period, only three famines occurred in England. According to Malthusian doctrine, any increase in the Irish population would be due to their carnal and vicious nature. Famine would control this population explosion, and in Malthusian terms this was deserved. The Irish, the British opined, were hopelessly inferior and incurably filled with vice and so they deserved the famine, which would exert control over their excessive breeding. In effect, the Malthusian theory was used to reinforce British prejudice against the Irish and to justify the British failure to provide relief. There was also a laissez faire economic policy under which the British government adopted a hands-off policy. The attitude in Great Britain was to let the market run its course. By the end of 1846, not a single potato was left in Ireland. In addition, that year had one of the coldest winters on record. The level of starvation among the people soared.
Although in 1845 to 1846 Britain’s Prime Minister, Robert Peel, attempted some countermeasures, including the importation of corn for resale in Ireland, no one knew how to cook it, and in return the starving and enfeebled Irish were required to perform public work by building roads, walls, piers, and bridges. It helped only a little. Soup kitchens were started, but they dispensed essentially flavored water. The churches offered little hope since the Church of Ireland was entitled to collect taxes from tenants regardless of their religion. Indeed, the Catholic Church increased its ownership of property in Ireland during the famine. The Church was vehemently on the side of the absentee English landlords, and it was left to the Quakers to seek long-term relief for the Irish.
In late 1846 the British Parliament came under the control of a new Prime Minister, John Russell, who reduced the British financial commitment to Ireland. This placed a greater burden on landlords and private charities. The public works schemes were inefficient and bureaucratic, and the wages paid were very poor and very late. Tenant farmers held short-term leases that were payable each 6 months. If the tenants failed to pay their rent, they were evicted and their homes were burned.
There was a severe winter in 1846 to 1847. In the early months of 1847—called Black ’47 (now an Irish Rock Group)—there were reports of dogs eating dead bodies in the streets. Public works projects were abandoned, and poorhouses were established. The poorhouses (also called workhouses) were mismanaged, overcrowded, and filthy, and the inmates were forced to wear prison-like uniforms. They subsisted on a watery oatmeal. To limit the number of people seeking relief, the Poor Law Extension Act was passed in 1847. This prevented tenant farmers with over a quarter of an acre of land from receiving assistance. In 1847 more than a million died of starvation or diseases such as typhus and cholera; this was a peak emigration year. Indeed, during the next 4 years, 2 million Irish emigrated from Ireland, never to return.
Conditions were made worse because the British government tried to placate the politically powerful landowners and allowed continued export of food from Ireland while preventing importation of food. The British idea of free trade led to the notion that assistance would weaken the resolve of the Irish peasants. The primary goal of the British was economic: extract the greatest amount of resources and exports from their colonies, thereby benefiting the bankers and landowners. One letter writer to the London Times stated that “Giving more money to Irish relief would be as ineffectual as throwing a sackful of gold into their plentiful bogs.” A Chancellor of the Exchequer said, “Except through purgatory of misery and starvation I cannot see how Ireland is to emerge into a state of anything approaching quiet or prosperity.” In addition, the Irish peasants were so weak from starvation and disease that they could not work the land. Compounding this problem were economic factors: the landowners, in order to meet their losses due to the famine, raised the rents of the tenants, which in turn led to nonpayment, eviction, and destruction of the houses of the tenant farmers. Between 1849 and 1854, at least 500,000 people were evicted. Thousands more were thrown out without official sanction, and homelessness became as much a problem as hunger.
At first the potato failure was believed to be due to God’s anger over the excesses of the people. Later, it was shown that the failure was due to “late blight,” a disease causing large necrotic areas (called blight) on potato leaves that occurs in the late part of the growing season, e.g., August and September. Late blight reappeared again in 1848 and 1849, and in some places 1849 was as bad as 1847. Many people saw emigration as their only solution. According to the Poor Laws, the landlords were to support the peasants who were sent to the workhouse. This cost £12 a year per person. Some landlords, however, economized and paid for the passage of the peasants to Canada, which cost only £6 a head! The very poor migrated to England—1.5 million went to Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Birmingham—whereas those who were slightly better off and could afford the cost of passage emigrated to the United States. Only about one-fifth of the migrants survived the trip across the Atlantic because of their poor health, the fact that it took weeks to months to cross, and no food was provided on board ship. These were not passenger ships: they were ships ordinarily used for hauling timber and cattle. There was no place to cook and no place to put the sick, and there were no proper latrines. The filth and stench below deck were overwhelming. Many of the passengers carried lice and were infected with typhus. Because of the high death rate on board, they were called “coffin ships.” And it is a bitter irony that in Ireland during this period, while people were starving, grain was still being exported. The potato famine changed the structure of landholding in Ireland—the poorest were evicted, but the landlords were also financially ruined, crushed by the burden of falling income and higher taxation. Many landlords sold out to larger landowners, who in turn were also unpopular with their tenants.
The Great Hunger’s Cause
The perils of a single-crop economy have seldom been better illustrated than in Ireland in 1845 to 1849, for at that time without the potato the Irish economy could not survive for very long. While other regions of Europe may have been able to turn to alternative food sources, this was not possible for the Irish. The potato blight was an ecological disaster compounded by the failure of government. Some consider it to be equal to the holocaust. Although theories as to the cause of late blight were many, including an act of God, introduction of the steam locomotive, and excessive uptake of soil water that the potato could not expel, it was the Reverend Miles J. Berkeley who in 1846, after making careful microscopic examination of diseased plants and seeing a whitish felt on the leaf surface (resembling that in moldy bread), proposed that it was none of these but instead was a fungus. Berkeley was mocked, and his contention gained little support. Indeed, the prevailing opinion of the time was that a cold and damp miasma resulted in blight.
A critical question regarding blight was: which came first, decay followed by fungus or fungus and then decay? In 1861 the great German biologist Anton de Bary clearly showed that late blight was caused by the fungus he named Phytophthora infestans, the “plant destroyer.” To confirm the role of the fungus, de Bary did a simple experiment: he grew healthy potato plants in pots, divided them into two groups, and deliberately dusted spores from the plants with blight onto the moistened leaves of a group of healthy plants; he left the other group (“controls”) alone, making certain that spores could not reach them. Both groups were exposed to a cool, moist environment where the miasma could do its work. In a few days the telltale sign of blight—spots of decay—appeared on the leaves of the fungus-inoculated plants. The control group showed no sign of disease. Clearly, potato plants did not rot because of a miasma or because they took up too much water. de Bary suggested that the microscopic spores ride on the stormy winds and that blight results when rain splashes them on to the leaves. In this way the infection spreads from plant to plant, field to field, and country to country. The significance of de Bary’s work led to a novel understanding of sickness: parasites can be the cause of a disease. Today de Bary and Berkeley are rarely recognized for their pioneering work, yet their experiments anticipated Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease by nearly a quarter of a century.
In late blight, the signs of impending disaster first appear on the leaves in the form of brown-black spots. Under moist conditions the spots enlarge quickly and the plant has a pungent odor. A white fuzzy growth, barely visible, appears in the spots; under the microscope, these are seen to contain the long tube-like threads
