CHAPTER XII.

State of the Country during the Winter of 1847--State of

Clare--Capt. Wynne's Letter--Patience of the suffering people--Ennis

without food. The North--Belfast: great distress in it--Letter to

the _Northern Whig_. Cork: rush of country people to

it--Soup--Society of Friends--The sliding coffin--Deaths in the

streets--One hundred bodies buried together!--More than one death

every hour in the Workhouse. Limerick: Experience of a Priest of St.

John's. Dublin: Dysentery more fatal than

cholera--Meetings--"General Central Relief Committee for all

Ireland"--Committee of the Society of Friends--The British

Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and

Scotland. The Government--Famine not a money question--so the

Government pretended--Activity of other countries in procuring

food--Attack on Divine Providence--Wm. Bennett's opinion. Money

wages not to be had from farmers. Was it a money or food

question?--The navigation laws--Freights doubled--The Prime

Minister's exposition--Free Trade in theory--protection in

practice--The Treasury says it cannot find meal. President Folk's

message to Congress--America burthened with surplus corn--could

supply the world--Was it a money question or a food question? Living

on field roots--Churchyards enlarged--Three coffins on a donkey

cart. Roscommon--no coffins--600 people in typhus fever in one

Workhouse!--Heroic virtue--The Rosary. Sligo--Forty bodies waiting

for inquests!--Owen Mulrooney--eating asses' flesh. Mayo--Meeting of

the County--Mr. Garvey's statement. Mr. Tuke's experiences--Inquests

given up--W.G.'s letters on Mayo--Effect of Famine on the relations

of landlord and tenant--Extermination of the smaller

tenantry--Evictions--Opinion of an eyewitness--A mother takes leave

of her children--Ass and horse flesh--something more dreadful!

(_Note_). The weather--its effects. Count Strezelecki. Mr. Egan's

account of Westport--Anointing the people in the streets! The

Society of Friends--Accounts given by their agents. Patience of the

people--Newspaper accounts not exaggerated.

Donegal--Dunfanaghy--Glenties--Resident proprietors good and

charitable. Skull--From Cape Clear to Skull--The Capers--Graveyard

of Skull--Ballydehob--The hinged coffin--Famine hardens the heart.

Rev. Traill Hall--Captain Caffin's

narrative--Soup-kitchens--Officials concealing the state of the

people--Provision for burying the dead--The boat's crew at a

funeral. State of Dingle. Father Mathew's evidence.

Bantry--Inquests--Catherine Sheehan--Richard Finn--Labours of the

Priests--Giving a dinner away--Fearful number of deaths--Verdict of

"Wilful murder" against Lord John Russell--The Workhouse at

Bantry--Estimated deaths--The hinged coffin--Shafto Adair's idea of

the Famine.

The year 1846 closed in gloom. It left the Irish people sinking in

thousands into their graves, under the influence of a famine as general

as it was intense, and which trampled down every barrier set up to stay

its desolating progress. But the worst had not yet come. It was in 1847

that the highest point of misery and death had been reached. Skibbereen,

to be sure, ceased to attract so much attention as it had been

previously doing, but the people of that devoted town had received much

relief; besides, there were now fewer mouths to fill there, so many were

closed in death, at the Windmill-hill, in the Workhouse grounds, and in

the churchyard of Abbeystrowry. Instead of one, Ireland had now many

Skibbereens. In short, the greater part of it might be regarded as one

vast Skibbereen. In the Autumn of 1846, the famine, which all saw

advancing, seized upon certain districts of the South and West; but as

ulcers, which first appear in isolated spots upon the body, enlarge

until, touching each other, they become confluent, so had the famine,

limited in its earlier stages to certain localities, now spread itself

over the entire country. Hence, it is not in any new forms of suffering

amongst the famine-stricken people that its increasing horrors are to be

looked for: it is in its universality, and in the deadly effects of a

new scourge--fever--which was not only manifesting itself throughout the

land at this time, but had already risen to an alarming height--a thing

not to be wondered at, because it is the certain offspring, as well as

the powerful auxiliary, of famine.

In the fall of 1846, several parts of Clare were in a very wretched

condition; but, at the opening of the new year, the most prosperous

localities in that county had been sucked into the great famine vortex.

Writing at this period from Ennis, the chief town, Captain Wynne says:

"The number of those who, from age or exhaustion and infirmity, are

unable to labour, is becoming most alarming; to those the public works

are of no use; they are, no doubt, fit subjects for private charity and

the exertions of relief committees, but it is vain to look to these

sources for relief at all commensurate with the magnitude of the demand.

Deaths are occurring from Famine, and there can be no doubt that the

Famine advances upon us with giant strides." Several of the officials

who had written to Sir Randolph Routh and others, from different parts

of the country, blamed the people for their listlessness, their

idleness, and the little interest they seemed to take in cropping their

land, in order to secure a future supply of food. Addressing himself to

this point, Captain Wynne says: "It is in vain to direct their [the

people's] attention to the prosecution of those agricultural operations

which can alone place any limit to their present deplorable condition.

Agricultural labour holds out a distant prospect of reward--their

present necessities require immediate relief. Such is their state of

alarm and despair at the prospect before them, that they cannot be

induced to look beyond to-morrow; _thousands never expect to see the

harvest_. I must say the majority exhibit a great deal of patience,

meekness, and submission." Again, in the same letter: "The effects of

the Famine are discernible everywhere: not a domestic animal to be

seen--pigs and poultry have quite disappeared. The dogs have also

vanished, except here and there the ghost of one, buried in the skeleton

of one of those victims of cruelty and barbarity, which have been so

numerous here within the last two months--I allude to the horses and

donkeys that were shot. It is an alarming fact that, this day, in the

town of Ennis, there was not a stone of breadstuff of any description to

be had on any terms, nor a loaf of bread."[213]

In the chief cities, the pressure of the Famine, day by day, became

greater. In Belfast, the flourishing seat of the linen trade, one of the

gentlemen appointed to visit the different districts, with the view of

ascertaining the real amount of distress amongst the poor, writes in the

following terms to the _Northern Whig_: "There is not any necessity that

I should point out individual cases of abject want, though in my

visitations I have seen many of whose extreme destitution I could not

possibly have formed a true estimate had I not seen them. Let it

suffice, however, to state, that in many of our back lanes and courts

there are families in the veriest wretchedness, with scarcely enough of

rags to cover their shivering emaciated bodies; they may be found

huddled together around a handful of dying cinders, or endeavouring to

fan into flame a small heap of damp smoking sawdust Perhaps when they

have not been happy enough to procure even that scanty fuel, they will

be found, to the number of five or six--some well, some ill, and all

bearing the aspect of pinching hunger--endeavouring to procure warmth by

crouching together upon a scanty heap of filthy straw, or mouldering

wood shavings, their only covering an old worn-out rag of a blanket or a

coverlet, that has been so patched and re-patched that its original

texture or colour it would be impossible to discern. On looking around

this miserable dwelling, nothing meets the eye save the damp floor and

the bare walls, down which the rain, or condensed vapour, is plentifully

streaming. Not a stool, chair, or seat of any description, in many

instances, is to be seen, nor commonest utensil; and as for food, not so

much as would satisfy the cravings of even a hungry infant. Let not this

picture be deemed overdrawn. If any one suppose it exaggerated, had that

individual been with me, on Sunday last, I could have shown him some

instances of suffering, that would have removed all doubt regarding the

reality of distress in Belfast. I will merely mention one of them:--"I

entered a house to which my attention had been directed; in the kitchen

there was not a single article of furniture--not even a live cinder on

the cold deserted-looking hearth. In the inner room I found a woman,

lately confined, lying upon a heap of chopped-up rotten straw, with

scarcely a rag to cover her; beside her nestled two children, pictures

of want, and in her bosom lay her undressed babe, that, four days

before, had first seen the light. She had no food in the house, nor had

she, nor her children, had anything since her confinement, save a little

soup procured from the public kitchen. Such was her statement; and the

evidence of her wretched dwelling bore but too ample testimony to her

melancholy tale."

Large numbers were in a state of utter destitution in the city of Cork.

As happened in other cities and important towns, the country people

flocked in to swell the misery; and roaming in groups through the

streets, exhibiting their wretchedness, and imploring relief, they gave

them a most sad and deplorable appearance. Even the houses of once

respectable tradesmen, denuded of every article of furniture, and

without fuel or bedding, presented a most affecting spectacle of want

and misery. And so impressed were the committee of the Society of

Friends in Cork with the sufferings of this class, that a separate

subscription was raised for supplying them with straw beds and some

fuel. The apparatus which this committee had erected for the making of

soup was, they thought at first, on too extensive a scale, but it was

soon found to be insufficient to meet the calls which were daily made

upon it. Their Report of the 1st of February says: "Our distribution of

soup is rapidly increasing; during the past week it averaged one

thousand and sixteen quarts a-day, and on seventh day it reached the

extent of twelve hundred and sixty-eight quarts." It went on increasing

until it had, a fortnight later, reached fourteen hundred quarts a-day.

Besides the distribution of soup by the Society of Friends, there were

four district soup houses, supplying over six-thousand quarts of soup

daily; so that, at this time, forty-eight thousand quarts of soup were

made and distributed weekly in the city of Cork. There was a nominal

charge of a penny or so a quart for some of this soup, but much of it

was given away gratuitously. Speaking of the accounts from different

parts of the county Cork, the Report says:--"Where the potato crop was

most completely annihilated--in the far west--the Famine first appeared,

but other quarters were also invaded, as the remnant of the crop became

blighted or consumed. Hence, in localities, which until recently but

slightly participated in this afflictive visitation, distress and

destitution are now spreading, and the accounts from some of these are

presenting the same features of appalling misery as those which

originally burst upon an affrighted nation from the neighbourhood of

Skibbereen." In the postscript of a letter to the _Cork Examiner_, Rev.

James O'Driscoll, P.P., writing from Kilmichael, says: "Since writing

the above a young man named Manley, in fever at Cooldorahey, had to be

visited. He was found in a dying state, without one to tend him. _His

sister and brother lay dead quite close to him in the same room. The

sister was dead for five days, and the brother for three days_. He also

died, being the last of a large family. The three were interred by means

of a sliding coffin."

The Cork Workhouse was crowded to excess, and the number of deaths in

it, at this time, was simply frightful: they were one hundred and

seventy-four in a single week--more than one death in every hour.[214]

In one day, in the beginning of February, there were forty-four corpses

in the house; and on the 10th of that month one hundred bodies were

conveyed for interment to a small suburban burial place near Cork.

Several persons were found dead in the streets; numbers of bodies were

left unburied for want of coffins. Under a shed at the Shandon

guard-house lay some thirty-eight human beings; old and young, men,

women, and infants of tenderest age, huddled together like so many pigs

or dogs, on the ground, without any covering but the rags on their

persons.[215]

The _Limerick Examiner_, in giving an account of the state of the poor

in that city, publishes a day's experience of one of the Catholic

priests in the Parish of St. John. In one day he was called to officiate

at the death-beds of seven persons who were dying of starvation, the

families of which they were members comprising, in all, twenty-three

souls. The wretched abodes in which he found them were much of the same

character--no beds, scarcely any clothing, no food, the children quite

naked. In one of those miserable dwellings he could not procure a light,

to be used whilst administering the Sacraments to a dying woman; and

such was the general poverty around, that _the loan of a candle could

not be obtained in the neighbourhood_. His last visit was to a girl in

fever, who had had three relapses. He found her father and mother

tottering on their limbs from want. The father said he had a dimness in

his eyes, and he thought he would become mad from hunger before night.

