Westward Cork Migration by Sail 1815-1860 by John Sutton

PART I CALENDAR OF CORK EMIGRANT SHIP SAILINGS 1815-60

PART l PART I CALENDAR OF CORK EMIGRANT SHIP SAILINGS 1815-60 Introduction Shipping was disorganized at the close of the 1803-15 Napoleonic Wars and the 1812-14 War of 1812, concerning US maritime rights which were violated by Britain. Ticket prices for transatlantic voyaging were prohibitive for a few years. However, the robust timber trade between British North America and Britain and Ireland found vessels with space to fill on the return trips to Quebec or St John with ticket prices in the 2–3 pounds range. On the other hand, comparable tickets to New York went for 5-7 pounds and were too high for many. As the century progressed tickets to the US became more competitive while other factors, such as head taxes to care for indigents and the sick, produced variations in prices, and protests from shipowners. Protestation arose because added costs lowered profits unless passed on to the customer, thereby making those passenger routes less appealing. Poorly delineated dates of departure were another headache for passengers, as ships tried to maximize their cargoes. In earlier years newspapers advertised vessel sailing dates that were often delayed and sometimes cancelled, adding unplanned costs of typical dockside crowded, often unhygienic rooming houses, and increasing potential exposure to diseases. Diseases easily spread in the close, poorly ventilated, foul-smelling, converted holds of leaky, wooden, rat-infested ships. Indeed, sadly for travelers, rats demonstrated an unrelenting ability to stowaway on sailing ships, adding to travel woes. Port cities such as Cork, prior to the motor car and the electric tram, became congested with hundreds of cart and carriage horses, adding a prodigious amount of dung to road refuse, and causing both a monstrous problem for streetcleaners and for street navigation by pedestrians forced to tolerate the filth. Such tolerance and ignorance about communicative diseases may explain Cork’s lax urban sewage management which, challenged by its marshy flood-prone city center, permitted the easy blend of human effluent with the tidal River Lee. Clean drinking water, once nicely facilitated by the Cork Waterworks on the Lee Road, became inadequate in underprivileged sections of town during the population explosion prior to the Famine, leading to recurrent epidemics of water-contamination associated diseases such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid fever (bubonic plague, as distinct from typhus which is spread by lice and fleas). Cork and the London of Dickens in those times shared similar problems, and would experience similar consequences, until Yorkshire’s John Snow, epidemiologist and anesthetist, traced the source of a large cholera epidemic in 1854 to contaminated water at London’s Broad Street Pump. Cholera spread was previously thought to be airborne. The option of sailing on ‘packet ships’ with definitive dates of departure from the 1830s onward would present a great convenience and improved safety for the traveler of means. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and even the seventeenth) ships carrying British mail packets were called packet ships. In 1818 three Quakers in New York, Marshall, Thompson and Wright formed the Black Ball Shipping Line, mainly to transport cotton from New York to Liverpool. The ships were moderately large and carried passengers. They determined to run with definite departure dates and offered spare cargo space to other merchants, and the idea caught on. Out of respect for the timeliness of the British mail packet ships they also called their regularly departing fleet of ships, packet ships. Their success led to enlargement