THE HISTORY
OF THE
GREAT IRISH FAMINE
OF
1847,
WITH NOTICES OF EARLIER IRISH FAMINES.
BY THE
REV. JOHN O'ROURKE, P.P., M.R.I.A.
THIRD EDITION.
Dublin:
JAMES DUFFY AND CO., LTD.,
15 WELLINGTON QUAY.
1902.
[_The right of translation and reproduction is reserved._]
TO
MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN
THIS NARRATIVE
OF ONE OF THE MOST TERRIBLE EPISODES
IN THE CHEQUERED HISTORY
OF
OUR NATIVE LAND,
IS
RESPECTFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED.
PREFACE.
The Author of this volume has, for a considerable time, been of opinion,
that the leading facts of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 ought to be put
together without unnecessary delay. Several reasons occurred to him why
such a work should be done: the magnitude of the Famine itself; the
peculiarity of its immediate cause; its influence on the destiny of the
Irish Race. That there should be no unnecessary delay in performing the
task was sufficiently proved, he thought, by the fact, that testimony of
the most valuable kind, namely, contemporary testimony, was silently but
rapidly passing away with the generation that had witnessed the Scourge.
Having made up his mind to undertake such a work, the Author's first
preparation for it was, to send query sheets to such persons as were
supposed to be in possession of information on the subject. And he has
here to express his gratitude and thanks to his numerous correspondents,
for the kindness and promptness with which his queries were answered.
He cannot recall even one case in which this was not done. But there is
a dark side to the picture too. In looking over the query sheets now, it
is sad to find how many of those whose signatures they bear have already
passed from amongst us.
Other materials of great importance lay scattered over the Public
Journals of the period; were buried and stowed away in Parliamentary
Blue Books, and Parliamentary debates;--were to be sought for in
pamphlets, in periodicals, and more especially in the Reports of the
various Societies and Associations, which were appointed for dispensing
the alms given with such free hand, to aid in saving the lives of the
famishing people. Those Records will be found quoted and referred to in
the course of the work.
Amongst them, it is but just to acknowledge, how much the Author owes to
the Report of the Census Commissioners for 1851; to the "Transactions"
of the Society of Friends; and to the _Irish Crisis_, by Sir Charles
E. Trevelyan, Bart.; which originally appeared as an article in the
_Edinburgh Review_ for January, 1848, but was reprinted in a small
volume of two hundred pages. Although far from agreeing with many of Sir
Charles's conclusions (he was Secretary to the Treasury during the
Famine), still the Author cheerfully acknowledges, that the statistical
information in the _Irish Crisis_ is very valuable to a student of
the history of the Famine period.
It was to be expected, that the alarm about the Potato Blight and the
Famine would be first raised through the public Press. This was done by
letters from various localities, and by Special Reporters and
Commissioners, who travelled through the country to examine the state of
the people, as well as that of the potato crop. There was a Commissioner
from the London _Times_ in Ireland at this period. His letters
written to that Journal were afterwards collected, and they made an
octavo volume of nearly eight hundred pages.
The English people, and many in Ireland, long adhered to the opinion,
that there was much exaggeration in the Irish Newspapers regarding both
the Blight and the Famine; but subsequent investigation showed, that
there was very little, if any, exaggeration; nay, that the real facts
were often understated. As to the Famine, several of the gentlemen sent
by the Charitable Societies to make Reports, wrote back, that there was
no exaggeration whatever, and, for a very sufficient reason, namely,
that, in their opinion, it was impossible to exaggerate the dreadful
condition in which they found the people.
Another mode of acquiring information adopted by the Author was, to
visit those parts of the country in which the Famine had raged with the
greatest severity. On such occasions he not only had the advantage of
examining the localities, but of conversing with persons whose knowledge
of that awful Calamity made them valuable and interesting guides.
As to the rest, it is left to the kindness of the Reader.
ST. MARY'S, MAYNOOTH,
_1st December, 1874._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
The Potato--Its introduction into Europe--Sir Walter Raleigh--The
Potato of Virginia--The Battata, or sweet Potato--Sir John
Hawkins--Sir Francis Drake--Raleigh's numerous exploring
expeditions--Story of his distributing Potatoes on the Irish coast
on his way from Virginia groundless--Sir Joseph Banks--His history
of the introduction of the Potato--Thomas Heriot--His description of
the Opanawk a correct description of the Potato--That root in Europe
before Raleigh's time--Raleigh an "Undertaker"--The Grants made to
him--The Famine after the War with the Desmonds--Introduction of the
Potato into Ireland--Did not come rapidly into cultivation--Food of
the poorest--Grazing--Graziers--Destruction of Irish
Manufactures--Causes of the increasing culture of the
Potato--Improvement of Agriculture--Rotation of Crops--Primate
Boulter's charity--Buys Corn in the South to sell it cheaply in the
North--Years of scarcity from 1720 to 1740--The Famine of
1740-41--The Great Frost--No combined effort to meet this
Famine--Vast number of Deaths--The Obelisk at Castletown
(_Note_)--Price of Wheat--Bread Riots--Gangs of Robbers--"The
Kellymount Gang"--Severe punishment--Shooting down Food-rioters--The
Lord Lieutenant's Address to Parliament--Bill "for the more
effectual securing the payments of rents and preventing the frauds
of tenants"--This Bill the basis of legislation on the Land Question
up to 1870--Land thrown into Grazing--State of the
Catholics--Renewal of the Penal Statutes--Fever and bloody
flux--Deaths--State of Prisoners--Galway Physicians refuse to attend
Patients--The Races of Galway changed to Tuam on account of the
Fever in Galway--Balls and Plays!--Rt. Rev. Dr. Berkeley's account
of the Famine--The "Groans of Ireland"--Ireland a land of
Famine--Dublin Bay--The Coast--The Wicklow Hills--Killiney--Obelisk
Hill--What the Obelisk was built for--The Potato more cultivated
than ever after 1741--Agricultural literature of the time--Apathy
of the Gentry denounced--Comparative yield of Potatoes a hundred
years ago and at present--Arthur Young on the Potato--Great increase
of its culture in twenty years--The disease called "curl" in the
Potato (_Note_)--Failure of the Potato in 1821--Consequent
Famine in 1822--Government grants--Charitable collections--High
price of Potatoes--Skibbereen in 1822--Half of the superficies of
the Island visited by this Famine--Strange apathy of Statesmen and
Landowners with regard to the ever-increasing culture of the
Potato--Supposed conquest of Ireland--Ireland kept poor lest she
should rebel--The English colony always regarded as the Irish
nation--The natives ignored--They lived in the bogs and mountains,
and cultivated the Potato, the only food that would grow in such
places--No recorded Potato blight before 1729--The probable
reason--Poverty of the English colony--Jealousy of England of its
progress and prosperity--Commercial jealousy--Destruction of the
Woollen manufacture--Its immediate effect--William the Third's
Declaration--Absenteeism--Mr. M'Culloch's arguments (Note
A.)--Apparently low rents--Not really so--No capital--Little
skill--No good Agricultural Implements--Swift's opinion--Arthur
Young's opinion--Acts of Parliament--The Catholics permitted to be
loyal--Act for reclaiming Bogs--Pension to Apostate Priests
increased--Catholic Petition in 1792--The Relief Act of
1793--Population of Ireland at this time--the Forty-shilling
Freeholders--Why they were created--Why they were abolished--the cry
of over-population, 1
CHAPTER II.
The Potato Blight of 1845--Its appearance in England--In
Ireland--Weather--Scotland--Names given to the Blight--First
appearance of the Blight in Ireland--Accounts of its progress--The
Royal Agricultural Improvement Society of Ireland--Its action--The
Dublin Corporation--O'Connell--His plan for meeting the
Crisis--Deputation to the Lord Lieutenant--How it was received--Lord
Heytesbury's Reply--It displeases the Government--The _Times_'
Commissioner--His suggestions--Mr. Gregory's Letter--Mr.
Crichton's--Sir James Murray on the Blight--Action of the
Clergy--the Mansion House Committee--Resolutions--Analysis of five
hundred letters on the Blight--Partial cessation of the Rot caused
by the Blight--Report of Professors Lindley and Playfair--Estimated
loss--Query Sheets sent out--Corporation Address to the Queen--Her
Reply--Address of the London Corporation asking for Free Trade--The
Potato Blight made a party question--Dean Hoare's Letter--Failure of
remedies, 48
CHAPTER III.
Lord Heytesbury and Sir Robert Peel--The Potatoes of last year!--Is
there a stock of them?--Sir R. Peel and Free Trade--Strength of his
Cabinet--Mr. Cobden proposes a Committee of Inquiry--His speech--Its
effect--Committee refused--D'Israeli's attack on Sir R. Peel
(_Note_)--Sir Robert puts forward the Potato Blight as the cause for
repealing the Corn Laws--The extent of the Failure not
exaggerated--Sir James Graham and Sir R. Peel--Appointments of Drs.
Lindley and Playfair to investigate the Blight--Sir R. Peel
announces that he is a convert to the repeal of the Corn
Laws--States his views, but does not reason on them--The Quarterly
Review--Special Commissioners--Mr. Buller's letter--Sir James Graham
and the Premier--Proceeding by Proclamation instead of by Order in
Council--Sir James's sharp reply--Agitation to stop
distillation--County Meetings proposed by the Lord
Lieutenant--Cabinet Council--The Premier puts his views before it in
a memorandum--The Corn Laws--Some of the Cabinet displeased with his
views--On the 6th November he submits another memorandum to the
Cabinet--Lord Stanley dissents from the Premier's views--The Cabinet
meet again next day and he concludes the memorandum--On the 29th
November he sends to each of his colleagues a more detailed
exposition of his views--Several reply--Another mem. brought before
them on the 2nd December--The Cabinet in permanent session--On the
5th of December Sir Robert resigns--Lord John Russell fails to form
a Government--The old Cabinet again in power--Mr. Gladstone replaces
Lord Stanley, 75
CHAPTER IV.
Meeting of Parliament--Queen's Speech--The Premier's speech on the
Address--Goes into the whole question of Free Trade--The
protectionists--Lord Brougham's views (_Note_)--The twelve nights'
debate on the Corn Laws--No connection between it and the
Famine--Stafford O'Brien's speech--Sir James Graham's reply--Smith
O'Brien's speech--His imprisonment (Note B.)--O'Connell's
motion--His speech--Sir Robert Peel replies--Substantially agrees
with O'Connell--Bill for the protection of life in Ireland--Its
first reading opposed by the Irish members--O'Connell leads the
Opposition in a speech of two hours--Mr. D'Israeli mistaken in
calling it his last speech--His account of it--He misrepresents
it--The opinions expressed in it were those O'Connell always held.
Break up of the Tory party--Lord George Bentinck becomes leader of
the Protectionists--Their difficulty in opposing the Coercion
Bill--Ingenious plan of Lord George--Strange combination against the
Government--Close of Debate on Coercion Bill--Government defeated by
a majority of 73--Measures to meet the Famine--Delay--Accounts from
various parts of the country--Great distress--"Are the Landlords
making any efforts?"--Notice for rent--The bailiff's reply--Number
of Workhouses open--Number of persons in them--Sir Robert Peel's
speech on his resignation--Accident to him--His death--The
Peels--Sir Robert's qualities and character--His manner of dealing
with the Famine--His real object the repeal of the Corn Laws, 93
CHAPTER V.
John Russell Prime Minister--He confers important offices on some
Irish Catholics--His address to the electors of London--Its
vagueness--Addresses of some of the other new Ministers--The Irish
difficulty greater than ever--Young and Old Ireland--The _Times_ on
O'Connell and English rule in Ireland--Overtures of the Whig
Government--O'Connell listens to them--The eleven measures--Views of
the advanced Repealers--Lord Miltown's letter to
O'Connell--Dissensions in the Repeal Association--The "Peace
Resolutions"--O'Connell's letters--He censures the _Nation_
newspaper--Debate in the Repeal Association--Thomas Francis
Meagher's "Sword speech"--The Young Ireland party leave Conciliation
Hall in a body--Description of the scene (_Note_)--Reflections--Sir
Robert Peel's speech after his resignation--Lord John Russell's
speech at Glasgow--His speech on the Irish Coercion Bill--His speech
after becoming Prime Minister--The Potato Blight reappears--Accounts
from the Provinces--Father Mathew's letter--Value of the Potato Crop
of 1846--Various remedies, theories, and speculations--State of the
weather--Mr. Cooper's observations at Markree Castle--Lord
Monteagle's motion in the House of Lords for employing the
people--Profitable employment the right thing--The Marquis of
Lansdowne replies--It is hard to relieve a poor country like
Ireland--Lord Devon's opinion--The Premier's statement about
relief--The wonderful cargo of Indian meal--Sir R. Peel's
fallacies--Bill for Baronial Sessions--Cessation of Government
Works--The Mallow Relief Committee--Beds of stone!--High rents on
the poor--The Social Condition of the Hottentot as compared with
that of Mick Sullivan--Rev. Mr. Gibson's views--Mr. Tuke's account
of Erris (_Note_)--Close of the Session of Parliament, 131
CHAPTER VI.
The Labour-rate Act passed without opposition: entitled, An Act to
Facilitate the Employment of the Labouring Poor--Its
provisions--Government _Minute_ explaining them--Heads of
Minute--Rate of wages--Dissatisfaction with it--Commissary-General
Hewetson's letter--Exorbitant prices--Opinion expressed on this head
by an American Captain--The Government will not order food as Sir R.
Peel did--Partial and unjust taxation--Opposition to the Labour-rate
Act--Reproductive employment called for--Lord Devon's
opinion--Former works not to be completed under the Act--Minute of
31st of August--Modified by Mr. Labouchere's letter of 5th of
September--People taxed who paid a rent of £4 a year--In many cases
a hardship--Barren works the great blot of the Labour-rate
Act--Arguments against the Act--Resources of the country should have
been developed--Panic among landowners--Rev. Mr. Moore's
letters--Level roads a good thing--Food better--A cry of excessive
population raised--Ireland not overpeopled--Employ the people on
tilling the soil--Sir R. Routh takes the same view--Relief Committee
of Kells and Fore--Reproductive employment--Plan suggested--Address
to the Lord Lieutenant--True remedy--O'Connell on the Famine--Writes
from Darrynane on the subject--Money in the hands of Board of
Works--Compulsory reclamation of waste lands--Drainage Bill--Mr.
Kennedy's opinion--Who is to blame?--The Government, the landlords,
or the people?--O'Connell for united action--Outdoor relief will
confiscate property--Proposed Central Committee--Several Committees
meet in Dublin--Mr. Monsell's letter--His views--Against
unproductive labour--Money wasted--Appeal to the Government--Cork
deputation to the Prime Minister--His views--He _now_ sees great
difficulties in reclaiming waste lands--Platitudes--Change of
views--Requisition for meeting in Dublin--Unexpected publication of
the "Labouchere Letter" authorizing reproductive works--Verdict of
the Government against itself, 167
CHAPTER VII.
