St. Brigid’s Day and the Coming of Spring

The first day of February marks the feast of Imbolc in the pre-Christian Celtic calendar in Ireland. Midway between the winter and spring solstices it heralds the traditional start of spring, a season of rebirth and fertility as Nature slowly wakes from her long deep slumber. Since Christian times in the fifth century, it also marks the feast of St. Brigid of Kildare, long observed by the weaving of a Brigid’s Cross from fresh rushes. These woven crosses adorn many Irish doorways invoking the saint’s blessings on the home. 

            With the coming of Christianity to Ireland, the Church often integrated pagan customs and beliefs into the Christian practices. St. Brigid, as we know her today, is likely a melding of that holy woman with an earlier Celtic fertility goddess, Brid, or Brigid, said to be the patron of healers, smiths, and poets. A daughter of the chief god Dagda, the pagan Brigid was a goddess of the mythical tribe Tuatha Dé Danann, an underground people often associated with the Sidhe, or fairy folk in Irish tradition. 

            And so as the cycle of the seasons comes round once more, spring has come early again to Ireland. The snowdrops and crocuses are up, and the birches and whitethorns, hazel, oak, and ash will soon come into leaf. Here in America, what does it matter that the groundhog might see its shadow or not in the early days of February? As inveterate New Yorkers will know, we still have six more weeks of winter before us here. Yet, in the darkness of the bleak midwinter, the days grow perceptibly longer and the daffodils peek out from beneath the melting snows. Within the soil, seeds are coming to life. Soon enough the snowdrops and crocuses and buds on the trees will start to sprout here too. There is hope of brighter days ahead, as the Brigid’s Cross above the doorway reminds us.

Of Hope and Despair: Gross Île, Canada's Irish Famine Memorial

   

In the early months of 1847, the authorities in Quebec braced for an influx of immigrants fleeing the cholera epidemic that was raging in Europe. They expected 12,000 arrivals, mostly refugees of what would come to be known as “Black ’47,” the worst year of the Irish Famine. Over 100,000 arrived. The medical inspection facility and quarantine station on Gross Île in the St. Lawrence River were woefully unprepared. 

Opened in 1832 to treat immigrants from a cholera epidemic that had struck Europe the previous year, Gross Île (pronounced Gross Eel, meaning Large Island) is an island in the St. Lawrence River near the village of Saint-Antoine-de-I’Isle-aux Grues, Quebec, just under thirty miles upriver from Quebec City. Gross Île, three miles long and one mile wide, was to serve as a waystation where immigrants to Canada would undergo a health inspection before proceeding downriver to Quebec City or Montreal. The sick were quarantined on Gross Île. 

According to British historian Cecil Woodham-Smith, in The Great Hunger, her 1962 account of the Great Famine in Ireland, Dr. George Douglas, the medical officer on Gross Île, had requested £3,000 to prepare the facilities to accommodate the anticipated throng of immigrants. He was given about £300 by the British authorities in charge of the Canadian government. (Canada would not become a self-governing dominion within the British Empire until 1867, twenty years later.) 

As the ice on the St. Lawrence was late to thaw in the spring of 1847, the first of the immigrant ships did not arrive at Gross Île until the middle of May. By the end of that month, Woodham-Smith tells us, forty ships were at anchor in the St. Lawrence stretching for two miles waiting to be processed. The hospital facilities at the immigration depot were overcrowded, and onboard the vessels at anchor, typhus, known as “ships fever,” was rampant. With nowhere to inspect them on the island, healthy passengers were ordered to quarantine aboard ship for fifteen days after the sick were removed. But in the cramped confines and fetid air of the ships, thousands were infected by typhus and never made it to land alive.

By the first week of June, 25,000 immigrants were quarantined on Gross Île and on ships  at anchor. By the end of July quarantine had become so untenable that Dr. Douglas permitted healthy immigrants to be admitted to Canada after a mere cursory check by a doctor onboard the deck of each ship. Some who appeared healthy travelled to Quebec City, but most were shipped downriver by steamer to Montreal. Others were carried by barge on the St. Lawrence to other Canadian ports. 

Authorities estimate that over 3,000 immigrants died on Gross Île in 1847, most of them fleeing the famine in Ireland. Over 5,000 are buried in the Irish cemetery there, many of whom died abord the ships. It is the largest graveyard for refugees of the Great Famine outside Ireland.

        In 1909, a 46’ by 8’ stone Celtic cross was erected on the highest point on the island to commemorate the Irish dead. In 1974, the Canadian government designated the quarantine station on Gross Île as the Irish Memorial National Historic Site. 

Today the Irish cemetery on the island is a short walk through a hilly woodland from the Celtic cross. An eerie silence prevails. Etched into the base of the granite cross are these words:

                                                        

      Sacred to the memory of 

                                                   thousands of Irish emigrants                                                  who, to preserve the faith, 

       suffered hunger and exile,

                                                    in 1847-48, and stricken with                                                                                      fever ended here  their                                           sorrowful pilgrimage.