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  Donovan was nevertheless relentless in his attempts to make a mark on the town, and in so doing left a trail of resentment in his wake. First, there was the canal he muscled through, despite questions concerning its management. Then there was his push to locate the markets and grain depots not in the town square but on the edge of Tralee and away from the influence of Denny. The nobleman and his followers were not impressed. Nor were they thrilled with the way Donovan managed to insinuate himself onto every town committee and even the Grand Jury, a move the Protestant-leaning newspaper in the region bemoaned as evidence that the once patrician town was now being run by “shopkeepers.”

  Even the most critical among the leaders in Tralee knew there was little they could deny Donovan. Everyone in the town depended, to some degree, on his ability to participate in global trade—the seeming ease with which he could bring in goods ranging from wood to wine or export the produce of Tralee’s farmers to the larger marketplace. And so they quietly stewed as they admitted him onto the town’s planning board and boroughs commission, the relief committee and local chamber. Donovan, it seemed, was a necessary force in the town’s quest to enter the Industrial Revolution.

  Certainly he was one of the town’s most dedicated residents. That harvest season, as the blight continued to decimate the potato fields surrounding town, he focused on Tralee’s grain crop with nothing short of single-mindedness. Each night, the gas lamps at 11 Denny Street shone well after dark. Those who lingered on the wide dirt thoroughfare below the grandly paned windows would have seen a thirty-one-year-old man, assiduous in his dress and comportment despite the late hour, toiling over ledgers until the wee hours of the morning, when he retired not to his seaside estate but to the small apartment on the third floor above his office. The new Whig government had promised an end to preferential subsidies on everything from rum to hoop skirts. That was good news for an importer with access to the global market. So too was the speculation throughout the empire that a railway boom would soon usher in a new phase of the Industrial Revolution. Donovan intended to capitalize on both, and he stayed up each night strategizing how to do just that. It was only at the week’s end that he made his way out of town to the seaside resort of Fenit Spa, where his wife, Katherine, sister of the Murphy Brewing scion, waited piously in their Italianate mansion surrounded by lavish gardens and grounds.

  As he made the three-mile trek home, Donovan had no choice but to observe the rapidly deteriorating conditions among Tralee’s poorest set. The noxious odor of the blight was now mixed with an equally acrid stench of burning thatch and down, the smoldering remains of cottages once occupied by cottiers who were now unable to pay their rent. Donovan saw the constabulary serving eviction notices, followed by the torches that would set many a hovel ablaze. He saw the bruises and blackened eyes on those who resisted. He saw the barefoot children, now homeless, begging outside churchyards, and the enfeebled old men shuffling to the town center hoping for bread.

  There was much to pity about the scene. But there was also much to be gained—of that Donovan was convinced. And though he wasn’t yet sure how, he was nevertheless certain that he could find in the famine tremendous opportunity not just to make a pretty profit but also to finally make his mark upon the town.

  3

  Ships, Colonies, and Commerce

  London, 1846

  ON THE OTHER SIDE of the Irish Sea, Henry Grey was also kept awake by the growing crisis and the opportunities it presented. As colonial secretary, Earl Grey was responsible for overseeing the British Empire’s massive global holdings. This was no small task, particularly for a resource-poor island like Great Britain. From the sugar plantations of the Caribbean to the opium fields in Bengal, Britain needed productive colonies if it were to remain a world leader. “Ships, Colonies, and Commerce” had been the rallying cry for well over a century, and the empire had ensured its primacy in all three by insisting on extensive protective tariffs that privileged colonial ships and goods, thereby ensuring a ready and closed trade capable of providing England with every possible commodity she needed—and more—all without the niggling difficulties associated with political alliance and global diplomacy. The advent of free trade, however, was changing all of that. A truly global marketplace meant an end to the protective tariffs that kept the empire’s goods competitive. It also threatened to make Britain’s colonies—along with their colonial officer—obsolete.

