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  Like other residents in and around Tralee, Daniel Reilly received these reports with growing concern. He too had lost his potato crop, and he walked his remaining acres daily, looking for signs that the disease was spreading. A multigenerational farmer, Daniel had been born in this lowland; since childhood he had worked the same dense soil cultivated by his father and grandfather. Now he had his own family—and it was growing.

  Despite the ribbing they would endure for their choice of days, Daniel Reilly and Margaret Foran were married on April Fool’s Day 1845. His brother, Eugene, stood as best man. Margaret, just seventeen at the time, came with her friend Joanna O’Sullivan and her brother John. The daughter of a steward in a nearby town, Margaret brought with her a modest dowry.

  Although he was ten years Margaret’s senior, Daniel nevertheless had little experience with women. They were both no doubt surprised to discover that Margaret was pregnant less than two months after their wedding. She took it with the same good-natured humor with which she embraced most things. Daniel wanted to do the same, but he couldn’t help but feel troubled by the ominous signs that Ireland was about to undergo a massive agricultural crisis.

  There had been lean times before—even entire crop failures—but none as dire as this one. It was as if the entire island, usually flush with delicate purple blossoms and dense green foliage, had been poisoned. What was left was as barren as the depth of any winter. Daniel may not have known any more than the botanists about why this was happening, but he surely knew it was dire. And without seed potatoes, the following year would no doubt be even worse.

  Such was the sentiment at every family dinner and local gathering, where conversation was filled with little other than the failed potato crop. The collective worry was present everywhere, perhaps best exemplified by a letter Daniel’s cousin James Prendergast wrote to relatives in America:

  Unless some such measures be taken to provide against next year greater fears are entertained for the coming than the present season. The Potatoe crop is much worse than the last. The disease that was not perceived until September, and even December in other places last year is now complained of throughout the Country. It is felt more severely as we have not the fourth part of last years produc [sic] even diseased. We expect good measures from the British parliament this year but we mus [sic] wait to know the issue.6

  James Prendergast and Daniel Reilly were not waiting alone. Mindful that Ireland was on the brink of disaster, even the English press demanded action. The London Times called on Parliament to intervene immediately in order to “prevent, as much as possible, the horrors, the high prices, and extortion of a famine.”7 Petitions from local governments throughout Ireland’s west foretold indescribable suffering and destruction. Given the reports of violence and the befuddled botanists still without a solution, the implications of these petitions and the suffering they predicted now seemed all too imminent.

  And so those in power took action, but it was far from what people like Daniel had hoped. Britain’s Queen Victoria, just twenty-six years old and still adjusting to her new life as a monarch, canceled her first scheduled visit to Ireland, citing concerns for her own safety as justification; her Conservative Parliament, led by Robert Peel, was also in no hurry to visit its beleaguered neighbor. However, a series of relief depots was established in the hopes of averting mass starvation; and in an effort to make grain more accessible, Parliament threatened to ban brewing on the island entirely. Concerned that these measures might not be enough to keep mortality figures in check, Prime Minister Peel also arranged to secretly import cornmeal from America, a decision that would soon cost him his political career, as those in Britain were already critical of any attempt to assist the Irish at state expense. Meanwhile resident Quakers convened at a coffee shop in Dublin, where they spearheaded what would become some of the most heroic attempts to keep the Irish people alive. They soon dispersed about the country, arriving in places like Daniel Reilly’s town of Tralee to establish soup kitchens to feed the destitute. With their somber black suits and foreign-sounding speech, the Friends seemed as alien as the queen herself might have, had she made her scheduled visit.

  The contrast between Victoria’s and Daniel’s experience of the blight is too telling to be ignored. Like the monarch, Daniel was also twenty-six, and he too had a young family. But unlike his new queen, Daniel also had a front-row seat to the misery that was about to irrevocably change the destiny of a people. He saw his neighbors, hat in hand, begging for the opportunity to break stone in exchange for bread. He stood helpless as the land turned into poison. But he arrived at the very same conclusion drawn by Victoria—a conclusion as simple as it was true, and perhaps all the more so given the disparate people who arrived at it: this was no time to be in Ireland.

  To avoid the blight and its fate, to ensure the safety of his own family, Daniel knew he had but one choice: to get them aboard one of the very same cargo ships that had delivered this scourge to his island, reversing the course of both the potato and the blight back across the Atlantic, where the Reillys could escape the suffering and the authority of Britain’s crown and forge a new life deep in America’s heartland. All that remained was to figure out how.

  2

  A Great Hunger

  THE IRELAND Daniel Reilly sought to escape was marked by dramatic transition. Once a densely wooded island populated by the Celts and Vikings, it had since been converted into a hinterland colony by its neighbor, England. Under the reign of Elizabeth I, Ireland, still a heavily forested island, had served as a timber nursery for a growing Imperial Navy. Once its innumerable trees were exhausted, the newly pastoral landscape was designated the breadbasket for a growing empire. Oatmeal, wheat, and flax were grown on arable acreage. Pigs, cows, and sheep grazed patchy grassland. They, along with the grain, were raised by a few small-scale farmers almost exclusively for English consumption. What was left—the rocky soil of the north, the boggy lowlands of the south, the inhospitable cliffs of the west—was frocked with potatoes. Collectively these potato fields dominated the face of Irish agriculture and diet.

