Packet boat in the context of "Cherokee-class brig-sloop"

The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger (Irish: an Gorta Mór [ənˠ ˈɡɔɾˠt̪ˠə ˈmˠoːɾˠ]), the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to "the bad life" and loosely translates to "the hard times".

The worst year of the famine was 1847, which became known as "Black '47". The population of Ireland on the eve of the famine was about 8.5 million; by 1901, it was just 4.4 million. During the Great Hunger, roughly one million people died and over one million more fled the country, causing the country's population to fall by 20–25% between 1841 and 1871, with some towns' populations falling by as much as 67%. Between 1845 and 1855, at least 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also on steamboats and barques—one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history.

Exodus 1947 was a packet steamship that was built in the United States in 1928 as President Warfield for the Baltimore Steam Packet Company. From her completion in 1928 until 1942 she carried passengers and freight across Chesapeake Bay between Norfolk, Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland.

From 1942 President Warfield served in the Second World War as a barracks and training ship for the British Armed Forces. In 1944 she was commissioned into the United States Navy as USS President Warfield (IX-169), a station and accommodation ship for the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach.

The Gaspee affair was a significant event in the lead-up to the American Revolution. HMS Gaspee was a Royal Navy revenue schooner that enforced the Navigation Acts around Newport, Rhode Island, in 1772. It ran aground in shallow water while chasing the packet boat Hannah on June 9 off Warwick, Rhode Island. A group of men led by Abraham Whipple and John Brown attacked, boarded, and burned the Gaspee to the waterline.

The event sharply increased tensions between American colonists and Crown officials, particularly given that it had followed the Boston Massacre in 1770. Crown officials in Rhode Island aimed to increase their control over the colony's legitimate trade and stamp out smuggling in order to increase their revenue from the colony. Concomitantly, Rhode Islanders increasingly protested the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts and other British policies that had interfered with the colony's traditional businesses, which primarily rested on involvement in the triangular slave trade.