Cian McMahon's aim in The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine is to “resituate the sailing ship, alongside the tenement and the weekly newspaper, as a dynamic element of migration history” (2) by using emigrants’ own words to convey the richness and variety of the emigration experience during the Great Irish Famine. In this, he largely succeeds. The book's five central chapters follow the arc of the emigrant voyage, from preparation to movement to arrival. His method is a composite one: rather than focusing on a small cross-section of experiences, he compiles material from fourteen libraries and archives in Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus material in digital collections, to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the emigrant experience. The variety of experiences he documents will challenge popular notions of famine migration and, I expect, inspire others to delve deeper into this important topic.

A major strength of the book is that McMahon allows us to hear the emigrants, and many others, speak. This is a book about how people experienced emigration, not about the structural forces that caused it or the consequences for Ireland or the host societies. Nor is it an assessment of the role of governments, landlords, or philanthropic societies in managing emigration (although these do receive some attention). These topics have been addressed by many others, and McMahon rightly avoids refighting old battles. Instead, he follows a recent tendency in social history to foreground the subjective experiences of marginalized people as a way of revealing their agency and individuality. A second strength proceeds from the first: in synthesizing these sources, McMahon demonstrates the centrality of personal relationships to the emigration process. At all stages, emigrants relied upon the knowledge and assistance of others—family and friends at home, family and friends abroad, landlords, bureaucrats, clergymen, shipboard acquaintances, and so on—to get them from one end to the other. This web of relationships was built upon a vast transportation infrastructure, and a third strength of the book is the picture McMahon paints of what it was like to travel during this era. Emigrant liners, convict ships, trains, coaches, canal paths, ports, prisons, workhouses—McMahon's sources say a lot about the global networks that linked up the mid-nineteenth-century world. McMahon is especially good on the shipboard experience, which comes alive in all its danger, fun, misery, beauty, boredom, and violence. I cannot think of another book on this period in which the author brings such a variety of experiences together with such success.

There are limitations to the composite approach, however. One is that, amid all the variety, it can be difficult to discern larger patterns. McMahon is very good at identifying one sort of pattern—his method is, essentially, to find emigrants who had similar experiences at different points in their journeys and to combine these into a broad, multivocal narrative buttressed by preexisting historiography. But other sorts of patterns remain obscure. In particular, more could be said about how emigrant experiences were inflected by class, gender, religion, place of origin, age, or occupation. McMahon documents these differences through numerous examples, and he acknowledges their importance toward the end of the book, but any analysis is fragmentary and broader conclusions elusive. In a related fashion, the larger significance of McMahon's central argument—that human relationships were central to the emigrant experience—is somewhat unclear. His assertions on this point tend toward the tautological, as when he describes emigrants’ relationships as important because they created “countless new threads in the worldwide web of the Irish diaspora” (3) or constituted “links in the international chains of Irish diasporic life” (99). Such assertions transmute insight into metaphor without telling us why the insight matters. At times, McMahon suggests that relationships mattered because they mitigated the hardships of the journey, and they therefore challenge our ideas about the misery of the so-called coffin ships. This is a crucial point, but it is difficult to square with opposing scenarios, where, for instance, certain relationships might have made emigrants’ lives harder, or hindered their progress, or prevented emigration altogether. In such instances, emigrant letters might conceal more than they reveal; indeed, relying on these letters as a principal source base may exaggerate the extent to which emigrants maintained affection bonds with other Irish people, since those who didn't maintain such bonds would not have written many letters, or may not have been entirely candid in the letters they did write. There is also the question of the duration of these relationships. McMahon ends this study with the sharp decline in emigrant numbers around 1855. This is a sensible choice, but it prevents us from seeing how long emigrants maintained their relationships with one another or with the folks at home—and this, in turn, makes it hard to see how sturdy these links in the chains of diasporic life really were.

Another limitation of the composite approach is that we never get to know any of the emigrants particularly well: few fragments of the kaleidoscope shine brighter than the others. This, I think, will limit the appeal of the book to general readers and undergraduates, who often crave characters and narratives that they can follow over many pages. This would not normally be worth dwelling on, but the book's structure—with the discussion of sources and methods tacked onto the end so as not to “bog down the introduction with scholarly stipulations and academic asides” (243)—suggests that either McMahon or the publisher had a broader audience in mind. I wonder if, having collected such an impressive array of sources, McMahon might consider publishing a companion volume of emigrant letters that would allow readers to get to know these emigrants even better. These reservations aside, I have little doubt that academic audiences will be stimulated by this deeply humane study to rethink their own assumptions about famine migration (and perhaps migration generally) and to follow some of McMahon's leads into ever more fascinating territory.