Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (19 page)

I
N the county of Cork in south-west Ireland lay the village of Schull, which took its name from a monkly school,
scoil
in the Gaelic, long since vanished and forgotten. It was only a straggle of mud cabins and shanties along the waterfront, treeless hills behind, in front a bleak and complicated inlet from the sea called Roaring Water Bay. There was a little church near the shore, and a Catholic chapel, and down at the quay the sinister black curraghs of the fishermen, black leather over wood frames, were drawn up like gleaming eels on the shingle. There was no city for many miles, only the hangdog town of Skibbereen—‘Skib’ for short—on the road to the east: over all hung the watery green-gold light of western Ireland—which, with its scoured and limpid glow, was not unlike that radiance we imagined from the ramparts of Fort Prince of Wales on Hudson Bay.

Into this melancholy settlement, in February 1847, there sailed Her Majesty’s Steam Sloop
Scourge
(Commander Caffyn). She tied up at the quay below the church, and her captain went ashore: and the report he later made upon what he found there is one of the most horrific of all imperial documents. Schull was in a state of nightmare. The weather was bitter, the village was half derelict, and most of the people were in the last stages of starvation. Some were like living skeletons, some had weirdly swollen stomachs or distended limbs. Here and there corpses lay upon the ground, half-eaten by rats, or gnawed at by starving dogs: elsewhere putrifying masses of flesh had been thrown into shallow pits. In one hut Commander Caffyn found a group of seven people crouched silent beside a peat fire, while from an adjacent room came the screams of a woman, lying like a pile of bones upon her bed, dementedly demanding food.
There were children with jaws so distended that they could not speak, men with bodies swollen to twice their normal size, babies with arms like little sticks, men with the blotched blackened skins of scurvy, boys whose heads of hair were reduced to patches, but upon whose faces a downy growth had eerily appeared, making them look, attenuated as they were and often silent with hunger, like poor enervated apes.

The captain was sickened but not surprised, for this was the Great Irish Famine, another catalytic episode in the history of Victoria’s Empire, and all over Ireland that year such horrors were commonplace. The famine was caused by a disease which had destroyed the potato crop throughout the island, and had in a few months reduced a population of exceptional stalwart health to the brink of extermination.

The Irish peasantry lived almost entirely upon the potato, eating in ordinary times the staggering average of 14 lb a day per head, and this vegetable, boiled, stewed, served in soups, made into bread, gave them all the sustenance they needed, and so supplied them with vitamins and calories that they were among the biggest people in Europe. ‘There are some things too serious for joking,’ an old Irish saying had it, ‘and one of them is the potato.’ Crops had often failed before, and at any time there were Irishmen near the starvation level, but the Great Famine was exceptional because it was so widespread and because it lasted for several years: the crop failed partially in 1845, wholly in 1846, wholly again in 1848. The disease, which came from America and had appeared patchily in England and on the continent, was dramatically sudden in effect. Overnight an entire crop could be blighted, the leaves black, the stem brittle, and in a few days a promising potato field might be reduced to a mess of rotting vegetation. Even potatoes which seemed healthy when dug presently began to rot: and the peasants, who habitually stored potatoes for the winter season in shallow pits, found that not only their growing crops, but their stores of provision too, were utterly devastated at a blow.

With famine came disease. Typhus and relapsing fever spread throughout Ireland, ravaging bodies debilitated already by hunger, filth and vermin. Dysentery became epidemic, the ground around the cabins at Schull being blotched with its tell-tale clots of blood. Scurvy was everywhere. Viruses of all kinds were carried from town to town, door to door, by the wolfish half-starved beggars who roamed the countryside. The island was in despair. Perhaps never before, at least since the Middle Ages, had a corner of Europe been so horribly devastated. The hospitals, the workhouses, the prisons were packed with starving destitutes, and Caffyn, like most visitors to the ravaged west, found himself surrounded by crowds of half-mad, half-dead people, often nearly naked, desperate with hunger and disease—‘in a few minutes’, wrote one visitor to Skibbereen, ‘I was surrounded by at least twenty such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain’. The workhouse admittance sheets for the period are pitifully classified—‘Sickly and lame’, ‘Sickly and cripple, very dirty’, ‘Occupation begging, very dirty’. In Skibbereen workhouse half the children admitted soon died—‘from diarrhoea’, reported the doctor, ‘acting on an exhausted condition’.

