Yesterday I read Famine Diary by James J. Mangan, a fictionalized version of a very real journal kept by Gerald Keegan to chronicle the 1847 famine in Ireland and the forced emigration — forced by hunger, English policy, and landowner threats — of thousands and thousands of Irish to Canada. The diaspora turned into a holocaust of thousands dying at sea and thousands more dying upon arrival at the infamous Grosse Isle in the St. Lawrence River just east of Quebec. (Henry Ford’s parents came over on one of these “coffin ships” and his mother died on Grosse Isle; his father left Canada for Detroit).
This book is powerful in its simplicity of language, description, and emotion. Keegan escaped from one hell — the hell of starvation in a land of plenty (Cecil Woodham-Smith, an authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845 -1849 that it is an “indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation“) – to the hell of life on an overcrowded ship akin to a slave ship in terms of amenities, care, and in lives lost during voyage.
The trip overland to get to the ports from which the emigrant ships left was another kind of hell: Keegan describes in his journal “the never-ending stream of gaunt, dejected looking, ghost-like figures shuffling along the roads to the nearest harbor where a transport ship is waiting to take them to a distant country…this march, this exodus, of what may amount to a hundred thousand people who are obliged to seek an existence in a foreign land.” (Records shows that one hundred thousand Irish did emigrate to Canada in 1847 and one out of five died –20,000 people — en route or at Grosse Isle).
Once arrived at their point of embarkation, the soon-to-be emigrants faced delays lasting days, days spent without shelter while the ship owners sought to fill their vessels to the rafters. These owners, eager to find business following the end of the slave trade, found new human cargo in the Irish immigrant. Each passenger paid and the more bodies that could pay, the more bodies were stuffed on board. Keegan points out that there were some ships better run than others but once enroute to Canada, his ship was a disaster of disease, inadequate food and water supplies. Keegan witnessed death after death after death, with bodies dispatched overboard daily on the journey over the Atlantic and again during the voyage down the St. Lawrence River.
After arriving at the quarantine location of Grosse Isle, yet another hell awaited those doomed to quarantine: crowded, subhuman conditions in the “fever huts”, too few doctors, and very little medicine. Canada was completely unprepared for the emigrants, despite promises made in Ireland (England’s governance again failing to provide basic human needs of shelter or care) and the disease and dying continued. Hundreds of bodies were buried daily in shallow, long trenches that could not keep the island rodent population away.
Keegan loses his wife after their long journey together when she succumbs to fever on Grosse Isle: he can find no consolation but throws himself into working with the clergy and the doctors who man the island’s sick wards. Keegan’s faith in God does not waiver, even as it fails to offer consolation: “What meaning can I attach to the destruction of the beautiful young girl buried on this God-forsaken island? My faith tells me that all such seeming contradictions will be rectified and all injustices vindicated in another world. This belief brings me little, if any consolation….the separation and the severe loss and the outward desctructioin that death brings about, leave us nothing but a sense of complete desolation.” My heart ached for him.
The fellow sufferers that Keegan writes about in his journal understand that their hunger is caused by landowner management and greed, and their forced emigration results from a policy of dispersal instead of aid. The only resignation to fate comes as a result of hunger (who can fight when hungry?) and not as a resignation to the will of God. As James Mangan writes in his introduction: “They gave what little they had to others and never accepted their fate as the will of God, knowing that their misery was a direct result of the evil machinations of their overlords, who allowed an entire nation to starve in a land of plenty.”
That is the great misery of Keegan and thousands of other Irish emigrants: to starve in a land of plenty, to be forced to leave their country to survive, and to die anyway, survival being the prize achieved by too few who made the journey. The great (and only) victory of Keegan and others is that throughout their miserable exodus, they were able, by and large (and by all accounts), to rely on and sustain themselves through their continued community, courage, kindness, charity, and faith in the face of absolute misery. It is this legacy that demands salute; it is the legacy of pain and injustice that demands remembrance.
