Coffin Ships revisited

December 10, 2023 2:26 AM

Challenging the ‘received wisdom’ about mortality rates aboard Irish emigrant ships during the Great Famine can open our minds about the past, while also influencing how we think about the present. (1,700 word essay, RTE 8th Dec 2023)

"I came to realise that the phrase [coffin ships], originally designed to honour the memory of the catastrophe’s victims, actually stripped them of their individuality and humanity. This group memory, which reduced Famine-era emigrants to undifferentiated masses of silent bodies, lying prone in the bottom of ‘coffin ships’, had erased any sense of them as people – mums, brothers, cousins, and friends – from places like Kanturk, Gorey, and Ballymoney. "

Same ground different voice in recently revised 2010 essay from Irish Central gives lists of 1847 [the worst year] victims from Grosse Île, Québec. The actual arrivals, hospitalization, death stats from Parks Canada. Many of the 1847 casualities due to ship fever aka camp fever, jail fever or epidemic louse-borne typhus is caused by Rickettsia prowazekii, which is carried from person to person by lice Pediculus humanus.

posted by BobTheScientist (22 comments total)

Thanks for this: I am looking forward to exploring more of RTE's "Atlas of the Great Irish Famine"!

Especially for the descendants of those emigrants, there is more legend and Received Wisdom about what happened than specific, documented knowledge. It makes sense, because the emigrants weren't wealthy, and also they were spending their time and attention on getting settled in their new homes.

And that lack of individual stories can be partially made up for by good research like this. It brings a more accurate story (albeit not a specific one) to families who never had anything but hearsay.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:06 AM on December 10, 2023

I wonder if the tendency to exaggerate these casualty rates comes from the same strain as right-wing “Irish Slaves” propaganda.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:57 AM on December 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

I wonder if the tendency to exaggerate these casualty rates comes from the same strain as right-wing “Irish Slaves” propaganda.

I think it's the other way round - the "Irish slaves" propaganda came from the fact that these casualty rates were exaggerated.

I took several courses in Irish history in college (NYU was REALLY lax when it came to what drama students could take), and distinctly remember a moment when the professor made a claim that several of the Irish emigrants were coming down with diseases previously known only in West Africa. That's all he said, and I remember sitting there in my seat having a galaxy-brain moment of "oh, wait, so....they were using former slave ships to ship Irish emigrants to the US. Yikes."

But it sounds like that was a mistake; and that professor was misinformed, and was repeating what was the received wisdom circa 1991. The mortality rate at Grosse Ile sounds like it was a worst-case scenario, and we humans have a bad habit of projecting the worst-case scenario out amongst the whole of a population; so that got accepted as "the whole ball of wax."

And then you have the very real fact that the Irish got seriously shat on when they got here. Scorcese did take some liberties with Gangs Of New York, but the "holy shit all these Irish Catholics are coming over to take jobs from us upstanding Protestant 'Muricans" stuff was true. The political cartoons Thomas Nast drew about the Irish in the late 1800s depicted them as ape-like and crude.

Combine that with the very real fact that indentured servitude happened to a number of Irish people prior to AND after The Famine, and that was no cake-walk. However, most historians are quick to add that indentured servitude is NOT slavery, because it was always for a finite period of time and the indentured person did get released at the end of it. Indentured servants also got treated differently than slaves; they got better clothes, they got better food, they slept in better quarters. Maybe they got worked harder, which for some unfortunate people may have prematurely killed them, but was more a function of the landowner trying to get as much work out of the indentured servants as they could before their indenture ran out. But when they WEREN'T working, they were treated better than slaves, and they did eventually get their freedom.

So the "Irish slaves" propaganda probably comes more from confusion about indentured servitude, mixed in with misinformation about the coffin ships.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:40 AM on December 10, 2023 [10 favorites]

When I've heard people go on about how bad the Irish immigrants had it, it has almost exclusively been paired with going on about how they overcame it so if black people haven't it must be something wrong with them. Like, openly stated. They may be confused about the history but it feels like a sort of intentional disregard for the details in support of an idea they already have.
(I'm talking from experience with extended family members and living in a very Irish catholic area of the US)
posted by sepviva at 8:14 AM on December 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

wow sepviva I have not encountered that particular angle of racism! my ancestors were (almost) all Famine immigrants into NYC, they were poor and worked menial jobs, but they were not indentured. to compare the willing (if necessary) migration to a new country, during a crisis which lasted for a few decades, to a new place in which you were able to eventually be integrated (no one has ever told me I do not need to apply). vs 400 years...ugh. I'm pretty sure Seamus and Siobhan are not getting stopped and frisked on the regular.
posted by supermedusa at 8:58 AM on December 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

I had assumed the Irish slaves myth came from Cromwell's deportation of decidedly unwilling Irish political prisoners as "indentured servants" to the West Indies in the 17th century. Or at least that's the most charitable read I can make on it.
posted by Zalzidrax at 9:38 AM on December 10, 2023

I had assumed the Irish slaves myth came from Cromwell's deportation of decidedly unwilling Irish political prisoners as "indentured servants" to the West Indies in the 17th century.

