That Peter McDonnell, along with all the others, is gone from Drumlish now. But the first McDonnell of the Drumlish clan was also a Peter, who emigrated to New York at some point between 1845 and 1855—no one is quite sure of the year, for family records were sketchily kept—to escape the great potato famine that ravaged the face of Ireland throughout that decade, and from which the country has never really recovered.
“What hope is there for a nation that lives on potatoes!” a nineteenth-century English official once wrote. And yet, for centuries, potatoes had been Ireland’s only hope. One estimate has placed the population of Ireland in 1791 at 4,753,000. In the next fifty years, some 1,750,000 Irishmen departed for America, and yet, despite this emigration, the Irish census of 1841 revealed that the population of the tiny country had jumped to at least 8,175,000. With more than eight million mouths to feed, in a land that had been condemned by British colonial rule to agriculture, and forbidden to compete in world commerce or industry, the only answer had been to subdivide the landscape into tiny farms, and the only crop that could be raised with any profit at all on these farms was the humble potato. An acre and a half of land, for example, could provide a family of five or six with food for a year, while to grow the equivalent amount of corn or grain would take an acreage four to six times as large. The potato, furthermore, was ideally suited for growth in the moist soil of Ireland. Only a spade was needed to grow potatoes. Trenches were dug and beds were made, and potato sets were laid out, and earthed up from the trenches. When the shoots appeared, they were earthed up again. Potatoes could also be grown on hillsides too steep to be plowed for any other crop, and, as the population grew through the early 1800’s, potato fields extended up the mountain slopes. Best of all, the potato was an extraordinarily useful food. It could be cooked in a variety of ways, it could be ground into flour, it produced fat and healthy children, and one did not tire of its taste. Chickens, pigs, and cattle thrived on it. His potato crop, in fact, solved nearly every Irishman’s need—provided it did not fail.
And yet the potato is also one of the most unstable of crops. In Ireland, potatoes were packed in barrels which were buried in pits, but still they did not keep well and could not be stored from one potato season to the next. Each year, some two and a half million Irishmen more or less starved during the summer months when the old potatoes were gone and the new ones had yet to come in. June, July, and August were therefore known as “meal months,” when there was danger that the potatoes would run out and meal would have to be eaten instead—bought at outrageous prices or on credit from the hated “gombeenman,” or the village usurer.
By the early 1840’s the Irish had grown used to the possibility of potato-crop failure, and regarded the chances of its occurring as philosophically as one might view a change in the weather. In 1728 there was reported “such a great scarcity that on the 26th of February there was a great rising of the populace of Cork.” In 1739 the crop was reported “entirely destroyed,” and the following year another “entire failure” was recorded. There had been a failure in 1770, and another “general failure” in 1800. In 1807 half the Irish potato crop was lost through frost, and in 1821, and again in 1822, the potato failed completely in Munster and Connaught and “distress horrible beyond description” was reported in and around Skibbereen. The years 1830 and 1831 were ones of failure in Counties Mayo, Donegal, and Galway, and, with gonglike regularity, the years 1832, 1833, 1834, and 1836 produced failures in a large number of areas from “dry rot and curl.” In 1835 the entire potato crop of Ulster was lost, and the two years following brought “extensive” failures throughout the country.
In 1839 there was again “universal failure” from Bantry Bay to Lough Swilly, and 1841 and 1844 were also disastrous years. There was, therefore, no real reason to suppose that 1845 would be any worse or any better. And yet by early July of that year the outlook was exceptionally bright. The weather had been perfect—hot, sunny, and dry, and on July 23 the Freeman’s Journal was able to say with confidence, “The poor man’s property, the potato crop was never before so large and at the same time so abundant.” Old potatoes—“even at this advanced season”—were coming into the market and were of excellent quality, and fine new potatoes were being dug. In London, the Times reported that “an early and productive harvest was everywhere expected” in Ireland. The first ominous note appeared in August, from the potato fields of the Isle of Wight, where “a blight of unusual character” appeared to have struck the summer crop. It was indeed unusual. Freshly dug potatoes appeared perfectly healthy, but, within a few days, or in some cases a few hours, they turned black and pulpy, emitted a black, oily ooze and a noxious odor like that of rotted meat. The disease appeared to have come, ironically enough, from the United States.
Furthermore, it seemed to be spreading, and on August 23, Dr. John Lindley, professor of botany at the University of London, published an article in the Gardeners’ Chronicle, which said, “A fearful malady has broken out among the potato crop. On all sides we hear of the destruction. In Belgium the fields are said to be completely desolated. There is hardly a sound sample in the Covent Garden market … as for cure for this distemper there is none.” And on September 13, in the same journal, Dr. Lindley told his readers, “We stop the press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain [as it had been labeled] has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. The crops about Dublin are suddenly perishing … where will Ireland be in the event of a universal potato rot?”