Dublin, notwithstanding its many advantages, did not escape the

all-pervading scourge. In the month of December, 1846, there were seven

hundred persons under treatment for dysentery in the South Union

Workhouse, besides convalescents. The disease proved more fatal than

cholera. Parochial meetings were held, and committees appointed to

collect funds for the relief of the starving people; besides which a

meeting of the citizens was convened at the Music Hall, on the 23rd of

December, to form a general committee for the whole city. In the

unavoidable absence of the Lord Mayor, it was presided over by Alderman

Staunton, Lord Mayor elect. The meeting was very numerously attended by

leading citizens and clergymen of various denominations. Amongst the

latter were the Most Rev. Dr. Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, and the

Provost of Trinity College. A committee was formed, whose duties were to

raise funds, and, "by a due disbursement thereof," for the relief of the

necessitous, to endeavour to mitigate "the alarming and unparalleled

distress of the poor of the city," and so arrest the progress of "a

train of evils that must otherwise follow in the track of famine."

Four days later "The General Central Relief Committee for all Ireland"

sprang into existence, under the chairmanship of the Marquis of Kildare,

the present Duke of Leinster. This became a very important and useful

body, having disbursed, during the year of its existence, over seventy

thousand pounds. Greater still were the results achieved by a committee

formed on the 13th of November, 1846, by the Society of Friends. That

admirably managed body sent members of the Society to the most

distressed parts of the country, in order to investigate on the spot the

real state of things, and report upon them. This committee received from

various parts of the world, the very large sum of £198,326 15s. 5d., two

thousand seven hundred of which remained unappropriated when they closed

their glorious labours in the cause of benevolence. But of all the

charitable organizations produced by the Famine, the most remarkable was

"The British Association for the Relief of _Extreme Distress_ in Ireland

and Scotland."[216] This association received in subscriptions, at home

and abroad, over £600,000. The balance in hands, when they drew up

their report, was the very trifling one of fourteen hundred pounds;

whilst so many of those more immediately connected with this gigantic

work laboured gratuitously, that the whole expense of management was

only £12,000, barely two per cent. Further on, I shall have an

opportunity of speaking more in detail of charitable committees.

There is one curious fact regarding the Government in connection with

those committees. It is this: The Government seemed anxious to have it

understood, that it was not the money outlay which concerned or alarmed

them, but the difficulty of procuring food, and the probability of not

being able to procure it in sufficient quantity, by any amount of

exertion within their power. "Last year," writes Mr. Trevelyan, "it was

a money question, and we were able to buy food enough to supply the

local deficiency; but this year it is a food question. The stock of food

for the whole United Kingdom is much less than is required; and if we

were to purchase for Irish use faster than we are now doing, we should

commit a crying injustice to the rest of the country." And again, in the

same letter: "I repeat that it is not a money question. If twice the

value of all the meal which has been, or will be, bought, would save the

people, it would be paid for at once."[217] In face of this assertion,

our Government, as we have already seen, allowed the French, Belgians,

and Dutch, who were in far less need than we, to be in the food markets

before them, and to buy as much as they required--even in Liverpool,

which they cleared of Indian corn in a single day. If food were the

difficulty, and not money, it is not easy to see what great advantage

there was in those charitable associations, formed to receive _money_

subscriptions for the purchase of food. Of what use was money, if food

were not procurable with it? The aid of such bodies, in investigating

cases of destitution and distributing food, would, no doubt, be very

valuable; but this service they could render the Government as well

without subscriptions as with them. Writing to Sir R. Routh, in

December, 1846, Mr. Trevelyan says: "I have continued to forward the

plan of a private subscription, as far as it lay in my power, both in

Ireland and in England; and Sir George Grey (Home Secretary) has

rendered his more powerful assistance. I think it will be brought to

bear."[218] It was brought to bear; and in a later communication, he

speaks of the British Association with evident satisfaction. "The

subscription is going on very well," he says; "six names down for a

thousand pounds each, and a good working committee organized."[219]

The Government, it may be fairly said, should not refuse any aid

proffered to them. Certainly not; but they did more. They showed a

decided anxiety to receive aid in money, not only from landlords, who

were bound to give it, but from any and every quarter--even from the

Great Turk himself, who subscribed a thousand pounds out of his bankrupt

treasury, to feed the starving subjects of the richest nation in the

world. And the noblemen and gentlemen who signed the Address of Thanks

to the Sultan Abdul Medjid Khan, for his subscription, amongst other

things, say to his majesty, that "It had pleased Providence, in its

wisdom, to deprive this country suddenly of its staple article of food,

and to visit the poor inhabitants with privations, such as have seldom

fallen to the lot of any civilized nation to endure. In this emergency,

the people of Ireland _had no other alternative but to appeal to the

kindness and munificence of other countries_ less afflicted than

themselves, to save them and their families from famine and death."[220]

Besides making the Famine a money question, this address contains the

blasphemous attack upon Divine Providence, so current at the time among

politicians. William Bennett, one of those praiseworthy gentlemen whom

the Society of Friends sent to distribute relief in the Far West, was,

however, of opinion that the responsibility of the Irish Famine should

not be laid at the door of Divine Providence, at least without some

little investigation. In his letters to his committee, he endeavoured,

he says, to give a bird's-eye view, as it were, of the distressed

portions of Ireland, drawn upon the spot, with the vivid delineation of

truth, but without exaggeration or colouring. And what is the picture,

he asks? "Take the line of the main course of the Shannon continued

north to Lough Swilly, and south to Cork. It divides the island into two

great portions, east and west. In the eastern there are distress and

poverty enough, as part of the same body suffering from the same cause;

but there is much to redeem. In the west it exhibits a people, not in

the centre of Africa, the steppes of Asia, the backwoods of America--not

some newly-discovered tribes of South Australia, or among the Polynesian

Islands--not Hottentots, Bushmen, or Esquimaux--neither Mahommedans nor

Pagans--but some millions of our own Christian nation at home, living in

a state and condition low and degraded to a degree unheard of before in

any civilized community; driven periodically to the borders of

starvation; and now reduced by a national calamity to an exigency which

all the efforts of benevolence can only mitigate, not control; and under

which thousands are not merely pining away in misery and wretchedness,

but are dying like cattle off the face of the earth, from want and its

kindred horrors! _Is this to be regarded in the light of a Divine

dispensation and punishment? Before we can safely arrive at such a

conclusion, we must be satisfied that human agency and legislation,

individual oppressions, and social relationships have had no hand in

it_."[221] Was it not a money question, when a labourer at task work

could only earn 8d. or 8-1/4d. a-day?--not enough to buy one meal of

food for a moderate sized family. No, no, answered the Government

people; this low rate of wages is fixed, in order not to attract labour

from the cultivation of the soil. Now, in the famine time, the labourer,

as a rule, could not obtain money wages for the cultivation of the

soil--a fact well known to the Government; so that _money wages_ of

almost any amount must withdraw him from agriculture, from the absolute

necessity he was under of warding off immediate starvation. If,

therefore, Government wished the labour of the country to be employed in

cultivating and improving the soil, why did they not, instead of

spoiling the roads, so employ that labour at fair money wages, and

subject to just and proper conditions? They were often urged to do it,

but in vain. They yielded at last, but at an absurdly late period for

such a concession.

Further: if it were solely a food question, the Government should have

used all the means in their power to bring food into the country, which

they did not do; because they refused to suspend the navigation

laws--this free-trade government did, and thus deliberately excluded

supplies from our ports. By the navigation laws, merchandize could be

brought to these countries only in British ships, or in ships belonging

to the nation which produced the merchandize. The importation of corn

fell under this _protective_ regulation. If those laws were suspended in

time, food could be carried to British ports in the ships of _any_

nation; and in fact, whilst a great outcry was raised by our Government

about the scarcity of food, and the want of ships to carry it, Odessa

and other food centres were crowded with vessels, _looking for freights

to England, but could not obtain them_, in consequence of the operation

of the navigation laws. The immediate effect was, a great difficulty in

sending food to those parts of Ireland where the people were dying of

sheer starvation. But a second effect was, the enrichment, to an

enormous extent, of the owners of the mercantile marine of England;

freights having nearly doubled in almost every instance, and in a most

important one, that of America, nearly trebled. The freights from London

to Irish ports had fully trebled.

The Prime Minister came down to Parliament at the end of January, 1847,

and proposed the suspension of the Navigation Laws until the first of

September following; in order, he said, that freights might be lowered

and food come in more abundantly; but, as one of the members said in the

debate that followed, the proposal, good in itself, came too late, being

made at a time when the surplus of the harvest of 1846 was to a great

extent, disposed of. In his speech proposing the suspension of the

Navigation Laws, Lord John Russell used, of course, in its favour the

arguments which everybody was tired pressing upon himself for months

before; but he especially dwelt upon the great increase of freights. The

ordinary freight from the Danube, said his lordship, used to be 10s. the

quarter; it is now 16s. 6d. to 17s.; from Odessa, 8s.; it is 13s. to

13s. 6d. at present: from the United States, 5s.; it is now 12s. 6d. to

13s.; and what concerns Ireland still more, he said, the usual freight

from London to Cork was 1s. to 1s. 3d. the quarter, and often

considerably less; it is now 3s. to 3s. 6d. the quarter, with much

difficulty in finding vessels even at those freights.

Lord John and his representatives in Ireland were exceedingly fond of

propounding free trade principles to those who complained that the Irish

harvest--the natural food of the Irish people--was being taken out of

the country. O'Connell, early in the Famine, said: close your ports

against the exportation of your corn--open them to the corn markets of

the world. This and the like advice was ridiculed as "Protection," and

"Ignorance," by those ostentatious apostles of free trade, who kept the

Navigation Laws in full force, in order to protect the monopoly of

English shipowners; and who, rather than share with other nations the

profits arising from carrying the food which would have saved the Irish

people, _protected that monopoly_, and left their fellow subjects to die

of famine, rather than withdraw the protection. Talk of Lord John and

his free trade government after that.

In the letter already quoted from the _Commissariat Series_ (p. 409),

and bearing date the 24th of December, Mr. Trevelyan, on the part of the

Government, says to Sir R. Routh: "You write as if it were in our power

to purchase grain and meal at our discretion, but I can assure you that

this is far from being the case. The London and Liverpool markets are in

a more exhausted state than you appear to be aware of, and the supplies

which are to be expected till April, are so totally inadequate to

filling the immense void which has been created by the failure of the

potato crop, the deficiency of the Spring crops, and the foreign demand,

that they give us no confidence.... You must therefore bear in mind, and

impress upon all those with whom you are acting, that even the stock of

food at your disposal has a certain fixed limit, and that it must be

economized, and made to last the requisite time, like any private stock.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer will, on no account, permit you to

undertake to provide food for any portion of the Eastern district of

Ireland. What we have is insufficient even for the Western district, for

which we have undertaken.... No exigency, however pressing, is to induce

you to undertake to furnish supplies of food for any districts, except

those for which we have already undertaken."

