This is John Batchelor, speaking with Professor Tyler Anbinder.

His new book is Plentiful Country, the Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York.

What was a coffin ship?

There weren't that many of them, the professor tells us, but it scared everyone coming from Ireland,

scared everyone close to the docking of ships from Ireland.

Coffin ship, typhus. Professor explains.

Great potato famine.

It lasted a finite number of years, but it very much was appalled over New York.

Most of the people arrived in New York.

Coffin ships.

More of this later tonight.

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 died 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 steerage 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.

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