  If Grey needed evidence of this fact, he had only to look as far as his crumbling office on 14 Downing Street, a dilapidated structure built over a sewer on a dead-end street. So decrepit was the building that housed the colonial offices that reams of old files were now being used as impromptu support beams in the basement, from which seeping water had to be pumped twice a day.1 Grey’s staff, already meager by bureaucratic standards, had dwindled further in recent years, with undersecretaries reporting for duty a few hours each afternoon and long after they had had their first glass of claret.

  Grey was not the kind of man to take this state of affairs lightly. At forty-five, he already had a reputation as a cranky malcontent. When he didn’t like a member of a committee or agency, he refused to join; when he disagreed with a decision made by his peers in the House of Lords, he threatened to resign. Colleagues called his petulant behavior perverse and his disposition tetchy. The reputation stuck, no doubt strengthened by Grey’s severe underbite, which gave him a countenance marked by what appeared to be a perpetual grimace.

  Whenever he considered the matter of Ireland, that grimace became all the more apparent. Colonies were supposed to support their motherland, not the other way around. The blight had become an untenable departure from this plan. Each day, Grey received reports from throughout Ireland about the growing distress among its poorest class. The most dire reports came from the area surrounding Tralee, a place he had never visited and never intended to. Stories of the growing suffering there made him uncomfortable. Worst of all, though, was the economic liability places like County Kerry were now thrusting on the empire. As far as he was concerned, the calamity in Ireland was entirely of the colony’s own making. “The evils of that unhappy country,” he told Parliament,

  are not accidental, not temporary, but chronic and habitual. The state of Ireland is one which is notorious. We know the ordinary condition of that country to be one both of lawlessness and wretchedness. It is so described by every competent authority. There is not an intelligent foreigner coming to our shores, who turns his attention to the state of Ireland, but who bears back with him such a description. Ireland is the one weak place in the solid fabric of British power—Ireland is the one deep (I had almost said ineffaceable) blot upon the brightness of British honour. Ireland is our disgrace. It is the reproach, the standing disgrace, of this country, that Ireland remains in the condition she is.2

  Grey wasn’t about to let that condition stand. And he was joined in this commitment by his new prime minister, John Russell, along with Charles Trevelyan, a civil servant and rising star who had just been appointed assistant to the Treasury. Together these three men represented the central nervous system of famine relief and the administration of Ireland. While they were distinguished by social class and position, they were nonetheless united by the fervent belief that the suffering now befalling Ireland was part of God’s plan. Collectively this triumvirate—and many of their followers—were motivated by Providentialism, the idea that God rewarded and punished as needed, that the virtuous would be provided for, while the depraved and iniquitous perished. As far as they were concerned, the growing crisis in Ireland was a result of the grossly primitive nature of the Irish people, who had grown slothful and indolent. The famine, though clearly unfortunate, was an opportunity to correct that once and for all. Those unwilling to work would perish; those capable of industry and self-reliance would find their way—and without the help of the government.

  The new Whig government sought to undo the meager aid policies established by the previous administration, b
eginning with the practice of importing cornmeal from America, which they saw as unduly influencing the British grain market. Better, they insisted, to let private market forces dictate price and availability. That was good news for Nicholas Donovan, who no doubt read with great relief the reports from London assuring merchants that the government planned to reduce its aid and announcing its refusal to close Irish ports.3

  Also good news was the new government’s insistence that the famine presented an opportunity to correct the gross inefficiencies in the Irish agricultural system. What Ireland needed—what all of the British Empire needed—was fewer farms and more acreage on each, along with the new machinery needed to make work efficient on them. That also meant fewer farmers—and fewer Irish people, which would surely be a blessing for everyone. At least, that was the firm conviction of Charles Trevelyan. “A population,” he insisted,

  whose ordinary food is wheat and beef, and whose ordinary drink is porter and ale, can retrench in periods of scarcity. But those who are habitually and entirely fed on potatoes live upon the extreme verge of human subsistence, and when they are deprived of their accustomed food, there is nothing cheaper to which they can resort. They have already reached the lowest point in the descending scale, and there is nothing beyond but starvation and beggary.4

