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POTATO
A HISTORY OF THE
PROPITIOUS ESCULENT
JOHN READER
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Introduction ix
Acknowledgements xiii
List of Plates xv
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
xi
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Acknowledgements
Bringing together the information that tells the story of the potato in world
history has been an exercise that relied very much upon the efforts of others,
and therefore one that leaves an author humbled, indebted, and deeply
grateful. First there were the scientists and historians whose publications are
listed in the notes and bibliography, then the institutions which facilitated
their research and my enquiries, and then the libraries which have made
their published results so readily available. Along the way, of course, there
were encounters with farmers, scientists, historians, managers, administrators
and librarians all generously welcoming with time, help and information.
Their contributions have been accumulative, and therefore not always
independently evident in the narrative, but always important to the frame-
work of the project. I offer thanks to all.
In addition, the late Jack Hawkes and Richard Lester merit special thanks
for their encouragement and hospitality at a crucial stage of my research, and
I am similarly indebted to Stef de Haan for access to his on-going research
in the Huancavelica region of the Peruvian Andes, and to the Ramos family
of Villa Hermosa for the insights I gained from them during the potato
harvest.
In Connemara, the families that cheerfully endured eighteen months of
my photojournalistic intrusions in the early s are always remembered with
special affection and gratitude in this instance most especially for the expe-
riences I have drawn upon in respect of the potato.
The International Potato Center (CIP Centro Internacional de la Papa)
was generous with hospitality and facilities, both at its Lima headquarters and
at the Huancayo research station. Scientists at the Scottish Crops Research
Institute (SCRI), where the Commonwealth Potato Collection is maintained,
were similarly helpful with my quest for basic understanding on a number of
xiii
Potato
topics. Libraries at CIP and the SCRI gave me access to uncommon and
specialist publications, and the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural
Society was an indispensible resource. As I have always found, the usefulness
of these and other libraries was greatly enhanced by the helpful efficiency of
dedicated librarians lets raise a cheer of gratitude for librarians everywhere.
Following the chronological order in which their names appear in my
notebooks, I am particularly indebted to: Christine Graves, Maria Elena Lanatta,
Paul Stapleton, Martin at the guest house, Cecilia Ferreyra, Hugo Li Pin,
Carlos Ochoa, Keith Fuglie, William Roca, Merideth Bonierbale, Juan Landeo,
Marc Ghislain, Enrique Chujoy, Sylvie Priou, Alberto Salas, Gordon Prain,
Oscar Ortiz, Hubert Zandstra, Pamela Anderson, Andre de Vaux, Ana Panta,
Maria Scurrah, Roberto Quiroz, Elias Mujica, Sarath Ilangantileke, Yi Wang,
Carlos Arbizu, Greg Forbes, Victor Otazu, Yi Jung Yoon, Seo Hyo Won, Oscar
Hualpa, Luis Salazar, Maria-Ines Rios, Brian W. Ogilvie, Harold J. Cook, Stef s
assistants: Anna, Marlene & Armando, Michelangelo Samaniego, Edward &
Phillada Collins, Bob Holman, Sarah Stephens, Peter Gregory, John Bradshaw,
Gavin Ramsey, Finlay Dale, Dave Cooke, Paul Birch, Brian Fenton, Hugh
Jones and Robert Rhoades my thanks to all.
Ravi Mirchandani and Pat Kavanagh made the arrangements that set the
project securely on course from concept to publication, and its progress has
been overseen by Jason Arthur, Caroline Knight, Gail Lynch, Alban Miles and
Mark Handsley. An old friend, Chris Lovell created the endpapers map with
a flourish of his exceptional talents Thank you.
xiv
List of Plates
xv
Potato
. Jack Hawkes (second right) with Edward Balls and two local staff on
expedition. Reproduced with permission from Phillada Collins.
. Woman with potato for sale at the market in Mendi, in the western
highlands of Papua New Guinea. Photograph by John Reader.
. Dutch agronomist and Quechua farmer at potato harvest near Huan-
cavelica in the Peruvian Andes. Photograph by John Reader.
. China: Opening of the First MacDonalds Restaurant April , .
Kees/Corbis Sygma.
xvi
Part One
South America
Chapter One
If the future of the potato stretches to Mars, its origins are firmly rooted
in the Andes. The ancestral species grow wild there hundreds of
scraggly, undistinguished plants whose value as food is far from obvious.
The foliage cannot be eaten because it is packed with poisonous glyco-
alkaloids; the tubers of most species are poisonous too, and small, so
that it is difficult to imagine what might have initially encouraged
people to experiment with them. Yet experiment they must have done,
and archaeological evidence indicates that the process that ultimately
produced edible cultivated potatoes began more than , years ago.
Since then Andean farmers have raised hundreds of edible varieties
in fact, they have given over , names to the different potatoes they
grow regularly, each known for its particular degree of productivity,
palatability, temperature tolerance, disease and pest resistance, and storage
quality. Many of the names are synonyms, but it is generally agreed
that at least distinct varieties of potato are grown in the Andes.
They fall into three broad groups, each suited to grow best at different
altitudes on the ascending slopes. Between , and , metres,
where rainfall and temperature are congenial, the varieties called papa
maway produce good crops; between , and , metres the more
hardy papa puna are grown; and above , metres only the frost-resis-
tant papa ruki will thrive.
No one household grows all varieties of potato, but each will
customarily plant from among a local selection of thirty, forty or fifty
varieties, and the selection itself varies with personal preference. Every
farmer has firm opinions concerning which can be expected to produce
the highest yields under specific conditions, which are most resistant
to frost and disease, which keep longest, which are easiest to cook and
which are most palatable; every member of his family probably could
take twenty-five varieties at random from the store, and readily give
the names and characteristics of each. This is not quite as difficult as
its sounds, for the native potatoes (as they are generally known) bear
only a slight resemblance to the ones we know. They come in a wide
variety of shapes and colours. Long and thin, short and fat; conical,
round, kidney-shaped, coiled even concertina-shaped. Colours range
from white to black, with all shades of red, yellow and blue in between;
To Mars from the Andes
Where the road from Huancayo, high in the Peruvian Andes, made a
hairpin bend and began its descent into the valley and the town of
Huancavelica, road improvement work was under way. A track led away
from the noise, up and across a meadow the sheep kept close-cropped,
past a patch of oats, ripening and shoulder-high; over low stone walls
that seemed to have come about as somewhere to put boulders cleared
from the land, rather than as divisive features up towards the scattering
of fields and dwellings that goes by the name of Villa Hermosa. The
slope was steep, and breathing was laboured for those unaccustomed
to such exertion at more than , metres above sea level, but Marlene
kept up a steady conversation with Armando Ramos, softly, in the
Quechua language, catching up with news about his family and events
locally, she said. It was late May, time to harvest potatoes, and Marlene
had come to record details of the crop for a study on the role of the
potato in low-income communities that was being conducted under
the auspices of the Centro Internacional de Papa (the Inter national
Potato Center, most widely known by its acronym CIP), an inde-
pendent internationally funded scientific research organisation founded
in with a mandate to increase food security and reduce poverty
in the developing world, which has its headquarters in Lima, and a
large research and field station in Huancayo. Identifying and preserving
the genetic resources of the potato in its Andean homeland was another
aspect of CIPs research programme to which the study was contributing.
Armando led the way to his compound three buildings set
horseshoe-fashion around an open yard. To the right, a low adobe hut
thatched with straw; ahead, a larger mud-brick building with a pantile
roof; and to the left, a double-storey house of similar construction but
roofed with corrugated iron. Did the progression of roofs around the
courtyard represent the improving fortunes of the family, one wondered.
No, the -year-old Armando replied, the double-storey house was built
as a necessity to provide additional accommodation when he got married
a few years before. The others were already there; the pantiled one a
store and the thatched adobe hut a kitchen, into which he now led us.
The hut had no windows, and with the only light coming through
the door, the far interior was dimly illuminated. Aid, Armandos
Potato
-year-old wife, was seated at the fireplace that filled the far end,
nursing the youngest of their three children. Her face caught the light,
shining like copper, while her black hair and clothing merged into
the sombre darkness of the walls and shadows behind her. We sat on
the benches strewn with sacks and sheepskins that lined two walls of
the hut; Armando took his baby daughter while Aid served out mugs
of a meat stew, and handed round a bowl of boiled potatoes native
potatoes, a novelty to the visitors, with their assorted shapes, deep
eyes and variety of colours, but uniformly tasty once unpractised fingers
had managed to remove the skins.
The harvest was late throughout the region that year, Armando
explained, his potato fields were not ready yet, but one his father had
planted out a few weeks earlier than most was ready and he was
expecting us. We walked a few minutes along the contour of the hill,
past the pits where clay had been mixed with straw to make the mud-
bricks for Armandos house, past a horse grazing on a field of oat stubble,
and whinnying to get at the sheaves of grain which stood, temptingly,
just beyond the length of its tether, past the spring and small pool of
beautifully clear water that supplied the Ramos households, and on to
the field where sixty-year-old Juan Ramos, his wife Sofia (aged fifty-
nine), and several of their children and grandchildren were harvesting
potatoes.
Juan had planted between fifty and sixty varieties in a field behind
his house early the previous November. Unseasonable frosts had damaged
the plants in the early stages of growth, but they had recovered. This
was because the mixture of varieties included some that were strong
enough to withstand the frost, Juan explained, and also tall enough to
lean over and protect their weaker brothers. The field was small; twenty
ridged rows, each perhaps metres long, but at the regions average
rate of tonnes per hectare, Juan and his family helpers could expect
to harvest about tonnes of potatoes that day. Not that they spoke in
terms of areas, weights and average yields. Their appreciation of the
crop was more direct. Juan was pleased with the tubers their ayachos (a
short-handled mattock with a leaf-shaped blade that is wielded like a
pick-axe) were uncovering. The crop could have been much worse.
Neighbours over the hill were harvesting tubers the size of sheep drop-
pings, he said with a sly laugh. But look at these: big as a bulls cojones!
Juan told us the local Quechua names of the twelve different varieties
that he had dug from just metres of ridge all related in some way
to the colour or shape of the tuber. Among them Waka qallu cows
To Mars from the Andes
tongue; Quwi sullu guinea pig fetus; Puka pepino red cucumber; and
Papa Ilunchuy waqachi the potato that makes the new bride weep
because it is so difficult to peel. He cut open some tubers to show us
the red and purple flesh that distinguished some varieties but it was
his hands, in contrast with the fresh-cut potatoes, that left the strongest
impression working hands, with thick distorted fingernails and
encrusted skin, such as Vincent Van Gogh would have known when he
painted The Potato Eaters in .
Papa Ilunchuy waqachi is a severe test for any girl wanting to impress
her prospective mother-in-law, though conditions are testing for anyone
trying to scratch a living from the Andean highlands or from any of
Perus rural environments, for that matter. Peru has one of the most
difficult and demanding landscapes in the world. For a start, only per
cent of its land surface is suitable for growing food crops, compared
with per cent in the United States and over per cent in Europe.
And the problems of inadequate arable land are intensified in Peru by
the extremes of its three distinct geographical regions: the arid coastal
plain, the snow-capped Andean chain and the lush tropical forest.
Indeed, Peru is a land of extremes and paradox. Rainfall is almost
non-existent on the coast, overabundant in the tropical forest and highly
variable in the mountains. Paradoxically, the arid coastal plain is the
countrys most productive agricultural region, since the narrow desert
strip ( kilometres wide and , kilometres long) is cut through by
some fifty rivers that drain the Andes into the Pacific Ocean. Over a
million litres per second rush off the western slopes of the Andean
chain. The river valleys lie like green snakes across the drab grey desert,
with irrigation canals carrying their waters to farms and extensive plan-
tations of sugar and cotton.Thus the region with least rainfall contributes
far more to national production than the lush tropical forest which
gets most. In terms of productivity (as well as geography) the Andean
highlands fall between these two extremes, but are especially import-
ant as they contain virtually all the countrys rain-fed agricultural land
and are a vital source of food crops including, of course, potatoes.
Ten million people ( per cent of Perus population) live in the
Andes at altitudes of , metres and above. The majority are the
Quechua descendants of the hunters and gatherers who first established
a human presence in the mountains, , years ago. It was they who
first domesticated the potato, they who created the Inca empire, and
were cruelly reduced to less than per cent of their number by the
Potato
Spanish conquest and the diseases it introduced. Their descendants are
a resilient stock who came through that genetic bottleneck with a stoic
and unhurried capacity for survival that persists to this day.
The towns are in the valleys, but the valleys containing major centres
such as Cuzco, Ayacucho, Huancayo and Huancavelica are already more
than , metres above sea level, while the majority of the popula-
tion lives in farming communities at even higher elevations on the
slopes and plateaux above. Theirs is an exceptionally demanding environ-
ment, where solar radiation is intense but temperatures generally low.
Snow and forsts are seasonally frequent, but rainfall erratic, and, most
limiting of all from a human point of view, oxygen pressure is far lower
than at sea level. New arrivals always feel distressingly short of breath,
and many are stricken with severe headaches and nausea. They tire
easily, sleep badly and may experience disconcerting bouts of mental
disorientation. Their bodies adapt after a while, but never completely.
Even years of living at altitude will not enable migrants to match the
work capacity of the Quechua who were born and raised there.
On Juans field, the harvesting continued. Three, four, five hefty blows
of the ayacho broke the crust of soil, the dried haulm was lifted and
shaken free, the potatoes detached and set in a neat pile on the cleared
ridge. Then on to the next. Juan and his nephew were wielding the
ayachos, his wife and Armando were gathering the potatoes and cousin
Estelle was following up behind with a plastic sheet onto which she
collected about kilos of tubers before neatly gathering in the corners
and transforming the sheet into a sling that served to carry them to
the pile beside the field. Back and forth she went, the ayachos thud-
ding into the dry hard soil; they stopped for a swig of water now and
then, but there was little conversation; Juan occasionally refreshed the
wad of coca leaves he chewed from dawn to dusk. Estelles four-year-
old son had been chasing chickens in the yard, then he came to his
mother and promptly fell asleep on the harvested ground, sprawled face
up in the open sun until his mother, sweating and breathing hard,
fetched a jacket to lay over his face. In one hour she collected and
carried kilos of potatoes from the field.
Meanwhile, the bulldozers and earthmovers working on the road a
few hundred metres below had cut and shifted many tonnes from the
hairpin bend they were widening. Throughout the morning the synco-
pating thud of the ayachos was backed by the hum and squeals of
machinery. Like a piece of modern music, one might say, but more an
eloquent reminder of how little can be achieved by human labour in
To Mars from the Andes
the modern world. Worthy, yes, but arduous and so very slow. Most of
these lands were brought into cultivation before even draught animals
and the wheel were introduced to the Andes, and the topography puts
a lot of agricultural land beyond the use of machinery anyway. A tractor
could never reach the high and steep-sloping fields, and oxen could
never plough them even for those who could afford to buy and
maintain such things.
Human muscle power created the thousands upon thousands of neat
ridged rectangles that are scattered throughout the high Andes muscle
assisted only by the taclla, a spade-like foot plough with a narrow blade
and a handle set low on the shaft to ease the job of lifting and turning
the heavy soil. The Inca are said to have invented the taclla as a means
of increasing agricultural productivity as their empire expanded in the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Along with the taclla the Inca
introduced a new order to the Andes, one which harnessed a substan-
tial fraction of all available muscle power to the service of the state and
established an ominous precedent. Pre-existing traditional customs which
obliged families and villagers to work cooperatively among themselves,
giving and receiving labour as required, were formalised into manda-
tory public service known as mita from the Quechua mita, which
means a turn or a season.
The Inca mita required every man and woman to contribute a propor-
tion of their annual labour output to the state and was arranged so
that at any given time around one-seventh of a community was doing
its turn. They cut roads through the mountains, mined gold and silver,
harvested state crops, sheared its livestock, wove its cloth and fought its
battles.The staggering achievements of the Inca state an empire which
extended from Columbia to Chile; up to million subjects ( per
cent of the entire population of north and south America at that time);
over , kilometres of paved road; massive irrigation and terracing
projects were a product of the mita.
There is much to admire in the achievements of the Inca. Their
legacy is visible at Macchu Picchu and other sites, and in the gold and
silver craftworks that escaped the attention of Spanish plunderers. But
their mita system of extracting labour from the general population
bestowed an oppressive burden on future generations. It lingered on as
a tradition of forced labour even to recent times. Juan Ramos speaks
angrily of work on the hacienda which until the land reforms of the
s encompassed the fields that are now his. Juan was born on the
Sanchez hacienda, as were his father and grandfather.The owners treated
Potato
us like slaves, he says. No wages, just the space to build a house and
the use of some land good land, he admits, but they were never given
enough time to make full use of it.
We worked like slaves on the hacienda, he said, and one refrained
from mentioning that he worked like a slave now too. Standing there,
thin and drawn, half the day gone and not half the crop in yet. His
demeanour was an expression of deep unquestioning resilience: the
work had to be done. Was it so much worse for all the generations
before him? I asked. He gestured dismissively down the valley towards
Huancavelica a town founded on the rich deposits of mercury ore
that were discovered close by in the sixteenth century. It was much worse
working down there in the old days, he said, much, much worse.
production at Potos and thus cripple the economies of Peru and Spain.
