1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [127]
Blight was first reported in Ireland on September 13, 1845. By mid-October the British prime minister was privately describing the epidemic as a national disaster. Within another month between a quarter and a third of the crop had been lost. Cormac Ó Gráda, an economist and blight historian at University College, Dublin, has estimated that Irish farmers planted about 2.1 million acres of potatoes that year. In two months P. infestans wiped out the equivalent of between half and three-quarters of a million acres in every corner of the nation. The next year was worse, as was the year after that.
Recall that almost four out of ten Irish ate no solid food except potatoes, and that the rest were heavily dependent on them. Recall, too, that Ireland was one of the poorest nations in Europe. At a stroke, the blight removed the food supply from half the country—and there was no money to buy grain from outside. The consequences were horrific; Ireland was transformed into a post-apocalyptic landscape. Destitute men lined the roads in their rags, sleeping in crude shelters dug into roadside ditches. People ate dogs, rats, and tree bark. Reports of cannibalism were frequent and perhaps accurate. Entire families died in their homes and were eaten by feral pets. Disease picked at the survivors: dysentery, smallpox, typhus, measles, a host of ailments listed in death records as “fever.” Mobs of beggars—“homeless, half-naked, famishing creatures,” one observer called them—besieged the homes of the wealthy, calling for alms. So many died that in many western towns the bodies were interred in mass graves.
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As resources vanished, life became a struggle of all against all. Starving men stole into fields to steal turnips from the ground. Farmers dug mantraps in their fields to stop them. Landlords evicted tenants in huge numbers, tore down their homes, then went bankrupt themselves. Neighbor fought neighbor for food and shelter. Crime levels exploded, the murder rate almost doubling in two years. Some hungry people stole to put food on the table, others to be fed while incarcerated. In one case two men released from prison were sent back the next day for trying “to break into jail.” The only violent crime to decline was rape, because potential perpetrators lacked the energy.
Hundreds of thousands of desperate people fled the country in what became known as “coffin ships.” One passenger remembered bodies “huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart.” The ships marked their passage with a trail of dead slid into the sea. Most migrants went to the United States and Canada. Multitudes of sick and starving filled the quarantine area at Grosse Île, in the St. Lawrence River by Quebec. A mass grave there contains thousands of bodies. They died an ocean away from Ireland but were as much victims of P. infestans as if they had never left.
In early 1847 the Illustrated London News asked the artist James Mahoney to tour the famine-wracked Irish countryside. His articles and illustrations depicted a landscape of ruins and starving beggars—and did much to bring the crisis to the attention of the English public. (Photo credit 6.5)
Britain mounted the biggest aid program in its history, but it was catastrophically insufficient—largely, Irish nationalists charge, because London treated the crisis as a chance to expand its efforts to transform Ireland’s “primitive” subsistence farming to export-oriented agriculture. Instead of simply providing food, the British pulled people off the farm, massed them in workhouses, and fed them from soup kitchens; meanwhile, the farms were consolidated into bigger, more export-friendly units. Other critics point to the export of food from Ireland during the famine: 430,000 tons of grain in 1846 and 1847, the two worst years. “The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight,” nationalist leader