Read long of Thomas Gallagher's Paddy’s Lament, the story of the Irish famine and emigration. The deprivations and squalor those who made the trip in the late 1840s experienced on British ships reads like a novel, or rather you wouldn’t believe it if it was in a novel. As the book quotes one as saying: how hard can it be to get waste products into the endless ocean and not in the finite ship quarters? Very hard if prevented from doing so, and yet somehow they put up with it. The British sealed off deck access during stormy periods leaving no privies available and thus “ship fever” ran rapid, killing 20-25% of the travelers. The mind reels. It’s always seems a failure of imagination to imagine just how bad they had it. Worse than black slave ships even.
Those old Irish were so different in a million ways, but this latest read makes it clear in two areas especially: 1) the lack of squeamishness over bodily fluids and such given the American obsession with cleanliness, and relatedly 2) the integration of the material and physical. They simply had a different view of the material and physical that seems unrecreatable in our present culture:
All their lives they had linked the material and spiritual world in odd and delightful ways that made one as attractive as the other in what amounted to a mutually dependent relationship…[One] belief was that the dead of one parish graveyard competed with the dead of another parish graveyard in the old Irish game of hurling. Each parish team had a living man from its parish to keep the goal, and when the teams met, always under a full moon, at one or the other of the graveyards, the two live goalkeepers had to be, and always were, present…Sam Sweep’s burial at sea prevented the steerage passengers from putting these benign superstitions to any imaginative use. In the middle of the Atlantic, the idea of two graveyards competing with each other in the game of hurling became even in their eyes a meaningless museum piece.I can’t even begin to get my head around how terrifying burial-at-sea was to these 1840-era Irish. It was perceived so horrible a fate that a great many of them died immediately upon reaching land – which is to say the only thing keeping them alive was the horror of being buried in water rather than land. They were so close to their God-given bodies! They didn’t live in our Gnostic age when sacraments are seen as superstitions and when we think only the spirit matters, despite the clear evidence of the Bible to the contrary. We’re now okay with cremation or our bones “floating on the ocean”, as so horrified those Irish.
But it's true the Irish were superstitious and that's foreign in our age of science and irreligion. The Catechism says: “Superstition in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion; irreligion is the vice contrary by defect to the virtue of religion.” Another way the Irish were different is they would fight like hell to win a bet only to share it when they received it:
The British sailors never ceased to be amazed by this harmlessly fierce competition among the famine Irish, who seemed as willing to gamble away their last farthing as they were baffled by what to do with their winnings. The sailors could not understand why the prize, once won, became so sharable. Nor could the Irish, whose attitude towards beggars was equally mysterious to the sailors, have explained. For them it was a mode of thinking never questioned or challenged, a folkway twined with their pagan past as with the oppression they’d suffered for so long. With good reason they believed that good luck carried with it dangers as well as responsibilities: when it paid you a visit, you had to share that visit with someone or risk never being visited again.
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