The Measures of Relief for 1846-7--Difficulties--Shortcomings of the
Government--Vigorous action of other countries--Commissary General
Routh's Letter on the state of the depôts--Replies from the
Treasury--Delay--Incredulity of Government--English Press--Attacks
both on the Landlords and People of Ireland--Not the time for such
attacks--View of the _Morning Chronicle_--Talk about
exaggeration--Lieutenant-Colonel Jones--Changes his opinion--His
reason for doing so--Mr. Secretary Redington's ideas--Extraordinary
Baronial Presentments--Presentments for the County Mayo beyond the
whole rental of the county!--The reason why--Unfinished Public
Works--Lord Monteagle--Finds fault with the action of the
Government, although a supporter of theirs--Expenses divided between
landlord and tenant--Discontent at rate of wages on public works
being 2d. per day under the average wages of the district--Founded
on error--Taskwork--Great dissatisfaction at
it--Combination--Attempt on the Life of Mr. W.M. Hennessy--True way
to manage the people (_Note_)--Stoppage of Works--Captain
Wynne--Dreadful destitution--Christmas eve--Opposition to Taskwork
continues--Causes--Treasury Minute on the subject--Colonel Jones on
Committees--Insulting his officers--Insult to Mr. Cornelius O'Brien,
M.P.--Captain Wynne at Ennistymon--A real Irish Committee--Major
M'Namara--His version of the Ennistymon affair (_Note_)--Charges
against the Gentry of Clare by Captain Wynne--Mr. Millet on
Ennistymon--Selling Tickets for the Public Works--Feeling of the
Officials founded often on ignorance and prejudice--The Increase of
Deposits in the Savings' Banks a Proof of Irish Prosperity--How
explained by Mr. Twistleton, an official--Scarcity of silver--The
Bank of Ireland authorized to issue it--The Public Works of 1845-6
brought to a close in August, 1846--The Labour-rate Act--Difficulty
of getting good Officials--The Baronies--Issues to
them--Loans--Grants--Total--Sudden and enormous Increase of
Labourers on the Works under the Labour-rate Act--How distributed
over the Provinces--Number of Officials superintending the Public
Works--Correspondence--Number of Letters received at Central
Office--Progress of the Famine--Number employed--Number seeking
employment who could not get it--The Death-roll, 196
CHAPTER VIII.
Operations of the Commissariat Relief Department--Not to interfere
with Mealmongers or Corn Merchants--Effects of this Rule--Deputation
from Achill (_Note_)--Organization of the Commissariat Relief
Department--Reports on the Potato Crop--The Blight in
Clare--Commissary-General Hewetson's opinion--Commissary-General
Dobree's Report--Depôts--Universality of the Blight--Rules with
regard to Food Depôts--Fault of the Treasury--Scarcity of
Food--Depôts besieged for it in the midst of harvest--Depôts to be
only on the West Coast--What was meant by the West Coast--Coroner's
Inquests at Mallow--Rev. Mr. Daly--Lord Mountcashel--Famine
Demonstration at Westport--Sessions at Kilmacthomas--Riot at
Dungarvan--Captain Sibthorpe's Order--Mr. Howley's Advice--Attempt
to rescue Prisoners--Captain Sibthorpe asks leave to fire--Refused
by Mr. Howley--Riot Act read--Leave to fire given--People retire
from the town--Two men wounded--The carter's reason for
fighting--Lame Pat Power--Death of Michael Fleming, the
carter--Formidable bands traverse the country--Advice of the
Clergy--Carrigtuohill--Macroom--Killarney--Skibbereen--March on that
town by the workmen of Caheragh--Dr. Donovan's account of the
movement--The military, seventy-five in number, posted behind a
schoolhouse--Firmness and prudence of Mr. Galwey, J.P.--Biscuits
ordered from the Government Store--Peace preserved--Demonstration at
Mallow--Lord Stuart de Decies--Deputation from Clonakilty to the
Lord Lieutenant--Ships prevented from sailing at Youghal--Sir David
Roche--Demonstrations simultaneous--Proclamation against food
riots--Want of mill-power--No mill-power in parts of the West where
most required--Sir Randolph Routh's opinion--Overruled by the
Treasury--Mr. Lister's Account of the mill-power in parts of
Connaught--Meal ground at Deptford, Portsmouth, Plymouth, and
Rotherhithe; also in Essex and the Channel Islands--Mill-power at
Malta--Quantity of wheat there--Five hundred quarters purchased--The
French--The Irish handmill, or quern, revived--Samples of it
got--Steel-mills--Mill-power useless from failure of
water-supply--Attempt to introduce whole corn boiled as food, 221
CHAPTER IX.
The Landlords and the Government--Public Meetings--Reproductive
Employment demanded for the People--The "Labouchere"
Letter--Presentments under it--Loans asked to construct
Railways--All who received incomes from land should be
taxed--Deputation from the Royal Agricultural Society to the Lord
Lieutenant--They ask reproductive employment--Lord Bessborough
answers cautiously--The Prime Minister writes to the Duke of
Leinster on the subject--Views expressed--Defence of his Irish
Famine policy--Severe on the Landlords--Unsound principles laid down
by him--Corn in the haggards--Mary Driscoll's little stack of
barley--Second Deputation from the Royal Agricultural Society to the
Lord Lieutenant--Its object--Request not granted--The Society
lectured on the duties of its Members--Real meaning of the
answer--Progress of the Famine--Deaths from starvation--O'Brien's
Bridge--Rev. Dr. Vaughan--Slowness of the Board of Works--State of
Tuam--Inquest on Denis M'Kennedy--Testimony of his Wife--A
fortnight's Wages due to him--Received only half-a-crown in three
weeks--Evidence of the Steward of the Works; of Rev. Mr. Webb; of
Dr. Donovan--Remarks of Rev. Mr. Townsend--Verdict--The _Times_ on
the duties of Landlords--Landlords denounce the Government and the
Board of Works--Mr. Fitzgerald on the Board and on the
farmers--Meeting at Bandon--Lord Bernard--Inquest on Jeremiah
Hegarty--The Landlord's "cross" on the barley--Mary Driscoll's
evidence; her husband's--_Post-mortem_ examination by Dr.
Donovan--The Parish Priest of Swinford--Evictions--The _Morning
Chronicle_ on them--Spread and Increase of Famine--The question of
providing coffins--Deaths at Skibbereen--Extent of the Famine in
1846--Deaths in Mayo--Cases--Edward M'Hale--Skibbereen--The diary of
a day--Swelling of the extremities--Burning beds for fuel--Mr.
Cummins's account of Skibbereen--Killarney Relief Committee--Father
O'Connor's Statement--Christmas Eve!--A visit to Skibbereen twenty
years after the great Famine, 243
CHAPTER X.
The Landlords' committee--A new Irish party--Circular--The "Great
Meeting of Irish Peers, Members of Parliament and Landlords" in the
Rotunda--The Resolutions--Spirit of those
Resolutions--Emigration--great anxiety for it--Opening of
Parliament--Queen's Speech--England on her Trial--Debate on the
Address--Lord Brougham on Irish Landlords--Lord Stanley on the
Famine--Smith O'Brien's speech--Defends the Landlords--Mr.
Labouchere, the Irish Secretary, defends the Government--The Irish
Agricultural population were always on the brink of starvation, and
when the Blight came it was impossible to meet the disaster--The
views of the _Morning Chronicle_ on the Government of Ireland--Mr.
Labouchere quotes the Poor-law Enquiry of 1835 and the Devon
Commission--Change of the Government's views on the
Famine--Griffith's estimate of the loss by the Blight--Extent of
Irish Pauperism--Lord George Bentinck points out the mistakes of the
Government--The people should have been supplied with food in remote
districts--He did not agree with the political economy of
non-interference--Mr. D'Israeli's manipulation of Lord George's
speech--Letter of Rev. Mr. Townsend of Skibbereen--Fourteen funerals
waiting whilst a fifteenth corpse was being interred--Quantity of
corn in London, Liverpool and Glasgow--Lord John Russell's
speech--He regarded the Famine as a "national calamity"--Absurd
reason for not having summoned Parliament in Autumn--Sir Robert
Peel's view--The Prime Minister on the state of Ireland--His
views--His plans--Defends the action of the Government--Defends
unproductive work--Reason for issuing the "Labouchere
Letter"--Quotes Smith O'Brien approvingly--Mr. O'Brien's letters to
the Landlords of Ireland (_Note_)--Confounding the questions of
temporary relief and permanent improvement--Fallacy--Demoralization
of labour--The Premier's "group of measures"--Soup
kitchens--Taskwork--Break down of the Public Works--Food for
nothing--Mode of payment of loans--£50,000 for seed--Impossibility
of meeting the Famine completely--The permanent measures for
Ireland--Drainage Act--Reclamation of waste lands--Sir Robert Kane's
"Industrial Resources" of Ireland--Emigration again--Ireland not
over-peopled--Description of England and Scotland in former times by
Lord John Russell--His fine exposition of "the Irish question"--Mr.
P. Scrope's Resolution--A count out--Bernal Osborne--Smith
O'Brien--The good absentee landlords--The bad resident
landlords--Sir C. Napier's view--Mr. Labouchere's kind
words--Confounds two important questions--Mr. Gregory's quarter-acre
clause--Met with some opposition--Irish liberals vote for it--The
opponents of the quarter-acre clause--Lord George Bentinck's attack
on the Government (_Note_), 280
CHAPTER XI.
Lord George Bentinck's Railway Scheme; he thought the finishing of
the railways would be useful; he was a practical man, and wished to
use the labour of the people on useful and profitable work--The
state of England in 1841-2--The remedy that relieved England ought
to have the same effect in Ireland--Under certain arrangements,
there could have been no Irish Famine--Tons of Blue books--No new
Acts necessary for Railways--1,500 miles of Railway were
passed--Only 123 miles made--Lord George Bentinck's speech--Waste of
power--Traffic--Great Southern and Western Railway--Principles of
the Railway Bill--Shareholders--What employment would the Railway
Bill give?--Mode of raising the money--£20,000,000 paid to
slave-owners--Why not do the same thing for Ireland?--Foreign
Securities in which English money has been expended--Assurances of
support to Lord George--The Irish Members in a dilemma--The Irish
Party continue to meet--Meeting at the Premier's in Chesham
Place--Smith O'Brien waits on Lord George--The Government stake
their existence on postponing the second reading of Lord Bentinck's
Bill--Why? No good reason--Desertion of the Irish Members--Sir John
Gray on the question--The Prime Minister's speech--The Chancellor of
the Exchequer's speech a mockery--Loans to Ireland (falsely)
asserted not to have been repaid--Mr. Hudson's speech--The
Chancellor going on no authority--Mr. Hudson's Railway
Statistics--The Chancellor of the Exchequer hard on Irish
Landlords--His way of giving relief--Sir Robert Peel on the Railway
Bill--The Railway Bill a doomed measure--Peel's eulogium on industry
in general, and on Mr. Bianconi in particular--Lord G. Bentinck's
reply--His arguments skipped by his opponents--Money spent on making
Railways--The Irish vote on the Bill--Names, 335
CHAPTER XII.
State of the Country during the Winter of 1847--State of
Clare--Capt. Wynne's Letter--Patience of the suffering people--Ennis
without food--The North--Belfast--great distress in it--Letter to
the _Northern Whig_--Cork--rush of country people to
it--Soup--Society of Friends--The sliding coffin--Deaths in the
streets--One hundred bodies buried together!--More than one death
every hour in the Workhouse--Limerick--Experience of a Priest of St.
John's--Dublin--Dysentery more fatal than
cholera--Meetings--"General Central Relief Committee for all
Ireland"--Committee of the Society of Friends--The British
Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and
Scotland--The Government--Famine not a money question--so the
Government pretended--Activity of other countries in procuring
food--Attack on Divine Providence--Wm. Bennett's opinion.--Money
wages not to be had from farmers--Was it a money or food
question?--The Navigation laws--Freights doubled--The Prime
minister's exposition--Free Trade in theory--protection in
practice--The Treasury says it cannot find meal--President Polk's
message to Congress--America burthened with surplus corn--could
supply the world--Was it a money question or a food
question?--Living on field roots--Churchyards enlarged--Three
coffins on a donkey cart--Roscommon--no coffins--600 people in
typhus fever in one Workhouse?--Heroic virtue--The
Rosary--Sligo--forty bodies waiting for inquests!--Owen
Mulrooney--eating asses' flesh--Mayo--Meeting of the county--Mr.
Garvey's statement--Mr. Tuke's experiences--Inquests given
up--W.G.'s letters on Mayo--Effect of Famine on the relations of
landlord and tenant--Extermination of the smaller
tenantry--Evictions--Opinion of an eyewitness--A mother takes leave
of her children--Ass and horse flesh--something more dreadful!
(_Note_)--The weather--its effects--Count Strezelecki--Mr. Egan's
account of Westport--Anointing the people in the streets!--The
Society of Friends--Accounts given by their agents--Patience of the
people--Newspaper accounts not
exaggerated--Donegal--Dunfanaghy--Glenties--Resident proprietors
good and charitable--Skull--From Cape Clear to Skull--The
Capers--Graveyard of Skull--Ballydehob--The hinged coffin--Famine
hardens the heart. Rev. Traill Hall--Captain Caffin's
narrative--Soup-kitchens--Officials concealing the state of the
people--Provision for burying the dead--The boat's crew at a
funeral--State of Dingle--Father Mathew's
evidence--Bantry--Inquests--Catherine Sheehan--Richard Finn--Labours
of the Priests--Giving a dinner away--Fearful number of
deaths--Verdict of "Wilful murder" against Lord John Russell--The
Workhouse at Bantry--Estimated deaths--The hinged coffin--Shafto
Adair's idea of the Famine, 364
CHAPTER XIII.
