Six million Jews went to their deaths during the Second World War. The extermination camps were specially constructed for the purpose, and located a distance from centres of population and away from the movements of the German army lest military personnel would baulk at the mass slaughter of civilians ordered by the Nazi leadership. This we call The Holocaust.
In Ireland, in the mid nineteenth century, we had what is sometimes referred to as the Hidden Holocaust, though it was clear for all the world to see. This was the deaths of the famine years when over a million people died of starvation and many more escaped to Canada and America in what came to be known as ‘coffin ships.’
In 1847 Gerald Keegan and his new bride Aileen travelled on one of these ships, The Naparima, out of Dublin Port en route for Canada. Gerald had studied at Maynooth, but having decided that the priesthood was not for him, he became a hedge-school master. He had seen daily among the children he taught, the effects of famine. Some of his cousins were on board availing of the offer of their landlord to emigrate in exchange for waiver of rent arrears. They were promised ten shillings from the landlord’s agent on landing in Quebec and the allocation from the Canadian government of 100 acres of land.
The Naparima, left the Port of Dublin laden with passengers way beyond capacity, providing extra profit for her owner. Gerald and his bride had a cabin, ‘a cubbyhole on deck,’ that cost him £5, while his cousins were in appallingly overcrowded conditions in steerage. Passengers soon became used to the sound of the sea on the hull, the creaking of the timbers and the wind in the rigging. A day or two out Gerald went below deck to visit his cousins. He was overcome with the stench as starving passengers suffered from seasickness and dysentery, with many of the old and sick unable to leave their berths; a hoard of destitute and diseased humanity, and above all the eerie silence of people dying of hunger.
On the fourth day out a boy of five and a young woman died. Both were dropped overboard at sunset. Every day for the rest of the five-week voyage as fever spread, passengers died. Three, four, five and more a day were dropped into the ocean. The number increased daily and the passengers, preoccupied with their own survival, became immune to the presence of death. The living lay beside the dead, for bodies were removed only night and morning, and in many cases there were two or three corpses in a berth.
Gerald and Aileen did what they could to help other passengers. Gerald appealed to the captain on their behalf, without success.
‘Leave the poop,’ the captain shouted at him, ‘or I’ll pitch you overboard. I’ll have no mutiny on my ship.’
Aileen tended the women and made dresses of sacking for young girls who otherwise couldn’t go on deck to get fresh air.
Despite the stench, the atrocious conditions and death the indomitable human spirit provided some moments of light relief. Three old women sitting near the hatch to the galley smoking their doodeens stole a large pot of freshly made tea. They gave it round to the passengers, filled the pot with water and returned it. Then, casting him in a mock-heroic role, they tormented the Mate, when he tried to find out who had stolen the tea. Finally Mrs Dolan agreed to point out the culprit to him below deck, but the Mate would not follow her for fear of the fever, and stormed off defeated.
Some days later the same Mate ordered a young boy passenger up the foremast to fix tackle. The lad’s mother had died the previous day. After several attempts the boy could not do it. The Mate pulled him down violently by the feet and whipped him mercilessly on the deck with a rope end. Gerald lost his temper. He took him on and beat him to pulp. The Mate did however get his revenge. When the ship arrived at Grosse Isle, Canada’s quarantine island, Gerald, though bound for Quebec, went ashore to help to bury some dead and when he returned to the wharf the ship had sailed and Aileen stood there with their belongings. The Mate had told her that Gerald had left a message for her to land.
One of Gerald’s cousins, a young woman of 17, survived the voyage and found her way to the farm of her uncle in Quebec. He recounts that ‘she had the face of an old woman, for the bones were sticking out of her tight drawn, deadly grey skin and she had black lines above and below her eyes.’ She told how Gerald and Aileen had been left at Grosse Isle. The uncle set out immediately and eventually asked the landlord of a nearby lodging-house how he would get over to the island.
‘Yer jokin you are,’ says he, ‘people lave it, they don’t go to it.’
Gerald finally convinced a boatman to bring him over to the island. Aileen had already died and he found Gerald in one of the bunkhouses on the point of death. He carried him outside to get some air, and just before Gerald died he directed him to a journal he had kept on the voyage. He told his uncle to go back inside and under his bunk he would find a bag.
‘Open the bag.’ Gerald said, ‘and in it you’ll find a little book. It will tell to those now unborn what Irish men and women have suffered in this summer of sorrow,’