CHAPTER 26

Dying was one way out of the nightmare. But there had for some time been another: emigration. It was death to stay in Ireland, so the hungry wandering people turned towards the ports. From 1847 onwards people were leaving from every port in Ireland. Before the famine, to leave Ireland had been regarded as the most terrible of all fates, and transportation was the most dreaded of sentences. Figures are not known for those lost and forgotten, desperate and frightened people. In a great mass movement they made their way, by tens of thousands, out of Ireland. There were hundreds of little schooners sailing out of every bay on the west coast, weighted down with human cargo, of which no record was ever kept. What is known is that while the population by 1850 should have been at least ten million, fifty years later it was still less than half that amount.

It was a mass emigration, the largest in the history of mankind, and it was to alter permanently the population structure of Ireland. This was not the colourful journeying of emigrants so often pictured in romantic anecdotes, with banners and streamers waving and fluttering in the warm gentle breeze, and Ol’ Billy’s brass band playing at the quay while good-byes were blown into snow-white silk handkerchiefs.

Hunger and fever travelled with these ill-fated people, and the path to a new life became a path to horror. The tales of bitterness of those years could fill a hundred volumes — a thousand volumes. The Irish, instead, have allowed the tears of those terrifying years to flow down the streams of time, ashamed to remember the degradation and the horror piled on horror. It seemed as though there was a curse on those doomed, hapless, people. The chief casualty was the human spirit; crushed by the weight of horror, made wanton by the circumstances of the time. Ordinary decent people were forced to do things they would never otherwise think of doing.

These were things to be spoken of in hushed tones around the winter fires for the next two or three generations, events never to be told to the ‘stranger’. For your people to have died of hunger, amidst plenty, was in itself shameful. To be found dead with a mouthful of grass — maddened by the hunger — was ignominious. There was also the guilt that survival imposes on those who make it through an affliction like the famine. The relief of escape is often offset by shame at having survived at the apparent expense of others weaker or less lucky. The enormity of what happened was too painful to confront. It was best to forget these things. But it was impossible to forget! It was their own sins they were trying to forgive, the ‘Original Sin of Irish birth’.

It is in the nature of humanity to ascribe righteousness to the victorious and depravity to the vanquished. There was never to be the benefit of a general accounting and settling-up. Britain was never to face up to its atrocities in Ireland. The truths there too would be too uncomfortable. It would plunge a knife deep into the heart of an otherwise fine and highly cultivated society. The wound was left to fester for too long. There is a folk memory of the Famine in the west of Ireland that may never be forgotten. It is perhaps because of the reluctance of the Irish to speak of their own degradation, that has allowed Britain to downplay the extent of the calamity that was Ireland under her administration.

The pre-Famine Irish were by nature a happy people, wretched though their conditions might be. Sir Walter Scott, during his visit to Ireland in 1825, wrote that ‘their natural condition is turned towards gaiety and happiness’. Music and dancing was the universal diversion. Lord George Hill left an account of renovating a cabin: ‘The custom on such occasions is for the person who has the work to be done to hire a fiddler, upon which engagement all the neighbours joyously assemble and carry in an incredible short time the stones and timber upon their backs to the new site; men women and children alternately dancing and working while daylight lasts, at the termination of which they adjourn to some dwelling where they finish the night, often prolonging the dance to dawn of day’. Arthur Young, the English traveller, commented on the fine physique of the average Irishman and the good looks of Irish women. And Nassau Senior, the economist, was ‘struck by the beauty of the population’.

The path of the emigrants to North America was made possible only because of the burgeoning timber importation from British North America. By the eighteen-forties, a trade that had barely existed thirty years earlier had grown to an annual importation of around one million loads of timber. The less than one hundred ships that sailed the Atlantic for Canada, before timber from northern Europe was drastically reduced, had increased, by 1845, to 2,000 ships, totalling over 1,000,000 tons.

Owners of timber ships had a major problem. Finding return cargo to British North America was extremely difficult. Demand for European goods was almost non-existent and timber-ships were forced to return in ballast, empty. The solution was the ‘passenger trade’ and owners began to look for emigrants with the blessing of the British Government.