Attempts were made to improve conditions, but it was always the impor-
tance of maintaining output that was given priority. Racial prejudice
made Indian lives an acceptable price to pay for the security of mercury
and silver production. A typical mine owner, Pedro Camargo, gave his
opinion of the Indians in a letter he addressed to the king of Spain in
March :
they take these miserable Indians by force against their will from
their houses and take them in iron collars and chains more than
leagues to put them in this risk, . . . and from this has resulted their
mothers maiming and crippling their sons to preserve them.
slaughtering its mutton and beef animals two major annual tasks that
might last up to a month each. Then there was the agricultural work:
ploughing, sowing, weeding and harvesting the haciendas potato and
cereal crops, as well as tending the owners kitchen gardens, and providing
fodder for the dairy cattle and pack animals. They were also obliged
to transport hacienda produce to market and collect stores using their
own llamas or mules and without any recompense for loss or damage
and all adult family members had to work as general-purpose servants
in the owners residence for up to one month per year. Only after
these obligations had been fulfilled could they attend to their own
needs.
Labour relationships on the haciendas were unregulated. There were
no written contracts, and this inherent vagueness concerning the work
that a labourer could be called upon to do, and for how long, left
plenty of room for conflicting interpretation. Dispute and bad feeling
were endemic, and while there must have been some instances of genial
and mutually supportive relationships between workers and hacienda
owners, the overwhelming impression is one that supports Juans assess-
ment: the workers were treated like slaves.
Thus the mita system of forced labour upon which the Inca had
built an empire persisted in the mercury and silver mines and was trans-
posed to the haciendas, where it survived through three centuries of
Spanish rule to Perus achievement of independence in July . And
did not end there. By then a home-grown (and often mixed-blood)
elite had inherited the estates. Quechua was the first language for many
of them. They were Peruvian, but with Spanish names implying some
right to live and behave as aristocracy. They expected to be addressed
as Don, and saw no need or reason to change the longstanding modes
of operation on the estates least of all, arrangements for the acqui-
sition and deployment of labour.
The haciendas were by now the mainstay of Perus agricultural
production their viability dependent upon a relic form of forced
labour and the unacknowledged value of Perus gift to the world: the
potato. Potatoes were the staple food of workers on haciendas in the
high Andes.
Like the feudal estates of medieval Europe, the haciendas supported
the extravagant lifestyles of a select and relatively small section of the
population. But unlike the European examples, social and economic
factors in Peru were slow to dismantle them. The oppressive arrange-
ments persisted well into the twentieth century reinforced by the
Potato
wealth that many owners accumulated during the First World War, when
the demand for wool (to make uniforms) made Perus production very
valuable indeed. But economic viability slumped steadily thereafter, and
the owners enthusiasm for agriculture with it. The haciendas carried
on, but largely as before; producing no more than they had ever done,
and therefore ensuring that agricultural production fell increasingly
short of the countrys growing needs. The owners were rich in land,
but incomes fell while costs were rising. The government had set a
minimum wage; it was low but few haciendas paid it. Indeed, an agron-
omist reported that if the workers on haciendas in the Andes were paid
even the legal minimum wage no hacienda would make a profit, and
a living wage would drive most into bankruptcy. Only the Indians
forced labour kept them going, he concluded.
The adjustments that finally broke the hacienda owners feudal
stranglehold on agriculture and farm labour came in a programme of
agrarian reform enacted by the government between and .
Under these plans, the ownership of all estates of more than hectares
in the highlands (and hectares on the coast) was transferred to their
labour force in the form of production cooperatives.The former owners
were financially compensated but on the basis of their previous tax
returns, which neatly ensured that valuations were as low as they could
be.
Juan spoke harshly as he recalled the events of that time. The
landowners attempted to avoid the takeover, he said, by trying to have
their estates divided up into units of less than hectares, but a nation-
wide outcry forestalled them. The disposal of livestock and equipment
could not be stopped, however. Those hacienderos would have taken
the soil from the ground if they could, he said, and left us just rocks.
He gestured to fields dug on the ridge above us, and on high slopes
across the valley, ten kilometres away; he pointed to a string of farms
on the road down to Huancavelica, and to his own land facing the
limestone outcrop they call Urahuaca. He named the communities we
could see: Attaya, Antaccocha, Harawasa, Chacariya all these and several
more had been part of the hacienda owned by the Sanchez family;
now they are grouped in an autonomous farmer community that takes
the name of the former hacienda: Villa Hermosa.
The highest land is used communally for pasture and potatoes, with
individual householders planting and fallowing the land in a sequence
of rotations that all have agreed upon. No one can do just as they like
on the common land; that privilege applies only to land at lower
To Mars from the Andes
had been fallow for only three years. And from the top of the lime-
stone outcrop you could see the problem: the homesteads of six families
were spaced among the patchwork of tilled fields and pasture which
had once been expected to support just one household. What else
could we do? Juan asked. My brothers and I needed land and a house
when we married, so our father gave us some of his; and Ive done
the same for my son, Armando. But he will have to do something else
for his children.
Like the American Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of
Human Rights and Duties adopted by the Organisation of American
States in April (six months before the United Nations adopted
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) enshrines the attainment
of happiness as an essential right of every individual. Peru is a signa-
tory, but Juan was puzzled when asked how much happiness had been
attained in his lifetime. Happiness? What makes people happy? Healthy
animals, he said cautiously, and a good potato harvest. And then added:
Money! And best of all, a job. Yes, a job would make us happy. The
farm is not enough anymore, but with a job wed have money and
could buy our potatoes.
Chapter Two
Domestication
But not the potato alone. In fact, the venerable tuber to whose origin
and domestication we now return is but one of twenty-five root and
tuber crops that were domesticated in the Andean regions, at least ten
of which are still grown and marketed today: arracacha, yacn, mauka,
achira, ahipa and maca; ulluco, oca, mashua and, of course, the potato.
Together, these plants comprise a group of high-altitude species that are
ecologically unique the worlds only such numerous and diverse group
of domesticated root and tuber crops and it is worth considering
how such a range of choice could have facilitated the domestication
of the potato.
The environment is the crucial factor: these plants produce roots and
tubers simply because they evolved in regions that regularly experience
a long and unbroken dry season. Under such demanding conditions,
an underground store of starchy reserves enables them to survive the
dry season and regenerate quickly when the rains come. For millions
Domestication
of years they had the place virtually to themselves, exploiting their
innate adaptability, proliferating, and colonising the landscape from the
forest edge to the Altiplano, with its rocky thin soils where no perennial
grasses or herbs could survive.
Although these high bleak landscapes would not have been much of
an attraction for gatherers to begin with, the populations of indigenous
llama, alpaca and vicua they supported would certainly have attracted
hunters to the scene. And then it was only a matter of time before
some hunters discovered the bounty of food that was stored, ripe for
the harvesting, in the ground at their feet. The bonus these roots and
tubers added to the food budget can be imagined especially in the
dry season, when food of any kind is scarce. At a stroke the mountains
acquired a more generous reputation. Hunting forays became gathering
expeditions, which in turn doubtless became annual events and the
occasions of ceremony, celebration and expressions of gratitude that
mark the harvesting of Andean crops even today.
Those early gatherers would have been fully aware that if they wanted
to have a harvest worth returning for next year, they must ensure there
were enough left in the ground this year. While turning the soil, leaving
one tuber or root for every three or four removed became common
practice. The wisdom of leaving a harvested area to lie fallow for a few
seasons developed then too, and eventually these gatherers became, in
effect, farmers selecting and nurturing the progeny of the tastiest and
most productive plants they found in their managed fields of wild
stock. In other words, progressively moving the plants from a wild to
a domesticated state.
The potato would not have featured much in this process to begin
with but the potato had an advantage which made it more desirable
than all the other Andean roots and tubers put together once a means
of dealing with its toxins had been discovered. The advantage was this:
while the other Andean roots and tubers shrivel, soften and rot if not
eaten within a short time of being harvested, potatoes can be stored
and will keep for months providing sustenance when other foods are
in short supply.
It can only have been the selection and nurturing of progressively
less bitter progeny, year by year, that brought the wild potato into
domestication, but it is interesting to note that those early exploiters
of the resource also developed some methods of dealing with its toxic
content methods which persist to this day.
In a study combining ethnobotany and chemical ecology, a team led
Potato
by the biochemist Timothy Johns found that several of the potato vari-
eties eaten by the Aymar people of the Lake Titicaca region (where
the potato was first domesticated) contain dangerously high levels of
poisonous glycoalkaloids. They liked the bitter taste, the Aymar said,
but were aware that too much of it caused stomach pains and vomiting
and could make a person seriously ill. Their solution, the study found,
was to eat their bitter potatoes mixed with a quantity of clay that is
specifically collected for the purpose. And sure enough, back in the
laboratory, Johns analysis has shown that the clay did indeed contain
elements that bind to the glycoalkaloids and so ensured that the poten-
tially lethal elements passed through the system undigested.
Taking a small amount of earth with their food, or geophagy, has
been observed among South American monkeys and parrots, so people
probably acquired the habit by copying what they had seen as purposeful
behaviour in the wild, but while the practice continues in some places
(as a matter of taste largely, just as some like their fries with ketchup and
others do not), much more efficient methods have been developed by
the people who grow bitter potatoes at , metres and above in the
Andes. Taking advantage of the freezing nights and brilliant days that
the long dry season brings to these regions, they effectively freeze-dry
their potatoes, turning them into hard and chalk-white chuo that is
free of toxins and stores very well.
The process involves exposing the potatoes to three or four nights
of freezing temperatures (while keeping them covered during the day
to avoid the darkening caused by direct sunlight), then soaking them
in pits or a streambed with cold running water for up to thirty days.
After that, they are again put out to freeze at night and the next day
walked on to remove the peel and squeeze out most of their water
content. When that is finished, the tubers are spread out in direct
sunlight for ten to fifteen days, by which time they are almost completely
dehydrated. Rubbing them together by hand then removes any remaining
peel and gives the chuo its characteristic chalky appearance and light
firm consistency.
Production is a lengthy and complex procedure, but chuo has given
the people of the high Andes a food resource that will thicken stews
and fill bellies today and for months even years ahead. Indeed,
archaeologists have found chuo in sites at Tiwanaku which dates from
about , years ago. There is no record as to how edible the chuo
still was, but the discovery certainly testifies to the durability of the
product and the antiquity of the process.
Chapter Four
Potato
Christopher Columbus and the pioneering adventurers who took
Europes influence across the Caribbean and into the Americas were
not surprised to find their landfalls populated by people who clearly
had been living there for some time. They had, after all, expected to
land in India, or perhaps Japan. But once Europeans realised they were
not anywhere near the Orient, but in an entirely New World, confronted
by an amazing diversity of hitherto unknown cultures (and strange
animals, such as the llama and the three-toed sloth), Europes intelli-
gentsia wanted to know more about these people and places. The Bible,
final authority on all important issues in the Middle Ages, said nothing
about even the existence of a second-earth let alone its inhabitants
and whence they had come.
Apparent similarities between Egyptian and American cultures, such
as the pyramids of the Nile and Mexico, inspired the idea that one of
Noahs sons had somehow found his way to the western shores of the
Atlantic as the flood waters subsided. There were also suggestions that
Native Americans were the descendants of people who had survived
the destruction of Atlantis and other lost worlds; or were Jews derived
from the ten lost tribes of Israel. Indeed, by the early s the list of
possibilities was long enough for a voluminous compendium of theories
to be published, though in conclusion it could only suggest that there
must have been many origins, since no single theory could explain all
the many customs and languages found among the people of the New
World.
Such vagueness was not good enough for Jos de Acosta, a Jesuit
missionary who lived and worked in the Peruvian Andes from to
. He wanted a logical explanation for the existence of living crea-
tures in a hitherto unknown continent and used the Bible as the
means of constructing one. Like most people of his day, Acosta believed
the Bible was a chronicle of historical fact literally true. So, if the
book of Genesis said the entire earth had been submerged in the Deluge,
eliminating all animal life except that which Noah had taken in the Ark,
the inhabitants of the New World could only be the descendants of
survivors who stepped ashore when the Ark docked on Mount Ararat.
Logical enough; but where is the route whereby the beasts and the
birds traveled . . . How could they have come from one world to
another? Acosta rejected swimming as a possibility and thought it
equally unlikely that people, beasts and birds could have reached the
New World by boat. Ergo, the migrations could only have been by
land:
Whence have they come?
I conjecture [he wrote in ] . . . that the New World . . . is not
altogether severed and disjoined from the other world . . . I have
long believed that the one and the other are joined and continued
one with another in some part, or at least are very near.
Acosta proposed that land bridges into the New World extended
either from Europe in the east, or from Asia in the west . . . which
solved the question of access, but immediately raised others: why should
people and animals have bothered to cross the land bridges, and why
were some animals in the New World so different from those existing
elsewhere? One might suppose that a man of Acostas intellectual athleti-
cism could have found answers to these questions in the Bible, but here
he used the logic of scientific observation instead, and in so doing put
himself two or three centuries ahead of his time.
Having noted that certain regions were more compatible than others
with the needs of certain animals, Acosta concluded that if an animal
found itself in an unsuitable region it would either move on or die
out. So, once off the Ark, the species not suited to life in the environs
of Mount Ararat would migrate driven by the need to find the regions
that best suited their specific physiological requirements and would
keep moving until they found a place in which they could live, repro-
duce and multiply most successfully. That was why the llama and the
three-toed sloth were found only in South America, a long way from
Mount Ararat, and nowhere in between.
In this analysis Acosta not only gave theologians an acceptable expla-
nation for the existence of people and strange animals in the New
World; he also defined the first principles of biogeography.
The term biogeography did not come into use until the late nine-
teenth century, but the principles Acosta had deployed to explain the
puzzles of animal life in South America were nonetheless a starting
point for scientific investigations into the origins and diversity of plants
and animals around the world. They were fundamental to the idea
that while God might have created life, environmental circumstance
had been a powerful influence on its subsequent development. Bio-
geographical principles guided the observations of Charles Darwin
on the Beagles circumnavigation of the world, during which he
gathered so much of the evidence upon which his theory of evolu-
tion would be founded.
Meanwhile, Jos de Acostas conjecture regarding the existence of a
land bridge between Asia and North America was confirmed, and by
Potato
Thomas Jefferson could describe the peopling of the New World
in terms that remain valid to this day:
For Jefferson and everyone else it was obvious that once people had
entered the New World across what was later to be called the Bering
land bridge, they must have gradually trickled down and spread out to
populate the entire region, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, as though
the force of gravity had drawn them southward, down the familiar face
of Mercators map of the world. They had crossed the land bridge
during one or more of the warmer and ice-free episodes that occurred
between , and , years ago; once across, a limitless prospect
lay before them such as none had confronted before: million square
kilometres of virgin territory, one-third of the total inhabitable area of
the earths surface. Not that the pioneers would have been aware of
this; they were nomadic hunters, simply doing what they had always
done, moving on and doubtless hoping that conditions ahead would
be as good or better than those they were leaving behind. Their advance
proceeded erratically, as groups budded-off from the growing edge
of the clans, dividing, redividing, dispersing and colonising new terri-
tories.
In the s, archaeologists discovered stone projectile points and
blades lying among the bones of extinct animals at a site near the town
of Clovis in New Mexico. These tools matched discoveries at other
sites scattered across North America, the oldest of which dated back
to about , years ago. This date fitted in nicely with what was
known of conditions on the land bridge around that time and so
persuaded many that the first immigrants must have arrived in the New
World not long before then. And the Clovis culture became firmly
established as the earliest evidence of a human presence in the New
World.
Meanwhile, though, Clovis-style artefacts were being found at sites
in South America too, which effectively extended the range of the
Whence have they come?
technology from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. And raised a problem.
All dates for Clovis sites in North America clustered tightly between
, and , years ago, while sites at the southern tip of South
America were dated at , years ago. Could people have populated
an entire hemisphere in such a short span of time to years
from the initial crossing of the land bridge to the appearance of arte-
facts in Tierra del Fuego?
It seemed improbable, but so long as there was no contradictory
evidence to hand, the all-embracing concept of a Clovis culture
throughout the Americas held. Indeed, it became an article of faith,
generating not a little rancour during the late twentieth century as
archaeologists sought and disputed evidence of a human presence in
the Americas that predated the Clovis culture. Literally scores of pre-
Clovis contenders came forward, only to wither under critical scrutiny,
as an authority close to the issue reported. So many failed that the
archaeological community grew highly sceptical of any and all pre-
Clovis claims. Few went so far as to absolutely exclude the possibility
that earlier evidence might be found, but most were unwilling to take
such claims at face value. The evidence was always flawed in some way:
the dating was not secure enough; the geology was confused, or the
artefacts were open to doubt. Clearly, if a site was going to break
through the Clovis barrier it must be unimpeachable, with unambiguous
artefacts or human skeletal remains in an unquestionable geological and
stratigraphic context, chronologically anchored by absolutely secure
radiocarbon dates.
As a graduate student, Thomas Dillehay had been trained to believe
(and never seriously question) the veracity of Clovis as the first culture
of the New World, so he was startled, to say the least, when radio-
carbon tests on archaeological material from a site at Monte Verde in
southern Chile yielded dates of more than , years ago. If the
Clovis culture was the first in the New World and the people respon-
sible for it had come to North America no earlier than , years
ago and reached South America perhaps years later, how could
there have been people living at Monte Verde more than , years
earlier? Dillehay was sceptical. The chronology must be wrong, or the
site must have been disturbed by erosion or flooding that left artefacts
of different ages mixed together. And besides, there were none of the
spearpoints that distinguished the Clovis culture.
The puzzle of Monte Verde began in , while Dillehay was
doing a spell of teaching and archaeological research at the Southern
Potato
University of Chile. A student brought in a large mastodon tooth and
other bones which had been exposed where some local men had been
clearing a path for their ox carts. Since the bones bore marks which
could have been made by people cutting meat from them, Dillehay
decided that an exploratory excavation was merited. The following year,
he and his team found more bones with unmistakable cut-marks, clay-
lined hearths with charcoal and burned food plants, and stone tools
all buried in the same thin geological layer. Because the material included
mastodon remains, Dillehay believed the site probably dated from the
late Ice Age, between , and , years ago, when the animals
were known to have inhabited the region.
