BETWEEN 1845 and 1851 Ireland lost, in real terms, two and a half million of its population. First there was the Great Famine, then the great exodus to the New World. In the 1830s an annual average of 5,000 Irish men and women emigrated to the United States and Canada. In the five years 1846-51 one million did so, 651,931 of them to New York, the rest to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans and Canada. There are now 40 million "hyphenated Americans" of the Irish persuasion, the result of a 300 year migration that took seven million souls from these shores. But nothing compares with the great diaspora in the immediate post Famine years - one of the greatest demographic phenomena in all human history.
There have been myriad books about the Famine, but this one is a skilled monograph dealing with an "all Ireland" aspect of those tragic years: the Irish owned ships, the Irish crews who sailed them, the Irish ports they sailed from and the Irish passengers they carried. Although the British are rightly put in the dock for an artificial and avoidable famine which could have been averted - had not London, not for the last time, been in thrall to ideological dogma concerning "the market" - Laxton does not fudge man's inhumanity to man on an intra Irish basis. Captains, mates and crew could be just a callous and brutal to their own countrymen in pursuit of a buck, and the luckless emigrants had little choice but to bow their heads; at sea they were as much in thrall to the whims and dictates of the captain as the lowliest deckhand.
Laxton has researched deeply in libraries and archives in England Ireland and the US to provide a graphic picture of the hazards of the North Atlantic crossing. To face the full fury of one of the most notoriously stormy stretches of ocean in the world - even the QE2 was hove to for 48 hours in 1972 as she was battered by 70 foot waves - pathetically flimsy vessels put to sea to carry their hopeful human cargo to New York; Laxton identifies one, the Hannah, which was only 59 feet long and 19 feet wide but still carried 60 passengers. Just one statistic unearthed by Laxton makes the point with a kind of quiet numerical elegance: there were 2,746 voyages from Ireland to New York in these years, but only 325 of the ships cared to repeat the experience by making more than one voyage.
There is an obvious danger that a book drawn from unpublished shipping record, port entry books, immigration rolls and certificates of registration will turn out duly, but Laxton has adroitly interweaved dozens of "human interest" stories. While not avoiding the narratives of the most famous emigrants in these years (Henry Ford's father, from Cork, and president J.F. Kennedy's great grandfather, from Wexford) he concentrates on lesser known stories: a good example is the Wexford parish priest who led eighteen families across the Atlantic to New Orleans and then up the Mississippi to found the town of Wexford, Iowa.
This is a splendid book, written in a fresh and accessible way, which will grip anyone with the most superficial interest in the Famine years. It is perhaps sad that the persecuted so often become the persecutors, and that by 1863 the Irish in New York (by then a third of the city's population) should have so far forgotten their own sufferings that they instigated race riots rather than serve in the Union armies to help "the niggers". But they were brought up in a moral jungle, where their English "betters" never saw fit to express remorse for the Famine. Mary Robinson, when in London in 1995, was still hoping in vain that after 150 years the British government might make a token statement of regret. "Even now it is not too late to say sorry. That would mean so much." She forgot that the motto of the British elite is and always has been: "Never apologise, never explain."