This letter, written, as all Mr. Trevelyan's were, by the authority of

the Treasury, assumes that the Government had a full knowledge of the

state of the food markets. And, no doubt, it was their bounden duty to

collect such knowledge, by trusty agents, despatched at the earliest

moment, to investigate and report upon the harvest-yield in Europe and

America. Yet, at the very time it was written, President Polk's message

to Congress, delivered in Washington on the 8th of December, arrived in

England, containing the following passage: "The home market alone is

inadequate to enable them [the farmers] to dispose of the immense

supplies of food which they are capable of producing, even at the most

reduced prices, for the manifest reason that they cannot be consumed in

the country. The United States can, from their immense surplus, supply

not only the home demand, but the deficiency of food required by the

whole world."

Was it a money question or a food question?

There was, naturally enough, a mournful sameness in the news from every

part of the country: starvation, famine, fever, death; such are the

commonest headings in the newspapers of the time. Seven deaths from

starvation near Cootehill was the announcement from a locality supposed

not to be at all severely visited. In Clifden, County Galway, the

distress was fearful; 5000 persons there were said to be trying to live

on field roots and seaweed. A Catholic priest who was a curate in the

County Galway during the Famine, but who now occupies, as he well

deserves to do, a high position in the Irish Church, has kindly supplied

the author with some of his famine experiences. There are five

churchyards in the parish where he then ministered. Four of these had to

be enlarged by one half during the famine, and the fifth, an entirely

new one, became also necessary, that there might be ground enough

wherein to inter the famine-slain people. This enlargement of burial

accommodation took place, as a rule throughout the South, West, and

North-west. One day as this priest was going to attend his sick

calls--and there was no end of sick calls in those times--he met a man

with a donkey and cart. On the cart there were three coffins,

containing the mortal remains of his wife and his two children. He was

alone--no funeral, no human creature near him. When he arrived at the

place of interment, he was so weakened by starvation himself, that he

was unable to put a little covering of clay upon the coffins to protect

them. When passing the same road next day, the priest found ravenous,

starved dogs making a horrid meal on the carcasses of this uninterred

family. He hired a man, who dug a grave, in which what may be literally

called their remains were placed. On one occasion, returning through the

gray morning from a night call, he observed a dark mass on the side of

the road. Approaching, he found it to be the dead body of a man. Near

his head lay a raw turnip, with one mouthful bitten from it. In several

of the reports from the Board of Works' inspectors, and other

communications, it was said that as the Famine progressed, the people

lost all their natural vivacity. They looked upon themselves as doomed;

and this feeling was expressed by their whole bearing. The extent to

which it prevailed amongst all classes is well illustrated by a

circumstance related by the same clergyman. When the Famine had somewhat

abated in intensity, he was one day in a field which was separated from

the public road by a wall. He heard a voice on the road; it was that of

a peasant girl humming a song. The tears rushed to his eyes. He walked

quickly towards her, searching meantime for some coin to give her. He

placed a shilling in her hand, with a feeling somewhat akin to

enthusiasm. "It was," said he to the author, "the first joyous sound I

had heard for six months."

From Roscommon the brief, but terrible, tidings came that whole

families, who had retired to rest at night, were corpses in the morning;

and were frequently left unburied for many days, for want of coffins in

which to inter them. And the report adds: The state of our poorhouse is

awful; the average daily deaths in it, from fever alone, is eighteen;

there are upwards of eleven hundred inmates in it, and of these six

hundred are in typhus fever.[222] In a circumference of eight miles from

where I write, says a correspondent of the _Roscommon Journal_, not less

than sixty bodies have been interred without a coffin. In answer to

queries sent to a part of Roscommon, I received the following replies

from a reliable source: _Query_. "What other relief was given during the

Government works by private charity, committees, etc.?" _Answer_. "There

was considerable relief given by charitable committees." _Query_. "What

did the wealthy resident landlords give_?" Answer_. "Considerable."

_Query_. "What did the wealthy non-resident landlords give?" Again the

answer was, "Considerable." But I am sorry to add that the two latter

queries were almost uniformly answered from various parts of the country

by the expressive words, "Nothing whatever." The same correspondent

said, in reply to another query, that the aged and infirm did not live

more than a day or two after being sent to hospital. They died of

dysentery. The two following anecdotes are given on the best authority:

a family, consisting of father, mother, and daughter, were starving;

they were devotedly attached to each other; the daughter was young and

comely. Offers of relief were made by a wealthy person, but they were

accompanied by a dishonourable condition, and they were therefore

indignantly spurned. Fond as I am of my life, said the starving girl,

and much as I love my father and mother, for whose relief I would endure

any earthly toil, I will suffer them as well as myself to die, rather

than get them relief at the price of my virtue. A Roscommon man thus

writes in the query sheet sent to him: "Years after the Famine, and when

in another part of the country, I was obliged, on my way to my house, to

pass the house of a poor blacksmith; and often at night, as I passed, I

heard him and his family reciting the Rosary. I told him one day how

much edified I was at this. The poor fellow replied with great

earnestness: 'Sir, as long as I have life in me I'll say the Rosary, and

I'll tell you why. In the Famine times, my family and myself were

starving. One night the children were crying with the hunger, and there

was no food to give them. By way of stopping their cries they were put

to bed, but, after a short sleep, they awoke with louder cries for food.

At length, I recommended that all of us, young and old, should join in

saying the Rosary. We did; and before it was ended a woman came in,

whose occupation was to deal in bread, and she had a basketful with her.

I explained our condition to her, and asked her to give me some bread on

credit. She did so, and from that day to this we never felt hunger or

starvation; and from that day to this I continue to say the Rosary, and

will, please God, to the end of my life.'"

The news came from Sligo, through the public journals, that the Famine

was carrying off hundreds and thousands there, and that the work left

undone by the Famine would be finished by pestilence. The Workhouse was

described as a pesthouse, and the guardians in terror had abandoned it.

The following short note will give a better idea of the state of this

part of the country than any lengthened description:--

"_Riverston, 8th Feb_.

"SIR,--_Half-a-dozen_ starvation deaths have been reported to Mr. Grant

this evening, and he directs me to write to you to request you will

attend here early to-morrow morning to hold inquests.

"JAMES HAY, _Head Constable_.

"Alexander Burrows, Esq."

But things were much worse than was revealed by this note. Mr. Burrows

was quite unequal to the work he had to do. In one day, although he

tired three horses, he succeeded in holding only five inquests. Poor

progress indeed, inasmuch as there were FORTY dead bodies in the

district of Managharrow alone, awaiting him! One of the cases, that of

Owen Mulrooney, was a moving one. He was a young, muscular man, in the

prime of life. He had a wife and five young children. Here is the

substance of his wife's depositions at the inquest held upon his

remains. She sold all her little furniture for ten shillings, and with

this sum she and her five children left home to make her way to England,

as she thought her husband would be able to support himself, if

unencumbered by her and the family. The weather became cold and rainy;

and when she had got as far as Enniskillen, the children took cramps,

and she had to retrace her steps by slow degrees, and seek again her

desolate home. Meantime, the public works, upon which her husband had

been employed, were stopped, and he was at once reduced to starvation. A

neighbour gave him one meal of food and a night's lodging. He was

revived by the food, and had strength enough to make up two loads of

turf, which he sold, and bought an ass, which he killed, and tried to

cook and eat. He partook of some portion of the ass's flesh twice or

thrice, but his stomach refused the food, as it always brought on great

retching. When his wife and children returned he was dying, and she was

only in time to see him, and give the above sorrowful evidence. We

select this case, said the local journal, out of dozens; because it has

some remarkable features in it. Many, it further adds, who were sent to

purchase food, died of starvation on the journey. The family of Mary

Costello were in a state of starvation for three weeks, and she herself

had not had food for two days. Previous to her death, one of her

brothers procured the price of half-a-stone of meal, for which she was

sent to town; and on the following morning she was found dead by the

roadside, with the little bag of meal grasped tightly in her hand.

Although it is notorious that some districts in the South, especially

Skibbereen, were the first to attract a large share of public attention,

the county Mayo, so populous, so large, so poor, was from the beginning

marked out for suffering; but it lacked an organ so faithful and

eloquent as the _Southern Reporter_, through whose columns Skibbereen

and Bantry and Skull became as well known to the Empire as Dublin,

Paris, or London. Poor Mayo suffered intensely from end to end, although

it suffered in comparative silence. In the beginning of January, what

may be termed a monster meeting of the county was held in Westport.

Forty thousand persons were said to have assembled on the occasion. The

Very Rev. Dean Burke, who presided, complained that, as far back as

September, a presentment of £80,000 was passed for the county, £12,000

of which was allotted to their barony, Murrisk; but from that time to

the period of the meeting only £7,000 had been expended. Resolutions

were passed, calling for a liberal grant of money to save the people

from death; expressive of deep regret at the uncultured state of the

corn lands of the county; calling for the establishment of food depôts

in the remote districts; and recommending the completion of the roads

then in progress. More than one speaker hinted that there existed an

under current for preventing the employment of the people, and that this

under current emanated from the landlords, who were opposed to the

taxing of their properties for such a purpose. At the close of the

meeting, one of the gentlemen present, Mr. John C. Garvey, made the

following observations:--"It has been said that an under current exists

to prevent the employment of the people. In my opinion the landlords

would be working against their own interest in preventing the employment

of the poor. (Cries of No, no.) Well, I, as one of the landlords, do

declare most solemnly, before my God, that I have not only in public,

but in private, done everything that I could do to extend the employment

of the people (loud cheers); and I now brand every landlord that does

not come forward and clear himself of the imputation."

A great number of coroners' inquests were reported from Mayo, but those

inquests were no real indication of the number of deaths which occurred

there from starvation; there were not coroners enough to hold inquests,

and four-fifths of those that were held were not reported. Besides,

inquests were not, and could not be held unless in cases where the death

was somewhat sudden, or had some specialty about it. The effects of the

Famine were not usually very sudden. People dragged on life for weeks,

partly through that tenacity of life which is one of the characteristics

of human nature; partly through chance scraps of food obtained from time

to time, and in various ways. Families have gone on for many weeks on

boiled turnips, with a little oatmeal sprinkled over them; often on

green rape, and even the wild herbs of the fields and seaweed; such

things kept prolonging life whilst they were destroying it. After a

while they brought on dysentery: dysentery--death. But no one thought of

a coroner in such cases, which were by far the most numerous class of

cases until fever became prevalent, and even then dysentery commonly

came in to close the scene.

"During that period," writes Mr. James H. Tuke, "the roads in many

places became as charnel-houses, and several car and coach drivers have

assured me that they rarely drove anywhere without seeing dead bodies

strewn along the road side, and that, in the dark, they had even gone

over them. A gentleman told me that in the neighbourhood of Clifden one

Inspector of roads had caused no less than 140 bodies to be buried,

which he found scattered along the highway. In some cases it is well

known that where all other members of a family have perished, the last

survivor has earthed up the door of his miserable cabin to prevent the

ingress of pigs and dogs, and then laid himself down to die in this

fearful family vault."[223]

In January, 1847, a Protestant gentleman, now a colonial judge, well

known for his ability and integrity, gave, through the columns of a

Dublin newspaper, an account of the state of Mayo as he saw it. He found

great dissatisfaction--in fact indignation, existing with regard to the

unaccountable delay of the public works, which had been presented for in

that county; and this not merely amongst the starving people, but

amongst the most respectable and intelligent persons with whom he

conversed. He--a man not likely to take a narrow or prejudiced view of

any subject--was of opinion that those complaints were not groundless.

