CHAPTER 1
“THE DISTRESS IS UNIVERSAL”
DECEMBER 16, 1846, CITY OF CORK, COUNTY CORK
When night finally came, a bone-weary Father Theobald Mathew dipped the nib of his pen into the ink and scratched the full measure of his despondency onto the page.
He aimed for precision with his writing, but he also needed to modulate his description of a truly appalling situation. Bold, direct words were necessary, but overly inflammatory language would raise skeptical eyebrows in London, damage his credibility, and, most importantly, put thousands of additional lives at risk. This was his fifth letter since August to Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary at the British Treasury responsible for famine relief efforts, each more desperate than the last. Now, just days before Christmas, Mathew wrote with renewed urgency, hoping that his reputation for directness and honesty, and as a champion for the poor, would convince Trevelyan of his veracity.
“I am grieved to be obliged to tell you that the distress is universal,” he lamented at the outset of his letter. “Men, women, and children are gradually wasting away.” It was not the first time Father Mathew had underlined passages to emphasize the urgency of his message, and it would not be the last. Reviewing his opening words, he debated whether he had succumbed to the very temptation he sought to avoid—the use of sensational rhetoric. In the end he decided to let the letter stand: he knew of no more accurate way to describe the heartbreak he witnessed each day. These imperiled citizens were not anonymous “famine victims” but people he knew and loved—neighbors, parishioners, followers, friends.
He would speak for them.
In some ways, these were the most frustrating and dispiriting hours for the fifty-six-year-old priest, sitting quietly at his desk, fighting exhaustion, his eyes straining by his lantern’s pallid light in the otherwise dark parlor, his desktop covered with ink-stained pages and the floor beneath him strewn with correspondence. Daytime hours were a blur, physically draining and mentally dispiriting—Mathew had just returned from several weeks’ work in different parts of Ireland, assessing the potato blight, organizing relief efforts, comforting the sick, ladling soup to the hungry, kneeling at their deathbeds and praying for their souls, presiding over their burials. Upon his return to Cork he discovered that his city and county were among the hardest hit by the famine; again his daytime hours were consumed with tending to those burning with fever or filling their stomachs with “cabbage leaves and turnip tops … to appease the cravings of hunger.” The night offered time to reflect, to be sure, but these were unwelcome and damnable hours, for it was while he sat alone in the darkness that the full tragedy of the widespread hunger, coupled with the futile sorrow that he could do little or nothing to stop it, pressed upon him like a great stone.
* * *
He had worked on behalf of Ireland’s Catholic poor for years. Projecting humility, he was gratefully embraced by Irish peasants who were reminded daily of their subservient status by English landlords, church elders, even simple shopkeepers.
Born in 1790 to wealth and station in Thomastown House, a mansion in Tipperary, Father Mathew had nonetheless felt most at home among those who struggled daily to subsist. The fourth son in what would eventually become a family of twelve children born to James and Anne Mathew—James was the adopted son of a baron and Anne the daughter of a prominent attorney—Father Mathew knew his calling from the age of ten, when he delighted his mother by announcing at the family dinner table that he would become a priest. After he was ordained on Easter Sunday 1814 at the age of twenty-four, he joined the Capuchin Order in Kilkenny, which he would describe as “the lowliest and least influential” of the orders in Ireland. A year later, he was transferred to a small chapel in Cork.
Never enamored by the trappings of the priesthood, nor encumbered by what he saw as an imperious church hierarchy bound by restrictive canonical traditions, Father Mathew had, in the thirty years since his ordination, come to view himself as a people’s priest, and comported himself accordingly. He was both respectful of and deferential to civil and ecclesiastic authority, but never cowed or affected by it; in the words of his closet friend and eventual biographer, Father Mathew was “thoroughly free from the vice of toadying to the great—whether the greatness was derived from power, position, wealth, or the accident of birth.” Father Mathew’s manner was “polished, but it was not artificial.” He was “so full of fervor and zeal” in his efforts to help those in need, “so respectful to poverty,” that the poor could not “think of him without love, or speak of him without enthusiasm.” Father Mathew himself expressed his philosophy early in his career when he opined that it was “by the people alone [that] the churches are built, the educational and charitable institutions maintained, the bishops and parish priests and curates, the monks and friars of various orders, supported, sheltered, and clothed.”
