Note 83 — Chapter IV · 1820 TO 1860

The following passage, quoted from J. T. Maguire’s The Irish in America, gives a vivid picture of conditions on the voyage, and of the circumstances that attended landing in Canada. “But a crowded immigrant sailing ship of twenty years since [written in 1868], with fever on board!—the crew sullen or brutal from very desperation, or paralysed with terror of the plague—the miserable passengers unable to help themselves or afford the least relief to each other; one fourth, or one third, or one half of the entire number in different stages of the disease; many dying, some dead; the fatal poison intensified by the indescribable foulness of the air breathed and rebreathed by the gasping sufferers—the wails of children, the raving of the delirious, the cries and groans of those in mortal agony!” The only provision for the reception of these sufferers at Grosse Isle, where many of them were landed, consisted of sheds which had stood there since 1832. “These sheds were rapidly filled with the miserable people, the sick and the dying, and round their walls lay groups of half-naked men, women and children, in the same condition—sick or dying. Hundreds were literally flung on the beach, left amid the mud and stones, to crawl on the dry land how they could. ‘I have seen,’ says the priest who was chaplain of the quarantine, ... ‘I have one day seen thirty-seven people lying on the beach, crawling on the mud, and dying like fish out of water.’ Many of these, and many more besides, gasped out their last breath on that fatal shore, not able to drag themselves from the slime in which they lay.” As many as 150 bodies, mostly half naked, were piled up in the dead-house at a time. (pp. 135, 136.) The moral evils and dangers were said to be even worse than the physical.