Mailboat
Mailboat
In Brief
Leaning on the "parapet" that surrounds the roof of the tower, Stephen looks down on "the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown." Later, Haines looks over the bay, "empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline." The mailboats were oceangoing ships that carried the mail between Kingstown, Ireland and Holyhead, Wales twice every day. Later in this day, Joseph Patrick Nannetti takes the mailboat to Wales to catch a train to London.
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The ships departed from Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) at 8:15
AM and 8:15 PM every day. When Stephen sees one passing the
harbormouth, the time must be about 8:20 AM. Receiving the
day's mail by express rail cars from Dublin, the mailboats
carried it to the port of Holyhead in northwest Wales, where
trains carried it to London and other parts of England.
In Cyclops, Bloom learns from Joe Hynes that Nannetti, the newspaper printer and M.P., will shortly be "going off by the mailboat" to ask questions the next day about an action pending in the Parliament at Westminster. In Nausicaa he thinks, "Nannetti's gone. Mailboat. Near Holyhead by now." Gifford notes that "the run to Holyhead...took about two and a half hours in 1904," but it does not seem possible that nearly so much time has elapsed since the boat's departure at 8:15 PM, so Bloom's estimate may be mistaken. Gifford also notes that, according to the Evening Telegraph, the actual Nannetti raised his questions in Parliament on June 16, not June 17.
Mail steamer leaving Kingstown Harbour, ca. 1900, in a photograph held in the National Archives of Ireland. Source: www.census.nationalarchives.ie.
Mail steamer in regalia in the Harbour. Source: John F. Finerty, Ireland in Pictures (1898).