With the site appearing to be so old, Dillehay proceeded cautiously
as well he might, given the scathing scepticism with which pre-Clovis
claims were customarily greeted. Over the next ten years he directed
a programme of excavation and research with a team of more than
eighty professionals at Monte Verde. They found a wide variety of
wooden, bone and stone tools, as well as scraps of animal hide and
chunks of meat, human footprints, hearths, and fragments of edible and
medicinal plants, all scattered in and around the remains of wooden
hut foundations. Additional excavations and radiocarbon dates proved
conclusively that the site was a valid human locality, at least ,
years old.
Dillehay and his colleagues were convinced, but another ten years
of painstaking analysis was undertaken before the findings were published
in two volumes, totalling over , pages. Analytical overkill, said
a reviewer, but necessary given the volume (in both quantity and inten-
sity) of doubt expressed about Monte Verdes antiquity since the site
was first reported. In a party of experts and specialists staunch
sceptics among them was invited to examine the site and its collec-
tions. They could not find fault with any aspect of the work and conclu-
sions: the Monte Verde site was unimpeachable and , years
old.
As Dillehay reports in his popular book on the settlement of the
Americas, Monte Verde was an open-air settlement on the banks of a
small freshwater creek, surrounded by sandy knolls, and backed by a cool
damp forest. A bog developed in the creek basin some time after the
settlement had been abandoned, steadily burying everything under a layer
of peat. Because the lack of oxygen in the bog inhibited bacterial decay,
and because constant saturation stopped anything drying out, all kinds
of perishable materials that normally disappear from the archaeological
Whence have they come?
record were preserved, giving an unprecedented glimpse of life on the
banks of that creek. And there in the cracks of wooden mortars and
in food storage pits set in the corners of shelters were the preserved
remains of potatoes. The Monte Verdeans had gathered, processed and
eaten potatoes, , years ago.
The settlement had been occupied throughout the year by perhaps
twenty to thirty people, who had built a -metre-long tent-like struc-
ture its frame made of logs and planks and its walls of poles covered
with animal hides. The tents dirt floor was imbedded with hundreds
of microscopic flecks of hide tissue, suggesting that it was probably
covered with skins. Inside, planks and poles divided the floor space into
individual living areas, each with a clay-lined firepit surrounded by the
remains of vegetable foods, and stone tools. Outside the tent there were
two large communal hearths, a store of firewood, wooden mortars with
their grinding stones, and even three human footprints near a large
hearth, where someone had walked on clay brought in to reline some
firepits.
The remains of a wide variety of edible and medicinal plants were
recovered from the hearths, living floors and small pits, along with the
remnants of mastodon, paleo-llama, small animals and freshwater
molluscs. Aquatic plants provided the greatest variety and, along with
meat, the bulk of the Monte Verdeans diet. Most of their food came
from ecological zones on the Pacific shore, about kilometres to the
west, or from the Andes. More than half of the purely medicinal plants
found at the site came from distant parts too one from arid regions
about kilometres to the north. All of which indicated that the
Monte Verdeans either travelled regularly to distant environments or
were part of a complex social and exchange network.
Monte Verde broke the Clovis barrier; the paradigm shifted and the
old school was now obliged to confront the profound implications of
a site so old, so far south. The fact that Monte Verde dated from ,
years ago meant that the initial crossing from Asia into the Americas
must have occurred much earlier. How much earlier depended largely
on obstacles encountered along the way: routes south from Alaska were
blocked by glaciers from about , to , years ago, for instance,
and remained an ecological barrier for several millennia. The timing
also depended on how well the migrants maintained their reproduc-
tive viability while living in relatively small numbers spread thinly over
vast and unpopulated continents.
Current knowledge suggests that people first crossed the Bering land
Potato
bridge into the New World at least , years ago. But even this has
awkward implications. If people entered the New World that long ago,
why is no site in North America older than , years? What were
people doing for those several thousand years? Or could the New
World have filled up from the bottom, as any container would when
a flowing mass pours in from the top? This idea is not as fanciful as it
might seem, and finds support in the contention that a Pacific coastal
route would have been the best way for people to enter the Americas.
In this scenario, hunting groups with relatively simple watercraft
could have successfully migrated along the coastal zone from Asia to
the Americas even at the height of the last glaciations. Compelling
geological and biogeographical evidence shows that well-spaced breaks
in the chain of coastal glaciers retained ample terrestrial and marine
life to support migrants as they advanced. And once past the glaciers,
people could have followed the coast down to the southernmost tip
of South America. It all sounds plausible, but will remain no more than
hypothesis until hard confirmatory evidence is found. The best would
be a string of occupation sites along the coast. Unfortunately, though,
any that might exist in the appropriate locations are invisible, deep
underwater, drowned by rising sea levels as the glaciers melted.
Invisibility is a major problem in archaeology. The out of sight, out of
mind principle creates a danger that if something cannot be seen its
absence generates a belief that it did not exist as the discoveries at
Monte Verde demonstrated. Of course, the collapse of the Clovis barrier
did not mean that previous arguments against it suddenly became valid
sites that were not genuinely old before Monte Verde were no older
afterwards but it did open the field to more discussion and hypothesis.
And this, along with the new avenues of enquiry that were developed
in the interim genetics and linguistics, for example reinvigorated inves-
tigations into the number, timing and antiquity of migrations into the
Americas.
Another issue that Monte Verde brings to light is more general,
concerning some very deeply rooted beliefs about the nature and lives
of people before the advent of agriculture: the concept of Man the
Hunter.
Man the Hunter was the title of a symposium held in Chicago in
that brought together seventy-five scholars from around the world
for the first intensive survey of . . . mans once universal hunting way
of life. The undisputed tenet here was that hunting defined humanity;
participants declared that hunting is the master behavior pattern of the
Whence have they come?
human species; our intellect, interests, emotions, and basic social life
are all evolutionary products of the success of the hunting adaptation.
War and cowboy films were two aspects of life in the second half
of the twentieth century which helped to ensure that boys grew up
believing males were born to fight and prevail, while females bore chil-
dren and kept the home fires burning. Hunting was the respectable
adult expression of this; red meat its reward. Not surprising, then, that
the prevalence of spearpoints, arrowheads and animal bones that archae-
ologists unearthed at prehistoric sites around the world was seen as
proof that hunting had been the primeval driving force of human evolu-
tion: for those who would understand the origin and nature of human
behavior there is no choice but to try to understand Man the Hunter,
the Chicago symposium was told.
And once a belief like that is established, research on the subject
tends to become self-fulfilling, with evidence assessed by the extent to
which it conforms with the paradigm. Here, too, Monte Verde broke
through the barrier. The site had been preserved in a bog, which inhib-
ited the decay of organic matter and left indisputable evidence of a far
more diverse and bountiful economy than hunting. The occupants had
occupied the site throughout the year; they were not exclusively nomadic;
nor were they principally big-game hunters they ate meat, certainly,
but the acquisition and preparation of vegetable foods and medicines
had clearly occupied a good deal of their time and energies too. Yet if
the Monte Verde site had been in a more typical location, none of the
organic matter would have been preserved. Only the hundreds of stone
artefacts and bones would have been found. And then it would have
been another classic Man the Hunter site important for its antiq-
uity, but adding little or nothing to the understanding of the origin
and nature of human behaviour.
Monte Verde is a rare if not unique case. Most archaeological
evidence of early human activity in the Americas has been recovered
either from sites in open locations, as at Clovis, where the preserva-
tion of organic material is poor to non-existent, or in caves, where it
is not much better. How many sites that have been so readily attrib-
uted to Man the Hunter would have been classified in more general
terms if the preservation had been as complete as at Monte Verde?
In the Peruvian Andes, for instance, numerous cave sites are listed
under The Central Andean Hunting Tradition by virtue of the bones
and stone points, blades and scrapers they contained. Dating from up
to about , years ago, the caves are located at elevations of between
Potato
, and , metres. Since protein and fats are essential elements of
the human diet (and skins, bone and sinews have practical uses), we
can be sure that the cave-dwellers used some of the points and blades
for hunting. Even so, they would have needed a dependable source of
vegetable foods for even a relatively brief stay in the region. So perhaps
it was not merely fortuitous that their caves usually overlooked valleys
or lakes, where the local vegetation, with its host of edible seeds, roots
and tubers, could have been as much of an attraction as its animal popu-
lation. Indeed, these are exactly the locations where the domestication
of the potato (and other Andean crops) probably began.
Scraps of organic material do occur in some of the high Andean
cave sites, and even the remains of edible plants have been found, but
archaeological investigations still draw more attention to the hunter
than to the gatherer unsurprisingly, given that the evidence of hunting
activities is more readily preserved, but frustrating to those wishing to
trace the use and domestication of the potato through the millennia.
All we have is the evidence of potatoes being consumed at Monte
Verde around , years ago, and then a gap of several thousand years
before any sign at all of the potato appears in the archeological record.
In , shrivelled tubers found during the excavation of a cave site
on the high western slopes of the Andes, kilometres south-east of
Lima, were identified as domesticated potatoes, and said to be ,
years old. But this claim is treated with extreme caution, since it is
based on the plants position in the deposit, not on radiocarbon dating
of the specimens themselves (the danger here is that such items can
easily slip down through cracks in the deposit, thus encouraging a belief
that they are older than they are). In fact, after Monte Verde, the first
reliable evidence of potatoes as part of the human diet comes more
than , years later and , kilometres to the north.
Archaeologists have found tubers to which secure radiocarbon dating
gives an age of around , years near Casma, in the coastal desert of
central Peru. But this was not a bog site nor even a cave site; it was
an agglomeration of domestic and civic ruins spread over more than
two square kilometres of dry desert sands larger than Londons Hyde
Park. Extreme aridity (the present rainfall average of less than milli-
metres per year has prevailed for millennia) preserved organic matter
as effectively as the bog at Monte Verde, and it is equally clear that
people at the Casma locations also enjoyed a varied diet and partici-
pated in extensive trade networks. Their potatoes, for instance, were
most definitely domesticated (comparative analysis of starch cells proved
Whence have they come?
that), but could not have been grown in the coastal desert conditions
at Casma without extensive irrigation (of which there is no evidence).
They must have come from the highlands probably exchanged for
fish and could even have been brought down as chuo, the dried
form that both preserves potatoes and detoxifies them. All of which
indicates that by , years ago at the latest, the potato was domesti-
cated and grown extensively enough in the Andes for it to serve both
as a food crop and an item of trade.
In South America, as in all centres where civilisation first took root,
the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and a settled
way of life was accompanied by profound cultural and social change.
Within a few generations of abandoning the nomadic way of life that
had sustained their ancestors for untold thousands of years, the settlers
villages grew to the size of cities and their egalitarian communities
were subsumed into states under the control of a ruling elite. In South
America the process began along the Andean coastline, where numerous
settled communities were established by , years ago. And no sooner
had some developed successful economies than they began spending
their surplus wealth on the construction of temples, tombs, grand plazas
and massive pyramids just like their counterparts in Egypt,
Mesopotamia and China. Dozens of such places were built along the
coast, each with its monumental architecture demonstrating the
conspicious extravagance that has characterised the early formative stages
of civilisation around the world.
There was art too paintings, sculpture, carvings, tapestries and
wonderful ceramics. A diverse series of ceramic styles evolved, each
with a wide range of examples, but the most interesting from the point
of view of this narrative is the pottery of the Moche, who ruled the
coastal and immediate inland regions of northern Peru from the begin-
ning of the Christian era until about AD . The Moche took the
potters art to an exceptionally high standard, producing vessels whose
purpose must have been more decorative, or ceremonial, than utili-
tarian. Every aspect of Moche life is depicted in the finely worked clay:
men in the fields, people chasing deer with spears and clubs, hunters
aiming blowguns at brilliantly feathered birds, fishermen putting to sea
in small canoes, craftsmen at work, soldiers in battle, and scenes of
human sacrifice all beautifully painted and burnished. There are also
scenes of people being carried in sedan chairs, seated on thrones,
receiving tribute and engaging in sexual activities both commonplace
and remarkable all shown in exquisite detail.
Potato
Potatoes feature prominently among the Moche ceramics. Of course,
the tubers globular form is easily reproduced, and there are plenty of
what might be called conventional potato pots, in that they are shaped
like a potato, but there are also some oddities that combine the potato
and the human form in a disturbing manner. The simplest just make
a head or a face of the potato, or use naturally occurring shapes to
represent the human form like the tubers that occasionally turn up
with knobbly heads or limbs attached but others are more sinister.
On one, several heads erupt through the skin; on another, a man carrying
a corpse emerges from the deeply incised eyes; a potato head has its
nose and lips cut off; potato eyes are depicted as mutilations . . .
We can never know whether any particular significance should be
attached to the combination of human and potato forms in Moche
pottery, but surely must agree with an authority on most things relating
to the potato, the Cambridge scientist Redcliffe N. Salaman, who
concluded that the pots illustrate the overwhelming importance to
certain sections of the population of the potato as a food, . . . to the
people both of the coast and the sierra especially in times of famine
or war. For, as we know, the potato could not be cultivated on the
hot and arid coastal desert. Imports from the highlands were the only
source, and for coastal people who had become dependent on the
potato a disrupted supply could spell disaster.
The Moche civilisation disintegrated around AD , and if the
collapse was precipitated by a failure in potato supplies, it was prob-
ably caused deliberately especially if the Moche had been getting
their potatoes from around the shores of Lake Titicaca; for it was here
that a number of groups coalesced into what became the Tiwanaku
state. And the rise of Tiwanaku precisely coincided with the fall of
Moche. They were all states for whom warfare and bloodshed were the
principal means of gaining and governing territory, but depriving an
opponent of an essential food would have been a no less effective
strategy.
Tiwanaku was the first state to be based largely on the cultivation
of potatoes. It was also the first state in the Americas to build its
numerous huge monuments in stone (Moche and others had used clay
and mudbricks) and it was the exceptional productivity of their farming
practices that enabled them to afford such extravagances a first instance
of the economic, social and political influence the potato would have
throughout the world.
Today, Tiwanaku is a UNESCO world heritage site administered by
Whence have they come?
the Bolivian government. It stands at an altitude of , metres above
sea level, close to the southern end of Lake Titicaca. The site is a popular
venue for tourists visiting the region, though much of its architecture
is in a poor state of preservation after centuries of looting and amateur
excavations. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
substantial amounts of its stonework were taken for building and railway
construction, and the remainder was used for military target practice.
Nonetheless, some impressive monuments and statues remain.
At the height of its powers between AD and , Tiwanaku
was a huge and powerful state, controlling an empire of some ,
square kilometres from its capital of state buildings, palaces, pyramids,
temples, plazas and streets, apparently all built to an integrated design
by legions of stonemasons and master craftsmen. In its heyday, ,
people are said to have lived at Tiwanaku. This is impressive by any
standard, but at , metres above sea level where the air is thin,
the sun is fierce and temperatures regularly fall below freezing the
achievement merits even greater admiration and further examination.
The key to Tiwanakuan success was the judicious husbanding and
manipulation of the regions natural resources. They domesticated and
herded vast numbers of llamas, for example, which not only provided
transportation for their voluminous trade with the lowland regions, but
also converted the Altiplanos widely dispersed grasses into a compact
and easily gathered source of energy. Dried llama dung has a high
calorific value; it has fuelled the cooking fires and heated the dwellings
of Altiplano farmers for hundreds of years.
The llama herds would also have supplied the Tiwanaku commu-
nities with meat but the entrenched view of Man the Hunter as the
formative imperative of human development should not be allowed to
exaggerate the significance of this.The Titicaca region was also endowed
with native plants of exceptional nutritional value, and while it might
have been hunting that first attracted people to the area, it was the
food plant resources that enabled them to establish permanent settle-
ments there. There were several tasty options to be dug from the soils
of the Altiplano, as we have seen, including the potato, but also above-
ground food plants such as quinoa and kaihua two pseudo-cereals
which, although not of the grass family, yield prodigious quantities of
cereal-like seeds. Both quinoa and kaihua typically have a protein
content of per cent (enough to temper the hunting imperative),
and a most useful capacity to thrive under the extreme conditions of
the Altiplano. Indeed, kaihua will germinate and start to grow at minus
Potato
degrees Celsius, and some varieties of quinoa are similarly able to
begin growth at or near freezing point.
The practice of allowing livestock to feed on the stubble of newly
harvested fields and thus manure the fields and improve productivity
was adopted by Tiwanaku farmers at an early stage. They also developed
the practice of planting their crops on ridges one metre or more high,
and metres wide, with ditches in between. The ridges were set
typically in a pattern of ten or more; the ditches were open-ended,
neither closed off such as might serve to keep water in or out nor
forming a network typical of drainage or irrigation systems.
When Tiwanaku first came under scientific scrutiny in the s,
investigators were puzzled as to what the function of the ridged fields
could have been especially as surveys revealed that they had once
covered a total area of more than square kilometres. Neither irri-
gation, drainage nor land reclamation made sense in that region on
that scale, but in the s a series of studies showed the raised fields
functioned extremely well as a means of keeping the land frost-free. It
was found that when the ditches contained a reasonable depth of water
(as they usually did), its temperature, and that of adjacent soils, could
be as much as degrees Celsius higher than the surrounding air
temperature on cold nights.
Differentials on this scale can raise productivity significantly. In trials,
quinoa and kaihua yields were four to eight times larger on the ridges
than on flat fields, and potato yields were equally impressive: . tonnes
per hectare compared with regional averages of between . and
tonnes.
