Grosse Ile: Canada’s Famine Memorial

Abstract

GROSSE ILE: CANADA’S FAMINE MEMORIAL MICHAEL QUIGLEY on Saint Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1996, Sheila Copps, deputy prime minister of Canada and minister of Canadian heritage, announced Canada’s recognition of the National Historic Site at Grosse Ile as “the Irish Memorial .” This memorial will henceforth commemorate the Irish tragedy in the quarantine station in 1847. The site’s focal points will be the mass graves of the Irish famine victims and the only hospital building remaining from 1847, a long wooden shed called the Lazaretto. Equally important, Grosse Ile will “pay homage to the welcome, generosity and devotion of the local population” who comforted the afflicted.1 Minister Copps’s declaration was the culmination, and vindication, of almost a century of efforts by Irish Canadians to ensure the acknowledgment and preservation of the sanctity of what is almost certainly the largest Great Famine mass grave site in the world. The approach to Grosse Ile is dominated by the 46-foot-tall Celtic Cross, erected by the Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1909. Standing on a rocky promontory on the highest point on the island, the base of the cross bears the following inscription, which is translated from the Irish: Children of the Gael died in their thousands on this island fleeing from the laws of foreign tyrants and an artificial famine in the years 1847–48. God’s blessing on them. May this monument be a token to their name and honour from the Gaels of America. God Save Ireland.2 GROSSE ILE: CANADA’S FAMINE MEMORIAL 20 1 Rt. Hon. Sheila Copps, deputy prime minister and minister of Canadian heritage, “Speaking Notes: Declaration of Grosse Ile and the Irish Memorial,” Québec, 17 March 1996, 3. 2 The Irish inscription on the panel on the eastern face of the cross reads: Cailleadh Clann na nGaedheal ina míltibh ar an Oileán so ar dteicheadh dhóibh ó dlíghthibh na dtíoránach ngallda agus ó ghorta tréarach isna bliadhantaibh 1847–48. Beannacht dílis Dé orra. Bíodh an leacht so i gcomhartha garma agus onóra dhóibh ó Ghaedhealaibh Ameriocá. Go saoraigh Dia Éire. Grosse Ile is a small island, barely three miles long and one mile across, situated midstream in the Saint Lawrence river about thirty miles downstream from Québec City. Much of the island is densely wooded with stands of oak, maple, pine, and birch; migrating ducks and geese rest on its south shore. A pretty place, it was a favorite picnic spot for officers in the Québec garrison in the early nineteenth century. Robert Whyte, who arrived at Grosse Ile in July 1847, called it “a fairy scene . . . the distant view of which was exceedingly beautiful.” But, he added, “this scene of natural beauty was sadly deformed by the dismal display of human suffering that it presented.”3 To the question Charles Orser posed recently—“can there be an archaeology of the Great Famine?”—Grosse Ile provides an affirmative, albeit limited, answer.4 At the western end of the island lies a broad meadow with a ridged surface, resembling nothing so much as the lazy beds, the old Irish ridge-and-trench manner of cultivating potatoes. Similar to the lazy beds, the ridges of Gross Ile were manmade, for they mark the mass graves where victims of the 1847 Irish famine were buried, “stacked like cordwood ,” as one observer noted.5 GROSSE ILE QUARANTINE STATION Chosen because it is isolated in mid-river but still close to Québec City, Grosse Ile was designated as a quarantine station for sea-borne traffic from 1832, and it continued to function in that capacity until 1937. The need for a quarantine station stemmed from well-founded fears in Canada of the cholera epidemic, which had swept westwards across Europe from India beginning in 1826. The Grosse Ile quarantine station was created as “the centre of an outer defence to prevent the disease reaching Quebec City.”6 GROSSE ILE: CANADA’S FAMINE MEMORIAL 21 3 Robert Whyte, The Ocean Plague (Boston: 1848), reissued as Robert Whyte’s 1847 Famine Ship Diary (Cork: Mercier Press, 1994), 62, 67. 4 Charles E. Orser, Jr...