![]() More than 17,300 of them died, including 5,000 who remain buried in mass unmarked graves on Grosse Isle. As months trudged along, 100,000 Irish immigrants arrived in British North America. Boats couldn’t unload for days at a time, effectively jailing thousands without food, water or medical attention. ![]() ![]() “I never contemplated the possibility of every vessel arriving with fever,” Douglas confided in a letter to London. Grosse Isle was set up as a quarantine island, but the sheer volume of people rendered that purpose absurd. This was how the United Kingdom decided to combat the Great Famine of Ireland: cast off the poorest to British North America. But by May 20, 1847, the transatlantic fleet had off-loaded 12,519 Irish emigrants, all of them sick, poor, starved and hopeless. When the boats started landing, Douglas upped it to 250. Lawrence River was equipped with just 200 hospital beds. Tragedy did not faze the doctor-you don’t spend a decade as the medical superintendent of a Victorian colony’s quarantine island without digging a few graves-but the tiny speck in the middle of Quebec’s St. By the time the 30th boat arrived on the shores of Grosse Isle, an island smaller than eight square kilometres, George Mellis Douglas knew the deaths were inevitable. ![]()
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