Twelve Diseases that Changed Our World. Irwin W. Sherman
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pens) . . . were employed in washing clothes or spreading them out on rocks and bushes to dry. The people appeared perfectly destitute of shame or a sense of common decency. Many were almost naked, still more partially clothed. We turned in disgust from the revolting scene . . . Could we have shut out the profane sounds which came to us on every breeze, how deeply we should have enjoyed an hour amid the tranquil beauties of the . . . lovely spot.”
Although the detention of immigrants at Grosse-Ile was presumably instituted as a means of protecting the public health, in actual fact it served as a vehicle for maintaining class distinctions and scapegoating the “wretched refuse” of Ireland.
In 1833, as the number of sick immigrants arriving in Canada dwindled, the Grosse-Ile detention station fell silent. A decade later, however, it once again became active due to the changes that were taking place in Ireland. Indeed, between 1845 and 1849 the population of Ireland would decline by over 2 million. Half of these would die of starvation, disease, and malnutrition, while the other half would emigrate. The United States was traditionally the route for Irish immigrants, but in 1847 the United States enforced an increase in the cost of passage and ships that were overloaded were to be confiscated. This opened up new routes to the United States from Canada as ship owners sought a cheaper option. Hundreds of thousands of Irish were crowded aboard unsanitary sailboats unfit for transporting human beings. During the voyages of these “pest ships,” people who died, along with their possessions, were hastily wrapped in canvas and thrown overboard as if they were dead birds or garbage.
Although ships usually took 45 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean, 26 of those that set sail in 1847 took over 60 days to reach Grosse-Ile. In 1847, over 5,000 people died en route, and a like number were buried in a mass grave on the island. Four physicians at Grosse-Ile, aided by a crew of eight, worked from dawn until dark every day digging trenches and burying the dead three deep. By August, dirt had to be imported to the rocky island to bury more bodies. In spite of this, rats were coming off the ships to feed on the cadavers. All told, the number of deaths on Grosse-Ile probably exceeded 9,000, and many thousands more died elsewhere in colonial Canada during that “summer of sorrow.” The epidemic disease that prompted the Irish to leave their homeland and choose immigration and almost certain death in the passage to a foreign land was the disease known as “late blight.”
Politics and the Great Hunger
The earliest settlers in Ireland came from mainland Europe about 6000 BC, and about 400 BC the Celts from Britain and Europe arrived. In about AD 400, St. Patrick introduced Christianity to this island, along with the Roman alphabet and Latin literature. Ireland, save for fish, is without any valuable natural resources, such as gold or silver, gemstones, oil or natural gas, or iron ore, and it has an unproductive soil and miserable weather. About AD 795 the Vikings began raiding Ireland. At first the people of Ireland could do little to defend themselves, since until AD 1000 the lack of iron (as well as copper and tin) left Ireland a Stone Age economy. In 1014, the Irish King Brian Boru organized the princes of several kingdoms and drove out the Vikings. Beginning in 1160, the Normans increasingly controlled Ireland, and by 1300 they were in complete control. In 1534 Henry VIII began to try to regain Ireland from the Normans, and in 1542 he forced Ireland’s parliament to declare him King of Ireland. Henry tried to introduce Protestantism into Ireland, but without much success. Throughout the later 1500s Henry VIII’s daughter Elizabeth I strengthened the English hold and attempted to establish Protestantism. Elizabeth I outlawed Roman Catholic services and executed a number of bishops and priests. The porphyric King James I (see p. 2), who succeeded Queen Elizabeth I, continued to seize land in Ireland and give it to the English—a system known as “plantations.” This occurred especially around Ulster and established the majority of Protestants, whose descendants still live in Northern Ireland.
Under the Protestant King William III (who reigned from 1689 to 1702 and succeeded James II), Penal Laws were instituted. These laws barred Catholics from the military, commerce, and civic office; they were also denied the vote and could not purchase land. However, Catholics who converted to Protestantism were given land. In the early 1600s there were Irish revolts, but these were quickly put down by a succession of English kings; by the 1700s there was tight control by Britain. Irish Protestants objected to the restrictions, and in 1782 Britain granted autonomy to the Irish Parliament. The Catholics were given the right to hold land and to worship, but were granted no political power. In 1798, the Irish staged an unsuccessful rebellion, and although it was put down, the British Prime Minister William Pitt persuaded both the Irish and the British Parliaments to pass an Act of Union in 1801. As a result, Ireland became a part of the United Kingdom. This ended the Irish Parliament, and now Ireland would send its representatives to the British Parliament in London; later, Irish Catholics were permitted to serve in the British Parliament. During the 1800s there were several attempts to institute home rule, under which Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom but would have its own parliament to govern domestic affairs. The Protestants in Ulster, however, were opposed to home rule, fearing that Catholics would dominate Parliament, and so the British remained in control. In effect, Ireland became a British colony.
The attitude toward the Irish was described by one English writer: “Ireland is a little island at the edge of Europe with a Stone Age culture . . . its inhabitants wild, feckless, and charming or morose, repressed, and corrupt, but not especially civilized.” Benjamin Disraeli, the beloved Prime Minister of Queen Victoria, had a stronger opinion: “The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion.” Britain maintained Ireland as an agricultural colony and prevented manufacture of anything the British produced; Irish culture was suppressed save for music and dance. The British colonization of Ireland introduced a tenure system that gave Protestant landlords control of 95% of the land.
The landlords (most of whom were absentees) subdivided their land into 5-acre lots that were rented to estate agents. These lots, in turn, after being subdivided into smaller ones, could then be rented again at higher rates. At the base of this economy were 3 million tenant farmers who might have one quarter of an acre of land. On this small plot, the tenant farmer and his family cultivated a small garden and lived in a tiny one-room mud cottage with neither floor nor windows, only a door and a hole in the thatched roof to let out the smoke from the turf fire. On average, there were 10 people per cabin, which they shared with the family pig. The tenant farmers had another 5 acres that were used for growing cash crops such as wheat, oats, and barley.
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