The term coffin ship is used to refer to the ships that carried Irish immigrants escaping the Great Irish Famine as well as displaced Highlanders due to the Highland Clearances. These ships, crowded and disease ridden, with poor access to food and water, resulted in the deaths of many people as they crossed the Atlantic, and led to the Typhus epidemic of 1847 at quarantine stations in Canada. Owners of coffin ships provided as little food, water, and living space as was legally possible – if they obeyed the law at all.
While coffin ships were the cheapest way to cross the Atlantic, mortality rates of 30% aboard the coffin ships were common. It was said that sharks could be seen following the ships, because so many bodies were thrown overboard.
Read more about Coffin Ship: Legislation, Memorials, In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words coffin and/or ship:
“Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strewn.
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)