Potatoes are easy to grow, and have a high yield per plant. One acre of land could produce enough potatoes to feed an entire family for a year. Potatoes are rich in protein, carbohydrates and vitamins. As improbable as it sounds, it is possible to stay healthy by eating just potatoes. In fact, it was said that the peasants in Ireland were healthier than their counterparts in England who ate bread as their main food. Bread is not as nutritious as potatoes.
By the time of the famine, over one-third of the population of Ireland lived almost exclusively on potatoes. Adult males might eat an astonishing 5 to 6 kilograms of boiled potatoes per day, while women and children consumed less. When possible, milk, butter, cabbage or fish were mixed with the potatoes, and added flavour and nutrition. In this way, the Irish were able to support themselves — until disaster struck.
In the fall of 1845, the potato crop throughout Europe failed. Just before harvest, the leaves on many potato plants turned black and rotted. When the potatoes were dug up, they looked fine. But within a day or two they had rotted into a slimy mush that gave off a horrible smell. No one knew it at the time, but the potato crop had been attacked by a fungus that spread easily in the air. The effect of the potato blight was especially hard in Ireland, where so many people relied on potatoes as their main source of food.
Today if such a disaster struck, relief organizations would swing into action and do everything they could to help the starving. But this was not the case in the 1840s. There were no organizations able to offer large-scale relief.
By the spring of 1846 the British government, which controlled Ireland, took some steps to help the famine victims. It set up programs to pay Irish farmers in return for public works, such as building roads. But this was badly organized and the money the workers were paid was often not nearly enough to feed a whole family. Also, some of the workers were already too weak from hunger to be able to work. Some even died from starvation and overexertion.
The British government also bought corn from America to sell to the starving, but many of the Irish could not afford to buy it. American corn, called “Indian corn” or “maize,” was unknown in Ireland. Those who could afford it did not know how to cook it properly, and suffered from stomach ailments and diarrhea as a result.
By the second year of the famine there had been a change in government in England. The new government stopped all food relief to Ireland. It hoped that the new crop of potatoes would be healthy and said that it did not want the Irish to become dependent on handouts from England.
But the potato crop in 1846 was not healthy. The famine got worse. People ate whatever they could find — seaweed, roots, weeds, even grass. They sold whatever they could in order to pay their rent to their landlords, so that they would not be homeless as well as hungry. On top of that, the winter of 1846–1847 was one of the harshest in Irish history. People froze as well as starved. Many became sick. The immediate cause of death for many of those who died during the famine was not starvation but, rather, diseases such cholera, typhus, dysentery and famine dropsy that preyed on their weakened bodies. So great was the death toll that people were often buried without coffins or were dumped into mass graves. There were even stories of coffins being built with trap doors in the bottom so that they could be used over and over.
Starving, with nothing to eat and no money to pay their rent, hundreds of thousands of Irish men, women and children were turned out of their homes. This suited many landlords who were eager to increase their incomes by growing wheat or raising cattle and sheep, which they could not do as long as they had tenant farmers occupying their land. They evicted tenants who owed back rent and pulled down their little houses so that they could never return. They also began to pay to send these now landless farmers overseas. Those who were sent or chose to go to Canada were transported in cargo ships — usually ships that had brought timber to England — that installed wooden berths and crammed in as many passengers as they could, so they could make as much money as possible returning to North America. Because disease and death were so common aboard these vessels, they came to be called “coffin ships.”
The trip from Liverpool (or from ports in Ireland itself) to Quebec was 4800 kilometres and, depending on the wind and the weather, could take from five or six weeks to three months. Passage included some food, but often not enough to keep a person healthy. Drinking water often went bad before the end of the journey. The accommodations were terrible: people were crowded together below deck, with no ventilation, no sanitary facilities, and no shortage of disease-carrying rats. They shared their space with those who fell ill or were already sick when they boarded the ship. In these conditions, disease spread quickly and easily.
Passengers who survived the journey were inspected by a doctor when they arrived in Quebec. Those who were ill were quarantined on Grosse-Île, a small island about 48 kilometres from Quebec City. In 1847 so many ships arrived with so many ill passengers that Grosse-Île, overcrowded and short of doctors and nurses, was a place where patients were almost certain to die. The medical authorities were so overwhelmed that many passengers did not even receive a proper medical inspection. They were sent by steamer to Montreal, Kingston and Toronto, where they often arrived sick and dying. These cities tried to provide medical treatment, but it was often too little too late.
It is hard to know how many Irish died in the famine in Ireland, how many emigrated, and how many survived the journey. Record-keeping was poor, passengers were not required to register their place of birth, and many ship captains did not keep proper passenger lists. But some historians estimate that about one hundred thousand Irish made the journey to Canada in 1847, and that one in five of these died from disease and malnutrition. Many children arrived in Canada as orphans. These children were generally well cared for by religious and charitable organizations, and many were adopted by Quebec families. Most people arrived with nothing and had to work hard to find employment.
By the mid-1850s, ten thousand Irish called Quebec City their home, and many more had settled in Montreal and found employment as shop-keepers, artisans, tailors, shoemakers and policemen. The majority of Montreal Irish, however, worked as labourers, servants, coachmen, blacksmiths and carpenters, and lived in Griffintown, where factories stood beside the Lachine Canal. Griffintown was widely described as a slum.
In Toronto at the same time, one quarter of the fifty thousand inhabitants were Irish, the largest national group in the city. Most lived near the lakefront in Cabbagetown, so called because of the cabbage patches the Irish grew in their yards.
Irish immigrants settled in many other places in Canada, such as Ontario’s Ottawa Valley, Kingston and area, and Peterborough. Hundreds of thousands more settled in the United States, in places like Boston, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia, and founded Irish-Catholic communities that remain a part of the identity of those cities today.
