Home
> The Journey: Irish Passengers
|
Irish
Passengers to Argentina (1822-1929)
|
The following
list includes 7,159 passengers. It is a published version of the
Irish Passengers to Argentina Database, which was compiled from
diverse sources. The most important of them was Eduardo A. Coghlan's
El Aporte de los Irlandeses a la Formación de la Nación Argentina
(Buenos Aires, 1982), Table I, pp. 25-107. Coghlan transcribed data
from the files of Archivo General de la Nación ('Libros de Entradas
de Pasajeros' 1822-1862), and from the arrival lists published by
'The Standard' newspaper from 1863 to 1880 [1]. The author selected
those passenger surnames presumably of Irish origin, and sorted
all entries alphabetically. The Irish Passengers to Argentina Database
includes 58% of records from Coghlan 1982. Other lists have been
added to the database, particularly, from CEMLA database. CEMLA
(Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos) is a non-profit
organisation based in Buenos Aires, which since 1985 works in the
field of microfilm and database transcription of Argentine immigrant
records. The database includes 42% of records from CEMLA database,
particularly 1,772 records from the SS Dresden ship
manifest, which make 1/4 of the database.
Alphabetical
list sorted by last name
The Irish
Passengers to Argentina Database includes a relatively small portion
of all Irish emigrants bound to Argentina. According to Patrick
McKenna (1994), during the nineteenth century, 40-45,000 Irish emigrants
arrived in Argentina. Approximately one out of two of these emigrants
settled in the country, and the other re-emigrated to other destinations
of the Irish Diaspora, particularly, North America and Australia.
Therefore, this list would be a more or less representative sample
of the Irish emigrants who arrived in Argentina during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
In his
book, Eduardo Coghlan totals 4,129 immigrants. However, in page
16 of the Introduction (Table 1: 'Irish persons arriving at Argentina
through the Port of Buenos Aires 1822-1880, classified by gender'),
Coghlan mentions a total of 5,306 immigrants (to this point, I have
not been able to find a satisfactory explanation to this difference).
We should be grateful to the great job done by Eduardo Coghlan in
registering the arrivals of a significant percentage of the Irish
immigrants in Argentina.
Out of
1,669 Irish immigrants whose citizenship was registered by Coghlan,
1,233 (74%) declared English citizenship. This may be due to the
fact, as he explains in p. 20, that immigration officers registered
all English-speaking passengers under English citizenship, regardless
of their origin. Additionally, the Irish held British passports
until the 1920's, so it was acceptable for the local authorities
to register them as 'inglés' (which was the official denomination
reserved for all British citizens in nineteenth-century Argentina).
However, this would not explain why 26% of them were registered
as Irish. Other possibility is that a majority of the immigrants
simply wanted to be qualified as English. During the twentieth century,
however, only 8% of passengers declared English citizenship, which
is a direct result of the political events that took place in Ireland
in the first decades of this century. Interesting enough, typically
Irish given names, as Padraic or Seamus, are registred only
from the 1900s on.
Liverpool
was, by far, the most important port of departure in every period,
with 50% of the passengers for whom a port of departure is declared
(6,447). Follow Queenstown (now Cobh), 28%; Dublin, 8%; Southampton
6%; London, 3%; and New York, 1%.
Further
studies should be undertaken to research the makers, owners, crew,
sailing patterns and other details of the ships in which the Irish
emigrated to Argentina. Some of these data for the ships most frequently
used are provided in the next chart. From 1851, steam ships were
used in the South Atlantic seaways with great improvement of speed.
In 1868-78, Lamport & Holt (Liverpool, Brazil and River Plate
Steam Navigation Co.) operated some of the ships used by Irish
emigrants (Leibnitz, Agamennon, Tycho Brahe,
Maskelyne, Hipparcus, Kepler, Pascal,
Copernicus and Biela). This company carried contract
mails for the British Post Office thus offering regular services
to the River Plate. An average journey took a maximum of 34 days
from Liverpool to Buenos Aires, calling at Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo
(or alternatively at Lisbon and Bahia), versus 60 to 90 days for
the sail ships in use up to 1851. In a letter written by W. J. Lamport
to F. I. Scudamore, of the General Post Office, London, on 15 June
1868, he expressed that 'the number of British Settlers in these
States [Argentina and Uruguay] is immensely large - and, unlike
most other fields which attract immigration, they comprise all classes
of society from the Upper middle class downwards. A very great number
of the "estancias" and "saladeros" (ranches and meat-salting plants)
in the country are the property of and managed and worked by Englishmen' [2].
The 1889
arrival of the SS Dresden represents the end of the
Irish nineteenth-century emigration to Argentina. She 'carried the
largest number of passengers ever to arrive in Argentina from any
one destination on any one vessel,' and was the result of a deceitful
immigration scheme managed by 'the Argentine government agents in
Ireland - J. O’Meara, and John S. Dillon, a brother of the famous
Canon Patrick Dillon who founded The Southern Cross. [The
affair] became infamous and was denounced in Parliament, press and
pulpit ' [3]. These emigrants came from poor urban
areas of Dublin and Limerick and most of the adults were city labourers
and servants. After that, and up to the end of the 1910s, the Irish
immigration was irrelevant. But in the 1920s, there was yet another
peak of arrivals from Ireland (76% of 1900-1929 Ireland-born passengers
arrived in the 20s), in which the majority of immigrants were educated
urban professionals, with a higher proportion of Church of Ireland
religion. This increase may have been a consequence of political,
social, and economic turmoil in Ireland. However, it ended by the
end of 1929, as a consequence of the global financial crisis that
seriously affected the employment and economic growth of Argentina
and other countries.
During
the nineteenth century, the ships most frequently used by the Irish
emigrants to Argentina were the following:
*
Previous entries are probably referred to other vessel with the
same name.
In
the twentieth century, the Nelson Line was an important carrier
of Irish passengers to Argentina. Founded by James Nelson in Buenos
Aires, this company pioneered the carriage of refrigerated cargos,
including meat, operating from South America (Nelson owned Las
Palmas meat-processing plant). With the emigrant flow to South
America growing at a high rate, in 1910 Nelson added new calls in
London, Boulogne, Corunna, and Vigo, and its ships were adapted
to the emigrant trade. It became one of the associated companies
of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Co., with its own subsidiaries. Some
of the Nelson emigrant ships were Highland Corrie, Highland
Glen, Highland Harris, and Highland Laddie.
Acknowledgements:
This list could not have been compiled without the help of Jorge
Fox, who kindly scanned Eduardo Coghlan's volume in html format.
In addition to this, I am grateful to Margarita O'Farrell de Coghlan
and to Martha Coghlan for the authorisation to use Eduardo Coghlan's
information. I am also indebted to Michael Geraghty, who generously
submitted the passenger list of the SS Dresden, transcribed
by Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos (CEMLA), and
to Alicia Bernasconi of CEMLA for her contribution of Irish arrivals
1889-1929.
[1]
The Buenos Aires Standard, published weekly, later daily,
from 1861 to 1959, and founded by brothers Michael George Mulhall
(1836-1900) and Edward Thomas Mulhall (1832-1899).
[2]
Howat, Jeremy N. T., South American Packets 1808-1880 (York:
William Sessions Ltd., 1984) pp. 159-174.
[3]
Geraghty, Michael John, Argentina: Land of Broken Promises, in: Buenos Aires
Herald (17 March 1999)
|