by Brian Fagan
At first the potato was merely a supplement to the Irish diet, except throughout Munster in the south, where the poorest country people embraced it as a staple very early on. Wrote an observer in 1684: "Ye great support of ye Poore sortes of people is thire potatoes." They were a winter food, consumed between "the first of August in the autumn until the feast of Patrick in the spring." 2 The harvest was so casual that many farmers simply left the tubers in the ground and dug them out when required. They learned the hard way that a hard frost would destroy the crop in short order.
Potato cultivation increased twentyfold over the next half century, despite a terrible famine in the exceptional cold of 1740 and 1741, when both the grain and potato crops failed; 1740-1 became known as Blaidhain an air, "the year of the slaughter." An unusually long spell of cold weather destroyed both grain and potato crops and killed livestock, even seabirds. By this time, the poor of the south and west were depending almost entirely on potatoes and were especially vulnerable to crop failure. The government intervened aggressively, prohibiting grain exports and deploying the army to provide famine relief. There was little excess food in Europe, partly because of poor harvest and also because of the War of Austrian Succession. Instead, "large supplies of provisions arrived from America."3 Both local landlords and gentry, and members of the Anglican church organized large scale charity relief in the form of free food, subsidised grain, and free meals. This generosity was sparked more by fear of social disorder and epidemic disease than by altruism. Despite the assistance, large numbers of the poor took to the roads to beg for relief or to move to the towns in search of food, employment, or a departing ship. Between 300,000 and 400,000 people perished of dysentery, hunger, and typhus in a famine that foreshadowed the great tragedy of the 1840s. In the end, at least 10 percent of Ireland's population perished of starvation and related medical ills. The famine demonstrated that neither potatoes nor oats were a complete panacea to Ireland's farming problems, partly because stored potatoes only kept about eight months in the damp climate.
As memories of the famine faded, the explosion in potato farming continued. The late eighteenth century was the golden age of the Irish potato, "universally palatable from the palace to the pig-sty."4 Potatoes formed a substantial part of the diet of the wealthy and the entire diet of the poor. The excellent Irish strains developed during these years were admired and planted throughout northern Europe not only for human use but as animal fodder. By the 1790s, farmers were throwing out large numbers of surplus potatoes each year, even after feeding their cattle and pigs. "They left them stacked in heaps at the back of ditches, piled them in the gaps of fences, used them as top dressing, buried them, or stacked them in fields and burned them."5
Visitor after visitor remarked on the healthy looks of Irish countryfolk, and their cheerful demeanor, and their constant dancing, singing, and storytelling. By the end of the eighteenth century, physicians were recommending potatoes "as a supper to those ladies whom providence had not blessed with children, and an heir has often been the consequence."6 John Henry wrote in 1771 that where "the potato is most generally used as food, the admirable complexions of the wenches are so remarkably delicate as to excite in their superiors very friendly and flattering sensations." 7 In 1780, traveler Philip Lucksome observed that the poorer Irish lived on potatoes and milk year round "without tasting either bread or meat, except perhaps at Christmas once or twice."8
Everyone grew potatoes in rectangular plots separated from their neighbors' by narrow trenches. Each tract was about two to three meters wide, fertilized with animal dung, powdered shell, or with seaweed in coastal areas. Using spades called toys, ten men could turn over and sow 0.5 hectare with potatoes in a day. To sow a cereal crop of the same area in the same time would take forty. The Irish "raised fields," sometimes called "lazy beds," could produce as many as seventeen tons of potatoes a hectare, an astounding yield when compared with oats. The potato had obvious advantages for land-poor farmers living in complete poverty. With the vitamins from their tubers and milk or butter from a few head of cattle, even the poorest Irish family had an adequate, if spartan, diet in good harvest years.
Oblivious of the potential dangers from weather and other hazards, Ireland moved dangerously close to monoculture. Grain was no longer part of the diet in the south and west of the country and had become predominantly a cash crop in the north. The beauty of the potato was that it fed the laborers who produced oats and wheat for export to bread-hungry England. The illusion of infallible supply caused a growing demand for Irish potatoes in northeast England to feed the growing populations of rapidly industrializing Liverpool and Manchester.
In 1811, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, a writer in the Munster Farmers' Magazine called potatoes "the luxury of the rich and the food of the poor; the chief cause of our population and our greatest security against famine."9 But for all their advantages, potatoes were not a miracle crop. Unusually wet or dry summers and occasional exceptionally cold winters subjected the country to regular famine. The combination of rain and frost sometimes killed both cereals and potatoes. Even in plentiful years, thousands of the poor were chronically unemployed and dependent on aggressive government intervention for relief. Many Irish workers, including many skilled linen workers, emigrated to distant lands to escape hunger. In 1770 alone, 30,000 emigrants left four Ulster ports for North America. They departed in the face of rapid population growth, archaic land tenure rules that subdivided small farming plots again and againand the ever-present specter of famine.