The officials, he says, instead of extending the works in Mayo, and

feeding the people, "are employed in diverting public attention by

prating of subscriptions, paltering about Queen's letters and English

poor-boxes, and frittering away the strength of public opinion and the

efficiency of all public action, by engaging private charity in a task

that can be met only by the Herculean efforts of a whole nation, knit

into a single power, and bound into concentrated exertion by all the

constraining forces that the constitution of political society

affords."[224] And then the starving people are blamed for finding

fault, and for being suspicious. What else, he asks, can they be? How

can a man dying of starvation have patience?

The chief places he visited were Balla, Claremorris, Ballyhaunis, and

Hollymount. The scenes he witnessed were, he says, scarcely if at all

less harrowing than those which had been reported from the locality of

Skibbereen. This writer, a Protestant, conversed, amongst others, with

the priests of the districts which he visited, and of them he says: "The

Catholic clergy are the only persons who can form a tolerably correct

estimate of the numbers of persons who are now dying of starvation. The

Catholic clergy know all the people of their respective parishes--_no

one else does_; the Catholic priest knows them as the shepherd does his

sheep; he knows them individually; he knows not only every lineament of

every individual face, but he knows, too, every ailment of body--every

care of mind--every necessity of circumstance from which he is

suffering. The Catholic clergy of the West attend every death-bed: the

poor there are all Catholics. The Catholic clergy know, then, to what it

is that the extraordinary mortality now prevalent is owing--_and they

set it down as the immediate consequence of want and starvation_."[225]

One of the priests of whom W.G. asked information told him his whole

time, and that of his assistant, was unceasingly occupied in

administering the last comforts of religion to the victims of

starvation. It would, he said, be an endless task, and he feared a

useless one, to record his sad experiences.

People died in Connaught whilst in full employment on the public works,

just as they did in Munster. Of such cases, the following is one of

which W.G. collected some particulars:--James Byrne, of Barnabriggan,

Brize, parish of Balla, was employed up to his death on the public

works. The last food of which he had partaken was obtained by his wife

pledging her cloak. There was an inquest upon this poor man's remains,

at which his wife deposed that up to the time of his death he was

employed on the public works, and as they had no food she was obliged to

pledge her cloak for one stone of meal. Deceased often said he would do

well if he had food or nourishment. Deponent states to the best of her

belief that her husband died for the want of food. She and her four

children are now living on rape, which she is allowed to gather in a

farmer's field. James Browne, Esq., M.D., being sworn, said he found, on

examination, all the internal organs of the deceased sound. There was no

food whatever in his stomach, or in any part of the alimentary canal.

There was a small quantity of thin faeces in the lower portion of the

large intestine. Is of opinion that deceased came by his death from

inanition, or want of food. Verdict: "James Byrne came by his death in

consequence of having no food for some days; and died of starvation."

"With every disposition," writes W.G., "to make allowances for the

difficulties of their position, let me ask, Sir, how have the gentry

acted? They have seemed to think that the whole relief question just

split itself into two sides, one of which belonged exclusively to the

Government, the other exclusively to them. One side comprised the duty

of providing for the lives of the people, and this was left to the

Government; the other, the duty of providing for the safety of the

estates, and this the gentry took upon themselves." "They [the

landlords] have complained much of the character of the works; they have

strongly urged the Government to undertake something else; _at all

events to give up what they were doing at the moment_; but when did

their indignation take the shape of complaining that what the Government

was doing was inadequate for coping with the starvation that was

abroad?"

The penetrating mind of W.G. led him to forecast tremendous results from

the potato failure, exclusive of its immediate effect--death by

starvation. Having expressed his opinion that the extent of the

destitution was fearful, he makes the following observations, which time

has completely verified. "As regards the effect," says he, "of the

present calamity upon the relations of landlord and tenant, believe me,

that terrible as are the immediate and direct effects of the calamity,

you will find a set of collateral results springing out of it, tending

to the EXTERMINATION of the smaller tenantry by the landlords, that may

lead you, ere many months, to regard the secondary stage of this scourge

as scarcely less terrible to our unhappy peasantry than the first." And

again: "Symptoms of a WIDE-SPREAD SYSTEMATIC EXTERMINATION are just

beginning to exhibit themselves. I am not speaking under the influence

of any prejudice against the landlord class. Let none of your readers

set down to the account of such a feeling my present warning as to the

wholesale system of ejectment that is now in preparation." "The potato

cultivation being extinguished, at least for a time, the peasant

cultivators can pay no rents; sheep and horned cattle _can_ pay rents,

and smart rents too; therefore the sheep and cattle shall have the

lands, and the peasants shall be ousted from them; a very simple and

most inevitable conclusion, as you see." "I repeat it, a universal

system of ousting the peasantry is about to set in. Whether this results

from the fault or from the necessities of the landlords it matters not."

The following extract from the _Roscommon Journal_ is emphatically cited

by W.G. in support of his views. "_The number of civil bills served by

landlords for the approaching sessions of this town_ WILL TREBLE THOSE

EVER SENT OUT FOR THE LAST TEN YEARS."[226]

More than twenty years after W.G. wrote those letters, I had a

conversation relative to the Famine with a gentleman who knew the

Midland Counties and portions of the West well. I asked him what was the

effect of the Famine in his district. "My district," he answered, "was

by no means regarded as a poor one, but the Famine swept away more than

half its population. The census of '41 gave the families residing in it

as 2,200; the census of '51 gave them at 1,000." Did the landlords, I

enquired, come forward liberally to save the lives of the people? "Only

one landlord," he replied, "in the whole locality with which I am

connected did anything to save the people, F---- O'B----. He asked no

rent for two years, and he never afterwards insisted on the rent of

those two years; although I must say he was paid it by many of his

tenants, of their own free will; but, for the rest, he cancelled those

two years' rent and opened a new account with them, as with men owing

him nothing." And what, I further asked, were the feelings of the

landlords with regard to their tenants dying of starvation? He answered

with solemn emphasis--"DELIGHTED TO BE RID OF THEM."

The present leader of the Conservative party seems to entertain feelings

akin to this; for, some years ago, addressing his constituents, and

speaking of some results of the Irish Famine, he said

significantly--"there are worse things than a famine."

"I shall never forget," said Rev. Mr. F---- to W.G., "the impression

made on my mind a few days ago by a most heartrending case of

starvation. It was this: The poor mother of five children, putting them

to bed one night, almost lifeless from hunger, and despairing of ever

again seeing them alive, took her last look at them, and bade them her

last farewell. She rose early in the morning, and her first act was to

steal on tiptoe to where they lay. She would not awake them, but she

must know the truth--are they alive or dead? and she softly touched the

lips of each, to try and discover if there was any warmth in them, and

she eagerly watched to see if the breath of life still came from their

nostrils. Her apprehensions were but too well founded, she had lost some

of her dear ones during the night."

The mournful poetry of this simple narrative must touch every heart.

Ass and horse flesh were anxiously sought for, even when the animals

died of disease or starvation. In the middle of January it was recorded

that a horse belonging to a man near Claremorris, having died, was

flayed, and the carcass left for dogs and birds to feed upon; but, says

the narrative, before much of it was consumed, it was discovered by a

poor family (whose name and residence are given), and by them used as

food. Father, mother and six children prolonged life for a week upon

this disgusting carrion, and even regretted the loss of it, when the

supply failed; and the poor mother said to the person who made the fact

public, "the Lord only knows what I will now do for my starving

children, since it is gone!" A fortnight earlier a most circumstantial

account of the eating of ass flesh is given by a commercial gentleman in

a letter addressed to the Premier, Lord John Russell, and dated

"Ballina, Christmas-eve." (!) In this case the poor man killed his ass

for food, the skin being sold to a skin dealer for 8d. The writer of the

letter visited the skin dealer's house, in order to make sure of the

fact. It was quite true, and the skin dealer's wife told him this could

not be a solitary case, "as she never remembered so many asses' skins

coming for sale as within the month just past."[227]

Mr. Forster, in his report to the Society of Friends, says of the

condition of Westport in January, 1847, that it was a strange and

fearful sight, like what we read of beleaguered cities; its streets

crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro, with hopeless air

and hunger-struck look; a mob of starved, almost naked women were around

the poorhouse, clamouring for soup-tickets; our inn, the head-quarters

of the road engineer and pay clerks, was beset by a crowd of beggars for

work.[228] The agent of the British Association, Count Strezelecki,

writing from Westport at this time, says, no pen could describe the

distress by which he was surrounded; it had reached such an extreme

degree of intensity that it was above the power of exaggeration. You

may, he adds, believe anything which you hear and read, because what I

actually see surpasses what I ever read of past and present

calamities.[229]

The weather in March became mild, and even warm and sunny; some little

comfort, one would suppose, to those without food or fuel. But no; they

were so starved and weakened and broken down, that it had an injurious

effect upon them, and hurried them rapidly to their end. A week after

the passage quoted above was written, Count Strezelecki again writes,

and says he is sorry to report that the distress had increased; a thing

which could be hardly believed as possible. Melancholy cases of death on

the public roads and in the streets had become more frequent. The sudden

warmth of the weather, and the rays of a bright sun, accelerate

prodigiously the forthcoming end of those whose constitutions are

undermined by famine or sickness. "Yesterday," he writes, "a

countrywoman, between this and the harbour (one mile distance), walking

with four children, squatted against a wall, on which the heat and light

reflected powerfully; some hours after two of her children were corpses,

and she and the two remaining ones taken lifeless to the barracks.

To-day, in Westport, similar melancholy occurrences took place."[230]

Some years ago, during a visit to Westport, I received sad corroboration

of the truth of these statements. I met several persons who had

witnessed the Famine in that town and its neighbourhood, and their

relation of the scenes which fell under their notice not only sustained,

but surpassed, if possible, the facts given in the above communications.

A priest who was stationed at Westport during the Famine, was still

there at the period of my visit. During that dreadful time, the people,

he told me, who wandered about the country in search of food, frequently

took possession of empty houses, which they easily found; the inmates

having died, or having gone to the Workhouse, where such existed. A

brother and sister, not quite grown up, took possession of a house in

this way, in the Parish of Westport. One of them became ill; the other

continued to go for the relief where it was given out, but this one soon

fell ill also. No person heeded them. Everyone had too much to do for

himself. They died. Their dead bodies were only discovered by the

offensive odour which issued from the house in which they died, and in

which they had become putrefied. It was found necessary to make an

aperture for ventilation on the roof before anyone would venture in. The

neighbours dug a hole in the hard floor of the cabin with a crowbar to

receive their remains. And this was their coffinless grave!

This same priest administered in one day the last Sacrament to

thirty-three young persons in the Workhouse of Westport; and of these

there were not more than two or three alive next morning.

Mr. Egan, who at the date of my visit was Clerk of the Union, held the

same office during the Famine. The Workhouse was built to accommodate

one thousand persons. There were two days a-week for admissions. With

the house crowded far beyond its capacity, he had repeatedly seen as

many as three thousand persons seeking admission on a single day.