  Grey and Russell agreed, so they charged Trevelyan with the task of determining how to limit both. His decisions were immediate and, by many accounts, draconian. In place of Peel’s food depots, Trevelyan erected soup kitchens resembling those established by the Quakers. But unlike the Society of Friends, Trevelyan’s relief centers offered no bread or soup. Instead his menus consisted entirely of stirabout, a cooked porridge of corn. Not only was this grain the cheapest on the market, but it also had the appealing attribute of going bad quickly. “Stirabout,” Trevelyan later wrote in his history of the famine, “becomes sour by keeping, has no value in the market, and persons were therefore not likely to apply for it who did not want it for their own consumption.”5

  To further restrict application for aid, he established a byzantine system of forms and prerequisites along with the mountains of paperwork both required: tens of thousands of applications and ledgers, along with an estimated three million ration tickets, all of which had to be catalogued and tracked not by government bureaucrats but by new local poor commissions made up of resident gentry and rate payers—in other words, people like Sir Edward Denny and Nicholas Donovan.6

  Meanwhile Henry Grey launched an audacious project of his own, one that sought to gut all vestiges of preindustrial Ireland. Doing so, he insisted, was not only his God-given right; it was also his duty to the rest of the planet. “There is not,” he told Parliament,

  a foreigner—no matter whence he comes, be it from France, Russia, Germany, or America . . . who visits Ireland, and who on his return does not congratulate himself that he sees nothing comparable with the condition of that country at home. If such be the state of things, how then does it arise, and what is its cause? My Lords, it is only by misgovernment that such evils could have been produced: the mere fact that Ireland is in so deplorable and wretched a condition saves whole volumes of argument, and is of itself a complete and irrefutable proof of the misgovernment to which she has been subjected.7

  Best to liquidate the island and begin again, Grey concluded. There were no doubt thousands of famine sufferers clamoring to leave. Why not help them by paying for their passage out of Ireland?

  That doing so flew in the face of the laissez-faire politics Grey himself promoted was of little consequence to him. He saw in this proposal a ready solution to myriad problems: the shortage of labor in British North America’s timber region, the overpopulation of Ireland, the vast unprotected border with the United States. And so he continued to work the floor of Parliament, now hoping to garner support for an assisted immigration policy that would conduct famine sufferers to interior Canada, where they could harvest much-needed timber and grow food, all the while keeping an eye on the Americans looking for their own piece of virgin forest.

  Grey found support in unlikely channels, including the same erstwhile editors of the London Times who had beseeched Parliament to provide the Irish with relief support. “Ireland’s difficulty,” they wrote in a front-page editorial, “is England’s opportunity.”8 The majority of Grey’s fellow Parliamentarians agreed.9 But they fell short of an all-out approval of state-assisted immigration to make good on this opportunity. Such an endeavor had been tried in the years leading up to the famine. Not only had it been expensive, but many of the Scottish and Irish families who had sailed to Canada on government-subsidized trips suffered terribly under the brutal conditions of the timber camps. They fled for the United States, where they were under no obligation to fell timber or grow food for the crown or reimburse the British people for their passage. In little time, the program had proven an embarrassing failure.

  Grey’s opposition in Parliament was quick to remind him as much, eventually forcing the colonial secretary to withdraw his proposal, lest he experience embarrassing political defeat. But Grey was far from done with his scheme. Trevelyan, no doubt instructed by his colonial secretary, adopted a nom de plume under which he wrote a series of editorials in favor of Irish immigration to North America. Meanwhile British shipping agents in New York and Boston began bribing the captains of immigrant vessels to leave the United States and sail north to the St. Lawrence River, depositing passengers there, where they could be of use to the crown. Not to be outdone, the British consul in New York began plying local ship pilots and the emigrants themselves to continue on to Canada. Colonial officials also created guidebooks that sung lyrically about the opportunities for farmers just like Daniel Reilly in the fertile land of Canada. They posted warnings about the “aguish swamps of Illinois or Missouri, or other distant regions of the Western States.”10 British North America, they insisted, was about to become the new city on a hill.

