In the struggle of Malvern Hill, he was on a gunboat, the USS Galena, which at 1 point was ten miles (16 km) absent, down the James River. Much earlier, in 1819, James McQuige, a veteran Methodist lay preacher in Irish, wrote: "In some of the largest southern cities, Cork, Kinsale and even the Protestant city of Bandon, provisions are sold in the marketplaces, and cried in the streets, in Irish".