Ships to US `are as bad as slave trade'

November 8th, 1847: Famine refugees continue to cross the Atlantic even though it is perilously late in the season

November 8th, 1847: Famine refugees continue to cross the Atlantic even though it is perilously late in the season. Many of the emigrants flee in a mood of despair, anxiety, even hysteria, being willing to risk an autumn or winter sailing in their determination to leave Ireland.

The dramatically increased volume of traffic is too great a temptation for agents to resist extending the season, leading to more turbulent crossings and exposing already-weakened emigrants to the harsh North American winter.

While the majority of ships reach Canada and the United States safely, others, like those carrying the tenants of the Mahon and Palmerston estates, buried a third of their steerage passengers at sea and, as we have seen, disgorged nearcorpses at the quarantine stations.

The Lord Ashburton has just landed in St John, New Brunswick - as the St Lawrence is closed by ice - with 100 fewer passengers than sailed from Lord Palmerston's Sligo estate. Two other ships chartered by Palmerston unload their hu man cargoes of widows with young families, old women and men "riddled with disease".

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The citizens of St John declare they cannot support those emigrants and offer them free passage and food as an incentive to return to Ireland. The city council censures Palmerston, one of Her Majesty's mi nisters, for having "exposed such a numerous and distressed portion of his tenantry to the severity and privations of a New Brunswick winter . . . unprovided with the common means of support, with broken-down constitutions and almost in a state of nudity".

St John is filled with "swarms of wretched beings going about the streets imploring every passer-by, women and children in the snow, without shoes or stockings and scarcely anything on". More like ghosts than human beings, they now face the intense cold of the Canadian winter.

A member of the Legislative Council asserts, in a letter to the British Colonial Secretary, Earl Grey, that conditions aboard the ships bringing the destitute Irish to Canada are "as bad as the slave trade".

The Roscius arrives at Staten Island after a crossing of 44 days with the first batch of Ballykilcline exiles. Although she reports no losses at sea, the Roscius lands only 43 Crown emigrants in New York, leaving 68 men, women and children missing somewhere be tween Strokestown and Staten Island.

The immigrant slum is a profound psychological shock. Even before the Famine hordes arrived, child mortality reached hideous levels in the Irish areas of Boston and New York. Children in the Irish districts of Boston seem "literally born to die".

In New York, the old men cadging drinks in the shebeens of the Sixth Ward or confined in the lunatic asylum on Black well's Island or dying in the Bellevue wards are heading for the Potter's Field pauper cemetery.