Sligo’s Famine Diaspora

Sligo’s Famine Diaspora: Emigrants from Palmerston’s Sligo Estate, 1847.

In Ireland, the impacts of the Great Famine of 1846 – ’52 are clearly recalled to this day. Internationally, its resulting forced departure of many emigrants, is one of the best-known facts about Ireland. Sligo, a county on the west coast of Ireland, was one that suffered severely from the Famine, and when its well-known landlord Lord Palmerston, later twice Prime Minister in London, is mentioned in connection with that Famine, it is usually with claims of him shipping out his malnourished and destitute tenants in unseaworthy vessels, just to enhance profits from his Sligo estate. In contrast, his government colleagues, and others, of that time saw him as supportive of his Irish tenants and of spending excessive funds on their welfare.

This book looks at those claims. It outlines the scale of emigration from Sligo and from its Palmerston’s estate in Black ’47, and it tells of searches for the descendants of some of those emigrants. It lists the sixty-four emigrant ships that sailed from Sligo Port in 1847, the worst year of the Famine, including the nine ships that carried ‘Assisted Emigrants’ from the Palmerston Sligo estate. Many of those on Palmerston’s ships are named, with accounts given of their journey out and experiences on arrival. From letters home, and from marriage, bank, census and burial records, it recalls their anguish on leaving home and the challenges they faced in their early settlement years. It exposes the story of the Carrick of Whitehaven, which took emigrants from the Palmerston estate in April 1847, only to crash and sink off Cap des Rosiers, on the Canadian coast, later that month. That sinking resulted in 133 deaths, and 48 survivors. It describes how the descendants of one family, three members of whom survived that tragedy, were linked back to their roots in Sligo despite a family name change that occurred on arrival, and of which the descendants were unaware. It relates the stories of other families, who went out on other Palmerston ships, through the lives of traced descendants, from their arrival in Canada to the present day.  (Since publication the descendants of yet more families who went to Canada from Palmerston’s Sligo estate in 1847 have come forward as they too link their roots back to Sligo).

As for Palmerston, the reader can decide if he was the cruel and uncaring man as often depicted now, or the benign and overly generous man as recounted by some of his colleagues during the Famine. Perhaps he was some of both?