In London, meanwhile, the British Government—in order that its administration appear in as good a light as possible, and that the world might not be unduly reminded of the impoverished state of the Irish populace—took a more sanguine view of the situation, and the first official comment spoke of the “alleged” failure of the Irish potato crop, and called the reports “very greatly exaggerated.” And on October 6, to counter reports of widespread starvation and death, Sir James Graham, the British Home Secretary, announced his “belief that the potato crop, tho’ damaged, is not so much below the average as some of the exaggerated reports from Ireland have led us to apprehend.” The Irish, Sir James implied, were a race of liars anyway. As more and more disastrous news flooded in from across the Irish Sea, the government continued to release bland and comforting news about these “false alarms.”
The blight spread like fox-fire across Ireland, and farmers tried to rush their crops to the markets and sell them cheaply before the potatoes turned black and putrid. When diseased potatoes were fed to pigs and other livestock, they sickened and died. When starving people tried to eat the evil-smelling tubers, they, too, became violently ill. In the wake of starvation came, quickly, disease—cholera, typhus, typhoid, or “fever.” A parish priest wrote:
I was called in to prepare a poor fellow, whose mother lay beside him dead two days.… I was called in two days after to a miserable object, beside whom a child lay dead, for the twenty-four hours previous; two others lay beside her just expiring, and, horrible to relate, a famished cat got upon the bed, and was just about to gnaw the corpse of the deceased infant, until I prevented it … a third of the population has been already carried away. Every morning four or five corpses are to be found on the street dead, the victims of famine and disease.
In many Irish hamlets there were no hospitals and no doctors, and the home remedies—herb juices, wild garlic, sheep’s blood, milk and water boiled with salt—did no good, and in some cases may have speeded death. Suddenly it was a commonplace sight to see a small band of frightened children pushing a wheelbarrow in which two dead parents lay. Mass burials became a necessity, and bodies were dumped in open pits on top of other bodies that waited there, scattered with lime. By late October, 1845, when more than half the potato crop of Ireland had either been utterly destroyed or soon would be, the Home Secretary was ready to admit that the state of affairs was “very alarming.”
No one, furthermore, had any notion of what was causing the blight. Various theories
were advanced. It was said that the potatoes had been damaged by “static electricity” from the air, and it was suggested that puffs of steam from passing locomotives—recently introduced in Ireland—might be to blame. One theory held that the disease was caused by “mortiferous vapours” rising from “blind volcanoes” in the interior of the earth, and another school of thought held that the villain was guano manure, made from the droppings of seagulls, that was used as fertilizer in some areas. Did it come from the air, the earth, from the water? From County Clare came a report that one section of a field, where clothes had been laid out to dry, had escaped the blight. “This,” said a local expert, “proves that the blow came from the air.” Dr. Lindley’s own analysis was no more helpful. He declared that the potatoes were suffering from “dropsy”—a human disease had invaded the plant kingdom. And while all this discussion was going on, the disease spread at a rampage, in regions wet and arid, from sheltered valleys to the highest mountainside. “Alarm” became terror.
A scientific commission was dispatched from London to Dublin, and presently the commissioners had drawn up a report: “Advice Concerning the Potato Crop to the Farmers and Peasantry of Ireland.” The advice was that the Irish farmer should dry his potatoes in the sun, then “mark out on the ground a space six feet wide and as long as you please. Dig a shallow trench two feet wide all round and throw the mould upon the space, then level it and cover it with a floor of turf sods set on their edges.” On top of this was to be sifted “packing stuff,” made by “mixing a barrel of freshly burnt unslaked lime, broken into pieces as large as marbles, with two barrels of sand or earth, or by mixing equal parts of burnt turf and dry sawdust.” If these preliminaries were not complicated enough, the detailed and lengthy instructions that followed were downright unintelligible—as the commissioners seemed to realize, for their report concluded: “If you do not understand this, ask your landlord or Parish priest to explain its meaning.” The landlord to ask, meanwhile, was in most cases an absentee, miles across the sea in England.
And even those farmers who did understand the commissioners’ recommendations found the procedure did absolutely no good at all. Next came instructions on how to prepare diseased potatoes for eating. The Irish peasant was to provide himself with a grater, a linen cloth, a hair sieve or cloth strainer, a pail or tub or two of water, and a griddle. Potatoes were then to be finely grated into the tubs, washed, strained; then the process was to be repeated and the resulting black pulp was to be dried in the griddle over a slow fire. The result, the commissioners said, was starch, and good bread could be made out of it. “There will,” the report noted, “be of course a good deal of trouble in all we have recommended, and perhaps you will not succeed very well at first.” The report closed on a note of chauvinism, urging the Irish to keep a stiff upper lip through it all. “We are confident all true Irishmen will exert themselves, and never let it be said that in Ireland the inhabitants wanted courage to meet difficulties against which other nations are successfully struggling.”
As word of Ireland’s peril spread, other suggestions poured in from well-meaning, if sometimes wild-eyed, authorities. One suggestion was that rotted potatoes should be baked—in primitive Irish cabins—at a temperature of 180 degrees Fahrenheit for eighteen to twenty minutes, or until “blackish matter” with a foul smell came oozing out in oily gobbets. The potatoes could then, it was claimed, be peeled and would be found sweet and white again. The process did not work. Nothing did, not even a proposal that the potatoes should be sliced and soaked in bog water, spread with lime or salt, or else treated with chlorine gas—“easily” made by cottagers by mixing vitriol, manganese dioxide, and salt. If tried, this method would have had the peasants manufacturing poison gas.
