A storm exposed children’s bones on a Canadian beach, reviving a 170-year-old mystery
Michael Miller 9 hrs ago
A Parks Canada employee searches for human bones on the beach of Cap-des-Rosiers near Gaspe, Quebec.
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A Parks Canada employee searches for human bones on the beach of Cap-des-Rosiers near Gaspe, Quebec.
In the spring of 2011, a powerful storm swept over the stony shores of Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula, just as another had 164 years earlier.
After the squall ended, the damage was being documented when a surveyor spotted something sickeningly out of place among the pebbles and driftwood. Children’s bones.
The grim discovery launched a years-long scientific quest to identify the remains and solve an intercontinental mystery more than a century and a half in the making.
Last week, Canada’s national parks agency announced that chemical analysis of the bones and others later found nearby indicate that they belonged to Irish immigrants who had fled the country’s Great Famine only to drown in an 1847 shipwreck, within sight of their new home.
“It’s like an episode of ‘Columbo,’ ” said Mathieu Côté, a resource conservation manager at Forillon National Park, where the remains were found. “We now have all the clues together, and we can have some kind of conclusion.”
The findings shed light on the local folklore and fragmentary scholarship surrounding the Carricks shipwreck, Côté said. They also illuminate a lesser-known chapter of Irish and Canadian history at a time when mass immigration to North America is again in the news.
Next month, the remains will be reburied by officials from Canada and Ireland as well as descendants of the shipwreck’s survivors.
“We often have to be reminded of our history,” Côté said. “Science and technology has brought us the end of this story.”
In March of 1847, nearly 200 people crammed inside a small, two-masted ship called the Carricks of Whitehaven, which was bound from Sligo, northwest Ireland, to Quebec City in Canada. Many were women or children. Some were sick with typhus, cholera or dysentery.