Voyage of Mercy by Stephen Puleo

Author:Stephen Puleo
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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Breathless, Forbes and Father Mathew dashed into a Cork neighborhood store and made their way to the back door to get away from the starving crowd that had surrounded them outside the front entrance, begging for food. It was near the end of their depressing walk through Cork and, hoping to provide some relief to the poor but perhaps not yet understanding their desperation, Forbes had distributed a few pieces of silver that he had brought from home. Within minutes, the throng swelled and aggressively pressed in on the two men, dozens of voices pleading and clamoring for help. Soon the money was gone and Mathew and Forbes feared they would be crushed. The doorway of the store offered their only escape from a once-hopeful crowd whose desperation had transformed it into a mob.

For a stunned Robert Bennet Forbes, the incident was the culmination of a day that had shaken the well-traveled man deeply. He had seen poverty and hopelessness in other parts of the world, but nothing like this. He had read about the dire situation in Ireland and perhaps imagined the horror as the Jamestown plowed through the Atlantic waves toward Ireland—but there was simply no way to prepare for the horror he encountered.

“I saw enough in five minutes to horrify me,” he wrote later, “hovels crowded with the sick and dying—some called for water … and others for a dying blessing.” At one point, he and Mathew ventured off a main street into an alley, which he later described as “not the Valley of the Shadow of Death” but the “valley of death and pestilence itself.” Forbes was aghast that “every street corner is filled with pale, careworn creatures, the weak leading the weaker; women assail you at every turn with famished babies imploring alms.” Father Mathew, like Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Present, next led Forbes to a Cork soup kitchen, where he witnessed a scene that staggered him: “Hundreds of spectres stood without, begging for some of the soup which I can readily conceive would be refused by well-bred pigs in America,” he wrote.

Like others who visited Ireland at that time, Forbes kept the worst visages of the famine to himself. He noted that he could easily expound upon his descriptions of the “horrible tales of suffering” but the facts were “too revolting to human nature to be recorded on paper.” One fact he was clear on: the newspapers were not exaggerating their stories of the famine. If anything, they were understating the Great Hunger’s disastrous impact on Irish society for fear of offending or disgusting their readers.

“You will find the truth” in newspapers, Forbes wrote soberly, but “not the whole truth.”

Forbes also knew that Mathew had spared him from viewing the worst “haunts of misery”—the urban cellars and dark, fetid apartments in which entire families perished. What he had seen on the streets of Cork today are “nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to what I might see had I the courage to go with Rev.

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