Knowing, as we do, the utter dislike the Irish peasantry had in those

times to enter the Workhouse, this is a terrible revelation of the

Famine; for it is a recorded fact that many of the people died of want

in their cabins, and suffered their children to die, rather than go

there. Those who were not admitted--and they were, of course, the great

majority--having no homes to return to, lay down and died in Westport

and its suburbs. Mr. Egan, pointing to the wall opposite the Workhouse

gate, said: "There is where they sat down, never to rise again. I have

seen there of a morning as many as eight corpses of those miserable

beings, who had died during the night. Father G---- (then in Westport)

used to be anointing them as they lay exhausted along the walls and

streets, dying of hunger and fever."[231]

The principal aim of the Society of Friends was to establish

soup-kitchens, and give employment to the women in knitting. As soon as

their committee was in working order, they sent members of their body to

various parts of the country--more especially to the West--to make

inquiries, and to see things with their own eyes. Their reports, made in

a quiet, unexaggerated form, are amongst the most valuable testimonies

extant, as to the effects and extent of the Famine. The delegate who was

the first to explore portions of the West writes that, at Boyle (a

prosperous and important town), the persons who sought admission to the

Workhouse were in a most emaciated state, many of them declaring that

they had not tasted food of any kind for forty-eight hours; and he

learned that numbers of them had been living upon turnips and

cabbage-leaves for weeks. The truth of these statements was but too well

supported by the dreadfully reduced state in which they presented

themselves, the children especially being emaciated with starvation, and

ravenous with hunger. At Carrick-on-Shannon he witnessed what he calls a

most painful and heartrending scene--poor wretches in the last stage of

famine begging to be received into the house; women, who had six or

seven children, imploring that even two or three of them might be taken

in, _as their husbands were earning but 8d. a-day_, which, at the

existing high price of provisions, was totally inadequate to feed them.

Some of those children were worn to skeletons; their features sharpened

with hunger, and their limbs wasted almost to the bone. Of course, he

says, among so many applicants (one hundred and ten), a great number

were necessarily refused admittance, as there were but thirty vacancies

in the house. Although the guardians exercised the best discrimination

they could, it was believed that some of those rejected were so far

spent, that it was doubtful if they could reach their homes alive--those

homes, such as they were, being in many cases five or six Irish miles

away. This kind-hearted gentleman, having expressed a wish to distribute

bread to those poor creatures, that they might not, as he said, "go

quite empty-handed," forty pounds of bread were procured, all that could

be purchased in the town of Carrick-on-Shannon. They devoured it with a

voracity which nothing but famine could produce. One woman, he says, was

observed to eat but a very small portion of her bread; and being asked

the reason, said she had four children at home, to whom she was taking

it, as without it there would not be a morsel of food in her cabin that

night. What struck him and his fellow-traveller in a special manner was

the effects of famine on the children; their faces were so wan and

haggard that they looked like old men and women; their sprightliness was

all gone; they sat in groups at their cabin doors, making no attempt to

play. Another indication of the Famine noticed by them was, that the

pigs and poultry had entirely disappeared. To numberless testimonies, as

to the spirit in which the poor people bore their unexampled privations,

this good man adds his: "To do the poor justice," he writes, "they are

bearing their privations with a remarkable degree of patience and

fortitude, and very little clamorous begging is to be met with upon the

roads--at least, not more than has been the case in Ireland for many

years. William Forster," (his fellow-traveller), he adds, "has

completely formed the opinion that the statements in the public

newspapers are by no means exaggerated."[232]

Although Donegal is in the Ulster division of the kingdom, in the famine

time it partook more of the character of a Connaught than an Ulster

county. A gentleman was deputed by the Society of Friends to explore it,

who has given his views upon the Irish Famine with a spirit and feeling

which do him honour as a man and a Christian. Writing from Stranorlar he

says: "This county, like most others in Ireland, belongs to a few large

proprietors, some of them, unhappily, absentees, whose large domains

sometimes extend over whole parishes and baronies, and contain a

population of 8,000 to 12,000. Such, for instance, is the parish of

Templecrone, with a population of 10,000 inhabitants; in which the only

residents above small farmers are, the agent, the protestant clergyman,

the parish priest, a medical man, and perhaps a resident magistrate,

with the superintendent of police and a few small dealers.[233] Writing

from Dunfanaghy in the midst of snow, he says: "A portion of the

district through which we passed this day, as well as the adjoining one,

is, with one exception, the poorest and most destitute in Donegal.

Nothing, indeed, can describe too strongly the dreadful condition of the

people. Many families were living on a single meal of cabbage, and some

even, as we were assured, upon a little seaweed." A highly respectable

merchant of the town called upon this gentleman and assured him that the

small farmers and cottiers had parted with all their pigs and their

fowl; and even their bed clothes and fishing nets had gone for the same

object, the supply of food. He stated that he knew many families of five

to eight persons, who subsisted on 2-1/2 lbs. of oatmeal per day, made

into thin water gruel--about 6 oz. of meal for each! Dunfanaghy is a

little fishing town situated on a bay remarkably adapted for a fishing

population; the sea is teeming with fish of the finest description,

waiting, we might say, to be caught. Many of the inhabitants gain a

portion of their living by this means, but so rude is their tackle, and

so fragile and liable to be upset are their primitive boats or

_coracles_, made of wicker-work, over which sailcloth is stretched, that

they can only venture to sea in fine weather; and thus with food almost

in sight, the people starve, because they have no one to teach them to

build boats more adapted to this rocky coast than those used by their

ancestors many centuries ago.[234] This is but one among many instances

of the wasted industrial resources of this country which, whether in

connection with the water or the land, strike the eye of the stranger at

every step."[235]

To Glenties Mr. Tuke and his companions made their journey through a

succession of wild mountain passes, rendered still wilder by the deep

snow which covered everything. They put up at Lord George Hill's

Gweedore hotel, and endorse all they had previously heard about the

admirable zeal and enlightened benevolence of that nobleman, who had

effected great improvements both in the land and in the condition of the

inhabitants of one of the wildest portions of Donegal. "We started at

daybreak," he writes, "for Glenties, thirty miles distant, over the

mountains; and after leaving the improved cottages and farms on the

Gweedore estate, soon came upon the domain of an absentee proprietor,

the extent of which may be judged by the fact, that our road lay for

more than twenty miles through it. This is the poorest parish in

Donegal, and no statement can be too strong with respect to the wretched

condition, the positive misery and starvation in which the cottiers and

small farmers on this immense domain are found. We baited at Dungloe. A

more miserable and dilapidated village or town I never saw. What a

contrast did its dirty little inn present to the hotel at Gweedore."

There was not a single pound of meal, Indian or oat, to be purchased in

this miserable place, whilst thousands were depending on it for their

supplies. It was crowded with poor people from the surrounding country

and from the island of Arranmore, who were crying with hunger and cold;

the next market town was thirty miles from them, and the nearest place

where food could be obtained was Lord George Hill's store at Bunbeg,

some twenty miles distant. Surely this extreme wretchedness and neglect

must be, to a great extent, attributed to the want of a resident

proprietor.

"Leaving Dungloe," says Mr. Tuke, "we proceeded to Glenties, still on

the same property; and throughout our journey met with the most squalid

scenes of misery which the imagination can well conceive. Whilst

thousands of acres of reclaimable land lies entirely neglected and

uncultivated, there are thousands of men both willing and anxious to

obtain work, but unable to procure it. On the following morning, William

Forster had an interview with the resident magistrate, as well as with

the rector of the parish and some other gentlemen, who gave distressing

accounts of the poverty existing around them. Their attention was

directed to the necessity for the immediate establishment of

soup-kitchens, the employment of women in knitting, and the formation of

local committees for their relief, extending over several parishes. We

visited the poorhouse at Glenties, which is in a dreadful state; the

people were in fact half starved and only half clothed. The day before,

they had but one meal of oatmeal and water; and at the time of our visit

had not sufficient food in the house for the day's supply. The people

complained bitterly, as well they might, and begged us to give them

tickets for work, to enable them to leave the place and work on the

roads. Some were leaving the house, preferring to die in their own

hovels rather than in the Poorhouse. Their bedding consisted of dirty

straw, in which they were laid in rows on the floor; even as many as six

persons being crowded under one rug; and we did not see a blanket at

all. The rooms were hardly bearable for filth. The living and the dying

were stretched side by side beneath the same miserable covering! No

wonder that disease and pestilence were filling the infirmary, and that

the pale haggard countenances of the poor boys and girls told of

sufferings which it was impossible to contemplate without the deepest

commiseration and pity."

The carelessness and neglect of their duty by Irish landlords have so

often come before us during the progress of the Famine, that it is a

pleasure to meet with something worth quoting on the other side.

"Throughout Donegal we found," says Mr. Tuke, "the resident proprietors

doing much for their suffering tenantry; in many cases, all that

landlords could do for their relief and assistance. Several of them had

obtained loans under the late Drainage Act, and with this or private

resources are employing large numbers of labourers for the improvement

of their estates. We met with several who had one hundred men employed

in this manner. Many of these landlords, as well as the clergy, are most

assiduously working in all ways in their power. They have imported large

quantities of meal and rice, which they sell at prime cost, there being

in many districts no dealers to supply those articles; and are making

soup at their own houses, and dispensing daily to their famishing

neighbours."[236]

In the South, after Skibbereen, Skull, its neighbour, seems to have

suffered most. To cross from Cape Clear to Skull--partly rowing, partly

sailing--in a stiff breeze is very exciting, and might well cause

apprehension, but for the crew of athletic Cape men, or Capers, as the

people of the mainland call them, in whose hands you have placed your

safety. With them you are perfectly secure. Those hardy, simple-minded

people are as used to the sea as a herdsman is to green fields. Even

when they are not actually upon its stormy bosom, they are usually to be

seen in groups about the little harbour, leaning against the rocks,

quietly smoking their pipes, watching the tide and the weather, and

discussing the proper moment for "going out." It is some five miles from

Cape Clear to the town of Skull. The distance is not long, but without

skill and local knowledge the passage is dangerous, for what seems only

a light gale elsewhere makes the sea almost tempestuous among the bluffs

and rocky islands of this wild coast, where many a foundering barque has

been rescued from destruction by the brave and trusty oarsmen of Cape

Clear. Leaving Roaring-water bay to the north-east, and getting in

shelter of the land, a church tower, humble in design and proportions,

rises in the midst of a graveyard, crowded in one part with tombstones,

and almost entirely devoid of them in the other. There rest the mortal

remains of many generations of the people of Skull; but it is especially

worthy of notice as the burial-ground which had to be doubled in size in

order to receive upwards of half the population within its bosom in a

single year; and yet all were not interred there: many found a grave in

the fields nearest to which they died; many others, among the ruins of

their dismantled cabins. This graveyard, looking out upon the restless

waters from its quiet elevation, must remain for ages the most historic

spot in the locality, although Skull is not without a history and

historic remains. Many a castle and stronghold have the O'Mahonys and

O'Donovans built among the crags of the rocky islands, which are grouped

in such variety to seaward, the ruins of which are to-day full of

interest and beauty for the tourist. But surely the day will come when

those crumbling ruins shall be once again a portion of the common soil,

nameless and forgotten; but distant though that day may be, Skull and

Skibbereen, those two famine-slain sisters of the South, must still be

found on the page of Irish history, illustrating the Great Famine of

1847.

