Page 211 - Encyclopedia Of World History

diseases, plant 561

The Irish Potato Famine

The following account of the Irish potato famine was make such persons distribute such a starvation of
provided by Alexander Somerville (1811-1885), the food over seven days equally. Their natural cravings
British journalist whose Letters from Ireland during made them eat it up at once, or in one, or three days
the Famine of 1847 were published in the Manches- at most, leaving the other days blank, making the
ter Examiner. pangs of hunger still worse.
But in the calculation I am supposing all the wages
I saw the poor man and his poor family, and truly
go for meal. I believe none of it was expended on any-
might he say,“God have mercy!” They were skeletons
thing else, not even salt, save fuel: fuel in this village
all of them, with skin on the bones and life within the
must all be purchased by such people; they are not
skin. A mother skeleton and baby skeleton; a tall boy
allowed to go to the bogs to cut it for themselves. Nor
skeleton, who had no work to do; who could do
is this the season to go to the bogs, if they were
nothing but eat, and had nothing to eat. Four female
allowed.The fuel required to keep the household fire
children skeletons, and the tall father skeleton, not
merely burning, hardly sufficient to give warmth to
able to work to get food for them, and not able to get
eight persons around it, to say nothing of half-naked
enough of food when he did work for them. Their
persons, would cost at least sixpence a day. Where-
only food was what his wages of 10 d. per day
fore, no fuel was used by this family, nor by other
would procure of “yellow meal”—the meal of the
working families, but what was required to boil the
Indian corn.The price of that was 3s. per stone of 16
meal into a stirabout ...
lb. This gave for the eight persons 26 lb. 10 oz. of
Source: Somerville, A. (1994). Letters from Ireland during the famine of 1847. Dublin:
meal for seven days; being about seven ounces and a Irish Academic Press.
half per day for each person. No self-control could

potato propagates by shoots, new potatoes, barring ine, the German socialist Karl Marx and his English
mutation, are genetic equivalents of the parent potato. counterpart Friedrich Engels in 1848 denounced the
With all potatoes near carbon copies of one another, any exploitation of the poor in the Communist Manifesto.
disease that threatens one potato threatens all. Revolution swept across Europe that year as intellectuals
With the potato vulnerable, catastrophe struck in and the poor demanded an end to oppression. The
1845. Six weeks of rain hastened the spread of the blight potato blight was more than a disease; it was a call to
fungus across Ireland.The plants died and potatoes rot- arms, a call for political and economic reforms. The po-
ted in the ground. Blight struck again in 1846.Their sta- tato blight thus left its imprint on agriculture, science,
ple gone, the Irish scrounged for nuts and roots while politics, and economics.
English landlords took their wheat and livestock. One
million starved and 1.5 million fled Ireland. Corn Diseases
The tragedy galvanized scientists throughout Europe As with potato diseases, scientists know little about corn
into action. In 1861 Anton de Bary isolated the culprit, a diseases during the pre-Columbian period.What is clear,
fungus he named Phytophthora infestans, and by spread- however, is that corn, unlike potato, is a cross-pollinating
ing it on healthy potato plants demonstrated that it plant that produces plants with genetic diversity. Cross-
caused blight.The Potato Famine had spurred de Bary’s breeding achieves diversity by reshuffling chromosomes
discovery,which marked the beginning of plant pathology in any plant or animal, including humans.This diversity
as a science. should minimize the occurrence of epidemics, for within
More than that, potato blight made conspicuous the a heterogeneous population some individuals, in this case
evils of economic oppression. On the heels of the fam- corn plants, should be resistant to disease.