DUBLIN — A replica of a ship that carried thousands of Irish emigrants from famine to new lives in North America will set sail from Ireland next month to retrace the journey across the Atlantic.
Project organizers said on Friday the "Jeanie Johnston" was scheduled to arrive in Alexandria, the port of Washington, D.C., around June 21 and would visit some 20 cities in the United States and Canada in the coming months.
President Clinton, who has ancestral roots in Ireland, is expected to greet the ship, a three-masted barque, on its arrival in the United States after its three-week crossing.
The original vessel famously never lost a passenger to disease or the sea in 16 voyages across the Atlantic in the 1840s and 1850s.
"We look forward to promoting Ireland overseas and celebrating the enormous contribution of the Irish to every sphere of American and Canadian life," said John Griffin, chief executive of the project.
A team of experienced shipwrights and unemployed youngsters have been working for more than two years to build the boat at a special yard close to Tralee in southwest Ireland. The replica of the 150-foot vessel has cost 5.5 million Irish pounds ($6.70 million) to construct.
The original was built in Quebec by master shipbuilder John Munn. The ship was bought by the O'Donovan family of Tralee and served as a passenger and cargo vessel, carrying 200 passengers and 17 crew on her maiden voyage in 1848.
The mid-19th century was a period of mass emigration from Ireland as the Irish sought to escape starvation after the potato crop was ravaged by blight.
Census records suggest some 1.4 million people left Ireland between 1841 and 1851 and a similar number of those left behind died of starvation and disease.
Large numbers of those fleeing the famine for North America never made it across the Atlantic. Many died at sea in dreadful conditions on so-called "coffin ships."
The replica ship will carry 40 people—10 professional sailors, 18 volunteer crew and 12 passengers.
It is expected to cover some 13,000 nautical miles on a voyage that will take in cities including New York, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit and Chicago. It is scheduled to return to Ireland from New York this November.
The project has been accompanied by efforts to computerise and index information relating to an estimated six million 19th century Irish emigrants to the United States and Canada.
A 20-strong team based in Tralee has spent four years logging data from ships' passenger lists and its records will be housed in a research centre at the shipyard.
And in an ironic modern twist, Ireland's FAS Training and Employment Authority is expected to use publicity created by the ship to boost efforts to bring skilled workers to Ireland.
Ireland's booming "Celtic Tiger" economy has left it with tens of thousands of unfilled job vacancies in areas such as IT, software design, electronics, health care, civil engineering and tourism.
It is now looking to recruit workers from overseas to fill the jobs, with the Irish diaspora one of the targets.