The periodic food shortages that plagued Ireland between 1753 and 1801 were mostly of local impact, with relatively low mortality. 10 A serious food shortage developed in 1782/83, when cold, wet weather destroyed much of the grain crop at the height of a major economic slump. Private relief efforts and aggressive intervention by the Irish government averted widespread hunger. The Earl of Carlisle, at the time the lord lieutenant of Ireland, disregarded the lobbying of grain interests, embargoed food exports to England and made £100,000 available as bounty payments on oat and wheat imports. Food prices fell almost immediately. When the severe winter of 1783/84 prolonged the food crisis, the lord lieutenant once again intervened. He assumed control over food exports and made money available for relief at the parish level in affected areas. Within ten days, the parish scheme brought generous rations for the needy: a pound of bread, a herring and a pint of beer daily. The number of deaths was much lower than it had been during the disaster of 1740-42. Government's priorities were clear and humane, and were matched by rapid response to needs.
An Act of Union joined England and Ireland in 1800. Ireland lost her political and legislative autonomy and her economic independence. The decades after 1800 saw Britain embark on a course of rapid industrialization that largely bypassed Ireland, where competition with their neighbor's highly advanced economy, the most sophisticated in Europe, undermined many nascent industries. By 1841, 40 percent of Britain's male labor force was employed in the industrial sector, compared with only 17 percent of Irishmen. Much of the deindustrialization in the famed Irish linen industry came from the adoption of labor-saving devices. New weaving machinery and steam power had transformed what had been a cottage industry into one concentrated in large mill facilities centered around Belfast in the north. Until the factories came along, thousands of small holders had subsisted off small plots of land and weaving and spinning. Now, having lost an important source of income, they were forced to depend on their tiny land holdings, and above all on the potato. And in lean years, the authorities in London were less inclined to be sympathetic than their Irish predecessors.
Irish commercial agriculture, which generated enough cattle and grain exports to feed 2 million people, required that as much as a quarter of Ireland's cereals and most livestock be raised for sale abroad. Ireland had become a bread basket for England: Irish oats and wheat kept English bread prices low, while most of the Irish ate potatoes raised on rented land and lived at a basic,
and highly vulnerable, subsistence level. Nowhere else in Europe did people rely so heavily on one crop for survival. And the structure of land ownership meant that this crop was grown on plots so small that almost no tenant could produce a food surplus.
Potatoes were an inadequate insurance against food shortages. More than 65,000 people died of hunger and related diseases in 1816, the "year without a summer." They died in part because the British authorities chose not to ban grain exports, an effective measure in earlier dearths. Chief Secretary Robert Peel justified this on the specious grounds that private charity givers would relax their efforts if the government assumed major responsibility for famine relief. In June 1817, he issued a fatuous proclamation to the effect that "persons in the higher spheres of life should discontinue the use of potatoes in their families and reduce the allowance of oats to their horses."''
By 1820, the potato varieties that had sustained the Irish in earlier times were in decline. Black, Apple, and Cup potatoes were outstanding varieties, especially the Apple with its deep green foliage and roundish tubers, which produced a rich-flavored, mealy potato likened by some to bread in its consistency. These hardy and productive strains began to degenerate due to indiscriminate crossbreeding in the early nineteenth century. They gave way to the notorious Lumper, or horse potato, which had originated as animal fodder in England. Lumpers were highly productive and easily raised on poor soil, an important consideration when people occupied every hectare of land. By 1835, coarse and watery Lumpers had become the normal staple of Irish animals and the poor over much of the south and west. Few commentators had anything polite to say about them. Henry Dutton described them as: "more productive with a little manure ... but they are a wretched kind for any creature; even pigs, I am informed, will not eat them if they can get other kinds."12
The agricultural writer Arthur Young, touring through Ireland in 1779, had written glowingly of the potato and its ability to feed people. But as the population soared and yields dropped, the potato's disadvantages be came apparent. Lumpers did not keep from one year to the next, so one could not rely on the previous year's crop as a cushion against a poor harvest. Ireland's poor, already living on an inferior potato with dubious nutritional value, thus had no food reserves. They were also running out of land. Ireland's population had risen rapidly until it was over one-half the combined population of England and Wales. The rapid rise put severe pressure on farming land even as larger farmers increasingly converted their land to grain or stock raising for export. The conversions forced poor potato growers higher into the hills and on to ever less fertile land. Inevitably, crop yields fell. During the often hungry summer months, people were tempted to consume their seed potatoes, even to dig up their new crops as soon as the tubers formed. Year after year, as the distress intensified, thousands of Irish migrated to North America to escape increasingly difficult circumstances at home. Many commentators on both sides of the Irish Channel became voices of doom. "The condition of Ireland becomes worse and worse," wrote John Wiggins in The Monster Misery of Ireland, published in 1844. Ireland was "a house built upon sand ... and must inevitably fall the moment that the winds blow and the waves rage, or even with the first and slightest gale."13 He urged immediate action.
