PART I CALENDAR OF CORK EMIGRANT SHIP SAILINGS 1815-60
from Cork to America on at least twenty occasions between 1828 and 1856, many under the captaincy of Robert Hall, who died of typhus in 1847 at the quarantine station on Partridge Island, after arriving at St John with emigrants from Cork. *Crimean War ended in 1856: The defeat of Russia concluded with the 1856 Treaty of Paris (one of many). Of the 111,000 British military personnel, Army and Navy, one-third were Irish. Of the 21,000 deaths, less than 20% were due to the conflict. Of the 111 Victoria Crosses bestowed for bravery, 32 went to Irishmen. 7,000 Irish died. Trench warfare and the battlefield conditions were notable for lack of sanitation and 80% of the deaths were due to diseases and skin problems including cholera, dysentery, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, erysipelas, cellulitis, abscesses, scurvy and gangrene - many conditions familiar to our 19 th century transatlantic migrants. Florence Nightingale and the Irish Sisters of Mercy both contributed nursing services (Huddie, 2015). Irish military enlistments in a perceived ‘just’ war and the wartime economic boom may well have contributed to a modest decline of emigration from Ireland between 1854 and 1856 .
Fig. 14: Laying the Pacific Railroad. The US experienced an economic downturn in 1857 . Railroad companies were being developed. Loans were being made. The banks were overextended. Businesses were stretched. The New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company went bankrupt in August 1857, triggering the ‘Panic of 1857’, with a decline in the market, loss of jobs and a depression that persisted up to the Civil War (1861-65). Immigration declined, and when the numbers rose again in the mid-1860s, the transatlantic voyage experience was greatly changed. The ships were larger, increasingly steam-powered, faster, less subject to extremes of wind and weather, and better designed for passenger safety and comfort.
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