A JOURNAL OF A VISIT OF THREE DAYS TO SKIBBEREEN, AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD. BY ELIHU BURRITT. LONDON: CHARLES GILPIN, 5, BISHOPGATE-STREET WITHOUT. BIRMINGHAM: JOHN WHITEHOUSE SHOWELL, 26, UPPER TEMPLE-STREET. 1847. EXTRACT FROM THE SPEECH OF LORD JOHN RUSSELL, _On The Irish Poor Relief Bill, March 12th, 1847. _ "A gentleman who lately called upon me, and whom I have every reason to trust, gave me a letter from a person resident in that union (Skibbereen, ) stating, that though the property within the union is rated to the poor as being of the value of £8, 000 a-year only, its actual value is no less than £130, 000 a-year, and that, until September last, no rate had been made exceeding sixpence in the pound, but that, in November, a rate was made of ninepence in the pound; but that rate has never been levied. (Loud cries of 'Hear, hear. ')"--_See "The Times" of Saturday, March 13. _ Elihu Burritt, well known on both sides of the Atlantic by his devotedlabours for the good of mankind, especially in the promotion of peaceand universal brotherhood, has recently paid a visit to some of thedistressed parts of Ireland, principally with a view of sending astatement of facts, from his own observation, to his native country, together with an appeal on behalf of the sufferers under the awfulpressure of famine and disease. In this appeal, which was sent to the United States by the last steampacket, Elihu Burritt, speaking of the locality he had visited, says:--"I have come to this indescribable scene of destitution, desolation, and death, that I might get the nearer to your sympathies;that I might bring these terrible realities of human misery more vividlywithin your comprehension. I have witnessed scenes that no language ofmine can portray. I have seen how much beings, made in the image of God, can suffer on this side the grave, and that too in a civilized land. " The reader will judge for himself, when he has perused the followingrecord of only three days of this journey, whether the foregoinglanguage is too strong. Although the fearful facts Elihu Burritt relatesmay have found a parallel in the statements of others, it is thoughtdesirable to publish them in this country, as he recently witnessed themin the very district to which the sympathies of the English have been, for several months past, particularly directed, and for which localitylarge subscriptions have been specially contributed. A single individualis reported to have given £1000 for Skibbereen. Yet, notwithstanding allthat has been subscribed, up to the period when this journal waswritten, no effectual means had been adopted for the decent interment ofthe dead, or even for their timely removal from the hovels of theliving, and the great expenditure of the British Government, appears tohave effected, at least in this district, but little mitigation of thefearful calamity. There are many noble instances of individual sacrifices by personalattention to the sufferers, and other efforts for their relief, butnothing short of a law to give the poor of Ireland the right to claimsupport from the owners of the soil, before they are reduced tostarvation, will effectually meet the evil, or be any security againstits recurrence. The Poor Law of England admits the claim of the people for support fromthe land and other fixed property; and, until this is given, neitherlandlord or mortgagee is entitled to rent or interest. This should be fully applied to Irish legislation, and partial andunjust laws removed, including those of primogeniture and entail. To theneglect of these measures and that of giving the cultivators of the soila proper security for the labour and expense which they bestow upon it, is mainly to be attributed the fact that a country possessing some ofthe finest natural advantages in the world, and which could be renderedcapable of supporting in comfort at least three times its presentpopulation, is now overspread with such extreme human misery that theawful scenes portrayed in the following pages cease to excite a thrillof horror. JOSEPH STURGE. _Birmingham, 3rd Month, 15th, 1847. _ THREE DAYS AT SKIBBEREEN, AND ITS VICINITY. SKIBBEREEN, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20. --Rev. Mr. F---- called with severalgentlemen of the town, and in their company I took my first walk throughthis Potter's Field of destitution and death. As soon as we opened thedoor, a crowd of haggard creatures pressed upon us, and, with agonizingprayers for bread, followed us to the soup-house. One poor woman, whoseentreaties became irresistibly importunate, had watched all night in thegrave-yard, lest the body of her husband should be stolen from hisresting place, to which he had been consigned yesterday. She had leftfive children sick with the famine fever in her hovel, and she raised anexceedingly bitter cry for help. A man with swollen feet pressed closelyupon us, and begged for bread most piteously. He had pawned his shoesfor food, which he had already consumed. The soup-house was surroundedby a cloud of these famine spectres, half