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  News of this auspicious launch should have made the front page of every newspaper in Quebec, not to mention the shipping reports in London and beyond. And yet not a single paper mentioned the story. In fact for the first time ever, reports on British ship construction had ceased altogether. No ship, no matter how grand, could compete with the worsening crisis plaguing Ireland and now the rest of the world.

  Munn hardly noticed the omission. As he stood on the edge of his shipyard, watching the England and his stout little Jeanie departing for the docks of Liverpool, he looked visibly concerned. Given her overall size and dimensions, the Jeanie would probably join the growing roll call of coffin ships plying the Atlantic with famine refugees. The larger England might escape that fate and become a Pacific hauler. Still, she too would have to land in Liverpool before being recommissioned. This did not sit well with the shipwright, who knew he was tempting fate with the voyages. By sending these two ships to Liverpool, he was also dispatching their crews right into the heart of one of the century’s biggest catastrophes. Worst of all, he knew, those on board would be helpless to combat it.

  • • •

  From the moment the Jeanie Johnston left her dock at the Munn yard, the ship and her crew had a front-row seat to much of the drama unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic. The port of Quebec was quiet on June 18, 1847, an unexpectedly sultry day, with little wind and temperatures in the upper 90s. But as still as the harbor may have been, there was plenty of drama to be had farther out in the Gulf.

  As Armstrong guided the Jeanie Johnston through the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, he passed the Wadsworth, the Scotland, and the George. Later Armstrong would learn that each of these three vessels lost well over a hundred passengers to typhus and starvation.

  Even without knowing the precise death toll, Armstrong and his men could tell that many of the immigrant ships were in trouble. The surface of the St. Lawrence was cluttered with obstacles: mattresses and fiddles, teapots and trunks, aprons and trousers—all personal effects of fever victims that had been cast off by crew or fellow passengers thinking that doing so might stave off contagion.2 Passing Grosse Île, Armstrong and his crew observed no fewer than eighty-four coffin ships anchored around the island. The mob of stricken vessels made navigating the Jeanie difficult, even with the mandatory addition of a Quebec pilot to oversee her course.

  During the early days of the Jeanie’s maiden voyage, Armstrong was kept abreast of the growing crisis through regular contact with incoming ships, many of which were flying their distress flags or laying anchor until the crew was well enough to continue. Their conversations were necessarily terse. Although Morse code had been invented in 1838 and the telegraph in 1846, neither was available to captains like Armstrong, who relied on centuries-old technology at sea, particularly where communication was concerned. By tacking up close to another vessel, he and other captains communicated with one another through brass trumpets, a kind of narrow megaphone about two feet in length used to broadcast news from ship to ship. What Armstrong heard bellowing from the decks of these distressed ships only confirmed what he and Munn had already assumed: that the scene awaiting the Jeanie in Liverpool was, inconceivably, even more dire than the one he was leaving in North America.

  Once the Jeanie and her crew made their way into the Atlantic proper, communication between ships diminished considerably. The chief task now became the assessment of the barque’s seaworthiness. The open waters of the North Atlantic challenged the design and craftsmanship of any vessel. That was particularly true for a new wooden ship whose planks would swell and sometimes warp or whose caulking was all that prevented water from flooding the hold. Armstrong’s men kept hourly track of the hull and bilge, looking for any sign that the Jeanie might be taking on water. They watched the keelson and ribs for signs of strain or splintering; they found none. They worked the hundreds of lines connecting sails to the thick wooden yards and the yards to the Jeanie’s enormous masts. Each watch was instructed to look for chafing and wear; a mislaid line or carelessly set rigging could tear through a sail or even an entire mast. None was apparent.

  The directions in which a sailboat can travel are known as points of sail. Thanks to the placement and angle of its sails, a contemporary cruising sloop or even a traditional schooner has a fairly wide radius, or broad points of sail. A square-rigged vessel like the Jeanie Johnston, on the other hand, could not sail closer than 75 degrees to the true wind. As a result, Captain Armstrong had considerably fewer choices about where he could point his vessel. In the North Atlantic, more often than not, that meant pointing her directly into oncoming weather, requiring continuous heavy work for the crew, with little rest. At every wind shift, Armstrong would call all hands on deck to tack the Jeanie or turn her about. A constant team of men worked below, pumping out the bilge as the barque’s new seams gapped against the bounding surf.

  Aiding the men in their bid to cross these tumultuous waters were the most minimal of tools. They relied heavily on the vessel’s weatherglass, a precursor to the barometer in the shape of a teardrop. Filled with colored water, the glass and its accompanying tulle allowed the crew to predict the series of storms that would batter their vessel on this voyage.3 Equally as important was the ship’s “log,” a triangular piece of wood invested with lead and tied to a knotted rope. When launched from the stern, the log would immediately sink in the water, pulling out knotted line as it did. A crewman would then count the number of knots that passed by over a thirty-second period, thereby determining the speed of the vessel as measured in “knots,” which were then carefully pegged on the vessel’s traverse board.4 This information, coupled with the painstaking navigational records maintained by Armstrong, gave the crew of the Jeanie Johnston their most crucial piece of knowledge for the safety of all those on board: knowing where they were.