The expense of fitting a ship was negligible and emigrants brought their own food. Fares were cheap, two or three pounds to Quebec, and as the trade developed ‘passage brokers’ undertook to supply owners with a fixed number of emigrants on commission. Firms of brokers in Liverpool sent agents around the Irish countryside to peddle passage tickets. Frauds were numerous, The Times, described passage brokers as ‘unprincipled, heartless adventurers’. Nevertheless the passenger trade was described as ‘one of the great supports of commerce’, and had the desirable result of enabling British North American timber to be sold at a low price.

Emigration became an industry. It was profitable, and easy profits attracted speculators. The English landlords, debauched, drunken, unscrupulous and dissolute, seized the opportunity, and cheerfully cleared whole townlands and villages. To these desperate victims emigration meant hope. How could they know, that an emigration officer in the United States would later write: ‘If crosses and tombs could be erected on the water, the whole route of the emigrant vessels...would long since have assumed the appearance of a crowded cemetery’.

Speculators sent people to sea in ships that sometimes were hardly out of sight of land before they sank. (Officially, 59 emigrant ships, on their way to America, sank in the years 1847—53.) Coffin ships, history called them. Survivors of hunger on land now found death by fever on the green Atlantic. But thousands did reach America where many found that hope was still a far-off thing.

There was very little desire on the part of the Irish emigrant to settle in British North America; with an almost frantic longing they wished to go to the United States. In the 1840s the US had nearly double the population that Australia has now, one hundred and fifty years later. It was a vibrant, prosperous country, while Canada then with only about a million inhabitants was desolate.

But the magnet that drew the emigrant away from Canada to the United States, wrote Thomas Colley Grattan, was ‘The Irishman looks on America as the refuge of his race, the home of his kindred, the heritage of his children and their children. The Atlantic is, to his mind, less a barrier between land and land than is St George’s Channel. The shores of England are further off in his heart’s geography than those of Massachusetts or New York.’

The native Irishman had long been convinced that no justice existed for him under the Union Jack. ‘It is not well for those who are thinking of leaving their beloved homes in Ireland to think of Canada as home’, wrote an Irishman in Boston ‘...the employment which grows from enterprise and the enterprise which grows from freedom are not to be found in Canada. It is a second edition of Ireland with more room.’

Irish emigration to Australia was negligible. The passage was expensive and anti-Irish prejudice amongst the colonists was strong. The only emigration (other than transportation) of even minor importance to Australia during the famine years was of female orphans from Irish workhouses, paid for by the British Government.[1]

At this period the United States was far from extending an indiscriminate welcome to emigrants. To be accepted they must be of good quality, healthy, and possessed of some resources. In the eighteen forties the country was still predominantly Yankee, hard and shrewd — anti British it is true, but also anti-Irish Catholic, as yet, not very far removed from the Anglo-Saxon dissenters who were the founding fathers. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty:

would have been angrily rejected at this date. Boston refused to give ships carrying any sick passengers permission even to enter the harbour. The despair of the unfortunate people who, after enduring the hardships of an Atlantic crossing in a crowded sailing-ship, with fever on board, who were ordered to put to sea again, with their supplies exhausted, can only be imagined. The measures had public opinion behind them, for the citizens of the USA dreaded the effect on the labour market of a large influx of cheap labour — ‘foreigners will work for what Americans cannot live on’.

Quarantine regulations were less severe in Canada than in the US and it was at Quebec that some of the poorest arrived. One eyewitness watching boats bringing the sick and dead from ship to shore described how ‘hundreds were literally flung on the beach, left amid the mud and the stones to crawl on the dry land as they could’, while another watching them as they crawled said they were ‘dying like fish out of water’.

Conditions can be gauged from the statistics of the ships typical being the Virginius: nine weeks from Liverpool to Quebec, out of 476 passengers, 158 died at sea, while another 106 landed sick with fever or ‘more dead than alive’ as an eye witness called them. They died soon after. William Henry Smith, an English civil engineer, records that on one vessel carrying 600 emigrants not a hundred survived.

On the 12 August 1847, the Montreal Board of Health reported that of the 4,427 passengers who had set sail in ten ships from Cork and Liverpool for Canada in the previous month, 804 died at sea while another 847 would soon be dead of fever. And of the remainder...

‘It may be supposed’ the Board went on, ‘that few of the survivors could reach other than an early grave. Terrible as have been the tales of the slave trade, against which the British nation has so long protested ... they exceed not in horrors, nor perhaps equal the dreadful realities to which these unfortunate wanderers have been subjected.’