naked, and standing or sittingin the mud, beneath a cold, drizzling rain. The narrow defile to thedispensary bar was choked with young and old of both sexes, strugglingforward with their rusty tin and iron vessels for soup, some of themupon all fours, like famished beasts. There was a cheap bread dispensaryopened in one end of the building, and the principal pressure was at thedoor of this. Among the attenuated apparitions of humanity that throngedthis gate of stinted charity, one poor man presented himself undercircumstances that even distinguished his case from the rest. He livedseveral miles from the centre of the town, in one of the ruraldistricts, where he found himself on the eve of perishing with hisfamily of seven small children. Life was worth the last struggle ofnature, and the miserable skeleton of a father had fastened his youngestchild to his back, and with four more by his side, had staggered up tothe door, just as we entered the bread department of the establishment. The hair upon his face was nearly as long as that upon his head. Hischeeks were fallen in, and his jaws so distended that he could scarcelyarticulate a word. His four little children were sitting upon the groundby his feet, nestling together, and trying to hide their naked limbsunder their dripping rags. How these poor things could stand upon theirfeet and walk, and walk five miles, as they had done, I could notconceive. Their appearance, though common to thousands of the same agein this region of the shadow of death, was indescribable. Their palenesswas not that of common sickness. There was no sallow tinge in it. Theydid not look as if newly raised from the grave and to life before theblood had begun to fill their veins anew; but as if they had just beenthawed out of the ice, in which they had been imbedded until their bloodhad turned to water. Leaving this battle field of life, I accompanied the Rev. Mr. F----, theCatholic minister, into one of the hovel lanes of the town. We found inevery tenement we entered enough to sicken the stoutest heart. In one, we found a shoe-maker who was at work before a hole in the mud wall ofhis hut about as large as a small pane of glass. There were five in hisfamily, and he said, when he could get any work, he could earn aboutthree shillings a week. In another cabin we discovered a nailer by thedull light of his fire, working in a space not three feet square. He, too, had a large family, half of whom were down with the fever, and hecould earn but two shillings a week. About the middle of this filthylane, we came to the ruins of a hovel, which had fallen down during thenight, and killed a man, who had taken shelter in it with his wife andchild. He had come in from the country, and ready to perish with coldand hunger, had entered this falling house of clay. He was warned ofhis danger, but answered that die he must, unless he found a shelterbefore morning. He had kindled a small fire with some straw and bits ofturf, and was crouching over it, when the whole roof or gable end ofearth and stones came down upon him and his child, and crushed him todeath over the slow fire. The child had been pulled out alive, andcarried to the workhouse, but the father was still lying upon the dungheap of the fallen roof, slightly covered with a piece of canvass. Onlifting this, a humiliating spectacle presented itself. What rags thepoor man had upon him when buried beneath the falling roof, were mostlytorn from his body in the last faint struggle for life. His neck, andshoulder, and right arm were burnt to a cinder. There he lay in therain, like the carcase of a brute beast thrown upon a dung heap. As wecontinued our walk along this filthy lane, half-naked women and childrenwould come out of their cabins, apparently in the last stage of thefever, to beg for food, "for the honour of God. " As they stood upon thewet ground, one could almost see it smoke beneath their bare feet, burning with the fever. We entered the grave-yard, in the midst of whichwas a small watch-house. This miserable shed had served as a grave wherethe dying could bury themselves. It was seven feet long, and six inbreadth. It was already walled round on the outside with an embankmentof graves, half way to the eaves. The aperture of this horrible den ofdeath would scarcely admit of the entrance of a common sized person. Andinto this noisome sepulchre living men, women, and children went down todie; to pillow upon the rotten straw, the grave clothes vacated bypreceding victims and festering with their fever. Here they lay asclosely to each other as if crowded side by side on the bottom of onegrave. Six persons had been found in this fetid sepulchre at one time, and with one only able to crawl to the door to ask for water. Removing aboard from the entrance of this black hole of pestilence, we found itcrammed with wan victims of famine, ready and willing to perish. Aquiet listless despair broods over the population, and cradles men forthe grave. