"I am a bit confused about some of the Erie Canal proclamations"
Terry Coleman's 'Passage to America' carries a great deal of information of who left from where and landed where - excellent starting point for anybody following up queries.
Jim Carroll
His account fo the early disasters
Jim Carroll
"In the first week of May 1847 the Liverpool Telegraph and Shipping Gazette carried a paragraph saying the King of Holland had strongly recommended the Emperor of Japan to throw open his country to the Europeans so as not to run the risk of being bombarded into civilization like the Chinese, and a letter, on something nearer home, from a correspondent who signed himself as One Long Connected with the Shipping Interests of Liverpool. He wrote:
Another emigrant ship has foundered and 248 of our fellow creatures have been launched, unshrived, into eternity. And another, and another, will share the same fate unless a strict and searching inquiry be instituted to ascertain if man is not guilty in some measure of causing so great a sacrifice of human life. The tale of one unfortunate vessel is the tale of many ... A few days and the circumstance is forgotten - it is only the foundering of an emigrant ship - remembered but by relatives. Of the 251 passen¬gers (the supposed number on board) only three escaped. The rest were drowned 'between decks' or washed from the wreck. No agonizing cry was heard - no piercing scream for help arose above the howling of the waves - all were silent, speechless, and sank into the sleep of mute death... O God! it is a most harrowing picture.1
The ship was the Exmouth, out of Londonderry bound for Quebec, and wrecked on the west coast of the Scottish island of Islay. She was an old vessel, launched in 1818, but she was in good repair. She foundered in a chasm. Later 108 bodies were recovered, hooked up by men who were lowered by ropes from the summit of the rocks on either side. Most of the dead were women and children, who were naked and mutilated, some without faces, others without heads or limbs. They were separately wrapped in sheets by two men named Campbell, who saw to their decent interment in a spot near the cliffs.
Fifty-nine emigrant ships to America were lost in the years 1847—53, and the Foundering Emigrant Ship was a clas¬sical Victorian disaster, much reported. The Powhattan, bound for Philadelphia, was wrecked on 16 April 1854 off the coast of New Jersey. She was stranded within eight yards of the low-water mark, so near that the passengers and crew could hear and reply to the suggestions made by those on shore, and though she did not break up for nearly twenty-four hours after she struck, no one from her reached the shore alive. The California Packet, a brig of 292 tons carrying pig iron, advertised to sail on 29 August 1853, finally did sail on 6 October, put back the next day, sailed again only on 3 November, and was abandoned the next day when she began to leak. The boats were not provisioned, the master abandoned the passengers seventy miles off the coast of Ireland, and made off. Three adults and fourteen children died.6 The summer of 1849 was a bad one. The brig Hannah, 287 tons, having had large repairs, and a new deck, sailed from Newry for Quebec, and struck an iceberg; 129 passengers were saved but fifty or sixty were crushed by the ice.6 In mid-July the Maria, with 111 passengers from Lim¬erick to Quebec, also struck an iceberg, and there were only nine survivors.' That same month the brig Charles Bartlett of Plymouth, Mass., bound from London to New York, was run down by the Cunard steamer Europa, 1,918 tons.
Forty-two of the brig's 142 passengers were saved, and the steamship company 'voluntarily intimated to the Mayor of Liverpool their intention of forwarding, free of charge, by their next two steamers to America, the persons saved from the wreck'.
The best-documented wreck of all was that of the OceanMonarch, which burned and sank in the Mersey barely out of Liverpool on 24th August 1848, with the loss of 176 lives"