Compiled from the Lenihan Family Archive, Providence, Rhode Island

Donated to posterity by George Lenihan, 1990.

Lightly edited for brevity. Heavily edited for libel.

It should be said, first and foremost, that Sean O’Malley had no intention of going to Mexico.

This was, in fact, the one consistent detail across all seventeen versions of the story — the singular, unshakeable truth at the heart of the legend. Sean had every intention of going to America. Specifically, to Boston, where his cousin Fergus had allegedly secured employment of some description and sent back a letter containing the words “grand entirely” and a drawing of what may have been a hat.

Sean was twenty-three years old in the autumn of 1847, the third son of a subsistence farmer in County Galway, and he possessed three things in this world: a wool coat of uncertain provenance, a deep and abiding talent for storytelling, and an almost supernatural ability to convince other people that whatever he was saying was not only true but probably the most important thing they’d ever heard.

He did not possess, it must be said, a talent for reading ship manifests.¹

The port of Galway in 1847 was a scene of magnificent chaos. Thousands of souls were attempting to leave Ireland simultaneously, the famine having made a compelling argument that perhaps somewhere else might be preferable. Ships were departing for Liverpool, for Boston, for New York, for Quebec, for places that people had only heard of in songs and weren’t entirely sure existed.

Sean arrived at the docks on the morning of September the fourteenth with a small bundle of his belongings, three shillings and fourpence, and a story he’d been working on for several weeks about a man who’d once outwitted the devil over a game of cards in Connemara.² He intended to use the story to charm his way aboard a vessel bound for Boston, as the price of passage had recently exceeded his budget by approximately everything.

The charming worked magnificently. It always did with Sean.

The problem was that in the middle of his telling — just at the part where the devil was beginning to suspect he’d been had — Sean had gestured broadly with his right hand, sending his bundle of belongings skidding across the dock and under the boot of a large man who was, at that precise moment, walking very quickly in the direction of a different ship entirely.

Sean, without pausing in his story, followed the bundle.

He followed it up a gangplank.

He followed it into a hold.

He was three days out to sea before anyone asked him where he thought he was going.

There followed a silence of some duration.

The ship was called the Santa Catalina de los Mares. She was crewed by eleven Mexican fishermen out of Veracruz, captained by a man named Rodrigo Esperanza de la Vega, and she was carrying a cargo of salt cod back across the Atlantic in the direction of absolutely nowhere near Boston.³

Captain Rodrigo, a broad man with a magnificent moustache and the expression of someone who had seen everything the sea had to offer and been only mildly impressed by it, looked at Sean for a long time.

Sean looked back at him.

“¿Hablas español?” asked the Captain.

“I do not,” said Sean. “But I’ll tell you a story that’ll make you very glad you asked.”

It is recorded in the Lenihan Family Archive — and corroborated, loosely, by a separate account discovered in a Veracruz church registry in 1923 — that Captain Rodrigo laughed for approximately four minutes before inviting Sean to sit down.⁴

What happened next would take three weeks, two kegs of the Captain’s personal tequila reserve, and one extraordinary evening under the stars somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, during which Sean O’Malley told eleven Mexican fishermen every story he had ever heard, invented, or substantially improved upon in his twenty-three years of life.

By the time the Santa Catalina reached warmer waters, the crew had developed the distinct impression that Sean O’Malley was either a minor saint, a gifted lunatic, or possibly both. They were not wrong.

And Sean, for his part, had come to a private accommodation with the situation.

Boston, it occurred to him, had been a plan based almost entirely on Fergus, and Fergus had never once in his life been reliably right about anything.

Perhaps, Sean thought, this was better.

He looked out at the warm blue water, the unfamiliar stars, the flying fish leaping in the bow wake, and he began, quietly, to work on a new story.

— To be continued in Volume II: The Poncho Ceremony —

¹ He could read them perfectly well. The issue was that he was telling a story at the time and simply did not look.

² This story was, by all accounts, excellent. The devil lost badly. The man got the cards, a fine horse, and a recipe for soda bread that Sean’s family maintained was authentic until at least 1962.

³ The salt cod was later described by Sean as “a fact I chose not to dwell upon, as it seemed beside the point.”

⁴ The church registry entry in question reads only: “Irish. Arrived with nothing. Left with much. God’s will, presumably.” The priest responsible was Father Tomás Concepción Vázquez, who appears to have been a man of admirable restraint.