  Armstrong’s two most important tools, however, were his compass and sextant, which he used to direct the vessel in a northeasterly arc that would send them to Liverpool. The weather was in his favor throughout the voyage, with breezes from the west that held steady from day to day. With this guaranteed wind from astern, the Jeanie maintained an easy speed of 6 knots across the Atlantic. Munn had been generous in his provisioning of the vessel, and the ease of the passage, coupled with these stores, allowed the men to maintain a comfort and regularity not often seen on the North Atlantic. It was a welcome relief, particularly after the scene that witnessed their departure.

  As the Jeanie neared the Celtic Sea, however, traffic began to increase. The men stood longer watches at the bowsprit and high up in the topmasts, where they had a nearly limitless view of the growing number of ships heading westward. The possibility of collision was significant, and Armstrong relied on his watch to keep him abreast of any other vessel in the area.

  Congestion continued to build as the Jeanie neared her destination, passing dozens of ships each day—all headed outbound, and most carrying hordes of Irish people. By the time Armstrong rounded Ireland and set his sights on the port of Liverpool, that flow had become a nautical traffic jam.

  The one-time locus of the global slave trade, Liverpool had long since established a notorious reputation as a place where everything—and everyone—could be rendered into a commodity. Herman Melville, who visited about the same time that the Jeanie was making her arrival, had much to say about the port city and its new Irish population:

  It seemed hard to believe that such an array of misery could be furnished by any town in the world. Old women, rather mummies, drying up with slow and starving age; young girls, incurably sick, who ought to have been in the hospital; sturdy men with the gallows in their eyes, and whining lie in their mouths; young boys, hollow-eyed and decrepit; and puny mothers, holding up puny babes in the glare of the sun, formed the main features of the season.5

  His friend and contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, agreed. Immediately upon arriving, Hawthorne insisted that famine-era Liverpool was the “most detestable place a residence that eve
r my lot was cast in—smoky, noisy, dirty, pestilential.” Hawthorne was appalled by the number of Irish paupers and their struggle to get by. Their lives, he wrote, appeared marked by filth and resignation: “At every two or three steps, a gin-shop; also filthy in clothes and persons, ragged, pale, often afflicted with humors, women, nursing their babies on dirty bosoms; men haggard, drunken, care-worn, hopeless, but with a kind of patience, as if all this were the rule of their life.”6

  Like it or not, it was to this vista that Armstrong and his men had arrived and where, for the rest of the shipping season, the Jeanie Johnston would remain. While waiting for a buyer, Munn had secured a berth for the Jeanie at Liverpool’s new Brunswick docks, specifically designed to accommodate the growing North American timber trade. The quayside there, engineered with just enough slope to facilitate the unloading of timber, now held millions of cubic feet of pine, stretching from nearby railways all the way to the water’s edge. On the river proper, flood gates and concrete walls protected the Jeanie and other North American timber ships from the harsh tides and even harsher weather that battered western England. Still, it was not a commodious location. The economic depression ensured that the Brunswick dock was packed to capacity with empty vessels, some similar to the Jeanie’s modest dimensions, others fully rigged ships that towered over her masts, still others smoke-spewing examples of the new steamers that would soon dominate the world’s oceans. And, like the Jeanie, nearly all of these vessels were for sale.

  It was common for nineteenth-century ship owners to advertise their vessels in one of the multiple Liverpool newspapers. Indeed publications like the Liverpool Mercury included dozens of such ads during the fall of 1847. But Munn chose not to advertise the Jeanie here, perhaps assuming that his reputation and the quality of his ship would speak for themselves. By now his reputation preceded him in all of the right ways. He was known throughout Liverpool as a wright who insisted on—and consistently delivered—meticulously high standards. He was also known as a man of unquestionable character. Like Munn’s other vessels, the Jeanie was registered solely in his name and was listed by his Liverpool agent.7Each of his ships would eventually secure a buyer keen to capitalize on the wright’s reputation.

  The barque’s temporary crew did not have this luxury of time. After stepping off the Jeanie, they occupied themselves with the task of finding their next ship on which to sail. For most of them, that meant a return to Quebec as crew members aboard one of any number of immigrant ships described by the London Times as so heinous that they made the Black Hole of Calcutta seem “a mercy.”8

  • • •

  It didn’t take long for Captain Armstrong to see why the Liverpool docks had become so notorious. From his vantage near the barque’s wheel-house, he watched the dozens of packet steamers and ships vying for position in the overcrowded port. Each was filled with some of the 100,000 Irish immigrants who would arrive in Liverpool that season alone. Many of these refugees were already showing signs of infection. Nevertheless new arrivals were herded into sheds or onto the city wharf, where they would remain packed together until they could be transported out to the waiting ships.

