Category Archives: Canada

by | 24 December 2025 · 3:59 pm

Preparing for VE Day in London

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 169-172:

ON 7 MAY IN LONDON THE BRITISH Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was woken with the news of the surrenders earlier that morning in Reims: Jodl had signed on behalf of the Flensburg government at 2.41 a.m. Delivering the news was Captain Richard Pim, head of the map room. Churchill looked at the document and initialled it. This was the news he had been waiting so long for. He teased Pim that finally he had made up for years of bringing him bad news by delivering the best news of the war. Celebrations, though, would have to wait – a decision was made that 8 May would be ‘Victory in Europe Day’, rather than as the BBC had po-facedly decided ‘Ceasefire Day’. Even with unfinished business in the Far East, this was bigger than any ceasefire; Churchill would have his victory.

The news was impossible to contain – the Ministry of Information told the public at 7.40 p.m. that a formal announcement of the victory would be made the next day by the Prime Minister. That said, the shooting hadn’t yet stopped. The Kriegsmarine took it upon itself to sink two ships off the Firth of Forth, the Norwegian Sneland I and the Canadian Avondale Park. Nine merchant seamen were killed by U-2336, the last maritime deaths in the western theatre, drawing out the pointless killing to the very last.

Nevertheless, a national holiday was declared for 8 May. Knowing that the moment was approaching, the government made sure that the Ministry of Food had sufficient beer for the impending celebrations. Licensing hours were extended – though this conjures up the notion that they could somehow be enforced on such a day. The ministry had prepared for VE Day, instructing shops on how long they should open, reassuring people that milk would be delivered as usual and that bakers should bake enough bread for the following day. Government departments received the code words ‘Mousetrap: noon tomorrow’ to alert them to it being official.

…

Celebrations had begun on the evening of the 7th and went into the early morning of the 8th – at 2 a.m. ships in Southampton Docks sounded air horns and a searchlight flashed V for Victory.

…

The newspapers were also allowed, for the first time since war had been declared, to run a weather forecast. Weather forecasting had been a top-secret enterprise up to this point, something upon which the fate of nations, of invasions, of bombing raids and air defence hung. VE Day lifted such secrecy. The first forecast since September 1939 predicted rain for the afternoon. Fortunately it was wrong and a fine day followed, with sunshine – the ‘King’s weather’.

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by | 24 December 2025 · 3:54 am

Eisenhower’s Command, 7 May 1945

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 145-148:

US ARMY GENERAL DWIGHT D. ‘IKE’ EISENHOWER was where the buck stopped. And it was one hell of a buck. Because the buck stopped with Ike not just for his fellow countrymen, not just for the US Army, but for all of the Allied armies in Europe. He had his masters in Washington – who in the wake of the death of President Roosevelt on 12 April were in some disarray – and in London, but he also had his subordinates, millions of them.

SHAEF HQ itself reflected the size of the task Eisenhower had undertaken, numbering 16,000 personnel, the same kind of strength as an entire division. Aided and abetted by senior officers from the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, Ike was at the centre of the Allied effort. These senior officers helped to carry the load, but it was Ike alone who had the ultimate responsibility.

His armies were as numerous and vast as they were diverse. Under his command were three army groups: US 12th Army Group comprising the First, Third, Ninth and Fifteenth Armies, twelve corps, containing forty-eight divisions, 1.2 million men under General Omar Bradley; US 6th Army Group with the French First Army and US Seventh Army commanded by General Jacob L. Devers, a comparatively small 700,000 men in forty-seven different armoured and infantry divisions; as well as 21st Army Group under Montgomery – the DUKEX contingent of 1,020,581 officers and men at its height – comprising the Canadian First Army and British Second Army, with additional Polish and Czech elements; First Allied Airborne Army with its seven airborne divisions, Special Air Service brigades and troop transport aircraft. He also commanded the RAF Second Tactical Air Force and US Ninth Air Force, and for the run of OVERLORD had had command of strategic air forces too. No soldier had ever commanded armies so numerous, wielded so much power, or been of so much consequence. He had the ultimate power of life and death over his men, though only one, Eddie Slovik, had faced the firing squad for desertion. Armies this large, this complex, competing among themselves for resources, priority, victory, were necessarily engines of friction, and it was Ike’s task to run it all as harmoniously as possible. Eisenhower was the twentieth-century warlord supreme, the reach and scale of his power only to be eclipsed by the imminent arrival of the atomic age.

Eisenhower therefore didn’t just shoulder the burden of his immediate infuriating, frustrating subordinates, the American generals and the British Field Marshal who could, in arguing so passionately when making their cases for how the war should be fought and won, drive him to distraction. By the spring of 1945 he had a million more subordinates. Of course, not all were men at arms; the Allies had a vast logistical network behind them because they were fighting every step as an expeditionary force, but Eisenhower bore the weight of this responsibility. They were all answerable to him; he was answerable to his bosses.

Death was at the core of every decision he made, for his own men, for the enemy and for the civilians in between. Every opportunity taken or ignored centred on death, slaughter, destruction. Every moment that delayed the war, every hesitation offered the prospect of more death. Ike considered Napoleon’s approach to leadership as something to aspire to: ‘The great leader, the genius in leadership, is the man who can do the average thing when everybody else is going crazy.’ Self-control, harnessing his temperament to the task in hand, was Eisenhower’s key to managing himself while he managed everyone else. He felt sure too that whatever pressure he might be under, there was someone worse off: ‘The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.’ Ike shared none of the pressures of the subaltern in the foxhole or slit trench; his were of a different order. They were political rather than military.

If anyone was to take the surrender on the Western Front, it would be Ike. He was the tip of the spear: he symbolized the Allied effort, warts and all. And this was why, once Monty had got von Friedeburg’s signature on the Lüneburg document, he, for all the accusations of ego and glory-hunting he faced, had passed the question of the larger surrender immediately on to his boss. It would have been impossible, and indeed out of character, for him to do otherwise.

And yet when the moment came, when Generaloberst Alfred Jodl signed the ‘Instrument of Military Surrender’ at 2.41 a.m. on 7 May 1945, Ike was absent. Rather than witness the German capitulation, as Monty had done, gleefully briefing reporters and dressing down the Germans sent to parlay with him, Eisenhower had instead decided that he would have nothing to do with the emissaries of the new Führer, that Dönitz’s men were Nazis like Hitler’s, and that was the end of it. Just as he had ignored General Hans-Jürgen von Armin when the Germans capitulated in Tunisia, so he would shun them again. As Ike saw it, this new government in Flensburg was no more legitimate than Hitler’s in Berlin had been, and no more entitled to try to dictate terms in the ruins of Germany than its predecessor.

Rather than treat with the Germans, he would leave it to his staff to handle them, get them to sign, dominate them in person and dictate terms. Ike – the diplomat soldier supreme within the coalition – had no appetite for any diplomacy with the enemy. On arrival at Eisenhower’s HQ, everyone on the Allied side divined that Jodl had been hoping to stall things for at least another twenty-four hours so that he could surrender not to the Soviets but the Allies, and buy more time for German formations to flee west and avoid the Red Army’s righteous fury. Ike’s staff were having none of it; they knew their chief believed in unconditional surrender, and they believed in their chief. If he was going to cold-shoulder the Germans at the moment of their surrender and add to their humiliation, then his staff were going to help him with it.

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by | 18 August 2025 · 12:12 am

Emigrating from Liverpool by Sea

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 229-232:

The modern Catholic cathedral in Liverpool is known irreverently but affectionately as Paddy’s Wigwam, in deference to its shape and to the antecedents of the masses who worship within the diocese today. The six years of the Famine sailings saw a million Irish emigrants arrive in Liverpool’s port. The majority had just completed the short trip across the usually turbulent Irish Sea – the first stage of their journey to America or Canada. Nearly a quarter of them would have nothing more to do with that cruel sea and those inhuman ships. Some travelled to England and Scotland but many an Irishman and his family remained in Liverpool. For some the city symbolised the end of all their travels and a section of the city came to be known as Little Ireland.

