More than a hundred thousand souls fled to the United States and Canada.  The United States maintained sanitary regulations on shipboard which were effectual to a certain extent.  But the emigration to Canada was left to the individual greed of shipowners, and the emigrant-ships rivalled the cabins of Mayo or the fever-sheds of Skibbereen.  Crowded and filthy, carrying double the legal number of passengers, who were ill-fed and imperfectly clothed, and having no doctor on board, the holds, says an eyewitness, were like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and deaths occurred in myriads.  The survivors, on their arrival in the new country, continued to die and to scatter death around them.

At Montreal, during nine weeks, eight hundred emigrants perished, and over nine hundred residents died of diseases caught from emigrants.  During six months the deaths of the new arrivals exceeded three thousand.  No preparations were made by the British Government for the reception or the employment of these helpless multitudes.  The Times pronounced the neglect to be an eternal disgrace to the British name.  Ships carrying German emigrants and English emigrants arrived in Canada at the same time in a perfectly healthy state.  The Chief Secretary for Ireland was able to inform the House of Commons that of a hundred thousand Irishmen who fled to Canada in a year, six thousand one hundred perished on the voyage, four thousand one hundred on their arrival, five thousand two hundred in the hospitals, and one thousand nine hundred in the towns to which they repaired.  The Emigrant Society of Montreal paints the result during the whole period of the famine in language not easily to be forgotten: 

“From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of our great river, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of immigration has extended are to be found one unbroken chain of graves where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in a commingled heap—­no stone marking the spot.  Twenty thousand and upward have gone down to their graves!”

This was the fate which was befalling our race at home and abroad as the year 1847 closed.  There were not many of us who would not have given our lives cheerfully to arrest this ruin, if we could only see a possible way—­but no way was visible.

(1848) MIGRATIONS OF THE MORMONS, Thomas L. Kane

Among the numerous religious bodies that have grown up in the United States, the sect of Mormons, officially called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” is perhaps the most unique in its origin and organization, and the most singular in its history.  The sect was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, of Vermont.  He declared that he had discovered one of its authoritative writings, the Book of Mormon, at Cumorah, New York.  This book, he said, was found by him buried in the earth at a place revealed to him by an angel.  According to the Mormons, the book, written in mystic characters on golden plates, is a record of certain ancient people—–­“the long-lost tribes of Israel,” Smith declared—­inhabiting North America.  This book is said to have been abridged by the prophet Mormon, and translated by Smith.  By anti-Mormons it is supposed to be based on a manuscript romance written by Solomon Spaulding.