Voyage Of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, the Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America's First Humanitarian Mission, Puleo-B +

   This is the history of America's, indeed the world's, first humanitarian mission. Never before had any nation, never mind the people of a nation, come to the aid of another. The mission was occasioned by the Irish famine that began in the summer of 1846, when the potato crop failed for the second year in a row. "Disaster was universal. Irish peasants - impoverished, weak, emaciated, sick, clad only in tattered rags-limped, stumbled, fell, and died by the thousands on country roads and in rain-filled ditches, in town squares, in snow covered bogs and on frozen hillsides, in dark windowless mud huts, in the slums and alleyways of cities......." Most in the Whig  government in London considered the victims as backward-looking slaves to their popish ways, unscientific and unable to fend for themselves. Indeed the assistant secretary at the Treasury for famine relief referred to the famine as a cure for the Irish's over-breeding. Ireland exported oats, wheat, cattle and barley to England. It is believed the exports alone, had they remained in Ireland, would have prevented a million deaths.                                                                                 When word of the famine reached America in early 1847, there was an immediate response across the country to organize assistance. Led by Sens. Clay and Webster, it encompassed all denominations and was truly bipartisan. A Boston merchant and sea captain suggested the US load up a warship with in-kind gifts to supplement the expected financial donations. Congress and President Polk assigned the USS Jamestown to Robert Bennet Forbes. That spring, thousands made an effort to leave Ireland. In the first six months of the year, 300,000 fled to Liverpool, many on their way to America. Often they were already ill from typhus or dysentery and died on the way across the Atlantic. The ships were called famine ships, and sometimes coffin ships, because by the time they arrived in America or Canada, almost all aboard had died.                                                                                                                              On March 28, 1847, the Jamestown sailed with a volunteer crew and 8,000 barrels of food. Every city, and virtually every community contributed, and 114 more ships followed the Jamestown to Ireland in 1847. Two weeks after leaving Boston, the Jamestown and Robert Bennet Forbes were met with unbridled enthusiasm and praise in Cork. Later that year, the half-hearted English attempts, soup kitchens and public works programs, were wound down because of concern over their costs and a fear of fostering Irish dependency. English antipathy was furthered by Irish demands for independence. American enthusiasm for assisting Ireland waned towards year end as both Boston and New York were literally overrun by poor and sick Irish immigrants, creating a backlash in their new cities.                                The Great Hunger took one million lives and sent a million-and-a-half overseas. It also permanently poisoned whatever  was left of Ireland's relationship with England. Irish hatred of England was most manifest a hundred years later when the Republic remained neutral in WWII. The almost million who left for America forever changed American politics and culture for the better, and led the way for waves of immigrants in the following 75 years. And America embarked on a policy of humanitarian generosity that survives in the 21st century.This book offers as fine a description of the famine and its consequences as any history or novel that I have ever seen. The definition of genocide is a 'deliberate' killing, so English indifference doesn't qualify. It should.