Three Famines (5 page)

If the curraghs or coracles had been able to deploy nets, and brought them full of Atlantic salmon and cod to shore, one wonders how it would have been distributed to the starving inland people. There was no refrigeration, and – as was mentioned earlier – no extensive fish treatment or salting works. There were also landlord rights over some sections of coastal waters, and instances of the coastguard confiscating fish. Fish in the lakes and rivers of Ireland generally belonged to landlords, and though they were plentifully plundered by the hungry – at risk of transportation to Australia or imprisonment – it was on a personal and temporary level that the
fine flesh of the salmon and trout relieved a family for a day or two.

Irish men, women and children travelled from the interior of the country to reach the beaches to scour the rockpools for limpets and fish for fluke in shallow waters. They collected all the seaweed they could find on the beaches – ‘shore food’, they called it. Carrageen moss and dulse (also called dillisk) were the most common of seaweeds to which the starving Irish had recourse. If prepared properly, carrageen had a neutral but not unpleasant taste, while dulse was said to have a taste of nuts and smokiness.

People who were coast-dwellers knew the rules for consuming seaweed better than those from the inland. Dulse could not be eaten cold, and some other species were not usually fit for consumption until after the first heavy frost in winter. (Coastal people also knew that some shellfish would kill them if eaten raw. For lack of such knowledge, the hungry beachcombers from the interior often suffered gastric illness or death.) Though nutritious and rich in iodine and vitamins, seaweeds lacked calories, and so did not give the eater much new energy.

Everywhere, Irish birds of all species were hunted down for food, and disappeared to the extent that a Wicklow landlord lamented that he never heard birdsong any more. People stole fish from landlords’ streams where possible, and ate worms dug up from the bottom of the river. They sought a plant named charlock, known as field mustard. There was an inherited memory from eighteenth-century famines that it was a food for times of need – ‘charlock of the fields, food of poor people’. Common wisdom said that charlock grew plentifully
in graveyards. Once brought back to the Irish hearth, it could be chopped finely, boiled with oatmeal or made into a soup.

A further Irish emergency food was borage, a normally discarded plant pulled up from the midst of the landlord’s corn, but rich in the fatty linoleic acid, and capable of inducing euphoria. Those who ate the weed acquired a yellow tint to their skin, but this was considered a minor price. Cornweed, watercress and nettles, dock, sorrel and dandelion were widely used too. The Irish national symbol, the shamrock or wood sorrel, had declined in quantity as the primeval woods of Ireland were cleared for farming. Now there was not enough of it to be a famine food. But when ploughing was taking place anywhere, people followed the plough and hunted for remnants of the small flower or stalk, which grew from the underground pignut (
pratá cluracan
), a pleasant-tasting but very small root. They also sought out the roots of fern or dandelion, which they would boil, roast or crush to make a kind of bread. One Galway recipe combined sorrel, nettles and dockweeds with a spoonful of yellow meal. Children were sent to search the woods for nuts, and the bogs and mountains for berries. The fruit of holly, beech, crab apple and laurel, and the leaves and barks of trees, were stripped and devoured.

So the landscape was denuded of previously common plants and fruits. Indeed, the census of 1851 argued that grass itself was eaten by the starving, since dead bodies were found with it in their mouths. In Ethiopia 140 years later, grass would also be eaten – where it existed – as a near-final resort.

Blood from animals provided some nourishment to the
Irish. By dark, men would sneak up on young cattle, make a slit in a vein and collect the blood in a jar or pail to take home to their families. Before leaving the animal, they would seal the wound with a swatch of cow hair from the beast’s tail, and with a pin. Cow’s blood would be salted or fried or – if the family had further ingredients to hand – boiled with milk, meal, cabbage, wild mushrooms or wild herbs, and made into ‘relish cakes’. An oral account tells of a man called Curnane bringing seven or eight cows to a starving family to allow them to draw blood, a quart from each cow. In many places, in fact, better-off people such as Curnane would take their cattle to a given site, where the ravening were permitted to draw blood.

