Abstract
Cian McMahon's empathetic history of ‘life and death at sea during the Great Irish Famine’ fills a gap that even those familiar with Irish migration historiography may not have fully appreciated existed. The realities of departing and arriving, of dislocation and assimilation, are well-worn topics in Irish migration history. Thanks to the existence of relatively large and rich collections of migrant correspondence, we may have as clear a picture of migrant experience at home and abroad, from the perspective of migrants, as we could possibly hope for, including through the pioneering and methodologically innovative works of Kerby Miller, David Fitzpatrick, Angela McCarthy and others.
Yet McMahon's book focuses on the still overlooked experiences of Irish emigrants during what were, given it was still the age of sail, weeks-long voyages in the late 1840s and early 1850s. His argument is that these were more than ‘brief interludes’ and constituted a ‘dynamic’ element of the migratory process which ‘fostered the development of countless new threads in the worldwide web of the Irish diaspora’ (pp. 2–3).
This argument is unfolded over five chapters which are both thematic and, in a sense, chronological. McMahon acknowledges that the sea passage itself was part of a longer process by beginning with two chapters on ‘preparation’ and ‘embarkation’ and ending with one on ‘arrival’. These buttress the central two chapters focused on ‘life’ and ‘death’ at sea. While the latter, given the cultural import of the book's title, may be the one most likely to end up on reading lists, the former is an equally important contribution.
In it, McMahon conveys well the realities of life aboard ship for passengers of different classes, including convicts, as well as crew. The unusual environment of the ship, the author shows, created both specific power structures in which captains and ship's surgeons reigned, as well as temporary communities of resistance and solidarity among migrants. Relationships, networks and communality, which McMahon shows were vital in getting most passengers to the point of embarkation, were also evident and important once the journey was underway. His point that ship life's regimented nature acted as a primer for immigrant city life, for people who were largely ‘moving from fields to factories’ is also well made: ships were, as he eloquently puts it ‘seaborne communities’ and ‘cities afloat’ (pp. 121, 145).
McMahon had, as an essay towards the end of the book elaborates, a raft of illuminating personal writings, diaries and letters to work with in reconstructing this picture, and this chapter in particular demonstrates his eye for a good quote. Migrants discuss the beauty and forbidding danger of the ocean in often poetic terms, but they equally found entertaining ways to describe the unremitting boredom of weeks at sea, for example, Thomas Francis Meagher's sardonic description of one day's mundane routine at sea being effectively ‘a complete history of a voyage around the world!’ (p. 108).
The chapter on death is an equally significant contribution, not least since it has more to do in terms of resisting popular mythologies of Irish Famine migration. McMahon, as he outlines well in his introduction, chose his book's title in part because the unrepresentative trope of the ‘coffin ship’ has ‘stripped [Irish emigrants] of their liveliness, creativity and agency’ (p. 2). Hence in chapter four he challenges the outlandish figures sometimes quoted for emigrant mortality at sea during the Famine, as others including David Fitzpatrick and Cormac Ó Gráda have done in the past. Put simply, the apocalyptic horrors of Grosse Île in Quebec in 1847 – with a death rate of 10% – were not representative of the larger experience of Famine migrants. Overall, he shows, death rates for Irish migrants during the Famine were closer to 3% than the 20% routinely claimed in the popular arena, in line with contemporary European norms. In other words, 97% of those who sailed from Ireland made it to their destinations.
But the chapter on death is a corrective in a second, even more original sense. McMahon follows his forensic breakdown of mortality figures with sections that foreground the voices of passengers in how they experienced shipboard mortality. He shows that individual deaths could be an ‘everyday’ part of sailing voyages and that they could bring out both the worst and best in people on board, challenging the communities and relationships that had formed (p. 146). The usual funerary customs, so integral to Irish culture, were largely not observed at sea, and yet death and dying was also ‘an ongoing topic of conversation among the world-scattered Irish’ which often drew people at home and abroad together (p. 191). Death on Irish emigrant ships, McMahon intimates, was about much more than statistics, whatever their veracity.
Overall, McMahon's book is a sensitive, empathetic history that is both less politically charged than the tropes of the popular/nationalist canon and less matter-of-fact and, frankly, cold, than many of the ‘revisionist’ takes on the Famine. In McMahon's hands, his subjects are fully human and have emotional lives which they communicated in language that was not simply prosaic, formulaic or politically encoded. His great achievement is to present ordinary (and some not-so-ordinary) emigrants as people whose experiences and inner lives merit exploration. The book deserves a wide readership.