Robert Scally is a professor of history of NY University and director of Ireland House in NYC. He is also author of "The End of Hidden Ireland." Per Mr. Scally, "If there was one experience common to the Irish refugees from the Great Famine, other than hunger, it was the sight of Liverpool. Very few sailed directly from Ireland across the Atlantic - fewer than one in four. The vast majority first sailed east to Liverpool, the greatest seaport of the 19th century - leaving Cork City, Dublin, Wexford, and Belfast behind. For these future Americans, the grimy seaport of Liverpool was the last they would see of Europe. Liverpool was the first gateway to America, directing the flow of hundreds of thousands of Irish to NY, Quebec, New Orleans, Boston, Charleston, Savannah. Its influence extended along the global maritime network of commercial ties and routes that had been in place, and growing, for more than 100 years by the time the migration reached its peak during the "hungry forties." Slavery and cotton were two of the main reasons for Liverpool's maritime dominance - it had cornered the slave trade before its abolition and then became the main receiver in Europe of the cotton from the Old South, the endless flow of 500-pound bales picked and hauled by slaves to the levees of New Orleans and Charleston. Ireland's "Black 1847" witnessed more Irish than ever pouring from the country, most of them refugees fleeing the hunger as best they could but among them, too, many thousands who had saved for and set their minds on emigrating for years. For the destitute, there was often no choice of destination: They had but money enough to be among the half-million who would immigrate only to Britain with perhaps a hope of one day returning. Or they were among those whose immigration to America was "assisted." That is, passage was paid for by their landlords, who, under the Poor Law Extension act, either moved their poor charges off the Crown's soil or paid for the tenant's welfare in Ireland. For those who could muster the fare, the courage, for the long voyage across the Atlantic, the choice was clear - a new life away from the blight, away from the Brits. And that route went through Liverpool. Ironically, it was into Liverpool and its massive warehouses that the cargoes of grain, meat, and dairy goods denied to the starving Irish countryside flowed unceasingly from Irish ports. Now the ships were carrying the supercargo of hungry Irish. In the two decades before the Famine, a rising tide of emigrants passed into Liverpool, reaching nearly 100,000 in some years before 1845. In 1847, at least 320,000 Irish men, women, and children poured from the Irish ferries, many of them unable or unwilling to go any further. It might be said that Liverpool beckoned the torrent of Irish emigrants to its doorstep through its Irish network. There was profit in the emigrants' fare, but thousands of them were also needed in the port itself for hauling cargoes, excavating the roads and railway cuttings, and in extending the great docks. For these tasks they were welcome. But as their numbers grew and their condition worsened, their popular reception became increasingly hostile. In the story of the Famine emigrants, the Liverpool ordeal attracted more attention at the time than London or New York. The scandal of death and suffering on its waterfront was widely reported in the press and reports to Parliament from the municipal health authorities. Contemporary writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Brontes depicted some of the horrors to which the Famine imigres were routinely subjected to as they were disgorged from the Irish ferries. Some were outraged by what they witnessed there. But not all observers of Irish misery on the Liverpool docks were moved by the spectacle of human suffering. Hawthorne, who was the American consul in Liverpool at the time, noted the ragged throngs of Irish huddled around the dock gates, but in him they inspired only disgust: "The people are as numerous as maggots on cheese," he wrote. Almost alone among the witnesses who wrote of Liverpool at that time, the young Herman Melville declared his outrage at the wanton cruelties the newcomers met in the town. In what is by far the most eloquent account of midcentury Liverpool, Melville described in "Redburn," His First Voyage," the "endless vistas of want and woe staggering arm in arm along these miserable streets." The desensitized feeling of humanity apparent in Liverpool may have been more extreme than elsewhere at the time, with its volatile mix of Celts, evangelists, and lawlessness. But it was not the end of the callous faces the Irish immigrants would encounter on their long journey to America."