The statements in the public journals about the effects of the famine in and about Skibbereen were so new and appalling that many people thought them greatly exaggerated. Finding this feeling to exist, and perhaps to some extent sharing in it, Mr. Cummins, a magistrate of Cork, proceeded to Skibbereen, to examine for himself the state of things there. He was not only convinced but horrified. He published the result of his visit in a letter to the Duke of Wellington, in which he begged that exalted personage to call the Queen's attention to the fearful sufferings of her people. Convinced that he was destined at least, to witness scenes of real hunger and starvation, Mr. Cummins informs us that he took with him as much bread as five men could carry. He began his inquiries at a place called South Reen, in the parish of Myross, near Skibbereen.[190] Being arrived at the spot, he was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. There was no external appearance of life—silence reigned around. On entering some of the cabins he soon discovered the cause. He was at once confronted with specimens of misery, which, he says, no tongue or pen could give the slightest idea of. In the first cabin he entered he found six famished, ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, huddled in a corner on a little filthy straw, their sole covering being what seemed a piece of ragged horsecloth; their miserable shriveled limbs were hanging about as if they did not belong to their bodies. He approached them in breathless horror, and found by a slow whining moan that they were alive—four children, a woman, and what had once been a man—all in fever. Mr. Cummins met other cases as fearful, more especially one similar to that described by the writer quoted above, where a corpse was lying amongst the surviving members of the family, sharing their straw bed and their scanty covering.
At a meeting of the Killarney Relief Committee, the Earl of Kenmare being in the chair, the parish priest, the Rev. B. O'Connor, made a statement, which, except as an illustration of the unprecedented misery to which the people had sunk, I would hesitate to reproduce. He said: "A man employed on the public works became sick. His wife had an infant at her breast. His son, who was fifteen years of age, was put in his place upon the works. The infant at the mother's breast," said the rev. gentleman, amid the sensation of the meeting, "had to be removed, in order that this boy might receive sustenance from his mother, to enable him to remain at work." Another poor woman, the mother of eight children, when dying of want, was attended by the Rev. Mr. O'Connor. She made her last request to him in these words: "O Father O'Connor, won't you interfere to have my husband get work, before the children die."
"In December, 1846, matters seemed to have come to a climax, and on the evening of the 24th [Christmas Eve] I witnessed a scene which scarcely admits of description. On that day a board was held at the Workhouse, for the admittance of paupers. The claims of the applicants were, in many cases, inquired into, but after some time the applicants became so numerous, that any attempt to investigate the different cases was quite useless, and an order was then given by the members of the Board present, to admit all paupers, and at least to give them shelter, as but little food was to be had. I shall never forget the scene which I that night witnessed: mothers striving, by the heat of their own persons, to preserve the lives of their little ones; women stretching out their fleshless arms, imploring for food and shelter; old men tottering to the destination where they were to receive shelter. The odour from the clothes and persons of those poor people was dreadfully offensive, and the absence of active complaints clearly showed that in many the hope of restoration was not to be expected. On my visiting this scene next morning, eleven human beings were dead."[191]
Some twenty years after the famine-scourge had passed away, and over two millions of the Irish people with it, I visited Skibbereen. Approaching the town from the Cork side, it looks rather an important place. It is the seat of the Catholic bishop of Ross, and attention is immediately arrested by a group of fine ecclesiastical buildings, on an elevated plateau to the left, just beside the road, or street, I should rather say, for those buildings are the beginning of the town; they consist of a cathedral and a convent, with very commodious schools, and a pretty gothic chapel. On the other side of the way is the schoolhouse, in shade of which the military were concealed on the day the Caharagh labourers invaded Skibbereen. A short distance beyond the town, the wooded hill of Knockomagh, rising to a considerable height, overhangs Lough Hyne, one of the most beautiful spots in Ireland. Some miles to the westward lies the pretty island of Sherkin, which with Tullough to the east, makes the charming little bay of Baltimore completely landlocked. Out in front of all, like a giant sentinel, stands the island of Cape Clear, breasting with its defiant strength that vast ocean whose waves foam around it, lashing its shores, and rushing up its crannied bluffs, still and for ever to be flung back in shattered spray by those bold and rocky headlands. The town of Skibbereen consists chiefly of one long main street, divided into several, by different names. This street is like a horse-shoe, or rather a boomerang, in shape. Coming to the curve and turning up the second half of the boomerang, we are almost immediately in Bridge-street, a name well known in the famine time; not for anything very peculiar to itself, but because it leads directly to the suburb known as Bridgetown, in which the poorest inhabitants resided, and where the famine revelled—hideous, appalling, and triumphant. Bridgetown is changed now. In 1846 it contained a large population, being not much less than half a mile in length, with a row of thatched houses on each side; when the Famine slaughtered the population, those houses were left tenantless in great numbers, and there being none to reoccupy them, they fell into ruins and were never rebuilt. Hence instead of a continuous line of dwellings at either side, as of old, Bridgetown now presents only detached blocks of three or four or half-a-dozen cabins here and there. Coming towards the end of it, by a gradual ascent, I accosted a man who was standing at the door of his humble dwelling: "I suppose you are old enough," I said to him, "to remember the great Famine?" "Oh! indeed I am, sir," he replied, with an expressive shake of his head. "Were there more people in Bridgetown and Skibbereen at that time than now?" "Ay, indeed," he replied, "I suppose more than twice as many." "And where did they all live—I see no houses where they could have lived?" "God bless you, sure Bridgetown was twice as big that time as it is now; the half of it was knocked or fell down, when there were no people to live in the houses. Besides, great numbers lived out in the country, all round about here. Come here," he said, earnestly; and we ascended the road a little space. "Do you see all that country, sir?" and he pointed towards the north and west of the town. "I do." "Well, it was all belonging to farmers, and it was full of farmers' houses before the famine; now you see there are only a couple of gentlemen's places on the whole of it. The poor all died, and of course their houses were thrown down." "And where were they all buried," I enquired. "Well, sir," he replied, "some of them were buried in the old chapel yard, near the windmill; a power of them were buried in Abbeystrowry, just out there a bit, where you are going to, but—" he suddenly added, as if correcting himself—"sure they were buried everywhere—at the Workhouse over—in the cabins where they died—everywhere; there was no way, you see, to bring them all to Abbeystrowry, but still there were a power of them, sure enough, brought to it."
