Skeletal victims dressed in tatters, such as these residents of County Cork, became a common sight across Ireland in the famine years.
7
WHEN THE POTATO BLIGHT struck in the summer of 1845, it dealt a devastating blow to several million Irish men and women whose diets consisted primarily or entirely of potatoes. That first year, the blight destroyed only 30 to 40 percent of the crop, and while it caused great hardship, government, church, and family assistance kept actual starvation rare. Yet all Ireland waited anxiously for the 1846 harvest, knowing that unless it was a success, those teetering on the brink of catastrophe would soon begin to starve.
From planting in the spring of 1846 to midsummer, as the stalks grew and blossomed, Ireland’s potatoes seemed perfectly healthy. Father Theobald Mathew, traveling by coach from Cork to Dublin in the last week of July, found the potato plants blooming “in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest.” But just below the moist surface, the fungus was thriving. Traveling over the same roads a week later, Mathew saw “one wide waste of putrifying vegetation.” Just as heartbreaking as the desolated fields were “the wretched people,” already overwhelmed with hunger, “wringing their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless.” The same scenes played out across Ireland. The fungus destroyed 90 percent of the island’s potato crop.1
By autumn, people all over Ireland began to starve or die of starvation-related diseases. When a landlord went to investigate conditions on his estate in west Cork near Skibbereen, he discovered “six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead . . . I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive . . . in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least two hundred of such phantoms,” pleading for food. “Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain.” Conditions were just as bad farther north in Meath and Galway, where Irish freedom fighter John Mitchel “saw sights that will never wholly leave the eyes that beheld them:—cowering wretches, almost naked in the savage weather, prowling in turnip-fields, and endeavoring to grub up roots.”2
Skeletal victims dressed in tatters, such as these residents of County Cork, became a common sight across Ireland in the famine years.
By late 1846 and early 1847, the Irish were exhibiting the classic symptoms of starvation, including bloated bellies (because bodily fluids typically confined to blood vessels escape when the body is deprived of protein and other nutrients for extended periods) and bloody diarrhea (from disintegrating, malnourished intestines). Death became omnipresent. In the southwest, in the village of Kenmare, the local priest recorded in his diary in early 1847 that there was “nothing more usual than to find four or five bodies in the street every morning.” In the northwest, in County Sligo, a relief official reported from a rural parish that “it is no exaggeration to affirm that . . . the people are dying from starvation by dozens daily.”3
The death toll would not have been so horrific had the English government, which controlled Ireland, not handled the crisis with such coldhearted ineptitude. The administration of Prime Minister Lord John Russell maintained that much of the crisis was the fault of the Irish themselves for seeking handouts rather than sufficiently exerting themselves. Public works projects were created to employ some of the indigent, but the sufferers were so debilitated from hunger, and given so little food in exchange for their labor (out of fear that they would come to prefer this work to their usual employment), that thousands died even while participating in them. Most of England believed that “Irish property must pay for Irish poverty,” meaning that wealthy Irish landlords ought to foot the bill for famine relief. This became the justification for cutting back on assistance that might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. From 1846 to 1851, about 1.1 million Irish men, women, and children died as a result of the famine.4
Record numbers fled Ireland—to the United States if they could raise the money needed for the fare, or to Canada if they could not afford the more expensive ticket to New York. Those who were hardest hit could not emigrate, for in addition to the fare, one needed to supply most of one’s own food for the four-to-six-week transatlantic journey. The only way that the truly destitute could make the crossing to America was through the assistance of others. As many as 50,000 had their fares paid by their landlords, who were motivated primarily by the fact that it was cheaper to pay for their tenants to emigrate than it was to support them in local poorhouses. Perhaps another 25,000 had their fares subsidized by religious or charitable organizations. But such programs accounted for no more than 5 percent of the total famine emigration.5
The vast majority of Ireland’s destitute inhabitants could make it to North America only with the financial support of family members who had immigrated before them, and victims of the famine did everything in their power to induce these relatives to send such assistance. “Pen cannot dictate the poverty of this country, at present,” wrote two residents of County Sligo in one such plea. “Pity our hard case, and do not leave us on the number of the starving poor . . . [I]f you knew what hunger we and our fellow-countrymen are suffering, if you were ever so much distressed, you would take us out of this poverty Isle . . . Don’t let us die with the hunger.”6
