The Coffin Ships: Crossing the Atlantic in Black '47

Some words should be hard to write. Coffin ships is one of them. It is the name the famine emigration left on the worst of the vessels that carried Ireland’s starving across the Atlantic, above all in Black ‘47, the most terrible year of An Gorta Mor, and it was earned in the plainest way a name can be earned. People walked up the gangways alive and were buried from the deck at sea. This piece sets out who sailed, why they risked it, what the crossing was like, and what the numbers actually say. If your people came out of the west of Ireland in those years, this is not distant history. It is a bereavement in the family, and it is written here the way a bereavement should be written.

Who boarded, and why

By 1847 the potato had failed and failed again, fever ran ahead of the relief, and in Mayo the workhouses at Ballina and Westport were crowded far past what they had been built to hold. Entering one was a last resort, and the memories of the time name neighbour after neighbour who went in and did not come out. On the land, rents could not be paid and evictions gathered pace; some landlords paid the fares of the tenants they cleared, emigration as eviction by another name. Between the workhouse door and the ship, thousands of families chose the ship.

The choice had a price built into it. Passage to British North America, to Quebec and the St Lawrence, was the cheapest way out, cheaper than New York or Boston, and the cheap trade was the least regulated and the worst provisioned. That is why the horror of 1847 concentrated where it did. The poorest bought the poorest passage, and the poorest passage was the deadliest.

No one chose the crossing over home. They chose it over the alternatives, and in Black ‘47 the alternatives were the fever ward and the roadside.

What the crossing was like

Under sail, a fair Atlantic passage took about six weeks. The unlucky spent two months and more at sea. Steerage was the dark of the hold: rows of close wooden berths, little air and less light, seasickness and dysentery, and, in the famine years, typhus, the “ship fever” that travelled in the crowding itself. Water was rationed and often went foul. What the law promised in provisions and what the hold delivered were rarely the same thing, and many boarded already weakened by hunger, with fever already among them.

One ship can stand for the rest, and she happens to be a Mayo ship. In July 1846, the summer before Black ‘47, the Elizabeth and Sarah sailed out of Killala, on the same north Mayo coast as Ballycastle. Her passenger list, certified in Killala, recorded 212 people. She carried 276. She had 36 berths, four of them kept for the crew. She carried about 8,700 gallons of water where the regulations required more than 12,500, and the seven pounds of provisions each passenger was due every week were, by the accounts of the voyage, never distributed at all. She was eight weeks at sea, went off course, broke down, and was finally towed into the St Lawrence. By the account in Cecil Woodham-Smith’s history of the Famine, forty-two of those aboard were dead by then.

Multiply the Elizabeth and Sarah by the hundreds of sailings that followed in the next eighteen months, and you have the shape of the catastrophe.

Why the coffin ships earned their name

The figures for 1847 are as close to exact as scholarship can make them, and they need no decoration. Roughly one hundred thousand people sailed for British North America that year. Of the 98,749 recorded as bound for Quebec, 10,820 died at sea or in quarantine, about one person in nine. Count the deaths in the fever sheds of Quebec and Montreal in the weeks after landing, and the toll of the Canada route in 1847 reaches about one in five.

Quarantine meant Grosse Ile, an island in the St Lawrence below Quebec City. By the end of May 1847, forty ships lay at anchor there waiting to land some 12,500 passengers, with more ships behind them, and the small station was overwhelmed. Trenches were dug for the dead. More than five thousand of the Irish dead of those years lie buried on Grosse Ile. In 1909, Irish societies in America raised a Celtic cross above the graves, and its inscription in Irish says plainly that the children of the Gael died there in their thousands, fleeing famine. One of the great burial grounds of the Famine is not in Ireland at all. It is on a river island in Canada.

Exactness matters here, because exaggeration is its own kind of disrespect. Most famine emigrants sailed for the United States, where fares were dearer, the passenger laws stricter and death rates far lower, and even in Black ‘47 most crossings ended in a landing, not a wreck. The coffin ship was not every ship. It is what the cheapest passage became in the worst year, and the dying fell, as it fell in everything that decade, hardest on the poorest. Saying so does not soften the story. It aims the grief where it belongs.

After the gangway

Those who landed came down weak, grieving and often infected, into ports that feared the fever they carried. Some went straight from the ship to a hospital shed; the rest went looking for lodgings and work with whatever strength was left to them. New York, the great destination, had no receiving depot of any kind until 1855, so the famine Irish stepped off onto open wharves among the runners and boarding-house sharks. Where the survivors actually landed, and what that means for finding your own family in the records, is a story of its own.

At home, the silence began. Weeks for the ship to cross, weeks more for word to come back, and no way to hurry either. Families had held an American wake on the night before the sailing precisely because they knew the first letter might never come. When one did come, it was proof of life first, and everything else second.

That is the crossing at the heart of the letters this site follows. Seán O’Donnell sails from Mayo for New York in October 1847, in the teeth of the worst year, and his mother Brigid writes into the silence without knowing what the sea has done with her son. The family is invented, and we are open about that. The fear in those first letters is not invented. It is the documented fear of that autumn, in every parish the ships drew from.

What the ships did not take

There is no bright close to put on Black ‘47, and this page will not manufacture one. What there is, is continuity. A young man survives the crossing. A letter comes back. Money follows it, and years later a ticket for the next of the family, and the correspondence that begins in grief becomes the thread a family lives along for a century. That thread is the whole of this project. It begins with Brigid’s family in Black ‘47, and it runs on through the whole century of letters, twelve letters at a time, to the 1940s. The ships took a great deal from families like these. They did not take everything.