Have you ever felt like escaping to your own desert island?

Jane Gaskin did exactly that, trading in the family home to begin a new life in the

tropics.

But she soon discovers that Paradise has its secrets.

I'm Alice Levine, and this is the price of Paradise,

the island dream that ends in kidnap, corruption, and murder. Wish you were here.

Follow the price of Paradise Now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is John Bachelor, an excerpt from a conversation with the authors Tyler Anbinder, his new book, The Professor's New Book,

Plentiful Country, The Great Potato Famine and The Making of Irish New York.

It is a wonderful saga and herein lies one of the details it's needed to clarify.

The coffin ships, what were they? What did they mean for the Irish arriving, the Irish

who were thinking about traveling to America fleeing the potato famine? The coffin ships of 1847 to 1850 roughly.

So the coffin ships, that term refers to ships that came from Ireland to North America during the famine on which a 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. 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.

...