We know a great deal less about the wild-food-collecting stratagems of the Bengalis, and there is a reason for that. The Irish and Ethiopian famines were visible history, but the Bengal famine seems submerged, specifically by World War II and its accompanying preoccupations. One of the reasons is that the area was closed off from journalists. For a long time, too, officials were more preoccupied with the threat of Japanese invasion than with the food crisis.

But we do know something of the plants sought out by the starving. As mentioned, among the Hindu population, Bengal Brahmin women sometimes chose death over undignified foraging. But others broke the taboos of their status to go out gathering famine foods their husbands had too much pride to collect. Whether Muslim or Hindu, people searched
for
radhani
, or wild celery, and for the fruit of the
marula
, or elephant tree. This is a food much loved by elephants and claimed to have four times the vitamin C of an orange. Cob-nuts (a form of hazelnut), wild mushrooms, rats and snakes and frogs were also hunted down.

Similarly, wild foods were gathered by Ethiopian farming families, including the many hundreds of thousands of them forcibly and disastrously resettled in unfamiliar regions to the west or south-west of the country. The Ethiopians scoured the countryside for wild dates and waterlily roots, and both farmers and the pastoral people stripped bare any berry trees they found. In the lowlands and the highlands of Ethiopia, there were a range of species of figs. A plant named
balanites aegyptiaca
gave edible yellow fruit, and roots that could be boiled up with cabbage to give the eater a good dose of vitamin A. Among pastoral people, the
yehub
nut tree produced fruit that tasted like almonds, and its leaves were so full of tannin they could be used to make tea. The less appetising water-berry or water pear was resorted to, and in desert regions, the baobab tree, called the bottle tree in English, grew large berries that could be mixed with milk. Black nightshade had a more ambiguous reputation. Its berries were generally eaten by children out herding the cattle or camels or goats, but its boiled-up leaves could be toxic and produce mental derangement and loss of eyesight. Ethiopian women of the kind who were seen on aid brochures (on their own way to becoming modern reproductions of the woman of Clonakilty) had knocked down termite mounds to find the grain that ants had stolen, or picked seeds out of the manure of animals.

But the fruits that made up the broad spectrum of wild
foods in Ethiopia and Bengal were – like Ireland’s fish and seaweed and charlock – inadequate on their own to save life. Such sources were exhausted, in any case, by the time the starving had wasted away towards their final state.

That was when the most appalling foods were sought. The Irish had always found temporary relief from summer hunger, in the months when potatoes were not available, not only by selling their pigs but also by slaughtering the sheep that grazed mountain areas. But in the famine, they would resort in the end, and in competition with other starving people, to diseased cattle, to pigs infected with bovine cholera, to dogs who had eaten corpses, to dead horses, rats and carrion in general. That is, they became recklessly omnivorous, as would also be the case in Bengal and Ethiopia.

Emigration is a coping mechanism in many famines, though in others – in Bengal for instance – it took the form of an internal exodus. The poorest Bengalis, located mainly but not exclusively in West Bengal, were a vulnerable class who, stricken by lack of food, began, like the Muslim poor, to make for the cities. This exodus had occurred in Ireland too, as will be narrated later. Apart from the restlessness of the famished condition, perhaps there is a primal belief in the ravening mass of country people that the central authorities and their urban wealthy do not understand the depth of misery that prevails in the countryside. So the starving bring their visible suffering to town, where it might be seen and relieved.

Hindu and Muslim Bengali farmers made their march
to the larger towns of the region – Chittagong on the coast, Comilla nearer the Burmese border, Barisal to the west of Comilla, Krishnanagar, north of Calcutta, and, above all, Calcutta itself. In this internal immigration, the refugees from the country, once in the cities and disappointed by a lack of concrete help there, pleaded loudly and desperately at doorsteps and gates for the water in which the household servants had boiled rice, and competed for the muddy stalks of vegetables discarded in the streets. They fought over refuse in the dustbins and competed with the scrawny dogs of the city for shreds of meat. Rats and mice, dead or alive, were deemed a treasure of temporary protein.

