Canada’s sadly neglected equivalent of Ellis Island
story and photography by Darcy Rhyno
Imagine it’s 1847—Black ’47, as it’s become known. Because of a potato blight killing crops year after year, the great potato famine is raging in Ireland. Hundreds of thousands are starving to death. Your English landlord wants to turn your tenant farm into pasture for sheep. He raises your rent until you and your family have no choice but to accept his offer of passage to the British colony of New Brunswick so he can be rid of you once and for all.
Once aboard, you discover why fare is cheap—provisions are sparse, the ship is barely seaworthy and it’s built to hold as many Irish refugees as possible, equipped with an extra deck to double the occupancy. A bucket is your toilet, seawater your bath. Huddled together in the dark, the stench of seasickness fills the dank air. During your six weeks at sea, typhus sweeps through the ship. Lice and rats are more common than people. You watch as a quarter of your fellow passengers—among them, one of your children—die slow, agonizing deaths, their bodies dumped overboard to the sharks that follow in your wake. Those left alive share in the dark humour of nicknaming tubs like this “the coffin ships.”
At last, someone shouts that land is in sight. It’s the port of Saint John, christened more than two centuries ago by Samuel de Champlain for the saint’s day on which he arrived. Ships crowd the busy port—but you will not be landing there. Instead, you and what’s left of your family are forced to disembark on the small 23-acre Partridge Island at the mouth of the harbour, where a quarantine station awaits your ship, crowded with malnourished, diseased and pest infested passengers. Still, you kiss the ground in gratitude that you have survived this harrowing voyage. Then it’s off to the quarantine station.
The kerosene shower burns your skin. The hot water shower that follows burns a second time, but somehow brings relief. Your ragged clothes are steam cleaned and returned. There is a hospital on the tiny island within sight of freedom, but you and your remaining family are forced into a military tent where you watch another of your children succumb to the typhus epidemic that has now spread to the city. The body of your beloved is quickly buried along with hundreds of others in one of the island’s six burial sites that were eventually established in hopes of stemming the spread of disease.
Through some miracle, you, your spouse and remaining children survive the epidemic and are permitted passage to the city of Saint John, where you survive by begging until one of you lands a job at one of the many lumber mills lining the shores. As you begin rebuilding your life, you learn that your captain is one of 13 who landed in Saint John to be convicted of overcrowding and starving his passengers in the name of profit.
A North American first
This imagined voyage wouldn’t have been unusual for the more than 30,000 Irish refugees who made their way to the British colonial city of Saint John in the toughest famine years of 1845 to 1847, many via Partridge Island. This was the height of Irish immigration to Saint John, but in the half a century from 1815 to Confederation in 1867, more than 150,000 arrived through the city. Little wonder Partridge Island earned the nickname the Emerald Isle, echoing Ireland’s own.
Established in 1785, Partridge Island’s quarantine station was North America’s first, nearly a century before New York’s famous Ellis Island and the same year Saint John became the first city to incorporate in what would become Canada. In 1974, the Partridge Island Quarantine Station was designated a national historic site.
“Anybody who has ever set foot on it feels that heavy historical presence,” says Marijke Blok, the secretary of the Irish Canadian Cultural Association, Saint John chapter and the chair of the defunct Partridge Island committee. “Those people endured such hardship crossing the ocean piled in like baggage and got so close—one kilometre from Saint John. For those Irish people, this was the promised land. It breaks my heart every time I think about it.”
Throughout much of the 19th century, over half the city’s population was Irish, leading to its claim as Canada’s most Irish city. After the partitioning of the British colony of Nova Scotia in 1784, New Brunswick was originally named New Ireland with the capital to be Saint John. Irish immigrants helped build the city and spread out across the province. Even today, one fifth or more than 150,000 of New Brunswick’s population claims Irish heritage.
Marijke Blok talks about efforts over the years to create interpretive infrastructure on the island. “It’s a scaled down version of Ellis Island, a real slice of Canadian history. It could be as well known as Pier 21.” In 1982, local historian Harold Wright led efforts to offer tours to the island. In 1988, he and a new charitable organization opened a museum there. Both the museum and the tours lasted until 1995.
A few years ago, then-federal finance minister Jim Flaherty allocated $250,000 for a feasibility study to improve the breakwater into a road. “His family had come through there,” says Blok. Neither this nor any other efforts led to permanent development of the island.
Photo Credit: Darcy Rhyno
Walking Partridge Island
On a recent kayak trip to Partridge Island, I witnessed how its role as a quarantine station and gateway for Irish refugees is just the beginning of its many historical roles, the remains of which now lie in ruins. Tiny, uninhabited Partridge Island is a largely undiscovered, under-celebrated and shockingly unprotected historical treasure chest of Canadian, European and even global significance.
Professional firefighter Pete Lavigne and retired technical salesman Jim Donahue of River Bay Adventures are my guides. On the leisurely hour-long paddle to the island on an unusually calm summer day for the Bay of Fundy, Donahue talks about his own Irish roots. “What I know is we came from County Cork. Relatives came over in the mid 1800s—Kean, Caine, Donahue and O’Neil.” He says when his great-grandfather arrived, he made his signature with an X. There’s a good chance Jim’s great-grandfather arrived on this continent through Partridge Island, though no one can be sure.
Regardless, Jim thinks of himself as Irish through and through. “My dad was very involved with the Irish Cultural Association in town. As a kid, we’d get all dressed up and I would go with my parents to all these events. I’m starting to become involved again.”
