This is a CBSI on the World. I'm John Bachelor sitting with Professor Tyler

Ann Binder. The book is plentiful country, the Great Potato Famine, and the Making of Irish New York.

The Irish, the famine Irish have taken the great risk of an ocean voyage to reach to America

rather than stay in Ireland where they might starve to death.

They are from all parts of Ireland and they're coming to an unknown land.

Professor, the trip itself was a test of one's not just endurance and patience, given that

you were packed together in steerage or on the deck of a very small ship.

But at the same time, there were, you were prey, suddenly prey to all the diseases that

can come to you if you're malnourished so there was a phenomenon known as the coffin ships what were those Tyler?

So the coffin ships, that term refers to ships that came from Ireland to North America during the famine on which disease spread rapidly and large numbers of the immigrants

before they even made it to America.

There were diseases like cholera, which was a waterborne illness,

or typhus, which is a disease that you got that was spread by body

lice on the ships and when you're packed in stairs together, you're sharing beds with multiple people,

often strangers, and so it was easy to get

something like typhus, which was spread by lice

jumping from one closely packed body to another.

Now, only a tiny fraction of the famine immigrants

would have come on coffin ships

because there weren't that many of them.

And once it became clear what was happening on them new regulations were put in place to prevent such huge disease on ships but still that the the story of the coffin ships scarred so many of the potential immigrants

and made them very scared to come to America and very fearful that they might die on the voyage.

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