For the past two weeks (okay, possibly four), I have postponed my weekly entries in an attempt to discover the plausibility of the question I posed in my last post: Might Thomas have arrived in New York, and then ventured across Lake Ontario to Toronto in 1847?
According to historian Mark. G. McGowan, 38 560 refugees arrived in Toronto’s harbour in 1847, 75% of whom were Irish. For Toronto’s then population of 20 000, Ireland’s mass exodus introduced significant health and socio-economic challenges that resulted in less than favourable opinions of the Irish. Many regarded the Irish as a diseased people who were dependent on the goodwill, and economy, of the citizens of their port of arrival.
To make matters worse, the Orange Order (or Loyal Orange Lodge) was well represented in Toronto, particularly amongst its politicians and city officials, earning Toronto its reputation as “the Belfast of Canada”. More often than not, the Irish-Catholics who arrived in Canada had very little with them as they tended to be from the areas of Ireland (largely the southern counties) that suffered the worst of the famine’s devastation. Attitudes toward Irish- Catholics began to harden in Toronto’s overwhelmingly protestant port.
In Death or Canada, McGowan asserts that most of the immigrants who arrived in Toronto landed between June and December, 1847. Those whose arrival preceded June “came not directly from Ireland, but from New York and Boston, two ports receiving migrants during the winter” (50).
And this, of course, is where the possibility of an American landing becomes increasingly interesting (and plausible) as the Thomas Shaw who left Belfast at twenty-two years of age, aboard a ship named Pontiac, arrived in New York’s harbour on 17 May 1847.
An American arrival may also offer insight into how well Thomas and his family fared the famine’s devastation. Passenger tickets from Ireland to the United States cost more than a ticket from Belfast to Canada, as American ports enforced stricter regulations on ship captains in an attempt to restrict famine immigration. Thus, as Lord Grey, Colonial Secretary, stated “ ‘all the poorest and most destitute flocked to Canada, while those who were better off, avoiding contact with such wretched objects, went to the United States’ ” (McKay 290).
General commentaries on the devastation of Ireland’s potato famine suggest that the northern counties may have been spared when compared to their southern, and largely Catholic, counterparts. According to Thomas’s obituary, he harkened from Saintfield, County Down, a county on Ireland’s northeast coast, and part of the region of Ireland known as Ulster. While potatoes remained the staple in the diet of Ireland’s southerners, “oats remained the staple diet among the Scots-Presbyterians in eastern Ulster” (McKay 220). Moreover, McKay also asserts that “[t]hough all regions suffered, the central midlands, eastern Leinster and northeast Ulster suffered less than the west (255). All this to say that Thomas and his family may have been able to save enough money to purchase passage to an American port as their crops and diet were more diversified than those relied upon in the southern counties.
So far the only details of Thomas’s life in Ireland are contained in his obituary. We know he arrived in Toronto, then Little York, in 1847 but we still cannot say from which harbour he departed. Did he arrive in Quebec directly from Belfast like so many other Irish? Or might he have made a stopover in New York before venturing across Lake Ontario to Toronto?
And of course, there’s yet another question for which we have no answer: Why did Thomas arrive in Toronto? What, or who, attracted him to this port? Alas, another fact to search out.
Thanks for reading!
Sources:
MacKay, Donald. Flight from Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada. Toronto: Dundurn, 2009.
Fitzpatrick, Rory. God’s Frontiersmen: The Scots-Irish Epic. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989
McGowan, Mark G., Death or Canada: The Irish Famine Migration to Toronto, 1847. Toronto: Novalis Publishing Inc., 2009
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