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When the Irish crossed the Atlantic, looking for a better life, they travelled on what became known as "coffin ships". It was common for 20-30% of the passenger

• morkalork 2y ago
  And not all that survived the trip across made it much further. Typhoid or "ship fever" was killing a lot of the passengers and when they arrived in North America, they were put into quarantine camps where many died.
• somenameforme 2y ago
  As an interesting factoid these sort of mortality figures were not especially uncommon in naval voyages until surprisingly recently. Scurvy is kind of a joke now a days, but it killed millions of people. It was such a big deal that vitamin c is literally named after it - ascorbic acid, or anti-scurvy acid. But that only happened on into the 20th century! The idea that such a brutal disease could have been prevented by eating fresh fruits and meats sounded more like a folktale than reality. And early experiments to try to demonstrate this were also not that conclusive since vitamin c tends to break down rapidly in the conditions it was stored in (prejuiced - metal containers). For instance during Vasco de Gamma's journey from Europe to India he lost more than half his crew, mostly to scurvy.