What is "coffin ship"

n. A ship that carried Irish emigrants escaping the potato famine, usually with an extremely high mortality rate onboard.

The term coffin ship is used to refer to the ships that carried Irish immigrants escaping the Great Irish Famine as well as Highlanders displaced by the Highland Clearances. These ships, crowded and disease-ridden, with poor access to food and water, resulted in the deaths of many people as they crossed the Atlantic, and led to the 1847 North American typhus epidemic at quarantine stations in Canada. Owners of coffin ships provided as little food, water, and living space as was legally possible – if they obeyed the law at all.

While coffin ships were the cheapest way to cross the Atlantic, mortality rates of 30% aboard the coffin ships were common. It was said that sharks could be seen following the ships, because so many bodies were thrown overboard.

Coffin ship is the name given to any ship that has been overinsured and is therefore worth more to its owners sunk than afloat. These were hazardous places to work in the days before effective maritime safety regulation. They were generally eliminated in the 1870s with the success of reforms championed by British MP Samuel Plimsoll.

Many of these in the days of wooden sailing ships were old ships riddled with wood rot and woodworm and shipworm, repainted and renamed and falsely stated to be new ships. There were over 2000 cases of sailors who had signed on as crew for a ship, seeing the ship's condition, refusing to go on board it, and being tried in court for this refusal. Samuel Plimsoll stated in the UK Parliament that "The Secretary of Lloyd's tells a friend of mine that he does not know a single ship which has been broken up voluntarily by the owners in the course of 30 years on account of its being worn out."

In 1977 the ship Lucona sank in the Indian Ocean as a result of a time bomb which had been planted by Udo Proksch, the owner of the cargo, so he could fraudulently collect the insurance money. The cargo was claimed to consist of a disassembled uranium processing plant but in fact consisted of worthless scrap. 6 of the 12 crew members died.