So dependent were the Irish upon the potato, by force of habit as by economic circumstance, that they had scarcely tried any other food—such grain as they grew they could not eat, because they used it to pay their rents. Now they were reduced to roots, weeds and berries. ‘I confess myself unmanned’, wrote one sensitive Welsh observer, ‘by the intensity and extent of the suffering I witnessed, especially among the women and little children, crowds of whom were to be seen scattered over the turnip fields like a flock of famishing crows, devouring raw turnips, mothers half naked, shivering in the snow and sleet, uttering exclamations of despair while their children were screaming with hunger. I am a match for anything else I may meet with here, but this I cannot stand.’ There were reports of dying people eaten alive by dogs: in Kenmare the parish priest entered a cottage to find a live man lying in bed with his dead wife and two dead children, while nearby a cat ate the body of a third child.

Probably a million people died in the Great Famine—most of them from the diseases of malnutrition. The population of Ireland was recorded in 1841 as 8 million, and the island was among the most densely populated parts of Europe. By 1851 death and migration had reduced it to 6½ million, and wide areas of countryside stood derelict and abandoned. All over Ireland, from poor Schull and delirious Skibbereen to the once prosperous farmsteads of Ulster, there arose the Irish mourning cry—that terrible keening wail, that howl of women’s voices, to the grave chanting of verses and clapping of hands, with which this people greeted the advent of death.

‘Am I,’ Mr Michael Shaughnessy, a barrister, asked himself incredulously, surveying these ghastly scenes in 1848, ‘am I in … a part of the British Empire?’ He was. Ireland was the nearest overseas possession of the Crown, and excepting only lesser islands of the British seas, the oldest too. It had been a British possession for 700 years, since Henry II had first sent his armies across the Irish Sea, and settled his Anglo-Norman knights within the fertile enclave of the Pale. Since then successive ‘plantations’ of Scotsmen and Englishmen had been settled there, and a governing class of Anglo-Irish Protestants had come into being, but still the island was never subdued or Anglicized. It remained an intensely foreign place. The Irish peasantry was passionately but primitively Catholic, still speaking the ancient Gaelic tongue, and honouring in the folk-memory all the saints, kings, heroes, poets and jesters of their own Celtic tradition—a lyric tradition, expressed long before in an airy and fanciful love of nature and of liberty: 

Time and again the Irish had rebelled against the English. Always
the English had beaten them down. The Irish gentry had been virtually extinguished, the Irish proletariat was powerless.

The last big Irish rebellion had been in 1798, when Wolfe Tone’s rebel forces, helped by French troops and money, had been ferociously defeated by an England preoccupied with her wars against Napoleon. This tragedy, which was scored on every Irish patriot’s mind, had been almost immediately followed by a gesture called the Act of Union. A legislative act imposed by the English Parliament, this was intended as a fresh start to the relationship. It was to make the two countries one. Ireland’s own Parliament, a body of Protestant gentlemen dealing only with Irish domestic affairs, was to be abolished, and instead the Protestant voters of Ireland would send 100 members of their own to speak for the island at Westminster. But it only exacerbated the ancient quarrel, for not only was it, in Irish eyes, another national humiliation, but it did not even bring the island prosperity. The powerful English manufacturers presently demolished what little Irish industry there was. Wages sank, and even the demand for Irish foodstuffs declined. The Irish were now not only enslaved, as they saw it, they were also poverty-stricken as never before. Their overcrowded island, which they loved with an atavistic zeal, could not support them, and they were left baffled and embittered.