Thus, although they had settled in one of the most demanding inhab-
itable environments on earth, the Tiwanaku were blessed with a bounty
of food. Even without the innovation of heat-conserving ridges, their
domesticated animals and cultivated food plants could have sustained
sizeable populations. But with potatoes growing in temperature-
controlled soils, the potential soared. Even if only three-quarters of the
ridged fields was in use at one time (which would allow for a four-
year rotation), potatoes alone would have produced enough calories to
support a population of at least , people, while quinoa, kaihua
and llamas provided the protein they required.
In fact, the Tiwanaku population was never so large, which invites
the conclusion that, at the peak of operations, there was a sizeable
surplus of potatoes to dispose of. And here the freezing nights and dry
sunny days of the Altiplano worked to the advantage of the Tiwanaku,
Whence have they come?
facilitating the conversion of their surplus potatoes into chuo a
durable, valuable and highly marketable commodity. With herds of
domesticated llamas to provide the transport, Tiwanaku potatoes must
have been distributed far and wide. There are the remnants of several
large ancient causeways in and around Tiwanaku that were probably
built to facilitate the export traffic, and it is significant that some of
Perus major roadways appear to have been constructed as Tiwanaku
rose to supremacy, for they would have been essential for the efficient
movement of goods to distant markets such as Moche.
Potatoes thus not only filled Tiwanakuan bellies, but also fuelled
long-distance trade and the emergence of the bureaucracy needed to
run the operation which in turn called upon the states communal
organisations for the massive labour forces required to produce, process,
store and transport the goods.
The demise of Tiwanaku appears to have been a relatively slow
process, and certainly not due to sudden capitulation. The ridged fields
fell into disuse; the power of Tiwanaku dwindled. It seems that no
single cause was responsible, though factional differences between leaders
on what are now the Bolivian and Peruvian sides of Lake Titicaca
cannot have helped, and climatic changes could have made the matter
worse. Ice cores taken from glaciers on mountains to the north-west
show that the Titicaca basin was already in the grip of a serious drought
from to , and limnological studies at the lake itself confirm
that lake levels were at their lowest for over years by that time.
Researchers conclude from these findings that from about AD or
a little earlier, the entire southern Altiplano was affected by a major
long-term drought, which steadily eliminated the elaborate farming
system and, with it, the power of the Tiwanaku state. And left the
stage clear for the appearance of the mighty Inca.
The Inca went beyond mere statehood to found an empire that was
the largest and most highly integrated political system ever to appear
in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. Their origins are not
definitively known. Oral histories recorded by the Spanish tell of
Quechua groups uniting on the fertile lands of the Cuzco valley some-
time around AD under the leadership of Manco Capac, to whom
legend attributes the founding of the Inca dynasty. Subsequently they
captured the town, formed an alliance with neighbouring groups and
progressively added new provinces to the empire by conquest, treaty
or simple annexation.
Potato
Perhaps inspired by the construction work they saw at Tiwanaku,
the Inca transformed their capital city, Cuzco, into an orderly arrange-
ment of streets, houses and monumental buildings, complete with a
municipal water supply and drainage system. From here, they ruled an
empire they called the Tahuantinsuyu the parts that in their four-
ness make up the whole which embraced over a million square kilo-
metres of South America.The empire stretched from the Pacific coastline
eastward across the Andes into the Amazonian lowlands and from
Columbia southward to central Chile and Argentina, and brought many
diverse regional economic and political systems under the administra-
tion of a single royal lineage. At its height, million people were living
under Inca rule in one of the most intricately ordered societies of all
time.
The strength of the Inca system was their determination to estab-
lish a permanent presence in the territories they took over. Instead of
the invasion, plunder and withdrawal that had characterised expansion
tactics until that time, the Incas installed local administrators and located
military garrisons throughout the empire. To facilitate communications,
pre-existing land routes (such as had carried the Tiwanaku export trade)
were linked and upgraded to create a network of paved roads that gave
all corners of the empire direct access to Cuzco. This involved cutting
tunnels through mountains; laying causeways across swamps; building
embankments along the flanks of precipitous ravines, and spanning rivers
with suspension bridges made of fibre ropes hung from stone towers.
In all, about , kilometres of roads were built enough to encircle
the globe with food stores and administrative outposts placed along
them at strategic points and runners stationed about a kilometre apart
so that a message passed from one to another could travel as much as
, kilometres in just five days, it is said.
The economic basis of the Inca empire was an integrated system
of farming, herding, fishing, mining, craft manufacture, state service
and so forth. Starvation was not a threat under the Incas, but people
lived at the order of the state and, in one way or another, food was
the sine qua non of Inca administrative policies. Flights of terraces
were built to bring hitherto unusable steep mountainsides into culti-
vation; canals and aqueducts brought water from distant sources to
irrigate dry land; existing irrigation systems were extended to increase
productivity (though the Tiwanaku raised fields were not reinstated,
perhaps because appreciation of the technology had been lost, or
climate still militated against it); guano and fish remains were brought
Whence have they come?
from the coast to fertilise the soil. Throughout the empire, the agri-
cultural land accessible to each community was divided into three
parts: one for the Gods, one for the State, and one for the commu-
nity. Farmers were obliged to cultivate all three, but lived off the
produce of their communitys land. The harvests they reaped from
the other two categories were consigned to the stores of the Gods
and the State, to be used in ceremonies, to feed soldiers and the
armies of masons, miners and craftsmen working for the greater glory
of the Inca, and also for distribution to those whom local crop fail-
ures might have left in need.
But the masterstroke of the Inca was the spread and intensification
of maize production. Maize was not a native Andean crop, having been
introduced from its Mexican homeland even before the Inca rose to
power. In their hands, however, it achieved new heights of utility. Highly
productive and easily transported, maize flowed continuously through
the Incas arterial network, nourishing their physical, economic and
strategic systems. But the greatest benefit was that while it fuelled the
expansion of the empire, maize production did not completely replace
the traditional agricultural system.
By Inca times, potatoes were well and truly established as the staple
food of the high Andes, grown in rotation with the indigenous quinoa
and kaihua, on land lengthily fallowed and fertilised by herds of
domesticated llama and alpaca. Maize displaced potato production at
lower altitudes, but this intensified its continuation higher up, at ,
metres and above, where maize would not grow. Under the Incas, people
were obliged to build terraces and irrigation systems for maize, and
tend the crop, but organised labour also increased all-round efficiency.
The traditional systems persisted, and people lived off the produce of
traditional agropastoralism even while they worked on state and reli-
gious lands or on civic projects for the benefit of the Inca empire.
Thus, although the Inca used maize to extend and maintain their power,
the grain supplemented rather than supplanted the most valuable sub-
sistence crop of the Andes the potato.
Maize was important to the Inca not only as an easily transported
food commodity, but also as a grain from which a beer they called
chicha could be brewed. Chicha is nutritious as well as alcoholic a
welcome and altogether palatable brew that became a prestige item,
associated with the imperial power and theology of the Inca state.
Throughout the empire people were regularly brought together for
communal feasts at which large quantities of chicha were consumed; in
Potato
this way, the elite reinforced their status and reminded the peasantry
of how much they owed to the state and its religion.
The Inca worshipped the gods of sun and thunder, of the Earth,
the sea, the moon and the stars. They recognised that the sun was
the giver of life in the cold highlands and so, lacking a distinguished
past or any inherited property, the founder of the Inca dynasty,
Manco Capac, had declared that his father was the sun, his mother
the moon, and his brother the day-star,Venus. Manco Capac ordered
the building of the Coricancha, the Sun Temple, in Cuzco, a massive
building demonstrating the finest skills of Inca stonemasonry, with
exterior walls measuring metres by metres and interior struc-
tures more than metres high. A gold frieze about a metre wide
ran around the exterior wall and the entrance was similarly sheathed
in solid gold. It is said that , attendants watched over the various
shrines and treasures of the Coricancha, the most precious of which
symbolised the Inca belief in their divine descent from the sun a
massive disc of solid gold, with sunbeams radiating from a human
face at its centre.
There was also a garden dedicated to the sun at the Coricancha,
where golden cobs of maize stood life-size on stalks of silver and the
ground was scattered with lumps of gold resembling potatoes.
The Inca empire had existed at its fullest extent for less than
years when its rule was brought to an end by Spanish conquistadors
in . Given the size and power of the empire, it seems odd that it
should have fallen so readily to Francisco Pizarro and his force of less
than men, but the seeds of downfall had been sown some years
before. The death of the Inca Huanya Capac in had been followed
by eruptions of opposition to Inca rule in several parts of the empire
(so much so that some factions actually welcomed the Spanish when they
arrived). Huanya Capac had died suddenly in the Incas Ecuadorian
capital, Quito, in an epidemic of smallpox that spread from Spanish
exploratory landings on the coast that year. He had died without
declaring which of his three sons, Ninan, Huascar or Atahuallpa, should
succeed him as absolute ruler and further confusion ensued when the
first-born, Ninan, died of smallpox shortly after his father, leaving Huascar
and Atahuallpa each claiming the right of succession. Their political
intrigues culminated in civil war, from which Atahuallpa had only just
emerged victorious, in , when Francisco Pizarro and his men
reached Cajamarca an Andean town in what is now Peru, on the
Inca road from Quito to Cuzco.
Whence have they come?
By then, Huascar was in captivity, the systematic slaughter of his
family and followers had been completed and Atahuallpa was journey-
ing to Cuzco for his installation as ruling Inca. He stopped to meet the
Spaniards, who were virtually imprisoned in Cajamarca by encircling
Inca armies. A formal meeting was arranged, and an eyewitness, Francisco
de Jerez, recorded how Atahuallpa entered the town at twilight with a
party of his senior generals, all splendidly dressed and bedecked with
gold and silver regalia. Retainers swept the road before them, dancers
and singers accompanied them, and Atahuallpa was carried on a litter
lined with red, yellow and blue parrot feathers. In the town square, an
ambush awaited them. Atahuallpa was captured and his companions
killed before the armies outside the town could be alerted.
With their divine ruler captive and leading generals dead, the Inca
armies fell into disarray. Pizarro played one disaffected faction against
another and eventually gained control of them all. Atahuallpa was held
hostage while a huge ransom of gold and silver treasure was collected
to secure his release; then he was tried on charges of offending the
laws of Spain, found guilty and executed.
The earth refused to devour the Incas body rocks trembled, tears
made torrents, the Sun was obscured, the Moon ill, a sixteenth-century
account laments, and with the death of Atahuallpa, the last divine image
of the Sun on Earth, the New Worlds most imposing indigenous civil-
isation fell to the power of Europe.
Atahuallpas ransom was melted down to tons of pure gold and
silver ingots. This was only the beginning of the fabulous wealth that
flowed from the Andes into Spanish coffers and it was to have a
profound effect on the economies and history of Europe. So too would
another Andean treasure which the Spaniards almost entirely over-
looked: the potato.
Chapter Five
A dainty dish
Huge amounts of gold and silver were shipped to Spain in the decades
following the discovery of the Americas, but, even so, it was not the
prospect of treasure that attracted most of the , men and
women known to have left Spain for the New World between
and .
They were not all soldiers or romantic adventurers by any means,
more an advance guard of European economic expansion, with a real-
istic outlook and the uncompromising demeanour of entrepreneurs
who would acquire land, engage in trade, and change the ecological
and human landscape to suit their needs. In research that looked beyond
the facts of conquest into the nature of Spains colonisation of South
America, the historian James Lockhart investigated the life stories of
Pizarro and his men: who were they, where did they come from, what
were their occupations, their ambitions, and what became of them?
Lockhart was able to do this because when the Inca treasure was
melted down and distributed among Pizarro and his men after the
ransom and execution of Atahuallpa at Cajamarca in , records were
made of exactly who received how much. Over a period of nearly four
months, tons of treasure were melted down, producing , pounds
of .-carat gold; silver objects yielded , pounds of silver. The
ingots emerging from the furnaces were officially stamped with the
royal mark, to show that each had been legally melted and the oblig-
atory one-fifth of its value paid to the royal treasury. Francisco Pizarro
received the largest share roughly pounds of gold and over ,
pounds of silver and every one of the other men received a
precise fraction of the total according to his status and role on the
expedition.
Potato
Each allocation of gold and silver was recorded and notarised, and
if this attention to detail seems surprising in a newly discovered land
where even the paper it was recorded on had travelled thousands of
miles and a pen would need to be cut from an eagles quill, then
consider the occupational qualifications of the men that Pizarro selected
for his expedition. The men of Cajamarca were a diverse lot, coming
from every region of Spain, representing every social position from the
son of a slave to the relative of a courtier, and between them practising
all the major callings and crafts. The maintenance of the expedition
and the bureaucratic needs of a new colony were as well provided for
as the demands of conquest.
Every man accompanying Pizarro was obliged to take arms when
called upon to do so, but there were only four professional soldiers
among the men whom Lockhart identified by occupation. The expe-
ditions largest contingent consisted of artisans: six tailors, two black-
smiths, two carpenters, one cooper, one swordsmith, one stonemason,
one crier and one barber. Next came the professionals: notaries,
secretaries and accountants twelve in all, who were required to
make records of all transactions, double-check the arithmetic, certify
the legality of agreements and generally ensure that the bureaucratic
foundations of the new colony were soundly laid (as well as compen-
sate for the fact that Francisco Pizarro himself could neither read
nor write).
As Lockhart points out, it is because there were notaries and secre-
taries on Pizarros expeditionary force that so much is known about
the men of Cajamarca. And it is overwhelmingly evident that, among
them, as with most Spaniards who left their homeland for new hori-
zons during the sixteenth century, the driving ambition was to amount
to something. First as an individual, but most importantly as the means
of raising the position and prestige of ones family and lineage. Once
they had wealth, the men of Cajamarca longed to get back to Spain
to buy property, to acquire a position at court or in regional admin-
istration, to marry well, have children and ensure the continuity of a
wealthy and respected family line.
If they had been free to go, the majority of Pizarros men probably
would have taken their treasure and returned to Spain forthwith. Why
else did Pizarro order that most should stay and assist in the task of
consolidating the Spanish presence in Peru? A general exodus would
have dangerously weakened the Spanish position, so only a few were
permitted to leave in the immediate aftermath of the conquest: among
A dainty dish
them officials accompanying the treasure due to the Spanish crown,
and the married men who had been away longest. The yearnings of
those obliged to remain, their thoughts of the homeland and dreams
of how they might use their new wealth to further themselves and
their families, are poignantly illustrated in a letter Gaspar de Marquina
wrote home to his father from Cajamarca in July .
Gaspar was from the Basque country, an illegitimate son whose father
had recognized him, brought him up, and given him an education that
could have qualified him to become a merchant or a notary. But instead
of settling down in Spain, Gaspar set off for the New World at an early
age, where he adopted the name Marquina. He was still in his early
twenties when he became a footman to Francisco Pizarro on the expe-
dition to Peru. His letter is the only one to survive of the many personal
letters the men of Cajamarca must have sent back to Spain with the
first returnees. James Lockhart gives a translation:
Of the men who each received a share of the Inca treasure at Cajamarca,
sixty-six are known to have returned to Spain within a few years of
the conquest. Among them, Juan Ruiz, like Gaspar de Grate and many
others, was from a family of commoners but schooled more in the
training of horses than in the education required of a merchant or a
notary (Ruiz could sign his name, but his ability to read and write did
A dainty dish
not extend much beyond that). He sailed to the New World around
at the age of eighteen, shortly after the death of his father. Having
tried his luck without success in Jamaica, Honduras and Nicaragua,
he caught word of operations in Peru and signed up as a horseman
with Pizarros expedition.
With a share of treasure amounting to more than double that which
Gaspar de Grate had received, Juan Ruiz was among the first to return
to Spain after restrictions were relaxed in . By September , he
was at the royal court in Madrid, negotiating substantial annuities in
return for gold and silver he had brought back. He was granted a coat
of arms too, and with that retired to his home town of Alburquerque
in western Extremadura. He was not yet thirty years old, but lost no
time in outfitting himself and his family line for the seigneurial life
that every Spaniard dreamt of, but very few ever achieved.
Having made a will and testament ensuring that his descendants
would be citizens of substantial means for generations to come, Juan
Ruiz revelled in a life of extravagant magnificence. A palace in the
town, a noble wife, and ostentatious display:
He had twelve squires who served him at table, and many more
servants, pages, lackeys, Negroes and horses, armour, and much table
ware, silver and gold, and many mules at his service; the pitchers he
sent to the fountain were all of silver of much value. When he went
out to hunt or other places he took along many horsemen, the cream
of the town, and his squires as servants. He kept hunting dogs, falcons
and hawks, horses, parrots and other animals. At his death [around
] they gave mourning clothes to twenty-four people besides all
his servants and squires.
The trickle-down effect of the wealth that Juan Ruiz and others
brought back to Spain doubtless gave local economies a boost bene-
fiting trade and providing employment for many who might otherwise
have struggled to support themselves and their families. But the effects
were patchy, more urban than rural, and hardly touched the per
cent of the population that was dependent on subsistence agriculture
there were simply not enough wealthy men to improve living stan-
dards for more than a small fraction of the population as a whole.
Indeed, ironically and tragically the influx of so much gold and
silver from the new world actually made the already deteriorating
prospects of most Spaniards even worse.
Potato
Like all of Europe, Spain in the sixteenth century was suffering the
pains of transition from an agricultural subsistence economy to one
based increasingly on money and the market forces of supply and
demand: the beginnings of capitalism. Crucially, the profits to be made
from wool and textile manufacturing encouraged landowners to convert
tillage to pasture, thereby reducing the amount of land devoted to grain
production and exacerbating the problems of an agricultural economy
that had to contend with poor soils and a testing climate at the best
of times.
Most of Europes sixteenth-century farmers could expect to harvest
about six times the amount sown in an average year; but in Spain A
year which yielded four times the amount sown was considered to be
abundant; very good if it gave five times; extraordinary if six or seven
times were harvested. For Spain, then, even more than for the rest of
Europe, Grain was a preoccupation simply because it was always scarce,
a matter of life and death. The country was already struggling with
the effects of repeated and prolonged grain shortages as the sixteenth
century dawned, and prospects for the future were not improved when
more and more sheep were put out to graze where wheat had previ-
ously grown.
