In 1847, 24-year-old Matilda Joyce fled disease, death and despair in Ireland, believing that she would be delivered to the Promised Land. Instead, when she went to North America via Liverpool, she was again enveloped by hell.
Between 1845 and 1855, the Irish population of 8 million was decimated by one-third. Famine and disease killed 1.2 million. Emigration drained the Emerald Isle of another 2 million residents. A comparable catastrophe would be the 14th century Black Death with its calamitous mortality, economic disintegration and psychological trauma.
For a generation previous to An Gorta Mór (Gaelic for "The Great Hunger"), there was a collapse in Irish peasant living standards so that the sole sustenance for two-thirds was the potato. In 1845, a fungus infected the crop, putrefying potatoes into black, gelatinous tubers and effusing a stench that permeated the fields. Famine stalked the Irish.
In 1840 only 5% of Irish peasants owned land, most leasing land from predatory English absentee landlords who coerced tenants into producing crops and raising livestock for export to feed the burgeoning English industrial working class. Irish peasants were relegated to 1 acre for potato cultivation, while in 1842, $600 million worth of potatoes (in today's equivalent) was seized from Irish soil for export. Even then, landlords demanded that one-third of their potato crop be diverted to fodder livestock for export. Impossible to pay rents, Irish tenants were evicted with no legal recourse. Between 1847 and 1851 evictions rose 1,000%.
Sir Charles Trevelyan expressed the Crown's righteous mission: "God sent this calamity [famine] to teach the Irish a lesson."
The belief of the Victorian English was that Irish indolence, immoderate fondness of John Barleycorn, promiscuity and Celtic superstition brought divine judgment on the "savage" Irish. English free market economists argued that government relief would only exacerbate these iniquities. A more charitable member of Parliament suggested that since Irish grass was abundant, it could feed the Irish. So as Irish wharves piled high with larders of butter, beef and pork sides, and grains for transport to England, the Irish starved. These attitudes and policies had genocidal consequences.
Even before the famine, the British government reported in 1840 that one-third of Irish peasants could not subsist after paying rent, thus compelling them to do seasonal migrant labor in Scotland or England. Similar conditions in present South and Central America and Mexico induce campesinos to migrate to el Norte.
Matilda Joyce, my great-great-grandmother and kin to the venerated Irish writer James Joyce, was typical of the Irish diaspora. In her dissipated 1840s Isle of Erin she would have witnessed horrific mass starvation, where the body cannibalizes itself, and typhus epidemics that cause the afflicted to hallucinate with 104+ degree fevers. At the height of the famine, it was common to see processions of hysterical dying in Irish villages like the emaciated plague specters in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. By 1847, coffins and those to bury the dead were so scarce that dogs and rats devoured unburied corpses. John Kelly observes in The Graves Are Walking, "Fields were littered with unattached body parts."
Before her harrowing exodus, a desperate Matilda Joyce went to an Irish workhouse where her hard labor was exchanged for one meal of thin gruel, bread and a bed shared with three others. Dysentery was endemic, with diarrhea and vomit collecting in overflowing latrines that caused cholera outbreaks. With such overcrowding and disease, in the 1840s 250,000 Irish indigent perished in these workhouses, conceived to reform the "savage" Irish. Since landlords were obliged to pay the tax on workhouse costs, as the famine intensified and workhouses became congested, it was cheaper to buy these godforsaken tickets out of Ireland rather than paying the tax rate.
For those who survived these crucibles, their lament was "Anywhere but Ireland." In 1847, the Irish flight commenced in earnest. Many who departed found passage on steamers leaving Liverpool where they were fleeced by flimflammers, robbed of their paltry shillings in its hundreds of brothels and taverns, succumbed to disease in filthy lodgers crowded with strangers, and interrogated and sometimes deported by corrupt English officials.
"The scum of Ireland come to Liverpool," said the Liverpool Mail. Sound familiar? An enlightened English official suggested diverting these Irish to West Indies colonies to replace the emancipated African slaves. Today's emigres face similar perils — violent gangs, rapacious coyotes and Mexican federales on the take.
Like many migrating Irish, Matilda Joyce's passage was on a British ship because the fare was £3 compared to £5 on American steamers. Destination: Canada. Once arrived, eventually most would walk into the U.S. But £3 did not buy food, only space on the open deck or in cramped steerage. Herman Melville was appalled by steerage on a "good" ship — "an open cesspool... They were packed like slaves on a slave ship." These were the long cónra (coffin ships). Convicts transported to Australia had better onboard conditions than the Irish. In 1847, up to 18% of Irish emigres were estimated to have died in this Irish Middle Passage.
Before arriving in Montreal, the beleaguered Irish passengers, including Matilda Joyce, were quarantined on the notorious Grosse Island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. (Between 1842-1850, 800,00 Irish arrived in Canada, equal to the number that disembarked in New York City and Boston in that period.) In April of 1847, the Grosse hospital had 250 beds, but by May there were 1,200 patients on the island with ships languishing in the river with over 12,000 passengers, many falling ill. A quarter died onboard. John Kelly describes the foul conditions on the island: "They slept with the dead, they slept in each other's excrement." Contagion annihilated medical staff. Over 5,000 Irish died at Grosse Island. There was a similar shameful scenario upstream at Montreal with 6,000 Irish expiring.
Many who eluded the Grim Reaper's scythe, like Matilda Joyce, went to Montreal and in time immigrated into America. In 1850, she married Englishman George Tremblett. By 1852 they settled for a time in Ulster County, New York, 100 miles north of New York City where by 1860 50% of the population was Irish. In the city, the "scattered debris of the Irish nation" confronted malicious racism and discrimination. A popular song at the time was "No Irish Need Apply." During St. Patrick's Day, shops would display four leaf clovers which in Irish Catholic lore represented death. Pious Irish would only wear the three-leafed shamrock, symbol of the Trinity.
Roger Daniels in Coming to America observes: "It was widely believed that the Irish should be employed in the most dangerous, high mortality jobs rather than risking the loss of valuable Negro slaves." In the 19th century, Irish were brutalized like beasts of burden building canals and railroads, mining coal, and forging steel. Today so-called "aliens" also labor in the most hazardous jobs — construction and roofing, food and meat processing, and agriculture. Their sweat is indispensable to the goods and services on which we depend. Deport them and the economy collapses and prices surge.
So if quaffing a pint of black Irish stout this St. Patrick's Day, don't forget the troubles of Irish past. Sláinte mhaith! (Good health!) ♦
John Hagney taught Spokane high school and college history for 45 years. He was a U.S. Presidential Scholar Distinguished Teacher. His oral history of Gorbachev's reforms has been translated into six languages.
