Grosse Ile, Quebec, July 19th, 1847: The fetid holds are emptied slowly of their human cargoes. The superintendent of the quarantine station is criticised for delaying disembarkation but there are now 2,500 sick on the island. Dr George Douglas and his dwindling staff - four doctors have died of typhus - are overwhelmed by a tidal wave of suffering.
The fever patients endure agonies in the summer heat due to lack of medical attention and care. Father Bernard McGauran, who has led the first group of priests to the island, records seeing "in one day 37 lying on the beach, crawling in the mud and dying like fish out of water". At the same time "we have 32 of these vessels which are like floating hospitals, where death makes frightful inroads, and the sick are crowded in among the more healthy, with the result that all are victims to this terrible illness."
Father Bernard O'Reilly, from Galway, adds: "Vessels come daily crowded with sick and, unless some person through kindness brings us on board, the wretched emigrants are allowed to die in the sight of their clergy, without the supreme consolation of an Irish Catholic, the last rites of his church."
A medical commission notes the traumatisation of the Irish, "common sympathies being apparently annihilated by the mental and bodily depression produced by famine and disease." Dr Douglas says he "never saw people so indifferent to life; they would continue in the same berth with the dead person until the seamen or captain dragged out the corpse with boat hooks". Bishop George Mountain witnesses "scenes of loathsomeness, suffering and horror in the holds".
Ashore, Father Jean Baptiste Antoine Ferland finds men, women and children huddled together in the hospital sheds. Many who entered without any serious illness die of typhus caught from their neighbours.
Another French-Canadian priest, Elzear-Alexandre Taschereau, is filled with courage and consolation by the blessings of the dying.
Stephen de Vere, who is standing by those with whom he crossed the Atlantic, describes the hospital sheds as miserable: "Many poor families prefer to burrow under heaps of stones near the shore, rather than accept the shelter of the infected sheds."
When they reach Quebec, de Vere rents a large house to enable emigrants to recover their strength. His "coffin-ship" report has made a profound impression, being read aloud in the House of Lords, and will lead to reforms.
The Famine refugees are dying at the rate of 40 to 50 a day on Grosse Ile. Six men dig trenches in which the corpses are "stacked like cordwood". As a final indignity in this world, rats leave the ships to devour the bodies which lie in shallow mass graves eerily reminiscent of potato lazy beds.