North Atlantic Steerage Fares, Mortality and Travel Conditions: evidence from the Cope Line Passenger Service, 1820-1860

"The emigrant passenger trade, especially in the decade following the Irish famine, is usually considered one of the great tragedies of the Victorian world. Contemporary liberal writers blamed ship-owners and travel brokers, and governments responded with the Passenger Acts. Modern historians have generally accepted this view, but some have challenged the severity of the crisis. The Cope Line shipping records in the Pennsylvania Historical Society offer several new approaches to this question. Copes operated the leading Liverpool to Philadelphia packet line, and carried about 55000 passengers westwards and 20000 eastwards between 1820 and 1860. These are probably the only full scale records of a contemporary packet line in existence. The Copes were wealthy Philadelphia Quaker reformers and operated high class ships. However they were keen businessmen, and the technology and conditions of the time inevitably meant steerage travel on even the best ships was rough. The question is how hard were these passages in terms of contemporary conditions and expectations? Fares are one parameter of the equation. It is obvious they were sufficiently low in the 1840s and 1850s not to block the huge transatlantic migration, but the details are fragmentary. The Cope records are sufficiently complete to present for the first time continuous series of westward and eastward fares from 1820 to 1860. The Cope captains often reported cash spot fares on Liverpool to New York transients could occasionally be much lower than standard packet rates to Philadelphia, but the latter are a good indication of general levels. The Cope records also enable some new assessments of travel conditions. Research using the US Passenger Lists has suggested mortality on the passage was much lower than traditionally accepted, but it is not clear how fully captains reported deaths. The Copes did not keep explicit records of illness or mortality, but the partners’ and captains' letters are sufficiently full to somewhat qualify this new view. Secondly successful migrants in Pennsylvania often purchased prepaid passage tickets in Philadelphia to send to relatives in England and Ireland. After presentation in Liverpool thousands of these tickets were returned to the Cope archives in Philadelphia, and several hundred have short messages on the reverse from the senders. These gave the recipients some idea what to expect on the pass age, and are a good indication of what contemporaries thought about conditions, which are often considerably less dire than the liberal view"