For nearly two centuries, from c. 1700–1900, Liverpool’s port enabled Britain to dominate rival maritime nations. Liverpool sent out ships to explore the world but also ships full of human cargo, first slaves, and then emigrants. Known as the slavers’ port in the 18th century, Liverpool rapidly became an emigrants’ port in the 19th century, though Liverpool’s ship owners continued to trade in slaves until slavery was abolished by Britain in 1807. During that final year, 185 ships transported as many as 50,000 slaves. Soon the commercial rule of ‘slaves-out and sugar-back’ gave way to ‘emigrants-out and timber-back’. On ships bound for New York or Boston during the Famine, it cost 6 cs to insure US $4 worth of baggage but only 4 cs to insure your life. But the Irish were only part of the emigration story. During the 19th century, a total of nine million emigrants spilled out of Europe, sailing from Liverpool to America. Liverpool enjoyed unique commercial and geographical assets. Sited strategically close to the Irish Sea, the city lay only 3 miles up the River Mersey. Liverpool was also one of the first posts to forge a rail-link with Hull, 100 miles away. Hull, in turn, enjoyed busy trade with the ports of Hamburg and Bremen, Gothenburg and Danzig, from where a remarkable ethnic mix of people journeyed, sometimes fleeing their homelands for various reasons. The crossing from Europe to Hull over the North Sea, was as short as that over the Irish Sea, and the rail fare was only a few shillings. Of course, at this particular time the mainland Europeans formed only a minor part of the emigrant population in Britain.

It was logical for the Irish to aim for Liverpool as their launching pad into the New World, not merely because it was the nearest port of convenience, but also because it was a familiar site and source of summer work. Thousands of Irish farmhands regularly crossed to Liverpool, seeking work at the back end of summer on England’s farms. Too few opportunities existed at home at harvest time and the wages in England were better. Additionally, many more ships were available in Liverpool, with its big, fast vessels and speedy American packet ships. The fast packets grabbed a good half of the emigrant trade towards the end of the Famine years, averaging 40 days westward and 23 days eastward. Liverpool was also one of the world’s busiest shipping ports, with over 36 miles of quays and a massive ship tonnage registered as three times the overall tonnage owned in America at that period. Into this teeming city sailed the Irish families from their rural communities. Already overawed by the Irish cities of Dublin, Belfast or Cork, the rural emigrants had to survive the streetwise con-men and racketeers of Liverpool, and later of New York or Boston. At various levels the Liverpool fraternity was engaged in the business of exporting people and, as human cargo was regarded as a commodity, every trader sought to extract his ounce of flesh from that commodity. Yet help was at hand, if only the emigrants knew where to look and who to ask. Various publications offered guidance, and government circulars advised on how to find lodgings, how to seek a passage and buy a ticket, where to exchange money, what to avoid at the docks, on the ships and on arrival.

The priority for the emigrant in Liverpool was to obtain a ticket for a ship sailing within a few days. Space on most of the Atlantic ships was often sold in one block by the owners to the passenger brokers and competition was so intense that fares varied from day to day, sometimes changing by the hour. A berth in steerage ranged between £3 10s to £5 (US $17.50 to $25). The port authority licensed 21 brokers who each provided a bond plus two sureties totalling £200 (US $1,000). The brokers paid a small commission to dock-runners for each emigrant delivered to their office. Given half a chance, a runner would lead his unsuspecting victims from the brokers to a lodging house, and then on to a chandler for provisions and suitable clothing, earning further commission, if he could persuade his prey to part with his last few pennies. Before the day of departure, each emigrant had to appear before a medical officer who was paid by the ship owner or charterer £1 (US $5) for every hundred passengers he inspected. After a very rudimentary examination, he would stamp each ticket as proof of inspection. Passengers were entitled to board the ship 24 hours before departure. Once settled, if lucky to have among them a fiddler or a piper and while spirits were high, the passengers might enjoy a song and dance. Once out on the ocean, the sloping decks and strong south-westerly winds would soon restrict their activities. Occasionally, there were scenes at the quayside if passengers arrived late, after the gangway had been raised, the mooring lines cast off and the ship had sailed away. The late arrivals would be rushed to the dock-gate and as their ship passed close by, their luggage and boxes would be flung aboard, followed by the passengers themselves, hopefully landing on the deck. If they or their luggage missed the ship and splashed into the water, there was usually a man in a rowing boat positioned for a rescue, and a reward.

