The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  Splendidly attired Meagher, no longer inhibited by his relationship to the Liberator, was called upon to coruscate at that Rotunda meeting. He achieved an astounding authority of presence for a man of twenty-three. ‘Sir, there was a levee at the Castle this morning. Our gentlemen went there to pay their respects to the representative of Royalty. We have met here this night, to testify our allegiance to liberty.’ He held up a fistful of papers, tables which showed how much potentially life-restoring food had been shipped out of starving Ireland in the past five months. ‘I hold in my hand a statement of Irish exports from 1 August to 1 January. From the statements you will perceive that England seizes on our food whilst death seizes on our people—total export of provisions from the ports of Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Belfast, from 1 August, 1846 to 1 January, 1847: pork, barrels, 37,123; bacon, flitches, 222,608; butter, firkins, 388,455; ham, hogsheads, 1,971; beef, tierces, 2,555; wheat, barrels, 48,526; oats, barrels, 543,232.’ And so with barley, oatmeal, flour, live pigs, cows, and sheep. ‘From this table, Lord Monteagle would expatiate for nights upon the benefit of the English connection … From this table, Mr Macaulay would surely conclude that Irish opulence was a sound reality—that Irish famine was a factious metaphor.’ Meagher appealed then to his Protestant fellow citizens. ‘Let not the dread of Catholic ascendancy deter. If such an ascendancy were preached, here is one hand that would be clenched against it. Yes, here are four thousand arms to give it battle!’ Then he turned to Smith O’Brien: ‘Sir, you who are the descendant of an Irish king—go to the English Commons, and tell the English Commons what you have seen this night … Tell the Commons, that these citizens decide that the destiny of the Union shall be the destruction of the Union.’

  The ageing and ailing Liberator at once denounced Meagher’s speech as inflammatory, and was accused in return of ‘felon setting,’ that is, trying to plead for Meagher’s arrest. But despite all the rhetoric, there was still co-operation. Repeal and the Confederation supported the one candidate in the Galway by-election in February. John Martin would later remember how he, the sober Protestant, and Meagher, the dandified Catholic with no aversion to a drink, ‘travelled all night through the flat snowy wastes of Roscommon,’ to be in place for electioneering. In the Theatre Royal, Galway, before a mixed crowd of supporters and detractors, the Young Tribune thundered again:

  The struggle, begun this morning upon the hustings of your old town, is not a struggle between two men—it is a struggle between two countries. On the one side, the side of the Whig candidate, hangs the red banner beneath which your Senate has been sacked, your commerce has been wrecked, your nobility has been dishonoured, your peasants have been starved. On the other side—the side of the Repeal Candidate—floats the green flag, for which the artillery of 1782 won a legitimate respect—beneath which your Senate sat, your commerce thrived, your nobility were honoured, your peasants prospered.

  The Liberator and his son John blamed the narrow loss of the Repeal candidate on the inflammatory speeches of Young Ireland. Smith O’Brien blamed it on his fellow landlord, Lord Clanricarde, who threatened all his tenants in the Claddagh of Galway with eviction, to compel them to vote for the Whigs.

  That same February of the Galway elections, the distracted, grieving Liberator made what proved to be his last speech to the Commons. He was a profoundly distressed old man. He had great personal debts, and only £30 a week was coming in to Conciliation Hall. Maurice O’Connell had not proved a competent administrator of his estate at Derrynane, and the O’Connell family had much capital tied up in the Derrynane food stores. Apart from that, the Whig alliance had been a disaster, and the millions of humbler Repealers were dying of it. Now, scarcely able to stand in the House without trembling, O’Connell, the ‘Big Beggarman’ as he was called by The Times, could utter only a plea. He told the house that the Irish ‘were starving in shoals, in hundreds—aye, in thousands and millions. Parliament was bound, then, to act not only liberally and generously—to find out a means of putting a stop to this terrible disaster … He solemnly called on them to recollect that he predicted, with the sincerest conviction, that one-fourth of her population would perish unless Parliament come to their relief.’

  The Liberator’s doctors and his chaplain had in the meantime told him to go to sunnier places for his health’s sake, to the South of France and on to Rome. His biographers are not utterly specific on the cause of his illness, but from his tottering gait and sense of doom, on top of ravaged hopes it may have been cardio-vascular. In Paris, Lyons and Genoa, the old man became increasingly panicked and fearful and dependent on his chaplain, Father Miley. ‘By night all his griefs and terrors are on me—for he will not be satisfied unless I am by his bed,’ wrote Miley. The pilgrimage of healing he had planned to fulfil in Rome was now an impossibility. He died in Genoa in agony of soul one evening in May of 1847.

  Throughout Ireland those who had paid the Catholic and Repeal rents were travelling down the same path or else trying to outdistance death by emigrating. When O’Connell’s embalmed body was returned home later in the summer, it would pass ships full of the refugees of Famine. The Confederates of Young Ireland were not invited to the funeral. They were the heedless youngsters who had killed an irreplaceable father. Many of them, Meagher in particular, were abused in the streets of Dublin for having shortened the Liberator’s life: assassination by oratory. Richard O’Gorman, John Mitchel and Meagher himself, emerging from the Rotunda, had to run from a mob and hide in a grocer’s shop. Tom Meagher’s dreams must have been uneasy, but it was clear by daylight reasoning that the Famine and the Whigs had done more to destroy O’Connell than had the young men who had challenged his policy.