The Irish Relief Act, 10th Vic., c. 7--Rapid expansion of Public
Works--They fail to sustain the people--Clauses of the new Relief
Act--Relief Committees--Their duties--Union rating. Principal clergy
members of Relief Committees--Duties of Government
Inspectors--Finance Committees--Numbers on Public Works in February,
1847--Monthly outlay--Parliament gives authority to borrow
£8,000,000--Reduction Of labourers on Public Works--Task work
condemned--Rules drawn up by new Relief Commissioners--Rations to be
allowed--Definition of soup--First Report of
Commissioners--Remonstrances--Quantity of stationery used--Cooked
food recommended--Monsieur Soyer comes to Ireland--His coming
heralded by the London Journals--His soup--Jealousy--M. Jacquet on
Soyer--The _Lancet_ on him--Professor Aldridge, M.D., on Soyer's
soup--Sir Henry Marsh on it--M. Soyer's model soup kitchen--A "gala
day"--Ireland M. Soyer's "difficulty"--Last appearance!--Description
of his "Model Soup Kitchen" (_Note_)--Reclamation of waste
lands--Quantity reclaimable--Sir Robert Kane's view--Mr. Fagan on
Reclamation--Mr. Poulette Scrope on the Irish question--Unreclaimed
land in Mayo--The Dean of Killala--Commissary General Hewetson on
reclamation and over-population--Opposition to reclamation--No
reason given for it--Sir R. Griffith on it--Mr. Fetherstone a
reclaimer of bog--Reclamation of bog in England--Second Report of
Relief Commissioners--Relief Works closed too rapidly--The twenty
per cent. rule--Mr. Labouchere's reply to Smith O'Brien--Letter from
Colonel Jones--The Premier's promise--The Claremorris
deanery--Effect of the dismissals in various parts of the
country--Soup kitchens attacked--Third Report of the Relief
Commissioners--Questions from Inspectors--O'Connell's last
illness--His attempt to reach Rome--His death--His
character--Remaining Reports of the Relief Commissioners--The
Accountant's department--Number of rations--Money spent, 420
CHAPTER XIV.
The Fever Act--Central Board of Health--Fever Hospitals--Changes in
the Act--Outdoor Attendance--Interment of the Dead--The Fever in
1846--Cork
Workhouse--Clonmel--Tyrone--Newry--Sligo--Leitrim--Roscommon--Galway--
Fever in 1847--Belfast--Death-rate in the
Workhouses--Swinford--Cork--Dropsy--Carrick-on-Shannon--Macroom--
Bantry Abbey--Dublin--Cork Street Hospital--Applications for
Temporary Hospital accommodation--Relapse a remarkable
feature--Number of cases received--Percentage of Mortality--Weekly
Cost of Patients--Imperfect Returns--Scurvy--The cause of
it--Emigration--Earlier Schemes of Emigration--Mr. Wilmot
Horton--Present State of Peterborough (_Note_)--Various
Parliamentary Committees on Emigration--Their Views--The Devon
Commission--Its Views of Emigration--A Parliamentary Committee
opposed to Emigration--Statistics of Emigration--Gigantic Emigration
Scheme--Mr. Godley--Statement to the Premier--The Joint Stock
Company for Emigration--£9,000,000 required--How to be applied--It
was to be a Catholic Emigration--Mr. Godley's Scheme--Not accepted
by the Government--Who signed it--Names (_Note_)--Dr. Maginn on the
Emigration Scheme--Emigration to be left to itself--Statistics of
Population--The Census of 1841--Deaths from the Famine--Deaths
amongst Emigrants--Deaths amongst those who went to
Canada--Emigration to the United States--Commission to protect
Emigrants--Revelations--Mortality on board Emigrant Ships--Plunder
of Emigrants--Committee of Inquiry--Its Report--Frauds about Passage
Tickets--Evidence--How did any survive?--Remittances from
Emigrants--Unprecedented--A proof of their industry and
perseverance, 474
CHAPTER XV.
The Soup-kitchen Act--The harvest of 1847--Out-door Relief
Act--Great extension of out-door relief--Number
relieved--Parliamentary papers--Perplexing--Misleading--Sums
voted--Sums expended--Sums remitted--Total Treasury advances under
various Acts--Total remissions--Sum actually given as a free gift to
meet the Famine--Charitable Associations--Sums collected and
disbursed by them--Two Queen's Letters--Amount raised by
them--Assisting distressed Unions--Feeding and clothing school
children--Feeling about the Irish Famine in America--Meetings
throughout the Union--Subscriptions--Money--Food--Number of Ships
sent to Ireland with Provisions--Freight of Provisions--Ships of
War--The "Jamestown" and "Macedonian"--Various Theories about the
Blight--The Religious Theory--Peculiar--Quotations--Rev. Hugh
M'Neill--Charles Dickens--The Catholic Cantons of
Switzerland--Belgium--France--The Rhenish
Provinces--Proselytism--Various causes for Conversions assigned--The
late Archbishop Whately's Opinions--His Convert--He rejects the idea
that Converts were bought--Statement of the late Archdeacon
O'Sullivan--Dr. Forbes on the Conversions in the West--Mr. M'Carthy
Downing's Letter--The Subscription of £1,000--Baron
Dowse--Conclusion 505
(NOTE A.)--Absenteeism: Mr. M'Culloch's defence of it examined, 522
(NOTE B.)--Smith O'Brien's refusal to serve on a Committee of
the House of Commons, 556
(NOTE C.)--Treasury Minute, dated August 31st, 1846 541
(NOTE D.)--The "Labouchere Letter," Authorizing Reproductive
Employment, 549
THE GREAT FAMINE OF 1847,
ETC.
CHAPTER I.
The Potato--Its introduction into Europe--Sir Walter Raleigh--The
Potato of Virginia--The Battata, or sweet Potato--Sir John
Hawkins--Sir Francis Drake--Raleigh's numerous exploring
expeditions--Story of his distributing Potatoes on the Irish coast
on his way from Virginia groundless--Sir Joseph Banks--His history
of the introduction of the Potato--Thomas Heriot--His description of
the Opanawk a correct description of the Potato--That root in Europe
before Raleigh's time--Raleigh an "Undertaker"--The Grants made to
him--The Famine after the War with the Desmonds--Introduction of the
Potato into Ireland--Did not come rapidly into cultivation--Food of
the poorest--Grazing--Graziers--Destruction of Irish
Manufactures--Causes of the increasing culture of the
Potato--Improvement of Agriculture--Rotation of Crops--Primate
Boulter's charity--Buys Corn in the South to sell it cheaply in the
North--Years of scarcity from 1720 to 1740--The Famine of
1740-41--The Great Frost--No combined effort to meet this
Famine--Vast number of Deaths--The Obelisk at Castletown
(_Note_)--Price of Wheat--Bread Riots--Gangs of Robbers--"The
Kellymount Gang"--Severe punishment--Shooting down Food-rioters--The
Lord Lieutenant's Address to Parliament--Bill "for the more
effectual securing the payments of rents and preventing the frauds
of tenants"--This Bill the basis of legislation on the Land Question
up to 1870--Land thrown into Grazing--State of the
Catholics--Renewal of the Penal Statutes--Fever and bloody
flux--Deaths--State of Prisoners--Galway Physicians refuse to attend
Patients--The Races of Galway changed to Tuam on account of the
Fever in Galway--Balls and Plays!--Rt. Rev. Dr. Berkeley's account
of the Famine--The "Groans of Ireland"--Ireland a land of
Famines--Dublin Bay--The Coast--The Wicklow Hills--Killiney--Obelisk
Hill--What the Obelisk was built for--The Potato more cultivated
than ever after 1741--Agricultural literature of the time--Apathy of
the Gentry denounced--Comparative yield of Potatoes a hundred years
ago and at present--Arthur Young on the Potato--Great increase of
its culture in twenty years--The disease called "curl" in the Potato
(_Note_)--Failure of the Potato in 1821--Consequent Famine in
1822--Government grants--Charitable collections--High price of
Potatoes--Skibbereen in 1822--Half of the superficies of the Island
visited by this Famine--Strange apathy of Statesmen and Landowners
with regard to the ever-increasing culture of the Potato--Supposed
conquest of Ireland--Ireland kept poor lest she should rebel--The
English colony always regarded as the Irish nation--The Natives
ignored--They lived in the bogs and mountains, and cultivated the
Potato, the only food that would grow in such places--No recorded
Potato blight before 1729--The probable reason--Poverty of the
English colony--jealousy of England of its progress and
prosperity--Commercial jealousy--Destruction of the Woollen
manufacture--Its immediate effect--"William the Third's
Declaration--Absenteeism--Mr. M'Cullagh's arguments--See _Note_ in
Appendix--Apparently low rents--Not really so--No capital--Little
skill--No good Agricultural Implements--Swift's opinion--Arthur
Young's opinion--Acts of Parliament--The Catholics permitted to be
loyal--Act for reclaiming Bogs--Pension to Apostate Priests
increased--Catholic Petition in 1792--The Belief Act of
1793--Population of Ireland at this time--The Forty-shilling
Freeholders--Why they were created--Why they were abolished--The cry
of over-population.
The great Irish Famine, which reached its height in 1847, was, in many
of its features, the most striking and most deplorable known to history.
The deaths resulting from it, and the emigration which it caused, were
so vast, that, at one time, it seemed as if America and the grave were
about to absorb the whole population of this country between them. The
cause of the calamity was almost as wonderful as the result. It arose
from the failure of a root which, by degrees, had become the staple food
of the whole working population: a root which, on its first
introduction, was received by philanthropists and economists with joy,
as a certain protection against that scarcity which sometimes resulted
from short harvests. Mr. Buckland, a Somersetshire gentleman, sent in
1662 a letter to the Royal Society, recommending the planting of
potatoes in all parts of the kingdom, _to prevent famine_, for which he
received the thanks of that learned body; and Evelyn, the well-known
author of "The Sylva," was requested to mention the proposal at the end
of that work.
The potato was first brought into this country about three centuries
ago. Tradition and, to some extent, history attributes its introduction
to Sir Walter Raleigh. Whether this was actually the case or not, there
seems to be no doubt about his having cultivated it on that estate in
Munster which was bestowed upon him by his royal mistress, after the
overthrow of the Desmonds.[1] Some confusion has arisen about the period
at which the potato of Virginia, as I shall for the present call the
potato, was brought to our shores, from the fact that another root, the
_batatas_, or sweet potato, came into these islands, and was used as a
delicacy before the potato of Virginia was known; and what adds to the
confusion is, that the name potato, applied to the Virginian root, is
derived from _batatas_, it not bearing in Virginia any name in the least
resembling the word potato. Up to 1640 it was called in England the
potato of Virginia, to distinguish it from the sweet potato, which is
another evidence that it derived the name potato from _batatas_.[2] The
latter root was extensively cultivated for food in parts of America, but
it never got into anything like general cultivation here, perhaps
because our climate was too cold for it. It is now only found in our
hot-houses, where it produces tubers from one to two pounds in weight.
It has been asserted that Sir John Hawkins brought the potato to Ireland
in 1565, and his kinsman Sir Francis Drake to England in 1585. Although
this is not improbable, writers generally assume that it was the sweet
potato which was introduced by those navigators.
Whether or not Raleigh's third expedition, which sailed from England in
1584, was the _first_ to bring into these countries the potato of
Virginia, there can be no reasonable doubt of its having been brought
home by that expedition. The story of Raleigh having stopped on some
part of the Irish coast on his way from Virginia, when he distributed
potatoes to the natives, is quite groundless. Raleigh was never in
Virginia; for although by his money and influence, and perhaps yet more
by his untiring energy, he organized nine exploring expeditions, he did
not sail with any of them except the first, which was commanded by his
half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert. But this had to return disabled to
England without touching land.[3]
Sir Joseph Banks, the well-known naturalist, and President of the Royal
Society from 1777 till his death in 1820, was at great pains to collect
the history of the introduction of the potato into these countries. His
account is, that Raleigh's expedition, granted to him under patent "to
discover such remote heathen and barbarous lands, not yet actually
possessed by any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people, as
to him shall seem good," brought home the potato of Virginia. This
Charter bears date 25th March, 1584, and was a new and more extensive
one than the first granted to him, which was in June, 1578. With this
expedition sailed one Thomas Heriot, called the Mathematician, who was
probably sent out to examine and report upon the natural history of such
countries as they might discover. He wrote an account of Virginia, and
of the products of its soil, which is printed in the first volume of De
Bry's collection of Voyages. Under the article "Roots," he describes a
plant which he calls Opanawk. "These roots," he says, "are round, some
as large as a walnut, others much larger; they grow in damp soil, many
hanging together as if fixed with ropes. They are good food either
boiled or roasted." This must strike anyone as a very accurate
description of the potato. Gerarde, in his Herbal, published in 1597,
gives a figure of the potato under the name of the potato of Virginia.
He asserts that he received the roots from that country, and that they
were denominated Naremberga.
Raleigh's expedition, which seems to have been already prepared, sailed
in April, and having taken possession of that portion of America which
was afterwards named Virginia, in honour of Queen Elizabeth, and by her
own express desire, returned to England about the middle of September of
the same year. Although, as already stated, in all likelihood the potato
of Virginia was introduced into England and Ireland by that expedition,
Sir Joseph Banks was of opinion that the root had come to Europe
earlier. His reasons for thinking so are: 1. Clusius, otherwise
L'Ecluse, the great botanist, when residing in Vienna, in 1598, received
the potato from the Governor of Mons, in Hainault, who had obtained it
the year before from one of the attendants of the Pope's Legate under
the name of Taratouflè,[4] and learned from him that in Italy, where it
was then in use, no person knew whether it came from Spain or America.
From this we may conclude that the root was in Italy before it was
brought to England; for this conversation happened only three years
after the sailing of the expedition of 1584. It is further very
probable that the root found its way from Spain into Italy, as those
parts of America, where the potato was indigenous, were then subject to
Spain. 2. Peter Cicca, in his Chronicle of 1553, says, the inhabitants
of Quito and its vicinity have, besides mays (maize), a tuberous root
which they eat and call _papas_; which Clusius with much probability
guesses to be the same sort of plant that he received from the Governor
of Mons.
There is one obvious difficulty in this reasoning: we are not at all
sure that it was the potato of Virginia that Clusius obtained from the
Governor of Mons, it may have been the sweet potato. However, the
conclusion which Sir Joseph Banks draws from these details is, that
potatoes were brought from the mountainous parts of South America in the
neighbourhood of Quito, and that, as the Spaniards were the sole
possessors of that country, there can be little doubt of their having
been first carried into Spain. Further, that as it would take a
considerable time to introduce them into Italy, and make the Italians
acquainted with them to the extent of giving them a name, there is good
reason to believe, that they had been several years in Europe before
they had been sent to Clusius.
About 600,000 acres of land in Munster were declared forfeited to the
Crown on the fall of the Desmonds. This was parceled out to "Gentlemen
undertakers" on certain conditions; one being that they were bound,
within a limited time, to people their estates with "Well-affected
Englishmen." Raleigh became an undertaker, and by a legal instrument,
bearing the Queen's name, dated from Greenwich, last of February, 1586,
he had given to him 42,000 acres of this land, and by a further grant
the year after, the Monastery of Molanassa and the Priory of Black
Friars, near Youghal.[5]
Famine followed close upon the war with the Desmonds. "At length," says
Hooker, "the curse of God was so great, and the land so barren both of
man and beast, that whatsoever did travel from one end to the other of
all Munster, even from Waterford to Smerwick, about six score miles, he
should not meet man, woman, or child, saving in cities or towns, nor yet
see any beast, save foxes, wolves, or other ravening beasts."[6] Such
was Munster when the great colonizer planted the potato there, in the
hope, perhaps, of averting future famines!
