Irish Famine Ships Dock At State Street

Bethany Sheffer wants you to book passage on a coffin ship. Well, a re-creation of one, for a voyage into the history of Irish immigration to America that very much resonates today.

She’s the curator/registrar of the Knights of Columbus Museum, and coffin ships were the names given to the shoddy, ill-equipped vessels that ferried 1.5 million Irish immigrants, refugees from the terrible potato famine that killed more than a million people, to ports in Canada and the United States between 1845 and 1860.

That experience of maritime flight is the subject of ​“Fleeing Famine: Irish Immigration to North America, 1845 – 1860,” the illuminating exhibition that runs at the museum through the fall.

When the museum acquired six Rodney Charman oil paintings depicting re-enactments, based on historical research, of what might have been scenes of the grueling passage of the coffin ships, Sheffer decided to build an exhibition around the new acquisitions.

Building an exhibition around newly acquired work is standard operating procedure for curators. It usually involves assembling other artworks and documentary material that give context to the subject of the acquisitions, which Sheffer has done. This exhibition is enhanced partially by bronze sculptures borrowed from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University in Hamden.

But Sheffer’s enthusiasm for the project has taken it one step further. She and her K of C museum crew have transformed half of the second-floor gallery into a kind of walk-in re-creation of the deck of the Washington Irving, a ship that brought thousands of Irish immigrants from Liverpool to ports in Canada and North America, including Boston.

“I had to have the fire pit,” she said, pointing to the cooking area, depicted in Charman’s graphic scene from the deck of The Odessa, which she has created on the facsimile ship.

The informative labels and graphic material, including reproductions of reportage, advertisements for the voyages, sketch in the very tough conditions on these ships.

The people depicted in Charman’s compositions — which have the look of Depression-era social realism — do not evoke the brutal conditions that African slaves faced in the vessels that transported them from the west coast of Africa to the New World in the Middle Passage.

Yet perhaps due to the longer voyages under sail, which might have taken a month or more, they nevertheless describe conditions that are significantly more dangerous and rigorous than they were on the vessels that carried Italian and Jewish immigrants to Ellis Island 75 years later.

Most of the vessels were British flag ships that, having delivered cargoes of timber and other such raw materials from Canada to ports in Ireland or England, then did not want to make the return transatlantic voyage empty.

Owners jerry-rigged rickety bunks below decks and primitive stoves on deck. Into the spaces they packed poor Irish farmers and their families in conditions that in some instances resulted in deaths in high numbers from typhus and other diseases.

Sheffer says that more immigrants went to ports in Canada because American authorities put certain legal limits on the number of immigrants permitted on these vessels. English officials were far more lax.

One of the surprises of her research is that the American Irish community, and others, had advanced enough to be able to mount some relief efforts for the famine, which is portrayed in Charman’s depiction of the U.S.S. Jamestown leaving Boston harbor with a cargo of food and other supplies.

One of the reasons the museum purchased the paintings and committed to illuminate this aspect of Irish immigration heritage is that the founder of the K of C was Father Michael J. McGivney, whose parents arrived in America a generation before aboard coffin ships, Sheffer added. (McGivney founded the K of C in 1882)

While the story of suffering is indeed grim, the ship Sheffer built ultimately carries a cargo of hope, but it’s a surprise Sheffer doesn’t want to be revealed, unless you go.

The labels on the ship also tell the story of a little boy named Patrick who makes the 32-day, 3,600-mile journey from Liverpool. He ends up settling in East Boston where he gets a grueling job working 12 hours a day, seven days a week at a cooperage, a brass foundry making barrels and utensils. He marries Bridget Murphy, a cousin of the girl who got him the job, yet then comes down with disease and dies at an early age.

Still, one of his descendants, his great-grandson, becomes president of the United States. (Any idea which one? Hint: the 35th.)

The images also remind you that while today’s immigrants — say, from Syria, where famine as well as war has contributed to the mass flight — may arrive on swift airplanes at JFK, the conditions they endured before taking those flights were also grim and not of their own making.

And who knows if one of their descendants too may rise to high prominence in a generation or two?

“Fleeing Famine: Irish Immigration to North America, 1845 – 1860” runs at the Knights of Columbus Museum, 1 State St., through the fall. Admission and parking are free.