Overview
Chronicle of an Irish coffin ship journey. The voyage of the 'coffin ship' the Ajax, from Dublin to Grosse Ile, the Canadian quarantine station described in the contemporary diary of one of the passengers, Robert Whyte.
Whyte was a Protestant gentleman of education and positions as well as being a professional writer who intended to publish his diary. The diary appeared in 1848. It is signed in the author's own handwriting and features vivid descriptions of the spectacular scenery along the way and striking delineations of the passengers, the crew and the suffering travellers. Brother James Mangan, a distant relative of James Clarence Mangan, was born on July 26, 1907 at Admaston, Ontario. His elementary schooling was at a little red schoolhouse near the village of Eganville and Douglas. He attended high school at De La Salle College, Aurora, Ontario. There, deciding to become a De La Salle Brother, he spent a year of spiritual training, a year called a novitiate. This was followed by two years of scholasticate, years of study. James had the choice of spending the second year with a French-speaking group in a college in Montreal. Here he became bilingual.