The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America

Introduction: These Desperate People

For 700 years prior to the Great Famine, the Irish had gradually become a nation of tenants in their own homeland. Ireland’s estates and farms were continually seized and redistributed by their oppressors, the invading armies and the avaricious kings and noblemen of England. The land was let and sub-let, divided and sub-divided, often to be rented and worked by the original owners. In 1841 a census revealed that the population of Ireland had peaked at just above 8 million. Fully two-thirds of those depended on agriculture for their survival, but they rarely received a working wage in return for the patch of land they needed to grow enough food for their own families.

The rich maintained their wealth through ownership of the land and wielded the political power in Ireland, yet a number of the absentee landlords living in England had never set foot in Ireland. They extracted profitable rents from their impoverished tenants or paid them minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export. This was the system which forced Ireland and so many of her people to rely on a single crop, and only the potato could be grown in sufficient quantity on these tiny scraps of soil.

The rights to a piece of land meant the difference between life and death in Ireland in the early 1800s. The population was exploding, and with hundreds of thousands without work, entire families managed to exist on a section no bigger than half an acre, growing nothing more than row after row of potatoes. If they were lucky, they might have enough land to raise a pig each year, to slaughter, salt and eat through the worst of the winter months. They might go hungry for a few weeks at the end of the summer, when the previous season’s potatoes were no longer edible, but what was the alternative?

There were famine years before the blight struck and the English rulers were well aware of the problems arising out of the economic structure they had forced on the Irish. During the first 45 years of the last century at least 150 committees and commissions of inquiry, appointed by the British Parliament, had made their reports on the State of Ireland. But nothing happened.

Emigration to America began in earnest more than a hundred years earlier, but the Famine years, from 1846 to 1851, were marked by an urgency to get away as never seen before. Ships had always sailed in the spring and summer months. Now, the clamour for a passage saw vessels of every kind and size, with bunks hastily raised in the holds, departing in the autumn and winter too. They braved the worst of the weather – the bitter cold, ice, gales, fog, storms and heavy seas, short days and long nights, could not deter these desperate people. Desperation was the distinctive feature of the Famine sailings.

As the potato crop was wiped out in successive years, Ireland started to starve and the exodus to America began. On tiny two- and three-masted ships they sailed from Dublin and Donegal, from Sligo, Galway and Limerick, from Waterford and Wexford, New Ross, Belfast, Londonderry and Cork, from Tralee, Drogheda, Newry, Kilrush, Westport and Youghal, directly to America.

A selection of Charles Mackay’s poetry, dedicated to the Irish Emigration.

More often, however, they were ferried across the Irish Sea to Liverpool on the hated British mainland, to seek bigger ships for the Atlantic crossing. Liverpool was the ill-famed slavers’ port, where human cargo always had a value, and the Irish would travel in no greater comfort than the slaves before them.

For ship owners, captains, crews and agents, this sudden increase in the passenger trade all the year round, was very welcome. Whereas in previous years they had operated a lucrative three-sided business – timber, iron, tools, salt and varied cargo down to West Africa; slaves out to America; cotton, tobacco, wheat and provisions back to Europe – outward-bound passages had been losing money. The Napoleonic Wars had ended around the turn of the century, completely upsetting the balance of trade in Europe. In particular, the price of timber had soared five-fold: the forests of Canada had more than enough wood to satisfy demand in Europe, and it was cheaper to buy there and ship it home. It was cheaper still if cargo could be found for the westward crossings and once again the human cargo, emigrants instead of slaves, provided the answer. Within a year or two it would provide more revenue than Canadian timber sailing eastwards.

Five thousand ships sailed across the Atlantic with Irish emigrants in the six years of the Famine Emigration. They were diverse in size, safety and comfort, or the lack of it, and they varied in many other respects – in age and in the experience and quality of their crews, their speed on the voyage, provisions on board, and the fares they charged.

American packet ships of more than 1,000 tons, with triple-decks were built in the late 1840s specifically for the emigrant trade. They would carry more than 400 passengers, some in private cabins. But by no means all the ships were custom-built. When the British Queen first put to sea in 1785 she needed several major repairs before she could carry passengers on regular voyages from Liverpool to New York. And when the Elizabeth and Sarah achieved infamy in the fever year of 1847, she had been at sea for 83 years.

Undoubtedly, many of the Famine ships would have carried African slaves in the early years of the 19th century. The European slave traders finally ended their activities barely a dozen years before the onset of the Famine and the Arab slavers continued to ply well into the 1860s.

There were tiny vessels like The Hannah with a crew of six and measuring only 59 feet – about the same length as four family cars parked bumper-to-bumper. She was converted from a coaster by the addition of a third mast to enable her to go into deeper waters, and sailed to New York five times, from Dublin, Cork and Limerick, with a complement of only 50 or 60 passengers crammed below in a single hold.

These Irish men and women were not always welcome on arrival in their new homeland, for this desperate migration represented cheap labour, a threat to the established American workforce. But they dug canals, built roads and laid railways, they became seamstresses and servants.

The alternative was to stay at home and starve. A meal, a job, a place to rest, a chance to survive was all the Famine emigrants asked. They left Ireland by sailing ship every day, summer and winter, for six years while the Famine lasted, to make the 3,000 mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean. This is their story.

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