Lesson 3: 100 Years that changed the world
Two Great Empires were striving to extend their boundaries and often , other Countries , other races were often used as pawns in the race for supremacy. Ireland found itself in this position , with disastrous results , without even having to contend with natural disasters.
Ireland
On 27 December 1739 , temperatures across Ireland fell far below freezing point , and a frost , made all the more unbearable by a week of strong Easterly gales , set in. What ensued , in Ireland , and across most of North –Western Europe ,was the most severe period of extreme cold on record. The Arctic weather lasted almost without remission for seven weeks – and was followed by an extraordinary set of freak seasons- starting with a cold and rainless Spring. By late May it was said that the ‘grass and corn were all burnt up and the fields looked as red as foxes’; a cool dry Summer was followed by the coldest Autumn in two centuries and then by a snowy Winter; there was drought but little heat in the Summer of 1741 , and normal rainfall patterns only returned nearly two years after the ‘Great Frost.’
The overnight disaster of December 27th was the beginning of the crisis. All except the potatoes about to be consumed were either still in the ground or were stored in shallow pits. The frost was so severe that nearly all of the tubers were frozen and therefore inedible. There followed the first great potato crisis in Irish history, and made all the worse by the knock-on effects of the strange weather- hypothermia and a collapse in personal standards of hygiene, a huge mortality of cattle , sheep and horses, and a sharp recession in economic activity in the towns. The outbreak of war in 1740 between Britain and Spain put a great damper on overseas trade and the demand for Irish beef and butter. Much of the seed corn was consumed in the early months of the potato scarcity, and so the cereal and potato acreage sown and harvested in 1740 was greatly down on that of normal years. Because it was a continent- wide crisis, the usual sources of emergency grain to top up Irish supplies, Southern and Eastern England and the Southern Baltic – were not able to make up the deficit on this occasion.
The population of the country on the eve of this crisis was claimed to be in the region of 2.4 millions. After the first round of deaths from the cold and starvation, tens of thousands were reduced to begging, to wandering along the highways, and to collecting the classic foods of famine : docking leaves, cresses , nettles , seaweed and the blood drawn from living cattle. The combination of indigestible and unsustaining food and dangerously unhygienic living conditions gave rise in the later months of 1740 to a series of overlapping epidemics –typhus ,relapsing fever and dystentery ( known as the bloody flux) – with mortality peaking in 1741 , the year of the slaughter. ' (1)
