“I could,” says Captain Caffin, “in this manner take you through thirty or more cottages that we visited, but they, without exception, were all alike—­the dead and the dying in each; and I could tell you more of the truth of the heartrending scene, were I to mention the lamentations and bitter cries of each of those poor creatures, on the threshold of death.  Never in my life have I seen such wholesale misery, nor could I have thought it so complete.  All that I have stated above,” he concludes, “I have seen with my own eyes, and can vouch for the truth of.  And I feel I cannot convey by words the impression left on my mind of this awful state of things.  I could tell you also of that which I could vouch for the truth of, but which I did not see myself, such as bodies half eaten by the rats; of two dogs last Wednesday being shot by Mr. O’Callaghan whilst tearing a body to pieces; of his mother-in-law stopping a poor woman and asking her what she had on her back, and being replied it was her son, telling her she would smother it; but the poor emaciated woman said it was dead already, and she was going to dig a hole in the churchyard for it.  These are things which are of every-day occurrence."[238]

Taking Ballydehob as a centre, there were, at this time, in a radius of ten or twelve miles around it, twenty-six soup kitchens—­namely, at Skibbereen, Baltimore, Shirken, and Cape Clear (three); Creagh, Castlehaven (two); Union Hall, Aghadown (two); Kilcoe (three); Skull (two); Dunmanus, Crookhaven (two); Cahiragh (two); Durrus, Drimoleague, Drenagh, Bantry, Glengariff, Adrigoole, Castletown, Berehaven, and Ballydehob.  They were making and distributing daily about seventeen thousand pints of good meat soup.  They did great good, but it was of a very partial nature.  Mr. Commissary Bishop tells us “they were but a drop in the ocean.”  Hundreds, he says, are relieved, but thousands still want.  And he adds, that soup kitchens have their attendant evils:  an important one in this instance was, that the poor small farmers were selling all their cows to the soup kitchens, leaving themselves and their children without milk or butter.

There seems to have been an understanding among the employes, that the true state of things, in its naked reality, was not to be given in their communications to Government.  It was to be toned down and modified.  Hence the studied avoidance of the word Famine in almost every official document of the time.  Captain Caffin’s letter was written to a friend and marked “private;” but having got into the newspapers, it must, of course, be taken notice of by the Government.  Mr. Trevelyan lost no time, but at once wrote, enclosing it to Sir John Burgoyne.  To use his own words on the occasion, the receipt, from the Commander of the Scourge, of “the awful letter, describing the result of his personal observations in the immediate neighbourhood of Skull,” led him (Mr. Trevelyan) to make two proposals on the part