Before Portrush had a proper harbour, it had ships — and for over a century, a steady trickle of emigrants boarding them for a new life across the Atlantic.
Hidden behind Coleraine’s name
Coleraine gets most of the historical credit for emigration from this stretch of coast, but its own harbour at the mouth of the River Bann was treacherous — a shifting sandbar limited access to high tide only. Before 1830, Portrush had no harbour capable of taking large vessels either, so ships anchored offshore in the sheltered Skerry Roads or West Bay, with passengers rowed out from the Old Dock or Port-an-dubh (“the black inlet”) on the peninsula’s east side. Because shipping agents were based in Coleraine, many sailings recorded in the historical record as departing “from Coleraine” almost certainly left from Portrush waters instead. A New York Gazette report from 28 November 1768 makes the point directly: it describes the ship Providence sailing “from Colerain,” while the same voyage’s actual departure point, three months earlier, was “the Skerry road of Portrush.”
Named ships, named passengers
The historical record here is unusually specific. The earliest identified Portrush emigrant, Robert Morrison, born in Scotland around 1684, sailed from Portrush on 7 August 1726 and settled in Nottingham, New Hampshire. The Snow Prince (160 tons) advertised for Newcastle and Philadelphia in June 1752. The Lord Dunluce (350 tons, Captain William Osborne) sailed 20 June 1755, explicitly built with passenger comfort in mind. Further documented voyages carried travellers to New York (Snow Success, 1760), and repeatedly through the 1760s and 1770s aboard ships named Providence, Rainbow, and Betty and Hellen. By the early 19th century, sailings had extended to St. John’s Newfoundland, Halifax, Quebec, Charleston and Savannah — a 1821 shipping notice records the schooner Lark completing “a remarkably quick passage of 17 days” from Halifax.
A quieter kind of history
Unlike the famine-era emigration most associated with Irish history, this is an earlier and steadier story — 18th-century Ulster Scots and others leaving from a coastline without so much as a proper harbour, on ships whose names, captains, and departure dates survive in old newspaper advertisements. For visitors tracing family history back to this coast, it’s a genuinely useful — and largely untold — starting point.