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The Famine Ships
The Irish Exodus to America
By Edward Laxton Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1998 Edward Laxton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5592-2
CHAPTER 1
From Dublin's Fair City
For an island nation during the last century, the sea was the only link with the outside world. The black waters of the River Liffey, where they enter Dublin Bay, provided perfect anchorage for as many as 4,000 ships, registered to the port of Dublin, in the mid-1800s. Small cutters and sloops carried the mail, cattle and agricultural produce for the English markets and the expanding passenger trade to Liverpool. Colliers and schooners kept local industry thriving while the big three-masted barques and brigs traded on the high seas. Dublin was the home port for 300 square-rigged ships sailing to every corner of the world, though few were fitted out to carry human cargo until the Famine arrived. Every day the cobblestones on Custom House Quay would ring with the sound of horses' hooves and creaking cart wheels and the shouts of men in a hurry. Dockside gangs unloaded cargoes from recent arrivals on to barges plying busily along the canals leading into the old city.
The year 1846, which marked the beginning of the Famine Emigration, saw the start of a dramatic change in the scene on Dublin's quays. The Irish Quarterly Review would subsequently record this scene as follows:
A procession fraught with most striking and most melancholy interest, wending its painful and mournful way along the whole line of the river, to where the beautiful pile of the Custom House is distinguishable in the far distance, towering amongst the masts of the shipping.
Melancholy, most melancholy, is the sight to the eye not only of the Dublin citizen or resident, but to the eye of every Irishman who is worthy of being so called and indeed, the spectacle is one of sadness and foreboding. A long continuous procession ... a mixed stream of men, women and children, with their humble baggage, who are hurrying to quit for ever their native land!
It is not a departing crowd of paupers but unhappily an exodus of those who may be regarded as having constituted, as it were, the bone and sinew of the land; the farmers and comfortable tenantry, the young and strong, the hale and hearty, the pride and the prime of our Nation!
In later years the Irish Quarterly Review stated that the procession, or queue, would stretch a mile-and-a-half from the railway station to the Custom House, which today is still the most beautiful building in Dublin's fair city.
The London architect James Gandon had refused a commission in Tsarist Russia to build a palace for Catherine the Great in St Petersburg, in favour of taking his ideas to Dublin where he also built the magnificent Four Courts and King's Inns. His splendid grey-stone structure standing on the quayside was begun in 1781 and took ten years to finish. It carries statues representing Navigation, Industry, Commerce and Wealth. Prophetically, the architect also included in his design stone figures symbolizing Neptune chasing away Famine and Despair.
Dublin at this time was a thriving city with grand Georgian mansions and elegant houses lining the newly laid-out streets and squares, a gracious city to rival any of Europe's capitals. The name is taken from the Gaelic Dubh-linn, meaning Black Pool, suggested by the waters of the Liffey which flows only a few miles from the Wicklow Mountains and through the city and into Dublin Bay before it reaches the sea.
As Ireland's capital city, Dublin was by far the biggest and busiest of all the ports around the Irish coast, and the passengers for one of the first voyages of the Famine period, directly to New York, boarded here on St Patrick's Day in 1846. The sweet smell from the hatches of the Perseverance still hung in the air, for Demerara, the old Dutch colony in the West Indies, was her last port of call and sugar, rum and molasses had recently been unloaded.
The passengers were full of wonder and apprehension, with little or no idea of what lay ahead, but they were fortunate in their choice of ship. She was commanded by a man who knew his craft so well that some years earlier the owners had entrusted him with overseeing the building of new vessels for their fleet. Martin and Sons were long-established Dublin merchants, and when the Atlantic trade replaced the nearer but less profitable markets of Europe, the place to build and buy ships was on the eastern seaboard of British North America, as Canada was then known.
The abundant Canadian forests had more than enough wood to equip the expanding fleets on either side of the ocean and timber was only a fraction of the price compared with Europe. So Martin and Sons despatched their senior captain, William Scott, to Saint John in New Brunswick, to build, buy and commission new ships to sail under their flag, to be registered in the port of Dublin.
A native of the Shetland Isles in the north of Scotland, Captain William Scott was a veteran of the Atlantic crossing. At around the time when most men would be thinking of retiring, he gave up his desk job and his home in Saint John and returned to his adopted city. When he took the Perseverance out of Dublin that day, he was an astonishing 74 years old.
For the first time Captain Scott's barque of 597 tons was carrying passengers, the vanguard of a million Famine emigrants. He would cut short the farewells, scorning the quayside tears, anxious to get this strange cargo down below while he prepared his ship to catch the late afternoon tide the following day, on Wednesday, March 18th. The crew had cleared the holds, and ship's carpenter James Gray had fitted out bunks four tiers high and 6 feet square. The fare in steerage was £3 (around US $15). In the cramped conditions for 210 passengers, pots and pans to cook their meagre rations were a priority, as were a tradesman's tools to earn a living in America. The mate Shadrack Stone checked the passengers and their belongings as they stepped on board. Perhaps there was also room for a couple of fiddles, maybe a squeezebox or a set of Irish pipes.