As wool production soared and Spain began to dominate the inter-
national markets, the country became increasingly dependent on grain
imports from the Middle East and the Baltic to make up for the defi-
ciencies in home production a precarious state of affairs which the
influx of so much wealth from the New World might have been expected
to alleviate. But, in fact, the sheer volume of gold and silver flowing
into Spain had the effect of devaluing the currency, precipitating a price
revolution that saw the cost of staple goods and foodstuffs rise three-
fold in the course of the century.
This ominous trend had begun even before the New World was
discovered, as silver production in Europe rose to meet the demand for
money in the growing market economies. The trend accelerated with
Spains acquisition of so much treasure in so short a period, and the
discovery of silver at Potos in the s intensified its effects. The
amounts of treasure then at the disposal of the crown (with the confi-
dent expectation of plenty more to come) fuelled Spains imperialist
ambitions, invigorated the countrys determination to defend the
Catholic faith against Protestantism and Islam, financed wars and, in
short, became the bedrock upon which Spains aggressive foreign policy
was founded. In those days of relatively undeveloped international
A dainty dish
finance, gold and silver were highly prized means of supporting military
operations in distant lands.
Thus, by way of its military and economic activities, Spain flooded
the markets with more wealth than could be absorbed and the conse-
quences were felt wherever nations and merchants engaged in trade.
There was simply too much money around for the amount of avail-
able goods and services. Prices rose as the value of silver fell. The econ-
omist Adam Smith wrote of this in The Wealth of Nations ():
So, although hopes of finding (or making) a fortune will have sharp-
ened the enthusiasm of many who left Spain for the New World in
the early sixteenth century, most were looking for a chance to satisfy
needs and ambitions they believed could not be fulfilled at home, where
the price revolution was making life difficult for all but the very wealthy.
The emigrants wanted a livelihood of some sort, and prospects of
advancement. But whatever had forced them to leave, they took their
homelands social and cultural standards with them. A new world yes,
but one moulded to resemble the old. Religion, law, society and culture
must replicate the forms they had known in Spain. They strove to live
like Spaniards and especially to eat like Spaniards.
After weeks of hardtack and salt meat on the crossing, new arrivals
welcomed the abundance of fresh fruit and green vegetables that was
available, but were far less enthusiastic about the indigenous staple foods
of the Caribbean, central America and the Andes. Few deigned to touch
the edible rodents that ran through the fields and forests; nor did they
fancy the iguana lizards which local people ate with such relish. In
central Mexico only the most desperate Spaniards would eat any of
the many wild animals found in and around the lakes. In the Andes,
the llama, vicua and the alpaca were similarly regarded as useful sources
of protein in an emergency, but no substitute for beef and mutton as
part of a day-to-day diet. Likewise, Andean hares and guinea pigs were
little more than novelty local foods to the Spanish. Nor did breads
made from maize and cassava meet with much approval; nor native
grains such as amaranth and quinoa. All in all, the emigrants generally
regarded the native foodstuffs that sustained central and south America
Potato
as fit for livestock, poultry and the indigenous population, but not for
Spaniards except in an emergency.
And the potato? We read of Pizarro and his party subsisting on guinea
pig, llama meat, maize, potatoes and chicha (a fermented maize drink
tasting like stale cider) while at Cajamarca, and there is some sugges-
tion that they may have resorted to eating potatoes in the absence of
anything else at Tmbez on the northern coast, but first-hand accounts
of sightings (and tastings) of the potato are few and far between. The
earliest known have been uncovered by scholars delving through
contemporary manuscripts in the archives and libraries of Madrid and
Bogot, Lima and Seville, Quito and Paris.
Credit for the first description of potatoes being seen by Europeans
goes to Juan de Castellanos, whose legas of record the exploits
of an expedition which set out in from Santa Marta on the
Caribbean shore of what is now Columbia. The expedition was led by
Jimnez de Quesada, and on entering the high valleys of the northern
Andes in , they found the local people cultivating a crop which
they likened to the European truffle. It was not identified by name, but
can only have been the potato:
The houses were all stocked with maize, beans and truffles, spher-
ical roots which are sown and produce a stem with its branches and
leaves, and some flowers, although few, of a soft purple colour;
and to the root of this same plant, which is about three palms high
[ inches, centimetres], they are attached under the earth, and
are the size of an egg more or less, some round and some elongated;
they are white and purple and yellow, floury roots of good flavour,
a delicacy to the Indians and a dainty dish even for the Spaniards.
The first writer to identify the potato by its name was Pedro Cieza
de Len, who travelled extensively through the Andes in the late s
and s and left voluminous accounts of the regions history, the places
he visited and the people he saw. Cieza de Lens writings extend to
around , pages. He writes of the Inca, and their history before the
arrival of the Spanish; he gives the details of Pizarros expedition, the
events at Cajamarca, and the battles that established Spanish dominion
over Peru; he describes mountains, rivers and valleys where there were
large palm groves, and palm hearts were taken from some varieties,
and they bore coconuts that were used for milk, and they even make
a cream and lard from them that can be used in lamps, for they burn
A dainty dish
as oil. He writes of land so fertile that one hundred bushels of maize
are harvested for every bushel sown; of farmers who put two sardine
heads with the maize in the same hole that is made for the seed, and
in this manner the grain grows and yields abundantly . . .
But amidst such copious detail, Cieza de Len makes scant mention
of the potato surprisingly scant, given what is now known of the
potatos importance as a staple food of Andean peoples at the time, and
the benefits it has subsequently brought to the wider world:
many harbours on the coast of the seas, and many rivers, good and
large. Its islands are high and there are very lofty mountains. All are
Potato
most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all are accessible and filled
with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, and they seem to touch the
sky. And some were flowering and some bearing fruit. And the
nightingale was singing, and other birds of a thousand kinds. . . . The
people go all naked, men and women . . . They are so guileless and
generous with all they possess that no one would believe it who has
not seen it.
Part Two
Europe
Chapter Six
John Fletcher, who wrote these lines for his play The Loyal Servant, was
one of a band of dramatists who, in the early s, made London the
worlds first centre of the entertainment business. The theatre was a
popular novelty and better value at the basic admission price of one
penny than even a beer or a meal. Thirteen per cent of Londoners
went to see a play every week in ; which works out at some ,
a day or , theatregoers a week for Londons then population of
,.
The demand for new works was insatiable. In the fifty-two years
between and (when the civil war started, and Parliament
declared that publicke Stage-playes shall cease and be forborne) a total
of over , plays are known to have been written by named authors.
Shakespeare contributed thirty-eight, but for every one of his at least
another twenty were written by other dramatists. Many have been lost,
but are known, of which no fewer than were the work of just
forty-four dramatists. Among these, Thomas Heywood claimed he had
written or had a maine finger in plays. Thomas Dekker wrote at
least sixty-four, forty-four of them in the five years from to .
And John Fletcher wrote or collaborated in a total of sixty-nine plays.
The dramatists knew their market, and even Shakespeare was not
above including the salacious exchanges that would provoke a laugh
Potato
and might encourage the audience to return next week, keen for more.
Thus in The Merry Wives of Windsor he has Falstaff in Windsor Park,
dressed as a stag, awaiting a cool rut-time and greeting Mistress Ford
as: my doe with the black scut! Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder
to the tune of Green Sleeves, hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes;
let there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here. And
in Troilus and Cressida Thersites declares: How the devil luxury, with
his fat rump and potato-finger, tickles these together! Fry, lechery, fry!
The potato was believed to be an aphrodisiac in Shakespeares day
and it is in this context rather than as food that Falstaff and
Thersites are speaking of it. But Shakespeare was an innocent when
compared with his contemporaries, and it is among their writings that
more frequent and direct references to the sexually arousing properties
of the potato appear.
John Fletcher again:
One might imagine that with so many references to the potato, over
an extended period, the year and location of the tubers first appear-
ance in Europe and England would be well known by now. After all,
here was an item renowned for characteristics that were likely to attract
interest even where serious discussion was unlikely, and expensive
enough to be known of even by those who could never afford it (Sir
The lonely impulse of delight
Joseph Banks, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, wrote
that potatoes were purchased when scarce at no inconsiderable cost,
by those who had faith in their alleged properties).
Surely, someone must have claimed credit for its introduction? Or
at the very least, first knowledge of its properties and availability must
have been recorded? But scour the literature and primary sources, and
far from discovering a precise name and date, the pursuit is soon over-
taken by confusion. Not least in respect of which potato the writers
were referring to; for there were two candidates: the common potato
Solanum tuberosum tuberosum; and the sweet potato Ipomoea batatas. The
two are in no way related, as we have seen.
Columbus had encountered sweet potatoes on his first voyage, in
, and reported that they looked like yams and tasted like chest-
nuts. They were included among the curiosities he exhibited to the
Spanish court on his return, and stocks of both roots and planting mate-
rial were shipped back to Spain on subsequent voyages. By the second
or third decade of the sixteenth century the sweet potato was already
widely cultivated in southern Europe wherever conditions were suit-
able. Northern Europe was too cold, so for London it was an imported
delicacy and costly, but presumably worth the expense to those in
need of its alleged properties. Though a tasty fare whether boiled, baked
or fried, it was as a sliced and candied sucket, or sweetmeat, that the
sweet potato is most often mentioned. It is said that Henry VIII was
especially partial to its delights.
Sixteenth-century writers were undoubtedly referring to the sweet
potato, since the common potato was unknown in Europe during their
time, but when writers during the seventeenth century attributed aphro-
disiacal properties to the potato they could be referring to either, since
both were available by then and neither was cheap.
But the difficulty in discovering who brought the common potato
to Europe and when is more than a confusion over names; it is also a
reflection of what was known in the fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries. The investigative study of botany and natural science had yet
to begin. The description of plants still followed the classical tradition
established by Pliny the Elders Natural History and the work of
Dioscorides (both compiled in the first century AD). Though their work
was thorough (Dioscorides described about species of plants), they
and their successors were motivated principally by a desire to produce
a catalogue of useful (or dangerous) plants and to describe how they
should be used (or avoided). It was plants with medicinal properties
Potato
that excited the most interest, and they were described in works (first
manuscripts then printed books) that went under the general title of
Herbals.
The Herbal was essentially a medical reference book which identi-
fied the vertues, vices and values of particular plants and listed the
illnesses and conditions to which they might be applied. Avowedly
practical, with an index directing readers to the cure for each malady,
the Herbals were something every household should have, and under-
standably popular (one author claimed to have sold , copies)
and for centuries their authors were content to reiterate and often
plagiarise the works of their predecessors. In the early sixteenth century,
however, a new perspective was introduced by authors who attempted
to advance knowledge with an explanation of the relationship between
condition and cure that they called the Doctrine of Signatures. This
could be seen as an early step in the direction of investigative science,
but serious respect was forever disqualified by the lengths to which it
was taken, and by the boastful arrogance of its most famous propo-
nent, Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim. In the fashion of the
day, von Hohenheim took the latin name Paracelsus, but his second
name, Bombast, is the clue to his character.
The Doctrine of Signatures held that the most effective medicinal
plants were those which in some way mirrored the condition to be
treated. It recommended red beetroot juice for anaemic women, for
instance, and prescribed the yellow celandine as a cure for jaundice.
The flowers of St Johns wort, when they are putrified, they are like
blood, Paracelsus noted, which teacheth us, that this herb is good for
wounds, to close them and fill them up. Similarly, the Doctrine proposed
that long-lived plants would lengthen life (while short-lived ones short-
ened it); herbs with a rough skin would heal diseases that destroyed
the natural smoothness of the skin. Plants with flowers like butterflies
would cure insect bites. The maidenhair fern, with bare stalks and
flowing greenery above, was recommended where baldness threatened
. . . and so on, to the English herbalist William Cole, who in gives
a supreme example of the Doctrine of Signatures in both its principle
and its fatuity:
Wall-nuts have the perfect Signature of the head. The outer husk or
green Covering, represent the Pericranium, or outward skin of the
skull, whereon the hair groweth, and therefore salt made of those
husks or barks, are exceedingly good for wounds in the head. The
The lonely impulse of delight
inner wooddy shell hath the Signature of the Skull, and the little
yellow skin, or Peel, that covereth the Kernell of the hard Meninga
and Pia-mater, which are the thin scarfes that envelope the brain. The
Kernel hath the very figure of the Brain, and therefore it is very prof-
itable for the Brain, and resists poysons; For if the Kernel be bruised,
and moystned with the quintessence of Wine, and laid upon the
Crown of the Head, it comforts the brain and head mightily.
The belief that walnuts are good for the brain and the idea that
potatoes will incite Venus are equally fanciful, but while the Herbals
and the Doctrine of Signatures provided one sort of botanical infor-
mation, another approach was gaining strength an approach that
would ultimately throw light on the question: who brought the potato
to Europe, and when?
It has been said that the scientific study of natural history was invented
in the Renaissance; the first botanists were a diverse community of
men from the Low Countries, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and
England; some of independent means, others from humble homes, who
were united by a passionate interest in the diversity and beauty of the
living plants not simply their medicinal value. They were driven by
an aesthetic imperative, the lonely impulse of delight. They wanted to
see, discover and describe, but soon found that the classical tradition
did not have the last word on plants and their distribution. At first,
loyally, they tried to squeeze their discoveries into the traditional format.
But there was too much that simply did not fit; too much that either
contradicted the received wisdom or was indisputably new.
Among the pioneers, Leonhardt Fuchs and Mathieu LObel are for
ever memorialised in the popular flowering plants that bear their name,
fuchsia and lobelia, and it is a pity that others are not similarly remem-
bered: Pietro Mattioli, Conrad Gessner, Valerius Cordus, Rembert
Dodoens and most especially Carolus Clusius, which was the lat-
inised name of Jules Charles de lcluse. As a scholar and investi-
gator Clusius was in a class apart, applying a degree of industry and
rigour to the study of plants that raised him above all his contempor-
aries. His work was central to the expansion of floristic knowledge by
which the Herbal was transformed into, and finally replaced by, the
Flora.
When Clusius was born in it was still possible for one man to
know every plant that had ever been described. By the time he died
Potato
in , thousands had been added to the catalogue from Europe
and around the world. More than any one man could know. As Adriaan
van de Spiegel wrote in :
John Gerard had trained as a physician, but his energies were chiefly
devoted to gardening and botany. For twenty years he maintained a
much-visited garden in London and supervised two others. In he,
like Bauhin, had published an unillustrated catalogue of his garden
plants, but his reputation as a botanist was founded on the much larger
and illustrated Herball mentioned above. Unhappily, however, that repu-
tation founders on the revelation that not much of the books content
The lonely impulse of delight
was Gerards own work. In an otherwise measured and temperate
account of English naturalists published in , the Cambridge scholar
Charles Raven makes no bones about it, describing Gerard as a rogue.
Moreover, botanically speaking, he was a comparatively ignorant rogue.
The original proposal for The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes had
been that of a London printer, John Norton, who had commissioned
a scholar, Dr Priest, to translate from Latin into English a botanical
work that one of the fathers of botany, Rembert Dodoens, had published
in . Norton purchased , woodcuts from another source to
illustrate the translation but unfortunately Dr Priest died before his text
and the illustrations could be faithfully united. The material passed to
Gerard for completion and he, noting that Priest had closely followed
the original Dodoens, set about rearranging the material so that it
should be recognised as his (Gerards) work, rather than a mere trans-
lation. But his knowledge of botany was not advanced enough for the
task of accurately matching text and illustrations. Many were misplaced,
and once this had been pointed out by a third party, John Norton
brought in another famed botanist, Mathieu LObel, to sort out the
muddle. LObel made numerous corrections, but not as many as he
would have wished, for Gerard became impatient and stopped the
process angrily claiming that LObel didnt know enough English to
do the job properly. Thus about two-thirds of The Herball or Generall
Historie of Plantes published in is reasonably accurate, but the other
third is less reliable.
John Gerard died in . His Herball was redeemed by an amended
edition published in , but his name was forever blighted by the
editors introductory comment:
For the author Mr John Gerard I can say little . . . His chiefe
commendation is that he out of a propense goodwill to the publique
advancement of this knowledge, endeavoured to performe therein
more than he could well accomplish; which was partly through
want of sufficient learning.
It is confusing that Gerard should claim his tubers came from Virginia,
for the potato was unknown there until introduced by settlers after his
time. But it is possible the potatoes arrived on ships that had sailed
from South America via Virginia, and not impossible that Gerard set the
facts aside in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Queen Elizabeth I
by claiming that this new food plant was the first fruit of a colony
which Sir Walter Raleigh had named after the Virgin Queen herself.
It is interesting, also, that whereas Gerard frequently omitted any refer-
ence to help received from other botanists, in this case he quotes Clusius.
But how did he know of Clusiuss report when, as we shall see below,
it was not published until , four years later?
Clusius visited England several times in the late s, but there is
no evidence that he ever met Gerard (who would surely have made
something of the fact if they had), nor did they exchange correspond-
ence. But they did have a friend in common: a London apothecary,
James Garret. Assuming that information on the potato passed among
the three, it seems that Gerard in London, and Clusius in Vienna must
have received their potatoes from different sources between and
. We will probably never know exactly where Gerards came from;
is the source of Clusiuss any clearer?