Yep - although technically they weren't indentured servants, since that was reserved for people who willingly entered into that kind of contract. Cromwell was doing a lot of political expulsion, though, and both things were happening at the same time and if you give it 400 years some of the nuances get a little lost.

When I've heard people go on about how bad the Irish immigrants had it, it has almost exclusively been paired with going on about how they overcame it so if black people haven't it must be something wrong with them. Like, openly stated.

There's also the weird way that the Irish were treated in the early 1800's; they held a sort of weird "Non-white" status. A lot of people today point to that as "evidence" that the Irish just kind of overcame that, but it's more like the simple passage of time and a generation or two of assimilation and everyone else got over it.

Also - there's the fact that some of those indentured servants who survived their terms then collected on their promised rewards of capital and land, and turned right around and did the same thing to others - and then some. Consider how many former slaves during Reconstruction took on the surnames of their former masters - and then consider how many African-Americans there are today with Irish surnames. I mean, I doubt that Shaquille O'Neill can trace all of his forbears back to Ulster.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:57 AM on December 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

When I've heard people go on about how bad the Irish immigrants had it, it has almost exclusively been paired with going on about how they overcame it so if black people haven't it must be something wrong with them. Like, openly stated.

Same. I also find it quite striking how much opposition Irish-Americans have shown to integration and school busing in places such as Chicago and Boston.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:43 AM on December 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

The act of denying solidarity is the act of whiteness. Whiteness isn't a culture, after all. It s an act of denying others.
posted by eustatic at 12:19 PM on December 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

It's worth remembering that in this time period Irish people would have been far safer on ships or in North America than in Ireland under British misrule. Not to belabor the obvious but a million people died!

I was recently playing a WW1 video game, and every time I won a battle I'd hear It's a Long Way to Tipperary. I started to notice the lyrics when a slur caught my attention. The entire second verse is nothing but racist stereotypes about the Irish. It was a jarring reminder that anti-Irish racism is very different in Britain than it is in North America.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 5:50 PM on December 10, 2023

from the article:

So, when we talk about 'coffin ships’ and excessive rates of emigrant mortality during the Famine, we are really talking about one route in one year: the voyage to Canada (and especially Quebec) in 1847, or ‘Black ‘47’ as it has long been (rightfully) known.

I'm going to assume this accounts for at least one-eighth of my bloodline, the pragmatic male forefather who chose (while en route to Quebec) to convert from Catholic to Anglican and thus got spared from getting dumped on a plague island in the St. Lawrence. At least, that's the story I heard a few years ago from a historian when I wondered why my family name was very Catholic Irish yet the family itself was solidly Anglican.
posted by philip-random at 8:12 PM on December 10, 2023

The article shows average death rates of 3% and rates as high as 11% in individual cases. Those rates to me seem very high on their face.

The article provides no proof that others claim a 20% death rate. If we put aside that high number, the article seems to me to confirm, not debunk, that that lots of Irish people died while emigrating.
posted by crazy with stars at 9:16 PM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

crazy with stars - the article also states that those were the death rates for cross-Atlantic travel in general at that time, and that they weren't unique to Irish emigrants (which is also part of the narrative).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:39 AM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's a Long Way to Tipperary. I started to notice the lyrics when a slur caught my attention. The entire second verse is nothing but racist stereotypes about the Irish.

Lyrics here. The history of the song is interesting in its own right.
posted by BWA at 5:43 AM on December 11, 2023

"It's A Long Way To Tipperary" is an English Music Hall song from the 1910s, concerning a sentimentalized depiction of an Irish immigrant in London who's going back home - so it's actually about a different phase of Irish emigrant history.