Catherine Halligan was a seamstress – was she forced to abandon her spinning wheel? Michael McSollough, a young blacksmith, would surely have no room for even a small anvil, and nor would Patrick Byrne or Tom Hanbury who shared his craft. John Butler was lucky, he was a watchmaker and his tools would fit easily into a pocket. George and Patrick Dermody were not so fortunate, as they were cabinet makers.
In reasonable weather groups of 20 or 30 passengers at a time would be allowed on deck to breathe fresh air for a change, wash their clothing and clean themselves, and to cook whatever rations were still intact and fit to eat. In bad weather they would be forced to remain below, in complete darkness if the seas were really rough, the heaving waves bringing all kinds of discomfort as well as the inevitable seasickness for poor travellers. Most of the time they stayed on their bunks: despite the lack of space, it was usually more comfortable there than on deck.
The caulking of the boards on the floor of the hold was often slack and the gaps between the planks, as they closed up with the movement of the ship, would catch the passengers' clothing, particularly the women's skirts. Sometimes they would be pinned in one position for hours on end, until the ship shifted in the wind on to a new course. Clothing would be released as the ship went over, although the smaller and weaker passengers might go with her, tossed to the other side of the hold, and become trapped again.
* * *
As we have seen, Irish emigration to America and Canada had been growing since 1835, but the potato failure ten years later had broken all records. There was bound to be an increase in emigration in 1846, and when the crop failed again, more than 100,000 had crossed the Atlantic by year's end. Anxiety to get away was replaced by an indiscriminate rush, and round-the-year sailings became necessary so that the number of ships available to make the voyage could cope with the numbers.
Later in 1846 Dublin politicians would appeal to the British Government in London, 'We would recommend that free emigrants should be treated at least as well as convicts in transport ships ...' The plight of the Irish Famine emigrants was compared to that of the English prisoners sentenced to be transported to the Colonies, which usually meant to the other side of the world in Australia.
That humane plea would be ignored, and soon enough every port in Ireland would bear witness to the sad departures of the Famine ships. Scavengers would converge on to the quays, picking over abandoned bundles: it was the same for every voyage. For those on board the Perseverance in early 1846, the chiselled statues on the domed Custom House looked down on all this activity, the noise echoing from its porticoed entrance. The voyage would not be an easy one. It lasted for two months, although the Perseverance was reckoned to be a fast ship with, as we now know, a determined and experienced master in Captain William Scott although he was very likely a hard task-master and unpopular with his crew. More than four years would pass before his ship made another such journey, carrying emigrant passengers to America.
The Perseverance arrived on May 18th 1846, and 216 went ashore – all the passengers plus the mate Shadrack Stone and the bosun Michael Kelly, both from Dublin, two seamen, Thomas Branagan from Rush and Patrick Maguire from Drogheda, and two young apprentices. According to the original ship's papers for this voyage the entire crew deserted in New York.
CHAPTER 2
Catholic Persecution
For many an Irish citizen, today's journey to New York, door-to-door, would take perhaps 12 hours. A hundred and fifty years later it is impossible to imagine the horrendous passage endured aboard the Famine ships, lasting four weeks if they were lucky, though twice as long was by no means exceptional. Even the captains and their crews were unwilling to repeat the experience too often, as the following simple statistic will reveal. The port of New York received more than half of Ireland's Famine emigrants: passenger lists recovered from US Immigration files show that 651,931 arrived on 2,743 voyages during the Famine period. Yet only 325 ships made more than one voyage.
Of those 325, only one, the 520-ton barque Brothers, made the voyage in each of those six years. She made a total of ten Atlantic crossings in the Famine period, all from Newry in County Down, Northern Ireland. Newry is not many miles from the site of the infamous Battle of the Boyne, and here we can see a little more of Ireland's bitter history. Though the battle was fought more than 300 years ago, it is still commemorated every year on July 12th, which remains a public holiday, by the Orange Marches celebrating a victory for the Protestant cause throughout the province of Ulster.
Perhaps the most disgraceful aspect of the Famine was that in each of its six years there was probably sufficient food exported out of Ireland to sustain the nation, certainly enough to have saved the million who died. The bulk of the agricultural produce, most of the cattle, butter, wheat, barley, vegetables, went to the markets in England. Politicians in London, and some in Dublin as well, determined that market forces should dictate the outcome. They were not disposed towards introducing food tariffs, and the starving Irish could not afford the market prices.