It is generally assumed by writers on Ireland that, soon after the
introduction of the potato, it became a general favourite, and was
cultivated in most parts of the country as an important crop. This seems
to be far from correct. Supposing the potato which we now grow, the
_Solanum tuberosum_ of botanists, to have come to Ireland in 1586, the
usually accepted date, it does not seem to have been in anything like
general favour or cultivation one hundred and forty years later, at
least in the richer and more important districts of the country. In a
pamphlet printed in 1723, one hundred and thirty-seven years after the
introduction of the potato, speaking of the fluctuation of the markets,
the writer says: "We have always either a glut or a dearth; very often
there are not ten days distance between the extremity of the one and the
other; such a want of policy is there (in Dublin especially) on the most
important affair of bread, without a plenty of which _the poor must
starve_." If potatoes were at this time looked upon as an important
food-crop, the author would scarcely omit noticing the fact, especially
in speaking of the food of the poor. At page 25 of the same pamphlet,
after exposing and denouncing the corruptions of those who farmed
tithes, the writer adds: "Therefore an Act of Parliament to ascertain
the tithe of hops, now in the infancy of their great growing
improvement, flax, hemp, turnip-fields, grass-seeds, and dyeing roots or
herbs, of all mines, coals, minerals, commons to be taken in, etc.,
seems necessary towards the encouragement of them."[7] No mention of the
potato.
In the next year, 1724, this pamphleteer was answered by an anonymous
M.P., who mentions potatoes twice. Arguing against what he calls
"extravagant stocks," he says: "Formerly (even since Popery) it was
thought no ill policy to be well with the parson, but now the case is
quite altered, for if he gives him [_sic_] the least provocation, I'll
immediately stock one part of my land with bullocks and the other with
potatoes ... so farewell tithes."[8] The fact of potatoes not being
titheable at this period seems to have encouraged their cultivation. The
next passage goes to show that they were becoming the food of those who
could afford no better. Speaking of high rents, and what he calls
"canting of land" by landlords, he says: "Again, I saw the same farm, at
the expiration of the lease, canted over the improving tenant's head,
and set to another at a rack-rent, who, though coming in to the fine
improvements of his predecessor, (and himself no bad improver,) yet can
scarce afford his family butter to their potatoes, and is daily sinking
into arrears besides."[9] From the tone of this passage, and from the
context, the writer seems to regard the potato as food to be used only
by the very poorest; for he adduces its use to show to what a state
rack-renting can bring even an industrious farmer.
The burthen of all the pamphlets of this period dealing with the land
question, was an attack on landowners for their excessive desire to
throw land into grass. One published in 1727 has this passage: "By
running into the fancy of grazing after the manner of the Scythians,
they [the landowners] are every day depopulating the country."[10] In
another, printed in the same type, and apparently by the same hand, we
read: "To bestow the whole kingdom on beef and mutton, and thereby drive
out half the people, who should eat their share, and force the rest to
send sometimes as far as Ægypt for bread to eat with it, is a most
peculiar and distinguished piece of public economy of which I have no
comprehension."[11] At this time there was extreme want in the country,
on account, it was thought, of the great quantity of land which, within
a short period, had been put out of tillage; graziers (whom the writer
calls "that abominable race of graziers") being mad after land then as
they are now. But there were other causes. William the Third, at the
bidding of the English Parliament, annihilated the flourishing woollen
manufacture of Ireland; her trade with the Colonies was not only
cramped, but ruined, by the navigation laws in force; which, amongst
other things, enacted that no colonial produce could come to Ireland
until it had at first entered an English port, _and had been landed
there_. Thus, whilst the fact that vast tracts of the soil had been put
out of cultivation compelled the country to buy food abroad, the unjust
and selfish destruction of her trade and commerce by England left her
without the money to do so.
The people being in a state of great destitution, the author of the
"Memorial" quoted above, said, there should be raised by taxes on a few
commodities, such as tea, coffee, etc., £110,000. £100,000 to buy
100,000 barrels of wheat, and £10,000 premium to those who would import
it. To this the Author of the Answer replies:--"By talking so familiarly
of £110,000 by a tax upon a few commodities, it is plain you are either
naturally or affectedly ignorant of our present condition, or else you
would know and allow, that such a sum is not to be raised here without a
general excise; since, in proportion to our wealth, we pay already in
taxes more than England ever did in the height of the war. And when you
have brought over your corn, who who will be the buyers? Most certainly,
not the poor, who will not be able to purchase the twentieth part of
it.... If you will propose a general contribution in supporting the poor
on potatoes and buttermilk till the new corn comes in, perhaps you may
succeed better, because the thing at least is possible."
Potato culture was clearly on the increase; the corn crop, however, was
still looked to as the food of the nation. But if the growing of
potatoes was on the increase, it seems to have partly arisen from the
very necessity of the case. There was not land enough under tillage to
give food to the people, it was laid down for grazing. Mountains, poor
lands, and bogs were unsuitable to graziers, nor yet would they yield
wheat, nor, in many instances, oats, or any white crop whatever; but the
potato was found to succeed very well in such places, and to give a
larger quantity of sustenance than such land would otherwise yield. Its
cultivation was therefore spreading, but spreading, it would seem,
chiefly amongst the poor Celtic natives, who had to betake themselves to
the despised wastes and barren mountains. In the rich lowlands, and
therefore amongst the English colony (for whom alone all the
publications of those times were intended), the potato was still a
despised article of food. And to this the latter part of the above-cited
passage points. The proposal to sustain the people on potatoes and
buttermilk until the new corn should come in, is evidently an ironical
one, really meant to convey the degradation to which grazing had brought
the country. Seventy or eighty years later the irony became a sad and
terrible reality.
Meantime increased attention was given to the improvement of
agriculture, arising, in a great measure, from the widespread panic
which the passion for grazing had caused. Good and patriotic men saw but
one result from it, a dangerous and unwise depopulation, and they called
aloud for remedies against so terrible a calamity. The Author of the
"Answer to the Memorial" quoted above, says, with bitter sarcasm:--"You
are concerned how strange and surprising it would be in foreign parts to
hear that the poor were starving in a rich country.... But why all this
concern of the poor? We want them not as the country is now managed;
they may follow thousands of their leaders, and seek their bread abroad.
Where the plough has no work, one family can do the business of fifty,
and you may send away the other forty-nine. An admirable piece of
husbandry never known or practised by the wisest nations, who
erroneously thought people to be the riches of a country."
This anxious desire to prevent the country from "running into grazing,"
called forth many treatises and pamphlets on the improvement of
agriculture. Some writers undertook to show that agriculture was more
profitable than grazing; others turned their attention to improve the
implements of husbandry, and to lay down better rules for the rotation
of crops. Potatoes must have been pretty extensively grown at this time,
and yet they do not get a place in any of the rotations given. We have
fallow, wheat, oats, rye, turnips, saintfoin, lucerne, barley, peas,
beans, clover, rye-grass, and even buck-wheat, tares and lentils rotated
in various ways, but the potato is never mentioned. The growth of
turnips is treated with special importance. Hops, too, receive much
consideration, and the Royal Dublin Society published in 1733 careful
and elaborate instructions for their growth and management. The reason
the growing of potatoes gets no place in any of the rotations of this
period seems to be, that their culture was chiefly confined to the poor
Celtic population in the mountainous and neglected districts; or, as the
author whose pamphlet has a short introduction from Swift[12] says, "to
the Popish parts of the kingdom." Those who wrote in favour of tillage
instead of grazing, set great importance on the increase of population,
and bewailed emigration as the effect of bad harvests and want of
tillage. All such observations made at this period must be taken as
referring to the English colony, or Protestant population, exclusively,
for there was no desire to keep the Catholics from emigrating; quite the
contrary; but they were utterly ignored in the periodical literature of
the time, except when some zealot called for a more strict enforcing of
the laws "to prevent the growth of Popery." And this view is supported
by the writer quoted above, who says it would be for the "Protestant
interest" to encourage tillage. Primate Boulter, bewailing the
emigration which resulted from the famine of 1728, "the result of three
bad harvests together," adds, "the worst is that it affects only the
Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North."[13] He, in his tender
anxiety for the Protestant colony, purchased corn in the South to sell
it cheaply in the North, which caused serious food riots in Cork,
Limerick, Waterford, Clonmel, and other places. These riots were of
course quelled, and the rioters severely punished. The broad rich acres
of the lowlands were in the hands of the Protestants; and these being
specially suited to grazing were accordingly thrown into grass, whilst
the Catholic Celts planted the potato in the despised half-barren wilds,
and were increasing far more rapidly than those who were possessed of
the choicest lands of the kingdom.
But a terrible visitation was at the threshold of Celt and Saxon in
Ireland; the Famine of 1740 and '41. There were several years of dearth,
more or less severe between 1720 and 1740. "The years 1725, 1726, 1727,
and 1728 presented scenes of wretchedness unparalleled in the annals of
any civilized nation," says a writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_.[14]
A pamphlet published in 1740 deplores the emigration which was going
forward as the joint effect of bad harvests and want of tillage: "We
have had," says the author, "twelve bad harvests with slight
intermission." To find a parallel for the dreadful famine which
commenced in 1740, we must go back to the close of the war with the
Desmonds.[15] Previous to 1740 the custom of placing potatoes in pits
dug in the earth, was unknown in Ireland. When the stems were withered,
the farmer put additional earth on the potatoes in the beds where they
grew, in which condition they remained till towards Christmas, when they
were dug out and stored.[16] An intensely severe frost set in about the
middle of December, 1739, whilst the potatoes were yet in this
condition, or probably before they had got additional covering. There is
a tradition in some parts of the South that this frost penetrated nine
inches into the earth the first night it made its appearance. It was
preceded by very severe weather. "In the beginning of November, 1739,
the weather," says O'Halloran, "was very cold, the wind blowing from the
north east, and this was succeeded by the severest frost known in the
memory of man, which entirely destroyed the potatoes, the chief support
of the poor."[17] It is known to tradition as the "great frost," the
"hard frost," the "black frost," etc. Besides the destruction of the
potato crop it produced other surprising effects; all the great rivers
of the country were so frozen over that they became so many highways for
traffic; tents were erected upon the ice, and large assemblies
congregated upon it for various purposes. The turnips were destroyed in
most places, but the parsnips survived. The destruction of shrubs and
trees was immense, the frost making havoc equally of the hardy furze and
the lordly oak; it killed birds of almost every kind, it even killed the
shrimps of Irishtown Strand, near Dublin, so that there was no supply of
them at market for many years from that famous shrimp ground.[18]
Towards the end of the frost the wool fell off the sheep, and they died
in great numbers.[19]
On Saturday, the 29th of December, there was a violent storm in Dublin,
which did much damage to the shipping in the river; and the cruiser,
"Man of War," which was at the North Bull, being in great danger, "cut
her cables, and ran up between the walls as far as Sir John's _Key_,[20]
where," adds the chronicler, "she now lies frozen up."[21] Another
curious incident is recorded which proves the intensity of the frost at
this time: the pressgang was very busy on the river catching sailors to
man the navy for the war with Spain, and under the above date we are
informed that more than one hundred pressed men walked on shore on the
ice with several of the crews; but, it is added, "they gave their honour
they would return."[22]
The frost continued about eight or nine weeks, during which all
employment ceased; the potato crop was destroyed, and the mills being
frozen up no corn could be ground. The effect on the population was
general and immediate. In the middle of January the destitution was so
great, that subscriptions to relieve the people were set on foot in
Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Clonmel, Wexford, and other places.
Some landlords distributed money and food to their starving tenants;
but, I am sorry to have to say, that the number of such cases on record
is very limited.[23] There was no general combined effort to meet the
calamity, the Government taking no action whatever, except that the Lord
Lieutenant (the Duke of Devonshire) gave to the starving citizens of
Dublin £150 in two donations, and forbade, by proclamation, the
exportation of grain, meal, bread, etc., _except to England_,
"apprehending," says his Excellency, "that the exportation of corn will
be bad for the kingdom during this extreme season." Later on in the
Famine, and when about two hundred thousand of the people had died of
hunger and pestilence, there was another proclamation ordering a
_general fast_ for the success of his Majesty's arms against the King of
Spain! But the fasting does not seem to have had much effect; Admiral
Vernon, commander of the fleet at the seat of war in the West Indies,
took Portobello, but had to give it up again; he attacked Carthagena
with all his forces, was repulsed, and so the war ended.
To add to the miseries of the people there was a great drought all the
winter and spring.[24] A person writing from the West on the 15th of
April, says: "There has not been one day's rain in Connaught these two
months." The price of provisions continued to rise. Wheat, quoted
towards the end of January in the Dublin market at £2 1s. 6d. the
quarter, reached £2 15s. 6d. in April, £3 14s. in June, and £3 16s. 6d.
in August. About the end of May there was a very formidable bread riot
in the city. Several hundred persons banded themselves together, and,
proceeding to the bakers' shops and meal stores, took the bread and meal
into the streets, and sold them to the poor at low prices. Some gave the
proceeds to the owners, but others did not. They were evidently not
thieves, and at least a portion of them seem to have been even
respectable, yet they were punished with much severity, several having
been whipped, and one transported for seven years. Some days after the
riot the Lord Mayor issued a proclamation giving permission to "foreign
bakers and others" to bake bread in Dublin; he also sent to all the
churchwardens of the city to furnish him with information of any persons
who had concealed corn on their premises; he denounced "forestallers,"
who met in the suburbs the people coming in with provisions, in order to
buy them up before they reached the market; thus in a great measure
justifying the rioters who were whipped and transported. The bakers
began to bake household bread, which for some time they had ceased to
do, and prices fell.[25]
Throughout the country there were numerous gangs of robbers, most of
them undoubtedly having sprung into existence through sheer starvation;
some, probably taking advantage of the Famine, pursued with more profit
and boldness a course of life to which they had been previously
addicted. The most noted of these was "the Kellymount gang." Their
head-quarters seem to have been Coolcullen Wood, about seven miles from
Kilkenny, but they extended their operations into the King and Queen's
Counties, and even to Galway. They were so formidable that a strong
military force had to be sent against them. This gang committed no
murders, disdained to take anything but money, horses, and sheep;
sometimes divided their plunder with the starving people; and had in the
outset pledged their honour not to rob any of the gentlemen of the
County Kilkenny. They were dispersed, after giving much trouble to the
military; many were taken prisoners, tried by a Special Commission, and
of course hanged; for, while the Government did nothing to alleviate the
horrors of the Famine, it put the law in force with a bloody severity.