Although, that maybe speaks to a part of how the "coffin ships" narrative grew up. Songs like that and movies like The Quiet Man presented a sort of idealized, idyllic and quaint idea of "What Ireland Is Like" to the older Famine emigrants and their kids. The song "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" even took it a step further - it was a song meant to encourage the kids of Famine Emigrants in the US to marry within the Irish-American community and to retain their "Irishness" instead of fully assimilating. A lot of the people who left Ireland would probably have preferred not to have done, and looked back on their old home with some rose-colored glasses - and those depictions most likely found their way into pop culture over time, along with the flip side narrative of "and not only were we cruelly deprived of the chance to stay, the journey over here was dangerous and risky on top of it". Repeat those kinds of narratives for a few generations and things can get inaccurate.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:18 AM on December 11, 2023

Thanks for the post BobTheScientist.
It sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole,
It's a bit of overlooked local history, that awful 1847 year.
I guess it got lost in the larger story.

here's a good resource called Irish Famine Migrant Stories in Ontario

During the summer of 1847, almost forty thousand Irish emigrants travelled on steam boats down the St Lawrence River and across Lake Ontario from Kingston to Toronto, which had a population of less than twenty thousand at that time. They were often desperately overcrowded on board these vessels and stricken with typhus fever.

There is John Young's Famine Diary
The horrendous conditions on board steamers transporting the Famine Irish to Toronto were also recorded in an eyewitness account by John Young.

There is also a diary by Stephen De Vere.
De Vere was a wealthy Anglo Irish aristocrat
his letter to Thomas Frederick Elliot on 30 November, 1847 shocked British Parliamentarians into changing the “Passenger Acts” to improve conditions for emigrants at sea.

I have seen small, incommodious and ill-ventilated steamers arriving at the quay in Toronto, after a forty-eight hours passage from Montreal, freighted with fetid cargoes of 1,100 and 1,200 Government emigrants of all ages and sexes. The healthy who had just arrived from Europe, mixed with the half-recovered convalescents of the hospitals, unable, during that time, to lie down, almost to sit. In almost every boat were clearly marked cases of actual fever – in some were deaths – the dead and the living huddled together.

Arrived at Grosse isle quarantine about 7 am. Detained waiting for dr till evening, when he inspected & gave us clean bill of health – abt. 40 ships detained there – villages of white tents on shore for the sick. Daily mortality about 150. One ship, Sisters of Liverpool, in with all passengers & crew in fever of this ship, all but the Cap’n and one girl died.

There is also a section on Kingston Ontario

The Famine Irish died in Kingston in greater numbers than anywhere else in Ontario during the summer of 1847. Approximately 1400 of them lie buried in layers in a mass grave to the south of what is now Kingston General Hospital.

There. are also Excerpts from the Annals Hôtel Dieu Hospital, Kingston,

Christmas Eve, 1847.

we served them by rows, as we had not sufficient dishes to serve them all at once, .. the poor children ate standing, 10 at a time, so the meals lasted quite a while
posted by yyz at 12:59 PM on December 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is tangential to the original article, but given the broader conversation, I’d like to gently challenge some of EmpressCallipygos statements about indentured servitude in the American Colonies – that conditions were significantly more humane than for later slaves, that freedom and a better life were a reasonable eventuality for most servants, and why & how slavery emerged in relation to earlier indentured servitude.

Over the past several years, I’ve read (and re-read) Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History of White People” and Barbara and Karen Field’s “Racecraft” – both scholarly, deeply anti-racist works that nevertheless provide information on the history of unfree labour (broadly, and in the United States) that challenged prior perspectives I had absorbed and taken for granted. Both of these books are very clear on the racist invocation of “white slavery” as a narrative – but also seek to correct historical misconceptions and inaccuracies that have developed alongside our contemporary understanding of race.

Firstly, on conditions for indentured servants in the American Colonies, Fields & Fields write:

“Indentured servants served longer terms in Virginia that their English counterparts and enjoyed less dignity and less protection in law and custom. They could be bought and sold like livestock, kidnapped, stolen, put up as stakes in card games, and awarded – even before their arrival in America – to the victors in lawsuits. Greedy magnates (if the term is not redundant) stinted the servant’s food and cheated them out of their freedom dues, and often out of their freedom itself when they have served their time. Servants were beaten, maimed and even killed with impunity.”

And similarly, Painter notes:

“The first shipment of 100 homeless children landed in Virginia around Easter in 1619, some four months before the arrival of “20 and odd Negroes” became the symbolic ancestry of African Americans. And so it went, with Africans and Britons, both ostensibly indentured servants, living under complete control of their masters, subject to sale as chattel at any time.”

The brutal conditions for this early indentured servitude had a significant impact on mortality, such that, per Painter:

“Any of them – African, British, Scottish, or Irish – were lucky to outlive their terms of service. Of the 300 children shipped from Britain between 1619 and 1922, only 12 were still alive in 1624.”

Fields & Fields agree, and describe a figure suggesting continued (if slightly-improved) mortality for indentured servants in the following years of this period:

“Fifteen thousand immigrants between 1625 and 1640 only increased the population from some thirteen hundred to seven or eight thousand.”