Clusius was in no doubt that the potatoes he described at length in
his publication were the same as those from the Andes that Pedro
Cieza de Len had seen in . They had been growing in his garden
for several seasons, but he could not explain how they had become so
widely distributed in Europe (he says potatoes by then were common
even fecund in Germany and Italy). Clearly, the original stock must
The lonely impulse of delight
have come from either South America, or Spain, but Clusius could
only say that his first knowledge of the plant had come from Belgium,
at the beginning of , when Philippe de Sivry, Prefect of the city
of Mons, had sent two potato tubers to him in Vienna. De Sivry appar-
ently had been given the tubers by a friend of the Papal Legate in
Belgium, who had brought them from Italy. The Italians had no idea
where their stock had originally come from, and Clusius could only
wonder that knowledge of the plant had not reached him earlier, since
by then it was so common in Italy that, apart from eating potatoes
themselves, people were also using them as fodder for pigs.
Clusius had good reason to wonder. Apart from being Europes fore-
most botanist, with a right to expect that his generous sharing of knowl-
edge and material would be reciprocated, he had also spent several
months travelling around Spain in , specifically looking for rare
and interesting plants. The meticulous account of his discoveries was
published in with no mention of the potato. Meanwhile, he
had also been making condensed and annotated translations of Spanish
reports on New World plants again, with no mention of the potato.
And Pedro Cieza de Lens published account of the potato in Peru
had not come to Clusiuss attention either. For most commentators,
this absence of the potato from Clusiuss work in Spain means that the
potato was not there. But it could also mean that the Spanish did not
want foreigners to know of it. There is evidence that some reports on
what the Spanish had found in America were not published, but
remained in manuscript in Seville, locked away by cautious Castilian
bureaucrats worried about divulging commercial secrets.
One should always be wary of conspiracy theories especially those
relating to events years ago. But then one should be suspicious of
negative evidence too especially when it is all that is on offer. And
the fact that Clusius did not see or hear of the potato while he was
in Spain is a long way from proof of its absence. And so the suspicion
mounts: there is something distinctly odd about the Spanish and the
potatos relatively sudden appearance in various parts of northern Europe
in the late sixteenth century without any previous mention of it in
Spain. After all, it is not as though the Spanish were not keen on
bringing things back from the New World. As one commentator put
it, the Spanish, always diligent imitators of all things foreign, who know
so well how to exploit other peoples inventions.
Maize, for instance, had been discovered for Europe by Columbus
and was so commonly grown in Spain and beyond by the s that
Potato
its New World origin had been forgotten. Leonhardt Fuchs believed it
had come from Turkey. He included a splendid woodcut of the plant
in his flora published in , naming it Turcicum Frumentum or Trck-
isch Korn and went on to remark that the Turkish grain is now growing
in all gardens. It was not until that its New World origins were
reconfirmed, when the Italian botanist Pietro Mattioli declared that it
ought to be called Indicum, not Turcicum, for it was brought from the
West Indies, not out of Turkey or Asia, as Fuchs believed. Then there
were tomatoes, cocoa, chilli, squash, tobacco all from the New World.
And the sunflower, now known to have been domesticated in North
America but long believed to have come from the land of the potato
itself, John Gerard having described it in his Herball as the marigold of
Peru. The sunflower had become so popular in Europe by the s
that it was grown everywhere, a contemporary source reports.
We should not forget, of course, that relations between Spain and
much of Europe were not always cordial during the sixteenth century.
Envy of the wealth that discovery of the New World had brought Spain,
plus religious animosity engendered by the Reformation, setting Protes-
tant against Catholic, had caused friction. Wars between the factions
erupted. Francis Drake famously singed the King of Spains beard in
, when he sailed a fleet into Cadiz, one of Spains main ports, occu-
pied the town for three days and destroyed twenty-six enemy ships as
well as a large quantity of stores. This attack delayed Spains attempt to
invade England, but Drake again routed the Spanish Armada when it
sailed into the English Channel a year later. In these circumstances, one
can imagine that the English were unlikely to grant the Spanish credit
for anything commendable, while Sir Francis Drake could do no wrong.
He was even credited with introducing the potato to Europe.
A statue of Drake holding a flowering potato plant, complete with
tubers and haulm, once stood in Offenburg in southern Germany,
commending the circumnavigator for bringing the potato to Europe
in . The plinth was decorated with a frieze of potato tubers and
bore an inscription that offered (in paraphrased translation):his immortal
memory the blessings of millions who cultivated the precious gift of
God as the help of the poor against need and bitter want. The statue
was destroyed during the Second World War, presumably because it
memorialised an Englishman, but the legend lives on: having brought
some potatoes back from his trip around the world, Drake gave them
to a friend, so the story goes, who grew them successfully enough but
cooked the berries instead of the tubers. They tasted terrible, so the
The lonely impulse of delight
gardener was ordered to root up the remaining plants and burn them.
The gardener did so, but happened to break open a potato that rolled
from the fire, nicely baked. He sniffed it, then tasted it. Delicious and
the potato was saved.
The story is invalidated, however, by the facts. Drake certainly knew
about potatoes, having encountered them on an island off the coast of
Chile in November , as his journal reports (but it was not published
until ): We being on land, the people came down to us to the
water side with shew of great curtesie, bringing us potatoes, rootes and
two very fat sheepe . . . But his voyage home was via the Pacific and
the Cape of Good Hope, and Drake arrived in Plymouth a full two
years later, by which time any remaining potatoes would have been
incapable of regeneration. It is also significant (though negative evidence,
admittedly) that Clusius, who knew Drake and had actually stayed with
him on a visit to England in , makes no mention of the potato
among his description of items Drake had brought back from his voyage
around the world (Clusius even named a plant after Drake).
Sir Walter Raleigh, another hero of English adventures in the
Americas and against the Spanish, is also said to have brought the potato
to Europe. Indeed, the precise date of the discovery was set at July
by Sir Joseph Banks, whose credentials include not only the
directorship of Kew Gardens but also his work as botanist on Captain
Cooks voyage to the Pacific. Rather less precision can be attached to
the story that Raleigh actually served a plate of boiled potatoes to
Queen Elizabeth I on his return to England, and all versions of the
story crediting Raleigh with the introduction of the potato founder
on what can only be called a case of mistaken identity.
Raleigh never actually went to the stretch of North American coast
that he named Virginia (now North Carolina), and even the settlers he
had sent there could not have found the potato, for the simple reason
that it was not native to North America. That they found and sent back
to Raleigh something resembling a potato seems certain, but it is most
likely to have been the roots of a native tuber-bearing climber called
openawk (which is confused with the potato in some accounts), or
even sweet potatoes; there is no evidence to connect Raleigh with the
introduction of the true potato to England and Europe.
By the early s the potato was regularly illustrated and described
in botanical treatises, but no author could cite an irrefutable source for
the route and date of its introduction or even give an instance of its
cultivation prior to . There was nothing conclusive, only a haze of
Potato
confusion. And that remained the case for more than years, until
it came under the scrutiny of the Cambridge scientist and potato expert,
Redcliffe N. Salaman.
A feature of Salamans research technique was the stream of enquiries
he addressed to any authority and every institution that he thought
might offer a glimmer of information on aspects regarding the potato
that were currently engaging his attention. Always courteous (and thrifty:
some of the carbon copies archived at the University of Birmingham
are on the reverse side of letters from his stockbrokers), these letters
winkled out the many unexpected insights and odd gems that make
his book The History and Social Influence of the Potato, published in ,
entertaining as well as a monument of scholarly endeavour. Among his
correspondents was a Harvard Professor of Economics, Earl J. Hamilton,
whose research matched Salamans own in its depth and diligence.
Hamilton was studying the effect that the influx of so much gold
and silver from the New World had had on the economies of Spain
and Europe during the sixteenth century. In search of figures that would
reveal changes in the cost of living over the decades, he scoured city
archives and those of any other establishments where the price of
commodities and essential items were consistently recorded. He spent
months in Seville, hunting down relevant sixteenth-century documents;
unravelling their often obscure manner of compilation; deciphering the
handwriting, translating the archaic Spanish and finally transcribing any
useful information that he had found. The search took him to the
Hospital de la Sangre, one of several hospitals for the poor and infirm
that were established in Seville and other Spanish cities during the four-
teenth to sixteenth centuries. The Hospital de la Sangre, however, was
distinguished by the detailed and almost unbroken records of its accounts,
both receipts and purchases, from on. Here, page after page gave
Hamilton details of what the hospital had paid for its supplies of bread,
honey, chickens, fish, meat and lard, vegetables, wine and vinegar, soap,
linen, wool and sheets, firewood and kindling, medicines and so on.
The list was exhaustive, showing how prices had changed year by year,
and showing also that on December the Hospitals purchasers
bought something they had never bought before: pounds of pota-
toes.
Potatoes become a regular feature of the Hospital accounts in subse-
quent years, first bought by the pound and later by the arroba (a unit
of pounds) so they must have been a rarity or luxury to begin
with, but gradually became more commonly available (and cheaper).
The lonely impulse of delight
Furthermore, all the purchases Hamilton had noted took place in
December and January, indicating that the potatoes had been grown
and harvested in Spain rather than imported, since South American
potatoes were harvested in March and April and would have reached
Spanish markets by June, or August at the latest. And if potatoes were
available in Seville during those months, the Hospital surely would have
bought them then too.
Salaman concluded that this new evidence permitted him to put the
date of introduction of the potato into Spain at least as early as ,
which allowed three years for the seed tubers to grow on and multiply
into a crop that was large enough for producers to market profitably.
This in turn meant that the original tubers could not have been gath-
ered in South America later than in the previous year, . On the
strength of these conclusions Salaman was generally credited with having
given us the earliest-yet known evidence of the potato in Europe. But
a doubt remained, one which bothered Birminghams former Professor
of Botany, J. G. Hawkes, for many years: Hamilton was an economist,
not a botanist; what if the purchases he had found in the Hospital de
la Sangre accounts were in respect of sweet potatoes, not true potatoes
would he have known the difference?
Professor Hawkes had worked on the taxonomy and cytogenetics of
South American potatoes for his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge University.
He had known and worked with Redcliffe Salaman, and had published
papers with him, but it was not until , at the age of seventy-six
(and nine years after he officially retired), that he was able to put that
nagging doubt to rest. In that year Hawkes travelled to Seville with J.
Francisco-Ortega, a visiting scholar from the Canary Islands, and together
they re-examined the account books of the Hospital de la Sangre.
They found that although the records were reasonably legible and in
many instances very clear, several books were in a very bad state indeed,
owing sometimes to damp or decay, and sometimes to the nature of
the ink used, which had destroyed the paper almost entirely, leaving
the writing as a kind of stencil. Moreover, both sides of the paper were
used, adding further confusion. First impressions were of admiration
for the dedication which Earl Hamilton had applied to his research,
then delight as Domingo xxvii [de Diciembre] de deiz y nueve libras
de patatas stood out from the page: Sunday th [of December]. Of
nineteen pounds of potatoes, the word patatas instantly recognisable
to these botanists who on occasion needed local experts to help them
decipher the handwriting.
Potato
So, like the economist sixty years before, the botanists were rewarded
for the lonely impulse of delight which had taken them to Seville, to
the archives, and to the florid script in which the accounts of the
Hospital de la Sangre were recorded. All the records of potatoes (and
there were many) in the account books used the Spanish word patata
and never the South American term papa. Furthermore, they did not
mention the sweet potato, for which the Spanish words batata or
camote (another New World term) would have been used. This was
enough to convince Hawkes and his colleague that Hamilton and
Salaman had been correct in assuming that the records referred to the
true potato, Solanum tuberosum, and not the sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas.
The nagging doubt was eliminated, potatoes were being grown in Spain
from but the investigators were not finished yet. What about
the Canary Isles, Francisco-Ortegas home could they not hold clues
to the arrival of the potato in Europe?
Descriptions of these Atlantic islands by several authors both histor-
ical and modern had already invited the conclusion that many New
World plants were brought to the Canaries before they reached Spain.
And sure enough, on closer inspection Hawkes and Francisco-Ortega
found references to both potatoes and sweet potatoes in the literature.
An account published in by the English adventurer Thomas Nichols
mentions the sweet potato (batatas) only: This iland hath singular
good wine, especially in the towns of Telde, and sundrie sortes of good
frutes, as batata, melons, peares, apples, oranges, lemons, pomegranads,
figs, peaches of diverse sortes . . ., but authors writing in Spanish refer
to the presence of patatas and batatas on the islands. Sometimes they
write papas or patatas, showing that both names were used for the
true potato, as well as batatas for the sweet potato. Thus the South
American word papa was used as well as the Spanish word patata in
the Canary Isles, while in Spain only patata was used. This in turn
suggested that the islands might have an older and more entrenched
connection with the potato and its South American origins than was
the case in Spain.
The investigators enquired further, and finally came to the most
interesting records from the Canary Islands so far discovered: a docu-
ment from the archives of the public notary in Las Palmas de Gran
Canaria dated November which read (in translation) . . . and
also three medium-sized barrels [which] you state contain potatoes and
oranges and green lemons. This nugget of information was found in
a document probably a bill of lading listing the goods which Juan
The lonely impulse of delight
de Molina had shipped to his brother, Luis de Quesada, in Antwerp,
Belgium. Another entry by the public notary, written on April ,
states: Also came from Tenerife two barrels of potatoes and eight . . .
of aguardiente [a fiery brandy]. This consignment was shipped with
other items to Hernando Qunitana in Rouen (France), also by Juan
de Molina.
For Hawkes and Francisco-Ortega these intriguing records were a
clear indication that potatoes were being grown on the Canary Islands
in commercial quantities by , and were exported from there to
ports in continental Europe. The tubers could not have come directly
from South America, they say, for after such a long journey they would
have been far too shrivelled and sprouted to be sent on as articles of
commerce to Antwerp and Rouen. They must undoubtedly have been
grown and harvested in the Canary Isles. To allow five years for the
bulking up of stock to commercial levels, potatoes would have to have
been introduced directly from South America to the Canary Isles no
later than in . Which puts the date of the potatos arrival in the
Old World back to only thirty years after the presumed first sighting
of them by Pizarro in , and not even ten years after they were
mentioned by Pedro Cieza de Len in .
It follows that the most likely explanation for the absence of the
potato from Clusiuss account of Spanish plants is that it had not
yet been transferred to continental Spain from the Canaries. He did
not see the potato in Spain because it was not there. But what about
Antwerp, where Clusius also had lived for a time during the s?
Did he know about the potatoes that Juan de Molina was then ship-
ping from the Canaries to his brother in the city? He does not mention
them; nor do potatoes crop up where the relevant years are covered in
the standard biography. Negative evidence again, but allowing us to
conclude as Hawkes and Francisco-Ortega have done that Luis de
Quesada and his family probably just cooked and ate their potatoes,
blithely unaware that in the same city lived Clusius, the man who could
have made them famous for introducing the potato to Europe had
they invited him to share a meal.
Chapter Seven
Four hundred years after Luis de Quesada and his family had been
eating their potatoes in Antwerp the tuber had become such a familiar
item in kitchens around the world that few who ate Kartoffel klsse,
pomme frite, french fries, rsti, mashed, boiled, fried, roasted or baked
potatoes were even aware of the tubers origin in the South American
Andes. The potato was now a dietary institution, a primary source of
energy for most of Europe and North America, plus a rapidly expanding
number of other nations.
Oswald Seematter, for instance, had been growing potatoes on the
family lands at Trbel, a village high in the Swiss Alps, all his life when
I met him in the s just like his father and grandfather before
him. The Seematters had been making cheese for generations too. These
two products potatoes and cheese were key elements in the staple
diet of farming families in the alps. Together, they made an easy meal
that was eaten daily by past generations, but these days was more often
served on occasions when there were visitors to be entertained
raclette.
There has been a village at Trbel for over , years, and the same
families have been tending its lands and raising children for most of
that time. In , Seematter was one of fourteen family names among
the signatories to a document drawn up to regulate use of the commu-
nitys commonage. Today, thirteen of those family names are still to be
found among the villagers and no others. One family line has died
out in the past years; none has come in. The same families, on the
same land, century after century. Such remarkable continuity speaks of
judicious social management and land use practices that take care to
nurture the land as well as feed the landowners.
Potato
Out on the patio, Oswald set a half-round of cheese edge-on to the
coals in his custom-made fireplace; the cheese melted, bubbled, scorched
and formed an appetisingly crisp crust. Deftly, he scraped a portion
onto each warmed plate; Mary added boiled potatoes, steaming and
floury on the outside, waxy inside just as they preferred them. A
sprinkling of chopped parsley, salt if you insisted, and there was a meal
that filled and satisfied.
How long have we been growing potatoes in Trbel? Oswald paused
only briefly. Weve always grown potatoes; the village couldnt have
existed without them, he said.
In fact, the potato was unknown in Trbel until the s, and its
arrival heralded what has been described as a genuine, perhaps even
revolutionary, change in the local environment that in turn directly
affected the peasant standard of living. The nutritional status of the
villagers improved with the increased food supply that the potato
brought to Trbel. Better fed, the villagers became more resistant to
disease, especially the respiratory illnesses to which the malnourished
are particularly susceptible. The death rate declined as a consequence,
while at the same time birth intervals shortened primarily because
well-nourished women generally resumed ovulation sooner after child-
birth than their poorly nourished antecedents had done. Similarly,
boiled potato mashed up with milk or butter, or cooked into a thick
soup, provided an easily prepared and digestible supplement for infant
feeding, thereby reducing the duration and intensity of breast feeding.
Fewer deaths and more births brought an overall increase in popu-
lation, but this did not strain resources as might be expected, simply
because the potato was adopted in Trbel as a supplement to the villages
established staple crops, not a substitute for them.
Before the arrival of the potato, the year-to-year survival and well-
being of Trbel was utterly dependent upon the size of its grain
harvests. An ascending sequence of fields enabled villagers to plant
according to which cereals grew best at particular altitudes wheat
and oats at lower elevations, barley and rye higher up but not even
rye would ripen above , metres. Potatoes, on the other hand, could
be depended upon to produce a useful harvest at , metres or more;
and even in years that saw grain crops parched by drought or flattened
by storms there were always some potatoes to be harvested.