Thousands of Irish Americans answered such calls, sending money and ship tickets to help loved ones escape the famine. In 1847, known to the Irish as “Black ’47” for the incredible suffering that befell their nation in that year, American immigration from Ireland tripled over pre-famine levels, and these figures exclude the tens of thousands who landed in Canada before continuing southward to the United States. Referring to it as “the hungry invasion,” the Times of London called the Irish exodus of 1847 “one of the most marvellous events in the annals of human migration. The miserable circumstances under which the majority left their homes, . . . the thousands of miles over which the dreary pilgrimage was protracted, the fearful casualties of the voyage by shipwreck, by famine, and by fever, constituted a fact which we believe to be entirely without precedent.” It was, the Times recognized, “a movement which has already exceeded all human experience.”7
Yet 1847, it turned out, was only the tip of the iceberg, as those who made it to America in 1846 and 1847 paid for additional loved ones to immigrate in subsequent years. “Our fine country is abandoned by all the population,” wrote a woman in County Meath in 1850. “The few that remain [are] in great need [because] there is no person to employ them . . . I think [we] will see you in America before long.” Remittances made such emigration possible. In County Galway, one newspaper reported in 1851, “each mail . . . brings letters containing money, and giving glowing pictures of the prosperity that awaits the emigrant in the new world.” The lucky recipients immediately booked passage “to what they call the land of liberty and plenty.” By 1851, annual Irish immigration to the United States had reached five times the pre-famine level, and it continued nearly as high through 1854. By the end of the 1850s, 2.1 million Irish men, women, and children—out of Ireland’s pre-famine population of 8 million—had fled their country. Of that total, 1.5 million emigrated to the United States, and 950,000 of them landed in New York.8
Conditions on board the sailing ships that took these immigrants to America were notoriously dreadful. Often these vessels were referred to as “coffin ships” because the shipboard death rates reached unprecedented levels. But in recounting the stories of the Irish passage to North America in the famine years, writers sometimes confused myth and legend with fact. One unscrupulous author even went so far as to copy passages from a late nineteenth-century work of fiction about the famine emigration and present it as a long-lost famine “diary.” The book, with its lurid descriptions of suffering aboard a coffin ship, was a best seller in Ireland until the fraud was exposed.9
The typical Irish emigrant in the famine years would have walked to Cork, Dublin, Belfast, or some other Irish port and taken a steamship from there to Liverpool, the European port of departure for 76 percent of the famine Irish sailing to the United States. The steamship journey from Ireland to Liver pool was an ordeal in itself.* Poor Irish emigrants could not afford tickets that granted them access to the interior of the vessel, so they typically spent the entire overnight crossing of the Irish Sea (fourteen hours from Dublin, thirty from Cork) outside on the deck without even benches to sit on. As a parliamentary committee noted in 1854, “all that time the cattle and live stock” transported on those steamers “are protected, while the deck-passengers . . . are left without shelter or accommodation of any kind on the bare deck.” Buffeted by fierce winds and doused by the persistent sea spray and frequent rainstorms, the emigrants arrived in Liverpool “positively prostrated,” shivering and soaked to the bone, “as wet as if they had been dipped in the sea,” according to a Cork shipping official. “The manner in which passengers are conveyed from Irish to English ports,” he told a parliamentary committee in 1854, was “disgraceful, dangerous, and inhuman.” To add insult to injury, as the dazed emigrants disembarked from the steamers, they would have had to pass through a gauntlet of “runners,” employees of ticket brokers and boardinghouse keepers who used every scam imaginable to induce the Irish to purchase their employers’ services at inflated prices.10
If the emigrants were lucky, they had bought or been sent a ticket to New York aboard a packet liner, a sailing ship that ran on a regular schedule. If so, they could have timed their trip to Liverpool so as to leave as short a layover there as possible, since Liverpool’s emigrant boardinghouses were notoriously seedy and expensive. One proprietor was prosecuted for lodging ninety-two emigrants in a house licensed to hold nineteen. Many Irish emigrants slept on the streets rather than pay for such places. The vast majority, however, would not have traveled on packets but would have bought tickets on the cheaper unscheduled ships, which never seemed to depart as soon as the ticket agent promised. These vessels cast off at the whim of the owner, typically when sufficient cargo, human or otherwise, had been found to make the voyage profitable. Emigrants sometimes had to wait weeks for their ship to finally leave Liverpool—stressful days during which their meager savings might be exhausted in paying for food and lodging.11
Emigrant ships like this one leaving the Liverpool docks in 1850 carried far more passengers during the Irish famine years than they ever had before.