His selfless and indefatigable work over the last few months, heroic as it was, was simply an extension of the enduring work of his lifetime. Now, as then, the Irish poor trusted him, appreciated his generosity and magnanimity, came to him for advice and consolation, and flocked to his confessionals, some as early as 5:00 a.m., before beginning their workday in the fields, or as late as 11:00 p.m., when they had finished their drudging toil. He often spent as much as fifteen hours in the confessional box in the stifling heat of summer or the numbing cold of winter; he learned Gaelic to converse with parishioners from the countryside who struggled with or spoke no English. It was in the confessional that he laid the foundation for his future fame and widespread influence; his reputation as a spiritual leader spread from parish to parish in Cork city and then to the most remote sections of the county, and then beyond the borders of County Cork. One apocryphal story, narrated years later by his biographer, held that “if a carman from Kerry brought a firkin of butter into the Cork market, he would not return home until he had gone to confession to Father Mathew.”
As a young priest, he established literacy schools for peasant children and provided charity to widows and orphans. He had ministered to the Cork peasantry during a dreadful cholera epidemic in 1832, risking infection and possible death within hours from the intestinal bacteria. “With the unselfish devotedness of a martyr and an apostle, he threw himself into the midst of the peril,” wrote a fellow priest at the time—ministering to the afflicted in private homes and public hospitals. When local priests arranged schedules to sit vigil among cholera patients at one of Cork’s largest hospitals, just a short distance from his home on Cove Street, Father Mathew insisted on taking the shift from midnight to 6:00 a.m., the least desirable and most difficult hours to cover. Several years later, he embarked on a nationwide and world-renowned crusade to combat the rampant alcoholism that brought “chronic misery” and threatened to paralyze his country. Distressed by the number of families shattered by excessive drinking—“children in rags and squalor, wives despairing and broken-hearted, husbands debauched or brutal”—he persuaded millions of people across Ireland to sign a temperance pledge, a feat that brought Father Mathew recognition across Ireland, Europe, and America.
His biographer noted that throughout his priesthood, Mathew encountered “misery and wretchedness in every imaginable form,” yet he “never saw distress, in whatever shape, without attempting to relieve it.” Perhaps this was because he had known distress himself; twice during his priesthood his faith had been tested, and because of these trials, he was prone to periods of gloom and despondency. When his pastor, mentor, and father figure died in 1820, thirty-year-old Father Mathew suffered a nervous breakdown that left him incapacitated for several months. He shuttered himself in his parish chamber, brooding alone, staring into the fire, fighting the temptation to imbibe on cognac stored in the cupboard. It had taken the friendship and assistance of a seventy-year-old priest from another parish to help nurture him back to active ministry.
But four years later, Father Mathew suffered his greatest loss when his youngest brother, Robert, died at the age of sixteen. The priest had brought his brother to Cork at a young age to live with him, so that he could supervise the boy’s education, and Robert quickly became the joy of his life. When the high-spirited and adventuresome young man sought permission from Theobald to travel by ship to Africa with another brother, Charles, Theobald reluctantly agreed. Theobald soon received the crushing news that Robert had died from sunstroke on the voyage. “The mother that bore him could not have felt a keener anguish than did poor Father Mathew for the loss of that engaging youth,” wrote one historian. “For some time he was inconsolable, plunged in an agony of grief.” While Father Mathew eventually buried his grief under a mountain of work, he still—more than twenty years later—suffered from effects of the shock, his depression most profound after a scene of happiness or “gay conviviality.”
Perhaps his parishioners sensed that Father Mathew’s compassion was tinged with, even fueled by, such deep despondency; that in his devotion to duty he found solace, that in their desperate stories he saw some of himself. Father Mathew could recite the New Testament from Genesis to Revelations, but his simple expressions of kindness, his quiet dignity, and his willingness to share their burdens most endeared him to his impoverished parishioners. He won the hearts of thousands of poor Irish because he was always “respectful to poverty, in which … he ever saw the image of the Redeemer.”
But what had occurred in Cork and across the country in the last four months, what he witnessed and what it foretold, shook his faith in man and left him fearful that God—finally, forever, and with swift cruelty—had visited His final judgment upon Ireland.