The parish of Skull is situated in the barony of West Carberry, county

of Cork, and is very large, containing no less than 84,000 acres. The

town, a small one, is on the shore in the portion of the parish called

East Skull; West Skull runs inland towards Skibbereen, and in this

division is the village of Ballydehob. The town of Skull is built upon a

piece of low level ground, a short distance from which, in the direction

of Ballydehob, there is a chain of hills, the highest of which, Mount

Gabriel, rises 1,300 feet above the sea level. Nothing can be happier or

more accurate than the poet's description of this scenery, when he

writes:--

"The summer sun is falling soft on Carbery's hundred isles,

The summer sun is gleaming still through Gabriel's rough defiles."[237]

A correspondent of the _Southern Reporter_, writing from Ballydehob

during the first days of January, gives the most piteous account of that

village; every house he entered exhibited the same characteristics,--no

clothing, no food, starvation in the looks of young and old. In a

tumble-down cabin resembling a deserted forge, he found a miserable man

seated at a few embers, with a starved-looking dog beside him, that was

not able to crawl. The visitor asked him if he were sick; he answered

that he was not, but having got swelled legs working on the roads, he

had to give up; he had not tasted food for two days; his family had gone

begging about the country, and he had no hope of ever seeing them again.

Efforts were still being made at this place to get coffins for the dead,

but with indifferent success. There were not coffins for half the

people; many were tied up in straw, and so interred. This writer

mentions what he seems to have regarded as an ingenious contrivance of

the Galeen relief committee, namely, the use of the coffin with the

slide or hinged bottom, but such coffins had been, previously used in

other places. He relates a touching incident which occurred at

Ballydehob, at the time of his visit. Two children, the elder only six

years, went into a neighbour's house in search of food. They were asked

where their father was, and they replied that he was asleep for the last

two days. The people became alarmed, and went to his cabin, where they

found him quite dead, and the merest skeleton. The mother of those

children had died some weeks before, and their poor devoted father

sacrificed his life for them, as the neighbours found some Indian meal

in the place, which he was evidently reserving for his infant children,

whilst he suffered himself to die of starvation.

But a common effect of the Famine was to harden the hearts of the

people, and blunt their natural feelings. Hundreds, remarks this

correspondent, are daily expiring in their cabins in the three parishes

of this neighbourhood, and the people are becoming so accustomed to

death that they have lost all those kindly sympathies for the relatives

of the departed, which formerly characterized their natures. Want and

destitution have so changed them, that a sordid avarice, and a

greediness of disposition to grasp at everything in the shape of food,

has seized hold of the souls of those who were considered the most

generous and hospitable race on the face of the earth. As happened in

other places, no persons attended the funerals; those who were still

alive were so exhausted that they were unable to inter the dead, and the

duty of doing so was frequently left to casual passers-by.

About the middle of February, Commander Caffin, of Her Majesty's ship

"Scourge," visited Skull, in company with the rector, the Rev. Robert

Traill Hall. After having entered a few houses, the Commander said to

the Revd. gentleman, "My pre-conceived ideas of your misery seem as a

dream to me compared with the reality." And yet Captain Caffin had only

time to see the cabins on the roadside, in which the famine was not so

terrible as it was up among the hills and fastnesses, where, in one

wretched hovel, whose two windows were stuffed with straw, the Rev. Mr.

Hall found huddled together sixteen human beings. They did not, however,

belong to one family--three wretched households were congregated into

this miserable abode. Out of the sixteen, two only could be said to be

able to work; and on the exertions of those "two poor pallid objects"

had the rest to depend. Eight of the others were crowded into one

pallet,--it could not be called a bed, being formed of a little straw,

which scarcely kept them from the cold mud floor. A poor father was

still able to sit up, but his legs were dreadfully swollen, and he was

dead in two or three days after the Rev. Mr. Hall's visit. Beside him

lay his sister, and at his feet two children--all hastening to eternity.

Captain Caffin wrote to a friend an account of his visit to Skull, and

his letter was published in many of the public journals. "In the village

of Skull," he says, "three-fourths of the inhabitants you meet carry the

tale of woe in their features and persons, as they are reduced to mere

skeletons, the men in particular, all their physical power wasted away;

they have all become beggars. Having a great desire to see with my own

eyes some of the misery which was said to exist, Dr. Traill, the rector

of Skull, offered to drive me to a portion of his parish. I found there

was no need to take me beyond the village, to show me the horrors of

famine in its worst features. I had read in the papers letters and

accounts of this state of things, but I thought they must be highly

coloured to attract sympathy; but I there saw the reality of the

whole--no exaggeration, for it does not admit of it--famine exists to a

fearful degree, with all its horrors. Fever has sprung up consequent

upon the wretchedness; and swellings of limbs and body, and diarrhoea,

from the want of nourishment, are everywhere to be found." Again: "In no

house that I entered was there not to be found the dead or dying; in

particularizing two or three they may be taken as the picture of the

whole--there was no picking or choosing, but we took them just as they

came." A cabin which he entered had, he says, the appearance of

wretchedness without, but its interior was misery. The Rev. Mr. Hall, on

putting his head inside the hole which answered for a door, said: "Well,

Phillis, how is your mother to-day?" Phillis answered, "O Sir, is it

you? Mother is dead." Captain Caffin adds--"And there--fearful

reality--was the daughter, a skeleton herself, crouched and crying over

the lifeless body of her mother, which was on the floor, cramped up as

she had died, with her rags and her cloak about her, by the side of a

few embers of peat." They came to the cabin of a poor old woman, the

door of which was stopped up with dung. She roused up, evidently

astonished. They had taken her by surprise. She burst into tears, and

said she had not been able to sleep _since the corpse of the woman had

lain in her bed_. The circumstance which destroyed her rest happened in

this way:--Some short time before, a poor miserable woman entered the

cabin, and asked leave to rest herself for a few moments. She got

permission to do so. She lay down, but never rose again. She died in an

hour, and in this miserable hovel of six feet square, the body remained

four days before the wretched occupant could get any person to remove

it. It is not much to be wondered at that she had lost her rest.

"I could," says Captain Caffin, "in this manner take you through thirty

or more cottages that we visited, but they, without exception, were all

alike--the dead and the dying in each; and I could tell you more of the

truth of the heartrending scene, were I to mention the lamentations and

bitter cries of each of those poor creatures, on the threshold of death.

Never in my life have I seen such wholesale misery, nor could I have

thought it so complete. All that I have stated above," he concludes, "I

have seen with my own eyes, and can vouch for the truth of. And I feel I

cannot convey by words the impression left on my mind of this awful

state of things. I could tell you also of that which I could vouch for

the truth of, but which I did not see myself, such as bodies half eaten

by the rats; of two dogs last Wednesday being shot by Mr. O'Callaghan

whilst tearing a body to pieces; of his mother-in-law stopping a poor

woman and asking her what she had on her back, and being replied it was

her son, telling her she would smother it; but the poor emaciated woman

said it was dead already, and she was going to dig a hole in the

churchyard for it. These are things which are of every-day

occurrence."[238]

Taking Ballydehob as a centre, there were, at this time, in a radius of

ten or twelve miles around it, twenty-six soup kitchens--namely, at

Skibbereen, Baltimore, Shirken, and Cape Clear (three); Creagh,

Castlehaven (two); Union Hall, Aghadown (two); Kilcoe (three); Skull

(two); Dunmanus, Crookhaven (two); Cahiragh (two); Durrus, Drimoleague,

Drenagh, Bantry, Glengariff, Adrigoole, Castletown, Berehaven, and

Ballydehob. They were making and distributing daily about seventeen

thousand pints of good meat soup. They did great good, but it was of a

very partial nature. Mr. Commissary Bishop tells us "they were but a

drop in the ocean." Hundreds, he says, are relieved, but thousands still

want. And he adds, that soup kitchens have their attendant evils: an

important one in this instance was, that the poor small farmers were

selling all their cows to the soup kitchens, leaving themselves and

their children without milk or butter.

There seems to have been an understanding among the _employes_, that the

true state of things, in its naked reality, was not to be given in their

communications to Government. It was to be toned down and modified.

Hence the studied avoidance of the word Famine in almost every official

document of the time. Captain Caffin's letter was written to a friend

and marked "private;" but having got into the newspapers, it must, of

course, be taken notice of by the Government. Mr. Trevelyan lost no

time, but at once wrote, enclosing it to Sir John Burgoyne. To use his

own words on the occasion, the receipt, from the Commander of the

Scourge, of "the awful letter, describing the result of his personal

observations in the immediate neighbourhood of Skull," led him (Mr.

Trevelyan) to make two proposals on the part of the Treasury. And

indeed, it must be said, well meant and practical they were. The first

was, to send two half-pay medical officers to Skull, to try and do

something for the sick, many of whom were dying for want of the

commonest care; and also to combine with that arrangement, the means of

securing the decent interment of the dead. The second proposal was to

provide carts, for the conveyance of soup to the sick in their houses in

and around Skull; a most necessary provision, inasmuch as the starving

people were, in numerous cases, unable to walk from their dwellings to

the soup kitchen; besides which, in many houses the whole family were

struck down by a combination of fever, starvation and dysentery. Sir

John Burgoyne, as might be expected, picked holes in both proposals. In

the carriage of soup to the sick Sir John sees difficulty on account of

the scarcity of horses, which are, he says, diminishing fast. And he

adds, that several, if not all of the judges, who were then proceeding

on circuit, were obliged to take the same horses from Dublin throughout,

as they would have no chance of changing them as usual. Then with regard

to the decent burial of the dead, Sir John thought there were legal

difficulties in the way, and that legislation was necessary before it

could be done. He failed to produce any objection against the

appointment of the medical officers. In a fortnight after, a Treasury

Minute was issued to the effect that Relief Committees should be

required to employ proper persons to bury, with as much attention to the

feelings of the survivors as circumstances would admit, the dead bodies

which could not be buried by any other means. How urgently such an order

was called for appears from the fact, that at that time in the

neighbourhood of Skull, none but strangers, hired by the clergy, could

be found to take any part in a burial.[239]

The incumbent of Skull, the Key. Robert Traill Hall,[240] a month after

Captain Caffin's letter was published, says, "the distress was nothing

in Captain Caffin's time compared with what it is now." On reading

Captain Caffin's letter, one would suppose, that destitution could not

reach a higher point than the one at which he saw it. That letter fixed

the attention of the Government upon Skull, and yet, strange result,

after a month of such attention, the Famine is intensified there,

instead of being alleviated.

Mr. Commissary Bishop had charge of the most famine-visited portion of

the Co. Cork (Skibbereen always excepted), including West Carbery,

Bantry and Bere. He seems to have been an active, intelligent officer,

and a kind-hearted man; yet his communications, somehow, must have

misled the Government, for Mr. Trevelyan starts at Captain Caffin's

letter, as if suddenly awakened from a dream. Its contents appeared to

be quite new, and almost incredible to him. No wonder, perhaps. On the

29th of January, a fortnight before the publication of Captain Caffin's

letter, Mr. Bishop writes to Mr. Trevelyan: "The floating depôt for

Skull arrived yesterday, and has commenced issues; _this removes all

anxiety for that quarter_." On the day before Captain Caffin's letter

was written, Mr. Bishop says: "At Skull, in both east and west division,

I found the distress, or rather the mortality had pretty well

increased." And this, notwithstanding the floating depôt. Yet in the

midst of the famine-slaughter described by Captain Caffin, Mr. Bishop is

still hopeful, for he says: "The Relief Committees at Skull and

Crookhaven exert themselves greatly to benefit the poor. There is an

ample supply of provisions at each place."[241] How did they manage to

die of starvation at Skull?--one is tempted to ask. Yet they did, and at

Ballydehob too, the other town of the parish; for, three weeks after the

announcement of the "ample supply of provisions," the following news

reaches us from the latter place, on the most reliable authority. A

naval officer, Mr. Scarlet, who was with the "Mercury" and "Gipsey"

delivering provisions in the neighbourhood of Skull, on his return to

Cork, writes, on the 8th of March, to his admiral, Sir Hugh Pigot, in

these terms: "After discharging our cargoes in the boats to Ballydehob,

we went on shore, and on passing through the town we went into the ruins

of a house, and there were two women lying dead, and two, all but dead,

lying along with them. When we enquired how it was that they did not

bury them, a woman told us that they did not know, and that one of them

had been dead for five days. As we were coming down to the boat, we told

the boat's crew if they wanted to see a sight, to go up the street. When

they went, there were four men with hand-barrows there, and the men

belonging to the boats helped to carry the corpses to the burial ground,

where they dug holes, and put them in without coffins."

