For Many, ‘Coffin Ships’ Lived Up to Their Name

During Ireland’s Great Potato Famine of 1845-49, they called them “coffin ships.” They were named for the accommodations provided the passengers as well as the fate that befell many on board.

An emigrant escaping the famine for North America was crammed with three others into a 6-foot-square berth--”less room than in a coffin.” The berths were stacked three high in the holds of sailing ships that took five to seven weeks to cross the Atlantic. Some ships carried 1,200 steerage passengers, who were seldom allowed on deck.

“Stowed away like bales of cotton and packed like slaves in a slave ship,” wrote the novelist Herman Melville, who was a deckhand on an emigrant ship out of Liverpool in 1849. “We had not been at sea one week when to hold your head down the hatchway was like holding it down a cesspool.”

The Irish were “paying ballast” on the return voyages of aging vessels that brought over cotton, tobacco, timber and, ironically, American corn to feed the starving.

Paddle-wheel steamers, recently introduced into transatlantic service, made the crossing in two weeks but the fare cost more than twice as much.

After the first potato crop failure in the fall of 1845, perilous winter crossings became common. Many coffin ships fulfilled both definitions of their macabre pseudonym:

In April, 1849, the brig Hanna, sailing from Newry to Quebec, hit an iceberg, as did the brig Maria out of Limerick in mid-July. In the same month, the brig Charles was run down by the Cunard steamer Europa with a loss of 134 lives.

The Queen buried 137 of its 427 passengers at sea “from famine dropsy and fever”--cholera or typhus. The Larch counted 108 dead in a passenger manifest of 440. The Avon, with 552 aboard, reported 236 dead. The Virginius, carrying 476, had 267 deaths. The Ceylon consigned to the deep 45% of its steerage passengers, the Loosthank 33%.