Irish Famine refugee's story of arrival in America

What we know from literature about what Irish Famine immigrants encountered upon their arrival in North America.

An official in a blue jacket arrived and went about the entire ship poking into every corner. … He said that a boat would be sent to bring the sick to the island, where they would temporarily be held in quarantine, but that the bodies of the dead must be brought immediately…. The flies made a frenzied hum in the air…. [A] woman delirious with fever [was] praying and cursing in Irish.  

Of course, not every crossing to North America was so deadly. The famous Jeanie Johnston ship crossed from Ireland to Quebec in relative safety over a dozen times. In addition, not every Irish immigrant who arrived in Canada stayed in Canada. Quite a few (such as the character Jack Mulcahey in The Banished Children of Eve) went to the U.S., making them the first large wave of border-crossing illegal aliens. Indeed, whether they went from Canada to Boston or New York or Chicago (a city which only began to grow in the 1840s), the first thing many Famine immigrants did was move yet again, in search of work, shelter or, at the very least, stability.  

Melville, Thoreau and the Irish

By now, we do know a fair amount about conditions aboard the “coffin ships” on which many immigrants traveled.

Books by Famine-era Irish writers such as Mary Anne Sadlier, Peter McCorry and Father Hugh Quigley often included scenes of the “crossing to America,” which is “seen as a wrenching rite of passage, the violence of which is often symbolized by a fierce storm at sea,” according to acclaimed Irish-American literary scholar Charles Fanning. In addition, some of the greatest American writers of the Famine era have explored the experiences of newly arrived Irish immigrants.

In 1849, Moby Dick author Herman Melville wrote the short novel Redburn, about a journey from Liverpool to New York. The ship’s passengers include the O’Briens and O’Regans. Redburn, however, is mainly about the journey of the young American at its center. Melville never follows the O’Briens or O’Regans once the ship docks. As is often the case with the Irish in 19th-century American literature, the immigrants in Redburn are peripheral, not to mention stereotypical.  (“Pat, ye divil, hould still while I wash ye,” Mother O’Brien says at one point while washing her sons. “Ah! But it’s you, Teddy, you rogue. Arrah, now, Mike, ye spalpeen, don’t be mixing your legs up with Pat’s.”)

Walden author Henry David Thoreau, in his journals, also writes of recent Irish immigrants picking through the rubble of what was once the ship St. John. It had left Galway but sailed into a storm and broke apart a mile from Boston Harbor.

“All their plans and hopes burst like a bubble,” the horrified author writes. “Infants by the score dashed on the rocks by the enraged Atlantic Ocean. No! No!”

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