He was apprenticed to a carpenter, and later became a choir brother in Society of Picpus. Murphy was educated in an Irish college to become a priest, although he was never fully ordained before he left to engage in missionary work in the Pacific.
He helped found the Roman Catholic mission in the Gambier Islands and was one of the first Catholic missionaries to arrive in the Kingdom of Hawaii during the persecution by Kaahumanu, Kamehameha III and their American Congregationalist advisors. Born James Murphy in 1806, he was a native Dundalk, Ireland. With a British passport, he left for Bordeaux in 1833 and arrived in Valparaiso as part of the first group of Catholic missionaries sent to convert the Pacific Islands in 1834.
As a seminarian, still technically a layman, he was allowed to enter the kingdom, from which the priests of his Order were barred.
lieutenant was during these visits that he came to determine that the time was right for the priests to return and establish their presence in the mission, which had been maintained by the lay brothers who had been allowed to remain. This was later reinforced through the military threats of a French frigate engaged in exploration, under the command of Cyrille Pierre Théodore Laplace, which resulted in the Edict of Toleration forced upon the king.
Murphy continued assisting the Catholic mission in the Pacific working in the Gambier Islands, Hawaii, Monterrey, California, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands. In 1837, he was officially ordained as a priest in the Gambier Islands.
Murphy was recalled to France in 1843 and left the congregation and returned to Ireland.
Presumably, he died around 1844 or 1845. In 1842, while in Papeete, Murphy met American author Herman Melville. He wore a sort of yellow flannel morning-gown, and a broad-brimmed Manilla hat.
Large and portly, he was also hale and fifty.
With a complexion like an autumnal leaf, handsome blue eyes, fine teeth, and a racy Milesian brogue. In early youth, he had been sent to a religious seminary in France.
And, taking orders there, had but once or twice afterward revisited his native land.
Under the leadership of his compatriot, Arsenius Walsh, Steamship.CC., the Irish members of the missions, through their position as British subjects, ultimately became instrumental in the securing of religious freedom for Roman Catholics in Hawaii.