Thus the potato slotted neatly into the ecological niches of the
Trbel landscape which previously had been unproductive, and brought
a greater degree of food security than ever before to the village, as well
The way it was
as an improved diet. Hardly surprising, then, that a distinct upturn in
Trbels fortune is detectable from that point on. As indeed can be said
of communities everywhere which successfully added the potato to
their suite of staple crops. And on an expanding scale, it can be seen
that the fortunes of entire regions, nations and continents were hugely
influenced by the arrival of the potato.
The historian William H. McNeill has said that the availability of
the potato as a food source in northern Europe during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries:
So the fortunate four out of ten children that reached their fifteenth
birthday would have seen famine among the afflictions that carried off
the other six. They had another twenty-five years ahead of them on
average, and could expect to suffer more famines before they died.
The most unwelcome and perhaps the hardest to bear came with the
marauding armies that were fighting over Europe throughout the Middle
Ages. Those glorified landmarks of history , Agincourt, Magde-
burg doubtless were pivotal events, but at what cost?
And then there were the famines brought about by Europes fickle
climate: drought and a scorching sun that withered the sprouting seed
and left a mocking stand of tough useless weeds. Or too little sun and
torrential rains that left the crop flattened, soddened and rotten. Even
in good years, the threat of famine or just the fear of not being able
to feed the household was never far away. Let illness, misfortune or
improvidence get a foot in the door and the unwanted guest would
swiftly force an entry. Nagging fear was then transformed into an
uncompromising reality of want and hunger which, paradoxically, was
greatest when the season was fairest: in midsummer.
July was the cruellest month, when the grass stood high in the
meadows, demanding to be cut and dried and stacked before a turn
in the weather spoiled it. Haymaking was the first great harvest of
the year but to feed livestock during the winter, not haymakers
at midsummer. People toiling in the hayfields were hungry, burning
up at least , calories a day at the time of year when their avail-
able supplies of energy-packed carbohydrates were lowest. The store
of last years harvest was nearly finished if there was any left at all
and crops planted in the spring would not be ready to reap for
weeks yet. Thus, summer was not a sunblest romp for the rural
majority in sixteenth-century Europe it was the hungry gap,
when people worked hardest and ate least, and many were starving
if last years harvest had been poor. Brueghel painted hayfield scenes
of bucolic fun. Midsummer madness? Perhaps, though as likely
induced by the lightheadedness of starvation as by the excesses of
consumption.
But despite the setbacks of famine, warfare and high infant mortality,
the population of Europe was rising steadily throughout the sixteenth
century. The continent had been home to around million before
the Black Death struck in the s; by the number had sunk by
up to one-third and then began to climb again to about million
in , million in and then past its pre-Black Death levels
on a rising curve to the total of modern times (about million for
a comparable area). The distribution was uneven, with about half of
Europes sixteenth-century population living in just three countries
France, Germany and England and wherever people had settled the
landscape was heavily used.
Potato
Surrounded by conveniences, we forget that prior to the develop-
ment of manufacturing economies, humanitys dependence upon the
landscape and its resources was absolute, and stark there was nothing
else.Those fields and pasture, mountains, woods, valleys, rivers and forests
plus the animals and birds they sustained were the totality of what
was available to keep people alive. And livelihoods had to be wrested
from the landscape. That was the normality of sixteenth-century life,
and never forgotten. A lad hearing the corncrake call would not pause
to wonder he heard a clue as to where some fresh-laid eggs might
be available. People did not stumble over fallen branches in the wood
they carried them home for the fire. Families did not gather on the
brows of hills in golden summer evenings to sigh over the beauty of
the view laid out before them the fields of waving corn, the hay
securely stacked, the cattle contentedly grazing, the sheep gathered in
for shearing at least, I do not believe they did.
I believe that when people scanned the landscape from the brow of
a hill in the Middle Ages, their purpose was primarily to assess how
much they could get out of it that year, and what a lot of hard work
it would be. The beauty of nature had nothing to do with their appre-
ciation of the view. In fact, the modern capacity to see beauty in a
landscape is probably a deep-seated sigh of relief. We do not have to
cut down and saw up that oak to make a new barn, nor milk the cows,
shear the sheep, or reap the corn.
How much would those people on the hill have known of the world
beyond their immediate horizon in the sixteenth century? Quite a lot
is the conclusion to be drawn from parish and community records of
the period. Although significant numbers were born, lived and died
without ever venturing beyond the bounds of their community, by
(and probably earlier) two-thirds of Englands rural population changed
their village of residence at least once in the course of their lives
and this was a trend that accelerated in succeeding centuries. Many went
into service on the great estates (visitors from the continent remarked
that the English gentry would rather have servants than children), but
cities and the attractions of urban life were the foremost incentive for
leaving the village. Indeed, no city in those days could have existed
let alone grow without a continuous influx of migrants from the rural
areas (urban death rates in Europe persistently exceeded birth rates until
the sanitary and healthcare measures of modern times were introduced).
Apprenticeship records from some of Londons professional com-
panies show that before (and the crisis of Englands civil war), as
The way it was
many as per cent of their apprentices had come from places
or kilometres away. So how did they get there? It was not as diffi-
cult as might be imagined. In his history of the English countryside,
Oliver Rackham says that [i]n the Middle Ages the road system of
England was rather denser than it is now . . . Every wood, meadow,
house, and barn and most fields and furlongs had vehicle access, and
there were also footpath rights-of-way across fields. Moors and heaths
were criss-crossed with tracks linking hamlets and farms. Even in
September communications were good enough for King Harold
to travel miles from London to York in four days, defeat Danish
invaders at Stamford Bridge then, on hearing three days later that
William of Normandy had landed at Pevensey, march his army
miles south to confront William at the Battle of Hastings on October.
As Rackham points out, few campaigns before the age of helicopters
can have packed more action into three weeks; a tribute to organisa-
tion and endurance, but also to the countrys road system.
It was the arterial network of Roman roads, strategically routed and
magnificently engineered, that enabled Harold to move armies up and
down the length of England so expeditiously, but the hinterland of
rural communities played an important role too. Simply by being there,
viable and economically active, they kept the network functioning and
serviceable. Overlay a map of Roman Britain with the location of
villages and towns that existed in medieval times, and the regions the
roads traverse are splattered with dots representing rural settlements of
everything from just a few to several dozen houses hamlets, villages
and towns.
The Romans are remembered as conquerors, but far from supressing
an indigenous rural economy, their network of roads actually facilitated
its development. The immediate hinterland of the roads was especially
well-populated: in medieval times, for instance, there were over villages
and towns within an hour or sos walk of the Fosse Way, a -mile
Roman road running diagonally across southern England from Exeter to
Lincoln, via Ilchester, Bath, Cirencester and Leicester. Other major routes
were similarly endowed. No one in Britain (or wherever else in Europe
the Romans had laid roads, for that matter) was more than a day or two
from one of these major highways.
Though news could travel no faster than a man on a horse in medieval
times, and goods at the speed of an ox-wagon or packhorse, informa-
tion was widely shared simply because its relatively slow passage
through any region gave ample time for it to be picked up and passed
Potato
on by interested parties. And for an indication of the volume of traffic
passing ponderously through the landscape, Exeter, at the southern end
of the Fosse Way, is a good example. The port had been handling a
wide range and volume of merchandise since Roman times, local and
from overseas. Such as foodstuffs: hundreds of fishing boats supplied
Exeter markets with fish, for instance, which was then distributed
throughout the south-west and beyond pilchards, herring, cod and
salmon; lamprey, eels, mackerel and sprats; fresh, salted, smoked or dried.
And wine: even in the aftermath of the Black Death, while times were
still hard, Exeter was importing a yearly average of more than tuns
of French wine for its customers enough to fill over half a million
bottles.
By the sixteenth century, Exeter was exporting a greater value of
wool than anything else, part of a development that would see increasing
numbers of English (and European) farmers moving away from food
production as their primary activity, and committing themselves more
and more to the business of producing the raw materials that manu-
facturing industry would pay good money for. Exeter was one of
numerous provincial centres that found themselves ideally placed to
serve this aspect of Europes nascent market economy. But no other
town in England grew so fast. The census of reveals a booming
mercantile centre, with widespread connections, handling an impres-
sive volume and variety of trade: there were hundreds of importers,
wool merchants, wholesalers, fish dealers, brewers, butchers, bakers and
candlestick makers . . . And how many people lived in the city at that
time? Seven thousand in present times, not even enough to fill the
citys new million football stadium at Sandy Park (capacity ,),
and little more than per cent of its population (,), but
in the sixteenth century enough to sustain a thriving centre of commer-
cial activity and the social interactions required to service it.
The volume of activity generated by relatively small populations in
the sixteenth century is one of the more striking features of life in
medieval times, though it was always constrained by the rights and obli-
gations of a strict social hierarchy in which everyone knew their place
and that of anyone else they may encounter in the daily round.
Inevitably, wealth tended to concentrate in the hands of those at the
top of the hierarchy. In fifteenth-century England, for instance, the
upper echelons of society who totalled about , and comprised
no more than per cent of the population shared an annual income
of close to half a million pounds; more than ten times the peace-time
The way it was
state budget of the country. And this disparity contributed to the fric-
tion which a century later provoked a fundamental change in the hier-
archical arrangement of English society.
In the early s the church in England was earning about ,
per year from its properties and landholdings, while the crown estates
were providing Henry VIII with an income of only about ,.
What followed is generally known as the dissolution of the monas-
teries, though some historians prefer to speak of the plunder of the
church. In the lands and incomes of lesser monasteries were
confiscated by the crown, followed in by the confiscation of
over greater monasteries and in by the property of various
colleges, chapels and hospitals, and Irish monasteries. In this way
more than per cent of the churchs wealth passed to the crown; and
of course the crown gained not just income, but also the capital value
of church lands, properties and treasures. The lands appear to have
passed through the crowns hands quickly, however, and into the posses-
sion of many smaller landowners royal courtiers and favourites of the
crown prominent among them.
The poor are always with us and deserving of attention, the Bible
says. The church had been a source of relief, but not all its charitable
obligations were taken over by the new owners of its properties. In
fact, legislation enacted during the late sixteenth century explicitly
required local authorities to provide care for the poor in their commu-
nities. The need was considerable, widespread and persistent throughout
the Middle Ages, with between half and one-third of Europes popu-
lation reduced to abject poverty at some time in the course of their
lives. Rural poverty was scattered, out of sight and not widely reported,
but reports of urban poverty abound. You cannot walk down the street
or stop in a square or church without multitudes surrounding you to
beg for charity; you see hunger written on their faces, their eyes like
gemless rings, the wretchedness of their bodies, with skins shaped only
by bones, a visitor to Vicenza near Venice wrote in . Nearly
per cent of Bergamos population were registered as paupers in .
In , Madrid too found that per cent of its population were
paupers.
Urban poverty was of course directly linked to rural poverty. When
harvests failed or warring armies rampaged across the landscape, starving
country people crowded into the towns. They had no other option.
Some had the money to buy food (though prices may have risen three-
or fourfold); others looked for work offering their labour in exchange
Potato
for bread and gruel alone if necessary. Riots ensued when and wherever
the point of total desperation was passed. Fernand Braudel writes of
Europe experiencing thousands of bread riots (one of which culminated
in the French Revolution). In England alone, the most acute of several
hundred grain shortages sparked off sixty serious riots during the century
after , spurring the authorities to a more meticulous application of
the poor laws (even when it meant price controls and ensuring that
available grain supplies went to bakeries rather than breweries). In France,
where grain riots became virtually endemic during the sixteenth century,
the authorities were less sympathetic. Their response, a commentator
reports, was almost always the same: an invasion of troops, summary trials
and gibbets groaning under the weight of corpses.
Clearly, Europes food supply was often strained to the limit, but the
underlying cause was not a rapidly expanding population (prior to the
Black Death, Europe had supported more people than in the sixteenth
century), nor the growth of urban centres (the ratio of urban to rural
populations remained roughly the same). The principal factor was the
change in farming practices that saw farmers turning away from food
production as their primary activity and concentrating instead on the
production of raw materials for manufacturing industries at home and
abroad. Especially wool. Increasingly, cornfields were transformed into
sheep pastures. Add to this the fact that agricultural productivity was
inherently low and you have what is politely called the agrarian problem
of the sixteenth century.
It is astonishing that at least three-quarters of the land being farmed
in England today was also under cultivation in the sixteenth century.
The difference is that todays cornfields produce twelve times more than
their counterparts years ago. Furthermore, while we can acquire the
necessities of life from any number of places, in the sixteenth century
everything not just foodstuffs came directly from the land, and prob-
ably from not very far away. Clothes were made from wool, linen and
leather; sheep and cattle fat (tallow) was used for lighting; people wrote
with a goose quill pen on vellum (calf skins) or parchment (sheep skins).
All forms of transport from sledges to ships were made of wood,
and land transport was powered by animals fuelled with hay and oats.
Hemp was grown to make rope; flax for linen; hops for beer; woad,
weld, madder and saffron for dyes; teasels to prepare wool for spinning.
The labour requirement was immense, with only wind- and water-
mills to ease the burden of men and beasts. It took five or six
experienced sickle-wielding reapers a day to harvest a hectare of wheat
The way it was
which yielded on average less than a tonne of grain (one-third of
which must be kept as seed for the next year), and in bad years might
not be enough to cover the food requirement of the harvesters. There
was livestock to be provided for too and haymaking called for equally
large inputs of labour over a short period of time. And throughout the
year there was ploughing, harrowing, sowing and weeding to be done;
ditches and drains to be dug out, hedges to be cut back, fuelwood to
be gathered, buildings to be repaired, and always the goading demand
of land to be cleared. Shortfalls in production always provoked calls for
more land to be brought into cultivation. Even three centuries on,
administrators were urging: Let us not be satisfied with the liberation
of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley
Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest
to submit to the yoke of improvement.
With agriculture and related occupations so labour-intensive, up to
per cent of Europes population were tied to the land in the sixteenth
century. In effect, nine out of ten people were supplying the needs of
themselves and one other individual not similarly engaged. Which
would have been fine if every farmer consistently produced a surplus
of per cent or more. But medieval agriculture rarely achieved such
efficient productivity. In England, for example, four out of five farmers
grew just enough food for the needs of the family household. Any
surplus they reaped and sold in good years would pay for essentials
such as salt and iron goods, and could provide some insurance against
bad years, but the wholesale production of grain for sale was beyond
contemplation: they simply did not have enough labour or land.
Farms were too small, and yields too low. Meanwhile, however, wool
was in high demand, and the price rising.
Ever since biblical times and probably before then the conflicting
needs of cultivators and herders have caused trouble. One wants a field
to plough, the other needs pasture for grazing. It is possible for them
to work together. After all, people need both protein and carbohydrate
and while livestock are grazing a fallow meadow they fertilise next
seasons plantings. Likewise, stubble on a harvested field is good supple-
mentary feed. But if either seeks to maximise production and sell the
surplus beyond the local community, difficulties arise. The wholesale
transition from cereal-growing to sheep-grazing, inspired by the high
price of wool, characterises the agrarian problem of the sixteenth
century. It changed the face of England and even more critically
set the economies of Europe on a course which moved society from
Potato
the world of the seasons, the village, and a sense of community and
natural justice, into the world of the marketplace and its remorseless
sense of competitive individualism.
Enclosure is the catch-all word that describes the process by which
ploughland was converted to pasture, but it involved much more than
the erection of fences to enclose flocks of sheep. The scattering of small
fields which previously had served to feed a number of households
were combined in single united areas; big landowners consolidated
their properties by combining the farms they leased out, evicting
tenants and destroying buildings; commonage was seized, with the simul-
taneous decrease or even complete abolition of the rights of commoners.
There were advantages: consolidation rationalised production, saving
both on the cost of labour and haulage costs of horses or oxen; land
which had formerly kept scores of men busy could now be worked
by a few shepherds; wool production was less susceptible to the vagaries
of climate than wheat, and fetched a good price; the value of land went
up. From a production and economic point of view there can be no
doubt that enclosure was sensible. But it caused much anguish and
suffering. The gentle sheep was more voracious than the wild beasts
of Africa; it ate men, ploughland, houses and whole villages. Tenant
farmers complained that the large landowners: leave no grounde for
tillage, thei enclose al into pastures, thei throw doune houses, thei plucke
down townes, and leave nothing standynge, but only the churche to
be made a shepe-howse.
The result was a breakdown in land-based self-sufficiency. Where
families previously maintained at least the means of producing food for
themselves to which every relation felt entitled to claim a share in
difficult times increasing numbers were cast off their land and became
dependent on paid employment for survival. By the first half of the
sixteenth century this disengagement from self-sufficiency had already
reached the point at which per cent of people in England aged
between fifteen and twenty-four were servants and labourers working
on large farms. In southern England a quarter of all adult men were
landless and dependent on working for others as the sole means of
supporting themselves and their families.
Meanwhile, the conversion of arable land to pasture, and the
economics of the marketplace, was pushing up the price of foodstuffs
especially wheat and bread, which were the measures against which
people judged their standards of living. Wages did not rise to match;
indeed, in terms of the quantities of wheat a working man could afford
The way it was
to buy, wages fell steadily throughout the sixteenth century. Seventeenth-
century records show no improvement: if the harvest was per cent
below expectations, the price of wheat rose per cent; if the yield
was only half, a working man had to pay four times the usual price
for a loaf of bread. And if these demand-driven fluctuations of a
market economy were making life hard for the wage-earner, self-
sufficient small farmers who had managed to hold on to their land
were having a no less difficult time. Indeed, they had the worst of all
worlds; caught in the marketing trap that forced them to sell cheap
and buy dear: whenever harvests were good and they produced a surplus,
the market was flooded and prices low; conversely, when harvests did
not cover their subsistence needs, supplies were scarce and the cost of
making up their shortages correspondingly high.