My informant was quite right about my going to Abbeystrowry. I had already enquired the way to it, and had learned that it was half-a-mile or so beyond Bridgetown. I wished my interesting informant good evening, and pursued my walk. Coming to the highest point of the road beyond Bridgetown, a very charming landscape opened before me, made up of the Valley of the Ilen and the agreeably undulating country beyond it. The river at this place is wide and shallow; but, judging from the noble bridge by which it is spanned, it must be sometimes greatly swollen. The evening was bright and pleasant; the sun had gone far westward, and the effect of his light, as it played on the scarcely rippled water, and shone through the high empty arches of the bridge, standing like open gateways in the shallow stream, made me pause for a moment, to take in the whole scene. It was during this time that I discovered, immediately beyond the river, the object of greatest interest to me—the object, in fact, of my journey—the churchyard of Abbeystrowry. There was the spot in which a generation of the people of Skibbereen was buried in a year and a half! Those places in which poor humanity is laid to rest when life's work is done have been always regarded as holy ground; cities of the dead, solemn and suggestive. But this was more; in its lonely seclusion, in its dark and terrible history, it was exciting in its impressiveness. In the still sunlit evening, wooed to rest, one could imagine, by the gentle murmurs of the Ilen, its little clump of gnarled trees grouped around its scanty ruin was a picture of such complete repose as to make the most thoughtless reflective. I entered. Immediately inside the gate, a little to the right, are those monster graves called by the people "the pits," into which the dead were thrown coffinless in hundreds, without mourning or ceremony—hurried away by stealth, frequently at the dead of night, to elude observation, and to enable the survivors to attend the public works next day, and thus prolong for awhile their unequal contest with all-conquering Famine. A difficulty arose in my mind with regard to the manner of interment in those pits. Great numbers, I knew, were interred in each of them; for which reason they must have been kept open a considerable time. Yet, surely, I reflected, something resembling interment must have taken place on the arrival of each corpse, especially as it was coffinless. The contrivance, as I afterwards learned, was simple enough. A little sawdust was sprinkled over each corpse, on being laid in the pit, which was thus kept open until it had received its full complement of tenants.
To trace one's steps, slowly and respectfully, among the graves of those who have reached the goal of life in the ordinary course, fills one with holy warnings; to stand beside the monument raised on the battle-field to the brave men who fell there, calls up heroic echoes in the heart, but here there is no room for sentiment; here, in humiliation and sorrow, not unmixed with indignation, one is driven to exclaim:—
O God! that bread should be so dear,
And human flesh so cheap.
Although thus cast down by earthly feelings, divine Faith raises one up again. Divine Faith! the noblest and brightest, and holiest gift of God to man; always teaching us to look heavenward—Excelsior in its theme for ever. And who can doubt but the God of all consolation and mercy received the souls of his famine-slain poor into that kingdom of glory where He dwells, and which He had purchased for them at so great a price. Even in their imperfections and sins, they were like to Him in many ways; they were poor, they were despised, they had not whereon to lay their head; they were long-suffering, too; in the deepest pangs which they had suffered from hunger and burning thirst (the last and most terrible effect of hunger), they cursed not, they reviled not; they only yearned for the consolations of their holy religion, and looked hopefully to Him for a better world. It is one of the sweetest consolations taught us by holy Faith that the bones now withered and nameless in those famine pits, where they were laid in their shroudless misery, shall one day, touched by His Almighty power, be reunited to those happy souls, in a union that can know no end, and can feel no sorrow.