Hmmm - interesting; I wondered about the lyrics in a David Kincaid rendition of "Opinion of Pattie Macghee" in which he alluded to in his "Irish Volunteer" album;

"... 'Twas America's Doctors who sent over the waters
The ships that were laden with corn and wheat."

and sentiments of Irish gratitude for American relief efforts during the famine.

Some stime ago, while perusing one of my musty old Civil-War period History Books, I came accross an account of Food being delivered to the starving Irish sometime around 1847, I think it was - not in cargo or Merchant vessels, but in the holds of fully armed Warships of the United States Navy!

It seems that the British were, as Stalin did to Russians some 100 years later, intentionally exploiting the famine, if not exacerbating it far beyond it's natural causes, in order to essentially commit systematic genocide against the Native Irish people.

The Crown apparently had a Naval blockade around Irelands' coasts to prevent "outsiders" from trying to break the famine, it was working so well. The American Navy, in relieving the Irish, broke the British blockade with military force - or at least the threat thereof - and who knows how close we might have come to a third war with England within a Century had they tried to stop the Yankee fleet?

Now I find it interesting that at no time in my life prior to this have I ever heard of this incident, despite being in adulthood somewhat of a "History Freak".

Could it be, that around the turn of the 19th Century, America and Great Britan had "made up" sufficiently so that some of the more embarrassing chapters of our mutual English Culture's History (like State-sponsored genocide against Indians here and Irish there) were politely "forgotten about"? Books stopped publishing them, and Teachers stopped teaching about them. Within a generation or two, they would, for all intents and purposes, have lapsed from the collective memory.

Except perhaps to unexpectedly re-appear years later in the words of an old song or two here and there... or the pages of an overlooked old History Text mouldering away in an attic somewhere.

I'll have to check out that link about the ship/boat; looks interesting.

Thanks!