Steam tugs usually towed a sailing ship into position down-river. As tugs were not always available during these early days of steam, outgoing ships were sometimes steered by a practised pilot with a single-sail cutter in attendance. The pilot’s local knowledge of navigational hazards, tides, currents and winds and his regular practice in handling a ship were invaluable. During the short voyage down-river, the ship’s crew searched for stowaways. All legitimate passengers were mustered on deck during the search, while dubious bundles were poked with long, sharp sticks and suspect barrels were turned upside-down. Many a barrel or trunk concealed a body or two. Once discovered, the guilty stowaways were transferred to the tug and returned to shore where they would be tried before a magistrate. A lucky few survived the search and made their appearance two or three days later when the crew would be grateful as the successful stowaways worked their passage by doing the most unpleasant jobs on board.

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Filed under Britain, Canada, economics, Ireland, labor, migration, slavery, travel, U.S.

by | 16 August 2025 · 1:22 am

Packet Ships with Livestock

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 146-147:

The scene aboard the Washington Irving is dramatically brought to life in Some Famous Sailing Ships, written in 1928 by Richard C McKay, grandson of the boat-builder:

One cannot help admiring the daring that impelled Enoch Train to start his celebrated line of sailing packets and to commission Donald McKay to build them expressly for the trans-Atlantic passenger, freight and mail service. He had to contend not only with the keen rivalry of the New York packet lines, but the Lords of the Admiralty (in London) had charge of the Royal mails and sometime previously had contracted for the conveyance of these with Mr Samuel Cunard.

He then brought into existence buildings required to house the live-stock for supplying the cabin table, the most important being the cow house where, after a short run ashore on the marshes at the end of each voyage, a well-seasoned animal of the snug-made Alderney breed, chewed the cud in sweet content.

An animal farm might be a practical option aboard one of Cunard’s early steamships, which could proceed with reasonably level decks, but keeping livestock aboard a sailing ship was a tricky business.
However, as Enoch Train was forced to compete with Cunard’s steamships, live animals were kept aboard his packet ships to supplement supplies. As McKay points out:

Preserved milk was unknown in those times; and the officers of a passenger ship would rather have gone to sea without a doctor, to say nothing of a parson, than without a cow and some nanny-goats. The ship’s cow and her health was always a most important matter and it is related that on one occasion, after a long spell of very bad weather, one of these creatures fell off in her supply of milk and was brought around again by a liberal supply of nourishing stout, wisely prescribed for her by the ship’s doctor.

Pigs always proved a thriving stock on a ship farm. Next to the pig, goats were the most useful stock. These animals soon made themselves at home on shipboard; they had good sea legs and were blessed with an appetite that nothing in the way of tough fibre was too much for, from an armful of shavings to an old newspaper or logbook. It was not, however, always practical to turn in sheep to feed with pigs at sea, for the last-named animals were apt to develop a taste for a good live leg of mutton after a few weeks afloat.

Truly in those days a ship was more like a small bit of the world afloat than it is now. One can imagine the noisy confusion that must have reigned aboard one of these packets on sailing day. Ducks, geese and poultry in general always sympathised with excitement near them while pigs and even sheep, thrown together for the first time, had a noisy way of their own. At intervals, even the old cow bemoaned her lot in life.

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by | 12 August 2025 · 6:07 am

Coffin Ships of 1847

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 41-44:

The potato crop had failed again, so it was not surprising that the direct shipping trade picked up dramatically, and 1847 lives in the memory as the worst year of the Famine, the year of the coffin ships. Thousands of passengers who suffered in these few months were not willing emigrants, they had not voluntarily given up their homes to seek a better life. They were the evicted tenants of wealthy landlords, sent out of Ireland aboard ageing ships on cheaper fares, the victims of landlord clearance.

This was really a phenomenon particular to the Canadian sailings and various estimates of the number of deaths have been voiced over the years. They can only be estimates, as so many died unreported on board ship and by no means all the burials on land could be recorded. In 1847 the emigration to Canada swelled enormously for several reasons. Considerably more than 100,000 set out for the Canadian ports, as compared with 43,000 in 1846, and began arriving as early in the spring as the melting ice would allow. The death toll was similarly out of all proportion: the most conservative estimates show that around 30,000 were struck down with typhus. One third of passengers managed to survive but there were at least 20,000 deaths, over 5,000 at sea, and 8,000 in Quebec and 7,000 in Montreal.