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21. --Dr. D---- called at two o'clock, and we proceededtogether to visit a lane of hovels on the opposite side of the village. The wretchedness of this little mud city of the dead and dying was of adeeper stamp than the one I saw yesterday. Here human beings and theirclayey habitations seemed to be melting down together into the earth. Ican find no language nor illustration sufficiently impressive to portraythe spectacle to an American reader. A cold drizzling rain was deepeningthe pools of black filth, into which it fell like ink drops from theclouds. Few of the young or old have not read of the scene exhibited onthe field of battle after the action, when visited by the surgeon. Thecries of the wounded and dying for help, have been described by manygraphic pens. The agonising entreaty for "Water! water! help, help!" hasbeen conveyed to our minds with painful distinctness. I can liken thescene we witnessed in the low lane of famine and pestilence, to nothingof greater family resemblance, than that of the battle field, when thehostile armies have retired, leaving one-third of their number bleedingupon the ground. As soon as Dr. D---- appeared at the head of the lane, it was filled with miserable beings, haggard, famine-stricken men, women, and children, some far gone in the consumption of the faminefever, and all imploring him "for the honour of God" to go in and see"my mother, " "my father, " "my boy, " "who is very bad, your honour. " Andthen, interspersed with these earnest entreaties, others louder stillwould be raised for bread. In every hovel we entered, we found the dyingor the dead. In one of these straw-roofed burrows, eight persons haddied in the last fortnight, and five more were lying upon the fetid, pestiferous straw, upon which their predecessors to the grave had beenconsumed by the wasting fever of famine. In scarcely a single one ofthese most inhuman habitations was there the slightest indication offood of any kind to be found, nor fuel to cook food, nor any thingresembling a bed, unless it were a thin layer of filthy straw in onecorner, upon which the sick person lay, partly covered with some raggedgarment. There being no window, nor aperture to admit the light, inthese wretched cabins, except the door, we found ourselves often inalmost total darkness for the first moment of our entrance. But a faintglimmering of a handful of burning straw in one end would soon reveal tous the indistinct images of wan-faced children grouped together, withtheir large, plaintive, still eyes looking out at us, like the sickyoung of wild beasts in their dens. Then the groans, and the choked, incoherent entreaties for help of some man or woman wasting away withthe sickness in some corner of the cabin, would apprise us of the numberand condition of the family. The wife, mother, or child would frequentlylight a wisp of straw, and hold it over the face of the sick person, discovering to us the sooty features of some emaciated creature in thelast stage of the fever. In one of these places we found an old womanstretched upon a pallet of straw, with her head within a foot of ahandful of fire, upon which something was steaming in a small ironvessel. The Doctor removed the cover, and we found it was filled with akind of slimy sea-weed, which, I believe, is used for manure in thesea-board. This was all the nourishment that the daughter could serve toher sick mother. But the last cabin we visited in this painful walk, presented to our eyes a lower deep of misery. It was the residence oftwo families, both of which had been thinned down to half their originalnumber by the sickness. The first sight that met my eyes, on entering, was the body of a dead woman, extended on one side of the fire-place. Onthe other, an old man was lying on some straw, so far gone as to beunable to articulate distinctly. He might have been ninety or fiftyyears of age. It was difficult to determine, for this wastingconsumption of want brings out the extremest indices of old age in thefeatures of even the young. But there was another apparition which sickened all the flesh and bloodin my nature. It has haunted me during the past night, like Banquo'sghost. I have lain awake for hours, struggling for some graphic andtruthful similes or new elements of description, by which I might conveyto the distant reader some tangible image of this object. A dropsicalaffection among the young and old is very common to all the sufferers byfamine. I had seen men at work on the public roads with their limbsswollen almost to twice their usual size. But when the woman of thiscabin lifted from the straw, from behind the dying man, a boy abouttwelve years of age, and held him up before us upon his feet, the mosthorrifying spectacle met our eyes. The cold, watery-faced child wasentirely naked in front, from his neck down to his feet. His body wasswollen to nearly three times its usual size, and had burst the raggedgarment that covered him, and now dangled in shreds behind him. Thewoman of the other family, who was sitting at her end of the hovel, brought forward her little infant, a thin-faced baby of two years, withclear, sharp