The emigrants usually arrived in Liverpool in the spring. Not only was the weather on the transatlantic journey best at that time of year, but also they were most likely to find work immediately after their voyage if they arrived in mid-to-late springtime, when employers did the bulk of their annual hiring. Even in 1847, when the Irish were literally fleeing for their lives, 46 percent of the emigrants left Liverpool in April, May, or June. Knowing they would probably land in New York with little money and no food, they did everything within their power to time their arrival to coincide with the season when their employment prospects would be brightest.12
As the ship floated away from the Liverpool docks and headed down the river Mersey toward the Atlantic, the famine immigrants were less likely to feel a sense of regret at leaving Ireland than had previous generations. Nonetheless, many were overcome with sadness at the idea that they would likely never see home again. Others were “quaking with fear, . . . some crying, some cursing” the spouse who had talked them into emigrating. Some even demanded to be brought back to the Liverpool docks. Before long, seasickness would set in, and within hours of departure, rivers of vomit might be flowing back and forth across the floor of the steerage quarters if these passengers were not permitted to retch over the side of the vessel. Emigrant guidebooks offered many seasickness remedies, which ranged from taking cayenne pepper to wearing woolen socks.13
Once the passengers’ seasickness subsided, they soon became overwhelmed by the tedium of the voyage. The time necessary to make the 3,043-mile journey from Liverpool to New York could vary tremendously, depending on the type of vessel, the cargo, prevailing winds, and storms. The trip typically took about five weeks, though six weeks was common and seven weeks was not unheard of. The fastest sailing vessel of the period that regularly carried immigrants, the Yorkshire, took twenty-nine days on average to make the crossing. This means that even the speediest immigrant ship traversed the Atlantic at just four miles per hour, and the typical ship did so at a snail-like three miles per hour. No wonder boredom was such a common complaint.14
Immigrants protested even more about the food served on board their vessels, both the quality and the quantity, than they did about the tedium of the voyage. Before 1803, ships were not required to provide their passengers with any food whatsoever. Immigrants were expected to bring their own. Any food that a passenger did receive was the result of negotiation with the shipping company at the time the ticket was purchased. But as immigrants became poorer, no longer able to afford the large cache of supplies that previous generations had brought with them, some began arriving in North America at death’s door, having eaten only what they could beg from other passengers. In 1803 Parliament passed its first so-called Passengers Act, requiring ships leaving British ports to provide enough food for each passenger to insure that no one would starve to death while crossing the Atlantic. The law mandated that emigrants receive per day at least one gallon of water; one and a half pounds of bread, biscuit, or oatmeal; half a pound of meat; and a half pint of molasses. As the emigrants became even more impoverished, Parliament amended the law in 1835. But rather than increase the allowance now that fewer immigrants could afford to bring substantial supplies of food with them, the lawmakers actually reduced the water ration to three quarts, cut the bread or biscuit ration to one pound daily, and eliminated the meat and molasses altogether. Flour, potatoes, and rice were later added as acceptable substitutes for bread and biscuit.15
Not only did the emigrants not get much food, but what they got was awful. The “ship bread” and “biscuit” were typically months old and rock hard. The voyagers needed to soak them in their precious ration of water to make them edible. Sometimes even that did not help. Often these foodstuffs became infested with maggots or otherwise spoiled. In 1848 on a ship headed for New York, Irish emigrant Henry Johnson received his weekly ration as two pounds of “meal” (probably cornmeal) and five pounds of “biscuit,” but the latter was so foul that even the pigs on the ship would not eat it. He had brought provisions from Ireland to supplement the ship’s allowance, but when he opened his trunk after a week at sea, he found it “alive with maggots and was obliged to throw it overboard.” He tried to beg food from others, “but it was every man for himself.” As a result, he recalled, “for the remainder of the passage I got a right good starving.” His voyage from Liverpool to New York took nearly eight weeks.16
Even preparing the food that was edible could be an ordeal. Rice, oatmeal, and potatoes required large quantities of water to be cooked, so immigrants who used some of their daily water ration to prepare them might satiate their hunger pangs only to find themselves overwhelmed by thirst. Some tried cooking with seawater, but they usually deemed the results inedible. Even those who had enough fresh water for cooking often found it impossible to gain access to the limited number of cooking stations. The ship’s cook would boil an immigrant’s rice or oatmeal in exchange for a bribe, but few could afford this expense, and instead took their chances at the public “galley.” The meek, weak, sick, and elderly, admitted a British investigative committee, could rarely muscle their way to the cookstoves, and were the ones most likely to suffer from hunger on an immigrant voyage. Only beginning on October 1, 1852, did Parliament require ships leaving Great Britain to serve immigrants their allowance of food already cooked.17
This cutaway view of a sailing ship in the emigrant trade provides an unusually clear view of the passenger quarters. “Cabin passengers,” those who paid a premium in exchange for less crowded conditions, are berthed on the first level below deck, steerage passengers are crammed into the middle level, and freight fills the lowest level.