  First introduced as an inexpensive ground cover, potatoes soon proved an effective means of feeding people. Prior to the blight’s arrival, they were everywhere. Frustrated by the tuber’s abundance, peasant farmers would stack potatoes like firewood at the edge of their fields. They would fill ditches with the excess crop and light it on fire. And, of course, they would eat them. On the eve of the famine, the average Irish adult was eating about fourteen pounds of potatoes a day, approximately thirty contemporary baking potatoes. But unlike our modern-day supermarket spuds, these potatoes were remarkably nutrient rich, lacking only protein and vitamin D, both of which could be ably sourced with a glass of buttermilk a day. Though undoubtedly monotonous, this diet was also remarkably healthy, so much so, in fact, that at the time of the famine, Irish people were taller than many of their European contemporaries and had a longer lifespan and lower infant mortality.

  As far as the British government was concerned, these were not heartening statistics. By the time the potato failed in 1845, Ireland was home to more than eight million people. Census officials predicted that the population would top nine million by 1851. Most of the Irish lived as cottiers, poor subsistence farmers who cultivated a fraction of an acre in exchange for the opportunity to grow the potatoes that would feed their families. Theirs was a life based not on money and commerce but rather on self-sufficiency and trade in kind. Many had lived like this for generations, paying a pittance or trading produce to their largely absentee landlords in exchange for the roof over their head. It was a hardscrabble life without luxury or reprieve. But, like their diet, it also kept an entire class of people alive—and multiplying.

  For decades Ireland’s Protestant gentry, joined by many in Britain’s Parliament, worried aloud about the inefficiencies of the cottiers’ agricultural system and the growing number of people who depended on it. In a world increas
ingly dominated by capitalism and a free market economy, self-sufficient subsistence farmers were not just archaic; they were a liability, incapable of contributing to the gross national product.

  This belief only intensified with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. Along with advancements in transportation and manufacturing, the new era brought a wholly altered relationship with the landscape. In England, families moved by the thousands from the country to cities like London and Manchester, where they went to work in cotton mills or coal mines. No longer farmers, these new laborers looked outward for their food. And with a population of 15 million—nearly twice that of Ireland and rapidly climbing—England’s grocery bill was substantial.

  Ireland had yet to make the shift to an industrial-based economy. That meant its intended role as breadbasket for the empire was falling short, making it more of a liability than an asset. Furthermore the island’s singular reliance on the potato as the diet of an entire class of people created a food system contemporary theorists call “vulnerable,” which is to say that it was, by its very nature, predisposed to disaster.1 It would take only one bad frost or drought or disease to wipe out an entire crop, leaving the cottiers with nothing and the rest of Ireland with nothing to eat. That’s the kind of liability that made British authorities more than just a little nervous.

  As early as 1845, cultural observers saw how this vulnerability could destroy much of Ireland. “The Irish peasant starves,” wrote the editor of the London Times, “because his whole subsistence depends on the produce of his own patch of ground, and in that failing he has nothing to offer in exchange for the necessaries of life elsewhere. In England, on the contrary, the laws of commerce operating fairly will preserve us from this horrible affliction.”2 Though no doubt insensitive in its tone, this assessment was nevertheless true for much of Ireland, and in no place more so than in Daniel Reilly’s native Tralee.

  Like much of Ireland’s west coast, the landscape surrounding Tralee is a place often hostile to human activity of any kind, thanks to its relentless southwesterly winds and rocky geography. Just to the south of town rest the imposing Slieve Mish Mountains, a series of sprawling peaks rising over eight hundred meters (about half a mile) and blocking the rest of the horizon from view. They take their name from a mythic Irish princess known for her cruelty, an apt allusion on many days, when clouds pushed to shore by Atlantic winds are sliced open by the mountain summits, spilling rain over the region on a day even twenty-first-century meteorologists swear will be perfectly sunny.

  For centuries, locals in the west of Kerry have joked that they have far more weather than they do climate. Winters are particularly blustery, with epic storms marked by unrelenting wind. Gales are not uncommon, even in the spring and summer. Because of these conditions, the region’s coastline shifts almost daily, reconfiguring itself according to the brutal tides and winds. The local flora—not to mention many of the human inhabitants—stand at a sharp angle, braced and pitched against the strong westerly winds. In fact the trees there—mostly hazel and a few hearty conifers—are so wizened by this constant battering that they escaped the notice of British foresters in the sixteenth century altogether.