…

Typhus is a fever, one of the most contagious diseases in existence, and the conditions endured in almost every facet of the emigrants’ lives, in the weeks and days leading up to departure, on the ocean, detained on board awaiting inspection and then in the quarantine centres, were ideal for its survival and propagation. Workhouses, lodging houses, ship’s holds without any form of sanitation, hospital wards and tents were perfect, and the typhus spread like wildfire. In 1847 it was called ship fever but before then it was known as hospital fever, gaol fever or camp fever. The microorganism is carried in the faeces of body lice and fleas which dries into a fine dust. The dust can be absorbed through the eyes or by being inhaled, and even people who were fit, healthy and clean, and not living in overcrowded conditions, went down with typhus.

Avoiding typhus was difficult indeed, and some emigrants contracted the disease at home before they travelled. In the first half of the year 300,000 Irish were crammed on to tiny vessels to reach Liverpool, where they slept as many as 20 to a room in boarding houses while awaiting passage, and there is no doubt that the fever started to spread in that environment. Residents of Liverpool suffered too, and in May alone, 1,500 cases were reported; the local landlords were as much to blame as the recently arrived Irish who then had to spend weeks at sea, jammed together in a ship’s hold, on their way to Canada.

The body lice which spread the fever are easily dealt with today by fumigation but the disease was a killer 150 years ago, with the surrounding problems. Doctors, nurses and priests in Canada, working in the quarantine hospitals and immigration sheds, died trying to save the lives of their new patients.

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by | 11 August 2025 · 5:53 am

Irish Famine Destinations

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 30-36:

The Irish arriving on America’s eastern seaboard usually settled in lodgings close to the port, especially in New York where a staggering average of 300 were disembarking daily, every day for six years: on some days more than 1,000 would arrive on a single tide. As we know, this was the favoured destination of the Irish exodus, which immediately raised its status to that of the busiest port in the world. Whether their original intention had been to move on to other cities or out on to the plains and lush farmlands, to head for the frontier or to join the Gold Rush, the majority of the Irish emigrants stayed right there, in New York.

…

The exodus to Canada was different: the vast majority moved on. Though many thousands sailed to the colony known as British North America, their true destination was the United States. Canada was cold, sparsely inhabited, and many of its people spoke only French. Job prospects were poor, and worse still, to remain there meant a continued existence under the hated British flag. Boston had only a tenth of New York’s direct traffic but its Irish population was swollen by the masses coming from Canada.

Many had sworn an oath to settle north of the border, in return for a cheaper Atlantic passage to Halifax or Saint John, and, if they were sailing into Quebec, a free place on a barge to carry them up the St Lawrence River to Montreal. English politicians and civil servants were anxious to populate the country and subsidized fares as low as £2 (US $11), were made available. Many thousands of families were not given a say in the matter. Canada was the destination for destitute tenants on the huge estates in Ireland, cleared by their landlords, who paid the fares and chartered the ships, and the passage to Canada was far more economical than to the United States.

Once they landed, however, a great many emigrants went south. If they had a little money they took the lake steamers, small coasters and schooners, or whatever means of transport was available. If not, they walked across the border. For six months of the year the larger Canadian ports and the St Lawrence seaway were ice-bound and closed but even in the warmer half of the year, the great majority of Ireland’s Famine emigrants an – estimated 200,000 – merely used those ports as staging posts.

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by | 10 August 2025 · 6:13 am

Voyage of the Perseverence, 1846

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 17-18, 34-35:

As Ireland’s capital city, Dublin was by far the biggest and busiest of all the ports around the Irish coast, and the passengers for one of the first voyages of the Famine period, directly to New York, boarded here on St Patrick’s Day in 1846. The sweet smell from the hatches of the Perseverance still hung in the air, for Demerara, the old Dutch colony in the West Indies, was her last port of call and sugar, rum and molasses had recently been unloaded.