Emigration saved money. The cost of emigrating a pauper was generally about half the cost of maintaining him in a workhouse for one year. Once the ship had sailed the destitute had been effectively banished, for they could never return. The temptation was therefore to ship off cheaply those unfortunates who, through age, infirmity, or starvation, had become a source of expense.

Stephen de Vere, of a well-to-do family from County Limerick, took a steerage passage on an emigrant vessel to Quebec, so, he might speak as a witness respecting the suffering of emigrants:

Before the emigrant has been at sea a week he is an altered man ... How can it be otherwise? Hundreds of poor people, men, women and children, of all ages from the drivelling idiot of 90 to the babe just born, huddled together, without light, without air, wallowing in filth, and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart ... the fevered patients lying between the sound in sleeping places so narrow, as almost to deny them ... a change of position ... by their agonised ravings disturbing those around them ... living without food or medicine except as administered by the hand of casual charity, dying without spiritual consolation and buried in the deep without the rites of the church.

The food, de Vere continued, was seldom sufficiently cooked because there were not enough cooking places. The supply of water was not enough for drinking and cooking — washing was impossible. The filthy beds were never allowed on deck to be aired. Provisions, doled out by ounces, consisted of meal of the worst quality, and salt meat. Water was so short that passengers threw their salt provisions overboard — they could not eat them and satisfy their raging thirst afterwards. People lay for days on end in their dark close berths, because by that method they suffered less from hunger. The captain used a false measure for water, and the so called gallon measure held only three pints instead of four. Lights were banned because the ship was carrying a cargo of gunpowder to Quebec. The voyage took three months and de Vere was told that the ship was ‘more comfortable than many’.

Another Englishman with a generous heart, the naturalist, Waterton, travelled from Quebec to Montreal on an American steamboat, on which there were 500 Irish emigrants. In his Wanderings he speaks of them:

They are going, they hardly knew whither, far away from their dear Ireland. It made one’s heart ache to see them all huddled together, without expectation of ever revisiting their native soil. We feared that the sorrow of leaving home for ever, the miserable accommodation aboard the ship which had brought them away, and the tossing of the angry ocean, in a long and dreary voyage, would have rendered them callous to good behaviour. But it was quite otherwise. They conducted themselves with great propriety. Every American on board seemed to feel for them. And then they were full of wretchedness. Need and oppression stared within their eyes; upon their backs hung ragged misery. The world was not their friend. ‘Poor dear Ireland’, exclaimed an aged female, as I was talking to her, ‘I shall never see it any more!’

On 11 December 1847, Mr Adam Ferrie, a member of the Legislative Council of Canada, wrote a furious open letter on Irish landlord emigration to the British Colonial Secretary, Earl Grey. He denounced landlords by name, the best-known being Lord Palmerston. Hordes of half-naked, starving paupers, declared Mr Ferrie, including aged and infirm, had been shipped off to ‘this young and thinly populated country without regard to humanity or even to common decency’. They were given promises of clothes, food and money and told that an agent would pay from two to five pounds to each family, according to size, on arrival at Quebec; upon arrival no agent could be found. Twice as many passengers as the ship could hold were huddled together between decks; there was too little food and water and conditions were ‘as bad as the slave trade’. A message was sent to Lord Palmerston that the ‘Common Council of the City of St John deeply regret that one of Her Majesty’s ministers, the Rt. Hon. Lord Palmerston, either by himself or his authorised agents should have 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.’

William Smith, a power-loom weaver from Manchester and ‘a thorough republican’ disgusted with England, recorded his experiences in a little book entitled ‘A Voice From the Steerage’. Most of the passengers, he writes, were from the south of Ireland; provisions and water were short and of execrable quality. Ship fever appeared before the India was a week out, and the captain caught it and died; twenty‑six passengers also died; water ran short and the ration was reduced to a pint a day; three of the passengers became lunatics and one threw himself overboard. Two ships were hailed and implored for a little water; they replied that they had none to spare — fever was raging in their own holds.

William Smith himself caught fever and he alleges that in the Staten Island hospital (off New York) the patients were cruelly treated; the beds, grids of iron bars with a little straw laid on top, inflicted torture on the sick, who were reduced, by fever, to skin and bones; the doctors were negligent and indifferent, the male nurses took a delight in abusing and thwarting the helpless, and struck the patients for innocent errors; food was inedible and conditions horribly unsanitary. The roofs leaked and the patients’ beds were appallingly drenched.