Images and Documents
Image 1: Irish children dig what potatoes they can salvage out of the ground. The potato blight rotted most of the potatoes before they could be harvested.
Image 2: A destitute father and child stand near their stone cottage. The famine forced tens of thousands of “Poor Irish” off the land when the crop failed and they could not afford to pay rent to their landlords.
Image 3: Emigrants huddle with their meagre belongings at dockside in Cork, before embarking on ships that will take them across the Atlantic to North America.
Image 4: Hundreds of thousands of emigrants crossed the ocean in hopes of finding a better life in Canada. They endured voyages of up to six or even twelve weeks, much of it spent crammed below decks, where illness such as typhus and cholera spread easily in the crowded conditions.
Image 5: Ships wait in the St. Lawrence near Grosse-Île (about 48 km from Quebec City) to offload ill passengers. Their families often had to remain in quarantine, or continue the voyage without them.
Image 6: Those quarantined in the Grosse-Île fever sheds lived in squalid conditions,
despite the efforts of the staff trying to care for them. Many who entered the sheds never emerged, except to be buried.
Image 7: This cooking stove from 1862 shows a hot water tank and an oven for roasting — major improvements to cooking over direct flame in a suspended kettle.
Image 8: Candle-making had been a long process of dipping string into melted tallow and allowing it to dry in stages. Molds such as this one made the work simpler.
Image 9: Eastern Canada in 1847. Famine Irish landed in eastern ports, with many moving further inland to Quebec, Montreal, Kingston and the Ottawa Valley in Canada, as well as Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia and Boston in the United States.
Acknowledgements
Every effort has been made to trace ownership of visual and written material used in this book. Errors and omissions will be corrected in subsequent updates or editions.
Cover cameo (detail): Christen Brun, A Basket of Ribbons, Image thanks to the Art Renewal Center ® www.artrenewal.org.
Cover background (detail) and Image 3: Emigrants Arrival at Cork — The Scene on the Quay, Library and Archives Canada, C-003904.
Image 1: The Irish Potato Famine, Illustrated London News Ltd / Mary Evans Picture Library.
Image 2: A destitute father and child in Mienies, Ireland; Illustrated London News Ltd / Mary Evans Picture Library.
Image 4: Thousands of people came from Europe, from Historical Etchings/Travel, Crabtree Publishing Company, p. 4.
Image 5: Boats waiting in line on the St. Lawrence River, to be welcomed on Grosse Île, courtesy of Bernard Duchesne/Collections Parcs Canada.
Image 6: Early quarantine station facilities at Grosse Île, 1832, courtesy of Bernard Duchesne/Collections Parcs Canada.
Image 7: Cook stove, C.W. Jefferys / Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1972-26-825.
Image 8: Candle mold, Image courtesy of the Niagara Historical Society & Museum, 969.32.
Image 9: Map by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs.
The publisher wishes to thank Barbara Hehner for her attention to the factual details, and Dr. Ross Fair, Ryerson University, for sharing his historical expertise.
To Mary Ellen Carson McClintock
About the Author
“I have always been interested in history and how ordinary people managed through all the wars, plagues, famines, natural disasters and other hardships of life throughout the ages,” says Norah McClintock. “My mother has a somewhat more personal interest in history — she has spent many years researching her genealogy to try to understand the lives of those who preceded her.
“Tracing one’s family tree is not as easy as it might sound to anyone who was raised in the age of computers, when it seems that there is almost too much personal information available. We have records galore these days, and the challenge is protecting them and safeguarding people’s privacy. But go back a generation or two, and things are entirely different. Records were kept on paper, which could burn (along with the buildings where they were stored) or succumb to floods, or neglect — or simply be discarded or lost. And that’s assuming records existed at all. In many cases they didn’t.
“It is very difficult to say with certainty exactly how many people died in Ireland during the famine, how many emigrated to other countries in the famine years, how many died on the voyage itself or immediately afterward, or exactly where the survivors ended up. My great-great-grandmother is a case in point.
“I know, thanks to my mother’s research, that her name was Mary Ellen O’Leary. I know that she left Ireland during the famine. I know that she died sometime after she left. I know that she had at least three children. But after that, there are more questions than answers.
“Was she really from Tipperary, as my great-grandmother told my mother? In which year did she leave Ireland? Did she die on the voyage, or on Grosse-Île, or later, when she reached Pembroke, Ontario? I don’t know. Two of her children were named Mary and Edward, and they were born in Ireland. There is another child, possibly named James. On the 1861 census, he is reported as having been born in Canada. What does that tell me about my grandmother, assuming it’s true?”
* * *
Norah McClintock is best known as one of Canada’s top mystery writers for young adults. Some of her most popular series are Chloe and Levesque, Mike and Riel and Robyn Hunter, each featuring a teenage sleuth. She is a five-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction, for Mistaken Identity, The Body in the Basement, Sins of the Father, Scared to Death and Break and Enter. She was also nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award for her non-fiction title, Body, Crime, Suspect, and for the prestigious Anthony Award for No Escape.
Though McClintock’s degree is in History and she has worked as a volunteer at Toronto’s Spadina House, this is her first historical novel. As she says, “It’s time to put that knowledge to use.”
While the events described and some of the characters in this book may be based on actual historical events and real people, Johanna Leary is a fictional character created by the author, and her diary is a work of fiction.
Copyright © 2012 by Norah McClintock.
Published by Scholastic Canada Ltd.
SCHOLASTIC and DEAR CANADA and logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan–American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read this e-book on-screen. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Scholastic Canada Ltd., 604 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5V 1E1, Canada.
ISBN: 978-1-4431-1973-3
First eBook edition: September 2012
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