April 19th, 1847: The USS Jamestown, manned by volunteers, arrives in Cork with eight tons of food. An estimated 20,000 "strangers" have crowded into the city. The people are dying in such numbers on the streets that Father Mathew provided for 135 burials in the past week.
A meeting in Faneuil Hall, Boston, resulted in the dispatch of two warships lent by the US government.
The gentlemen of Cove address the commander of the sloop: "Filled with sorrow and dismay at the calamitous condition of a large portion of our population, it is indeed most consoling and gratifying to us to receive such kindly and substantial evidences of sympathy from a country which we look up to with so much respect and admiration, and to know that the thousands who are now hastening from our shores are going to a land where they may calculate on a warm and hospitable reception, and where industry and integrity are sure of their reward."
Michael Doheny, the Young Irelander, has a more realistic idea of "the blessings of emigration". He reports from Cashel that farms are being consolidated rapidly: "The appendages of famine, like the pangs of death, may be differently modified in different localities, but the exhausting current of public weakness flows on and on unchangeably everywhere.
He observes that when a family emigrates, two or three of the weaker members remain behind. While the better off may leave them with a year's provision, the poor can provide scarcely a week's supply. He knows of three or four cases where a father and mother went away by night and left three little children, scarcely more than infants, to a person to be taken next morning to the poorhouse. It may be said this was cruel and unnatural, but those who say so little know what that father and mother may have endured - how much they struggled to avoid this awful sacrifice."
This practice is quite widespread. Imagine the legacy of guilt and bitterness which those people carry to America. They generally intend to send for their children, is successful in the New World.
Meanwhile, 15 vessels are preparing to sail from Limerick for British North America and the US.
In Killaloe, 100 families, averaging 500 people, surrender; their small holdings to the proprietor, Francis Spaight, in, return for a free passage to, Canada. The Jane Black sails with 500 passengers for Quebec. They are principally farm labourers from Limerick, Clare and Tipperary. The Heather Bell sails this evening for New York with 105 passengers, including several independent farmers with their families from the Co Kerry".
Some $218,040 has been collected for Ireland in the US. Even the Sultan of Turkey, upon hearing of the sufferings of the Irish, donates £1,000.
Thomas Moore sends £5 to the Bannow (Co Wexford) relief fund.