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Arthur Sullivan, New Ireland, 1882 (1st edition was 1877), chap. XI "Lochabar no more!", p.127
The Irish exodus had one awful concomitant, which, in the Irish memory of that time, fills nearly as large a space as the famine itself. The people, flying from fever-tainted hovel and workhouse, carried the plague with them on board. Each vessel became a floating charnel-house. Day by day the American public was thrilled by the ghastly tale of ships arriving off the harbours reeking with typhus and cholera; the track they had followed across the ocean strewn with the corpses flung overboard on the way. Speaking in the House of Commons on the 11th of February 1848, Mr Labouchere referred to one year's havoc on board the ships sailing to Canada and New Brunswick alone in the following words:-
"Out of 106,000 emigrants who during the last twelve months crossed the Atlantic for Canada and New Brunswick, 6100 perished on the voyage, 4100 on their arrival, 5200 in the hospitals, and 1900 in the towns to which they repairrd. The total mortality was no less than 17 per cent of the total number emigrating to those places; the number of deaths being 17,300."
In all the great ports of America and Canada hugh quarantine hospitals had to be hastily erected. Into these every day newly arriving plague-ships poured what survived of their human freight, for whom room was as rapidly made in those wards by the havoc of death. Whole families disappeared between land and land, as sailors say. Frequently the adults were swept away, the children alone surviving. It was impossible in every case to ascertain the names of the sufferers, and often all clue to identification was lost. The public authorities, or the nobler humane organisations that had established those lazar-houses, found themselves at the close of their labours in charge of hundreds of orphan children, of whom name and parentage alike were now impossible to be traced. About eight years ago I was waited upon in Dublin by one of these waifs, now a man of considerable wealth and honourable position. He had come across the Atlantic in pursuit of a purpose to which he was devoting years of his life -- an endeavour to obtain some clue to his family, who perished in one of the great shore hospitals in 1849. Piously he treasures a few pieces of a red-painted emigrant box, which he believes belonged to his father. Eagerly he travels from place to place in Clare and Kerry and Galway, to see if he may dig from the tomb of that terrible past the secret lost to him, I fear, for ever!
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