eyes that did not wink, but stared stock still at vacancy, as if a glimpse of another existence had eclipsed its vision. Its cold, naked arms were not much larger than pipe stems, while its body wasswollen to the size of a full-grown person. Let the reader group theseapparitions of death and disease into the spectacle of ten feet square, and then multiply it into three-fourths of the hovels in this region ofIreland, and he will arrive at a fair estimate of the extent or degreeof its misery. Were it not for giving them pain, I should have been gladif the well-dressed children in America could have entered these hovelswith us, and looked upon the young creatures wasting away unmurmuringlyby slow consuming destitution. I am sure they would have been touched tothe liveliest compassion at the spectacle, and have been ready to dividetheir wardrobe with the sufferers. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22. --Dr. H---- called to take me into the Castle-havenparish, which comes within his circuit. This district borders upon thesea, whose rocky indented shores are covered with cabins of a worsedescription than those in Skibbereen. On our way, we passed severalcompanies of men, women, and children at work, all enfeebled andemaciated by destitution. Women with their red, swollen feet partiallyswathed in old rags, some in men's coats, with their arms or skirts tornoff, were sitting by the road-side, breaking stone. It was painful tosee human labour and life struggling among the lowest interests ofsociety. Men, once athletic labourers, were trying to eke out a fewmiserable days to their existence, by toiling upon these works. Poorcreatures! Many of them are already famine-stricken. They have reached apoint from which they cannot be recovered. Dr. D---- informs me that hecan tell at a glance whether a person has reached this point. And I amassured by several experienced observers, that there are thousands ofmen who rise in the morning and go forth to labour with their picks andshovels in their hands, who are irrecoverably doomed to death. No humanaid can save them. The plague spot of famine is on their foreheads; theworm of want has eaten in two their heart strings. Still they go forthuncomplaining to their labour and toil, cold, and half naked upon theroads, and divide their eight or ten pence worth of food at night amonga sick family of five or eight persons. Some one is often kept at home, and prevented from earning this pittance, by the fear that some one oftheir family will die before their return. The first habitation weentered in the Castle-haven district was literally a hole in the wall, occupied by what might be called in America, a squatter, or a man whohad burrowed a place for himself and family in the acute angle of twodilapidated walls by the road-side, where he lived rent free. We enteredthis stinted den by an aperture about three feet high, and found one ortwo children lying asleep with their eyes open in the straw. Such, atleast, was their appearance, for they scarcely winked while we werebefore them. The father came in and told his pitiful story of want, saying that not a morsel of food had they tasted for twenty-four hours. He lighted a wisp of straw and showed us one or two more children lyingin another nook of the cave. Their mother had died, and he was obligedto leave them alone during most of the day, in order to glean somethingfor their subsistence. We were soon among the most wretched habitationsthat I had yet seen; far worse than those in Skibbereen. Many of themwere flat-roofed hovels, half buried in the earth, or built up againstthe rocks, and covered with rotten straw, sea-weed, or turf. In onewhich was scarcely seven foot square, we found five persons prostratewith the fever, and apparently near their end. A girl about sixteen, thevery picture of despair, was the only one left who could administer anyrelief; and all she could do was to bring water in a broken pitcher toslaken their parched lips. As we proceeded up a rocky hill overlookingthe sea, we encountered new sights of wretchedness. Seeing a cabinstanding somewhat by itself in a hollow, and surrounded by a moat ofgreen filth, we entered it with some difficulty, and found a singlechild about three years old lying on a kind of shelf, with its littleface resting upon the edge of the board and looking steadfastly out atthe door, as if for its mother. It never moved its eyes as we entered, but kept them fixed toward the entrance. It is doubtful whether the poorthing had a mother or father left to her; but it is more doubtful still, whether those eyes would have relaxed their vacant gaze if both of themhad entered at once with anything that could tempt the palate in theirhands. No words can describe this peculiar appearance of the famishedchildren. Never have I seen such bright, blue, clear eyes looking sosteadfastly at nothing. I could almost fancy that the angels of God hadbeen sent to unseal the vision of these little patient, perishingcreatures, to the beatitudes of another world; and that they werelistening to the whispers