…

The abundant Canadian forests had more than enough wood to equip the expanding fleets on either side of the ocean and timber was only a fraction of the price compared with Europe. So Martin and Sons despatched their senior captain, William Scott, to Saint John in New Brunswick, to build, buy and commission new ships to sail under their flag, to be registered in the port of Dublin.

A native of the Shetland Isles in the north of Scotland, Captain William Scott was a veteran of the Atlantic crossing. At around the time when most men would be thinking of retiring, he gave up his desk job and his home in Saint John and returned to his adopted city. When he took the Perseverance out of Dublin that day, he was an astonishing 74 years old.

For the first time Captain Scott’s barque of 597 tons was carrying passengers, the vanguard of a million Famine emigrants. He would cut short the farewells, scorning the quayside tears, anxious to get this strange cargo down below while he prepared his ship to catch the late afternoon tide the following day, on Wednesday, March 18th. The crew had cleared the holds, and ship’s carpenter James Gray had fitted out bunks four tiers high and 6 feet square. The fare in steerage was £3 (around US $15). In the cramped conditions for 210 passengers, pots and pans to cook their meagre rations were a priority, as were a tradesman’s tools to earn a living in America. The mate Shadrack Stone checked the passengers and their belongings as they stepped on board. Perhaps there was also room for a couple of fiddles, maybe a squeezebox or a set of Irish pipes.

…

In reasonable weather groups of 20 or 30 passengers at a time would be allowed on deck to breathe fresh air for a change, wash their clothing and clean themselves, and to cook whatever rations were still intact and fit to eat. In bad weather they would be forced to remain below, in complete darkness if the seas were really rough, the heaving waves bringing all kinds of discomfort as well as the inevitable seasickness for poor travellers. Most of the time they stayed on their bunks: despite the lack of space, it was usually more comfortable there than on deck.

…

The hearths were nothing more than rudimentary boxes lined with bricks, a crude form of barbecue. When the weather was rough, no fires would be allowed, but there would often be a period of calm at the end of the day, as dusk was settling on the ocean, when a few passengers would be allowed on deck to cook for their families and friends below. Then it would be the turn of the youngest apprentice seaman on board, Jack in the Shrouds as he was known, to clamber up the rigging carrying a jug of water to douse the flames. Many a protest was raised, but no argument was heeded.

The water ration was supposed to be 6 pints per person per day, to drink, wash and cook. If the journey lasted beyond the estimated period, passengers and crew alike went thirsty and dirty, and those on board could soon gauge if they were going to be on the sea for longer than expected when the daily water allocation was reduced. Head money covered the dues which might be payable by the captain at the port before any passengers were allowed to disembark.

During the six years of the Famine Emigration the Passengers’ Acts, which covered the provision of food, were changed, and different versions of these Acts were imposed by American and British governments. A glaring example of the contrast between the legislation of the two countries was in the number of passengers allowed on board. America decreed only two people be allowed for every 5 tons of the vessel’s registered tonnage, while in Britain, the allowance was three for every 5 tons. Thus, British ships could carry half as many passengers, again 300 instead of 200, as American ships of similar size. Not surprisingly, American ships were considered to be faster, safer, more comfortable, more modern, and sailed by more competent crews.

Rigid enforcement of the Acts was impossible. There were regularly too many passengers aboard too many ships and too few Customs and Immigration officers. These were hard times, desperate times: with so many ships carrying emigrants for only one voyage, the politicians in Washington and London could easily be ignored, and many a captain was guilty of failing to care properly for the people in his ship. Changes in the Passengers’ Acts were aimed at making ocean travel safer, for the protection of the passengers, but their effect was to drive up the fares, bringing despair to the impoverished people in Ireland.

In the first year of the Famine sailings the ships were supposed to provide each passenger, each week, with a total of 7lbs of bread, biscuit, flour, rice, oatmeal or potatoes. One pound of food a day was nothing more than an insurance against starvation: the passengers themselves were supposed to be responsible for anything else they required. Three years later, in 1849, the Acts were amended, decreeing that twice a week tea, sugar and molasses were to be given out. Ship owners were also directed to provide more space on board for each passenger. The new Act laid down a minimum of 12 square feet, so now the bunks were 6 feet long and 2 feet wide where previously they had been only 20 inches wide.

