When describing the suffering of those fleeing the Great Famine, the evocative trope of the ‘coffin ship’ is ubiquitous. Its near omnipresence has in many ways obviated the need for careful exploration. Of course, it is assumed, emigrants weakened by malnourishment in desperate straits would suffer astronomical and disproportionate death rates during the crossing. Obviously, we surmise, those passengers were unmitigated victims of unscrupulous shipping companies, of both landlords and landsharks, of inhumane British governance, of dogmatic laissez-faire political economy, or — at the very least — of nature and providence. Cian T. McMahon convincingly calls into question all of these assumptions and expectations with this well-researched and beautifully-written monograph.
In five well-paced chapters, McMahon follows emigrants through the entire arc of their journey from preparation and embarkation, to the onboard experience itself, and finally to what awaited them upon arrival at their destination. Utilising a diverse collection of sources including journalism, guidebooks, reports, letters, diaries, shipping notices and, most interestingly, notes and marginalia written on prepaid tickets, the reader is taken inside the emigration experience in illuminating ways. By detailing the larger process, McMahon demonstrates the myriad ways in which emigration relied on existing and transnational infrastructure of the modern world: roads, canals, postal services, credit, money and print journalism. Far from being lost or directionless peasants thrust into an unknown world, Irish emigrants drew on both existing relationships, systems of knowledge and skill sets to navigate the momentous journey.
Importantly, McMahon persuasively argues that by focusing on the actual journey itself, we can understand better the manner in which emigration was instrumental in the construction of the global diaspora that has come to define Ireland's place in the post-Famine world. Networks that were developed and exploited to enable emigration became the foundation of larger webs of ethnic solidarity and outsized Irish influence in the world.
One particularly welcome aspect of the book is the choice to extend the scope beyond the traditional chronology, arguing that while the blight may have largely disappeared after the 1851 harvest, emigration did not return to pre-Famine levels until 1855. Likewise, the inclusion of both emigrants and transported convicts to Australasia sheds new light on the relative hardships endured by the Famine Irish emigrating to North America. Stories of intentional law-breaking in order to be transported away from the tragedy of the Famine — and the ironic fact that often these convict ships were safer than commercial ships on the much shorter transatlantic journey due to greater regulation — shed light on the complexity of would-be emigrants’ agency.
While The coffin ship is not a Marxian history, it does repeatedly bring to mind Marx's famous dictum from The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’. A major and compelling theme of McMahon's work is the question of Irish agency despite the most difficult of circumstances. He shows us not one-dimensionally helpless victims, but people making choices, weighing costs and benefits, and assessing risks and rewards. By diving deeply into the process of Famine emigration, the author illuminates the seemingly endless set of decisions — often from a range of bad options — that Irish emigrants had to make: whether to emigrate in the first place, where to go, how to get there, what to bring, whom to trust? In doing so, the amorphous collective of two million Irish who fled Ireland in the decade after 1845 are rendered as fully living, breathing, conscious individuals.
McMahon notes that the term ‘coffin ship’ predated the Famine, but did not come into wide usage until the 1880s when it was adopted as a powerful rhetorical device for Irish nationalists during the Land War and has been used liberally ever since. The lack of a detailed exploration of the growth in popularity of the term in this later period and beyond was the one significant shortcoming in my opinion. An in-depth history of the ‘coffin ship’ narrative would be a welcome addition to already rich literature on memorialization and commemoration, as well as nationalist rhetoric's use of the past for political purposes.
In conclusion, McMahon has given us a colorful and insightful social and cultural history of the emigrant experience that expands our understanding of an iconic image of Irish popular history. Emigration, we are told, was clearly a form of relief during the height of the Famine, but it was simultaneously a tool of recovery, born of a changing world view in which a collective identity increasingly based on collective experience displaced one based on shared kinship.
