The mass immigration of the Irish during the great Famine and the decades that followed was a Diaspora of staggering proportions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, almost every family experienced the heartbreak of losing loved ones forever and often rapidly so via death in transit. But still they set out – three million out of eight – to they knew not what in the Americas, Australia, and the U.K. What drove such numbers on at such peril? What hardships awaited them and how fast did they acclimate? A number of fascinating museums now explore these questions in Ireland and abroad. An unusual one is the Jeannie Johnson, a replica of a tall ship that carried starving Irish across the Atlantic from 1847-1855 and is permanently docked at Dublin’s Custom House Quay. The brig now serves as a Famine museum with wrenching tableau of life in steerage on a “coffin ship.”
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