SNIPPET: Between 1846 and 1851, more than a million Irish, almost all destitute and downtrodden, crossed the Atlantic, and even after the blight lifted, huge numbers kept coming. Most of them weathered the Atlantic crossing in steerage - inferior, often wretched accommodations reserved for the lowest-paying passengers. For $50 dollars, no small sum for an impoverished immigrant, passengers were crammed into a cargo ship with as many as 900 others, allotted only as much space as their bodies took up, their possessions tightly rolled up by their sides. Worse, filth and human excrement was everywhere. And cholera and other fatal illnesses, often brought on board by diseased immigrants, stalked the ship like a stowaway. Stephen de VERE, a wealthy Irishman so curious about steerage conditions that he decided to experience them first-hand, set down his impressions in his "Journal," quoted in Terry COLEMAN's "Going to America." -- "Before the emigrant has been a week at sea he is an altered man. How can it be otherwise? Hundreds of poor people, men, women, and children, of all ages, from the drivelling idiot of ninety to the babe just born , huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart, the fevered patient lying ... in sleeping places so narrow as almost to deny them the power of indulging, by a change of position, the natural restlessness of their diseases; by the agnonized raving disturbing those around, and predisposing them through the effects of the imagination, to imbibe the contagion; living without food or medicine ... dying without the voice of spiritual consolation, and burying in the deep without the rites of the church." Scores of similar accounts survive, each describing a nightmare that lasted from one to three months. Although the American and English governments enacted laws meant to improve conditions, it was difficult to enforce them, and steerage passengers traveled at the mercy of captain, crew, and each other. Forced to share berths, men and women had little or no privacy. The standard meal consisted of rough grain, served as a hardened lump. Crew members cursed passengers and sometimes physically abused them. By the end of one 1853 voyage that began with 200 passengers, between 37 and 41 had died en route. Their corpses were heaved overboard. On the whole, though, immigrants arrived safely; death claimed on the average of about one out of two hundred passengers, decidedly better odds than those posed by the Great Famine. In one respect the burden of traveling steerage was eased: The cost of the voyage was often shouldered by existing communities of Irish North Americans who financed the emigration of relatives through organizations such as Boston's "Pilot" newspaper and New York's Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank. And in 1871 an international postal money-order agreement, signed by the American and British governments, aided the transfer of funds between nations. From 1848 to 1900 Irish North American sent an annual average of $5 million to Ireland, 90 percent of it from the United States. The vast majority of 19th-century Irish Catholic immigrants soon discovered, however, that conditions in America were little better than those they had escaped, particularly in the cities. In contrast with other newcomers - Scandinavians and Germans, for instance - the Irish seldom lit out for the unpopulated frontier. One reason was that the land had been a source of anguish in Ireland, especially after the recent crop failures. In addition, most Irish farmers had experience growing only one crop, potatoes, and were ill-equipped to try their hands at others. Finally, Irish were reluctant to venture into isolated areas barren of churches and other places where they were used to congregating. Huge numbers of Irish immigrants were thus lumped together in industrial and port cities. In the mid-19th century four states - MA, NY, PA, and IL, contained more than half the total Irish American population. Penniless and unskilled, these refugees from a land racked by starvati! on took whatever jobs they could find, for any wage. In the 1830s unskilled laborers received about one dollar per working day. A decade later, even as business boomed, wages dropped to less than 75 cents for a 10 to 12-hour working day. -- Excerpts, "The Peoples of North American: The Irish Americans," Jim F. Watts (USA/1988)