Peasants who had never been more than a few miles from their rural homes found themselves propelled through an ever larger, unfamiliar world: from the doorstep of a hut reclaimed by a landlord, to a fetid workhouse in the city, to the dank, crowded hold of a typhus-infected ship on the high seas. In 1847 alone, 17,000 Irish died in the Atlantic crossing, almost one in fifteen—most from the dreaded “fever” that spread through lice in the coffin ships. Only the slave trade, the Middle Passage shipment of 12.5 million blacks from Africa to the New World, had a higher death rate on the Atlantic.