  The leaving of Ireland had until now been seen by most small tenant farmers as a more grievous destiny than death. But as the pestilent summer of 1847 approached, people were passionate to quit, and did so in less comfort and security than had characterised Hugh Larkin’s Parmelia—without benefit of chains certainly, but also without surgeon-superintendents.

  Some tenants left in the middle of the night, without telling anyone. On the public works in the barony of Longford, names were called out but no answer was heard. In Irish experience this was an unprecedented flight. Women whose grip on the jambs of their hovels a year before would have needed dragoons and constables to relax it, now willingly fled the hearth. One song concerned an emigrant who symbolically renounced Ireland by jettisoning his hurley stick, an icon of Irish sportiveness and identity. ‘He was a fine lad. He brought his hurley and ball with him on board, and he tapped the ball upwards twenty-one times with the hurley; then, next time as it came down, he doubled on it into the ocean and threw the hurley after it.’

  To Esther Larkin, migration must have seemed a huge alteration of her area. Even so, it was not as massive a phenomenon as in Mayo, Connemara, Clare and West Cork. It seems that through lads like Esther’s sons, the people of Lismany and Laurencetown benefited still from being close to the Shannon and the Grand Canal, and the produce which moved there. Was it her resourceful sons, not the pathetic and shrunken chance of New South Wales, which kept her in place in Lismany instead of on a boat to the St Lawrence or Liverpool?

  Once in the ports, country people were sadly duped. Sold nautical instruments and equipment they were told they would need aboard, in many cases they paid their last money for forged tickets. But there was an impetus to board any ship and go from the isle of nettles, fevers and corpses. Ships little bigger than schooners tried to crowd passengers aboard in ports such as Ballina and Killala, Westport, Tralee, Kinsale, offering cramped passage to the cornucopia of the Americas.

  Perhaps all the poorest of emigrants could afford for the present was deck passage to Liverpool, though many ultimately had North America in their minds. ‘Hordes of paupers, bringing want and disease with them, are cast on the English shore,’ the Illustrated London News told the British public. The result of Irish immigration to the north of England had become already apparen
t to Friedrich Engels, who believed the powerless Irish at least had the power to debase:

  the most horrible spot lies on the Manchester side, immediately south-west of Oxford Road and is known as Little Ireland … The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten doorposts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench … must really have reached the lowest stages of humanity.

  British North America, Canada, was the closest American landfall to Ireland. Even so, many Irish emigrants landed at Quebec, took a barge down to Montreal and walked south over the border into the United States. The back door to the great republic was necessary because in terms of cubic space per passenger, rations, fresh water and medical attention, United States Passenger Acts demanded more of emigrant ships and their captains than did the similar British Acts. The American restrictions were not all humanitarian—the States wished to receive skilled and healthy immigrants, not wasted refugees. In February and March 1847 Congress passed two new Passenger Acts especially for the coming immigrant season. The number of passengers per ton of burthen was reduced by one third, and the minimum fare to New York rose to £7. New York State, sensing the coming flood, founded a Board of Commissioners of Emigration, six of whom belonged to the benevolent society called the Friendly Sons of St Patrick, and were equipped to succour newcomers until they were on their feet.

  It was in a sense all futile. Despite the regulations governing the shipping, landing and processing of immigrants at Castle Garden, a water-girt pleasure dome and immigrant clearing centre on the Hudson, despite the quarantining of ships with fever at Staten Island, and the guarantees ships’ captains had to give as to the capacity of passengers to support themselves ashore, just under 850,000 Irish would enter the United States via the port of New York in the years between 1847 and 1851: that is, the same number as entered all the ports of Canada and the United States in the previous two decades. Obviously not every one of those had paid £7 per passenger, so in various ways the new Passenger Acts were subverted. The impact on the city would be enormous. Irish navvies had made New York what it was by digging the Erie canal, which turned the port into a great outlet for the produce of the Midwest. Now, entering into the New York Irish traditional trades of digging, cartage, saloon-keeping and politics, the refugees of the Famine would give it its cheap labour, augment its particular character and influence for ever its politics. Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston were to be similarly rushed, and the United States faced unprecedented challenges to public health and civic imagination.

  As for Canada, the first ship of the season, Syria, arrived in the St Lawrence carrying eighty fever cases. By late summer a never-before-seen armada of immigrant ships crowded up that river. Most of the immigrants landed without supplies, even the seven pounds of provisions supposedly required under the British Passenger Act. Thousands of them lacked the steamer fare from Quebec upriver to the Irish enclaves of Montreal.

  When the St Lawrence iced over in the autumn of Black ’47, ships continued crossing the Atlantic to the Maritimes and to United States ports. The United States complained that they were becoming the year-round dumping house for European paupers.

