One hundred and fifty years after the 1847 Migration to Canada, Irish decedants remember the thousands who died at the hands of British authorities and their Canadian counterparts

by DAVID FENNARIO

I can't think of any music more death-haunted than the traditional music of the Irish people. Listen to the songs done by Irish folk musicians the Chieftains on any of their albums. Even the lightest toe-tapping jig carries inside it a lament, often striking a chilling note of doom on a tin flute or tambour that wouldn't sound out of place in Chopin's "Saul's Death March."

This sombre undertone is a reflection of Ireland's tragic history, a history that is relatively unknown in North America. Here the myth of the happy-go-lucky Irish lives on, perpetuated by the fanfare of the annual Saint Patrick's Day parades held in cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and Montreal. The green plastic hats, the "Kiss Me I'm Irish" buttons, the smiling redhaired leprechauns embroidered on ties, the sentimental Tin Pan Alley songs about the Emerald Isle--to millions that is what being Irish is all about. But that view might change for some people in 1997, the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1847.

A feature film based on the book The Voyage of the Naparima by James J. Mangan will be produced this year in Canada about the famine that killed one out of every seven people in Ireland. However, the various accounts of the tragedy are bound to differ, because the cause of the Great Famine is still under review. Was it the result of deliberate British government policy toward Ireland, as some claim, or simply a question of incompetence and lack of resources?

I am convinced that thousands upon thousands died, not only in Ireland but in Canada, because of the callous attitudes of the British authorities and their Canadian counterparts toward the Irish. Perhaps others may agree with me after I give an account of the Irish immigrants who died all up and down the St. Lawrence River, from St. John's, Newfoundland all the way to Saint Catherine's, Ontario, in the spring of 1847--a tragedy largely forgotten and ignored until recently by official textbook historians.

For years the only hint that something strange once passed up the river was the memorial stones marking the common graves of 20,000 Irish immigrants, often found in obscure places. In Toronto the common grave is marked only by a parking lot near the waterfront. In Montreal the gravesite remained unmarked for 12 years, until the workers who built the Victoria Bridge between 1851 and 1859 pulled a huge black boulder out of the river like a bad tooth and placed it on top of the common grave as a memorial. The "Irish Stone" is now stuck between a two-lane expressway that leads onto the bridge--a stone that the Canadian National Railway tried twice to remove as a traffic impediment, once in 1903 and again in 1965. Each time, the Irish community of Montreal raised hell and the stone remains where it was first placed, down in the Verdun-Pointe St-Charles district of Montreal where I grew up.

I first saw what we called "The Black Rock" when I was 10 years old, riding around on my bike. But I had no idea of its significance until six years later, when I read Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger. That's when I read about the potatoes going bad in Ireland in the spring of 1847. They had turned black in the fields overnight from a blight and millions of people began to starve, because after 700 years of British rule, potatoes were the main source of food for the majority of the Irish peasants. The old people died first and then the children. A reporter at the time described the children as "breathing skeletons."

"Had only one child or a few children been so afflicted," he wrote, "aid would have been immediately forthcoming from relatives, neighbours, even strangers. But there were thousands of them, and they were everywhere, inside and outside hovels, in the towns and along the roads. They no longer spoke, much less cried; they just stared with a gaunt unmeaning vacancy, a kind of insanity, a stupid, despairing look that asked for nothing, expected nothing, received nothing."

Between 1847-1851, a million and a half people died of starvation and disease and another million emigrated, forced off their land by British troops. In the spring and summer of 1847, 100,000 Irish immigrants came up the Gulf of the St. Lawrence on board what they called "coffin ships:" old lumber barges that didn't have enough air, water or food. By the end of the summer, close to 20,000 of them had died and the rest disappeared in the general direction of the Great Lakes, presumably down to the States, but no one is really sure.

Someone who played a large role in researching this tragedy is Marianna O'Gallagher of Quebec City, the author of Eyewitness: Grosse Île 1847. Her work is one of the main sources that historians consult on the migration of 1847. But her work is limited, I believe, by her political perspective on the Famine. She looks at the history of the migration of 1847 from the point of view of an administrator. She does not question the cause of the disaster; she is interested only in the effects. Consequently in her books she gives a lot of information about the attempts of the clergy, government bureaucrats and the military to cope with the scale of the disaster. She mentions, for example, that the 5,000 immigrants buried in a common grave on Grosse Île, the quarantine station outside of Quebec, were each dutifully buried in their own individual coffins. She does not mention, except in passing, the suffering these immigrants endured, caused by the same government that so thoughtfully supplied each of them a coffin.