But it was too late. A tiny fungus bred on the other side of the Atlantic was already on its way to Europe. Another observer, Dr. Martin Doyle, wrote in his letters on the state of Ireland that "should a dearth of provision occur, famine and pestilence will set in together, and rid us probably of a million."14 The disaster, waiting to happen, was compounded by indifference and inertia. A series of Parliamentary Commissions examined the state of Ireland but did nothing. In the memorable words of Austin Bourke: "Each in turn lifted the lid of the cauldron, looked helplessly into the mess of injustice, prejudice, starvation, and despair, and quietly put the lid on again."'s
Potatoes, like all crops, are susceptible to disease. Outbreaks of a viral disease called curl came in 1832-4 and were followed by a dry rot epidemic. Neither did lasting damage. Then, in 1843, an outbreak of potato blight, phytophthora infestans, sometimes called "late blight," attacked growing crops in the hinterland of major eastern United States ports. Extremely fast moving, its spores germinated on the leaves and stems of the potato plant or in the surrounding soil. The disease first appeared as black spots, then as a furry growth. The plant soon decayed and the growing tubers became discolored, pulpy messes. A distinctive smell was often the first sign that blight had struck. Over the next two years the disease spread rapidly from the New York-Philadelphia area both into the southeastern United States and westward into the Great Lakes region and Canada. Inevitably, the spores crossed the Atlantic. No one knows how, from where, or when the blight spread to Europe. Some authorities believe it arrived in potatoes imported from Peru, on ships carrying guano fertilizer (fertilizer from bird droppings) as early as 1844. Others point to Mexico or North America as sources. Once established, the blight spread rapidly, helped by the prevailing weather conditions.
The summer of 1845 was cold, sunless and wetter than normal, but by no means unusual for the mid-nineteenth century. Shallow, thundery depressions with highly variable winds penetrated into the Continent. The damp, chill weather and shifting winds favored the transport of blight spores in all directions. At the time, potato crops throughout Europe were extremely susceptible to blight, and the Lumper was even more so than most. The disease worked through plots of growing Lumpers with terrifying rapidity, sometimes rotting the tubers almost overnight.
Blight was first reported in Belgium in July 1845. By August, infected foliage appeared in fields around Paris and in the Rhineland; southern England and the Channel Islands were affected at about the same time. There was no effective antidote. Botanists and learned societies scrambled for an explanation of the unknown infection, attributing it to the unusually cool and gray summer, to progressive degeneration of the potato, or even to "some aerial taint originating in outer space." Meanwhile, the blight spread inexorably. At the end of August, the first reports of infection were reported from the Botanic Gardens in Dublin.
At first, the Irish newspapers played down the significance of the infestation, appearing as it did at harvest time. Public panic set in during October, when millions of ripe tubers turned rotten in the fields. "Where will Ireland be in the event of a universal potato rot?" asked Dr. John Lindley, the editor of the widely read Gardener's Chronicle.'6 The crop losses were heaviest in areas where the summer had been wettest. The mean loss from tuber rot in Ireland in 1845 was about 40 percent and the threat of famine immediate.
At first, potatoes were in plentiful supply. People hastened to sell their sound tubers or to eat them at once. The famine did not truly begin until five or six months later, when every fragment of potato had been consumed. Relief measures were complicated by the lack of good roads and by the chronic insolvency of many Irish landlords, who were virtually powerless to help their tenants. In London, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel responded to the reports of crop failure by appointing a Scientific Commission to diagnose the problem, report on the extent of the damage, and recommend an antidote. The Commission estimated that as much as half of the crop was destroyed or rotting in storage, failed to diagnose the cause, and raised such an alarm that Peel ordered the immediate importation of £100,000-worth of maize from the United States. Peel intended this measure not as a way of feeding the starving potato farmer but as a way of controlling grain prices cheaply, without any danger of the government being accused of interfering in the cereal marketplace.
By April 1846, the House of Commons learned that people were eating their seed potatoes. About a third less hectarage of potatoes was planted as a result, making scarcity inevitable. The spring was cold and wet, but May and June turned warm and dry. Hopes ran high. The growing potatoes looked luxuriant in the fields. Then in early August, the blight appeared a full two months earlier than the previous year, progressing east and northeastward on the wings of the prevailing
winds at a rate of about eighty kilometers a week. Almost every potato was lost. Father Mathew, a celebrated temperance advocate of the day, wrote how he had traveled from Cork to Dublin on July 27: "This doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the third instant I beheld with sorrow one wild waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless."17 For hundreds of miles, the fields were black as if ravaged by fire. The stench of rotting potatoes filled the air.
In 1845, the distress had been severe but not overwhelming, thanks to an above average harvest and at least partially effective relief efforts. This time, the failure was complete. There were not even any freshly harvested potatoes to tide over the hungry. Every scrap of clothing and other possessions, even bedding, had already been pawned or sold for food. Not a green potato field could be seen from Limerick to Dublin. Torrential rain fell, violent thunderstorms ravaged the blackened fields, and dense fog hovered over the blighted land. On September 2, the London Times called the potato crop a "total annihilation."