  Robert Whyte, a Dubliner who travelled cabin class on the Ajax from Dublin in June 1847 left a classic account of the travails of country people from County Meath who travelled in steerage to the new world. The steerage passengers of Ajax bravely formed a committee to try to deal with the shifts and dangers of their journey, but fever and other diseases had come on board with them, and would spread exponentially. Not long at sea, the captain was alarmed at an outbreak: ‘having shown itself in the unventilated hold of a small brig, containing one hundred and ten living creatures, how could it possibly be stayed without medicine, medical skill or even pure water to slake the patients’ burning thirst?’

  On 23 June, at sea, a poignant attempt was made to observe the Nativity of John the Baptist: ‘some young men and women got up a dance in the evening regardless of the moans and cries of those who were tortured by the fiery fever.’ Of a woman whom he had earlier noticed, Whyte wrote: ‘Her head and face had swollen to almost unnatural size, the latter being hideously deformed;’ cos dhubh, the Famine dropsy. He remembered ‘the clearness of her complexion when I saw her in health, shortly after we sailed … as the sun was setting, the bereaved husband muttered a prayer over her enshrouded corpse which, as he said Amen, was lowered into the ocean.’ Two brothers died of dysentery, leaving a third to mourn. The third then died and ‘left two little orphans, one of whom—a boy, seven years of age—I noticed in the evening wearing his deceased father’s coat.’ There was an even greater tragedy in that than the bacteriologically uninformed Whyte knew.

  The ship had now by-passed Newfoundland to starboard and Nova Scotia to port, entered into the Gulf of St Lawrence and was becalmed by the Îles de la Madeleine. But when the breeze revived, Ajax crept up the Honguedo Passage to the head of the St Lawrence estuary and then south between the lovely banks of the broad river. As soon as the inspecting surgeon, in straw hat and leather coat, stamped across the deck to the companionway into the hold, he was able by the stench to announce, ‘Ha, there is fever here,’ but told Whyte he was free to go on to Quebec if he wished. There Ajax herself, with a fleet of other immigrant ships, would have to stand to before the quarantine island, Grosse Île, which was screened from the city of Quebec by the huge wooded Île d’Orléans.

  In May, within four days of the quarantining of the first ship at Grosse Île, eight others had arrived carrying fever cases. ‘I have not a bed to lay them on or a place to put them,’ wrote Dr Douglas, the valiant physician who administered the station. Nine days later, thirty vessels with 10,000 immigrants on board were waiting at Grosse Île. Brave assistants like Dr Benson, an Irish doctor who had arrived on the Wandsworth and volunteered to work with Douglas, died of typhus, and others were overwhelmed by fever or fatigue. By 5 June, with summer barely begun, 25,000 Irish had been quarantined on Grosse Île or in ships anchored nearby.

  By the time Ajax arrived in full summer, the fever wards and tents ashore were impossibly overcrowded with 2,500 fever cases. Death came quickly, so that the 2,000–3,000 ashore one week bore little resemblance except in symptoms to the population of the previous week. In stupefying heat the dead on the quarantined ships were lifted out of the holds with hooks and stacked like cordwood on the shore. A Special Committee appointed by the Canadian Assembly found that because of lack of personnel and space, patients lay in their own excrement for days. Receiving water only once a day, they shared beds overnight with corpses, since there was no staff to move the dead at night.

  Whyte wrote of the continuous line of boats, each carrying its freight of dead to the burial ground. ‘Some had several corpses so tied up in canvas that the stiff, sharp outline of death was easily traceable. Others had rude coffins constructed by the sailors from the boards of their berths.’ As Ajax waited out the quarantine, the wife of the chief of the passengers’ committee perished. One of the sailors told Whyte that after the grave was filled up her husband took the shovels and placed them cross-wise upon it, and calling Heaven to witness said: ‘ “By that cross, Mary, I swear to revenge your death—as soon as I earn the price of my passage home, I’ll go back and shoot the man that murdered you and that’s the landlord.” ’ Significantly, unlike Young Ireland, he did not curse the Whigs.

  Partridge Island, a quarantine station off St John, New Brunswick, a nearer landfall to Ireland, was another ill-starred quarantine station. It received 17,000 Irish from ninety-nine vessels, of whom more than 2,000 died on the voyage or in quarantine. But apparently healthy immigrants took the disease ashore and into the town of St John. And Grosse Île similarly afforded the citizens of Quebec and Montreal only slight protection. Many immigrants who seemed healthy in Quebec died on their way to Montreal on board the river steamers, and those who sickened in their progress were received into the fever hospital in Mont
real. The Immigrant Hospital of Montreal contained by August more than 3,000 dying patients, both passengers and infected citizenry. Many of the surviving Irish settled in Montreal’s tenements, creating an instant and much resented Irish constituency.

  Some who survived this second sifting of fever were sent on to Kingston, 180 miles further south, and from thence to Toronto or over the border, every city and town being anxious to be rid of them as soon as possible. At St Catherine’s, 600 miles from Quebec, ‘I saw a family who were on their way to the western part of the state of New York. One of them was taken ill and they were obliged to remain by the wayside with nothing but a few boards to protect them from the weather. There is no means of learning how many of the survivors of so many ordeals were cut off by the inclemency of a Canadian winter.’