The number of persons condemned to death at the Spring Assizes of 1741
was really appalling. There was a sort of small food riot at
Carrick-on-Suir, where a boat laden with oats was about sailing for
Waterford, when the starving people assembled to prevent the food they
so much needed from being taken away. Their conduct was clearly illegal,
but they were at death's door with hunger, and ought to have been
treated with some consideration and patience. A justice of the peace,
with eighteen foot soldiers and a troop of horse, came out and ordered
them to disperse; they would not, or at least they did not do so with
sufficient alacrity. One account, published a fortnight or so after the
occurrence, asserts with a feeble timidity akin to falsehood, that
stones were thrown by the people. Be that as it may, they were fired
upon; five starving wretches were shot dead on the spot, and eleven
badly wounded. To give the finishing touch to this wicked slaughter, the
Lords Justices, Primate Boulter and Lord Chancellor Jocelyn, in the
absence of the Lord Lieutenant, came out with a proclamation, offering a
handsome reward for the apprehension of any of those who had escaped the
well-directed fire of the soldiery.
The Famine continued through the year 1741 and even deepened in
severity, provisions still keeping at starvation prices. The Duke of
Devonshire met the Parliament on the 6th of October, and in the course
of his address said: "The sickness which hath proved so mortal in
several parts of the kingdom, and is thought to have been principally
owing to the scarcity of wholesome food, must very sensibly affect His
Majesty, who hath a most tender concern for all his subjects, and cannot
but engage your serious attention to consider of proper measures to
prevent the like calamity for the future, and to this desirable end the
increase of tillage, which would at the same time usefully employ the
industrious poor, may greatly contribute." In answer to this portion of
the speech, they promise to "prepare such laws as, by encouraging
tillage, and employing the industrious poor, may be the means for the
future to prevent the like calamity." A Committee was appointed to
inquire into "the late great scarcity," and some matters connected with
tillage. They met many times; now and then reported to the House that
they had made some progress, and at last the heads of a bill were
presented by Mr. Le Hunte, the Chairman, which were ordered to be sent
to England. Nothing, as far as I can discover, resulted from this
proceeding, unless indeed it was a bill passed in 1743 "to prevent the
pernicious practice of burning land," which is probable enough, as the
heads of this bill were presented to the House by the same Mr. Le Hunte.
During the time this Committee was sitting and reporting, and sitting
again, Mr. Thos. Cuffe, seconded by Mr. George M'Cartney, presented the
heads of a bill "for the more effectual securing the payment of rents
and preventing the frauds of tenants," which was received and read and
committed by a Committee of the whole House on presentation, and was
hurried through its other stages, apparently without discussion, but
certainly without opposition; and this in the second year of a Famine,
now combined with pestilence, which slaughtered one-eighth of the whole
population.[26] The Act was a temporary one, but was never afterwards
allowed to die out. It was renewed in various reigns, and is the
foundation of the Acts which were in force up to 1870 "for the more
effectual securing the payment of rents."
The land had been thrown into grazing to an alarming extent for years,
so that the acreage for producing grain and other such food was very
limited; the people fell into listless despair from what they had
endured in 1740, and did not cultivate the ground that was still left
for tillage. The Catholics were paralyzed and rendered unfit for
industrious pursuits, by an active renewal of the worst penal statutes.
The prospect of a war with Spain, which was actually declared in
October, 1739, was made the pretext for this new persecution, and all
the severities recommended by Primate Boulter were put into rigid
execution. These measures plunged the people into the deepest distress:
horror and despair pervaded every mind.[27]
Such was the state of Ireland in 1741, when bloody flux and malignant
fever came to finish what the Famine had left undone. These scourges,
unlike the Famine, fell upon the castle as well as on the hovel, many
persons in the higher ranks of life having died of them during the year;
amongst whom we find several physicians; the son of Alderman Tew; Mr.
John Smith, High Sheriff of Wicklow; Mr. Whelan, Sub-Sheriff of Meath;
the Rev. Mr. Heartlib, Castle Chaplain; Mr. Kavanagh, of Borris House,
and his brother; the son of the Lord Mayor-Elect; two judges, namely,
Baron Wainright and the Right Hon. John Rogerson, Chief Justice of the
King's Bench. The prisoners died in thousands in the jails, especially
poor debtors, who had been long incarcerated. In November, 1741, the
prisoners in Cork jail sent a petition to Parliament, in which they say,
that "above seven hundred persons died there during the late severe
seasons, and that the jail is now so full that there is scarce room for
their lying on the floors." The fever was so general in Limerick that
there was hardly one family in the whole city who had not some member
ill of it. Galway was cruelly scourged by the Famine, to meet which
little or nothing seems to have been done by those whose bounden duty it
was to come to the relief of their starving brethren. When fever
appeared on the terrible scene, the town became one great lazaretto.
Under date of July the 8th, the following intelligence comes from that
unhappy place: "The fever so rages here that the physicians say it is
more like a plague than a fever, and refuse to visit patients for any
fee whatever."[28] "The gentlemen of the county" met, in a way peculiar
to themselves, this twofold calamity which threatened utter
annihilation to their historic capital. To counteract the inevitable
results of famine, they announced that they would give the reward of £30
for the first, and £10 for every other robber that would be prosecuted
to conviction, and this in addition to whatever the Government would
allow. What excessive liberality! They must have had plenty of money.
The plague, which no physician would attend, they dealt with by a
proclamation also, of which they seemed proud, for they published it
repeatedly in the journals of the time. Here is an extract: "The town of
Galway being at this time very sickly, the gentlemen of the county
_think proper_ to remove the races that were to be _run for_ at Park,
near the said town of Galway, to Terlogh Gurranes, near the town of
Tuam, in the said county." What humane, _proper-thinking_ "gentlemen"
they were, to be sure; and such precise legal phraseology! But their
enticing bill of fare contained more than the "races that were to be run
for;" it announced balls and plays every night for the entertainment of
the ladies.
The learned and kind-hearted Dr. Berkeley, Protestant Bishop of Cloyne,
under date 21st May, 1741, writes to a a friend in Dublin:--"The
distresses of the sick and poor are endless. The havoc of mankind in the
counties of Cork, Limerick, and some adjacent places, hath been
incredible. The nation probably will not recover this loss in a century.
The other day I heard one from the county of Limerick say, that whole
villages were entirely dispeopled. About two months since I heard Sir
Richard Cox say, that five hundred were dead in the parish, though in a
county I believe not very populous. It were to be wished people of
condition were at their seats in the country during these calamitous
times, which might provide relief and employment for the poor. Certainly
if these perish the rich must be sufferers in the end." The author of a
letter entitled "The Groans of Ireland," addressed to an Irish. Member
of Parliament, thus opens his subject:--"I have been absent from this
country for some years, and on my return to it, last summer, found it
the most miserable scene of universal distress that I have ever read of
in history: want and misery in every face; the rich unable almost as
they were willing to relieve the poor; the roads spread with dead and
dying bodies; mankind of the colour of the docks and nettles they fed
on; two or three, sometimes more, going on a car to the grave for want
of bearers to carry them, and many buried only in the fields and ditches
where they perished. This universal scarcity was ensued by fluxes and
malignant fevers, which swept off multitudes of all sorts: whole
villages were left waste by want, and sickness, and death in various
shapes; and scarcely a house in the whole island escaped from tears and
mourning. The loss must be upwards of 400,000, but supposing it 200,000,
(it was certainly more) it was too great for this ill-peopled country,
and the more grievous as they were mostly of the grown-up part of the
working people." "Whence can this proceed?" he asks; and he answers,
"From the want of proper tillage laws to guide and to protect the
husbandman in the pursuit of his business." [29]
This writer further says, the terrible visitation of 1740 and '41 was
the third famine within twenty years; so that in view of these and other
famines, since and before, Ireland might be not inaptly described as the
land of Famines. Almost the first object one sees on sailing into Dublin
Bay is a monument to Famine. This beautiful bay, as far-famed as the Bay
of Naples itself, has often been put in comparison with it. More than
once has it been my lot to witness the tourist on board the Holyhead
packet, coming to Ireland for the first time, straining his eyes towards
the coast, when the rising sun gave a faint blue outline of the Wicklow
mountains, and assured him that he had actually and really before him,
"The Holy Hills of Ireland." Nearer and nearer he comes, and Howth at
one side and Wicklow Head at the other define what he, not unjustly,
regards as the Bay. And surely on a bright clear morning, with just
enough of sunlight, it is as fair a scene as mortal eye can rest on. The
Dublin and Wicklow hills, which at first seemed to rise from the shore,
recede by degrees, and with their undulating graceful outlines, become a
charming background. Wicklow Head drops quietly out of the landscape,
and Howth to the north, and Bray Head to the south, now become the bold
gigantic flanking towers of what is more strictly regarded as Dublin
Bay. The traveller's eyes, beaming with enjoyment, survey the fine
perpendicular rock of Bray Head, with the railway marking a thin line
upon its side nearly midway above the sea, and almost suspended over it.
And then there is that beautiful cone, the Sugarloaf mountain; further
still away, the loftier Djous, overhanging a dark, misty valley, which
marks the spot where the waters of Powerscourt tumble down the rock a
height of three hundred feet; on, on across the Dublin range to
Montpelier, the valley of the Liffey, the city--notable to the
north-west by its dusky-brown atmosphere; then the historic plains of
Clontarf; Howth once again, and the panorama is complete. But he nears
the shore rapidly, and the harbour grows more distinct, Kingstown,
rising from it with its terraces, and spires, and towers, looking
important and aristocratic. The rich and varied fringe of gardens, and
lawns, and villas from Dalkey to Seapoint, mark at once the fashionable
watering-place; whilst Dalkey Castle, standing over the great
precipitous quarry from which Kingstown harbour was built, and the
Obelisk on Killiney Hill indicate points from which commanding views
can be obtained.
The morrow, and let us suppose the tourist ascends to the massive but
friendly gate which admits to that same Obelisk hill. Was ever such an
ascent open to him before? The broad, winding avenue, literally carpeted
with its firm green satin sward, defined by a belt of graceful planting
at either side, whilst in nooks and cozy places are inviting seats for
the weak and weary to rest awhile, and gain breath to enable them to
pursue their journey upwards. The Obelisk, as it is called, stands on
the highest point; the view from it on every side is unrivalled for
beauty--the sublime it has not--but the beautiful is perfect. The
mountains, which yesterday morning at sea, gave the first glimmering
indication of the Irish coast, assume new shapes, and are thrown into
new combinations. Inland, the landscape stretches on till it touches the
sky in all directions except where the mountains intervene. Looking
north, over the flat plain of Clontarf, he beholds the lofty Mourne
range, relieved against the sky; glancing along the Dublin mountains he
has that wooded and villaed slope, far as the eye can reach, which forms
the southern suburb, a rival for which no city in Europe can boast: to
the east are the deep clear waters of the sea, four hundred feet
beneath; and he gazes with delight on the tranquil and gracefully curved
strand, stretching three or four miles on to Bray, which fringes that
charming inlet known as Killiney Bay; its waves sending upwards, in
measured cadence, their soft, distinct, suggestive murmurs, whilst they
spend themselves on the shore of the ever new, ever delightful, ever
enchanting Vale of Shangannah, immortalized by our Irish poet, Denis
Florence M'Carthy. But this old Obelisk itself, what is it?--What
brought it here? The tourist reads: "Last year being hard with the POOR,
the walls about these HILLS, and THIS, etc., erected by JOHN MALPAS,
Esq., June, 1742." The story of Ireland is before him; it is told in
the landscape, and the inscription, it may be expressed in two
words--Beauty and Starvation.
The famine of 1741 did not deter farmers from the culture of the potato;
on the contrary, it increased rapidly after that period, and we now find
it, for the first time, recognised as a rotation crop. They preferred to
turn their attention to improve its quality and productiveness, and to
take measures for its protection from frost, rather than to abandon its
culture. And, indeed, it was as much a matter of necessity as choice
that they did so. The potato, on a given area, supplied about four times
as much food as any other crop; and, from the limited breadth of land
then available for tillage, the population would be in continual danger
of falling short of food, unless the potato were cultivated to a large
extent. The agricultural literature of the country from 1741 until the
arrival of the celebrated traveller, Arthur Young, in Ireland, consisted
chiefly of fierce attacks upon graziers--of a continual demand for the
breaking up of grass lands into tillage--of plans for the establishment
of public granaries to sustain the people in years of bad harvests, and
of the results of experiments undertaken to improve the culture of the
potato. The writers on these subjects also frequently denounced the rich
for the wretchedness and misery to which they allowed the labouring poor
to be reduced. The author of a pamphlet, which went through several
editions, thus attacks them, in the edition of 1755:--"The want of trade
and industry causes such inequality in the distribution of their (the
people's) property, that while a few of the richer sort can wantonly
pamper appetites of every kind, and indulge with the affluence of so
many monarchs, the poor, alas! who make at least ninety-nine of every
hundred among them, are under the necessity of going clad after the
fashion of the old Irish, whose manners and customs they retain to this
day, and of feeding on potatoes, the most generally embraced advantage
of the inhabitants, which the great Sir Walter Raleigh left behind
him."[30] This writer's remarks apply chiefly to Cork, Waterford, Kerry,
and Limerick. He proceeds: "The feeding of cattle on large dairies of
several hundred acres together, may be managed by the inhabitants of one
or two cabins, whose wretched subsistence, for the most part, depends
upon an acre or two of potatoes and a little skimmed milk."[31]
Many think that the yield per acre of potatoes has greatly increased
with time in Ireland. This opinion, although true, is not true to the
extent generally supposed; for, when Arthur Young travelled in this
country, and even before it, the yield, as far as recorded, seems nearly
equal to the quantity produced at present, except in some peculiar
cases. A well-known agriculturist, John Wynne Baker, writing in 1765,
says, in a note to his "Agriculture Epitomized," that he had in the past
year (1764) of apple potatoes (not a prolific kind) in the proportion of
more than one hundred and nine barrels an acre.