  Suspended in this geographic and cultural limbo, few Irish immigrants had the means to make themselves safe and comfortable while awaiting their passage across the Atlantic. From the moment they stepped off the transport ships, immigrants were surrounded by runners and crimps—con artists who made their living by selling forged ship tickets, leasing nonexistent boardinghouse rooms, or stealing luggage. Those immigrants who actually found—and could afford—lodging in Liverpool were packed by the dozens into single rooms, where they were instructed to utilize the limited floor space by sleeping in shifts. By some estimates, more than thirty-five thousand Irish lived in Liverpool under these conditions for much of the summer.9 Theirs was a largely hidden existence, tucked into cellars and alleys and away from the brightly lit world of commerce and trade.

  Infection spread rapidly in such conditions; by the time the Jeanie Johnston arrived, more than eighteen hundred Irish people had died in these refuges. In the ensuing months, an additional sixty thousand people in the city would contract typhus; the majority of them would not survive. More than 2,300 would be interred in a single crypt at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, where bodies were stacked from the floor to the ceiling. Countless others were laid to rest in Liverpool’s other burial grounds.

  Even Henry Grey’s most ardent supporters began to admit alarm about this situation. Indeed by the time the Jeanie Johnston arrived in Liverpool that August, few doubted the cataclysmic extent of the epidemic now molesting the city. Leading the opposition were the newly installed Irish members of Parliament, who demanded that Irish emigrants be treated with at least as much consideration as convicts aboard transport ships. For years Parliament had required that these prisoner vessels not carry cargo and humans simultaneously and that they provide the convicts with both a shipboard doctor and provisions that included weekly allotments of meat. The captains and owners of famine ships were under no such obligation. Why?

  Earl Grey was forced to concede. Speaking before Parliament, he “grieved to say that it was too true that the Government had received accounts of most deplorable sufferings endured by the emigrants. He had anticipated that this would be the case, and his anticipation had unfortunately turned out to be too correct.” The reason, he suggested, must be the “mere change of life” inherent in leaving one’s homeland, coupled with the “weakened state” of famine victims, rather than any deleterious conditions aboard the ships. Yes, he had heard about the number of deaths and the overrun quarantine stations throughout North America. He insisted, though, that the “scale of immigration” he envisioned could not only still be enacted but could be successful without any official governmental support for the immigrants.10 Surely the Colonial Office could rectify these problems with some added precautions at key medical outposts.

  But precisely which precautions remained anyone’s guess. The leading practice of the time found doctors prescribing typhus victims a toxic tincture of nitrous acid gas that they were to inhale through a pipe. Other physicians preferred the repeated inducement of vomiting, along with doses of opium, Epsom salts, lead, arsenic, or turpentine. If that didn’t work, patients would also endure blistering, a shaved head, the application of leeches, or baths of vinegar and mustard—all vigorously applied to instill confidence in patients until they (no doubt mercifully) died.

  City officials took their own steps to stem the disease, largely by seeking to sequester it from legal residents. One such precaution was the construction of a series of lazarettos in the Mersey River, where it was thought that this addition could keep the sickness from penetrating the city itself. A floating island of pine and oak, these barges measured nearly an acre in size and were said to have a carrying capacity of forty thousand individuals. Provisional nods to safety had also been granted to this new landing stage: a lighthouse was fashioned at one end to prevent collisions, and a fortified iron bridge connected the platform to the main Liverpool pier.11

  What wasn’t considered, however, was the fact that, at full capacity, each person on this barge would be allotted just over one square foot of standing space: perfect conditions for infected lice to hop from one immigrant to another. Nor were officials—or anyone else—aware that typhus has a gestation period of fourteen days, during which time a sufferer shows no apparent symptoms. Thus those individuals given a clean bill of health by one of the immigration officials would immediately be granted permission to board a waiting immigrant ship, often carrying infected lice or the disease themselves. That vessel—and the typhus-infected lice—would be well under way before anyone realized they were in trouble.

  Henry Grey didn’t know this, of course. Nor did he know that his laissez-faire policies had turned this already deplorable situation into a tinderbox. Blinded by his own moral rectitude, he continued to urge the vessels on. Once he was content that the trade was moving apace, he pic
ked up his pen and wrote to Lord Elgin, who had been eagerly awaiting a response to his earlier plea for help. Surely Grey would write and assure him that the crisis was coming to an end.

  That’s not the letter Elgin received, however.

  In his long-awaited dispatch, Grey insisted that the suffering endured by the immigrants was not the responsibility of the British government. Any death or damage, he explained, “did not appear to have been produced, or aggravated by our measures, or by our having neglected any precautions that it was in our power to adopt.” Despite the protestations to the contrary made by people like Father Horan and others toiling at Grosse Île, Grey insisted that, if anything, the casualties were probably caused by an excess of free food given to people long accustomed to starvation.12

  With this in mind, he urged Lord Elgin to take no more state action than was absolutely necessary, assuring him that the unaided immigrants would find their own way on the new continent. “I have to direct Your Lordship’s attention to the importance of enforcing the strictest economy in affording such assistance to the immigrants as may be absolutely necessary,” Grey wrote, “and of not losing sight of the danger that the grant of such assistance, if not strictly guarded, may have the effect of inducing the emigrants to relax their exertions to provide for themselves.” Meanwhile Britain would do all that it could to keep the tide of immigrants coming. North America, he insisted, would find a way to rise to the occasion.13