The City of Dresden, 1889: the ship that ended Irish emigration to Argentina

For forty years the Irish had come to Argentina through kin: a brother already minding sheep, a priest's letter, a fare advanced against a year's work. The City of Dresden was the opposite of that. It was filled by paid agents with the urban poor of three cities, on promises nobody could keep, and when it landed in February 1889 it ended organised Irish emigration to Argentina almost on the spot.

Fifty thousand tickets

The scheme had a respectable origin. Monsignor Patrick Dillon, the Irish chaplain who had succeeded Fahy, went to Ireland in 1881 and 1882 as a provincial and national agent and recommended free or assisted passages and land grants. Under President Juárez Celman the government granted 50,000 free or assisted tickets. In 1887 the priest's brother, John Stephen Dillon, and Buckley O'Meara were appointed agents in Europe with a bonus for each emigrant landed. Edmundo Murray, who records all this in his entry on Dillon, says the priest's own responsibility for what followed is still not fully understood.

Michael Geraghty's account in the Buenos Aires Herald describes what the agents promised: housing, seed, machinery and land, and even financing from "Fr Fahy's bank", nearly twenty years after Fahy's death. The Irish and Anglo-Argentines of Buenos Aires campaigned in the press against the recruitment, so it took over two years to assemble the party.

Queenstown to the Rotonda

The ship was built in Glasgow in 1888 for Norddeutscher Lloyd. Peter Mulvany, writing for the National Maritime Museum of Ireland, has her leaving Deepwater Quay, Queenstown, on 25 January 1889 with 1,772 emigrants, about 1,500 of them Irish, and arriving on 15 February. Geraghty gives about 2,000 Irish landing on 16 February after nineteen days, the largest single-origin shipload ever to reach Argentina. Murray's Dillon entry has 1,774, mainly from Dublin, Cork and Limerick; Roger and Speight say about 1,800; Helen Kelly says 1,700 Irish, many destitute. The cautious figure is about 1,800, most of them Irish. Murray's separate road article dates the sailing to September 1889, which conflicts with everyone else and is probably an error.

Geraghty describes the arrival. The Hotel de Inmigrantes, the Rotonda near Retiro, had no beds, so people slept on bare floors with little food. The overflow went to stables on Paseo de Julio, a hovel in Plaza Constitución and a shed on 25 de Mayo. Families were separated, and the dock staff spoke Italian and Spanish. Single women were sent to the Irish convent on Tucumán Street, and some were lured into brothels. A few found work with Irish and Anglo-Argentine families. Others scattered to Rosario, Quilmes, Zárate and Mercedes. Mulvany adds that families passed through an immigrants' hotel at Dársena Norte.

Napostá's tents

About 700, in Speight's figure, were taken south to a colony at Napostá. Geraghty says colonists were offered 40 hectares a family and 1,000 pesos at 9 per cent over twelve years, and arrived, without their lost luggage, to find no houses. The founder was an Irish-American named Gartland, whose first name Geraghty gives as David and Mulvany as Peter. Mulvany dates the journey south to 26 February 1889, to La Vitícola near Napostá, about 30 km north of Bahía Blanca, where the families lived in tents or in the open, with contaminated water and no medicine.

More than 100 died in two years, mostly children, in unmarked graves. The colony was dissolved in March 1891, and Geraghty records 520 colonists walking roughly 400 miles back to Buenos Aires. Not every family was destroyed. Mulvany follows the McCarthys of Ballyclough, Co. Cork, who survived and moved to Balcarce, where the 1895 census lists the father as a dairy farmer.

Fr Gaughren changes his errand

Matthew Gaughren, an Oblate priest born in 1843, had come to Argentina in mid-1888 on what Murray and Walsh, who edited his letters, call a "begging expedition" for the debt on Our Lady of Grace, Tower Hill, in London. When the Dresden landed he switched to appealing to the English-speaking community for the immigrants. Geraghty says he denounced their reception in The Southern Cross, stopped fundraising for his own church, and lived with the Napostá colonists for several months.

What the affair ended

The reaction in Ireland was swift. Archbishop T.W. Croke of Cashel wrote to the Freeman's Journal in 1889 urging the Irish poor not to go to Argentina; the affair was denounced in Parliament, the press and the pulpit. In May 1889 The Southern Cross wrote that the agents had done more to discourage emigration than anyone could, and that their work was finished. Geraghty's judgement is that the affair effectively ended organised emigration from Ireland to Argentina, and that Irish emigration, which had peaked in 1848, had dwindled to a trickle by 1900.

One institution grew directly out of the wreck. On 14 May 1891 the Ladies of St Joseph's Society founded the Fahy Institute for orphan boys, in the wake of the Dresden arrivals, María José Roger records. The Marist Brothers ran it from 1908 to 1933 and the Pallottines after them, and on 16 December 1929 it moved to a farm school at Moreno, where it still carries the chaplain's name. The counts of who sailed in the Dresden, and the day she landed, have never been settled.