To make matters worse, the ship’s crew often shortchanged the passengers when doling out their meager food allowance. Vere Foster devoted himself to famine relief after witnessing how the blight devastated the tenants living on his family’s estate in County Louth. On a fact-finding voyage on a fairly typical immigrant sailing ship in 1850, a year after Parliament had increased the minimum food allowance by 50 percent (and added molasses and tea to the required fare), Foster discovered that the common complaint that crews withheld food from the immigrants was true. Passengers on the Washington got less than half the promised allotment of oatmeal, biscuit, tea, and molasses, and only 60 percent of the stipulated rice. Foster thought that the complaint of a gentleman might put things right, but the captain vowed to declare him a pirate and throw him in irons if he persisted in interfering. “By Jesus Christ I’ll rope’s end you,” he and his crew threatened when any passenger persisted in demanding the proper ration.18
Conditions in the “steerage” compartments, where all but a handful of immigrants were berthed, were even more dreadful than their shipboard diet. The first level below the ship’s deck was divided into cabins. “Cabin passengers” from Liverpool to New York might pay £5 instead of £4 in return for larger food allowances and better-ventilated, roomier accommodations, with only two persons per bunk and four to twelve passengers per cabin. Some ships even offered more luxurious accommodations, with meals served in a dining “saloon” and sleeping quarters that were not shared with strangers.19
Descending a level farther, one reached the steerage compartments, so called because ships were once steered from that part of the vessel. Situated far below deck, the steerage compartments were pitch-black unless lit by candles (which the crew frowned upon) or dim lamps. The steerage quarters were huge, typically the width of the entire ship and half its length, with the berths placed along the walls. Whereas cabin passengers slept two to a bed, in steerage four adult passengers were shoehorned into each six-by-six-foot bunk, giving each adult eighteen inches of bed space. Those aged thirteen or younger got nine inches. The bunks were placed one right next to the other, with no dividers of any kind, for one hundred feet or more, so that the effect was of two long slabs of humanity, one on top of the other, on each side of the ship. On larger ships, a one-hundred-foot-long steerage cabin might hold three hundred passengers or more (depending on how many were children), and there were typically two such compartments, one in the bow and the other in the stern. The empty space between the rows of bunks lining either wall could be used to eat or congregate, though that space could barely hold all the passengers during crowded spring and early summer voyages. “Pigs are taken care of . . . much better than the emigrants,” admitted a British official summing up the passengers’ crowded plight. “Somebody has an interest in [the pigs’] lives, but nobody seems to care about the poor emigrants.”20
No image can adequately convey the overcrowding, the putrid stench, and the pitch-black darkness of the steerage compartments of famine era sailing ships. This attempt was made by a sketch artist from the Illustrated London News in 1851.