* * *
The destruction of the potato crop had occurred—or, rather, revealed itself—almost overnight. Mathew himself was one of the first to observe and report on the disaster. In late July, he was traveling from Cork to Dublin and saw fields of potato plants blooming “in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest,” a sight that heartened him after widespread potato-crop failure a year earlier had resulted in severe food shortages, but not full-scale famine. But six days later, August 3, during his return trip to Cork, Mathew’s spirit was shattered when he “beheld, with sorrow, one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.” The blight, caused by a fungus that thrived and multiplied in Ireland’s damp climate, had reproduced with lightning speed. In many places along the road, “the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly against the destruction that had left them foodless.”
Four days later Mathew expressed the worst in a letter to Trevelyan: “The food of a whole nation has perished.” The Times of London concurred: “From the Giants Causeway to Cape Clear, from Limerick to Dublin, not a green field is to be seen.” Indeed, on September 2, the Times declared that “total annihilation” had befallen the Irish potato crop. At this point, more than one-third of the entire Irish population depended exclusively on the potato for food and as a cash crop, but among poor tenant farmers, the proportion was even higher; a strong potato crop was their only hope for sustenance, for nourishment, for life itself.
Even pre-famine, survival had been precarious in Ireland, as tenant farmers and peasants scratched out a living raising and selling potatoes, or perhaps traded a pig or a cow for other goods. Food shortages were a near-constant peril, and temporary migration was a lifeline for many Irish families engaged in agricultural work, particularly those from western counties; seasonal trips to the grain-growing areas of the eastern counties, and to England, were commonplace. In the first half of the nineteenth century, seasonal migrants, often accompanied by their livestock, walked along Ireland’s dusty roadways in search of work and food.
Now such searches proved more and more futile.
Since Mathew’s August letter, the downward spiral had progressed with alarming speed. Now, he wrote to Trevelyan, more than 5,000 “half-starved wretched beings from the country” were begging on the streets of Cork city; “when utterly exhausted, they crawl to the workhouses to die.” He estimated that more than a hundred people a week were dying in his parish. And because of the frightful calamity that had swept the countryside, where food was all but nonexistent, thousands of peasants straggled into the city in search of something to eat, further straining scarce resources. Ten to twelve people a day died from starvation in the village of Crookhaven, where the community organized a collection to purchase a public bier upon which to place the bodies of those whose families could not afford coffins. Mathew was filled with dread, not only for the current state of affairs, but for the unknown depth of the abyss that lurked ahead.
“This country is in an awful position,” he stressed to Trevelyan, “and no one can tell what the result will be.”
* * *
Father Mathew was hardly the only person alerting Secretary Trevelyan to the catastrophe as 1846 drew to a close; indeed, by late November and into December, eyewitness and news reports were as widespread as the famine itself. A coast guard officer employed in relief service, Captain Mann, wrote to Trevelyan in mid-November, still shaken by the swiftness of the famine’s onslaught. Like Mathew, he had witnessed the potato crop’s demise in a one-week period from late July to early August, from “thirty-two miles thickly studded with potato fields in full bloom” one day to a crop whose “leaves were all scorched black” the next. “The face of the whole country was changed,” he said. “It was the work of a night.” Another relief worker reported that in a tour of 800 miles, “all is lost and gone,” that the stench from diseased potatoes was “perceptible as you travel along the road” in Cork. Colonel Knox Gore, lieutenant of County Sligo, found that “from Mullingar to Maynooth every field was black,” and another report described “the fields in Kerry look[ing] as if fire had passed over them.”
Disaster was universal. Irish peasants—impoverished, weak, emaciated, sick, clad only in tattered rags at the onset of one of the worst winters in Irish memory—limped, stumbled, fell, and died by the thousands on country roads and in rain-filled ditches, in town squares, in snow-covered bogs and on frozen hillsides, in dark windowless mud huts, in the slums and alleyways of cities, and often in holes they had scratched out in the ground in a vain search for grubs or to serve as protection against the elements. Snow had begun to fall in November, and for the most part it had not stopped. Desperate peasants in search of food now battled driving blizzards and deep drifts in the mountains, hail and sleet near the coasts, and raw winds and freezing temperatures across once-green meadows encrusted in ice and snow. One relief worker wrote of trudging through “wild mountain passes, rendered still wilder by the deep snow,” a “constant succession of violent snowstorms,” and peasants “crying with hunger and cold.” In one small town, he reported, he had left a small amount of dried peat—“turf,” the Irish called it—to enable several families to “keep up the smallest fire imaginable.” Otherwise, he concluded, “in this severe weather, many would be frozen to death.”