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by | 9 August 2025 · 1:56 pm

Irish Famine Ships Introduction

From The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America, by Edward Laxton (St. Martins, 2024), Kindle pp. 13-14:

Five thousand ships sailed across the Atlantic with Irish emigrants in the six years of the Famine Emigration. They were diverse in size, safety and comfort, or the lack of it, and they varied in many other respects – in age and in the experience and quality of their crews, their speed on the voyage, provisions on board, and the fares they charged.

American packet ships of more than 1,000 tons, with triple-decks were built in the late 1840s specifically for the emigrant trade. They would carry more than 400 passengers, some in private cabins. But by no means all the ships were custom-built. When the British Queen first put to sea in 1785 she needed several major repairs before she could carry passengers on regular voyages from Liverpool to New York. And when the Elizabeth and Sarah achieved infamy in the fever year of 1847, she had been at sea for 83 years.

Undoubtedly, many of the Famine ships would have carried African slaves in the early years of the 19th century. The European slave traders finally ended their activities barely a dozen years before the onset of the Famine and the Arab slavers continued to ply well into the 1860s.

There were tiny vessels like The Hannah with a crew of six and measuring only 59 feet – about the same length as four family cars parked bumper-to-bumper. She was converted from a coaster by the addition of a third mast to enable her to go into deeper waters, and sailed to New York five times, from Dublin, Cork and Limerick, with a complement of only 50 or 60 passengers crammed below in a single hold.

These Irish men and women were not always welcome on arrival in their new homeland, for this desperate migration represented cheap labour, a threat to the established American workforce. But they dug canals, built roads and laid railways, they became seamstresses and servants.

The alternative was to stay at home and starve. A meal, a job, a place to rest, a chance to survive was all the Famine emigrants asked. They left Ireland by sailing ship every day, summer and winter, for six years while the Famine lasted, to make the 3,000 mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean. This is their story.

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by | 17 April 2025 · 1:33 am

Labour, Het Volk, and Asiatic Exclusion

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 247-249, 253:

In 1906 and 1907 the Chinese Question on the Rand emerged as a key issue in two major political elections: the general election in Britain and the election for responsible government, or home rule, in the Transvaal. Both elections brought new parties into power that spelled the speedy demise of the Chinese labor program and, moreover, influenced broader political trajectories. In Britain, the Chinese Question helped the Liberal Party overturn more than twenty years of nearly unbroken Conservative rule and galvanized the trade unions to form the Labour Party, which would by the time of the Great War eclipse its Liberal ally as the main opposition to the Tories. The emergence of Labour as an independent political force was inextricably linked to a self-conscious identity that placed it at the center of an imperial white working class. Labour not only acted in solidarity with British workers in the settler colonies, it also expressed a self-interested vision of the colonies as destinations for working-class emigration as a hedge against domestic economic uncertainty. The trade union movement put its own stamp on social imperialism, claiming it from Milner and Chamberlain in a more class-based, yet eminently racialized, politics.

In the Transvaal, the Chinese Question emerged as a common complaint among diverse interests, which hurt the political fortunes of the establishment Progressive Party, dominated by the mining interest. It proved a sensational issue that helped stir Afrikaans-speaking voters to the new Het Volk party organized by the former Boer commandos Jan Smuts and Louis Botha. Het Volk won the election; a few years later, in 1910, Botha would be premier of the newly federated Union of South Africa, with Smuts in his cabinet. Their ascent signaled the electoral strength of Afrikaners in South Africa, even as Afrikaner politics would remain diverse across the subcontinent, from racial hard-liners in the Orange River Colony to moderates in the Cape Colony. Notably, Botha, and especially Smuts, while advocating for white supremacy and racial segregation, committed themselves to the mining interest and more broadly to British imperialism.

South Africa was the most bluntly racist of the British settler colonies. But it was of a piece with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all established as dominions of the British Empire, the concept of “dominion” signaling not a colony but a polity akin to a country, and one that indeed signaled its own dominion over native peoples. Dominions possessed maximum autonomy within the British Empire, which protected the rule of local white settlers while conveniently distancing the metropole from the openly racist modus operandi of native removal, racial segregation, and Asiatic exclusion—tenets of white settlerism that had, in fact, been forged in the United States.

