The town's population swelled as people abandoned the barren countryside, hoping to find work or food. In September 1845, The Cork Examiner rang the initial alarm. "We are assured by a gentleman of vast experience that the injury sustained by potatoes from blight on his domain is very serious – that they are entirely unfit for use, and he suggests that the potatoes so injured should be immediately dug out for use of pigs as if they are allowed to remain in the ground they will become for the increase of blight not even suitable as food for swine." Shortly after, Doctor Dan Donovan reported from Skibbereen that "one-third of the entire crop was lost" by October 28, 1845. By 1846, over 90% of the crop had failed, and the situation grew dire.

 

The Duke of Cambridge confidently waved off any notion of alarm in January of 1846, declaring, "Rotten potatoes and seaweed, or even grass, properly mixed, afforded a very wholesome and nutritious food. All knew that Irishmen could live upon anything, and there was plenty grass in the field though the potato crop should fail." The people of County Cork heeded the duke's suggestions. In the Schools Folklore Collection in 1937, Mr. M. O Neill of Cork recalls, "People were so hungry that they used to eat horses, rats, and rotten turnips." According to fellow Cork man Mícheál Ó Séaghdha, "When the potatoes were too long in the ground, they were bad, and so they killed many people. The people who had a garden had to watch all night to keep others from stealing the potatoes. Others used to go to the seashore and eat the seagrass, and that killed many of them."

 

A year after the Duke of Cambridge's advice, humanitarian Elihu Burritt arrived from Connecticut to Skibbereen, which he called a “Potter's Field of destitution and death,” in February 1847. Burritt and Mahony witnessed a very different Cork than the "romantic scenes" of Coyne and Sterling's travelogues that winter. Appalled at the conditions in Skibbereen, Burritt stated, "I can find no language nor illustration sufficiently impressive to portray the Famine to an American reader," and wrote a pamphlet, Three Days in Skibbereen, making Americans aware of the Famine in Ireland. In winter 1847, the streets were overcrowded with beggars, bodies lay outside churches, death carts, famine pits were filling up, and people were eating anything they could find to stay alive until that, too, was gone.

 

Justice of the Peace Nicholas Cummins visited the town just 12 weeks earlier. "I entered some of the hovels…and the scenes that presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horse-cloth and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees," Cummins stated in December 1846. "I approached in horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive – they were in fever, four children, a woman, and what once had been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe. By far the greater number were delirious either from Famine or from fever. Their demonic yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed on my brain."

 

On January 13, 1847, Dr. Donovan reported a significant amount of disease in the workhouse and anticipated that it would continue, necessitating additional medical assistance. It was the same story in Cork, says author Cormac Ó Gráda, who states that in March 1847, the workhouse was overcrowded and that it was so diseased and starving it had to be "fumigated twice a day with chloride of lime." A report from the Cork Union dated January 18, 1847, highlights four main issues in that workhouse, reflecting Skibbereen Union's similar troubles: The workhouse had 5310 inmates, 868 were admitted in just two weeks, and overcrowding was an issue. Medical officers were overwhelmed, and limiting further admissions was discussed. Construction of temporary wooden sheds was suggested to accommodate the overflow of inmates. The board of guardians recommended an expenditure statement for approval due to the prevailing distress.

 

There was a significant increase in crimes, with many perpetrators preferring jail or transportation to penal colonies in Australia over workhouses. Jail sentences were delivered for offenses such as "stealing a basket of turf, stealing a hen, and stealing turnips," says Ó Gráda. Soup kitchens, too, were under pressure. The Skibbereen soup kitchen fed hundreds per day, many coming to it on their hands and knees, unable to walk with weakness from hunger. Burritt, too, witnessed the severity of hunger in soup kitchens. “The soup-house was surrounded by a cloud of these famine specters,” Burritt says, “half-naked and standing or sitting in the mud, beneath a cold, drizzling rain.”

 

Had our wanderlust romantics, Coyne and Bartlett, taken the Millstreet road mentioned earlier, it would have led them near Bowen's Court, home of an Anglo-Irish family near Kildorrey in North Cork. Placed between three towns, Fermoy, Mitchelstown, and Mallow, the house claims an oppressive description of a working Famine soup kitchen. In Bowen’s Court, published in 1942, author Elizabeth Bowen delivers a chilling account of her ancestor, forty-year-old Eliza Wade's efforts to alleviate the suffering of others in 1849. "At Bowen’s Court, the desperate pressure of people against Eliza Wade's door at the end of the kitchen passage made it necessary that the door should be barred: through a trap, she gave out what soup there was, then she had to shut the trap and hear groaning movement continuing hopelessly outside."