"Who is to blame for the tragedy of 1847?" writes O'Gallagher in her book Eyewitness: Grosse Île 1847. "On this side of the Atlantic, there is no blame to be laid anywhere. On the contrary, 1847 was an example of unequalled heroism."

While it was true that certain lower-level officials, along with members of the clergy, did risk their lives to aid sick and dying immigrants out of compassion and religious conviction, they were not the people who made the big decisions that shaped the government's policy during the crisis of 1847. It was men like Lord Grey, head of the British Colonial Office, Lord Elgin, the British Governor General of Canada and A.C. Buchanan, Chief Emigrant Agent for the Canadas who laid down the directives that determined what was done by whom with what--directives that led to unnecessary suffering and death, according to Colleen M. Towns, another authority on the migration of 1847, a writer who sounds a note of anger in her writing totally missing from O'Gallagher's.

In her MA thesis written in 1990, titled "Relief and Order: the Public Response to the 1847 Famine Irish Migration to Upper Canada," Towns writes that the policy implemented by officials of the Canadian Immigration Department and various local boards of health, in conjunction with Lord Grey, Lord Elgin and A.C. Buchanan, was not inspired by compassion or even the need to protect the general population from disease. They simply wanted too spend as little as possible on a bunch of sick, starving 'Micks' who were incapable of helping themselves. She proves this by countering the common arguments that the government's well-intentioned attempts to aid the immigrants failed because they were uninformed, unprepared and short on resources.

The government was not uninformed. They knew by April of 1847, according to an article published in the Quebec City newspaper Le Canadien, that 100,000--possibly 200,000--Irish immigrants would come up the Gulf of the St. Lawrence that year, nearly two months before the first ships arrived. They knew that 28,000 Irish in absolute destitution had embarked from Liverpool and Irish ports. Yet Doctor Douglas, in charge of the quarantine station on Grosse Île, was not given the extra funds he requested. So on May 4, 1847, he opened up his hospital with his usual staff of three. Consequently, the hospital and the whole island was swamped by sick immigrants who died in the woods, on the beaches, in sheds and tents, virtually unattended.

The immigrants faced similar situations further up the river in Montreal, Cornwall, Kingston, Toronto. Not enough beds, doctors, medicine or shelters, because the government chose not to supply the resources that could have been available. As Lord Grey stressed in a communiqué to Governor General Lord Elgin: "The importance of enforcing the strictest economy in affording such assistance, if not rigidly guarded, may have the effect of inducing the emigrants to relax in their exertions to provide for themselves."

Because of the perceived danger of helping Irish immigrants, the government limited its provisions of food to a daily ration of three-quarters of a pound of bread and meat, and restricted shelter in the board of health immigrant sheds to a maximum of six days. Consequently, thousands died who might have lived had the government provided the extra funding requested by local authorities. Instead, they continuously pushed the immigrants farther up the river to no set destination.

Every other large Irish immigration left its mark on the map of Canada. There are villages, towns, even counties named after favourite Irish saints--Saint Catherine, Saint Ann, Saint Bridget, Saint Patrick, Saint Anthony. But the Death March of 1847 left behind only tombstones and orphans.

There are in Quebec and Ontario hundreds, perhaps thousands of descendants of those orphans who were placed with families, mostly on farms. But very few of them have any knowledge of their ancestors because the general coverup of the tragedy of the Migration of 1847 continues. It is Marianna O'Gallagher who will be giving the keynote speech this month at Grosse Île in a memorial ceremony jointly sponsored by the Canadian and Irish governments. Not Colleen Towns.

I tried contacting Colleen Towns because I wanted to encourage her to get her thesis published, so that the facts she uncovered could become part of the historical record. But I found out she had moved out of the country, address unknown. So I decided to write this article, not just for the historical record, but also to counter a government that is still prejudiced to immigrants.

The Canadian government has continued its anti-immigrant policies into the 20th century. Racist actions taken against the Chinese, Hindus, Jews and others have been documented. The elimination of immigrant services and the re-imposition of a head tax on immigrants demonstrate their priorities haven't changed much. They still place profits above people. This is why when we remember and lament the Great Famine of 1847, it should be with a note of resistance.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians annual pilgrimage to Grosse Île to commemorate the 1847 Irish Famine takes place this Saturday, August 16. Buses leave at 5:30 am. $80. For info/reservations call Kevin at 737-4615