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THE ARGUMENT AGAINST Chinese labor was not just that it cost whites jobs. Critics believed that an additional, if not greater, danger lay in the prospect that indentured Asian labor would lead to a settled Asian population of merchants and traders. The use of indentured Indians on the Natal sugar plantations was an object lesson in the consequences of importing indentured colored labor. Indian indenture had led inexorably to a free, settled population, including merchants and traders who undersold white businesses. By 1905 there were more Indians than whites in Natal, and they were migrating to the Transvaal. Whites worried that the small population of Chinese merchants in Johannesburg would likewise grow, especially with an indentured labor force potentially offering an ethnic market. They warned that the “imported Asiatic gains a grip on a country with wonderful rapidity.” Although Natal passed laws to restrict immigration of Asiatics, the colony was “a back door wide open” because indentured Indian laborers were not required to repatriate at term: “the indentured coolie of to-day is the free man of tomorrow, and the free man becomes the trader.”

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by | 3 April 2025 · 8:23 pm

Effects of Witwatersrand Gold

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 193-195:

THE MINING OF Witwatersrand gold had both global and regional effects. At the level of world trade and finance, the economic historian Jean-Jacques Van Helten argues that expansion of international trade in the 1880s and ’90s required an enlargement of the overall money stock and hence the world supply of gold. The gold standard was not yet universal, but since the 1870s it had become the basis of international payments among the leading industrial countries. Witwatersrand gold, along with gold discoveries in the 1890s in Western Australia and Canada, increased the global supply of gold and strengthened the position of Britain, which was already the center of the international financial market.

Van Helten presents the late-century gold discoveries as a fortuitous meeting of a demand, but it also might be considered a stimulus, a new phase of capital accumulation, that powered the expansion of trade and foreign investment. Although this accumulation built on previous decades of gold discoveries in North America and Australasia, South African gold helped inaugurate a new period of capitalist development, the so-called New Imperialism, in which monopoly and finance capital came to the fore; when the great powers scrambled to carve up Africa, the last continent to fall to European colonialism; and Germany and the United States nipped at Britain’s heels for position at the top of the world economic order.

The supremacy of the pound sterling (i.e., gold) in international finance and trade lay at the heart of Great Britain’s strategy to maintain global dominance. The City of London reaped handsome profits from international investment and trade, both within the empire and without: the British compensated for desultory investment in domestic industries by exporting “old” English manufactures to sheltered markets within the empire. The colonies were induced to buy these products (often at artificially high prices) while they in turn sold primary products to the rest of the world (wool from Australia, cotton from India). These enabled Great Britain, in turn, to offset its trade deficits from importing wheat from the United States and Argentina for domestic consumption.

In southern Africa, labor patterns that had been established on the diamond fields carried over to the Rand. The rapid capitalization of diamond mining had reduced independent diggers to wage workers while the industry relied increasingly on African migrant laborers contracted on meager wages and confined to compounds. White miners adopted an aggressive racism to police the color line in order to protect their superior position and wages.

The mining of gold also shifted the center of economic power from the Cape Colony to the heretofore isolated and undeveloped Transvaal. Lord Selborne, who served as undersecretary to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, considered the Transvaal “the richest spot on earth,” the key to South Africa’s future. “It is going to be the natural capital state and centre of South African commercial, social and political life,” he wrote in 1896.

By then, Johannesburg had grown to a cosmopolitan city of 100,000, with a large population of uitlanders (foreigners), British and other Europeans, who were aggrieved over political exclusions (fourteen years residency for naturalization and the franchise) and high taxes. Mine owners agitated against high railway tariffs and inflated prices set by state monopolies over essential resources (especially dynamite). More broadly for the British Empire, political instability in the Transvaal threatened to unravel the assumptions of its superior position in southern Africa based on commercial and financial domination, British immigration, and geopolitical power. After the failed Jameson raid of 1895 (a botched coup d’état backed by Cecil Rhodes and other leading mine magnates), ZAR president Paul Kruger stiffened his resolve. The British did not want the vote, he said. They wanted his state.

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