Arthur Young came to Ireland in 1776, and he brings his account of the
country down to 1779. Thirty-six years had elapsed since the great
Famine, only one generation, and he found the famous root of Virginia a
greater favourite than ever. From Slane, in Meath, he writes that
potatoes are a great article of culture at Kilcock, where he found them
grown for cattle; store bullocks were fed upon them, and they were even
deemed good food for horses when mixed with bran. In Slane itself, the
old custom, which was the chief cause of the famine of 1740, still
prevailed; for he says, the people there were not done taking up their
potatoes till Christmas. The potato culture, he elsewhere remarks, has
increased twenty-fold within the last twenty years, all the hogs in the
country being fattened on them. They were usually given to them
half-boiled. Wherever he went he almost invariably found the food of the
people, at least for nine months of the year, to be potatoes and milk,
excepting parts of Ulster, where they had oatbread, and sometimes flesh
meat. In the South, for the labourers of Sir Lucius O'Brien and their
families, consisting of two hundred and sixty-seven souls, the quantity
of potatoes planted, as appears from a paper given to him, was
forty-five acres and a quarter, ranging from a quarter of an acre to
four acres for each family. As to yield, the lowest he gives is forty
barrels per acre, Irish of course; and the highest reported to him was
at Castle Oliver, near Bruff, namely, one hundred and fifty barrels
(Bristol).[32] The average produce of the entire country he gives at
three hundred and twenty-eight bushels per acre--about sixty-six
barrels. "Yet, to gain this miserable produce," he says, "much old hay,
and nineteen-twentieths of all the dung in the kingdom is employed."
Potatoes grown on the coast were frequently sent to Dublin by sea; and
Lord Tyrone told Arthur Young at Curraghmore, that much of the potatoes
grown about Dungarvan were sent thither, together with birch-brooms. The
boats were said to be freighted with _fruit_ and _timber_!
Amongst the endless varieties of the potato which appeared from time to
time, that known as the "apple" was the best in quality, and stood its
ground the longest, having been a favourite for at least seventy or
eighty years. The produce recorded above as raised by Mr. Wynne Baker
was as we have seen from this species, what kind gave the still greater
yield at Castle Oliver is not recorded. Thus it is perfectly clear that
in 1780, and even before that time, the staple food of the Irish nation
was once again the potato. In fact, it was cultivated to a far greater
extent than before 1740, which caused the population to increase with
wonderful rapidity.[33]
The prolific but uncertain root on which the Irish people became, year
after year, more dependent for existence, once again dashed their hopes
in 1821, and threw a great part of the South and West into a state of
decided famine. The spring of that year was wet and stormy, retarding
the necessary work, especially the planting of potatoes. The summer was
also unfavourable, May was cold and ungenial; in June there was frost,
with a north wind, and sometimes a scorching sun. The autumn, like the
spring, was wet and severe, rain falling to a very unusual extent. The
consequent floods did extensive injury; not merely were crops of hay
floated off the lowland meadows, but in various places fields of
potatoes were completely washed out of the ground and carried away. The
crops were deficient, especially the potato crop, much of which was left
undug until the ensuing spring, partly on account of the inclement
weather, partly because it was not worth the labour. The low grounds
were, in many instances, inundated to such a depth that even the
potatoes in pits could not be reached. About the middle of December "the
Shannon at Athlone," says an eye-witness, "looked like a boundless
ocean," covering for weeks the potato fields, souring the crop, and
preventing all access to the pits. The loss of the potato in this year,
and its cause, are thus epitomised in the following extract from the
Report of the London Tavern Committee:--"From the most authentic
communications, it appeared that the bad quality and partial failure of
the potato crop of the preceding year (1821)--the consequence of the
excessive and protracted humidity of the season--had been a principal
cause of the distress, and that it had been greatly aggravated by the
rotting of the potatoes in the pits in which they were stored. This
discovery was made at so late a period that the peasantry were not able
to provide against the consequences of that evil."[34] From the letters
published in their own Report, the Committee would have been abundantly
justified in adding, that the distress was greatly increased by the
almost total want of employment for the labouring classes, arising from
the fact, that very many of the landlords in the districts that suffered
most were absentees. A writer on this Famine, who, in general, is
inclined to be severe in his strictures upon the people, thus opens the
subject:--"The distress which has almost universally prevailed in
Ireland has not been occasioned so much by an excessive population as by
a culpable remissness on the part of persons possessing property, and
neglecting to take advantage of those great resources, and of those
ample means of providing for an increasing population, which Nature has
so liberally bestowed on this country."[35]
The winter and spring of 1822 continued very wet, and it was extremely
difficult to perform any agricultural work. Seed potatoes were
excessively scarce, and the first relief that reached the country was a
prudent and timely one; it consisted of fourteen hundred tons of seed
potatoes, bought by the Government in England and Scotland. Charitable
persons at home also gave seed potatoes, cut into _sets_, to prevent
their being used for food; yet, in many instances, those sets were taken
out of the ground by the starving people and eaten. Cork, Limerick,
Kerry, Clare, Mayo, and Galway were the counties most severely visited.
These, according to the accounts given in the public journals of the
time, were in a state of actual famine. Potatoes were eight pence a
stone in districts where they usually sold from one penny to two pence.
But although the potato had failed, food from the cereal crops was
abundant and cheap enough if the people had money to buy it. "There was
no want of food of another description for the support of human life; on
the contrary, the crops of grain had been far from deficient, and the
prices of corn and oatmeal were very moderate. The calamities of 1822
may, therefore, be said to have proceeded less from the want of food
itself, than from the want of adequate means of purchasing it; or, in
other words, from the want of profitable employment."[36] Poor
Skibbereen, that got such a melancholy notoriety in the later and far
more terrible Famine of '47, was reported, in May, 1822, to be in a
state of distress "horrible beyond description." Potatoes were not
merely dear, they were inferior, not having ripened for want of
sufficient heat; and, furthermore, they soured in the pits. The use of
such unwholesome food soon brought typhus fever and dysentery upon the
scene, which slaughtered their thousands. In parts of the West the
living were unable to bury the dead, more especially in Achill, where,
in many cases, the famine-stricken people were found dead on the
roadside. A Committee appointed by the House of Commons to investigate
this calamity reported, amongst other things, that the Famine was spread
over districts representing half the superficies of the country, and
containing a population of 2,907,000 souls.
There are no statistics to give an accurate knowledge of the numbers
that died of want in this Famine, and of the dysentery and fever which
followed. If the Census of 1821 can be relied on, which I much doubt,
the famine and pestilence of the succeeding year did not in the least
check the growth of the population, as it increased in the ten years
from 1821 to 1831, fifteen per cent.; an increase above the average,
even in the absence of any disturbing cause.
This famine was met by Government grants; by the contributions from the
London Tavern Committee; the Dublin Mansion House Committee, and, to a
limited extent, by private charity.[37] In June, 1822, Parliament voted
£100,000 "for the employment of the poor in Ireland, and other purposes
relating thereto, as the exigency of affairs may require." And in July,
£200,000, "to enable His Majesty to take such measures as the exigency
of affairs may require." The London Tavern Committee, with the aid of a
King's letter, received subscriptions amounting to £304,180 17s. 6d., of
which £44,177 9s. was raised in Ireland. The Dublin Mansion House
Committee collected £30,406 11s. 4-1/2d. Thus, the whole sum from
charitable collections was £334,587 8s. 10-1/2d., of which £74,584, 0s.
4-1/2d. was raised in Ireland. This, with the grant of £300,000 from
Government, makes a grand total of £634,587 8s. 10-1/2d. The sum appears
to have been quite sufficient, as the London Tavern Committee closed
its labours whilst it had yet in hands £60,000, which sum was partly
distributed and partly invested in ways considered beneficial to this
country.[38]
Every two or three years from 1821 to the great blight of '45 and '46, a
failure of some kind, more or less extensive, occurred to the potato
crop, not merely in Ireland, but in almost every country in which it was
cultivated to any considerable extent. Reviewing, then, the history of
this famous root for over a period of one hundred years, we find, that
although it produces from a given acreage more human food than any other
crop, it is yet a most treacherous and perishable one; and it may,
perhaps, surprise future generations, that the statesmen and landed
proprietors of that lengthened period did nothing whatever to regulate
the husbandry of the country, in such a way as to prevent the lives of a
whole people from being dependant on a crop liable to so many
casualties. Perhaps the social and political condition of Ireland,
during these times, will be found to have had something to do with this
culpable apathy.
It is commonly assumed that the subjugation of Ireland was effected by
Elizabeth, but the submission to English rule was only a forced one; the
spirit of the nation was one of determined opposition, which was
abundantly shown at Aughrim and Limerick, and on many a foreign field
besides. Great Britain knowing this, and being determined to hold the
country at all risks, was continually in fear that some war or
complication with foreign powers would afford the Irish people an
opportunity of putting an end to English rule in Ireland, and of
declaring the country an independent nation. As progress in wealth and
prosperity would add to the probabilities of success in such an event,
it was the all but avowed--nay, truth compels me to say, the
_frequently avowed_ policy of England to keep Ireland poor, and
therefore feeble, that she might be held the more securely. For that
reason she was not treated as a portion of a united kingdom, but as an
enemy who had become England's slave by conquest, who was her rival in
manufactures of various kinds, who might undersell her in foreign
markets, and, in fact, who might grow rich and powerful enough to assert
her independence.
The descendants of the Norman adventurers who got a footing here in the
twelfth century; English and Scotch planters; officials and undertakers
who, from time to time, had been induced to settle in Ireland by grants
of land and sinecures, were, by a legal fiction, styled The Nation,
although they were never more than a small fraction of it. For a great
number of years every writer, every public man, every Act of Parliament,
assumed that the English colony in Ireland was the Irish nation.
Denunciations of Papists, the "common enemy"--gross falsehoods about
their principles and acts--fears real or pretended, of their wicked,
bloodthirsty plots, thickly strewn in our path as we journey through
this dismal period of our history--reveal to us, as it were by accident,
that there was another people in this island, besides those whom the law
regarded as the nation; but they had no rights, they were outlaws--"the
Irish enemy." One hundred and fifty years ago Primate Boulter expressed
his belief that those outlaws made four-fifths of the population, and
the English colony only one-fifth; but the colonists held the rich
lands; the bulk of the people, who formed the real nation, were in the
bogs, the lonely glens, and on the sterile mountains, where agriculture
was all but impossible, except to the great capitalist. Capital they had
none, and they were forced to subsist, as best they could, on little
patches of tillage among the rocks, whose _debris_ made the land around
them in some sort susceptible of cultivation. By degrees those outlaws
discovered that the potato, coming from the high moist soil of Quito,
found in the half-barren wilds of Ireland, if not a climate, a soil at
least congenial to its nature. It was palatable food, as it became
acclimatized; it grew where no other plant fit for human food would
grow; it was a great fertilizer; it was prolific: no wonder the poor
Celt of our bogs and mountains, in time, made the potato more associated
with the name of Ireland than it ever was with its native country,
Virginia.
Before 1729 we have no record of the potato having suffered from blight
or frost, or anything else. But this is not to be wondered at; even
though such things occurred, the outlaws, who were its chief
cultivators, excited neither interest nor pity in the hearts of the
ruling minority. They were watched and feared; they were known to be
numerous; and many were the plans set on foot to reduce their numbers,
and cause them to become extinct, like the red deer of their native
hills. Surely, then, a potato blight, followed by a famine, would not be
regarded as a calamity, unless it affected the English colony. The
Celtic nation in Ireland could have no record of such a visitation,
unless in the fugitive ballad of some hedge schoolmaster.[39] Anyhow,
the Celt, forced to live for the most part, in barren wilds, where it
was all but impossible to raise sufficient food, found the potato his
best friend, and his race increased and multiplied upon it, in spite of
that bloody code which ignored his existence, and with regard to which
Lord Clare, no friend to Ireland, thus expresses his views in his speech
on the Union: "The Parliament of England seem to have considered the
permanent debility of Ireland as the best security of the British
crown, and the Irish Parliament to have rested the security of the
colony upon maintaining a perpetual and impossible barrier against the
ancient inhabitants of the country."[40]
Another cause for the increased cultivation of the potato may be found
in the poverty of the English colony itself. Whilst the people of whom
that colony was composed, through the Parliament that represented them,
pursued the Catholic natives with unmitigated persecution, they were
themselves the object of jealous surveillance, both by the Parliament
and the commercial classes of England. Long before the times of which I
am writing, the English always showed uneasiness at the least appearance
of amalgamation between the descendants of the Norman invaders and the
natives, although their fears on this head were to a great extent set at
rest by the change of religion in England, which change extended in a
very considerable degree to the English colony in Ireland. After the
Reformation there was not much danger of a union between the Catholic
Celt and the Protestant Norman. Still another jealousy remained--a
commercial jealousy. The colonization of Ireland meant, in the English
mind, the complete extirpation of the natives, and the peopling of this
island by the adventurers and their descendants; but it is a strange
fact, that even had this actually happened, we can, from what we know of
the history of the period, assert with truth, that still their
commercial prosperity and progress would be watched, and checked, and
legislated against, whenever they would even seem to clash, or when
there was a possibility of their clashing, with the commercial supremacy
of Great Britain. Not to go into all the commercial restraints imposed
on Irish manufactures by the English Parliament, let us take what,
perhaps, was the most important one--that imposed on the woollen
manufacture. For a long period this branch of industry had flourished in
Ireland. We not only manufactured what we required for ourselves, but
our exports of woollens were very considerable. This manufacture existed
in England also, and the Englishmen engaged in it were determined to
have the foreign markets to themselves. After many previous efforts,
they at length induced both Houses of the English Parliament to address
William the Third on what they were pleased to consider a grievance--the
grievance of having foreign markets open to Irish woollens equally with
their own. To those addresses the King replied that he would do all in
his power to "discourage" the woollen trade in Ireland, to encourage the
linen trade, and _to promote the trade of England_.[41] Accordingly, a
duty equal to a prohibition was imposed upon the exportation of Irish
woollens, except, indeed, to England and Wales, where they were not
required--England at the time manufacturing more woollens than were
necessary for her home consumption. About forty thousand people in
Ireland were thrown out of bread by this law, nearly every one of whom
were Protestants; for that trade was almost entirely in their hands, so
that neither Palesman nor Protestant was spared when their interests
seemed opposed to those of England. William's declaration on this
occasion about encouraging the linen manufacture in Ireland was regarded
as a compact, yet it was violated at a later period by the imposition of
duties.[42] The jealousy and unkindness of the prohibitory duty on the
export of woollens is exposed by the able author of the "Groans of
Ireland," who says: "It is certain that on the coasts of Spain, and
Portugal, and the Mediterranean, in the stuffs, etc., which we send
them, we, under all the difficulties of a clandestine trade, undersell
the French eight per cent., and it is as certain that the French
undersell the English as much--it has been said--_eleven per
cent_."[43] So that although the English manufacturer was unable to
compete with the Frenchman abroad, his narrow selfishness would not
permit Ireland to do so, although she was in a position to do it with
advantage to herself.
Impoverished by such legislation, the English colony itself, Protestant
and all as it was, had to lower its dietary standard and cultivate the
potato, or, at least, promote its cultivation by the use of it.
