The Potato Giveth, and the Potato Taketh Away: A Selection from Charles C. Mann’s 1493 (2012)

The potato was brought over to Europe from the Americas as part of “the Columbian Exchange”. Within a few generations this unbelievably productive crop had raised the population of Ireland from 1.5 million to close to 10 million. But then, as Charles C. Mann makes clear, everything went horribly wrong: “Blight was first reported in Ireland on September 13, 1845. By mid-October the British prime minister was privately describing the epidemic as a national disaster. Within another month between a quarter and a third of the crop had been lost. . . .

In two months P. infestans wiped out the equivalent of between half and three-quarters of a million acres in every corner of the nation. The next year was worse, as was the year after that. . . . Recall that almost four out of ten Irish ate no solid food except potatoes, and that the rest were heavily dependent on them. Recall, too, that Ireland was one of the poorest nations in Europe. At a stroke, the blight removed the food supply from half the country—and there was no money to buy grain from outside. The consequences were horrific; Ireland was transformed into a post-apocalyptic landscape. Destitute men lined the roads in their rags, sleeping in crude shelters dug into roadside ditches. People ate dogs, rats, and tree bark. Reports of cannibalism were frequent and perhaps accurate. Entire families died in their homes and were eaten by feral pets. Disease picked at the survivors . . . .

So many died that in many western towns the bodies were interred in mass graves. . . . As resources vanished, life became a struggle of all against all. . . . Neighbor fought neighbor for food and shelter. Crime levels exploded, the murder rate almost doubling in two years. Some hungry people stole to put food on the table, others to be fed while incarcerated. . . . The only violent crime to decline was rape, because potential perpetrators lacked the energy. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people fled the country in what became known as coffin ships. . . .

Most migrants went to the United States and Canada. Multitudes of sick and starving filled the quarantine area at Grosse Île, in the St. Lawrence River by Quebec. A mass grave there contains thousands of bodies. They died an ocean away from Ireland but were as much victims of P. infestans as if they had never left. . . . the consequences of the famine to Ireland are indisputable: it broke the nation in half. At a million or more fatalities, it was one of the deadliest famines in history, in terms of the percentage of population lost. A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost forty million people. Only the famine of 1918–22 in the Soviet Union may have been worse.

Within a decade of the blight another two million fled Ireland. Many more followed in subsequent decades, inexorably driving its population down. The nation never regained its footing. As late as the 1960s its population was half what it had been in 1840. Today Ireland has the melancholy distinction of being the only nation in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than 150 years ago.”—Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2012)