Most fever cases on Staten Island were Irish emigrants from British ships; indeed a representative of the New York Tribune reported that he did not notice one fever patient in hospital who was not Irish.

An inscription on a monument in Grosse Isle — off Quebec in the St Lawrence River, where quarantine had been abandoned as hopeless, since the line of ships waiting for inspection was at times several miles long, tells a grim story:

In this secluded spot lie the mortal remains of 5,294 persons who, fleeing from Pestilence and famine in Ireland in the year 1847, found in America but a grave.

It was erected in a beautiful wooded valley by Dr Douglas and eighteen medical assistants who were on duty during the epidemic of that year.

There is a second monument on Grosse Isle, a Celtic cross of granite with inscriptions in French, English and Irish. The first epitaph runs:

Sacred to the memory of thousands of Irish immigrants who to preserve the faith suffered hunger and exile in 1847-48, and stricken with fever ended here their sorrowful pilgrimage.

Thousands of the children of the Gael were lost in this island while fleeing from foreign tyrannical laws and an artificial famine in the years 1847-8. God bless them. God save Ireland!

It is a deeply moving experience to stand before a large, simple, unhewn stone, erected in 1859 by the Irish railroad navvies constructing the railway bridge in Montreal, (further up the St Lawrence River) where they had discovered the bones of their fellow countrymen, women and children, who were buried in mass graves on the site of the old emigration sheds at Point St Charles. The inscription on the rough boulder reads:

At least they got a monument! But with typical irony the real monument was being erected to their solicitous Queen who had step-mothered them with such concern in their hour of need!

A report of the Montreal Emigrant Society says: ‘From Grosse Island, the great charnel-house of victimised humanity, up to Port Sarnia, and along the borders of our magnificent river, upon the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie — wherever the tide of emigration has extended — are to be found the final resting places of the sons and daughters of Erin, an unbroken chain of graves, where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in one commingled heap, without a tear bedewing the soil, or a stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand and upwards thus went down to their graves.’

Dr Douglas, the medical officer at Grosse Isle, stated in his report that in his opinion the filthy Liverpool slums, where poor emigrants were forced to lodge before they embarked, were one of the main causes of the ship fever disaster. Three-quarters of the emigration across the Atlantic sailed from Liverpool, and ninety five per cent of that emigration was Irish. As no passenger was allowed to board a vessel at Liverpool until it was almost time to sail, because cargo was being stowed up to the last moment, every emigrant who was leaving from Liverpool was compelled to spend at least one night in the town, generally two or three nights. The squalor and filth of the poor Irish lodging-houses were notorious. The emigrants lay down closely packed with twenty or thirty others in a row on the floor; and thousands who had escaped typhus infection in Ireland were infected in these lodging-houses.

But the British Government was preparing to take quick, effective remedial action. A Bill was introduced into parliament and rushed through both Houses, which gave municipal authorities powers to send Irish paupers back to Ireland with the minimum of formality and delay. Five days after it became law, Dublin received its first consignment of returned paupers. ‘The Lord Mayor seemed puzzled what to do with them’, wrote Redington, the Irish Under-Secretary. Destitute persons actually suffering from fever were returned, and the mayor of Drogheda complained to the Home Office that the Liverpool authorities had sent fever cases who were too ill to stand down to the docks in a cart, and forced them on board.

The operation of the Act was harsh. The destitute Irish protested that they would rather die in Liverpool than go back to Ireland to further disadvantage and disable their kin.

By the end of 1847, as far as England in general and Liverpool in particular were concerned, the worst was over.

When the emaciated scarecrows — once men and women — skeleton children, dirt, nakedness, fever, and the hideous diseases which hunger brings — appeared on British doorsteps, the British response was one of violent irritation.

The Anglo-Irish landlords — and as a body it was impossible to regard them with sympathy, were made the scapegoat. The Irish people starved and died in one world, the landowning classes inhabited another. As Colonel Conolly of Kildare and Donegal told a Select Committee of the House of Lords in 1846 ‘Where the Landlords have never seen their estates, you can hardly suppose that their sympathies are very strong for the sufferings they have never witnessed’. The British Government then drafted a new Act, transferring the cost of relieving the destitute to the mostly bankrupt landlords in a spirit of reprisal; the theory being that the landlords could collect what rents as may be necessary to relieve distress amongst the starving tenants, from the starving tenants.