Emigrants found steerage travel mortifying not merely because their berths were so crowded but because they often had to share them with total strangers. The emigrants typically got to choose their own berths, but if a family of three claimed one of the four-person bunks, a stranger would have to squeeze in with them. Unmarried women would undoubtedly have sought to bunk with other women, but if they were among the last to arrive, or if they managed to fill only three of the four places in a bunk, a strange man might join them. If women wanted to change their clothes or use a chamber pot (which they tended to prefer to the vile privies on deck), they had to do so in front of complete strangers, male and female. “There is,” as one official admitted, “no privacy whatever.”21
Parliament did eventually try to mitigate these conditions. Beginning in 1852, when most of the famine emigration was over, a new Passengers Act required unmarried men age fourteen and older to be housed in a separate steerage compartment at the front of the ship. The statute also reduced from four to two the number of unrelated passengers who could be placed in the same bunk, and banned shipping companies from putting men and women above the age of fourteen in the same berth unless they were married. But while this law meant that single women no longer had to disrobe in front of single men, they were still subject to the wandering eyes of the ship’s married male passengers. Not until after the Civil War would regulations mandate that single men, single women, and families each have their own separate steerage quarters.22
Nearly every transatlantic crossing involved at least one terrifying storm. During a violent gale, wrote Irish emigrant Thomas Reilly, his vessel “screech[ed] with every stroke of the waves, every bolt in her quaked, every timber writhed, the smallest nail had a cry of its own.” The huge waves struck at the ship’s “bows and sides with the force and noise of a thousand sledge hammers upon so many anvils.” During these storms, the crew battened down the hatches and locked the steerage passengers inside their teeming, pitch-black compartments, though when conditions became especially dire, the sailors might release some of the men in order to have them assist with pumping out the seawater that sometimes flooded the ship’s lower compartments. The women and children remained below, praying earnestly and loudly until the emergency had passed.23
Even when steerage passengers were not locked into their compartments, it was difficult for them to find good places to ride out an Atlantic storm, something this image from 1881 clearly illustrates.
Incredible as it may sound, steerage was not the worst place to be in a storm. In order to transport even more immigrants than could be berthed in steerage, some enterprising ship owners placed crude huts on the main deck near the privies. At first glance, these accommodations might seem superior to steerage, but inspectors found them to be the worst of all because of exposure to the elements, especially the wind. During a storm, these cabins were pummeled by seawater as well.
Emigrant John Ryan from Limerick was placed in one of these huts along with eight members of the Fitzgerald family and five other single passengers aboard the E.Z., a ship that carried thousands of famine emigrants to New York. He initially thought his accommodations were “not bad at all.” But Ryan soon discovered that the wind and spray were so constant and the hut so crudely built that while his shipmates in steerage were dry, he spent the day in water up to his knees. When a storm hit about two weeks into his crossing, Ryan—fed up with being so wet—decided to ride it out in another part of the ship. It was a wise decision, because as the storm intensified, his hut was torn from the deck and “washed overboard, . . . people and all.” No trace of the hut or its thirteen inhabitants was ever found.24
Immigrants also dreaded steerage because of the deadly diseases that spread among those forced to spend most of the journey in its suffocating confines. The vomit that seasick passengers began heaving up nearly from the moment their ship began its journey was rarely cleared away from the steerage compartments. No one, least of all the ship’s crew, was willing to clean up that mess. Furthermore, in the rough waters of the North Atlantic, the contents of the passengers’ chamber pots would spill onto the steerage cabin floor. There it mixed with the vomit and the seawater that leaked (or in some cases poured) into the compartment during storms, creating, as one official who inspected these ships would later recall, “the foulest stench that can be conceived of.”25
The prevalence of feces in the vile muck that swirled around the steerage passengers’ feet increased as many became sick and confined themselves to their berths. The terrible shipboard diet of spoiled, rock-hard, undercooked food caused severe digestive ailments, of which diarrhea and dysentery were the most common. The propensity of the sick to stay in bed explains why those who boarded ships early chose the top steerage bunks so they would not have to worry about vomit or diarrhea dripping down on them from a sick passenger above.
Contagious diseases spread quickly in these close quarters. The most prevalent was typhus, known as “ship fever.” Body lice, which reproduced exponentially in the sardine-can crowding of the steerage cabins, carried this bacterial infection in their own feces. Scratching at the lice caused tiny abrasions in the skin through which the feces entered and infected their human hosts. Those suffering from typhus endured severe headaches, high fevers, chills, and nausea. They had neither the strength nor the desire to leave their beds. Immigration officials were undoubtedly referring to these lice when they complained that they found the steerage cabin’s “filthy beds teeming with abominations.”