Much of the land was owned by landlords in England, and though the two countries were now officially one, and Westminster was known as the Imperial Parliament in consequence, the peasant in Ireland possessed none of the security enjoyed by English labourers. A smallholder in England had rights of tenancy by law, and a general assurance of decency by custom. A smallholder in Ireland had no security whatever. He was simply permitted, by a man he had often never met, through a generally contemptuous and usually alien agent, the use of a small plot of land. He generally paid his rent in grain, using the rest of the land to grow his own potatoes. He had to provide his own cabin, his own fences, his own water: but if, by the sweat of his own hands, he succeeded in making some improvement on the property—as likely as not, that is, converting a barren patch of heath into productive land—if, after no matter how many years of family toil or sacrifice, he had increased the value of the holding, then
there was nothing in the world to stop the landlord putting up the rent, and evicting him if he could not pay. Often he had no lease at all, and could be thrown out without more ado: if he had a lease, it was not difficult to find a pretext for anulling it.

The more cruelly the peasant was exploited, the more his family grew: until the catastrophe of the Great Famine, the Irish population was growing faster than any other in Europe. Irish people married young—what was the point of waiting?—and bred prolifically. As a result, the poverty of their circumstances was infinitely depressing; many Irish families, even at the best of times, knew little more of the great world than tribesmen in Afghanistan or Crees at Norway House. Dublin itself, architecturally one of the most prepossessing cities in the Empire, was pestilent and filthy: in the hot weather its elegant streets and lovely squares stank horribly, and in the winter a characteristic sight was that of the poor vagrants huddling against the ‘Hot Wall’ of Jameson’s Brewery in Bow Street, where a little warmth seeped through from the boilers inside.
1
The average country dwelling was a one-roomed mud cabin, often without windows, with a thatched roof and a pile of manure outside the door. In the bleak west, where little English was spoken, there were people living in burrows in the bog, and people who had never seen a tree. In Galway, as a correspondent of
The
Times
discovered in 1846, there were peasants so vague about the meaning of money that they were known to pawn it, getting 10s for a
£
1 note, or 15s for a gold guinea. There never was, the Anglo-Irish Duke of Wellington once said, such a country. ‘Now that I have seen Ireland,’ wrote the German traveller Kohl, ‘it seems to me that the poorest among the Letts, the Esthonians and the Finlanders, lead a life of comparative comfort.’

The English at home disliked the Irish almost on principle. Working people resented them because they offered a reservoir of cheap labour, educated people despised them as half-savage—‘that wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race’, as the young Disraeli once called them in
The
Tims
.
2
Yet observers who
met the Irish in Ireland gained a different impression. The Irish were certainly stubborn and unco-operative, but there was a dignity to them, different in kind from the homelier assurance of the English countryman, which sprang directly from their pride of race, nation and religion. Their courtesy was gentlemanly, their hospitality almost universal, and they were very sprightly. For all its monotony, their diet had made them a handsome and energetic people, and they loved dancing, drinking, racing, and all convivial, hell-for-leather activities. Their impetuous tempers, which could quickly flame into violence and treachery, easily sprang into gaiety too, and they enjoyed (though they could not often indulge it) a gypsy taste for colour and flamboyance.

In the early 1840s, before the Famine, this intelligent and unappeasable people had been in a reckless condition once again. A movement to repeal the Act of Union, as the first step towards independence, had become a national passion. Ireland was never short of prophets, and the spokesman of the 1840s was Daniel O’Connell—‘Swaggering Dan’—the first Catholic mayor of Dublin since the Reformation. O’Connell was the most famous man in Ireland, the most beloved and the most hated. With his round pudgy face, his curly hair and the satirical smile at the corners of his mouth, he looked almost a caricature of an Irishman, and perennially Irish too were his political methods. He was a fastidious rabble-rouser, a man who stood in pictorial attitudes, a wit, a caustic sophist, who could combine instant sarcasm with a rumpled benevolence, and was once described by Disraeli as being a more terrible enemy of England than Napoleon himself.