Unheard stories of the 19th century - Irish evacuation to Montreal

Sometime in the 20th century, I was a medical student at St Anthony Hospital in the north of Newfoundland. The Hospital was a legacy of the Grenfell Medical Mission, so I read Grenfell's (sometimes fanciful) stories of the late 19th and early 20th century european hunter gatherers of those remote lands.

Those were, and are, tough lands. The native population was small even before the european plagues.

Foreign to those all but uninhabitable lands the europeans hunted fish and seal, lived as debt slaves in squalor and misery, and died in droves on the ice. I was not long from a stay in 1980s Bangladesh, then a synonym for misery, and I though that hot misery had its advantages over cold misery.

No-one in those days, incidentally, would have predicted Bangladesh would do as relatively well as it has. That's worth remembering.

The stories of Newfoundland's back country are fascinating, but they are all but forgotten to our time. Just like this glimpse of the Malthusian agony of Ireland's 19th century, seen from Montreal, Canada in the years before America's immigration-amplified civil war ...

Seeking hope, they found death Rene Bruemmer, The Gazette

The Irish came by the tens of thousands in 1847, packed like cordwood below deck in fetid ship holds meant for timber....

... There were so many corpses, trenches were dug to dispose of the dead in what is now Point St. Charles. Twelve years later, labourers building the Victoria Bridge would uncover the bones of their brethren and insist the remains be protected. To make sure of it, they planted a massive 30-tonne, 10-foot high boulder dredged from the St. Lawrence River over the burial site, and inscribed it, in part: "To preserve from desecration the remains of 6,000 immigrants who died of ship fever."  [Epidemic Typhus, a Rickettsial disease transmitted by human lice]...

... In 1845, potatoes were struck by a fungal infection that caused half the crop to rot in the earth. In 1846, the blight returned, wiping out almost the entire crop, followed by one of the harshest winters in living memory, and the people starved....

... Most would have preferred the well-established promised lands of New York and Boston, but America had set strict standards and fares for passage to the U.S. were too high for the impoverished. But British traders who shipped lumber from Quebec City and St. John's were happy to have emigrants paying a low fare to serve as ballast for their return trips to Canada. Many passage brokers told passengers food would be provided for the 45-day journey, which was untrue...

... Canadian immigration officials, who had no say in emigration policies determined by the British colonial authorities, were sorely unprepared and underfunded for the deluge of emaciated Irish. At the immigration depot on Grosse Île, an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence 50 kilometres east of Quebec City, the medical officer in charge of the quarantine station prepared beds for 200 invalids, thinking 10,000 emigrants had departed from Britain. That summer, more than 100,000 would flee to Quebec.

By the end of May, there were already 40 ships lined up for three kilometres, awaiting to discharge passengers. The ships kept coming till the river iced over in October....

... The ill overflowed the quarantine stations, lying outside on the grass and sand beaches. Healthy passengers were stuck waiting on the ships for 20 days, a death sentence for many. Bodies were pulled from the holds with hooks and stacked on shore. Between 3,000 and 5,000 died on Grosse Île...

... Overwhelmed health officials started waving many ships with "healthy" passengers on to Montreal.

They disembarked, malnourished and diseased, dying in the streets and on the wharves, begging for water on the steps of churches. Worried about an epidemic, authorities constructed three wooden "fever sheds" 150 feet long and 50 feet wide at Windmill Point, near where Victoria Bridge now stands in Point St. Charles. The sick and dying lay two or three to a bed, side by side with the dead, leaving hundreds of orphans behind. The number of sheds grew to 22. Military cordoned off the area so the sick couldn't escape.

Seeing the ill dying alone, the Grey Nuns went to help, attending to the sick and carrying women and children in their arms from the ships to the ambulances. Thirty of 40 nuns who went to help fell ill, and seven died, writes historian Edgar Andrew Collard. Other nuns took over, but once the surviving Grey Nuns had convalesced, they returned...

When a mob of frightened Montrealers threatened to toss the fever sheds into the river, Montreal mayor John Easton Mills quelled the riot, and later went himself to help in the evenings, giving them water and changing their straw bedding. The father of a large family, he died in November.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Montreal urged French Quebecers, linked to the Irish by their Catholic faith, to help the orphans. Many came from the country to adopt one or two children, accepting them in to their families, in some cases passing their land on to them...

... Grosse Île, site of the largest Irish famine graveyard outside of Ireland, is now known as the Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada...

I grew up in Montreal, but this is the first I read this story. John Mills was born in deeply Protestant and English Massachusetts twenty years after the American revolution, but ended up in Canada. Were his family loyalists fleeing the rebels?  At 50 this presumably Protestant mayor of English descent died helping starving, diseased and exiled Catholic Irish. I wonder if any of his family survive to tell more of what must a remarkable life.

The movie almost writes itself, doesn't it? There would be worse ways to remember those people and those times.

There's a long way down from where most of the world is today. It would do us all well to look over the edge once in a while, the better to inspire our kindred ascents.