JUNE 21st, 1847: Most of the Irish disembark at Grosse lle because the fare to Canada is lower than to New York and the regulations governing the transport of passengers are less strict. The Famine devastation now extends to this quarantine station 30 miles downriver from Quebec.
A medical officer observes "a stream of foul air issuing from the hatches as dense and as palpable as seen on a foggy day from a dung heap".
Stephen de Vere notes: "Water covered with beds cooking vessels etc of the dead. Ghastly appearance of boats full of sick going ashore never to return. Several died between ship and shore. Wives separated from husbands, children from parents."
Even though the Catholic archbishop of Quebec has addressed a circular to the Irish bishops, asking them to use every endeavour to prevent. your diocesans emigrating in such numbers to Canada", at least 45,000 more are expected.
Imposing a quarantine for fever is "physically impossible", according to Dr Douglas, the line of ships awaiting inspection being several miles long. There is no room on the small island to make quarantine effective. Therefore passengers are to perform their quarantine on board, after the fever cases have been removed.
But so great is the number of sick that "a fatal delay of several days" occurs before fever cases are taken away; infection envelops the poor emigrants as the healthy and ill, dying and dead, are cooped up together under the Canadian sun. The Agnes, for instance, which arrived with 427 passengers, has only 150 alive after a quarantine of 15 days.
Dr Douglas warns the authorities of Quebec and Montreal that a typhus epidemic is bound to occur. With quarantine regulations abandoned as hopeless, up to 5,000 so-called healthy people have left Grosse Ile; out of these, "2,000 at the least will fall sick somewhere before three weeks are over".
In Quebec, "emaciated objects" are soon crowding the doors of churches, the wharves and the streets, "apparently in the last stages of disease and famine". Fever sheds are put up at St Roch in the face of violent opposition from citizens, who throw down the first buildings erected.
Montreal is the main destination, however. Steamer-loads of emigrants, at the rate of 2,304 in 24 hours, come up from Grosse Ile. They are discharged sick, bewildered and helpless; some lie on the wharves dying; others throng the streets with "troops of children". The Board of Health issues urgent recommendations: "the pestilential odour from the emigrants' clothes alone makes it undesirable" that they should be landed in the centre of the city.
In Montreal, the sick are nursed by the Sisters of Charity. Seventeen "Grey Nuns" and seven priests die ministering to the Irish, who are expiring at the rate of about 30 a day.