For Ethiopian peasants and labourers and their families, there was, soon enough, that overriding urge to get to the cities. But this pilgrimage was thwarted, as those of so many Irish and Bengalis had been. Those who, at the end of all their other struggles, dragged themselves to the city of Addis Ababa in 1983–4 were not permitted to enter, and so were left to form a line for hundreds of miles in length along the roads leading to Mengistu’s capital. The government kept them out of Addis by armed force, a denial method used in the 1970s by the emperor whom Mengistu had deposed.

Emigration or flight to the Sudan and to Somalia became an option for Ethiopian farming families, and the middle class also began to emigrate in unprecedented numbers, though in their case emigration was spurred not only by their having witnessed famine but also as a reaction to its accompanying politics, injustice and government-instigated terror. Until the famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the only travelling Ethiopians were those who had been sent
overseas to be educated and to provide future bureaucrats and officials for the Ethiopian empire. Suddenly, however, Ethiopians could be found living in exile in the Sudan and Somalia and, ultimately, from Sweden and Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and Tasmania.

In traditionally honest communities, stealing seed and other food, or even stealing money, became common during famished times. In Ireland, the number of people committed for trial for theft rose from 20,000 in 1842–6 to 31,000 in 1847; 38,500 in 1848; and 42,000 in 1849. The statistics for other categories of crime remained level in the same period. One man sent to Australia for his crime was Michael Frawley, who was convicted of stealing money from the Board of Public Works, the body that supervised make-work relief. He claimed he committed his crime for the sake of his young and helpless family, for whom, he said, there was no room left in the workhouse. Michael Cullinan, also condemned to transportation, argued with some credibility that he had stolen a cow because his young family were hungry. But he was never shipped away because he died in prison of dysentery.

If given an opportunity, famished Bengalis thieved from government food depots without any sense that their acts were ‘criminal’, and sometimes under the blind eye of compassionate Indian police.

Attempted food theft became common in Ethiopia too. During the famines of the early 1970s and mid 1980s, people in Ethiopia who still possessed their seed crop tried to plant
it in secret at night and to disguise the fact they had done so by spreading soil or straw, or employing other ruses, both to hide the fact that a crop had been planted, and to prevent people from digging up and stealing the seeds at night.

Under the pressure of coping, the ties between people, even within the same family, withered. Some separations, of course, were well-intentioned. In Ireland during
an Gorta Mór
, parents might send their children to the hated and punitive-looking workhouses instituted under the Irish Poor Relief Act of 1838. There, at least, some form of spartan succour was available, but of such a demeaning kind that many adult Irish were too proud to partake of it. Often the children would never see their parents again, and their parents knew this when they delivered them to the grim outer gate of the workhouse. Men who set out for the Bengali cities were often deluded enough to believe they would get work there and have their families join them later. Likewise, Ethiopian women and children were frequently sent by the fathers of their families to relief camps or towns, while the men searched for work rather than throw themselves on anyone’s mercy.

But other separations did not have the quality of being designed for mutual good. In northern Ethiopia in the hungers of 1983–4, out of pure desperation families abandoned the elderly and weak, a pattern that had occurred in hungers of the past and would in those of the future. Vulnerable members of the family who seemed already too frail to walk
towards relief, real or hoped-for, were frequently left behind to perish in the family house in the village.

In Bengal, among the families of sharecroppers, landless labourers, fishermen, weavers, barbers and potters, husbands abandoned wives and children were sold or left to die. Married men often expelled their widowed sisters from the house, and thus as good as condemned them to death by the roadside.

A frightful option taken in all famines is the maternal choice between feeding the child who might survive instead of the one who will not. An extreme Irish case of this preferential maternal love, reported by Mary Anne Hoare, a contemporary writer, was that of the woman who chose to neglect her ‘miserable pallid infant’ to suckle an eighteen-year-old son, a boy who worked on the road projects that were begun as famine relief. The family’s survival depended on the boy, not on the infant, the latter almost certainly doomed whatever the mother did. For starvation induces a pragmatic desperation in its subjects, and this choice, too, is a coping mechanism. And as a crime it is minor compared to some of the other options historically taken with children.