Even in the days before antibiotics, three in four typhus sufferers managed to recover on their own, though their fever and other symptoms lasted for several weeks. Some were debilitated for months. The unlucky ones developed delirium and gangrene and would eventually succumb to kidney or cardiac failure. Because it took ten days from infection for the first symptoms to emerge, and then several weeks after that until death occurred, most of these fatalities took place not at sea but in hospitals and tenements in the United States and Canada. “In this country . . . there is thousands of people dieing” from “the tipes [typhus] fevir,” one Irish immigrant wrote from Canada to her parents back in Ireland. Because of the particular overcrowding on the vessels with cheap fares headed to Canada, mortality from typhus was much more common there than in New York, where the annual death toll from the disease was likely to be in the hundreds rather than the thousands. Famine immigrants to Canada were three times more likely to die on or immediately after the voyage than those who were able to afford passage on a ship sailing directly to New York.26
Immigrants sailing across the Atlantic feared cholera even more than typhus, for while it was a relatively rare disease, those who contracted it usually did not survive. The cholera bacteria typically entered the body when the victim ingested water or food contaminated with the feces of someone already infected with the ailment. Symptoms included acute vomiting, severe abdominal cramps, high fever, and “rice water” diarrhea, in which the “rice” was actually pieces of the victim’s colon flaking away as the bacteria destroyed the digestive system. What made cholera particularly terrifying was that someone who seemed perfectly healthy one moment might become incapacitated with fever a few hours later and die the following day. The cholera bacteria sloshed around in the liquid filth of many a steerage cabin during the famine migration, especially in 1849 and 1853, and while it killed fewer immigrants than typhus, it spread to others in the cities where the famine immigrants settled. More than one thousand inhabitants of the Irish neighborhoods of New York perished during the cholera epidemic of 1849.27
In the years immediately before the famine, four or five passengers on average would die during the voyage of the typical five-hundred-passenger immigrant vessel headed for New York (a mortality rate of 0.9 death per one hundred passengers). During the famine years, the death rate on board immigrant vessels landing at New York doubled to eight deaths per five-hundred-passenger ship. The mortality rate peaked in 1849, the year of the worst cholera outbreak, at fifteen fatalities per five hundred passengers. An equal number probably died after disembarking from diseases (especially typhus) contracted during the journey. Whether the higher death rate during the famine years was the result of deteriorating conditions on board or the pre-voyage debilitation of famine victims is hard to determine. This 3 percent mortality rate for ships arriving in New York is frighteningly high, but perhaps not enough to justify calling them “coffin ships.”28
Immigrant ships bound for Canada, however, did sometimes arrive in North America with dozens of dead passengers. In the years before 1848, when the fare to Canada was half that to the United States, and relatively few famine victims already had relatives in the States who could pay for their tickets, the most destitute, desperate Irish emigrants would almost always book passage to Canada. These famine immigrants, the ones already suffering from severe malnutrition and unable to afford food to supplement the ship’s allowance, were the ones most likely to succumb to the common shipboard ailments. The death toll was also far higher on ships headed to Canada because conditions on these British vessels, many of which were not designed for the transportation of immigrants, were far worse, in terms of both crowding and cleanliness. “The Black Hole of Calcutta was a mercy compared to the holds of these vessels,” complained the Montreal Board of Health.* In the most extreme cases—fewer than a dozen—these ships would arrive in St. John, New Brunswick, or Quebec City with 15, 20, or even 30 percent of their passengers already dead, and just as many severely ill. “Coffin ship” is not too strong a term to describe these vessels.29
Canadians compounded these problems by quarantining both the sick and their family members in tents on Grosse Isle, an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, thirty-five miles east of Quebec City. In September 1847 the Times of London characterized the Grosse Isle facilities as “ridiculously insufficient,” owing to both lack of care and the subfreezing temperatures of the Canadian autumn. At least five thousand immigrants died on Grosse Isle that year. Many might have survived had they been treated in real hospitals, as sick immigrants were in New York. According to some estimates, 30 percent of the famine Irish who secured passage to Canada in “Black ’47” died either during the crossing or soon after arrival.30
Many Britons recognized that their treatment of the Irish was nothing less than, as the Times of London put it, a “national inhumanity,” one that would be “an eternal scandal to the British name.” Yet only about 10 percent of New York’s famine Irish immigrants came to the city via Canada. As a result, few of New York’s Irish-born inhabitants were forced to endure the infamous “coffin ships.”31
While the terrible journeys would remain forever seared in their memory, the immigrants’ first sighting of land, and of New York Harbor in particular, was also something they would never forget. “Early in the afternoon, the exciting cry of ‘Land!’ ‘Land!’ ‘Land!’ ran through the ship like wild fire,” recalled English immigrant William Smith, whose ship from Liverpool limped into New York Harbor in 1848 after a voyage of nearly eight weeks. “The effect it had upon the passengers, baffles all description. Some fell upon their knees and thanked God for his mercy to them, some wept for joy, others capered about, exhibiting extravagant demonstrations of joy.” A German immigrant whose ship dropped anchor in New York Harbor at night under a moonlit sky called her first view of the city “enchanting, unforgettable.”32
Staten Islanders hated having the immigrant quarantine hospital in their midst. When state officials delayed acting on their promise to move the facility, angry residents took matters into their own hands in 1858 and burned it to the ground.
