3. NINETEENTH-CENTURY CORK SUTTON MARINERS
The West Cork Suttons were late arrivals in Ireland and the first Sutton recorded in this area of the county of Cork was Robert Sutton, vicar of Desertserges and Kilbrogan in 1615. The male first name choices over the next couple of centuries would remain similar, suggesting the West Cork Sutton families came from a common stock and were quite separate from the Suttons of Wexford. While the West Cork families were employed in a variety of endeavours, one branch of the West Cork Suttons became merchant mariners.
From Ring to Cork City by way of Kinsale (c.1790 – 1830)
Many of the harbours of West Cork suffered from a process of sedimentation that began after the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago. It is possible that the tsunami resulting from the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 may have accelerated this process but unfortunately no documentary proof of this exists. A major Irish historian of the period, Lewis, writing in 1832 does not mention it. However, a certain amount of folklore has been passed down, such as the destruction of the Inishannon bridge by the wave of the tsunami and the consequential limiting of up- river passage to Collier’s Quay, three kilometres below Inishannon. At Clonakilty it was probably long-term sedimentation rather than an extreme weather event that caused cargo to be landed at the outer harbour of Ring, one mile below the town and mostly ferried in and out of the town by smaller vessels. Channel maintenance was carried out by sandlighters (Appendix 6: Ports of Clonakilty, Courtmacsherry, Kinsale and Bandon; Sandlighters). Changes in the fortunes of the West Cork ports, whether caused by silting or tsunami, were reflected in the nineteenth-century crew lists which document very few mariners from Bandon and Timoleague, while Kinsale, Courtmacsherry and Clonakilty supplied seamen in considerable numbers. The Suttons, as successful entrepreneurs, gravitated from their local port of Clonakilty to the larger centre of Kinsale and finally to the busiest port in the county, Cork.
Ring
The silting of Clonakilty Bay saw the Sutton mariners come to reside in Ring at the turn of the nineteenth century. They had their own pier at Ring harbour in 1822: ’where they unloaded coal, timber, fertilizer and animal f eedstuffs for Clonakilty and surrounding areas’ (Kingston 2017). Later in the nineteenth century the Suttons sent their coal horses from Cork city to Ring to recuperate during the summer months. Ring was such a successful harbour at the end of the eighteenth century that other local ports were detrimentally affected. An article in the Hibernian Chronicle (1786) reported that: A mob of ruffians was dispatched to Ring in the dead of night by unscrupulous merchants from the towns of Kinsale and Bandon. They burned the mills and warehouses and even boarded the schooners anchored in the bay, cutting down the masts of several of them.
It was here, at Ring, that the first generation of Suttons, Robert Sutton (b.1761) and Catherine Murphy (b.1772) had five mariner sons. These were Nathaniel (b.1794), Thomas (b.1797/98),
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