Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, August 20, 1995                   TAG: 9508180076
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: D1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: COBH, IRELAND                                 LENGTH: Medium

FROM FAMINE TO `COFFIN SHIPS'

An emigrant escaping the famine for North America was crammed with three others into a 6-foot-square berth - ``less room than in a coffin.'' The berths were stacked three high in the holds of sailing ships that took five to seven weeks to cross the Atlantic. Some ships carried 1,200 steerage passengers, who were seldom allowed on deck.

``Stowed away like bales of cotton and packed like slaves in a slave ship,'' wrote the novelist Herman Melville, who was a deckhand on an emigrant ship out of Liverpool in 1849. ``We had not been at sea one week when to hold your head down the hatchway was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool.''

The Irish were ``paying ballast'' on the return voyages of aging vessels that brought over cotton, tobacco, timber and, ironically, American corn to feed the starving.

Paddle-wheel steamers, recently introduced into trans-Atlantic service, made the crossing in two weeks but the fare cost more than twice as much.

``Sailing ships, many lumbering through their last voyages, some especially built to carry slaves, were now paying a final dividend to their masters,'' noted famine historian Robert Scally at New York University.

After the first potato crop failure in the fall of 1845, perilous winter crossings became common. Many coffin ships fulfilled both definitions of their macabre pseudonym:

In April, 1849, the brig Hanna, sailing from Newry to Quebec, hit an iceberg, as did the brig Maria out of Limerick in mid-July. In the same month, the brig Charles was run down by the Cunard steamer Europa with a loss of 134 lives.

The Queen buried 137 of its 427 passengers at sea ``from famine dropsy and fever'' - cholera or typhus. The Larch counted 108 dead in a passenger manifest of 440. The Avon, with 552 aboard, reported 236 dead. The Virginius, carrying 476, had 267 deaths. The Ceylon consigned to the deep 45 percent of its steerage passengers, the Loosthank 33 percent.

The nine ships Lord Henry Palmerston, erstwhile British foreign secretary, chartered to clear 2,000 tenants from his Irish estate arrived in the ice-choked St. Lawrence River with 25 percent of the passengers ``almost in a state of nudity,'' recorded the Quebec health authorities. ``They had pawned bedding and clothing for food; 99 percent became public charges immediately.''

In the early famine years, Canada was the preferred destination because Congress had banned overcrowded ships and some ports, like New York, levied $1 ``head money'' as insurance against becoming ``wards of the state.'' One in every six bound for Canada in the fierce winter of 1847 died of fever or malnutrition.