Before immigrants were allowed to disembark, however, they had to pass a medical inspection. “Each passenger’s name was called over, and every one had to pass in review” before a doctor sent from the immigrant quarantine hospital on Staten Island, recalled one English steerage passenger. Those deemed fit were allowed to continue on to Manhattan, while those suffering from typhus or other diseases had to go to Staten Island to recuperate. The immigrants forced to convalesce on Staten Island considered the experience hellish, ignorant of how much worse their fate would have been in the same situation in Canada. “‘Is it their object to kill or cure the patients?’ was a question I asked myself more than once during my stay there,” wrote Smith, who had contracted typhus, after his experience in the quarantine hospital in 1848. “From the moment I entered the hospital to the time of leaving it, I saw no kind feelings, no generous actions.” Smith was one of 3,944 immigrants sent to the quarantine hospital in 1848, out of 189,176 immigrants landing that year. Before they could finish their journey, about two out of every one hundred immigrants arriving in New York in the early famine years (the late 1840s) had to convalesce on Staten Island. In the 1850s, only about one in one hundred was required to do so.33
For those who managed to avoid the quarantine hospital, there was one more challenge to face before or upon landing. “People may think that if they get safe through Liverpool they are all right,” wrote Michael Hogan to his aunt Catherine in County Carlow in 1851, “but I can assure you that there is greater robberies done in New York on emigrants than there is in Liverpool.” Hogan was referring to the “runners,” those “scoundrels of the very lowest calibre” who pocketed a commission if they could entice the dazed and confused immigrants to buy a railroad or steamship ticket from their employer. Runners also worked for boardinghouse keepers, preying on immigrants desperate for a good night’s sleep before they looked for their own place to live, hunted down their friends and relatives in the city, or continued on by boat or train to their final destination.34
Through much of the famine era, runners could board the immigrant ships even before they landed and sell train or boat tickets at double or triple the actual fare to unsuspecting newcomers. “It is not uncommon, after the vessel is cleared from quarantine, for eight or ten boat loads of runners to surround it,” testified a physician in 1847. “They are desperate men, and can be kept off only by an armed force.” Even if the immigrants refused to do business with them, the runners might make off with an immigrant’s luggage and hold it hostage until the newcomer paid a “handling fee.” Runners were often immigrants themselves. “We find the German preying upon the German—the Irish upon the Irish—the English upon the English,” reported an investigative committee, though the report admitted that many native-born Americans were also engaged in this “nefarious business.” The New York legislature attempted to rein in the runners by licensing them, but the law was completely ineffectual. The threat posed by the runners became internationally known. Guidebooks warned against their “extortionate charges” and urged immigrants to walk right past them, no matter what they might say. But many an exhausted, disoriented immigrant fell prey to their lures and snares.35
“Runners” did everything in their power to swindle the arriving immigrants. New York’s first immigrant depot, opened at Castle Garden in 1855, was created largely to allow government officials to have access to the immigrants before the runners.
