I think it safe to say that Cormorant was not built by ‘The
Victoria Shipbuilding Company’. With the help of the Cork City and County
Archives I have found Francis Guy’s ‘County and City of Cork Directory
1876-1876’ (Photo 951).
This records
that the company running the Victoria Dockyard at the time was the ‘Cork
Harbour Docks and Warehouses Company’.
Their entry in the Directory shows their address as Victoria Docks,
Passage West (Photo 952).
The Directory has
no record of any Victoria Shipbuilding Company or any Passage West Shipbuilding
Company (probably confusion with the Passage West Docks Company). The Cork
Archivist reminded me that another Cormorant was said to have been built in
1855, for the Cork Steamship Company. This was found among the records of the
Cork Steam Packet Co Ltd, a successor company. It was certainly not a lightship
and apparently it was broken up in 1894.
Another historical question,
on which I am reasonably confident in pronouncing, is the location of the dry
docks where Cormorant was built. They
are filled in now of course but back in the late 1880s I reckon they were where
I suggested last month (Photo 953).
I
wish I could find a detailed map of the area dated around 1880 just to confirm
that, but I have had no luck in finding one yet.
David
PS: If Alex Coulter
reads this, please get in touch. My
computer crashed earlier this year and I lost all my e-mail addresses!
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