Those who crossed the Atlantic were not returning, so the exodus continued in that direction. Poor and unfortunate though they were, the people, before they crossed the ocean had lived in one of the most beautiful and poetic countries in the world; and to exchange the majestic, picturesque beauty of Ireland for an emigrant slum was in itself a profound psychological shock. So many left home with hope in their hearts, for a life of freedom from unimaginable enslavement and persecution, only to die amongst degradation, debasement, despair and humiliation.

Amongst those who died in Canada was the wife of one John Ford, a small farmer from County Cork. John Ford escaped the fever and went on, by one of the customary emigrant routes, through the Great Lakes to Detroit, where he carved for himself a farm out of the wilderness. He was the grandfather of Henry Ford, inventor and maker of the Ford motor car, and founder of the modern automobile industry.

The Irishman before the famine was sturdy and strong, he understood English, and he was sought after by large construction companies. Before a large-scale enterprise began, United States employers were accustomed to advertise in Dublin, Cork and Belfast newspapers to tempt men over. The canals, the roads, the railways of the United States, as of Canada, were constructed by Irish labourers; hard, difficult and dangerous work, dogged by accident and disease — for about a dollar a day.

Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who had emigrated in 1842 and become editor of the Boston Pilot, reminded the people of the United States who called the Irish foreigners ‘...that Ireland did supply the hands which led Lake Erie down to the sea, and wedded the strong Chesapeake to the gentle Delaware, and carried the roads of the East out to the furthest outposts of the West’.

Very few of the poor Irish who fled from Ireland in the Famine emigration — with hatred in their hearts for the British and the British Government — were destined to achieve prosperity and success themselves. The condition to which the people had been reduced, under British rule, not only by the famine but by the centuries which preceded it was much too severe a handicap, and it was the fate of the Irish emigrants to be regarded with aversion and contempt. They were fugitives, a hapless horde of diseased, distressed, dying people. The authorities never ceased complaining of the high proportion of old people, cripples, young children, even idiots and blind amongst the refugees.

The death toll in the emigrant slums was high and a terrible price was paid by the children in particular. They were dying in the crowded Irish slums, ‘with the most terrible mortality the world has ever seen’. In his report on the Boston census at that time, Lemuel Shattuck states that ‘the children in the Irish districts were literally born to die, and taking the Irish Catholic population as a whole the average age of persons buried, during the same period, was 13.43 years only’.

It was not until the second or third generation that Irish intelligence, quickness of comprehension and wit asserted themselves, and the descendants of the poor famine impelled emigrants became successful and powerful and were to continue to be Britain’s bitter enemies, exacting vengeance for the suffering their forebears endured. The statistics of their endurance, though understated, still make grim reading. In the year 1847 one hundred thousand emigrants left for British North America. By the end of that year twenty thousand had died in Canada, seventeen thousand perished during the voyage. One of the captains, Robert Whyte, noted that he never saw any of the emigrants from his brig again, with the exception of two young men. ‘The rest’ he wrote ‘wandered over the country, carrying nothing with them but disease and owing to their weak constitutions very few can have lived through the winter’.

The story of the Irish in the New World is not a romantic story of liberty and success, but the story of a bitter struggle. As bitter and as painful, though not as long, as the struggle by which the Irish at home were eventually to win the right to freedom and the right to call themselves a nation.

It was all for the advancement of civilisation, our wise and humane English friends assured us. Their mouthpiece, the London Times, which when the exodus was most pitiful, screamed with delight in one of its editorials:

They are going! They are going! The Irish are going with a vengeance. Soon a Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan — Law has ridden through Ireland: It had been taught with bayonets, and interpreted with ruin. Townships levelled with the ground, straggling columns of exiles, workhouses multiplied, and still crowded, express the determination of the legislature to rescue Ireland from its slovenly old Barbarism, and to plant there the Institutions of this more civilised land.