  More than a few of Ireland’s landlords, eager to remove cottiers from their property, leaped at the chance to send out their tenants—even at their own expense. And they found vessels aplenty on which to do just that. British ship owners and landlords didn’t really care if Canada was Shangri-La, El Dorado, or anything else. All that mattered to them was that there were Irish peasants eager to get there. Hundreds of ship owners saw in Grey’s proposal their own opportunity. For decades, they had been bemoaning inefficient triangle trades. There was Canadian timber to ship to England and the Caribbean, not to mention the tons of sugar and rum to feed the empire’s growing vices. Britain, however, had precious little to ship back across the Atlantic. An empty vessel is an unstable vessel, and that meant sailors had to spend valuable time and resources loading the enormous cargo vessels with sand and stone as ballast. What would happen, they wondered, if they replaced that stone and sand with ballast that could load itself? And what if that ballast was willing to pay for the privilege to do so?

  It was an audacious plan, but it worked, perhaps better than anyone had hoped or feared.

  4

  Dominion

  1846

  ALREADY THE CENTER of British shipping and a thoroughly cosmopolitan city, Quebec City seemed immune from Irish distress. The city played temporary home to thousands of sailors hailing from locales as far-flung as India, the South Pacific, and the Caribbean. They mixed—to varying degrees of success—with Quebecois timber drivers, escaped slaves from America, and the continuing influx of British immigrants. It was a cacophony of cultures, with all the sounds, smells, and sights that accompanied them.1

  Added to this dynamism were the vestiges of the city’s frontier origins still worn proudly by Quebecois. Amid the coffeehouses, brokerage offices, and fine restaurants were plenty of reminders that this was a city on the edge of civilization: sleds pulled by wolf-dogs skirted the narrow streets, Abenaki tipis dotted the river’s edge, otherwise respectable businessmen wielded hatchets to slice off sections of animal carcasses they had cached in snowbanks. Th
en there were the trees, millions of tons of them, all harvested in the wilds of the Ottawa Timber Valley—a region populated by outlaws and rowdies that made Quebec seem demure by comparison—then floated down Canada’s massive rivers to the dozens of timber coves lining the St. Lawrence. There they were either ushered onto vessels destined for places like Nicholas Donovan’s import yard or rendered into the massive tall ships that would carry future loads of wood staves and boards.

  It was this industry Grey hoped the Irish would soon enter, and at least one Canadian official had assured him that Quebec could easily absorb the influx of immigrants. That the reality was proving otherwise was of no matter to these men of high ideals. So they kept sending boatloads of famine refugees. The lucky ones—those who already had families and friends waiting for them—loaded their stained mattresses and beaten trunks onto steamers and trains bound for the Ottawa timber camps or the American border. The plucky ones strode into pubs with names like St. Michael’s Immigrant Tavern and the Dublin Inn, where they hoped their accent might afford them a drink. The most resourceful made their way to the shipyard of John Munn, a boatbuilder who was known far and wide for his philanthropy and great love of an immigrant story.

  • • •

  They arrived by the tens of thousands. Most were young cottiers made all but destitute by the blight’s return that season. Their clothing, already coarse and worn, was reduced to rags during the fifty days at sea. Their hands and faces were filthy; with only a few pints of water allotted a passenger each day, using it to wash was a luxury few could afford. Their bodies were rail-thin. All showed signs of hardship. Some were visibly marred by grief: a son crushed by a lifeboat or drowned; a wife lost to childbirth unassisted by a doctor or midwife; a father consigned to the sea after succumbing to fever. To the residents of Quebec City, the arriving refugees were the nameless throngs of Irish threatening to overtake a city already perched on the cusp between order and bedlam. To the waiting families in places like Boston, Toronto, and the Great Plains, they were the hope of reunification and new beginnings. To British colonial officials, they were wards—liabilities, really—with no means of support.