Notwithstanding, how did a nation of 8 million people come to rely to such a degree on a solitary crop, the humble potato? Admittedly, much of Ireland's soil is infertile, consisting of peat-bog, marsh and mountain, but the true reason lies in the division and ownership of the land – Catholic land.
Ireland has suffered from religious discord for centuries. The Civil War in England in the mid-1600s saw the removal and execution of the Catholic King Charles I. Support for the deposed Catholic monarchy remained strong in Ireland, and the people, land-owners and peasants alike, paid dearly for that. The ruler who succeeded King Charles to become Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, was a commoner, a soldier turned statesman, the Protestant Oliver Cromwell. In a series of brutal battles, Cromwell put down the Irish insurrections, slaughtering thousands and imposing savage punishments on his devout enemies. He also transported a term, 'deportation', used then to describe the sentence of deportation from their own country for petty criminals, trouble-makers and anyone deemed an enemy of the State. During Cromwell's rule, 100,000 Irish were transported to America, one of Britain's colonies. Unwittingly, the hated Lord Protector may have started a movement which has lasted for 350 years, although the flow of emigrants from Ireland to America is not deemed to have started in earnest until 1730.
The savagery of Oliver Cromwell's government was continued by his successors – still worse was to follow some 40 years later. After Cromwell died the monarchy was restored in England; then King James II, a converted Roman Catholic, was forced to abdicate in 1688. He fled to Ireland to live in exile and to raise an army as he fought to recover his throne. Once again Catholic supporters in Ireland rallied to the royal cause but James's final demise came at the Battle of the Boyne. Here, in July 1690, he led a 21,000-strong Catholic army, consisting mostly of French and Irish troops, who were outfought and outmanouevred by a Protestant force of 35,000 containing detachments of Dutch Guards, French Huguenots and English cavalry, plus Danish, Prussian, Finnish and Swiss mercenaries.
With King James in exile, the English had invited the intensely anti-Catholic Dutch ruler, William of Orange to assume the throne in London and be crowned King William III, as joint sovereign with his wife Queen Mary. William, who was also a soldier, never happier than on the battlefield, led the Protestant army himself on that fateful day, encircling his opponents on the banks of the River Boyne. Although 2,000 men perished he allowed the vast majority of his opponents to escape, and the war continued in Ireland, with battles and skirmishes, major and minor, for another year.
The loyal Irish already had good reason to loathe this cruel monarch, but in 1695, when he introduced the Penal Laws, he left his mark on them forever. All public practices of the Roman Catholic religion were banned, and various decrees stripped the huge Catholic majority of their wealth and position, homes and estates, and gradually turned them into paupers.
In time, barely 5 per cent of the land remained in Catholic ownership. Catholics were barred from purchasing land, and any acreage owned at death had to be distributed equally between all the sons in a family, unless the eldest turned Protestant, in which case he could keep the entire estate. Historians long ago identified an estate in County Clare farmed by one owner in 1793 and by 96 tenants in 1847. No Catholic could vote, hold office, practise law, join the army, carry a sword, keep a gun or own a horse worth more than £5, the equivalent of US $25 then, but today, not much more than US $7.
Education was virtually impossible: Catholic schools were closed and priests ran secret hedge schools. Morale was shattered as churches were shut, religious devotions were forbidden and priests were hunted down. The penal ways – paths followed by the faithful as they went from their villages to worship together and take Mass at isolated meeting places – can be clearly seen to this day etched into the Irish countryside. And the Penal Laws were not entirely repealed until 1829, 16 years before the Famine.
It was tiny strips of tenanted land, planted year after year with potatoes, that kept the Irish alive. Individual consumption varied from 6-9lbs a day, sometimes more, and a family were doing well if they raised a pig each year, feeding the animal on raw potatoes too small to cook. Few could afford to buy extra food, though the plate of potatoes might be fortified with buttermilk and salt. An average family of five needed to grow 6 tons of potatoes a year, and recovery from a bad year was difficult, with too few good tubers to plant for the following season.
Strangely enough, the 1845 potato rot is believed to have emanated from America a year earlier, transported in tubers destined for Europe. It was in Holland and the southern counties of England that the first signs of the blight were seen, many weeks before making an appearance in Ireland.
Those with the foresight and sufficient funds made their departure early on in those trying years, immediately after the Famine struck. Many people, especially from the Protestant communities in the north, who had suffered no religious persecution in the previous two centuries and had managed to hold on to their farms and wealth, decided to sell up and emigrate not because they were hungry or destitute but because they could see that Ireland would take so long to recover from the dreadful Famine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Famine Ships by Edward Laxton. Copyright © 1998 Edward Laxton. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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