THE END OF THE FAMINE

In June 1849, Ireland was to lose her best, and last remaining friends, the Quakers or Society of Friends, when through exhaustion they were forced to conclude their relief work. On 2 June Lord John Russell offered a donation of £100 towards any plan they might be drawing up for the relief of the distress in the West of Ireland. In reply the Quakers wrote that there would be no plan, and with their habitual courtesy and restraint administered a few home truths. There was a ‘great and increasing distress prevailing in many parts’, but the problem of relief was ‘far beyond the reach of private exertion, the Government alone could raise the funds and carry out the measures necessary in many districts to save the lives of the people ... and we are truly sorry that it is now out of our power to offer ourselves as the distributors of Lord John’s bounty to our suffering fellow countrymen, ...the condition of our country has not improved in spite of the great exertions made by charitable bodies’ — and could not be improved until the land system of Ireland was reformed, which was a matter for legislation, not philanthropy.

Trevelyan was knighted for his labours in the Irish Famine, in April 1848 he was made Sir Charles Trevelyan, KCB. In 1853 he investigated the system of admission into the civil service, and it is for this undertaking that his reputation chiefly rests. He was appointed to a position that was, in fact, though not in description, Finance Minister of India. He won the confidence of the native population and although, periodic famines occurred under his administration, his letters reflect a more humanitarian attitude than he exhibited in Ireland. It could be said — though it rarely is — that his Irish experience had had a softening effect. He died in 1886.

To conclude this chapter of Irish history would be inappropriate without relating the remedy in which Lord Clarendon was finally to put all his faith. Through his efforts, Ireland was to receive all the benefits that it was entitled to, and that it was possible for England to bestow on it — a visit from Queen Victoria!

Queen Victoria made her visit. If the people had known what was in the good lady’s heart they would have stayed at home, instead of rejoicing. She wrote to her cousin, Leopold of Belgium, that she wished the people would rise in rebellion so that Britain might ‘teach the Irish a lesson’. There were banquets and festivities costing thousands of pounds each, at a time when the Marquess of Kildare announced that the Dublin Central Relief committee had completely exhausted their funds. Two-and-sixpence (1/8 of a pound), the Marquess stated, would keep a family of five alive for a week, by enabling them to buy a little meal to mix with cabbage and other vegetables. Four royal children accompanied their parents, and the total of the party, with servants, was thirty-six. Charles Wood was horrified; ‘...we never dreamed of anything like this’, he wrote to Clarendon. Clarendon was ‘considerably disgusted’, at the ‘petty difficulties’ raised and the ‘want of consideration’ he felt was being shown him by the Queen and the Prince. For the sake of accuracy it should be said that the Queen and the Irish people fell in love with each other for a few brief days in August 1849. The attraction was a mirage, the participants were unsuited, the episode was soon forgotten, and the course of history was left unchanged and uninfluenced.

The poverty of the country did not escape the Queen. She wrote, ‘You see more ragged and wretched people here than I ever saw anywhere else’, she wrote twice on the good looks of Irishwomen (who knows what she expected to find — possibly monkeys): ‘En revanche [on the other hand] the women are really very handsome, even in the lowest class...such beautiful black eyes and hair, and such fine colour and teeth’. And again: ‘The beauty of the women is very remarkable and struck us much; such beautiful dark eyes and hair, and such fine teeth; almost every third woman was pretty and some remarkably so’.

The Journal of Elizabeth Smith gives some idea of the impression Queen Victoria made on her Irish subjects: ‘Our party was hurt by the Queen, so many had gone in to see her enter Dublin. She was enthusiastically received, showed herself most gracefully and abundantly and was in high good-humour. She has grown very fat, was much sunburned, and too plainly dressed to please the Irish.’ And from ‘Our Welcome’ by Elizabeth Varian, and published in the Nation:

For the most part, false impressions were made and false conclusions were drawn, then false government ensued.

The details of the Famine are far from pretty but they need to be related in some detail to explain how the flower of one of the finest nations on the face of the earth was mowed down in swaths, and in windrows they lay and withered and decayed from off the planet — under the aegis of British rule.

[1]It wasn't until the late 1800s that a rush to get rid of as many poor and hungry people as possible resulted in assisted passage schemes, which resulted in over 100,000 emigrants—mainly from Counties Cork, Kerry, Clare and Tipperary—arriving in Australia, where they worked to repay the cost of their fare. The famous Caroline Chisolm was particularly successful in attracting Irish girls as ideal wives for farmers.

CHAPTER 26

EMIGRATION

THE END OF THE FAMINE