REAL HISTORY. In 1847, Boston removed the cannon from a warship and filled it with food.

Abandoned by England’s Ruling Caste

When word of what was happening in Ireland reached Massachusetts, four thousand people crowded into Faneuil Hall. A China trade merchant from Milton named Robert Bennet Forbes went to Congress and asked to borrow a United States naval vessel.

On 3 March 1847, with Congress busy with the Mexican War, a joint resolution passed both Houses. Two ships were released: the Jamestown in Boston and the Macedonian in New York.

A History First

It was the first time in American history that a naval warship was handed over to a civilian captain for a private relief mission.

They stripped out her guns

On St. Patrick’s Day 1847, volunteers from the Boston Laborers Aid Society, almost all of them Irish immigrants themselves, began loading thousands of barrels of provisions aboard her in the Charlestown Navy Yard. Food came in from all over New England.

Crowds Lined the Wharves

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She sailed on 28 March with 800 tons of supplies and a crew of 38 who had signed on for nothing.

Crowds lined the wharves and the shore to cheer her out. The crossing was fifteen days of rain, sleet and fog.

She anchored at Cobh (Cork) on 12 April, and the church bells rang out across the harbour.

Then Forbes went ashore

Walked out of the main street with Father Theobald Mathew, and saw it for himself. He wrote afterwards that it was the valley of death and pestilence itself, and that he would gladly forget what he saw if he could.

That evening the local dignitaries invited the Americans to a grand dinner of the finest food and drink, while people were dying in the streets outside. Forbes and his crew found it mortifying.

The cargo was divided into 160 districts, five tons to each. He went home and immediately started loading another ship.

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