Glyde Court, County Louth, above, ancestral home of Vere Foster; the house is now in ruins.

By 1847, there was no shortage of press reports and first-hand accounts of the horrors experienced by emigrants taking ship from England or Ireland to North America.  Despite this, Britain did little to enforce the provisions of the Passenger Act which delineated how much space each passenger was to be allotted, that ships carry lifeboats, and that a pound of food and 3 quarts of water per day be provided to each passenger.  As little influence as the authorities chose to exercise over British captains and crew, they did even less to keep American shipping companies in line.

In order to bring attention to the horrific conditions aboard some of the ‘coffin ships’ where mortality rates were 20% or more, a group of wealthy and/or well connected booked passage along with the starving masses.  One of these men is profiled below.

With 933 others, Vere Foster boarded the USS Washington in October, 1850, bound for New York.  (He was to make 3 such voyages).  The ship was owned by the Black Star Line, notorious for putting to sea a number of  miserably run packets ships  – the William Rathbone and the Atlas among them.  Foster, an Irishman and graduate of Eton and Oxford, had never known want.  His family were landed gentry, his father a diplomat.  Yet, Foster made helping the less fortunate of his homeland his life’s work.

While on board the Washington, Foster kept a record of how the passengers were starved and brutalized.   When he petitioned the captain on their behalf, he was beaten but managed to wrest some food for his fellow passengers.  At the journey’s end, 130 of the Washington’s passengers put their name to a written indictment of the captain which Foster forwarded to a friend who raised the matter in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.  No action was taken against captain or crew, but in time the laws changed, perhaps due in part to men like Foster.  He went on to write a pamphlet called the Penny Emigrant Guide in which he detailed what emigrants should expect aboard ship and how they should prepare for an Atlantic voyage.

Vere Foster died in Belfast at the age of 81.  He enjoyed considerable success as a drawing master, but it is for his philanthropy – supporting the Irish education system, underwriting the passage of many emigrants to North America, and experiencing first-hand the privations of a crossing – that he is most remembered.