Another of the alleged causes for the poverty of the country, and the
consequent increase of potato culture, was absenteeism. In 1729 a list
of absentees was published by Mr. Thomas Prior, which ran through
several editions. The list includes the Viceroy himself, then an
absentee, which he well might be, at that time and for long afterwards,
as Primate Boulter was the ruler of Ireland. Mr. Prior sets down in his
pamphlet the incomes of the absentees, and the total amounts to the
enormous annual sum of £627,769 sterling, a sum in excess of the entire
revenue of the country, which, though increasing year after year, even
twenty-nine years afterwards was only £650,763.
Besides the exhausting drain by absentee proprietors, there was another
kind of absenteeism, namely, that of Englishmen who, through Court or
other influence, obtained places in Ireland, but discharged the duties
of them, such as they were, by deputy. Mr. Prior cites the following
instance as an example:--"One of those Englishmen who got an appointment
in Ireland landed in Dublin on a Saturday evening, went next day to a
parish church, received the Sacrament there, went to the Courts on
Monday, took the necessary oaths, and sailed for England that very
evening! This was certainly expedition, but still coming over at all was
troublesome: so those who had obtained appointments in Ireland got an
Act quietly passed in the English Parliament dispensing them from
visiting Ireland at all, even to take possession of those offices to
which they were promoted."[44]
That a large proportion of the owners of the soil of a country should
reside out of it, has been always regarded as a great evil, as well as a
real loss to that country. Mr. M'Cullagh's elaborate attempt to prove
there is no real pecuniary loss inflicted by mere absenteeism convinces
no impartial man, least of all does it convince those who experience,
daily in their own persons, the evils which inevitably result from
absenteeism. It is fallacious with regard to any country, but especially
so as regards Ireland, which, in his argument, he assumes to have her
proportion of the profit from the manufactured exports of the United
Kingdom, whereas she is not a manufacturing country at all, having as
exports, only some linen and the food that should be kept at home to be
consumed by her people. When taxes are to be levied and battles to be
fought, we are always an integral part of the United Kingdom; but when
there is a question of encouraging or extending manufactures, we are
treated as the rival and the enemy of England.[45]
The avarice and tyranny of landlords, is usually set down as a principal
cause of the great poverty and misery of the Irish people, during a long
period. If we examine the rents paid one hundred and fifty, or even one
hundred years ago, they will appear trifling when compared with the
rents of the present day; so that, at first, one is inclined to question
the accuracy of those writers who denounce the avarice and rack-renting
propensities of the landlords of their time. But when we examine the
question more closely, we find so many circumstances to modify and even
to change our first views, that by degrees we arrive at the belief,
that the complaints made were substantially true. If the rents of those
times seem to us very low, we must remember that the land, for the most
part, was in a wretched condition; that the majority of farms had much
waste upon them, and that the portions tilled were not half tilled; so
that whilst the acreage was large, the productive portion of the land
was only a percentage of it. Then, agricultural skill was wanting; good
implements were wanting; capital was wanting; everything that could
improve the soft and make it productive, was wanting. These and many
other causes made rents that seem trifling to us, rack-rents to the
farmers who paid them. Swift had no doubt at all upon the matter, for he
says: "Another great calamity is the exorbitant raising of the rents of
lands. Upon the determination of all leases made before the year 1690, a
gentleman thinks that he has but indifferently improved his estate if he
has only doubled his rent-roll. Farms are screwed up to a rack-rent;
leases granted but for a small term of years; tenants tied down to hard
conditions, and discouraged from cultivating the lands they occupy to
the best advantage by the certainty they have of the rent being raised
on the expiration of their lease, proportionably to the improvements
they shall make."[46] As to the unlimited power of landlords, and its
tyrannical use, Arthur Young, writing in 1779, less than one hundred
years ago, says: "The age has improved so much in humanity, that even
the poor Irish have experienced its influence, and are every day treated
better and better; but still the remnant of the old manners, the
abominable distinction of religion, united with the oppressive conduct
of the little country gentlemen, or rather vermin, of the kingdom, who
were never out of it, altogether bear still very heavy on the poor
people, and subject them to situations more mortifying than we ever
behold in England. The landlord of an Irish estate, inhabited by Roman
Catholics, is a sort of despot, who yields obedience in whatever
concerns the poor to no law but that of his will ... A long series of
oppressions, aided by very many ill-judged laws, have brought landlords
into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals
into that of an almost unlimited submission. Speaking a language that is
despised, professing a religion that is abhorred, and being disarmed,
the poor find themselves in many cases slaves even in the bosom of
_written_ liberty." And again, this enlightened Protestant English
gentleman says of the Irish landlord, that "nothing satisfies him but an
unlimited submission."[47]
Forty years later, some of their more obvious, not to say essential
duties, were brought under the notice of Irish landlords, but in vain.
The writer quoted above on the Famine of 1822 says: "It is therefore a
duty incumbent on all those who possess property, and consequently have
an interest in the prosperity of this country, to prevent a recurrence
of this awful calamity [the Famine], and to provide for those persons
over whom fortune has placed them, and whom they should consider as
entrusted to their care, and entitled to their protection; and this can
only be successfully carried into execution by their procuring and
substituting other articles of food, so as to leave the poor only
partially dependant on the potato crop, for their support."[48]
Some Acts of Parliament, without perhaps intending it, gave a further
impulse to potato cultivation in Ireland. As if the violation of the
treaty of Limerick by William the Third; the exterminating code of Anne;
its continuance and intensification, under the first and second George
were not a sufficient persecution of the native race, statutes continued
to be enacted against them, during the first twenty-five years of
George the Third's reign--that is, up to 1785, But although this was the
case, the necessity of making some concessions to them began to be felt
by their rulers, from the time the revolt of the American colonies
assumed a dangerous aspect. So that, whilst, on the one hand, the
enactment of persecuting laws was not wholly abandoned, on the other,
there sprang up a spirit, if not of kindness, at least of recognition,
and perhaps of fear. "It was in the year 1744," says Sir Henry Parnell,
"that the Irish Legislature passed the first Act towards conciliating
the Catholics."[49] And a very curious concession it was. It was
entitled--"An Act to enable His Majesty's subjects, of whatever
persuasion, to testify their allegiance to him."[50] Previously, the
Catholics dared not to approach the foot of the throne even to swear,
that they were ready to die in defence of it. But, two years before this
an Act was passed of no apparent political significance, which was of
much more practical value to the Catholics. It was "An Act to encourage
the reclaiming of unprofitable bogs."[51] This Act made it lawful "for
every Papist, or person professing the Popish religion," to lease fifty
acres, plantation measure, of such bog, and one half acre of arable land
thereunto adjoining, "as a site for a house, or for the purpose of
delving for gravel or limestone for manure." Certain immunities were
granted, and certain restrictions imposed. The immunities were, that,
for the first seven years after the bog was reclaimed, the tenant should
be free from all tithes, cesses, or applotment; the restrictions were:
(1) that no bog should be deemed unprofitable, unless it were at least
four feet from the surface to the bottom of it, when reclaimed--the Act
having been especially passed for the reclaiming of _unprofitable_ bogs;
(2) that no person should be entitled to the benefit of the Act, unless
he reclaimed ten plantation acres; (3) that half whatever quantity was
leased, should be reclaimed in twenty-one years; (4) that such bog
should be at least one mile from any city or market-town. Alas, how
utterly prostrate the Catholics must have been, when this was regarded
as a concession to them! Yet it was, and one of such importance, that
"in times of less liberality it had been repeatedly thrown out of
Parliament, as tending to encourage Popery, to the detriment of the
Protestant religion;" and to counter-balance it, the pension allotted to
apostate priests in Anne's reign was, in the very same Session of
Parliament, raised from £30 to £40 per annum, by the Viceroy, Lord
Townsend.[52] The wretched serfs were of course glad to get any hold
upon the soil, even though it was unprofitable bog, and largely availed
themselves of the provisions of the Act. Ten or twelve years later, we
find Arthur Young speaking with much approval of the many efforts that
were being made, in various parts of Ireland, to reclaim the
bogs--efforts resulting, no doubt, in a great measure, from this Bill.
In the process of reclaiming the bogs, the potato was an essential
auxiliary.
But of all the means of increasing the growth of that renowned esculent
in Ireland, the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 must, at least in more
recent times, be accorded the first place. That Act, it is said, was the
result of the fears excited in England by the French Revolution. Whether
this was so or not, the concessions it made were large for the time; and
its effect upon potato culture in Ireland is unquestionable. Dr.
Beaufort, in his Ecclesiastical Map, gives our whole population in 1789
as 4,088,226. Sir Henry Parnell says the Catholics were, at this time,
at least three-fourths of the population.[53] And this agrees with the
estimate which the Catholics themselves made of their numbers at the
period; for, in a long and remarkable petition, presented to the House
of Commons in January, 1792, they say: "Behold us then before you, three
millions of the people of Ireland." These three millions became, by the
Bill of '93, entitled to the elective franchise; or, as the Bill itself
more correctly expressed it, "such parts of all existing oaths," as put
it out of their power to exercise the elective franchise, were repealed.
The Catholics were not slow in availing themselves of this important
privilege, which they had not enjoyed since the first year of George the
Second's reign--a period of sixty-six years.[54] They soon began to
influence the elections in at least three out of the four provinces; but
they influenced them only through their landlords, not daring, for a
full generation after, to give independent votes. A landlord had
political influence in proportion to the number of voters he brought, or
rather drove, to the poll. To secure and extend this influence, the
manufacture of forty-shilling freeholders went on rapidly, and to an
enormous extent. The Catholics were poor, numerous, subservient, and
doubtless grateful for recent concessions; so bits of land, merely
sufficient to qualify them for voting, were freely leased to them, which
they as freely accepted.[55] On these they built cabins, relying on the
potato for food, and on a little patch of oats or wheat, to pay their
rent and taxes. By the influence of O'Connell and the Catholic
Association, the forty-shilling freeholders broke away from landlord
influence in the great General Election of 1826, and supported the
candidates who promised to vote for Catholic Emancipation, in spite of
every threat. From that day their doom was sealed; the landlords began
to call loudly for their disfranchisement, and accordingly they were
disfranchised by the Relief Bill of 1829, but of course they still
retained their little holdings. Immediately the landlords began to utter
bitter complaints of surplus population; they began to ventilate their
grievances through the English and Irish press, saying that their land
was overrun by cottiers and squatters--the main cause of all this being
kept in the background, namely, the immense and continuous increase of
forty-shilling freeholders, by themselves, and for their own purposes.
But the moment those poor men presumed to vote according to the letter
and the spirit of the Constitution, they were sacrificed to landlord
indignation; they were declared to be an incumbrance on the soil that
ought to be removed. Landlords began to act upon this view: they began
to evict, to exterminate, to consolidate; and in this fearful work the
awful Famine of '47 became a powerful, and I fear in many cases even a
welcome, auxiliary to the Crowbar Brigade.[56]
Thus was the cultivation of the potato extended in various ways, until
it had become the principal food of nineteen-twentieths of the
population long before the Famine of '47.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Raleigh earned this property by some terrible services. He was an
officer in the expedition of the Lord Deputy Gray, when he attacked the
Italian camp on _Dun-an-oir_, at Smerwick harbour in Kerry. After some
time the Italians yielded, but on what precise terms it is now
impossible to say, the accounts of the transaction are so various and
conflicting. Indeed, O'Daly says the English were the first to send a
flag of truce. Anyhow, the Italian garrison, which had come to aid the
Irish, fell into the power of the English, and here is Dr. Leland's
account of what followed:--"Wingfield was commissioned to disarm them,
and when this service was performed an English company was sent into the
fort. The Irish rebels found they were reserved for execution by martial
law. The Italian general and some of the officers were made prisoners of
war, but the garrison was butchered in cold blood; _nor is it without
pain that we find a service so horrid and detestable committed to Sir
Walter Raleigh_."
[2] The people of Quito said _papas_. The Spaniards corrupted this to
_battata_, and the Portuguese to the softer _batata_.
[3] Edwards (Life of Sir W. Raleigh. M'Millan, 1868), says Hooker is the
only contemporary writer who asserts that Raleigh sailed with this
expedition, and Edwards adds, "It is by no means certain that he did
so." But from the following entry in the State Papers of Elizabeth's
reign it appears quite certain that he did sail with it:--"The names of
all the ships, officers, and gentlemen, with the pieces of ordnance,
etc., _gone_ in the voyage with Sir Humfrey Gylberte,--Capt. Walter
Rauley, commanding the Falcon," &c--_State Papers (Domestic)_, Vol. 126,
No. 149, Nov. 18 & 19, 1578.
Mr. Edwards may not have met this entry, as he does not refer to it.
In spite of his many failures, Raleigh was, to the last, confident in
the final success of his scheme for colonizing America. After the
failure of nine expeditions, and on the ere of his fall, he said: "I
shall yet live to see it (America) an English nation." (Edwards.)
[4] Perhaps _Kartoffel_, one of the German names for potato, is a
corruption of this.
[5] Mr. Edwards says, I know not on what authority, that the land given
to Raleigh was about 12,000 acres. The grants are set forth plainly
enough in the following entries:--"The Queen, desirous to have the
Province of Munster, in the realm of Ireland, re-peopled and inhabited
with civil, loyal, and dutiful subjects, in consideration of the great
charge and trouble which Sir Walter Raleghe sustained in transporting
and planting English people into the province, and in recompense of his
good service rendered in Ireland, pursuant to her royal letters dated
the last of February, 1586 to the Lord Deputy and Lord Chancellor
directed, and intending to bestow upon him three seignories and a-half
of land, ... 'lying as near to the town of Youghall as they may be
conveniently,' _each seignory containing_ 12,000 _acres of tenanted
land, not accounting mountains, bogs, or barren heath_." And again: "And
as Sir Walter made humble suit, to enable him the better to perform the
enterprize for the habitation and repeopling of the land, to grant him
and his heirs, in fee-farm for ever, the _possessions_ of the late
dissolved abbey or monastery called Molanassa, otherwise Molana, and the
late dissolved priory of the Observant Friars, or the Black Friars, near
Youghall, ... and, as they lie adjoining the lands already granted to
him, her Majesty is pleased to comply with his request, and by her
letters, dated at Greenwich the 2nd of July, 1587, directed to the Lord
Deputy, expressed her intention to that effect." _Patent and Close
Rolls, Chancery, Ireland, reg. Elizabeth_, Mem. 5, 41, 1595, p. 323.
As the lands at first granted did not measure the 42,000 acres, the Lord
Deputy is instructed to issue a commission to measure off so much of
other escheated lands adjoining "as shall be requisite to make up the
full number and quantity of three seignories and a-half of tenantable
land, without mountains, bogs, or barren heath; To hold for ever in
fee-farm, as of the Castle of Carregroghan, in the Co. of Cork, in free
soccage and not in capite."--_Ibid._ p. 327.
