EMIGRANT LETTER: One of the most graphic accounts of life on board an emigrant ship is contained in a letter by Henry JOHNSON, dated 18 Sept 1848. After an eight-week voyage aboard an unnamed ship, he arrived in NY, but unable to find a job, he moved on to Hamilton, Canada, from where he wrote to his wife Jane at home in Dungonnell, Co. Antrim -- "I have had rather a rough time of it. I was a week in Liverpool before the ship sailed on July 7th. We started with a fine, fair breeze and got along well until the third day when it came on to blow very hard. I was lying in my berth sleeping when I was wakened with a cry, "ship's lost, the ship's sinking." I started up, and such a sight. Men, women and children rushing to the upper deck some praying and crossing themselves, others with faces as white as a corpse. On deck they were gathered like sheep in a pen, crying on the captain to save them. I seen sailors rushing down to the lower deck and I followed, determined to know for my self, and there sure enough the water was coming in through one of the portholes at the bow as thick as a large barrel. For a long time all the efforts of the sailors and two mates were unavailing to stop it and they gave it up in despair and came and told the captain to lower the boats. He cursed them and told them to try it again but the first mate refused and told him to go himself which he did telling the man at the helm at the same time, to put the ship before the wind, a very dangerous experiment at the time as we were near some rocks on the Irish Coast. However, he went down and got it partially stopped which partly quieted the fears of the passengers although some of them didn't get oer it until the end of the voyage. I took the matter cooly enough. I knew if we were to go down I might as well take it kindly as not, as crying wouldn't help me. We got all right again and went on our right course. Up to this time I had not opened my provision box as it was lowered into the hold but when I did get at it I found the ham alive with maggots and was obliged to throw it overboard. The remainder of the stuff I eat as sparingly of as possible but could not spin them out longer than four weeks at the end of which time I was obliged to subsist on the ship's allowance which was 2 lbs of meal or flour and 5 lbs of biscuit in the week. The pigs wouldn't eat the biscuit so that for the remainder of the passage I got a right good starving. There was not a soul on board I knew of I might have got a little assistance but it was every man for himself. Altogether it was nearly eight weeks from the time when we started from Liverpool until we got to New York, the longest passage the captain said ever he had. Six days before we got in, a regular storm came on with the wind in our favour and anything I had read or imagined of a storm at sea was nothing to this. We had some very hard gales before but this surpassed anything I ever thought of. although there was some danger yet the wind being with us and going at the rate of 13 miles an hour through mountains of sea, I enjoyed it well. In the six days the storm lasted we made more than we had done for six weeks before. This was the pleasantest time I had though not for some others. One poor family in the next berth to me whose father had been ill all the time of a bowel complaint I thought great pity of, he died the first night of the storm and was laid outside of his berth. The ship began to roll and pitch dreadfully. After a while the boxes, barrel etc. began to roll from one side to the other, the men at the helm were thrown from the wheel and the ship became almost unmanageable. At this time I was pitched right into the corpse, and there, corpse, boxes, barrel, women and children, all in one mess, were knocked from side to side for about 15 minutes. Pleasant that, wasn't it Jane dear? Shortly after the ship got righted and the captain came down, we sewed the body up, took it on deck, and amid the raging of the storm he read the funeral service for the dead and pitched him overboard." Though Johnson intended his wife and children, Mary and Alexander, to join him in America, sadly, they never saw each other again. Mrs. Johnson and the children sailed for Quebec on the "Riverdale." Johnson died in NY of cholera. -- Excerpt, "The Famine Ships," E. Laxton (1996) > >