of unseen spirits bidding them to "wait alittle longer. " Leaving this, we entered another cabin in which we foundseven or eight attenuated young creatures, with a mother who had pawnedher cloak and could not venture out to beg for bread because she was notfit to be seen in the streets. Hearing the voice of wailing from acluster of huts further up the hill, we proceeded to them, and enteredone, and found several persons weeping over the dead body of a womanlying by the wall near the door. Stretched upon the ground here andthere lay several sick persons, and the place seemed a den ofpestilence. The filthy straw was rank with the festering fever. Leavingthis habitation of death, we were met by a young woman in an agony ofdespair because no one would give her a coffin to bury her father in. She pointed to a cart at some distance, upon which his body lay, and shewas about to follow it to the grave, and he was such a good father, shecould not bear to lay him like a beast in the ground, and she begged acoffin "for the honour of God. " While she was wailing and weeping forthis boon, I cast my eye towards the cabin we had just left, and a sightmet my view which made me shudder with horror. The husband of the deadwoman came staggering out with her body upon his shoulder, slightlycovered with a piece of rotten canvass. I will not dwell upon thedetails of this spectacle. Painfully and slowly he bore the remains ofthe late companion of his misery to the cart. We followed him a littleway off and saw him deposit his burden along side of the father of theyoung woman, and by her assistance. As the two started for thegrave-yard to bury their own dead, we pursued our walk still further on, and entered another cabin where we encountered the climax of humanmisery. Surely thought I, while regarding this new phenomenon ofsuffering, there can be no lower deep than this between us and thebottom of the grave. On asking after the condition of the inmates, thewoman to whom we addressed the question answered by taking out of thestraw three breathing skeletons, ranging from two to three feet inheight and _entirely naked_. And these human beings were alive! If theyhad been dead, they could not have been such frightful spectacles, theywere alive, and, _mirabile dictu_, they could stand upon their feet andeven walk; but it was awful to see them do it. Had their bones beendivested of the skin that held them together, and been covered with aveil of thin muslin, they would not have been more visible, especiallywhen one of them clung to the door, while a sister was urging itforward, it assumed an appearance, which can have been seldom paralleledthis side of the grave. The effort which it made to cling to the doordisclosed every joint in its frame, while the deepest lines of old agefurrowed its face. The enduring of ninety years of sorrow seemed tochronicle its record of woe upon the poor child's countenance. I couldbear no more; and we returned to Skibbereen, after having been all theafternoon among these abodes of misery. On our way we overtook the cartwith the two uncoffined bodies. The man and young woman were all thatattended them to the grave. Last year the funeral of either would havecalled out hundreds of mourners from those hills. But now the husbanddrove his uncoffined wife to the grave without a tear in his eye, without a word of sorrow. About half way to Skibbereen, Dr. H----proposed that we should diverge to another road to visit a cabin inwhich we should find two little girls living alone, with their deadmother, who had lain unburied seven days. He gave an affecting historyof this poor woman; and we turned from the road to visit this new sceneof desolation; but as it was growing quite dark, and the distance wasconsiderable, we concluded to resume our way back to the village. Infact I had witnessed as much as my heart could bear. In the evening Imet several gentlemen at the house of Mr. S----, among whom was Dr. D----. He had just returned from a neighbouring parish, where he visiteda cabin which had been deserted by the poor people around, although itwas known that some of its inmates were still alive, though dying in themidst of the dead. He knocked at the door; and hearing no voice within, burst it open, with his foot; and was, in a moment almost overpowered bythe horrid stench. Seeing a man's legs protruding from the straw, hemoved them slightly with his foot; when a husky voice asked for water. In another part of the cabin, on removing a piece of canvas, hediscovered three dead bodies, which had lain there _unburied for thefortnight_; and hard against one of these, and almost embraced in thearms of death, lay a young person far gone with fever. He related othercases too horrible to be published. ELIHU BURRITT. PRINTED BY J. W. SHOWELL, TEMPLE-STREET, BIRMINGHAM. Transcriber's Note: Hyphenation has been standardised. Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note, whilst more significant errors have been listed below: Page 3, 'indescrible' amended to _indescribable_. Page 11, 'delapidated' amended to _dilapidated_.