On 7 January 1867, after violent storms, Captain Garibaldi ran his brig ashore at Duneen Cove, Ardfield to conduct repairs. It was Monday afternoon, the light was clear, and Coastguard Carr watched her sail two points before the wind straight through the rocks and onto the sands. In fifteen minutes Carr was on the beach, and within the hour, so were two hundred others. A game began. Every time the tide rose, the people retreated, for the ship could not be reached; every time it fell, they swarmed forward. They entered the icy water, lifting each other on board and throwing down everything they could steal. For twenty-four hours, six coast guard and five police battled, night and day, to keep at bay a growing crowd of four hundred. The coastguard Captain Synge was sick in bed, and it was down to Chief Boatman Bridle to control matters, but he was late arriving.

Instead, Denis McCarthy Gallwey, arriving from Greenfield House shortly after Carr, hired a boat and with RIC Constable Shields rescued the crew. The Italian Captain barely spoke English, and could not understand that he must pay for the coastguard and police to protect his vessel. So Miss Annie Gallwey came from Greenfield to speak with him in French. As a result, the unfortunate man went up to Muckruss House and signed his entire ship and its cargo of coal over to Henry Baldwin Beamish Esq., landlord and magistrate. By now it was Tuesday afternoon. Henry’s first action was to dismiss the police. He appointed his four gentlemen sons and his elderly father-in-law to protect the vessel. The crowd swelled to five hundred. The ship began to ring as if attacked by fifty caulkers (Coastguard Carr’s statement). Even after 7 pm, ‘as high as the tide is they are still rapping at her’ (Cornelius Donovan’s words). By Wednesday, five hundred-weight (40 stone) of the sheet copper covering the hull had disappeared into the Muckruss mist.

Confusion arose as Captain Garibaldi changed his mind and handed the ship’s papers to the official agents Cummins of Queenstown. They arranged for its auction at Duneen on Monday 14^th. Henry purchased the coals. The ship was bought by the surveyor who had been contracted to value her; but he reconsidered on the way home, and Henry got her at a knockdown price.

The Board of Trade ordered an Inquiry, partly because on Thursday night the people had taken to stoning the coast guards from the cliff, and in response John Dooley (Dirk Cove Coastguard) and boatmen John Warren and his son fired their pistols at them in the dark (no-one was hurt). Mostly, it was because the coastguard had still not been paid. The ship made £154 5s 6d at the auction; but after the shipping agents, the auctioneer, Beamish and Gallwey had submitted their claims, all that was left to her Captain was four shillings. The largest claim – at £37 8s –  had been made by Henry Baldwin Beamish.

The investigators were a lawyer John Hughes, and young Captain Henry Duncan Grant RN, who had risen through the ranks, fighting his way through India when Lieutenant on HM Pearl, and captaining anti-slavery missions in the Caribbean. They came fresh from the Elizabeth Buckram, sunk off the Wirral, Liverpool. Their brief: to inquire into the chaos that arose when her cargo of raw rum washed ashore. One hundred and fifty people fought over the barrels. A house painter emptied his paint can, wiped it with grass, filled it with rum and fell face down into a puddle. He had to have his stomach pumped. A lady, tempted to a tot, was found insensible in the dunes, having been abused. Women were seen drinking from their boots. The scenes of debauchery were unspeakable. A gentleman and a hotel boot boy disappeared into the waves never to surface again. Grant became a teetotaller.

Now here he was in Clonakilty and clear in his sights was Henry Baldwin Beamish, dodgy Irish magistrate with a bunch of pampered sons. Captain Grant asked why Beamish had dismissed the police. To save money, said Henry. Did he think that the expenses of those men would have amounted to what he had claimed for his sons? “I do not know what you do in England,” said Henry “but here we do not expect gentlemen’s sons to be paid at the same rate as labourers.”

Henry was not helped by the intervention of his younger son Tom, who accused the police of drunkenness at two earlier wrecks on his father’s land; and turning a blind eye to plundering if offered little glasses of whiskey. Tom insisted that Cornelius Driscoll should be brought in as a witness. Faced with the formality of the Court, Cornelius said he could only tell his story in Irish; the interpreter was a policeman, and Tom’s case was lost. Henry quickly established that the earlier wrecks would not fall within the scope of the current investigation.

The Inquiry lasted five days. By the Third Day, Grant and Hughes had stripped away every veneer and had Beamish wriggling on a pin. Then Henry Baldwin Beamish rose to read his formal statement to the Clonakilty Court. With flamboyant elegance and little flourishes of language, he made five points. He had been appointed agent for the ship by the Captain, and had he not been ‘overruled and supplanted’ by Messrs. Cummins, things would have gone on nicely. This was his property, his land, his country and he was the magistrate in charge. His dismissal of the police demonstrated the profound moral influence he had over the people, perfectly sufficient to protect the ship. The police had better things to do as they were a military force, directed of course by him as magistrate. Further,

“I would wish to impress upon you that if you think by inverting society, by putting common officers in the place of gentlemen of proper intelligence and worth … and that if the magistrates of this country are degraded by imposing over them stipendiaries – I say that the glory of old England is set for ever! and her sister island will perish in the sea!

“I fear not your utmost! Do your business! I am here to set you at defiance! I know the rectitude of my conduct. I care as little about that petty business of the San Francisco and her value of £200 as I care for 200 pence! My son will be here, and we defy you!”

These were no idle threats. It was Saturday 6 April 1867 –  exactly one month since the Fenian Rising – and Irish courts everywhere were arresting and prosecuting the patriotic rebels. The British government was in no mood to upset local magistrates, especially now Lord Naas, Chief Secretary for Ireland, had extended the ‘Fenian Pay’ to all the magistracy – as well as the constabulary, railway and telegraph workers – to keep them ‘loyal’.

From that moment the Court was in Beamish’s hands. Grant made his acid report to the British House of Commons, and nothing further was done. Business as usual re-established around the Galley Head. What did that mean? Grant could not decide. Close examination of witness statements suggests a pact between Beamish and his locals: they got some, he got some. In this, Denis Gallwey and his sister Annie colluded. On 9 January Denis sent a telegram from Greenfield house to the London Standard falsely stating that the San Francisco’s back was broken. But what about their side of the Galley Head?

Denis was baronial high constable for Ibane and Barryroe, recommended by his uncles, lawyers for the Crown Prosecution. His was an immensely respectable family with a long history of smuggling. Grandfather Michael and sons controlled tenancies across Kilkerran, Ballylibert, Lisduff, Donoure, & Dundeady. Their published family history relates that Michael, a brewer, was nearly convicted in 1821 but for Lord Longueville’s intervention. Professor Frank Hodnett from Clonakilty quotes O’Donaghue’s words on the Gallweys, “Smugglers, all of them.”(3)

1. The San Francisco was one of four wrecks around the Galley Head on 6 & 7 January 1867. The other three mentioned in the Cork Examiner and Skibbereen and West Carbery Eagle, no survivors, only one identified: the St. Helena researched by the author.
2. The eleven crew took up residence in Cornelius Donovan’s ‘small house on the cliff’ (BOTW).
3. The Galweys & Gallweys of Munster by Sir Henry Blackall, revised by A Galwey & T Gallwey 2015.