Canal fecundity

Mrs M’Cann, of Castlecomer, gave birth to two infant boys and a girl, in the canal fly boat from Athy to Dublin, on Monday.

Limerick Chronicle 3 March 1838

Just as well they were infants: giving birth to three teenagers would have been difficult.

2 responses to “Canal fecundity

  1. And the fare would have been higher!

  2. Indeed. But note the difficulty of giving birth in a boat 60′ long by only 6′ wide, designed to carry 20 first- and 32 second-class passengers (but perhaps carrying more) as well as the crew, and travelling at 10 British mph [Railway Commissioners’ second report appendix B6]. Providing Mrs M’Cann with enough space for herself and some assistants must have been difficult. bjg

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.