September 13th, 1847: The passage through Liverpool is the most common experience of Famine emigrants. Dr George Douglas, the medical superintendent at Grosse Ile, Quebec, insists the filthy slums in which poor emigrants lodged before they embarked were one of the main causes of the ship fever disaster.
The spectacle of the exodus is concentrated in the few square miles of the waterfront where, in a sense, all Irish townlands meet for the first time and witness their common fate.
In Liverpool, the poverty of the emigrants is visible in their malnourished bodies and rags. But their demeanour also distinguishes them from other paupers. The Famine refugees are "passive", "stunned" and "mute".
The authorities, especially the unenviable health and parish relieving officers, are frustrated by the tendency of the sick or starving peasants to hide themselves in cellars and tenements. Up to 27,000 Irish have crept into Liverpool's notorious cellars, in which as many as 40 people can be found in dens of 12 by 15 feet.
The secrecy is due partly to a fear of being sent back; some 15,000 have been returned to Ireland under the Poor Law Removal Act. Speaking Gaelic above a whisper outside the Irish wards also brands the emigrant for both the authorities and the swarms of predators. Ultimately, according to a missionary who has died since of typhus, the fever-stricken seem "resigned beyond natural resignation".
Crowds of paupers lining the waterfront are among the first of their countrymen the newcomers see on landing. Begging has become a scourge of the town and, although practised by many others, is associated particularly with the Irish.
The bedraggled hordes fleeing from Ireland provide an irresistible scapegoat for public fears and official impotence, while their brutalised condition confirms sectarian hatreds. The Liverpool Herald, a leading Orange newspaper, comments: "It is remarkable that the lower order of Irish papists are the filthiest beings in the habitable globe, they abound in dirt and vermin and have no care for anything but self-gratification that would degrade the brute creation."
They are associated with typhus by reason of their rags and otherness, rather than the deadly lice. Ignorant of the nature of the disease, many take the symptoms of deprivation and exposure, the consumption, ophthalmia and diarrhoea which beset the emigrants, as signs of infection and shun contact with the suffering people.
Anticipating the odour of racial prejudice awaiting them in the US, the American consul, Nathaniel Hawthorne, notes of the dock scene: "The people are as numerous as maggots in cheese; you behold them, disgusting and all moving about, as when you raise a plank or log that has long lain on the ground, and find vivacious bugs and insects beneath it."