And the disease could not be stopped. The terrible winter of 1845 grew into a worse year in 1846. The potato blight would continue, unstopped and unstoppable, for a full ten years. At the end of this period, the Irish population, with normal growth, should have stood at about 9,000,000. Instead, it had dropped to 6,552,385. With terrible slowness, relief funds trickled in from Britain and across the Atlantic. One of the first groups to help was the Society of Friends, or Quakers. Soup kitchens were set up. But still, over the ten-year period, more than a million Irish died, and more than a million others fled to other lands. In 1845, 50,000 came to America. The following year, it was 68,000. A year later, the figure climbed to 117,000, and continued to climb until the peak year of the famine, 1851, when 216,000 Irish souls made their way, in steerage, into New York Harbor. The immigration continued heavily through 1854, and then dropped to about what it had been in 1845, or 57,000. Peter McDonnell was one of this vast and hungry horde.
The situation that greeted the arriving Irishman in New York—where most immigrants disembarked—was not much better than the one he had left in Ireland. New York was already a city of great wealth, the money capital of the United States, with huge mansions parading up Fifth Avenue and across Murray Hill. But it was also a tough, rough-hewn, and competitive town whose leading men were entrepreneurs and, in many cases, outright scoundrels. For all its fine trappings, New York had a coarse underbelly. Vagrant pigs acted as scavengers, and garbage thrown in the street was dealt with in this manner. On August 20, 1847, the New York Sun complained of “pigs dangerous as hyenas.” An angry citizen wrote a letter to the editor about the pigs he met “lounging up Broadway.” A “Quaker lady” was charged by a pig, knocked down and bitten right on Fifth Avenue, and in another part of the city a pig attacked a child that was sitting on a stoop, and snatched a piece of bread from her hand. Other animals roamed freely about the city, and newspapers of the period carried advertisements for lost cattle and horses, including one for a “large, fat ox, red with a white face,” last seen strolling up Third Avenue. Manhattan’s side streets were rutted mud tracks, unsafe to walk in, and packs of wild dogs, many of them rabid, patrolled the town at night. New Yorkers today who complain of danger and violence in their city might well be grateful that they are not living in the mid-nineteenth century.
In her book The Great Hunger, an account of the Irish migration to America, Cecil Woodham-Smith has said, “The story of the Irish in the New World is not a romantic story of liberty and success, but the history of a bitter struggle, as bitter, as painful, though not as long-drawn-out, as the struggle by which the Irish at last won the right to be a nation.” Certainly the arriving Irish in New York found conditions much worse than those of the native New Yorker. There had been, to begin with, the six-to-eight-week journey in steerage across the Atlantic. Steerage passage cost between twelve and twenty-five dollars, depending upon the cupidity of the ship’s captain (the fare was sometimes paid by the British landlord, not out of charity but out of eagerness to clear his land of starving and dying people who could no longer pay their rents), and passengers were crowded belowdecks, seldom permitted to go above for fresh air, and the standard food ration was a bowl of pork and beans and a cup of water a day. Steerage was a hotbed of fever, and a report that as many as fifty persons had died during a single crossing was no surprise. The lucky arrivals were the healthy ones. A healthy male could find work as a laborer for seventy-five cents a day, and a healthy girl could work as a housemaid for room and board and a dollar a week. The sick were another matter.
All ships entering the port of New York were inspected by a port physician, and any passenger or crew member found ailing was sent to the hospital at the Quarantine Station on Staten Island. The Station, on the northeastern tip of the island, was located on thirty acres of ground and consisted of two hospitals, built to accommodate four hundred patients, plus a special smallpox hospital which could handle fifty cases at a time, and a workhouse for the destitute. By 1847, with as many as a hundred sick persons per arriving shipload, the hospitals were hopelessly overcrowded, and shanty outbuildings were thrown together to house the overflow. Inside, conditions were, at best, deplorable. Patients were placed on iron beds upon which a thin layer of straw w
as spread. The hospitals were understaffed, and doctors were cruel or indifferent; male nurses abused and beat patients for minor infractions. The kitchens were filthy, the food uneatable, and the sanitary arrangements hopelessly primitive. Even the officials of the hospital admitted that things were in “a bad state,” that the roofs leaked and that the patients’ beds were often soaking wet. A reporter from the New York Tribune visited the hospital, was shocked by what he saw, and wrote that there was not a single patient in the place who was not Irish.
A few patients who were strong enough to do so managed to escape from the hospital by stealing small rowboats and rowing the five and a half miles to Manhattan. And so it was inevitable that “ship fever” made its way quickly to the city. In the spring of 1847 an epidemic of typhus and typhoid fever broke out in New York, and 1,396 deaths were reported. The actual figure was unquestionably higher because, although one was supposed to report all such deaths, there was no penalty for not doing so.
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