Tracking the Great Famine's "Coffin Ships" across the Digital Deep

In Ireland's rogue gallery of oppressive technologies the Famineera "coffin ship" enjoys pride of place. Scholars and casual observers generally agree: the mortality rate on sailing ships was so high during the Great Famine that a wide range of contemporaries referred to emigrant vessels as "coffin ships." This truism is often cited to illustrate Irish people's desperation to leave or their anger toward "exterminating landlords" and heartless bureaucrats. In The Famine Ships, for example, Edward Laxton claims that "the stories of the coffin ships soon reached home [in 1847], but the Irish were not deterred."¹ Christine Kinealy agrees: "Even the soubriquet 'coffin-ships' and the greeting 'Irish need not apply,'" she writes, "did not deflect wouldbe emigrants from leaving Ireland [in 1847 and 1848]."² Many others have repeated the axiom.³ One historian even claims to have pinpointed the genesis of the phrase. In his 2008 biography of Young Ireland firebrand Thomas D'Arcy McGee, David A. Wilson cites an 1848 speech in which McGee complained that the packet ships "have become sailing coffins, and carried [emigrants] to a new world indeed; not to America, but to eternity!" Wilson asserts, without citing any primary-source evidence, that McGee's reference to "sailing coffins" had an instant effect, and "before long the boats that carried famine migrants across the Atlantic became known as 'coffin ships.'"⁴ Such unsubstantiated claims are important, especially when published in otherwise excellent works of scholarship such as Wilson's, because they run the risk of fossilizing historical inaccuracies. When Jason King edited a collection of Famine-era migration narratives in 2019, after all, he confidently cited Wilson's work on McGee when he wrote that the "ramshackle vessels on which [Irish emigrants] crossed the Atlantic [during the summer of 1847] became known as 'sailing coffins' or 'coffin ships.'"⁵ Yet the very popularity of this truism is also its weakness: if so many people were referring to emigrant vessels as "coffin ships" during the Famine, why has no historian produced primary source evidence to prove it?

Or, to pose the question differently, is it possible that our collective understanding of the "coffin ships" (as an artifact of the Great Famine per se) is actually an anachronism? Given the phrase's ubiquity in popular and scholarly discourse, answering that question could make a significant contribution to the literature on cultural memory in Ireland and the Irish diaspora. In the twenty-six years since 1995, which marked the sesquicentennial anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Famine, a wealth of scholarship has investigated that painful moment in modern history. While many scholars have focused on interpreting the actual events of the catastrophe itself (by trying, for example, to accurately estimate excess mortality or assess the government's response), others, as Oona Frawley has written, have recognized that "by addressing ourselves to the Famine, by considering its meaning and its impacts, by looking to its causes and its roots in a variety of spaces, we are considering memory."⁶ Much of the work on "remembering" the Famine has perceived it through the prism of collective trauma, although this approach is not without its critics.⁷ Many of its practitioners would agree, however, with Christopher Morash's description of the Famine as "primarily a retrospective, textual creation. The starvation, the emigration, and the disease epidemics of the late 1840s have become 'the Famine' because it was possible to inscribe those disparate but interrelated events in a relatively cohesive narrative."⁸ For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that "cohesive narrative" was employed for political ends. When scholars have examined the ways in which Famine-era emigrant ships in particular have been memorialized, however, they have tended to focus on either the literary contributions of a small number of authors or the public commemorations of the late twentieth century.⁹ We still know little about the ways in which the specific term "coffin ships" was politicized in the years during and immediately after the Famine.¹⁰

Digitized newspapers allow us...