Mr. Bishop writes to Mr. Trevelyan:  “The floating depot for Skull arrived yesterday, and has commenced issues; this removes all anxiety for that quarter.”  On the day before Captain Caffin’s letter was written, Mr. Bishop says:  “At Skull, in both east and west division, I found the distress, or rather the mortality had pretty well increased.”  And this, notwithstanding the floating depot.  Yet in the midst of the famine-slaughter described by Captain Caffin, Mr. Bishop is still hopeful, for he says:  “The Relief Committees at Skull and Crookhaven exert themselves greatly to benefit the poor.  There is an ample supply of provisions at each place."[241] How did they manage to die of starvation at Skull?—­one is tempted to ask.  Yet they did, and at Ballydehob too, the other town of the parish; for, three weeks after the announcement of the “ample supply of provisions,” the following news reaches us from the latter place, on the most reliable authority.  A naval officer, Mr. Scarlet, who was with the “Mercury” and “Gipsey” delivering provisions in the neighbourhood of Skull, on his return to Cork, writes, on the 8th of March, to his admiral, Sir Hugh Pigot, in these terms:  “After discharging our cargoes in the boats to Ballydehob, we went on shore, and on passing through the town we went into the ruins of a house, and there were two women lying dead, and two, all but dead, lying along with them.  When we enquired how it was that they did not bury them, a woman told us that they did not know, and that one of them had been dead for five days.  As we were coming down to the boat, we told the boat’s crew if they wanted to see a sight, to go up the street.  When they went, there were four men with hand-barrows there, and the men belonging to the boats helped to carry the corpses to the burial ground, where they dug holes, and put them in without coffins.”

At this period of the Famine, things had come to such a pass, that individual cases of death from starvation were seldom reported, and when they were they failed to attract much attention, deaths by wholesale had become so common.  To be sure, when Dr. Crowley wrote from Skibbereen that himself and Dr. Donovan had interred, in a kitchen garden, the corpse of a person eleven days dead, the case, being somewhat peculiar, had interest enough to be made public; but an ordinary death from hunger would be deemed a very ordinary affair indeed.  I will here give a specimen or two, of the way in which the progress of the Famine was chronicled at the close of 1846, and through the winter and spring of 1847.  The correspondent of the Kerry Examiner, writing from Dingle under date of February the 8th says:  “The state of the people of this locality is horrifying.  Fever, famine and dysentery are daily increasing, deaths from hunger daily occurring, averaging weekly twenty—­men, women and children thrown into the graves without a coffin—­dead bodies in all parts of the country, being several days dead