‘Migrant ship’ in distress off Corfu.’BBC News
A cargo ship believed to be carrying hundreds of migrants has sent out a distress signal near the Greek island of Corfu, reports say.
Now end of the world seems to have come for African states and for Syria. More than 150 years ago,it was the turn of Ireland. The Great Famine wasn’t just another chapter in the history of the Emerald Isle — it threatened the nation’s survival before it even became a nation.
One million died. Two million fled. Today, the population of Ireland and Northern Ireland combined is still lower than it was before Abraham Lincoln became president.
Now, the remains of some of those who tried to flee this cataclysm have been identified — on a beach in Canada.
The bones — vertebrae, pieces of a jawbone — washed up in 2011 on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, about 500 miles from Montreal. After three years of research, Parks Canada says that they likely belonged to Irish children fleeing the Great Famine who died in a shipwreck.
“They are witnesses to a tragic event,” said Pierre Cloutier, an archeologist at Parks Canada, “You can’t have a more tangible witness to tragedy than human remains.”
When famine descended on Ireland in the 1840s, North America beckoned. Another continent — one not gripped by a potato blight — was just a shallow ocean away.
But Irish without means who wanted to fill their bellies in the New World faced one major problem: The only way to get there were “coffin ships.” were themselves deadly, claiming the lives of up to 100,000 would-be migrants.
“These ships were packed with people,” Kathryn Miles, author of “All Standing: The Remarkable Story of the Jeanie Johnston, the Legendary Irish Famine Ship,” . “Most families of four would be given a platform that was about 6 feet square. So they were sleeping head-to-toe and there was no sense of quarantine or hygiene.”
One coffin ship, the Carricks, set sail from Ireland to Quebec City in 1847. But there would be no salvation for many aboard: The ship went down in a storm off of the peninsula. Survivors — 100 of them, by some accounts — washed up onshore and were taken in, while 87 people perished. In 1900, a monument was erected to memorialize the disaster.
But more than a century after the memorial went up, skeletal remains of some what Parks Canada said were victims of the Carricks were found 40 yards away from the memorial. Without DNA testing and carbon dating, the agency can’t be sure the victims were aboard the doomed coffin ship.
But there is quite a bit they do know. The bones belonged to children — two between 7 and 9, and another as old as 12. They showed evidence of rickets, a vitamin-D deficiency found among the malnourished. Analysis of a tooth showed its former owner ate a plant-based diet. And a button found near the site was linked to a Europe that had not yet endured the Great War.
(Justin Moyer/The Washington Post/12/31/14)
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