During 1849, Ireland was in the middle of the great Potato Famine. In his Université Rennes Master’s thesis, Landry Préteseille writes:

    It began with a blight of the potato crop that left acre upon acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot. As harvests across Europe failed, the price of food soared. Subsistence-level Irish farmers found their food stores rotting in their cellars, the crops they relied on to pay the rent to their British and Protestant landlords destroyed. Peasants who ate the rotten produce sickened and entire villages were consumed with cholera and typhus.
    Parish priests, desperate to provide for their congregations, were forced to forsake buying coffins in order to feed starving families, with the dead going unburied or buried only in the clothes they wore when they died.
    Landlords evicted hundreds of thousands of peasants, who then crowded into disease-infested workhouses. Other landlords paid for their tenants to emigrate, sending hundreds of thousands of Irish to America and other English-speaking countries.

    In the words of the Illustrated London News of July 6, 1850:

    The principal emigrants are Irish peasants and labourers. It is calculated that at least four out of every five persons who leave the shores of the old country to try their fortunes in the new, are Irish. Since the fatal years of the potato famine and the cholera, the annual numbers of emigrants have gone on increasing, until they have become so great as to suggest the idea, and almost justify the belief, of a gradual depopulation of Ireland.

    The colonies of Great Britain offer powerful attractions to the great bulk of the English and Scottish emigrants who forsake their native land to make homes in the wilderness. But the Irish emigration flows with full force upon the United States. Though many of the Irish emigrants are, doubtless, persons of small means, who have been hoarding and saving for years, and living in rags and squalor in order to amass sufficient money to carry themselves and families across the Atlantic, and to beg their way to the western states where they may 'squat' or purchase cheap lands, the great bulk appear to be people of the most destitute class, who go to join their friends and relatives, previously established in America.

    Large sums of money reach this country annually from the United States. Through Liverpool houses alone, near upon a million pounds sterling, in small drafts varying from 2 Pounds or 3 Pounds to 10 Pounds each, are annually forwarded from America for poor persons in Ireland, to enable them to emigrate; and the passage-money of many thousands, in addition, is paid in New York. Before the fatal year 1847, the emigration was very considerable; but, since that time, it has very rapidly increased.

    According to the Illustrated London News (July 6, 1850), a total of 219,450 emigrants left the U.K for the United States in the year 1849. It was during this period that steam-powered ships were gradually replacing sail and catering to well-to-do travelers, leaving the poor emigrants to go on the tall ships. Many of them wound up on "coffin ships"--vessels that never made it because they were shoddily built and poorly commanded. Hatch narrowly missed shipping out with his newfound friend Harry on such a ship--the Brewster. He wrote:

The Brewster's moorings were cast off, the tug alongside puffed and whistled, and the ship swung out into the East River. I had coaxed the captain of the tug to take me along as far as he was going, and bring me back with him. Outside the Narrows, the Brewster began to spread her canvas to the fresh northwest breeze. As the tug left her and turned up the bay, Harry swung his cap to me from the mizzen topsail yard where he was loosing the sail.

    The Brewster sailed away, and was never heard of afterward.

    When, thirty years after, I told Jack of my attempted treachery at that time, I thought he was going to cry, but he only said "T'were yer blessed luck kep' ye out o' that thar ship, an' yer bones from the bottom o' the sea."

    A.S. Hatch was extraordinarily lucky to have met up with Jack Corbett and gotten a berth on the New World. The New World was built in the Boston Shipyard of Donald McKay, who has been called the greatest naval architect and master shipbuilder in the sailing history of America. The New World was launched September 5, 1846. Originally built for Captain William Skiddy and Francis Skiddy, who was an old friend of McKay's, she was a three-masted, 1,407-ton monster, 187 feet in length with a 40-foot beam, and drew 28 feet of water. The New World was the first three-decked merchant ship ever built in an American shipyard and was the largest sailing vessel in the United States at that time. When she was commissioned, William Skiddy sailed her to New York and on to Liverpool where the Prince Consort came aboard to inspect her

    According to Landry Préteseille: