda. He identifies the vessels as Porcupine and The Ann, along with another ship, Alita, which is said to have transported wheat and corn from the Polish port of Szczecin to Drogheda. Reflecting on the circumstances, Matthews noted, “Records could not be kept at the port of Drogheda at that time. This timing fits the claim perfectly. The Ottoman Sultan may have sent these ships quietly to avoid upsetting the Queen of England; although the ships set sail on different dates, they arrived in Ireland at the same time.”

There are also other snippets of information adding to the secretive journey taken by the Sultan’s ships, author Ted Greene, in his commemorative volume Drogheda: Its Place in Ireland’s History makes the unattributed assertion that Queen Victoria “stepped in by preventing the ships entering, first Cobh [Cork], and then Belfast harbour but they finally succeeded to dock secretly in the small port of Drogheda and deliver the food”.

THE AID SHIPS

It is likely that the three ships reported to have sailed into the Port of Drogheda in 1847 were of very similar design and capacity; HMS Porcupine commanded by Captain Cleveland, The Ann under Captain Cloid sailing from Thessaloniki (Greece) and Atilia under Captain C. E. Meeluch arriving from Szczecin (Poland).

Looking more closely at HMS Porcupine, it was a Royal Navy three gun wooden paddle steamer built by Oliver Lang at Deptford Dockyard in 1844. The ship displaced about 490 tons and had an estimated cargo capacity of around 285 tons. It measured approximately 43 metres in length with a beam of 7.35 metres. Propulsion was provided by a two cylinder side levr steam engine producing about 285 horsepower, driving the vessel through paddle propulsion. The ship carried a crew of around 80 officers and men and was armed with one 32 pounder gun and two 32 pounder carronades.

In 1847, as the famine reached its most severe stage, Porcupine, along with other paddle steamers normally engaged in surveying work, were diverted to famine relief duties in Ireland and western Scotland.

Interestingly HMS Porcupine later gave its name to the Porcupine Bank, an area of seabed to the west of Ireland discovered during a scientific expedition in 1869, and named in honour of the vessel that carried out the survey.

THE FOLKLORE

To compound matters further a number of coincidental factors have combined to shape the folklore belief in a connection between the town of Drogheda and the Sultan’s three ships.

One often-cited example is the logo of the Drogheda Steam Packet Company, a green flag bearing a white five-pointed star above a crescent moon. While now commonly associated with Islamic heritage, the symbol was not derived from the Ottomans but from Drogheda’s own town crest, where the star and crescent have appeared since the late twelfth century. They were granted to the town by Richard the Lionheart in 1194, following his adoption of the emblem during the Third Crusade after capturing Cyprus in 1192.

The original motif combined the crescent of ancient Byzantium’s patron goddess Diana with the eight-pointed star of the Virgin Mary, and had been used by Byzantine rulers since the fourth century. It did not become associated with Islam until after the fourteenth century, and therefore has no direct connection to the Ottoman Sultan. In a similar overlap of seemingly unconnected symbols and coincidence, Drogheda incorporated the star and crescent into its municipal crest, where it remains today, appearing even on the jerseys of Drogheda United football club. 

In 1995, William Frank, then Mayor of Drogheda and a firm believer in the local folklore, marked the story of the Sultan’s ships landing aid in 1847 with a commemorative plaque over the entrance of the Drogheda Hotel, the same building believed to have housed Ottoman sailors from the three ships who landed the famine relief goods in Drogheda.

THE LAST WORD

We leave the final word on the Sultan’s ships said to have sailed into Drogheda in May 1847 to historian Brendan Matthews an expert on this story, who offers perspective on the convergence of fact and folklore surrounding the Sultan’s donation, his widely known humanitarian desire to do more, the long-standing symbols of Drogheda dating from the late twelfth century and the influences of  Ottoman sailors coming into Drogheda during the famine years.

“You had these ships coming in from the Ottoman Empire with Sardinian and Egyptian and Greek sailors on board, who were well aware of the star and crescent symbol of the Ottomans. You had 70,000 starving Irish people crowding the quay in search of work, or food, or a way to get out of the country. And then you had these local ships flying a flag with the star and crescent, which the Ottoman sailors could readily identify with,” Matthews observes.

He suggests that these circumstances may have given rise to a spontaneous humanitarian gesture, with sailors possibly sharing some of their grain directly with the starving population, whether out of compassion or a sense of connection with a port where the star and crescent was already a familiar symbol. “Perhaps they gave them 100 bags of food? Twenty bags of grain, to feed 100 families? Something happened that led to this story in our oral history: that in this time of crisis, we got food from the Turkish people,” according to Matthews.

Over time, as the story was passed from generation to generation, Matthews believes it became embellished, evolving into accounts of “secret” ships and the supposed “adoption” of the “Turkish” star and crescent by grateful town officials.

Fact or fiction, the 1847 donation by Sultan Abdulmejid I in Ireland’s time of need helped to forge a lasting bond between Ireland and Turkey that endures to this day.

My thanks to my father John Reid for suggesting this story

Sources of Information, Photo, Video & Music Credits: 

All music and sound effects used in Ireland Made – Stories of Irish Transport are royalty free and are fully licensed through Epidemic Sound. Ireland Made – Stories of Irish Transport therefore holds the legal right to use this audio material within its productions under the terms of the Epidemic Sound licensing agreement. 

BOA., İ.HR. 40-1888.

BOA., İ.HR. 54-2538.

Brian MacCraith – X Account

Drogheda: Its Place in Ireland’s History – Ted Greene

Drogheda Port Company

Merve Doğan Kader- Kezban Acar Kaplan, “Reflections of the Irish Potato Famine in the Ottoman Press (1845-1852)”, Journal of Historical Studies, XXXVI/2, 2021, p. 510.

Nurettin Tokdemir – photo credit 

Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye State Archives Directorate (BOA.), I.HR. 39-1847.

The original thank-you note is registered in BOA., MIL.E.1-1.

The Express 

Bibliography

Republic of Turkey Presidency State Archives Directorate Ottoman Archives

BOA., İ.HR. 39-1847.

BOA., İ.HR. 40-1888.

BOA., İ.HR. 54-2538.

BOA., MİL.E.1-1.

Theses and Articles

An Irish Tale of Hunger and the Sultan – Tom Verde – Aramco World

BAYĞIN, Akif, Ireland-England Relations (1845-1852), Hatay Mustafa Kemal University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of History, Master’s Thesis, Hatay 2019.

DOĞAN, Merve, The Irish War of Independence in the Ottoman/Turkish Press (1919-1921), Master’s Thesis, Department of History, Institute of Social Sciences, Celal Bayar University, Manisa 2014.

Drogheda & The Turkish Ships of 1847 – Brendan Matthews

KADER, Merve D. – KAPLAN, Kezban A., “Reflections of the Irish Potato Famine in the Ottoman Press (1845-1852)”, Journal of Historical Studies, XXXVI/2, 2021, pp.497-526.

Merve Doğan Kader-Kezban Acar Kaplan, op. cit., p. 513.

Merve Doğan Kader-Kezban Acar Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 510-511.

Merve Doğan, The Irish War of Independence in the Ottoman/Turkish Press (1919-1921), T.C. Celal Bayar

Ottoman ships on the Boyne – New evidence for the ‘myth’ – Irish Independent 

University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of History, Master’s Thesis, Manisa 2014, p. 21.

YAMAÇ, Müzehher, “Famine in Ireland and Ottoman Aid”, Journal of Anglo-Turkish Relations, Volume 6 Number 1 January 2025, pp. 107-138.