Alas! how soon he tired of the great and coveted prize.
[6] Hooker, Suppl. to Holinshed's Chronicle, p. 183.
[7] Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing
the Poor, addressed to Members of the House of Commons, by R.L. V.M.
Haliday Collection of pamphlets in the Library of the Royal Irish
Academy, Vol. 54.
[8] Page 18.
[9] Page 35.
[10] Short View of the State of Ireland. Haliday Pamphlets, Vol. 74.
[11] An answer to a paper called "A Memorial of the Poor Inhabitants of
the Kingdom of Ireland." _Same Vol._
[12] "Answer to Memorial," signed A.B., March 25, 1728.
[13] "Letter to the Duke of Newcastle."
[14] Vol. I., p. 166.
[15] "The famine of 1741 was not regarded with any active interest in
England or in any foreign country, and the subject is scarcely alluded
to in the literature of the day. No measures were adopted, either by the
Executive or the Legislature, for the purpose of relieving the distress
caused by this famine."--_Irish Crisis_, by Sir C.E. Trevelyan, Bart.,
p. 13.
[16] Probably the origin of the potato pit, as we now have it, in
Ireland was the following advice given in _Pue's Occurrences_ of Nov.
29th, 1740:--
"Method of securing potatoes from the severest frost.
"Dig up your potatoes in the beginning of December, or sooner, and, in
proportion to your quantity of potatoes, dig a large hole about ten foot
deep in such place as your garden or near your house where the ground is
sandy or dry, and not subject to water; then put your potatoes into the
hole, with all their dirt about them, to within three feet of the
surface of the ground. If you have sand near you, throw some of it among
the potatoes and on top of them. When you have thus lodged your
potatoes, then fill up the rest of the hole with the earth first thrown
out, and, with some stuff, raise upon the hole a large heap of earth in
the form of a large haycock, which you may cover with some litter or
heath. By the covering of earth of five or six feet deep, your potatoes
will be secured against the severest frosts, which are not known to
enter over two feet into the ground. The same pit will serve you year
after year, and when the frosts are over you may take out your
potatoes."
[17] "O'Halloran on the Air."
[18] _Exshaw's Magazine_.
[19] _Pue's Occurrences_, March 11, 1740.
[20] Sir John Rogerson's Quay, of course.
[21] _Pue's Occurrences_, Jan 1, 1740.
[22] This storm visited other parts of the coast. The news from Dundalk
under the same date is, that the _Jane_ and _Andrew_ of Nantz was
wrecked there, "the weather continuing very stormy, with a very great
frost." Accounts from Nenagh under date of Jan. 5th say:--"The Shannon
is frozen over, and a hurling match has taken place upon it; and Mr.
Parker had a sheep roast whole on the ice, with which he regaled the
company who had assembled to witness the hurling match." Under January
29th we have a ludicrous accident recorded, namely, "that the Drogheda
postboy's horse fell at Santry, near Dublin, and broke his neck. One of
the postboy's legs being caught under the horse _got so frozen that he
could not pull it out!_" At length some gentlemen who were passing
released him.--_Ibid._
[23] I find by the newspapers of the time that Primate Boulter acted
with much generosity, especially in the second year of the famine,
feeding many thousands at the workhouse at his own expense. He also
appealed to his friends to subscribe for the same purpose. The Right
Honourable William Conolly, then living at Leixlip Castle, distributed
£20 worth of meal in Leixlip, and ordered his steward to attend to the
wants of the people there during the frost. Lords Mountjoy and
Tullamore, Sir Thomas Prendergast, and other influential persons
commenced a general collection in Dublin, but it was only for the
starving artizans of Dublin. The co-heirs of Lord Ranelagh ordered £110
to be distributed in Roscommon; Lady Betty Brownlow, then abroad, sent
home £440 for her tenants in the North; Chief Justice Singleton gave
twenty tons of meal to be sold in Drogheda at one shilling and a penny a
stone; the Rt. Hon. Wm. Graham did the same--it was then selling from
one shilling and sixpence to one shilling and eightpence a stone; Lord
Blundell gave £50 to his tenants; Dean Swift gave £10 to the weavers of
the Liberty.
An obelisk 140 feet in height, supported upon open arches, and
surrounded by a grove of full-grown trees, stands on a hill near
Maynooth, and can be seen to advantage both from the Midland and the
Great Southern Railway. It is usually known as "Lady Conolly's
Monument." From its being built without any apparent utility, illnatured
people sometimes call it "Lady Conolly's Folly." It is said to have been
designed by Castelli (Anglicised "Castells"), the architect of Carton,
Castletown House, and Leinster House, Kildare Street, now the Royal
Dublin Society House. It bears on the keystones of its three principal
arches the suggestive date, "1740." It was erected to give employment to
the starving people in that year, not by Lady Louisa Conolly, as is
generally supposed, but by a Mrs. Conolly, as the following information,
kindly supplied by the Marquis of Kildare, will show:--
"I find in my notes," says the Marquis, "that the obelisk was built by
Mrs. Conolly, widow of the Rt. Hon. Wm. Conolly, Speaker of the Irish
House of Commons. She had Castletown for her life, and died in 1752, in
her ninetieth year. Mrs. Delany, in her Autobiography, vol. iii, p. 158,
mentions that her table was open to her friends of all ranks, and her
purse to the poor.... She dined at three o'clock, and generally had two
tables of eight or ten people each.... She was clever at business.... A
plain and vulgar woman in her manners, but had very valuable qualities.
1740 was a year of great scarcity, and farmers were ploughing their
wheat in May to sow summer barley. In March Mrs. Conolly's sister, Mrs.
Jones, wrote to another sister, Mrs. Bound, that Mrs. Conolly was
building an obelisk opposite a vista at the back of Castletown House,
and that it would cost £300 or £400 at least, and she wondered how she
could afford it. The nephew of the Speaker, also the Rt. Hon. Wm.
Conolly, lived at Leixlip Castle till he succeeded to Castletown in
1752. He married Lady Anne Wentworth, daughter of an Earl of Strafford.
His son was the Right Hon. Thos. Conolly, who married Lady Louisa
Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond. From her Castletown passed to
the father of the present Mr. Conolly, after the death of Lady Louisa."
Mrs. Jones must have made a very erroneous guess at the expense of
building the obelisk, even at that time; now, instead of three or four
hundred pounds, double as many thousands would scarcely build it.
Although erected by Mrs. Conolly, it stands on the Duke of Leinster's
property. The site is the finest in the neighbourhood, and she obtained
it from the Earl of Kildare, by giving him a portion of the Castletown
estate instead. Lately those two pieces of ground have been
re-exchanged, and when they came to be measured, they were found to be
of exactly the same extent.
[24] The coming of the thaw was indicated by some accidents on the ice.
Under date 10th Feb. it was reported from Derry that the ice gave way
there, and several persons were drowned. In Dublin, at the same date, a
man was also drowned who attempted to cross the river on the ice near
the Old Bridge. But a boy was more fortunate. He, too, was on the ice on
the Liffey, and the part on which he stood becoming detached was driven
by the current through Ormond and Essex Bridges; he kept his position,
however, on the floating ice till he was taken off in a boat.
[25] The following story is told in _Pue's Occurrences_, in May,
1740:--A broguemaker had been committed to Dungannon jail for some
offence, but managed to make his escape. He was pursued and searched for
in vain. The jailer gave him up as lost when, one day, after being at
large during five weeks, he presented himself at the jail to the
astonishment of the jailer, who questioned him as to the cause of his
return. He replied, that he had travelled to Dublin, and had gone
through a great part of Munster, but finding nowhere such good quarters
as he had in Dungannon jail, he came back.
[26] On the passing of this bill Sir Charles E. Trevelyan remarks with
quiet severity:--"There is no mention of grants or loans; but an Act was
passed by the Irish Parliament, 1741 (15 George II, cap. 8), for the
more effectual securing the payment of rents and preventing frauds by
tenants."--_Irish Crisis_, p. 13.
[27] Matthew O'Connor's _History of the Irish Catholics_, p. 222.
[28] The Judges held the assizes in Tuam instead of Galway this year, on
account of the fever in the latter place.--_Dutton's Galway_.
[29] _The Groans of Ireland, in a letter to an M.P._, 1741. The
estimated population in 1731 was 2,010,221. Rutty says it was computed,
perhaps, with some exaggeration, that one-fifth of the people died of
famine and pestilence. This agrees with the higher estimate above.
[30] _Philo-Ierne_, London, May 20, 1755. Reprinted in Cork with the
author's name, Richard Bocklesly, Esq., M.D. It is hardly necessary to
say that the "people" referred to in the above extract mean merely the
English colony in Ireland.
[31] _Ibid._, pp. 5 & 6--He seems to use the word "dairy" here in a
sense somewhat different from its present application.
[32] The Bristol barrel contained 22 stones--one stone more than the
Irish barrel.
[33] A disease called the _Curl_ appeared in the potato in Lancashire in
1764. It was in that Shire the potato was first planted in England; and
we are told the Curl appeared in those districts of it in which it was
first planted. The nature of the disease is indicated by its name. The
stalk became discoloured and stunted almost from the beginning of its
growth; it changed its natural healthy green for a sickly greenish
brown, the leaves literally curling like those of that species of
ornamental holly known as the "screw-leaved." The plant continued to
grow, and even to produce tubers, but they never attained any
considerable size, and from their inferior quality could not be used for
food. The Curl appeared in Ireland about the year 1770, where it caused
much loss, as we find a large quantity of grain was imported for food
about that period. Isolated cases of the Curl were not unfrequent in
this country long after it ceased to cause alarm to the farmer. I have
seen many such cases, especially where potatoes were planted on lea. On
examining the _set_ beneath a plant affected with Curl, I invariably
found it had not rotted away as was usual with those sets that produced
healthy plants. There were as many remedies propounded for the Curl as
for the blight of 1846-7 with a like result--none of them were of any
use.
[34] Report of the Committee for the "Relief of the Distressed Districts
in Ireland," appointed at a general meeting, held at the City of London
Tavern, on the 7th May, 1822.
[35] _Impartial Review_. Miliken, Dublin, 1822.
[36] Report of Parliamentary Committee.
[37] Amongst the means resorted to at this time to raise funds for the
starving Irish was a ball at the Opera House in London, at which the
King was present, and which realized the large sum of £6,000. This piece
of information the Irish Census Commissioners for 1851, curiously
enough, insert in that column of their Report set apart for
"_Contemporaneous Epidemics_."
[38] The chief part of this £60,000 is still under the management of the
"Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor of Ireland."
[39] The following extract from a letter of Mr. Secretary Legge, dated
London, May 4, 1740, and addressed to Dublin Castle, expresses very
_naively_ an English official's feelings about the terrible frost and
famine of that year:--"I hope the weather, which seems mending at last,
will be of service to Ireland, _and comfort our Treasury, which, I am
afraid, has been greatly chilled with the long frost and
embargo."--Records, Birmingham Tower, Chief Sec.'s Department, Box 10._
[40] Speech, p. 26; quoted by Plowden, vol. i., p. 253. Note.
[41] Answer to Address of Commons, 2nd July, 1698.
[42] _Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland_, App., p. 149.
[43] _Groans of Ireland_, p. 20.
[44] Mr. Prior's Pamphlet was dedicated to the Viceroy, Lord Carteret,
and both Houses of Parliament, which proves how certain he was of his
facts and statements.
[45] See Note A in Appendix, for a fuller discussion of the question of
Absenteeism.
[46] "The present miserable state of Ireland." How like the Ireland of
the other day!
[47] _Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland_, App., p. 40.
[48] _Impartial Review_, p. 3.
[49] _History of the Penal Laws_.
[50] 13 & 14 Geo. II, cap. 35.
[51] 11th & 12th Geo. II, cap. 21.
[52] Plowden.
[53] _History of the Penal Laws_.
[54] By the 1st Geo. II, cap. 9, sec. 7, it was enacted that no Papist
could vote at an election, without taking the oath of supremacy--an oath
which no Catholic could take. Primate Boulter thought he saw a
disposition on the part of the English colony to make common cause with
the natives in favour of Irish, interests, and taking alarm at the
prospect of such a dreadful calamity, he got the Ministers to pass this
law. It is said it was carried through Parliament under a false title,
being called a Bill for Regulating, etc.; but it would have passed under
any title.
[55] The feelings of the Irish Catholics for these concessions are
curiously illustrated, by an inscription on the Carmelite Church in
Clarendon Street, Dublin, in which the year 1793 is called, "the first
year of restored liberty," and George the Third is proclaimed as the
"best of kings." Here is the full inscription:--
D. O. M. Sub invocatione B.V. Mariæ. C. Primum hujus Ecclesiæ lapidem
posuit Johannes Sweetman, Armiger. Memoriale hoc grati animi restitutæ
Catholicæ Libertatis Georgio tertio Regum optimo, annuente Parliamento
ac toto populo acclamante, Dedicat Patriæ Pietas. Anno supradictæ
Libertatis primo. Regni vigesimo tertio, ab Incarnatione 1793, die
Octobris tertio.
T. BEAHAN, Arch.
[56] Forty-shilling freeholders in Ireland and forty-shilling
freeholders in England were quite different classes. The latter, by the
statute, 8 Henry VI, cap. 7, passed in 1429, must be "people dwelling
and resident in the counties, who should have _free land_ or _tenement_
to the value of forty shillings by the year at least, above all
charges;" whilst in Ireland, every tenant having a lease for a life was
entitled to a Parliamentary vote, provided he swore that his farm was
worth forty shillings annual rent, more than the rent reserved in his
lease.
Mr. Pim writes:--"A numerous tenantry having the right to vote, and
practically obliged to exercise that right at the dictation of their
landlord, was highly prized.... When the Emancipation Act was passed in
1829, the forty-shilling freeholders were disfranchised, and, being no
longer of use to their landlords, every means has since been employed to
get rid of them."--_The Condition and Prospects of Ireland, by Jonathan
Pim_, late M.P. for Dublin City.
"It is in vain to deny or to conceal the truth in respect to that
franchise [the forty-shilling franchise]. It was, until a late period,
the instrument through which the landed aristocracy--the resident and
the absentee proprietor, maintained their local influence--through which
property had its weight, its legitimate weight, in the national
representation. The landlord has been disarmed by the priest.... that
weapon which [the landlord] has forged with so much care, and has
heretofore wielded with such success, has broken short in his
hand."--_Mr. Peel's Speech in the House of Commons, 5th March, 1829,
introducing the Catholic Relief Bill_.
Leaving out the "_legitimate weight_" of landed proprietors, as
exercised through the forty-shilling freeholders, the above statement,
besides being a remarkable one from such a cautious Minister, is not far
from being correct.