We expect to find alternate spellings
of our ancestors' names in census and other records. Lately however,
I was startled to find another set of records that may have much more
wrong than a simple, unintentional name misspelling. I recently read
“Going to America” by Terry Coleman, which is available on
www.Ancestry.com. This book
describes emigration from Britain to North America largely from
1840-1860, a period that encompasses the Great Irish Potato famine.
In large part due to the famine, the number of people fleeing Great
Britain spiked in the early 1850s.
The problem, as outlined in the book,
was that passenger lists were sometimes falsified. According to the
laws at the time, the number of passengers allowed on a ship was
determined by its size. Unfortunately for the emigrants,
unscrupulous passenger brokers and ships' masters often colluded to
skirt these regulations. Brokers customarily received a commission
for berths sold, but sometimes a broker chartered an entire ship in
which case he “packed into that space as many passengers as the law
allowed, or really, as many as he could get away with.” [1]
Government officials were supposed to
inspect ships prior to departure to ensure they carried no more than
the allowable number of passengers and also to check that sufficient
supplies of food and water were on board. However, too many ships,
often all leaving on the same tide, and too few inspectors meant that
regulations were often meaningless. In case an emigration official
did attempt to inspect a ship there were two common ways in which
brokers and ships' captains circumvented the Passenger Acts. One was
to hide emigrants on board until the inspector left the ship.
Another trick was to state that some passengers were children, even
when they were not. This strategy was effective because during these
years children were allotted one half to two-thirds of the space of
an adult. If more passages were sold than space allowed, the ages
were simply altered to meet regulations. Among evidence cited by
Coleman are statements made by a steward in a complaint against the
Harnden shipping company. “The steward saw a decrepit woman of
about sixty who said her name was Eliza O'Neil. On the list she had
been put down as under fourteen. He asked Harnden's man if he
considered her a child, and the man said to say nothing about it and
offered the steward a sovereign. Tansley [the steward] said this was
one instance out of many. One family called Bateman was put down as
numbering four adults, and as entitled to rations for only four
adults, but in fact there were thirteen of them, the youngest about
twelve years old, and all had paid full fare.” [1]
To make matters worse, there were too
many ships leaving at once and too few officials to inspect them. In
1847 when twice as many emigrants left Great Britain (258,000) as in
any single year since at least 1835 the chief emigration officer at
Liverpool (the principal port of departure) had only one assistant to
account for the majority of the emigrants. By 1850 he had two
assistants, but still “had to cope with more than fifteen times as
many emigrants as his colleagues at London.” [1] By 1852, the peak
year for emigration from Britain (at least between 1835-1860),
369,000 emigrants left the nation, most of them through Liverpool.
[1] Complicating attempts to account for passengers, emigration was
not evenly distributed throughout the year. Traveling to North
America during the winter was dangerous due to bad weather and
icebergs in the shipping lanes. Those sailing to Canada were forced
to wait for the St. Lawrence river to thaw, which often didn't occur
until at least April. As a result, most trans-Atlantic travel
occurred during the warmer months. So, not only were two or three
emigration officers in Liverpool charged with enforcing regulations
on ships carrying the majority of the emigrants who left Britain, the
bulk of them left, conservatively, during a seven to eight month
period.
Based on statements and reports of the
chief emigration officers at Liverpool “in the years 1847 to 1851
the Passenger Acts had been enforced at Liverpool only upon vessels
sailing to British North America [Canada], that is to say, on one
vessel in thirteen. At by far the most important British emigration
port, vessels bound for the United States had done as they pleased.
The Passenger Acts had been enforced only if the ships' masters had
chosen to enforce them themselves. Neither food nor water had been
inspected, and the passengers had not been counted.” [1] Coleman
goes on to write “it also follows that the British government
figures for emigration from Liverpool for these years, apparently so
precisely recorded, are plainly false. They are nothing more than
the adding up of the masters' own statements. There is no saying how
inaccurate they are. The Blanche was carrying eighty-six
passengers in excess of her lawful complement of 386. [when
investigated in New Orleans in 1851] . . . It does seem reasonable to
suppose that in the years from 1846 to 1851 ships out of Liverpool
bound for the United States may have carried 10 percent more
passengers than they were allowed. After 1851 the new emigrant
officers at Liverpool. . . tried to be more exact, but even then they
cannot have succeeded to the letter. . . there were still only four
officers, and if eight vessels often left on one tide, they could not
possibly have done their duty.” [1]
One might imagine it should have been a
simple process for the government emigration officials to count
passengers as they boarded. This was all but impossible even had
ships left at different times. Emigration from Liverpool during this
period was, in a word, chaotic. The chief emigration officer at
Liverpool from 1845-1851 testified before a 1851 parliamentary
committee that “he could not count the passengers, because there
was no possibility of getting them together.” [1] Ships' captains
didn't want to be bothered with emigrants until all cargo was stowed
and then they apparently wanted to depart immediately. Passengers
had to literally scramble aboard while the ship was pulling away from
the dock. A medical officer stationed at Liverpool described the
scene before the 1851 committee. “[Question] And then he [the
captain] proceeds to move his vessel out of the dock before the
people have time to get onboard? – [Answer] Very often when she
gets to the entrance to the dock where it is very narrow, she is
detained there for a short time while other vessels are going out,
and during that time the passengers are scrambling in; and I have
seen 500 or 600 men, women, and children in a state of the greatest
confusion, and their screams are fearful.” [1] “'In consequence
of which we sometimes have dreadful scenes; sometimes the passengers
have to watch their opportunity, and when the ship gets near the
entrance to the dock you may see men, women, and children clambering
up the sides of the ship.' Frequently people fell into the water and
occasionally they drowned.” [1]
The bottom line is that between the
monetary incentive to carry more passengers than allowed, too few
inspectors, too many ships sailing at once and a record number of
emigrants the accuracy of ships' passenger lists suffered. The
manifests seem to be more about appearing to comply with regulations
than about accurately tabulating the passengers. Unfortunately, the
emigrants paid the price for this skulduggery in overcrowded
conditions and inadequate supplies.
Clearly ship masters also didn't care
about the plight of genealogists trying to catch their ancestors
crossing the pond. I suspect, but don't quote me on this, that the
closer we approach the present day, the more reliable passenger lists
become. The accuracy of these lists probably also depends on the
port of departure, the number of emigrants passing through and the
number of inspectors. I would like to think that in Germany for
example, passenger lists were more reliable. I can confirm the
stereotypical German attention to rules. When I lived there, no one,
and I do mean no one, even crossed the street if the light at the
crosswalk was red.
So, if you have ancestors who you
believe emigrated from Great Britain between 1840 and 1860 it is
important to keep the above information in mind. You may or may not
find your relatives in a passenger list. Even if they are there, you
might not recognize them if their ages were altered. While women
enjoy being thought of as younger than they really are, I'm sure the
emigrants would have preferred having the allotted space and supplies
instead.
1. Coleman, Terry. Going to America.
1972. Pantheon Books. New York.
