Читать книгу Twelve Diseases that Changed Our World - Irwin W. Sherman - Страница 16

The earliest settlers in Ireland came from mainland Europe about 6000 BC, and about 400 BC the Celts from Britain and Europe arrived. In about AD 400, St. Patrick introduced Christianity to this island, along with the Roman alphabet and Latin literature. Ireland, save for fish, is without any valuable natural resources, such as gold or silver, gemstones, oil or natural gas, or iron ore, and it has an unproductive soil and miserable weather. About AD 795 the Vikings began raiding Ireland. At first the people of Ireland could do little to defend themselves, since until AD 1000 the lack of iron (as well as copper and tin) left Ireland a Stone Age economy. In 1014, the Irish King Brian Boru organized the princes of several kingdoms and drove out the Vikings. Beginning in 1160, the Normans increasingly controlled Ireland, and by 1300 they were in complete control. In 1534 Henry VIII began to try to regain Ireland from the Normans, and in 1542 he forced Ireland’s parliament to declare him King of Ireland. Henry tried to introduce Protestantism into Ireland, but without much success. Throughout the later 1500s Henry VIII’s daughter Elizabeth I strengthened the English hold and attempted to establish Protestantism. Elizabeth I outlawed Roman Catholic services and executed a number of bishops and priests. The porphyric King James I (see p. 2), who succeeded Queen Elizabeth I, continued to seize land in Ireland and give it to the English—a system known as “plantations.” This occurred especially around Ulster and established the majority of Protestants, whose descendants still live in Northern Ireland.

Under the Protestant King William III (who reigned from 1689 to 1702 and succeeded James II), Penal Laws were instituted. These laws barred Catholics from the military, commerce, and civic office; they were also denied the vote and could not purchase land. However, Catholics who converted to Protestantism were given land. In the early 1600s there were Irish revolts, but these were quickly put down by a succession of English kings; by the 1700s there was tight control by Britain. Irish Protestants objected to the restrictions, and in 1782 Britain granted autonomy to the Irish Parliament. The Catholics were given the right to hold land and to worship, but were granted no political power. In 1798, the Irish staged an unsuccessful rebellion, and although it was put down, the British Prime Minister William Pitt persuaded both the Irish and the British Parliaments to pass an Act of Union in 1801. As a result, Ireland became a part of the United Kingdom. This ended the Irish Parliament, and now Ireland would send its representatives to the British Parliament in London; later, Irish Catholics were permitted to serve in the British Parliament. During the 1800s there were several attempts to institute home rule, under which Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom but would have its own parliament to govern domestic affairs. The Protestants in Ulster, however, were opposed to home rule, fearing that Catholics would dominate Parliament, and so the British remained in control. In effect, Ireland became a British colony.

The attitude toward the Irish was described by one English writer: “Ireland is a little island at the edge of Europe with a Stone Age culture . . . its inhabitants wild, feckless, and charming or morose, repressed, and corrupt, but not especially civilized.” Benjamin Disraeli, the beloved Prime Minister of Queen Victoria, had a stronger opinion: “The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion.” Britain maintained Ireland as an agricultural colony and prevented manufacture of anything the British produced; Irish culture was suppressed save for music and dance. The British colonization of Ireland introduced a tenure system that gave Protestant landlords control of 95% of the land.

The landlords (most of whom were absentees) subdivided their land into 5-acre lots that were rented to estate agents. These lots, in turn, after being subdivided into smaller ones, could then be rented again at higher rates. At the base of this economy were 3 million tenant farmers who might have one quarter of an acre of land. On this small plot, the tenant farmer and his family cultivated a small garden and lived in a tiny one-room mud cottage with neither floor nor windows, only a door and a hole in the thatched roof to let out the smoke from the turf fire. On average, there were 10 people per cabin, which they shared with the family pig. The tenant farmers had another 5 acres that were used for growing cash crops such as wheat, oats, and barley.

The potato, introduced into Europe by the mid-18th century, was never a cash crop; however, because it was better adapted to the cool, moist conditions in Ireland than other crops, most of the Irish population was dependent on it as a supplemental food source by 1800. The Irish tenant farmers were forced to pay exorbitant taxes and to export their cash crops as well as butter, eggs, pork, and beef in order to produce sufficient income to pay the landlords for the use of the land and to avoid eviction. Some of those evicted were relocated to less fertile areas where essentially only the potato could be grown, but even these lands remained under the control of absentee British landlords. The Irish peasants on the worst land came to rely almost exclusively on potatoes to store over the winter and to feed themselves and their livestock, especially the pigs. The potato became the staff of life for the Irish peasant. A family of 10 needed a ton of potatoes per month to survive, and an average adult ate 9 to 14 pounds per day supplemented with buttermilk.

In 1845 a “queer mist” came over the Irish Sea and the potato stalks turned black as soot. The next day the potatoes were a wide waste of putrefaction, giving off an odor that could be smelled for miles. About 40% of the potato crop was destroyed. In areas where the blight was most severe, tenant farmers and their families frantically scoured the land and bogs for stray potatoes. They washed away the rotted parts and grated the remainder to make flour. Children searched the woods for nuts and berries; they dug for fern and dandelion roots and ate the leaves and bark from the trees. The streams were fished for eels and trout, and the peasants trudged many miles to get to the shore, where they scraped mussels, limpets, and seaweed from the rocks. Many died from eating poisonous plants, but “The Great Hunger” forced them to try anything that seemed edible.

When the fourth rider of the Apocalypse, Famine, rode into Ireland, the Victorian historian Charles Kingsley described what he saw: “I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that 100 miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were.” As the Great Famine gripped Ireland, thousands of Irish died each day. Few were felled from starvation alone: death invariably was visited upon the Irish because malnutrition made them more susceptible to diseases such as typhus, cholera, dysentery, and relapsing fever. Desperate to escape from virulent racism and prejudice, as well as starvation caused by the potato failure, the people of Ireland began a process of migration that changed the course of their history and that of Canada, the United States, and Great Britain.