 

During the Famine, the therapeutic tradition of the Irish wake and a coffin for the deceased was abandoned. Ó Gráda states, "The cathartic sociability of the Irish wake gave way to hurried and sometimes furtive burials." The death cart delivered bodies to the three main burial grounds in Skibbereen, Chapel Lane, the workhouse, and Abbeystrowry Famine Pits, where 8,000-10,000 famine victims are buried. Fear of revealing that fever was in the house also led to clandestine burials, so "burials were carried out in secret, in the dead of night, at a mass grave," according to Terri Kearney and Philip O'Regan. Many people were almost buried alive. Kearney and O'Regan document three such incidents; Tom Guerin was "the boy who came back from the grave." Just three years old in 1848, he was presumed dead and placed with the other bodies in the Famine Pits at Abbeystrowry. He groaned when the gravediggers struck him with a shovel. Tom Guerin died in 1910 but remained disabled for all of his life. Dr. Donovan, too, rescued a girl still alive on a death cart in Skibbereen town square. She died a week later. He'd warned the Dublin Medical Press that due to "the influence of the cold on those suffering from starvation, many may be buried alive whilst in a state of asphyxia." Johnny Collins also survived being buried alive. How many were not so lucky as these three, we will never know. Elizabeth Bowen also mentions hasty and covert burials in North Cork. "Up in the corner of Farahy churchyard, the Famine pit was dug and not slowly filled. The bodies had to be tipped in coffinless, earth shoveled loosely over them, to be disturbed again. The names of many dead were not known; they were mountainy people drawn down to Farahy by hopes of reaching the Bowen's Court soup kitchen."

 

However, not all famine deaths were dealt with hastily. "In north Cork in April 1849," Cormac Ó Gráda states, "bodies were carefully concealed for a space of 13 or 14 days for the sake of an entitlement to half a stone of Indian meal." One of James Mahony's illustrations for the ILN is of Harrington's Hut near Ballydehob. Mahony describes the scene where "four people had lain dead for six days, and a fifth was passing." This is the hut of Tim Harrington, whom the Cork Examiner informs us that one coffin was reused twice, first for Mary Harrington and then for Tim's son John, who had been temporarily buried in the family's cabbage garden for eight days until the family could secure a coffin for him. Tim Harrington died "of hunger and malignant fever," as per the Cork Examiner, on January 22, 1847. Less than three months later, relief arrived from Boston.

 

On April 12, 1847, fifteen days after departing Boston, Captain Benjamin Fobes delivered Famine aid on board his ship, the Jamestown, to Cobh. He was greeted with a banquet of American mutton, turtle soup, and iced champagne, all from his ship the Jamestown—the irony of a feast amid Famine does not seem to register with Captain Forbes. Neither does it seem odd that food that could feed the hungry is fed to the elites. Also known as Black Ben, Forbes was an Opium dealer whose ship was designed to speed up ice delivery. He may not have believed initially that the suffering of the Irish was genuine, hence his ignorance and consumption of the food. However, faces in the crowd in Cork later seem to hit a nerve. Father Theobald Mathew was his host for the nine days in Ireland. As Fr. Mathew led Forbes through the streets towards the Ursuline Convent in Cork, Forbes realizes, "the hollow eyes, and the sunken cheeks, the old bagging wrappers for dresses and the appeals for food, spoke too plainly of real want for me to doubt its existence." Famine victims surrounded him.

 

Two years after Forbes sailed into Cobh, another newsworthy event occurred. Queen Victora visited Cobh on August 2, 1849. "We drove through the principal streets; twice through some of them; that they were densely crowded, decorated… with flowers and triumphal arches…. that our reception was most enthusiastic and that everything went off to perfection, and was very well arranged," Victoria wrote in her diary. The contrast to what was happening was night and day. What Victoria sees from her royal carriage resembles what Coyne and Bartlett described in 1842 —a highly romanticized version of Ireland.

 

Why would the starving Irish of Cork cheer for Queen Victoria, the Famine Queen? According to author Paul Lynch, playing along might have yielded some benefits. "The truth is that to survive an event of this magnitude, you might have had to connive, to lie, and to steal. You might have had to turn a blind eye to your neighbour. You might have taken food from your children. You might have had to kill. Cannibalism – documented in every Famine on human record – is something the Irish still do not want to address." This is not a pretty picture, but no honest illustration of the Famine is. It is a stark reality like Mahony's black-and-white sketches of Skibbereen in the winter of 1847.

 

We return to 87-year-old Ellen McCarthy, born in 1851, who recounted to her nephew, Michael Daly, in 1838 what she heard as a child in Skibbereen from those who survived the Famine.  "The corpses in the Skibbereen district were all buried in one large plot in the Abbey graveyard. When Queen Victoria paid a visit to Cobh on stepping ashore, a large inscription met her gaze- "Arise Ye Dead from Skibbereen, And Come to Cork to welcome your Queen." Turning on her heel, she boarded the vessel and never fulfilled her engagements in Cork City."

 

Sources:

1. The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland words by Joseph Sterling Coyne and illustrations by William Henry Bartlett

2. The Irish Times: An unvarnished portrayal of the Irish Famine by Jerry Mulvihill March 19, 2021

3. The Irish Famine: A Documentary by Colm Tóibín and David Ferriter

4. Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine by Cormac Ó Gráda

5. Bowen's Court & Seven Winters by Elizabeth Bowen

6. Skibbereen: The Famine Story by Terri Kearney and Philip O'Regan

7. Three Days in Skibbereen by Elihu Burritt

8. Skibbereen and District Fact and Folklore by Eugene Daly

9. 1847: A Chronicle of Genius, Generosity & Savagery (Chapter: The Opium King and the Apostle of Temperance) by Turtle Bunbury

10. The Schools' Collection, National Folklore Collection, UCD. Mark Daly

11. The Irish Times: Victoria, Famine Queen, and the Silence of Survivors by Paul Lynch October 6, 2017