Per these Author’s description, death resulting from exploitation wasn’t an occupational hazard for indentured servants – it was a pervasive and defining feature of this arrangement, and a serious challenge to the idea that it was an altogether different and gentler manifestation of unfree labour than slavery.

In fact, Fields & Fields argue that the dismal mortality rate for unfree labour in this context actually delayed the adoption of slavery as the norm, as slaves were much more expensive than indentured servants, and unfree labours were likely to die before masters could ‘get their money’s worth’:

“Although African or African-descended slaves dribbled in from 1619 on, the law did not formally recognize the condition of perpetual slavery or systematically mark out servants of African descent for special treatment until 1661. Indeed, African slaves during the years between 1619 and 1661 enjoyed rights that, into the nineteenth century, not even free black people could claim. Simple practicality decided the matter. Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code. And slavery could not become systematic so long as an African slave for life cost twice and much as an English servant for a five-year term, and stood a better-then-even chance of dying before five years could elapse.”

To be clear, Fields & Fields do not argue that the history of African slavery in the American Colonies is indistinct from earlier unfree labour – but rather that its distinctions became relevant – and were created – following an earlier period where all unfree labour was treated so disposably that owning slaves largely didn’t make economic sense:

“Neither white skin nor English nationality protected servants from the grossest forms of brutality and exploitation. The only degradation they were spared was perpetual enslavement along with their issue in perpetuity, the fate that eventually befell the descendants of Africans.”

Anyway! Apologies if this has gotten off-track. This doesn’t impact the much later “Coffin Ships” from the Article. But I do think its quite relevant to the broader discussion of Irish history in America, and the complexities of how unfree labour broadly factored into European colonization – which I think is much more nuanced than either of the takes I've commonly heard: “Irish-Americans had it the same/worse than Black Americans” (a lie) or, “Irish Slavery is entirely a racist invention, and “White” slavery was insignificant, if it occurred at all” (an inaccuracy). Painter concludes her “White Slavery” chapter as follows:

“In sum, before an eighteenth-century boom in the African slave trade, between one-half and two-thirds of all early white immigrants to the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere came as unfree laborers, some 300,000 to 400,000 people. The eighteenth century created the now familiar equation that converts race to black and black to slave.”
posted by AAALASTAIR at 1:51 PM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

yyz: During the summer of 1847, almost forty thousand Irish emigrants travelled on steam boats down the St Lawrence River and across Lake Ontario from Kingston to Toronto, which had a population of less than twenty thousand at that time.

Sounds like exponential growth! In 1833/5, there were more folk living in the three townlands that make up our valley in the Irish Midlands than in Chicago.

Year (ish)     ~1835    ~1841    ~1851
Cnocrua         350      356       241
Coonogue        120      118       121
Cullentragh     140      140       130
Chicago         370     4470     30000

posted by BobTheScientist at 2:28 PM on December 11, 2023

The numbers are staggering.
It's hard to believe.

I've been looking at Kingston. Ontario.
In 1847 the population would have been less than 10,000
It's hard to really nail it down , but 1831 population was 3600
In 1859 the population was 15,000

So 1400 recorded deaths in 1 year. 1847 , with a population of less than 10,000. That would have been beyond belief.

It would tax modern us to the limit
--
We have a high school in Toronto called Michael Power, a Catholic school,
I never realized it was named after Bishop Michael Power, who died ministering to the Irish in 1847 Whether last rites or whatever he got the typhus and died.
posted by yyz at 6:36 PM on December 11, 2023

I’d like to gently challenge some of EmpressCallipygos statements about indentured servitude in the American Colonies – that conditions were significantly more humane than for later slaves, that freedom and a better life were a reasonable eventuality for most servants, and why & how slavery emerged in relation to earlier indentured servitude.

In return, I'd like to gently challenge the assertion that I said that conditions were "significantly better" - I never used the word "significantly", and while on the one hand that's only a small difference it's one that makes it a little too easy to mischaracterize what I was actually saying.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:07 PM on December 11, 2023

crazy with stars - the article also states that those were the death rates for cross-Atlantic travel in general at that time, and that they weren't unique to Irish emigrants (which is also part of the narrative).

Sure, the Irish didn’t have higher death rates, as soon as you put aside the one time they did have significantly higher death rates. The article doesn’t really provide to me a compelling reason why we should ignore the admittedly exceptional case of the “Black ‘47.”
posted by crazy with stars at 5:55 PM on December 13, 2023

The article doesn’t really provide to me a compelling reason why we should ignore the admittedly exceptional case of the “Black ‘47.”

It does, though - it acknowledges the awfulness of that incident, while arguing that that incident was not typical of ALL crossings. It is stating that it was Black 47, full stop, as opposed to Black 47-69.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:19 PM on December 13, 2023