At this period of the Famine, things had come to such a pass, that

individual cases of death from starvation were seldom reported, and when

they were they failed to attract much attention, deaths by wholesale had

become so common. To be sure, when Dr. Crowley wrote from Skibbereen

that himself and Dr. Donovan had interred, in a kitchen garden, the

corpse of a person eleven days dead, the case, being somewhat peculiar,

had interest enough to be made public; but an ordinary death from hunger

would be deemed a very ordinary affair indeed. I will here give a

specimen or two, of the way in which the progress of the Famine was

chronicled at the close of 1846, and through the winter and spring of

1847. The correspondent of the _Kerry Examiner_, writing from Dingle

under date of February the 8th says: "The state of the people of this

locality is horrifying. Fever, famine and dysentery are daily

increasing, deaths from hunger daily occurring, averaging weekly

twenty--men, women and children thrown into the graves without a

coffin--dead bodies in all parts of the country, being several days dead

before discovered--no inquests to inquire how they came by their death,

as hunger has hardened the hearts of the people. Those who survive

cannot long remain so--the naked wife and children of the deceased,

staring them in the face--their bones penetrating through the skin--not

a morsel of flesh to be seen on their bodies--and not a morsel of food

can they procure to eat. From all parts of the country they crowd into

the town for relief, and not a pound of meal is to be had in the

wretched town for any price."

"This parish (Keantra, Dingle) contained, six months since, three

thousand souls; over five hundred of these have perished, and

three-fourths of them interred coffinless. They were carried to the

churchyard, some on lids and ladders, more in baskets--aye, and scores

of them thrown beside the nearest ditch, and there left to the mercy of

the dogs, which have nothing else to feed on. On the 12th instant I went

through the parish, to give a little assistance to some poor orphans and

widows. I entered a hut, and there were the poor father and his three

children dead beside him, and in such a state of decomposition that I

had to get baskets, and have their remains carried in them."[242]

A hearse piled with coffins--or rather rough, undressed boards slightly

nailed together--each containing a corpse, passed through the streets

of Cork, unaccompanied by a single human being, save the driver of the

vehicle. Three families from the country, consisting of fourteen

persons, took up their residence in a place called Peacock Lane, in the

same city. After one week the household stood thus: Seven dead, six in

fever, one still able to be up.

The apostle of temperance, the Rev. Theobald Mathew, gave the following

evidence before a Committee of the House of Lords on "Colonization from

Ireland":--

_Question 2,359_. "You have spoken of the state of things [the Famine]

as leading to a very great influx of wretchedness and pauperism into the

City of Cork. Will you yourself describe what you have seen and known?"

"No tongue," he answers, "can describe--no understanding can

conceive--the misery and wretchedness that flowed into Cork from the

western parts of the county; the streets were impassable with crowds of

country persons. At the commencement they obtained lodgings, and the

sympathies of the citizens were awakened; but when fever began to spread

in Cork they became alarmed for themselves, and they were anxious at any

risk to get rid of those wretched creatures. The lodging-house keepers

always turned them out when they got sick. We had no additional fever

hospitals; the Workhouse was over full, and those poor creatures

perished miserably in the streets and alleys. Every morning a number

were found dead in the streets; they were thrown out by the poor

creatures in whose houses they lodged. Many of them perished in rooms

and cellars, without its being known, and without their receiving any

aid from those outside. It may appear as if the citizens of Cork and the

clergy of Cork had neglected their duty; but they did not. The calamity

was so great and so overwhelming, that it was impossible to prevent

those calamities. As one instance, I may mention that one Sunday morning

I brought Captain Forbes, who came over with the 'Jamestown,' United

States' frigate, and Mr. William Rathbone, and several other persons,

to show the state of the neighbourhood in which I resided, and to show

them the thousands whom we were feeding at the depôt, While we were

going round a person told me, 'There is a house that has been locked up

two or three days.' It was a cabin in a narrow alley. We went in, and we

saw seventeen persons lying on the floor, all with fever, and no one to

give them assistance. Captain Forbes was struck with horror; he never

thought there could be in any part of the world such misery. That was in

the south suburbs. A poor, wretched widow woman resided there; she let

it out for lodgings, and received those people as lodgers, who all got

the fever. We three gave what relief we could, and got them conveyed to

the hospitals; but they all died."

_Question 2,365_. "Can you form any judgment what proportion of the

population, which is thus added at present, bears to the ordinary

population of the City of Cork?"

_Answer_. "Those poor creatures, the country poor, are now houseless and

without lodgings; no one will take them in; they sleep out at night. The

citizens of Cork have adopted what I consider a very unchristian and

inhuman line of conduct. They have determined to get rid of them. Under

the authority of an Act of Parliament, they take them up as sturdy

beggars and vagrants, and confine them at night in a market-place, and

the next morning send them out in a cart five miles from the town; and

there they are left, and a great part of them perish, for they have no

home to go to. When they fled from the country, their houses were thrown

down or consumed for fuel by the neighbours who remained, and those poor

creatures have no place to lay their heads."[243]

It would be a useless and a harrowing task to continue such terrible

details, I therefore close this chapter with some account of Bantry,

that town having had the misfortune to be the rival of Skull,

Skibbereen, and Mayo during the Famine-slaughter.

The deaths at Bantry had become fearfully numerous before it attracted

any great share of public sympathy, or even, it would seem, of

Government attention. The _Southern Reporter_ of January the 5th

publishes this curt announcement from that town: "Five inquests to-day.

Verdict--Death by starvation." The jury having given in its verdict, the

foreman, on their part, proceeded to say that they felt it to be their

duty to state, under the correction of the court, that it was their

opinion that if the Government of the country should persevere in its

determination of refusing to use the means available to it, for the

purpose of lowering the price of food, so as to place it within the

reach of the labouring poor, the result would be a sacrifice of human

life from starvation to a fearful extent, and endangerment of property

and the public peace. This remonstrance was committed to writing, and

signed E. O'Sullivan, foreman; Samuel Hutchins, J.P.; Richard White,

J.P.

One of the five cases was that of Catherine Sheehan, a child two years

old. She had been a strong healthy child, never having complained of any

sickness till she began to pine away for want of food. Her father was

employed on the public works, and earned ninepence a day, which was

barely enough to purchase food for himself, to enable him to continue at

work. This child had had no food for four days before her death, except

a small morsel of bread and seaweed. She died on the evening of

Christmas day.

The case of Richard Finn was another of the five. He went into a house

where they were making oatmeal gruel. He begged so hard for a little,

that the woman of the house took up some of it for him, when it was

about half boiled. The food disagreed with him, and he was able to take

only a small portion of it. He soon got into a fainting state, and was

lifted into a car by four men, in order to be carried to the Workhouse.

One of the priests, Rev. Mr. Barry, P.P., was sent for. He was at the

Relief Committee, but left immediately to attend Finn. In his

examination before the coroner, he said he found him in a dying state,

but quite in his senses. He would not delay hearing his confession till

he reached the Workhouse, but heard it in the car. Finn was then removed

to the House, and laid on a bed in his clothes, where he received the

sacrament of Extreme Unction. "I feared," said the Rev. Mr. Barry, "the

delay of stripping him." And the rev. gentleman was right, for he had

scarcely concluded his ministrations when Finn expired.

Every Catholic will understand how severely the physical and mental

energies of priests are taxed during times of fever, cholera, small pox,

and the like; but all such epidemics combined could scarcely cause them

such ceaseless work and sleepless anxiety as the Famine did, more

especially in its chief centres. To those who are not Catholics, I may

say that every priest feels bound, under the most solemn obligations, to

administer the last sacraments to every individual committed to his

care, who has come to the use of reason. What, then, must their lives

have been during the Famine? Not only had they to attend the dying, but

they were expected, and they felt it to be their duty, to be present at

Relief Committees, to wait on officials, write letters, and do

everything they thought could in any manner aid them in saving the lives

of the people. Their starving flocks looked to them for temporal as well

as spiritual help, and, in the Famine, they were continually in crowds

about their dwellings, looking for food and consolation. The priest was

often without food for himself, and had not the heart to meet his people

when he had nothing to give them. An instance of this occurred in a

severely visited parish of the West. The priest one day saw before his

door a crowd--hundreds, he thought--of his parishioners seeking relief.

He had become so prostrate and hopeless at their present sufferings and

future prospects, that, taking his Breviary, he left the house by a

private way, and bent his steps to a neighbouring wood. On reaching it,

he knelt down and began to recite his office aloud, to implore Almighty

God to have mercy on his people and himself. He did not expect to leave

that wood alive. After a time he heard a voice not far off; he became

alarmed, fearing his retreat had been discovered. Strange as the

coincidence seems, it is perfectly true; the voice he heard was that of

a neighbouring priest, a friend of his, who had taken the very same

course, and for the same reason. Gaining strength and consolation from

having met, and giving each other courage, they returned to their homes,

resolving to face the worst.

A physician, an excellent, kind-hearted man, who had been sent on duty

to Bantry in the later stages of the Famine, said one day to a priest

there--"Well, Father----, how are you getting on these times?" "Badly,"

was the reply, "for I often remain late in bed in the morning, not

knowing where to look for my breakfast when I get up."[244]

At this same time, there was a charitable lady in or near Bantry, who

had discovered that another of the priests was not unfrequently

dinnerless; so she insisted on being permitted to send him that

important meal, ready-cooked, at a certain hour every day, begging of

him to be at home, if possible, at the hour fixed. This arrangement went

on for a while to her great satisfaction, but news reached her one day

that Father ---- seldom partook of her dinner. Such dreadful cases of

starvation came to his door, that he frequently gave the good lady's

dinner away. She determined that he must not sink and die; and to carry

out her view she hit upon an ingenious plan. She gave the servant, who

took the dinner to Father----, strict orders not to leave the house

until he had dined; the reason to be given to him for this was, that her

mistress wished her to bring back the things in which the dinner had

been carried to him. That priest, I am glad to say, is still among us,

and should these lines meet his eye, he will remember the circumstance,

and the honest and true authority on which it is related.

A short time after the five inquests above referred to were held, the

_Cork Examiner_ published the following extract from a private letter:

"Each day brings with it its own horrors. The mind recoils from the

contemplation of the scenes we are compelled to witness every hour. Ten

inquests in Bantry--there should have been at least _two hundred

inquests_. Every day, every hour produces its own victims--holocausts

offered at the shrine of political economy. Famine and pestilence are

sweeping away hundreds, but they have now _no_ terrors for the people.