  Instead of loggers, a royal family by the name of Denny was granted occupancy of the region, encouraged by the crown to settle this landscape with peasant farmers, preferably of the Protestant variety. Under the vigilant eye of the Denny family, Tralee grew into a vibrant outpost in a region often believed to be populated exclusively by savages and otherworldly banshees. It also became a place of profound social contrast. At the end of the eighteenth century, the region was home to communities of spinners and weavers who made their living creating goods made of wool and flax. With the advent of mechanization, however, this work had been exported to enormous mills and factories throughout England and Ireland’s north. What remained were entire families with no means of supporting themselves. They, like the cottiers, composed County Kerry’s largest—and poorest—class. A census report completed by the British government in 1841 deemed three-fourths of the population of Kerry “destitute.” It also found there Ireland’s highest illiteracy rate—over 60 percent—and its lowest household incomes. The area surrounding Tralee claimed the greatest concentration of Ireland’s lowest class of homes: one-room hovels with mud floors and no windows. Surveyors of the poorer parishes in the region failed to find a single glass window, manufactured shoe, comb, clock, bonnet, or pair of scissors.3

  Daniel and Margaret Reilly were two of the more fortunate in Kerry’s agricultural class; they owned their farm and produced enough food to keep themselves fed: an egg now and again for breakfast, bread and cold meat at tea, a platter of cabbage and potatoes for dinner. There was whiskey punch made in a copper kettle on special occasions and a feather bed on which to sleep and nurse their newborn son, Robert. Unlike the majority of cottiers in the region, Daniel grew not just potatoes but also grain for sale—some of the 285,000 tons exported to England each year.

  If the growing catastrophe of the famine had a silver lining, it came in the fall of 1846, when grain prices reached historic highs and farmers like Daniel found themselves in great demand. That harvest season he worked relentlessly to cut his grain fields, sometimes not resting until he had cut an entire acre with the scythe carved to fit his calloused hand, stopping only to sharpen the blade dulled by the toughness of a late-season crop. He was buoyed through it all, no doubt, by the promise of high prices and cash in his pocket—cash he would need, in the absence of the potato, to feed his family.

  The grain trade was also Daniel’s introduction to the opulence that constituted Tralee’s other world. Each year at harvest time, he and his crop made the five-mile trek from his farm to the bustling center of Tralee, where horse races, agricultural fairs, and grain auctions dominated the social landscape, along with Tralee’s most formidable trader and the man who would soon hold the fate of the Reillys in his hand: Nicholas Donovan.

  Like Daniel, Nicholas Donovan was particularly busy that harvest season. The failure of the potato crop had only intensified England’s desire for grain, and Donovan could not fill his leased packet ships fast enough. Each week they made their way into Tralee Bay and up the narrow canal into the city—a canal, he liked to remind his fellow businessmen, he himself had been responsible for engineering. In the fall of 1846, that canal was littered with boats waiting to export food from the starving region.

  Ensconced in his grand Edwardian offices on Denny Street, the very heart of Kerry commerce, Donovan was able to keep a polite distance from much of the suffering overtaking the region. With their vaulted ceilings and a view of the town’s rose gardens, the offices of John Donovan & Sons Ltd. were a far cry from the cottier cabins that dotted much of the area’s landscape. There Donovan could keep a close eye on the ledgers that recorded deliveries from people like Daniel Reilly. That was reason enough for concern: even with the flush harvest, there wasn’t enough grain to supply English demand. Even more troubling were the insinuations from London that merchants like Donovan would soon be required to keep the year’s harvest in Ireland as relief for the poor. That was bad for business. Worst of all were the rumors that Parliament would soon close Irish ports altogether in an attempt to keep food on the starving island. It was within the government’s power to do so, and it would surely ruin an importer like Donovan.

  Speed, then, was a greater concern than ever for a man eager to get his shipments out on the open water, where they could move unrestricted. From his desk, Donovan kept close tabs on the stockyard next to John Donovan & Sons, where he could count the imported barrels, metal hoops, and thick timber staves for sale there. His grain dealings, on the other hand, required him to call for his carriage and make his way through town, past the growing number of beggars who lined the streets and the watchful eye of Sir Edward Denny.

  When he set off on these jaunts, Donovan was sure to be noticed. With large, prominently set eyes, a high brow, and broad lips, his sheer physiology alo
ne was likely to command attention. But he wasn’t content with that; to present himself as a leader and social force, he carefully styled his hair with pomade and trained it in a severe part, favored high collars and long coats, and wore an elaborate mustache in the style of Archduke Franz Josef, heir apparent to the Austrian Empire. Like the young nobleman, Donovan carried himself with a certain degree of entitlement. His preferred pose for portraits was one in which he stood angled away from the camera, arms crossed, daring the photographer with a sideways glance and casual jut of his hip. The effect suggested he was skeptical—even outright dismissive—of both the cameraman and any subsequent viewers.

  A similar attitude marked his dealings with the town. As a successful Catholic merchant, Donovan was a member of the newest and arguably most powerful class in Ireland. For centuries, his ancestors had been hemmed in by penal acts restricting their rights to own property, hold public office, or even vote. A series of reform bills culminating in 1832 had changed all of that, allowing Donovan and other Catholics of his generation to exert the kind of influence he coveted. At least, they did in theory. The truth of the matter was that Nicholas Donovan was still very much under the thumb of Sir Edward Denny and his aristocratic perception of the town. Even Donovan’s offices, built out of stone from the Denny castle and still owned by Sir Edward, remained out of Donovan’s complete control. No amount of posturing or grooming was going to change that, and that made the importer more than a little bitter.