A British magistrate writing to the Duke of Wellington described walking into an Irish village that appeared deserted, only to find starving peasants shivering in corners of shacks, lean-tos, and cabins. “In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth,” Nicholas Cummins wrote in a letter published in the Times of London on Christmas Eve 1846. “I approached with horror, and found by low moaning that they were still alive—they were in fever, four children, a woman, and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail.” Other peasants doddered from their dark hiding places, and within minutes, Cummins reported,
I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful specters as no words can describe, [suffering] either from famine or from fever. Their demonic yells are still ringing in my ears and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain.
Nor were stories of hunger confined to official reports. Across the country, hundreds of fearful tenant farmers, laborers, even small shopkeepers and tavern workers, either put quill to paper themselves or—more likely, if they were among the nation’s semi-literate or illiterate—scraped together meager funds to hire professional scriveners. These letters were then posted, most often to addresses in the United States and Canada, to loved ones who had already fled their home country. The missives generally contained one central message—Ireland’s situation was perilous—and one desperate plea: if at all possible, send money to bring some relief to family members left behind.
James and Elizabeth Prendergast of Milltown, County Kerry, parents of six, obtained the services of scriveners to whom they dictated letters to their three children—two sons and a daughter—and a son-in-law, each of whom had emigrated to Boston in search of employment.
Three of the Prendergast children were among the intrepid transatlantic travelers who’d left for North America between 1830 and 1845—sons Thomas and Jeffrey sailed for Boston in late summer 1839, a short time after daughter Julia Riordan and her husband, Cornelius.
At first, James harbored hopes that his family members were migrating temporarily—“I never will leave this life until I see you here,” he wrote to his children in February 1841. But food shortages in 1844 and 1845 and the abysmal conditions spreading across the country now had dashed those hopes. Opportunities in Ireland were nonexistent; even the most devoted parents knew that any child who had escaped was far better off. Writing in November, just a month before Father Mathew pleaded with Sir Charles Trevelyan, James Prendergast thanked his children for the money they had sent in July, and then informed them of the worst: “The state of this country is almost beyond description. Nothing to be seen in all quarters but distress and destitution. Famine and starvation threatening everywhere unless God mercifully sends some foreign aid.” He added that the last remittances from the United States were long gone “and we are considerably in debt. Therefore if ye can assist us as usual, do not delay your usual relief.”
Also writing in November, from Belfast to his nephew in Philadelphia, stable groom William Dunne said: “A good job that your father, mother, and family went the time they did for there is nothing here but hardship and starvation.”
* * *
As Christmas arrived, thousands of Irish peasants and farmers roamed the countryside and the city streets foraging for food of any kind. At the doorways of overcrowded poorhouses, mothers with six or seven children begged besieged workers to take in two or three—usually the youngest and weakest—for at least one night with hopes of securing them a hot meal and perhaps clean, dry straw upon which to sleep. In County Leitrim, a worker told the master of the poorhouse at which he worked that one sickly child “would trouble them but a very short time.”
By late December, the sheep, cows, pigs, and poultry had long disappeared, and starving peasants turned for food to the ever-dwindling supply of dogs and horses. In cities, carpenters began to build coffins with bottoms and sides that dropped away, so that they could be reused. In many remote areas, corpses were left “uncoffined and unburied,” Cove attorney Maurice Power reported, their bodies torn to pieces by vultures and “other evils no tongue could tell.” Power was not alone in his reluctance to include excessive detail; in numerous contemporaneous accounts, writers explicitly noted their reticence to share their most gruesome observances of starvation’s effects on the human body.
Coroners struggled to keep up with visits to homes of the deceased and soon ceased inquests to determine cause of death, too, knowing full well—as did mourning family members who gently closed the eyelids of their dead loved ones—that in almost every case, they would write “starvation” on the line designated for cause of death. Across Ireland, people who had yet to succumb stumbled toward death: in mid-December, 25,000 paupers were without food in County Wicklow; more than 400,000 were “totally destitute” in Mayo; and in Donegal, relief worker James H. Tuke reported that “fully half of the population subsisted wholly upon potatoes—a crop which is totally swept away from the face of the country as though it had never been.”
And from County Sligo, one relief inspector wrote to Trevelyan in December with a warning and a plea not unlike the messages from Father Mathew: “I assure you that unless something is immediately done the people must die. Pray do something for them. Let me beg you to attend to this.”
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen Puleo