Their only regret seems to be, that they are not relieved from their

sufferings by some process more speedy and less painful. _Since the

inquests were held here on Monday, there have been twenty-four deaths

from starvation_; and, if we can judge from appearances, before the

termination of another week the number will be incredible. As to holding

any more inquests, it is mere nonsense; _the number of deaths is beyond

counting_. Nineteen out of every twenty deaths that have occurred in

this parish, for the last two months, were caused by starvation. I have

known children in the remote districts of the parish, and in the

neighbourhood of the town, too, live, some of them for two, some three,

and some of them for _four days on water_! On the sea shore, or

convenient to it, the people are more fortunate, as they can get

_seaweed_, which, when boiled and mixed with a little Indian corn, or

wheaten meal, they eat, and thank Providence for providing them with

even that, to allay the cravings of hunger."

Although the writer of the above letter says, and with reason it would

seem, that the holding of any more inquests at Bantry was useless; the

very week after it was written, a batch of inquests were held there, one

of which bids fair to be, for a long time, famous, on account of the

verdict returned. There were forty deaths, but from some cause, perhaps

for want of time, there were only fifteen inquests. A respectable jury

having been sworn, the first of these was upon a man named John

Sullivan. One of the witnesses in the case said a messenger came and

announced to him that a man was lying on the old road in a bad state.

Witness proceeded to the place, but, in the first instance, alone;

finding the man still alive, he returned for help to remove him. He got

a servant boy and a cart; but on going again to where Sullivan was

lying, he found life was extinct. The jury having consulted, the foreman

announced their verdict in these terms: "From the multitude of deaths

which have taken place in the locality, and the number of inquests which

have already been held, without any good resulting, he thought, with his

fellow-jurors, that they ought to bring in a general verdict,

inculpating Lord John Russell, as the head of the Government. That

Minister had the power of keeping the people alive, and he would not do

so. Notwithstanding the fatal consequences which had attended his

policy, he had expressed his determination to persevere in the same

course, and therefore he (the foreman) thought that he was guilty of

this death and of the rest. He would bring in no other verdict but one

of _wilful murder_ against Lord John Russell." The Rev. Mr. Barry

suggested that the verdict should simply record the immediate cause of

death--starvation; and the jury might append their opinion as to how far

it was attributable to the neglect of Lord John Russell in yielding to

the interests of a class of greedy monopolists. The foreman said he

wished it should be remembered that the opinion which he had expressed

with reference to the conduct of the Government was that of men upon

their oaths. A verdict was ultimately given of death from starvation,

with the addition mentioned.

The inquest was held in the Court-house, in presence of three

magistrates, assisted by the Catholic clergy of the town, and the

officers of the Constabulary.

Other verdicts of the same tendency, although not so decided in tone as

this one, were recorded in different parts of the country. At Lismore an

inquest was held on a man, also named Sullivan, and the jury found that

his death was caused by the neglect of the Government in not sending

food into the country _in due time_. In this town fourteen horses died

of starvation in one week.

Whilst Bantry was in the condition described above, Dr. Stephens was

sent by the Board of Health to examine the Workhouse there. He found it

simply dreadful. Here is an extract from his report, which duty compels

me, however unwillingly, to quote: "Language," he says, "would fail to

give an adequate idea of the state of the fever hospital. _Such an

appalling, awful, and heart-sickening condition_ as it presented I never

witnessed, or could think possible to exist in a civilized or Christian

community. As I entered the house, the stench that proceeded from it was

most dreadful and noisome; but, oh! what scenes presented themselves to

my view as I proceeded through the wards and passages: patients lying

on straw, naked, and in their excrements, a light covering over them--in

two beds living beings beside the dead, in the same bed with them, and

dead since the night before." There was no medicine--no drink--no fire.

The wretched creatures, dying from thirst, were constantly crying

"Water, water," but there was no Christian hand to give them even a cup

of cold water for the love of God.

Towards the end of April, the Rev. Mr. Barry estimated the deaths from

famine, in Bantry alone, at four thousand.

Some time ago, speaking with a gentleman, a distinguished public man,

about the hinged coffin, he said: "At the time of the Famine I was a

boy, residing not far from Bantry. I have seen one of those hinged

coffins, which had borne more than three hundred corpses to the grave. I

have seen men go along the roads with it, to collect dead bodies as they

met them."

Good God! picking up human forms, made to Thy image and likeness, and

lately the tenements of immortal souls, as fishermen may sometimes be

seen on the seashore, gathering the _debris_ of a wreck after a storm!

With such specimens of the Irish Famine before us, we cannot but feel

the justice, as well as the eloquence, of the following passage: "I do

not think it possible," writes Mr. A. Shafto Adair, "for an English

reader, however powerful his imagination, to conceive the state of

Ireland during the past winter, or its present condition. Famines and

plagues will suggest themselves, with their ghastly and repulsive

incidents--the dead mother--the dying infant--the feast of

cannibals--Athens--Jerusalem--Marseilles. But these awful facts stand

forth as dark spots in the illuminated chronicles of time; episodes, it

may be, of some magnificent epoch in a nation's history--tragedies acted

in remote times, or in distant regions--the actors, the inhabitants of

beleaguered cities, or the citizens of a narrow territory. But here the

tragedy is enacted with no narrower limits than the boundaries of a

kingdom, the victims--an entire people,--within our own days, at our own

thresholds."[245]

FOOTNOTES:

[213] Letter from Captain Wynne, Government District Inspector to

Lieutenant-Colonel Jones.--_Commissariat Series, part 1, p_. 438.--The

italics are Captain Wynne's.

[214] Report of Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, pp.

180-2.

[215] Census of Ireland for the Year 1851. Report on tables of deaths.

[216] The circumlocutions had recourse to by relief committees and

Government officials to avoid using the word _Famine_ were so many and

so remarkable, that at one time I was inclined to attempt making a

complete list of them. Here are a few: "Distress," "Destitution,"

"Dearth of provisions," "Severe destitution," "Severe suffering,"

"Extreme distress," as above; "Extreme misery," "Extreme destitution,"

etc., etc. The Society of Friends, with honest plainspeaking, almost

invariably used the word "Famine;" and they named their report,

"Transactions during the Famine in Ireland."

[217] Commissariat Series, part I, p. 409.

[218] Commissariat Series, part I, p. 382.

[219] _Ib._ p. 442.

[220] Appendix to Report of British Association, p. 181.

[221] Report of Central Relief Committee of Society of Friends, p. 168.

[222] This Workhouse was built to accommodate 900 persons. The Fever

Hospital and sheds had room for only 250.

[223] _A Visit to Connaught in the Autumn of_ 1847: by James H. Tuke, in

a letter to the Central Committee of the Society of Friends, Dublin, p.

8.

At the end of February there was a meeting of coroners in Cork, at which

they came to the determination of holding no more starvation inquests.

[224] Letters from Mayo to the Dublin _Freeman's Journal_, signed W.G.

[225] The italics in the above quotation are W.G.'s.

[226] It is not to be inferred from this, that evictions were rare in

Ireland immediately preceding the Famine. A writer has taken the trouble

of recording in a pamphlet Irish evictions, from 1840 to the 3rd of

March, 1846; a period of about five years. Up to March, 1846, evictions

_arising from the Famine_ had not really begun, although preparations

were being made for them; so that those recorded in the pamphlet were

carried out under no special pressure of circumstances whatever. The

writer premises that he regards his list as far from complete, inasmuch

as it was compiled chiefly from the public journals, and every evicting

landlord uses all his power and precaution to keep his evictions as

secret as possible; still, it was found on record, that there were over

8,000 individuals evicted in Ireland during those five years, many of

the evictions being attended with much hardship and suffering, such as

the removal of sick and dying persons in order to take possession. In

one case a dead body was actually carried out. In two instances,

comprising the dispossession of 385 individuals, the evictions took

place avowedly for the purpose of bringing in Protestant tenants; in a

third, 1175 persons were evicted by a noble lord, and although he did

not give his reason, his name and his whole career abundantly justify

the conclusion that this vast clearance was effected to make way for a

Protestant colony.

[227] Letter of Mr. Joseph M. M'Kenna to Lord John Russell. Mr. M'Kenna

gives the names of all the parties. Yet still more dreadful is the case

we read of as having occurred in Galway. A man having been sentenced for

sheep-stealing in that city, it was stated to the bench by the resident

magistrate "that the prisoner and his family were starving; one of his

children died, and he was, he said, credibly informed that the mother

ate part of its legs and feet. After its death he had the body exhumed,

and found that nothing but the bones remained of the legs and

feet."--_Freeman's Journal, April, 1848._

[228] Letter dated from Killybegs, 18th of 12th month, 1846. Report, p.

151.

[229] Count Strezelecki's Report to the British Association, p. 97. "In

addition to the Government aid, large sums were distributed by the

British Association, through the agency of the generous and

never-to-be-forgotten Count Strezelecki."--_MS. letter from a Mayo

gentleman, in author's possession_.

[230] Report, p. 97.

[231] MS. notes taken down from Mr. Egan.

[232] Joseph Crosfield's Report to the Society of Friends, p. 145.

[233] James H. Tuke's report to the same Committee, p. 147.

[234] In Irish _corrac_, pr. _corrach_ or _currach_. This primitive boat

was made of a slight frame work of timber and covered with skins, whence

its name. In early times _corrachs_ were used in all the British

islands. They are mentioned by many Latin authors, especially by Cæsar,

who had several of them made after the British model.

[235] Mr. Tuke's report, p. 148.

[236] Letter dated from Killybegs, 18th of 12th month, 1846. Report, p.

151.

[237] _The Sack of Baltimore_, by Thomas Davis. A ballad, one of whose

many beauties is the striking correctness of its topography.

[238] Letter of Commander J. Cruford Caffin, R.N., of Her Majesty's

steam sloop "Scourge," dated 15th February, 1847, written to Captain

Hamilton.

[239] Assistant-Commissary Bishop's letter of 14th Feb., 1847.

[240] So he always signed himself, although Captain Caffin calls him Dr.

Traill.

[241] Letter to Mr. Trevelyan of 14th Feb., 1847.

[242] Correspondent of Dublin _Freeman's Journal_.

[243] "Report: Colonization from Ireland." Brought from House of Lords

23rd July, 1847; ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 23rd

July, 1847; pp. 243 and 244.

[244] This physician had three large crosses made from the timber of a

sliding or hinged coffin. One of these he kindly presented to the

author, which is now in his possession. It is two feet three inches

long, by one foot one inch across the arms. It bears the following

inscription:--

"During the frightful famine-plague, which devastated a large proportion

of Ireland in the years 1846-47, that monstrous and unchristian machine,

a "sliding coffin," was, from necessity, used in Bantry Union for the

conveyance of the victims to one common grave. The material of this

cross, the symbol of our Redemption, is a portion of one of the

machines, which enclosed the remains of several hundreds of our

countrymen, during their passage from the wretched huts or waysides,

where they died, to the pit into which their remains were thrown.--T.W."

[245] _The Winter of 1846-7 in Antrim, with Remarks on Out-door Relief

and Colonization_. By A. Shafto Adair, F.R.S. London: Ridgway, 1847.

Haliday Pamphlets, Royal Irish Academy, vol. 1,992. Mr. Adair is a

landlord of large possessions in the County Antrim, who exerted himself

very much to alleviate the sufferings of the people during the

Famine.--He was raised to the Peerage in 1873 as Baron Waveney.