1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [130]
Murphy, denouncer of lazy-beds, took his professional tour because disease had been striking Ireland’s potatoes. This was in 1834, a decade before the blight; the diseases he was concerned with were viruses, bacteria, nematodes, and so on—ordinary pests that were adapting to the new crop. As the pests evolved, they caused crop failures; fourteen occurred between 1814 and 1845. (None of these incidents was anywhere as severe as the Great Hunger.) Myers, the University of Texas researcher, came to believe these failures were due in part to the abandonment of lazy-bed cultivation, which inadvertently fostered plant disease. (It is worth noting that the Andes did not have such widespread potato epidemics.) The blight was simply the latest and worst pathogen to take advantage of the new scientific agriculture: one kind of potato, on a terrain shaped for technology, rather than biology.
The Great Hunger was the first truly contemporary agricultural disaster. Without the improvements wrought by modern science and technology, the blight would have had far less impact. Alarmed by the blight, governments in France, Belgium, Britain, and the Netherlands quickly asked biologists for help. But in its surge and sweep it was like nothing they had ever seen. During the next forty years, researchers attributed the blight to ozone, air pollution, static electricity, volcanic action, smoke from steam locomotives, excessive humidity or heat, gases from the recently introduced sulfur match, an emanation from outer space, various insects (aphids, ladybugs, tarnished plant bugs), and the potato’s own internal debilitation. Edward Hitchcock, a renowned natural historian at Amherst College, assigned blame to an “atmospheric agency, too subtle for the cognizance of our senses.” A few thought the cause was a fungus, but they were shouted down. No useful countermeasures were proposed. The plea for help went out to Science, but Science couldn’t answer.
“WAR UPON THE BEETLES”
In August 1861 beetles invaded a ten-acre garden in northeastern Kansas that belonged to a potato farmer named Thomas Murphy. His name was appropriate: Murphy, a common Irish surname, was also a slang term for potatoes. Murphy’s potatoes—Murphy’s Murphys—were overrun by so many beetles that he could barely see the leaves through the swarm of tiny glittering bodies. He knocked the insects from the plants into a basket, he wrote later, and “in a very short time gathered as many as two bushels of them”—remarkable, given that each insect was barely a third of an inch long. In a different context, perhaps, Murphy might have thought the beetle was beautiful, with its yellow-orange body and its forewings marked tigerishly with thin black stripes. But they were devouring his potato plants as fast as they came up.
Murphy had never seen the beetle before its hordes suddenly attacked his potatoes. Nor had his neighbors who also were visited by it, or the farmers in Iowa and Nebraska whom it invaded that summer. The insect marched steadily north and east, expanding its range by fifty to a hundred miles a year, shocking potato growers at every step. It reached Illinois and Wisconsin in 1864; Michigan, by 1870. Seven years later it was attacking potatoes from Maine to North Carolina. The little insects swarmed potato fields in such profusion, according to one widely repeated story, that they stopped nearby trains. Their bodies covered the tracks in a layer deep enough to make the wheels slip “as if oiled, so that the locomotive was powerless to draw the train of cars.” Strong winds blew the beetles into the sea, from which they washed ashore in a glittering, yellow-orange carpet that fouled beaches from New Jersey to New Hampshire. Farmers had no idea where the creature had come from or how to stop it from eating