sea hurled the helpless boat. When she delivered a healthy baby boy, after the most “dreadful night,” optimism was restored. The sacraments administered that Sunday brought new courage to a demoralized company.
Five days later they were in sight of the mountainous Irish coast, Dublin Bay filled with fishing boats and large ships. Finally, wrote Jean Rio, the winds had shifted, and escaping “this terrible Irish Sea” seemed imminent. She spent most of her time caring for little Josiah, who was weak but not markedly worse than at the time of their departure. Praying fervently that the sea would bring a curative miracle for the child, she alternated between attending to him and to the rest of her wretchedly seasick children and her in-laws.
On February 2, nearly a month after departure, they reached the Atlantic Ocean, traveling at a speed of eleven miles an hour. On that day Jean Rio cooked their last piece of fresh meat and burrowed in for what now seemed an interminable journey as the winds ebbed and arose again. She carried Josiah to the deck to show him the school of porpoises playing around the boat. A Dutch ship that saluted them broke the solitude of the broad expanse. But just as quickly as the wind had risen, it fell into a dead calm. “The folks at home, I suppose, are sitting by a good fire while we are on deck enjoying the view of a smooth sea in a warm sunshine,” she wrote.
Captivated by the serenity, she struggled to keep her own spirits high: “I can hardly describe the beauty of this night, the moon nearly at its fullest with a deep blue sky studded with stars, the reflection of which makes the sea appear like an immense sheet of diamonds.” Walking the deck late in the evening without a bonnet or a shawl, she noted the contrast of a calm sea with an earlier day when “we were shivering between decks and not able to keep our feet without holding fast to something or other. And if we managed to get on the upper deck, the first salute was a great lump of water in the face.” She went on: “I have seen the mighty deep in its anger with our ship nearly on her beam ends, and I have seen it, as now, under a cloudless sky and scarcely a ripple on its surface, and I know not which to admire most. I cannot describe it as it ought to be described, but I feel most powerfully the force of these words: ‘the Mighty God,’ which Handel has so beautifully expressed in one of his chronicles.”
On February 15, at the sign of “squally weather,” Josiah took a turn for the worse. As the winds became violent, Jean Rio joined her family for supper on the deck, where they were barely able to hold on to their plates as “shoals of flying fish” erupted before them. Then, as the ship pitched against the waves, six-year-old Charles West fell down the hatchway, landing on his head. His injuries were so serious that Jean Rio feared he might die, and his disorientation was made worse by a seeping eye inflammation that sealed his eyelids shut.
A week later Charles was still suffering, but it was her youngest who had sunk rapidly into death. At five-thirty p.m. on February 22, “my very dear little Josiah breathed his last.” Jean Rio felt that God had intervened to end her child’s suffering. She beseeched the captain to let her “retain his little body until tomorrow, when it will be committed to the deep nearly a thousand miles from land, there to remain until the word goes forth for the sea to give up its dead.”
Devastated by the loss, she faltered briefly in her stoicism. She was shaken by the reality that she would not be able to take her family “safely through to the city in the tops of the mountains,” in a reference to the Biblical Isaiah: “Now it shall come to pass in the latter days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the tops of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow to it.” The child’s body was removed to a cabin
Five days later they were in sight of the mountainous Irish coast, Dublin Bay filled with fishing boats and large ships. Finally, wrote Jean Rio, the winds had shifted, and escaping “this terrible Irish Sea” seemed imminent. She spent most of her time caring for little Josiah, who was weak but not markedly worse than at the time of their departure. Praying fervently that the sea would bring a curative miracle for the child, she alternated between attending to him and to the rest of her wretchedly seasick children and her in-laws.
On February 2, nearly a month after departure, they reached the Atlantic Ocean, traveling at a speed of eleven miles an hour. On that day Jean Rio cooked their last piece of fresh meat and burrowed in for what now seemed an interminable journey as the winds ebbed and arose again. She carried Josiah to the deck to show him the school of porpoises playing around the boat. A Dutch ship that saluted them broke the solitude of the broad expanse. But just as quickly as the wind had risen, it fell into a dead calm. “The folks at home, I suppose, are sitting by a good fire while we are on deck enjoying the view of a smooth sea in a warm sunshine,” she wrote.
Captivated by the serenity, she struggled to keep her own spirits high: “I can hardly describe the beauty of this night, the moon nearly at its fullest with a deep blue sky studded with stars, the reflection of which makes the sea appear like an immense sheet of diamonds.” Walking the deck late in the evening without a bonnet or a shawl, she noted the contrast of a calm sea with an earlier day when “we were shivering between decks and not able to keep our feet without holding fast to something or other. And if we managed to get on the upper deck, the first salute was a great lump of water in the face.” She went on: “I have seen the mighty deep in its anger with our ship nearly on her beam ends, and I have seen it, as now, under a cloudless sky and scarcely a ripple on its surface, and I know not which to admire most. I cannot describe it as it ought to be described, but I feel most powerfully the force of these words: ‘the Mighty God,’ which Handel has so beautifully expressed in one of his chronicles.”
On February 15, at the sign of “squally weather,” Josiah took a turn for the worse. As the winds became violent, Jean Rio joined her family for supper on the deck, where they were barely able to hold on to their plates as “shoals of flying fish” erupted before them. Then, as the ship pitched against the waves, six-year-old Charles West fell down the hatchway, landing on his head. His injuries were so serious that Jean Rio feared he might die, and his disorientation was made worse by a seeping eye inflammation that sealed his eyelids shut.
A week later Charles was still suffering, but it was her youngest who had sunk rapidly into death. At five-thirty p.m. on February 22, “my very dear little Josiah breathed his last.” Jean Rio felt that God had intervened to end her child’s suffering. She beseeched the captain to let her “retain his little body until tomorrow, when it will be committed to the deep nearly a thousand miles from land, there to remain until the word goes forth for the sea to give up its dead.”
Devastated by the loss, she faltered briefly in her stoicism. She was shaken by the reality that she would not be able to take her family “safely through to the city in the tops of the mountains,” in a reference to the Biblical Isaiah: “Now it shall come to pass in the latter days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the tops of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow to it.” The child’s body was removed to a cabin
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