The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine by Cian T. McMahon

Reviewed by: The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famineby Cian T. McMahon Anelise Hanson Shrout (bio) Irish famine, Immigration, Irish diaspora The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. By Cian T. McMahon. (New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 315. Cloth, $35.00) The phrase "coffin ship" conjures immigrants who were fleeing starvation, sickness, and abusive landlords. In the popular imagination, these people were packed cheek-by-jowl into the holds of wooden ships that carried them from Ireland to North America and the Antipodes. This idea of the coffin ship was enshrined in (likely fictitious, or at least pastiche) nineteenth-century accounts, such as The Ocean Plague(1848) and The Voyage of the Naparima(published in 1982, ostensibly based on an 1895 diary). It persists today in public memorials, such as John Behan's "Coffin Ship" in County Mayo, which re-imagines a nineteenth-century sailing ship built from skeletons, and Philadelphia's "Irish Memorial," which depicts the harrowing ocean crossing from Irish starvation to American prosperity. Cian T. McMahon centers this icon in his new book, The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine. Many histories of the Irish diaspora explore emigrants' lives on land before departure and after arrival. Others focus on one route or final location, tracing a single thread out from Ireland to a site elsewhere in the world. McMahon offers an alternative to these approaches. Instead of focusing on regional diasporic communities, The Coffin Shipcenters the ship itself, as both a real physical space and as a metaphorical crucible for identity formation. This framework allows McMahon to conceptualize famine migration as a somewhat generalizable process—one that was conditioned by transoceanic structures as well as local conditions in places of departure and arrival. The Coffin Shipalso revises popular historical conceptions of famine migration. Most ships, McMahon argues, were neither places of overwhelming death and suffering nor complete disruptors of Irish identity and community. Exceptionalist narratives often suggest that the post-famine [End Page 162]Irish diaspora was robust despite the trauma of migration. The Coffin Shipargues instead that famine emigrants made community through the emigration experience and that this communal creation helped to "reweave" Irish society around the world after the famine. Each of the five chapters in The Coffin Shiprelates to one stage of emigrants' experiences at sea. The first chapter, "Preparation," investigates the work that people in Ireland had to do to marshal the resources to emigrate. These resources included family savings, remittances from people who had already left Ireland, financial support from landlords, and government colonization schemes intended to send able-bodied workers to Canada or Australia. McMahon demonstrates that prospective emigrants were not without agency. Although some were cleared from landlords' estates, and others were transported as prisoners to Australia, many famine emigrants cannily negotiated the circumstances of their departure. The second chapter, "Embarkation," explores emigrants' experiences securing passage on ships. As they prepared to leave, they drew on informal advice from family and friends as well as the new and growing genre of immigrant advice books. The third and fourth chapters, "Life" and "Death," explore the crossing itself. McMahon argues that the relationships fostered on ships worked against the dislocation, dangers, and uncertainties of life at sea. Shared experiences of awe and boredom alike helped to foster some of these relationships. Efforts to work within, and in some cases resist, shipboard hierarchies helped to foster others. Chapter 4 takes on the historical accuracy of the image of the coffin ship itself. Drawing on mortality data, which he carefully interprets in light of absences and lacunae, McMahon contends that death rates on Irish emigrant ships were roughly equivalent to those of ships that sailed from other places, although some ports of departure and sites of arrival were deadlier than others. Still, by engaging with evidence of emigrants' experiences of and fears about shipboard death, he takes care to show that the fear of death and suffering was very real for emigrants. The final chapter, "Arrival," tracks how emigrants worked collectively to support each other as they transitioned...

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