Utopia’s Discontents: Émigrés and the Quest for Freedom

Abstract

odization. Most works indicate that the Great Famine stretched from 1845 when the staple potato crop precipitously declined to 1852 when potato crops returned to a stable level based on the reduced level of population in Ireland. McMahon extends this timeframe to 1855 when the number of Irish migrants declined to pre-1845 levels. All told, the Great Famine would kill over one million Irish and cause almost two million to flee the Emerald Isle. The sudden reduction of three million from a total population of approximately eight million within a single decade represents one of the largest population movements in global history. McMahon’s work is told from the perspective of the emigrants themselves using many diaries and personal accounts to balance and personalize the archival sources. McMahon focuses on the 1.5 million approximate emigrants who journeyed to the United States, but he does not forget the roughly 300,000 who traveled to each Canadian or Great Britain destination, nor the 75,000 who made the long journey to Australia. Very few of the emigrants left directly from Irish shores to their destination and the majority crossed the Irish Sea to the great British seaport of Liverpool before departing on the final leg of their journey. Most of the Irish emigrants who decided to remain in Great Britain occurred before 1848 when a head tax was levied on arriving Irish emigrants. From 1848 on, the Irish diaspora away from the English isles began in earnest. McMahon begins by explaining how nearly two million people found the means to leave Ireland during the collapse of the Irish economy. Some emigrants were granted passage money or received paid tickets from the very landlords in whose fields they had previously labored. This was done to reduce the cost of the tax burden incurred by the landlords from the abandoned tenant farms. Most received money from family and friends, either within the British Isles or from abroad, to make the journey. McMahon’s next section, and the heart of the work, is the long ocean voyage these emigrants endured to reach whatever destination to which they were bound. McMahon does this by viewing events through the eyes of the passengers themselves from embarkation to life in steerage on a passage boat, and the inevitable occurrence of death that some emigrants experienced on the voyage. The title Coffin Ship refers to the high death rate on some of the earliest ships used for Irish emigrants. McMahon is quick to argue, however, the term coffin ship had been used for many years prior to the Great Famine and that ship owners were quick to replace the early cramped vessels with ones that afforded better accommodations to compete more effectively for the increased passenger trade the emigrants represented. Throughout his work, McMahon highlights the sense of community in which these emigrants shared. The initial surge of emigrant travel ruptured the existing community of tenant farmers and their neighbors, while a dangerous sea voyage created new opportunities for community building based on shared life experience instead of shared familial ties. Upon arrival at their destination, the newly built community from the voyage was disrupted, but previously separated family members may have re-connected with their relatives who had made an earlier voyage. These communities, McMahon argues, created a larger, global Irish community even as the previous relationships were fractured and re-built over time and distance, based on the shared experience of a terrible economic crisis, a sea voyage fraught with danger, and an arrival on a foreign shore to an uncertain reception. Much has been written about the effect of the Great Famine in Ireland, and more has been written about the life of the Irish emigrants in the locations they ended up in. McMahon’s work fills the important middle step of the Irish emigrant’s voyage to these destinations. While he does not claim they were pleasure voyages, McMahon illustrates that the voyage was not one of constant sickness and death while not shying from the instances where these unfortunate events happened. The core of McMahon’s work is the Irish identity that survived the passage from Ireland to new lands, the communities that were built and fragmented along the way, and how the entire experience created the foundation of the identity and community of the Irish diaspora, wherever they are, that we know so well today.