The Road to Kinsale
by Seth A. Perry
Sometime in November or December of 1800, Connecticut itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow found himself alone and destitute in County Cork, Ireland. He had come to Ireland to preach, because George Whitefield and John Wesley preached there, and he wanted to be like them. He wasn’t, not yet at least. Piously committing himself to the Lord’s care, Dow hadn’t made many plans with respect to purse, scrip, or shoes. He tried to sell his watch in a shop in Bandon, and broke down in front of the watchmaker. Moved, the man fed him, and then Dow started walking the main road on into County Cork. As he described it in the first edition of his published journal:
It took me more than seven hours to walk nine miles to Kinsale: on the way I was near being stopped by a magistrate. I sat down by the road side and reflected thus; ‘here I am, a stranger in a strange land; but little money and few who shew me friendship; I am going now to a place; and I have no ground to expect reception: I can’t walk much further; I can’t buy a passage to a distant part; and what shall I do seeing I have no way to get bread? Once I had a father’s house and tender parents; and how would they feel if they knew my present case? Unless God works wonders for me soon, I shall surely sin.’ Then I lifted up my voice and wept. (The Life and Travels of Lorenzo Dow (1804), 191).
Dow and his career survived this first trip to Ireland and he went on to be, in his day, as famous as he had dreamt of being. I’m writing a book right now about self-narration and notions of experience in early American evangelicalism through Dow’s life, and I have been, for some reason, especially captivated by this moment on the road to Kinsale. On a trip to Ireland this past summer, I dragged my wife to go walk the road between Bandon and Kinsale. Our original intent was to hike those same nine-ish miles, but it turns out rural Irish roads are terrifyingly narrow and surprisingly full of traffic, all of it coming, to Americans, from unexpected directions. So instead we drove from Kinsale to a village called Innishannon, parked, and walked back and forth across the bridge there. There’s been a bridge at Innishannon since the seventeenth century, and in 1800 it was the only bridge over the River Bandon if you were moping your way to Kinsale, so I figured Dow must have crossed there.
Historians do weird things. Sometimes visiting the spaces described and occupied by our sources is an essential part of our research (it’s important to feel the vastness of someone’s sacred landscape or note the distance of a segregated balcony from the altar, for example), but this wasn’t really one of those times. Sometimes our work uncovers the importance of forgotten or neglected sites that really should be commemorated and preserved; this wasn’t that, either. It’s hard to imagine that anyone but me (and my very indulgent wife) could be much made to care about a plaque noting that Lorenzo Dow once crossed a bridge here, feeling sad.
Personal commemoration of only-cool-to-us historical sites is probably common to all historians – George Washington didn’t sleep here, but this other Revolutionary War hero you’ve never heard of did! – but I wonder if it’s different for historians of religion. Any historian might call a trip like that a pilgrimage, but when we call something a pilgrimage it carries a bit more weight. I happen to have nothing invested in Dow’s mission to convert the Irish; commemorating a stop along the way might make more sense if I did. I can’t really say why I wanted to walk where Dow walked, other than the pursuit of some closeness to his (very remote) life, to maybe see some things that he saw. I’m very much against sacralizing our sources, especially on their terms, but there is a form of reverence for the human that I think reduces our distance from our subjects: I too have felt alone and miserable in a foreign place, though my sense of distance and precarity will always be different than Dow’s. I’m invested in rendering my subjects as flesh and blood people rather than as types, and just seeing physical spaces where they lived and moved helps me to imagine them as physical beings who lived and moved. I can’t say that I learned anything new by standing over a river that Dow stood over, but I stood there a long time, looking at the water.
Seth Perry is Assistant Professor of Religion in the Americas at Princeton University. Perry’s first book, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the performative, rhetorical, and material aspects of bible-based authority in early-national America. His current book project is a biography of Lorenzo Dow, the early-national period’s most famous itinerant preacher.