Knowing how susceptible the immigrants were to the runners, New Yorkers set up aid societies to give the new arrivals a ready alternative to the scammers. While organizations aimed at assisting those from foreign lands had long existed in New York, these had been intended primarily to aid foreign-born residents after they settled in the city. But by the 1840s, tens of thousands of immigrants were passing through town annually on their way to other cities and states. They too needed protection from swindlers and help getting their bearings before heading to their final destinations. To this end, a British Protective Emigrant Society was established in 1844 on Rector Street, joining the already existing Irish Emigrant Society on Chambers Street. These groups also had satellite offices adjacent to the East River piers of the busiest transatlantic shipping lines. The society’s goal was to protect British immigrants “from fraud and imposition” and help them find employment, either in New York or elsewhere. In its first six years of operation, the protective society found jobs for 3,400 of 4,100 immigrants who sought them, and offered advice to 66,000 more. The Germans, French, Italians, and Dutch soon created their own aid organizations. Polish and German Jews ran separate societies to aid their respective communities.36
One of the reasons why immigrants were so susceptible to runners was that prior to 1855, there was no single place where all immigrants landed. On any given day, especially during the height of the immigration season in the late spring and early summer, a ship from the Black Ball Line might tie up at Pier 23, north of Fulton Street, while a vessel from the Black Star Line docked at the foot of Dover Street, and yet a third, from the Dramatic Line, landed its immigrants at Pier 14, just south of Wall Street. Runners would be on hand to greet the immigrants at all these locations, while the emigrant aid societies rarely had that kind of manpower.37
Realizing that the landing of immigrants could no longer remain wholly unregulated, in 1855 the commissioners of emigration of the State of New York opened a landing depot in Castle Garden at the southern end of Manhattan. Castle Garden was a beloved theater founded in 1824 within the walls of a former military fortress known as Castle Clinton, which sat on a little artificial island two hundred feet southwest of Manhattan’s southern tip. As recently as 1850–1851, it had played host to such noted performers as the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind and the exotic dancer Lola Montez. But with New Yorkers of means moving ever farther uptown, Castle Garden now sat empty most nights, and in 1855 the commissioners leased it and converted it into an immigration depot.38
The medical examination of immigrants at Castle Garden was a cursory affair compared to the more thorough inspections that would take place at Ellis Island beginning in 1892.
When the Castle Garden Emigrant Depot opened on August 1, immigrants for the first time underwent a standardized series of screening and processing steps before they were free to begin their lives in the United States. Barges towed by steamboats carried the passengers and their baggage from their ships moored in the harbor to the new facility. As the immigrants disembarked and entered the building, a physician would inspect them and pull out of line for further examination any who appeared sick. (This was in addition to the shipboard inspection done by a doctor from the quarantine hospital, so not many failed this second test.) The healthy immigrants then passed to the center of the cavernous hall to the huge registration desk, where clerks recorded their name, age, occupation, the number of accompanying family members, the name of the ship that brought them to New York, their destination, and the amount of money they had with them.39
Immigrants lingering inside Castle Garden before venturing out to begin their new lives in America.
“Next, the emigrant is shown to the baths,” reported the Times. With a deep trough of fresh running water, plenty of soap, tubs behind a screen, and “coarse roller towels, . . . every facility is granted the new comer, whatever may be his condition on entering it, to leave Castle Garden personally clean.” After washing, the immigrants returned to the pier to claim their luggage. If they planned to stay in the city, they could either take the baggage with them or leave it there out of the reach of the runners, who congregated just outside the depot, and claim it once they had found a place to live or located their friends or relatives already living in Manhattan. Before long, the commissioners would add currency and labor exchanges to the Castle Garden facility. The food offered for sale to the immigrants, initially just bread and cheese, later became more varied and substantial as well.40
Unlike modern travelers who try to make it out of airports to their final destinations as rapidly as possible, the newly arrived immigrants did not leave Castle Garden as quickly as they might have. Even after they had completed their processing, hundreds upon hundreds of them lingered in clusters all around the cavernous hall—some in the seats that remained from the building’s theatrical past, others on the floor around the tall central fountain. “The children were rollicking about it—sailing their paper boats, and full of unrestrained glee,” reported the Times during Castle Garden’s first days as an immigrant depot. “The women sat in groups, talking in some of those crooked old-country languages . . . , some knitting, some cutting and eating slices of rye German bread and cheese, some patching and fixing up the wardrobes of their family.” The immigrants found safety and comfort in the vast, sturdy rotunda, such a contrast to the rolling ships in which they had spent their previous five or six weeks. As long as they stayed inside Castle Garden, their European languages, accents, habits, and clothing would remain the rule rather than the exception and find acceptance rather than ridicule. In Castle Garden they could spend a few precious hours, sometimes even a day or two, decompressing from their harrowing ocean voyage and preparing for the challenges that lay ahead in creating the brand-new lives they had long dreamed of starting in New York.41