style="font-size:15px;"> The potato, introduced into Europe by the mid-18th century, was never a cash crop; however, because it was better adapted to the cool, moist conditions in Ireland than other crops, most of the Irish population was dependent on it as a supplemental food source by 1800. The Irish tenant farmers were forced to pay exorbitant taxes and to export their cash crops as well as butter, eggs, pork, and beef in order to produce sufficient income to pay the landlords for the use of the land and to avoid eviction. Some of those evicted were relocated to less fertile areas where essentially only the potato could be grown, but even these lands remained under the control of absentee British landlords. The Irish peasants on the worst land came to rely almost exclusively on potatoes to store over the winter and to feed themselves and their livestock, especially the pigs. The potato became the staff of life for the Irish peasant. A family of 10 needed a ton of potatoes per month to survive, and an average adult ate 9 to 14 pounds per day supplemented with buttermilk.
In 1845 a “queer mist” came over the Irish Sea and the potato stalks turned black as soot. The next day the potatoes were a wide waste of putrefaction, giving off an odor that could be smelled for miles. About 40% of the potato crop was destroyed. In areas where the blight was most severe, tenant farmers and their families frantically scoured the land and bogs for stray potatoes. They washed away the rotted parts and grated the remainder to make flour. Children searched the woods for nuts and berries; they dug for fern and dandelion roots and ate the leaves and bark from the trees. The streams were fished for eels and trout, and the peasants trudged many miles to get to the shore, where they scraped mussels, limpets, and seaweed from the rocks. Many died from eating poisonous plants, but “The Great Hunger” forced them to try anything that seemed edible.
When the fourth rider of the Apocalypse, Famine, rode into Ireland, the Victorian historian Charles Kingsley described what he saw: “I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that 100 miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were.” As the Great Famine gripped Ireland, thousands of Irish died each day. Few were felled from starvation alone: death invariably was visited upon the Irish because malnutrition made them more susceptible to diseases such as typhus, cholera, dysentery, and relapsing fever. Desperate to escape from virulent racism and prejudice, as well as starvation caused by the potato failure, the people of Ireland began a process of migration that changed the course of their history and that of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain.
Bite of Blight
Many of the great civilizations of the world were established by people who settled down and cultivated a staple food crop. In Southeast Asia it was rice, in Europe it was grain (wheat and rye), and for the Mayans and Aztecs in Central America and Mexico it was corn. The South American Incas cultivated a plant that grew well above the 10,000-ft level in the high valleys and cold plateaus of the Andes mountains. This plant had stems above and below ground level, and the swollen underground stems—called tubers—were highly nutritious. These tubers, which the Incas called “papas,” we call potatoes. The potato tuber is nutritious because it contains proteins, starches, and vitamins. The potato was the staple food source on which the Inca civilization was built, and even today it is one of the most important food crop plants in the world. Although rice, maize (corn), and wheat are the top three food plants, the potato ranks fourth. Indeed, one-fifth of the world’s people use the potato as their primary food source today.
The Incas first cultivated the potato over 6,000 years ago. When the Spanish Conquistadors under Pizarro came to the Americas in search of treasure, they destroyed the Inca civilization but discovered something more valuable than gold, silver, and jewels—the potato plant. This plant, perhaps the most priceless possession of the Incas, the Conquistadors did not even bother to record. By the late 1500s the sailors on Spanish galleons accidentally introduced these plants into Europe, where they were considered more of a curiosity than a foodstuff. They may have been rejected as a food because the potato is a member of the poisonous nightshade family. It was also claimed to cause leprosy, and even its reputation as an aphrodisiac did not make it acceptable. (The seductive Marie Antoinette, it is claimed, wore potato blossoms in her hair.) It was widely believed that eating potatoes caused flatulence, and so initially the tubers were fed to farm animals; however, since this caused no harm, the potato came to be accepted as a food fit for humans. By the 1800s, with an increase in the population of Europe and the inability of grains to support this population, the potato became a regular part of the diet. Easy cultivation and high yields in cool climates led to a major dependence on potatoes by populations on the high cold plateaus of Spain, the dank flatlands of Germany and Poland, and the soggy bogs of Ireland. The British landowners encouraged cultivation of the potato in Ireland since it saved the grain for export and for their own use. Furthermore, only in the southeastern part of Ireland is the soil suitable for growing grain (rye or wheat) from which bread can be made, but potatoes can be grown even in the poorest soils.
The Irish invented a highly efficient method of potato cultivation, called the “lazy bed.” The lazy bed is one in which the seed potatoes (“eyes” of the tuber) are placed helter skelter on the ground and covered with manure and seaweed, and then the soil dug from lateral trenches is piled on top so that long, narrow beds of soil are raised 2 to 3 ft above the surrounding ground. This protects the tubers from excess moisture. The cultivation of potatoes produces a high-yield crop (~30 tons/acre). Potato plants mature faster than most crops, taking 90 to 120 days, and edible tubers can be harvested in 60 days. The potato tuber is higher in protein than soybean, and half a potato can provide half of the human daily requirement of vitamin C.
Feudal systems tended to favor high birth rates because under such a system the number of dependents was a measure of a person’s wealth. Children were a cheap and expendable source of labor and could be relied on to provide assistance in one’s old age. In Ireland this led to a massive increase in the birth rate, and after the middle of the 17th century more newborns survived because there was a reduction in the death rate due to reduced infant mortality, tribal warfare, murder, and mayhem. In 1660 the population of Ireland was 500,000, but by 1688 it had doubled to 1.25 million. Between 1760 and 1840 it grew from 1.5 million to about 8 million. This explosive growth in the population of Ireland strained the economy and left many peasants living under bare subsistence conditions. As the Irish population grew, the land was further subdivided and living standards declined. The British government attempted to consolidate these small plots as a way of increasing grain output and also instituted Penal Laws which denied the Irish peasant population freedom. They were forbidden to speak their own language and practice their faith, to attend school or hold public office, to own land, or to own a horse worth more than £5. A peasant earned £7 per year, of which two-thirds was paid as rent. A pig, valued at £4 when sold, served as financial security for the peasant; it is from this that the term “piggy-bank savings” comes.
The English clergyman Thomas Malthus (1766 to 1834) wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, in which he stated that a population that is unchecked increases in geometric fashion. The consequences of unrestrained population growth, in Malthus’ words, would lead to “misery and vice.” These would tend to act as “natural restraints” on population growth. Today we understand that there are at least two kinds of checks to set the upper limit for a population: external or environmental factors (including limited food, space, or other resources) and self-regulating factors (such as fewer births, deliberate killing of offspring, or an increased death rate due to accidents or disease). Agriculture in its most efficient form can change the environmental restraint so that far larger human populations are possible; however, even here there are limits. It is estimated that without the potato as a food source, all the land in Ireland could support a population of only 5 million if the people were fed on bread. Compounding the problem caused by potato blight, there was a worldwide shortage of bread grains at a price the Irish could afford. Between 1798, when Thomas Malthus’ Essay on Population was published, and 1845 there were 20 failures of the Irish potato crop, all leading to starvation, disease, and
