Why Irish, you may ask? With the catastrophic failure of the Irish potato crop in 1845 (An Gorta Mór, the great hunger, an indelible event in Irish history), tens of thousands of starving Irish fled their homeland, desperate to reach the New World. Life aboard these ships was grim, conditions unfit for humans. Passengers depended on a weekly allowance of seven pounds (about three kilograms) of food and barely enough water to both drink and use for cooking. Sickness and death stalked those fleeing the Emerald Isle, now blackened by fields of rotting potatoes. 

May 17, 2022, marks the 175th anniversary of the beginning of one of the saddest episodes in the recorded history of the American continent. The arrival of the “coffin ship” Syria at Grosse Île in 1847 was the harbinger of a massive epidemic of typhus fever-ridden men, women and children. Of the ship’s 241 passengers, there were initially 84 cases on board. Soon more than 100 people had to be admitted to a hospital with capacity for only 150.

Within a week, 30 more vessels were waiting offshore to land their sick. By May 31, 1,100 people with fever were crammed onto Grosse Île, with 45,000 more immigrants expected to arrive soon. The squalor and suffering defy description, and providing medical attention proved nearly impossible. 

Clearly the facilities could not cope, and by the end of the summer of 1847, the practice of using Grosse Île as a quarantine site was discontinued (although it was subsequently reopened as a quarantine station and continued to function until the 1930s). The sick and apparently healthy were isolated on ships instead. In one early horrible example, the Agnes arrived from Ireland on May 27, 1847, with 427 aboard. Passengers were made to quarantine on board and, by the end of their 15-day stint, just 150 people were still alive. Grosse Île’s use as a quarantine station was taken over by an existing hospital and new specially built open sheds at Pointe-Saint-Charles, in southwest Montreal.