ABSTRACT
On 21 September 1847, the Times published an editorial that was both strident and strikingly atypical in its denunciation of the horrific conditions of the Irish Famine migration:
Did Ireland possess a writer endued with the laborious truth of Thucydides, the graceful felicity of Virgil, or the happy invention of De Foe, the events of this miserable year might be quoted by the scholar for ages to come, together with the sufferings of the pent-up multitudes of Athens, the distempered plains of northern Italy, or the hideous ravages of our great plague . . . The fact of more than a hundred thousand souls flying from the very midst of the great calamity, across a great ocean, to a new world, crowding into insufficient vessels, scrambling for a footing on a deck and a berth in a hold, committing themselves to these worse than prisons, while their frames were wasted with ill fare and blood infested with disease, fighting for months of unutterable wretchedness against the elements without and pestilence within, giving almost hourly victims to the deep, landing at lengths on shores already terrified and diseased, consigned to encampments of the dying and of the dead, spreading death wherever they roam, and having no other prospect before them than a long continuance of these horrors in a still farther flight across forests and lakes under a Canadian sun and a Canadian frost - all these are the circumstances beyond the Greek historian or Latin poet, and such as an Irish pestilence alone could produce.
The worst horrors of the slave trade . . . have been reenacted in the flight of British subjects from their native shores . . . The Blackhole of Calcutta was a mercy compared to the holds of those vessles.
Of these awful occurrences some account must be given. Historians and politicians will some day sift and weigh the conflicting narratives and documents of this lamentable year, and pronounce with or without affectation, how much is due to the inclemency of heaven, and how 2much to the cruelty, heartlessness or improvidence of man. The boasted institutions and spirit of the empire are on trial. 1