Just the week before, Jim and his wife made a quick trip—his first—to Ireland. “We’d been threatening to go to Ireland for a beer for the last five years. We finally just jumped on a plane to Dublin.” For three days, they soaked up the city’s history. “The next time we go over, we’ll go out into the green, as we say.”
We reach the pull-out location, the twisted metal and jumbled concrete of an old wharf, Jim and Pete take great pains to land safely, pointing out dangers like the tip of a metal ladder jutting above the surface. After securing the kayaks, we follow an overgrown road past foundations filled with shrubs and debris up a hill to the lighthouse, the only intact and functioning structure on the island. Looking back to the city and the mouth of the river, I recall the local indigenous creation myth of the island called Quak’m’kagan’ik in Mi’kmaq. The word means “piece cut out,” a dynamic description of how the great god Glooscap smashed a dam he’d built at the reversing rapids, setting adrift a chunk of land carried by the current to the mouth of the Saint John River, also known as the Wolastoq.
While there are no signs today of an Indigenous presence on the island, there’s plenty of European and Canadian history. A short walk away, a four-storey concrete cube of a building is painted with graffiti and flying a Canadian flag. It’s a radar observation post left over from World War II. When we reach it, we discover its many rooms burnt out by vandals and littered with trash. As we wander the island from site to site, we discover that all the structures are in a similar or worse state. All but one.
From the roof of this cube, we can see rising from a tangle of overgrowth next to a second concrete shell—a battery observation post of the same vintage—is a 40-foot tall Celtic cross. We make our way there to find a plaque at its base, which reads, “This monument was erected in memory of more than 2,000 Irish immigrants who died of typhus fever, contracted on shipboard, during the voyage from Ireland, in the famine year 1847, and of whom 600 were buried in this island.”
When I ask my guides where this mass grave might be, they are unsure, but tell me there is a burial site further on. I read the rest of the inscription. “This cross also commemorates the devotion and sacrifice of Dr. Patrick Collins, who, after ministering to the victims of the disease, himself contracted it and died.”
Jim explains that Collins, who had emigrated from County Cork, Ireland only 10 years previously, is considered a great hero of Saint John. During the typhus epidemic, his body was the only one allowed to be buried off island, and it was sealed in a lead-lined coffin. Some 4,000 people marched in his funeral procession, the largest in the city’s history. A plaque at St. Peter’s Church where he’s buried calls him, “A martyr to his duty.”
Finally, at the bottom of the plaque are the words, “Designed and erected by George McArthur 1927.”
“He’s buried right there,” says Jim. I turn to see a stone embedded in the ground. Pulling away the weeds, I read the headstone of the only individually-marked grave on the island. “George McArthur / Nov. 1, 1865—Oct. 4, 1932.”
While the site of the Celtic cross on Partridge Island has been neglected over the years, for the past 92 it has stood at the entrance to the harbour, visible from the city, as a reminder of the life and death struggle faced by the tens of thousands of refugees who arrived here seeking and receiving assistance, and for the many who arrived too late and perished.
Further on, we explore more ruins from the world wars—gun mounts, barracks, searchlight stations, air vents that indicate a network of tunnels deep beneath us. We pass a plaque lying on the ground, pried by vandals from its granite perch, that commemorates the installation of the world’s first steam fog horn in 1859. There isn’t much left to indicate the location of hospitals, schools and homes from the quarantine station years.
At last, we arrive at the cliff edge burial site. After the signs of destruction, we’ve seen all over the island, it’s a surprise to see the weather-worn wooden picket fences standing on this grassy promontory. White roses bloom at the edges. A small, rusting cross fashioned from metal pipe marks one of three fenced areas. The other two contain a single marker each of polished granite, one indicating a Protestant burial site, the other Jewish.
Making my way from marker to marker, I step on a fourth, which indicates where unidentified 19th century remains were reinterred here in 1985. Jim explains that over the years, erosion has exposed the bones of those who never made it to the mainland.
Remnants of war
Back on the mainland, I make two final stops in the pursuit of Partridge Island’s history. The first is at Carleton Martello Tower National Historic Site, perched atop a cliff overlooking the island. Kurt Peacock, site lead for this National Historic Site, stands next to the tower, looking over the west end of the city to the long breakwater that links the mainland to Partridge Island. The Celtic Cross and the lighthouse are clearly visible.
Built for the War of 1812, the Martello tower was often linked with the military operations on the island in times of war. The strange concrete structure thrusting upwards from the stone Martello tower is itself a Second World War leftover, the fire command post, as in “ready, aim, fire.” The breakwater between us and the island was built during the war because, says Peacock, “They were concerned that submarines could take a shortcut behind the island.”
“Certainly, any west side teenager has tried to cross to the island. It’s a rite of passage,” says Peacock. I’m reminded of the four people we spotted earlier from the kayaks, scrambling carefully over the boulders that cap the breakwater. “You’re exhausted by the time you make it across the breakwater. It’s a fantastic island to explore. I’m glad to see more public access with the kayak tours.”
My last stop is at the seaward tip of what’s called uptown Saint John. This is where a half-scale replica of the Partridge Island Celtic cross stands in a small park, surrounded by interpretive panels that tell the history of the island as a sign of hope for mariners, refugees and, in times of war, the city it served to protect. A block of polished granite is engraved with the same words as on the plaque at the base of the Partridge Island cross.
Referring to the island before me, one of the panels includes the lines, “Many of our ancestors made their start in the New World on its rocky shores...an estimated three million migrants and mariners passed through before it closed in 1941.”
Reading this beneath the replica cross, something Kurt Peacock said rings true. “It’s a story that deserves to be told. This island has importance not just to the city and province, but to the country.”