Food was the principal concern of most households years ago. Every
other aspect of their lives was subservient to the challenges of putting
sufficient food on the table, and the surrounding landscape urban as
well as rural was simply the place where they hoped to acquire it.
So how well did people eat? We read of London cookshops offering
three roast thrushes for twopence. Since a skilled medieval craftsman
earned only around eightpence a day this was a fast-food snack that
cost the equivalent of about in todays money; hardly something
that any but the very well-off could afford. Only the nobility sat down
regularly to meals the sixteenth-century chronicler William Harrison
describes, consuming beef, mutton, veal, lamb, kid, pork, cony, capon,
pig, or so many of these as the season yieldeth; nor can many ever
have shared a meal such as the Duke of Buckingham hosted on the
feast of Epiphany in , when a total of people consumed
rounds of beef, sheep, calves, pigs, suckling pigs, numerous
chickens and rabbits, geese, swans, capons, peacocks, herons, mallard,
woodcock, snipe, other unspecified birds great and small, as well as
oysters, salmon, sturgeon, cod, ling, flounder . . . and precisely loaves
of bread. All washed down with French wine and flagons of ale.
In fact, while attention focuses on extravagance at one extreme, and
on the peasants monotonous potage and bread at the other, a wider
view reveals simply that food was the largest single item in everyones
budget from aristocrat to labourer with the proportion of expend-
iture devoted to food increasing with each step down the social ladder:
the rich spent most, but the poor spent the greatest proportion of what-
ever they had on food.
Potato
Clearly, those who could afford to ate well. But among those who
spent the greatest proportion of their available income on food the
small farmers, artisans, labourers and the very poor rising prices eroded
their diets, in terms of both quality and quantity. While the food of
the rich became increasingly varied and their tables groaned with meat
and luxuries, the changing economic climate forced many to eat less
meat than formerly and to depend more heavily on cheap bread grains.
Malnourishment ensued.Then, towards the end of the century a succes-
sion of harvest failures brought starvation. A contemporary observer
reported:
[They] die, some in ditches, some in holes, some in caves and dens,
some in fields . . . rather like dogs than christian people . . . yet they
are forced to walke the countries from place to place to seeke their
releefe at every mans doore, excepte they wil sterve or famish at
home . . . Yea, in such troups doe they flocke, and in such swarmes
doe they flowe, that you can lightlie go any way, and you shall see
numbers of them at everie door, in everie lane, and in everie poor
cave.
Chapter Eight
People eat and prefer the foods they have grown up with. And for
centuries wheat, barley rye and oats the cereal grains had been the
staffs of life in Europe. It was a matter of belief as much as anything
else. Whether they ate bread at the high table or could afford only
barley to thicken a soup, the sentiment was the same; there was no
issue of taste or fashion, just an unquestioning, deep-rooted and universal
conviction that grain was essential.
In more than a century after John Gerard had first grown
potatoes in his London gardens market gardeners in southern England
still regarded radishes as a more worthwhile crop than potatoes. Cler-
gymen and priests banned their parishioners from planting the potato,
saying it was unworthy of human consumption because it was not
mentioned in the Bible, and an early edition of the Encyclopdia Britan-
nica lent its weight to such contentions by describing the potato as a
demoralising esculent. Not until the nineteenth century did the potato
achieve anything like the status it has today: Europes most widely
consumed, cheap and nourishing food years after its first arrival
on the scene.
The early botanists and herbalists of northern Europe must bear
some responsibility for the potatos slow progress. Driven by that
lonely impulse of delight, they were more interested in describing the
botanical features of a plant than in considering the usefulness of the
parts that lurked underground. After all, it was the visible portion of a
plant the stem, leaves and flowers that most readily distinguished
one plant from another. And the potato plants that botanists were
describing in the first flush of investigation seem to have been espe-
cially interesting above ground, with flowers so attractive and abun-
Potato
dant that the Finnish botanist Olaus Rudbeck (memorialised in the
popular garden plant Rudbeckia) even recommended potatoes more for
garden borders than for the dining table.
In mitigation, the botanists discounting of the potatos culinary
potential had a lot to do with the fact that the original stock had come
only recently from the equatorial Andes, and so was adapted to complete
its cycle of growth, flowering and tuber production in an environment
where the days were about twelve hours long all year round. When
they were planted in northern Europe, where summer days lasted up
to eighteen hours, the cycle was distorted. With so much warmth and
light the plants grew prodigiously, producing tier upon tier of leaves
and flowers but no tubers until late September, when twelve-hour days
at last brought the conditions under which they were adapted to tuberise.
By then, though, temperatures were falling, and the days getting shorter.
To stay alive at all, the plants then had to allocate a large proportion
of available nutrients to the maintenance of their stem and leaves. There
was little left over for making tubers and those that were produced
before the growing season ended were not very large. Numerous yes,
but mostly the size of marbles or smaller, and few even as big as a
chickens egg.
To select and breed a line of potatoes that would produce acceptably
large tubers at high latitudes was beyond the early botanists interest, so
it was fortuitous that the Spanish had begun growing them in the Canary
Isles a halfway house, as it were, between conditions in the potatos
Andean cradle land and those in northern Europe, where the plants
potential was to be most thoroughly exploited.The Canary Island farmers
succeeded in breeding varieties adapted to their variable day length very
soon after its discovery in Peru, so must have been persuaded that the
potato merited serious attention. In northern Europe its virtues were not
so rapidly appreciated.
Above all, there was the influence of the herbalists Doctrine of
Signatures to be overcome. Though mistaken in prescribing the walnut
as a cure for troubles of the brain simply because the one resembled
the other, the doctrines principle of similarity that both the cause
and cure of an affliction could be found in plants which resembled the
condition or the part of the body affected was a deeply entrenched
piece of folklore. Old wives tales, most of it, but offering explanations
and treatment when nothing else could. And sometimes the signatures
were right. For instance, the willow thrives in marshy ground, and we
now know that salicylic acid (aspirin) extracted from its bark will indeed
The demoralising esculent
ease the rheumatic pains of those who live in such places, just as the
doctrine advised.
So what did the doctrines advocates make of the potato? They found
its signature in the tubers those weird and unfamiliar products of dirt
and darkness. And the first potatoes to arrive in Europe were not
uniformly shaped, like those we know today; nor were they all the
same colour, but could be red, black or purple or deathly white, all
of which emphasised the sinister connotation of the nodules and the
bulbous finger-like protuberances that many of them bore. In the eyes
of the doctrines followers, potatoes resembled the deformed hands and
feet of the leper the shunned outcast of the Middle Ages. Ergo, their
signature was leprosy, that most loathsome disease.
This diagnosis should have meant that the doctrine would prescribe
potatoes as a treatment for leprosy. But there is no sign of that, probably
because leprosy was less prevalent in the early seventeenth century
rarely seen but widely known and feared. And since little need of a
cure was evident, the principles of the doctrine of signatures were
inverted. Instead of being regarded as a treatment of leprosy, the potato
was deemed to be its cause and proscribed.
This was more than enough to deter potential consumers from eating
potatoes especially as it related to a vegetable that was entirely new
to Europe, that grew underground, and without which people had been
getting along well enough. Certainly the belief that potatoes caused
leprosy became widespread, and was taken seriously enough to evoke
instances of official condemnation: I am told that the Burgundians are
forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the
eating of them causes leprosy, says the second edition of John Gerards
Herball ().
Not everything that Gerard wrote was beyond dispute, but in this
case the Herball was repeating almost word for word what a more
reputable botanist, Gaspard Bauhin, had written a few years before. And
there were other objections, among them complaints that potatoes were
difficult to prepare (all those knobs and deep-set eyes); they could not
easily be made into bread; they were windy and caused indigestion.
All in all, even those undeterred by the threat of leprosy tended to
regard potatoes as food fit only for animals and indigents. But it was
not just potential consumers that found the potato an unattractive
proposition. Potential producers the farmers and market gardeners
had their objections too.
At a time when meat and wheat (or other cereals) were considered
Potato
to be the diet that all should aspire too, and agricultural productivity
was low, there was little time, labour, land or enthusiasm to spare for
anything new. And the novelty of the potato was more than just that
it grew underground, in a variety of shapes and colours. The potato
was also the first crop Europeans had seen that grew from tubers, not
seed.This was completely different from customary practice, and imposed
heavy burdens on a farmer and his resources: whereas a field of wheat
could be sown by a single man walking back and forth, casting hand-
fuls of seed to left and right, each tuber in a potato field had to be
planted individually. And as with planting, so with harvesting: cereal
crops could be reaped more quickly and cheaply than a field of
potatoes could be dug.
Furthermore, growing potatoes conflicted with traditional patterns
of land use. Cereals rotated with fallow and stock grazing in the old
scheme of things, and while we think of fallowing as a means of resting
the land, early farmers did it to control weeds. By ploughing the fallow
fields in summer, before weeds had set seed, the presence of invading
plants was much reduced and farmers could expect (or least hope for)
a relatively weed-free harvest when the field was sown again the
following year. There was no space (temporal or territorial) for the
potato in this pattern of rotation. In order to grow potatoes, farmers
would either have to give up a portion of their cereal production, or
bring some new land into cultivation for the crop. Both options would
demand a major investment of conviction as well as resources.
This is not to say that root crops were unknown in Europe. Carrots,
turnips and parsnips were a familiar feature in the gardens of monas-
teries and houses great and small, as were leaf vegetables, leeks, onions
and garlic, herbs and such profusion of ingredients as would go into
the everyday potage and stew. But gardens and the taste for vegetables
were not universally popular even among kings. When Henry VIIIs
first wife, Katharine, wanted to eat vegetables such as she had enjoyed
at the table of her father, Ferdinand II of Aragon, for instance, she had
to hire a gardener from Flanders to grow them. And whatever that
gentleman introduced seems to have been lost among the succession
of wives that followed Katharine, for Henrys last wife, Catherine Parr,
reportedly sent agents to Holland whenever she needed so much as a
salad.
The botanists grew potatoes in their gardens in early seventeenth-
century Europe, and doubtless a few adventurous yeoman householders
did too, but only in the course of the eighteenth century would the
The demoralising esculent
potato finally break through the garden fence and become a field crop,
capable of supplementing and eventually competing with grain. By thus
enlarging the food supply, potatoes were then destined to fulfil their
potential as an influential factor in the economic and demographic
development of Europe. The process had already begun in Ireland,
where potato-growing was widespread and arousing comment in the
first half of the seventeenth century. The crop was quite well-known
in England and Scotland then too, and English immigrants could have
played an important role in the spread of the potato to Europe. Prime
candidate for this is a community of English Carthusian monks who
settled in Nieuwpoort, close to the Channel coast of Belgium in .
Another clue to the potatos escape from garden to field has been
found at Tielt, a small town miles inland from Nieuwpoort, where
an official writing in notes that for better than thirty-six years
potatoes have been planted outside the gardens [and] almost all the
inhabitants of the parish [are growing them], each for his [own] consump-
tion and convenience. This would put the beginnings of the potatos
influence as a field crop in that region at around and Tielt is
close enough to Nieuwpoort for the development to have come from
England, courtesy of the Carthusians. It is also not far from Antwerp,
which brings to mind the barrels of potatoes that were shipped from
the Canary Islands to a resident of that city, Luis de Quesada, in .
They too could have been a factor.
Anxious to take investigations from speculation into the realm of
verifiable fact, the Dutch historian Chris Vandenbroeke opened up an
illuminating line of enquiry in the s, when he began looking at
the lawsuits between tenant-farmers and tithe holders which had been
brought to court during the period in question. This was a master-
stroke of research. In the Middle Ages landowners throughout Europe
were entitled to levy as tax, or rent, one-tenth (a tithe) of their tenants
agricultural produce. But on October Charles V, ruler of the
Holy Roman Empire, had declared that new crops should be exempt
from tithes for forty years after their introduction. Tithe holders tended
to ignore the royal edict, however, and continued to tithe any crop that
was grown in open fields new or otherwise. Numerous lawsuits ensued
as farmers protested that the crops being tithed were new introduc-
tions. The cultivation of tobacco, clover, buckwheat and carrots all
featured as subjects of litigation. And, finally, potatoes too.
It follows that the number of lawsuits increased as the crops in ques-
tion began to be more extensively cultivated. Thus they could show
Potato
that at the time of litigation the crops were being grown in open fields,
on a scale that justified the effort of appealing to the courts for collec-
tion (or cancellation) of the tithe. Furthermore, since litigants had to
convince the courts that the crops in dispute had (or had not) been
under cultivation for more than forty years, the lawsuits were also a
good indication of when the crop had first been grown in open fields.
There were problems of biased testimony, as Vandenbroeke readily
admits, since all parties would be inclined to exaggerate the evidence
that supported their case. Nonetheless, the numerous lawsuits he exam-
ined in dozens of towns collectively show a definite evolution in the
diffusion of potato-growing from north-west to south-east Belgium.
Tielt is among the first towns in which the potato-tithe lawsuits
were noted (in ). Thirty-three years later they appeared for the
first time in the Brussels area, and a couple of years after that in Antwerp
and Limburg. Thus the evidence reveals that potato-growing started in
central Belgium around and that potatoes were a firmly estab-
lished field crop from on so much so that the bakers and millers
of Schaarbeek (now a suburb of Brussels) were complaining about the
reduction in the grinding of grain and sale of bread, since potatoes
have been planted in such great quantity.
The trail of lawsuits continued south and east, to Namur (where
a document from noted that potatoes were being harvested
everywhere in the country), and on to Limburg and Luxemburg. But
here some of the dates overlapped, indicating that the potato had
been advancing from the south, as well as from the north.
Vandenbroeke concluded that Luxemburgs potatoes had come from
Alsace. And Alsace, the evidence reveals, was where the potato first
broke through the garden fence to become established as an open
field crop that could save people from starvation. A document quoted
by Vandenbroeke explains what it was that had persuaded people to
set aside their prejudices and begin growing potatoes as their staple
food war:
Or
a Sure and Easie Remedy Against all Succeeding Dear Years;
by
a Plantation of the Roots called POTATOES,
whereof (with the addition of wheat flour)
Excellent, Good and Wholesome Bread may be Made, Every Year,
Eight or Nine Months Together, for Half the Charge as formerly.
ALSO
By the planting of these roots, ten thousand men in England and
Wales, who know not how to live, or what to do to get a
maintenance for their families, may of one acre of ground make
thirty pounds per annum
Invented and published for the good of the poorer sort
by John Forster, Gent.
While publishing his tract for the good of the poorer sort, Forster
dedicated it To the High and Mighty Monarch, Charles the II, by grace
of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the
The demoralising esculent
Faith, Etc., and here an economic motive is revealed. Though appar-
ently an honourable attempt to popularise the potato for the benefit
of those most in need, the tract also describes how the introduction
of potatoes could provide a healthy supplement to the Kings income.
In a section headed Benefits to the Kingdom, Forster declares that
the First Utility of the new crop would be to produce an income of
some , or , a year for the king, willingly and freely,
without any manner of compulsion.This would be achieved, he explains,
by strictly regulating the right to grow potatoes. The king should retain
a monopoly and grant licences to only one householder in every
hundred. At that rate, , licensees could provide all of England and
Wales with potatoes, Forster explains, and if each paid a year for
the privilege of being the only person in his district empowered to
grow and sell potatoes, then the royal coffers would be handsomely
enriched.
Furthermore, Forster continues in a section entitled The Second
Utility, when people have begun using potatoes as a food and constituent
of their daily bread, they will consume less wheat. Consequently:
Chapter Nine
Oh! Theres not in the wide world a race that can beat us,
From Canadas cold hills to sultry Japan,
While we fatten and feast on the smiling potatoes
Of Erins green valleys so friendly to man.
Along the coast of Connemara, where waves born in the open Atlantic
are brought to an abrupt halt by rocky shores and cliffs, people say the
potato came to Ireland years ago like Gods gift from heaven, off
ships of the Spanish Armada that Francis Drake had chivvied up the
North Sea and around the Orkneys, where they were caught in an
Atlantic gale and driven onto the Connemara shore. Twenty-five to
thirty galleons were wrecked they say, spilling cargoes that included
many barrels full of potatoes.
Some fine Arabian horses and sailors also managed to save
themselves. The horses galloped off into the hills, where they met
the local wild ponies and founded the world-famous breed of
Connemara ponies so the story goes. The fate of the sailors is more
than a story. Its a tragedy. They were taken in and cared for by the
local people, to whom they taught the practice of cooking and
growing potatoes. Then word arrived that the villagers should hand
every Spanish sailor over to the English authorities on pain of
death. From among the captives a nobleman and his nephew were
ransomed and spared; the remainder were beheaded at St Augustines
monastery in Galway in late June , amidst the murmurs and
lamentations of the people.
The Connemara version of the potatos arrival in Ireland in
is not universally accepted, however; not even in Ireland. Further
south, around Cork, they say Sir Walter Raleigh was responsible. His
gardener allegedly planted tubers from Virginia on the Youghal estate
lands Elizabeth I had granted Raleigh in return for putting down
some troublesome Irish rebellions. The introduction would have
occurred sometime between , when Raleigh was given the estate,
and , when he fell from favour and was sent to the Tower, where
he remained for fourteen years.
Where the praties grow
The brave Walter Raleigh, Queen
Besss own knight
Brought here from Virginia
The root of delight.
By him it was planted
At Youghal so gay;
An sure Munster praties
Are famed to this day
Philips invasion had been planned not just as aid for the Irish, but
principally as the Popes first move towards recovering lost dominions.
Victory would have given Catholic forces access to England via the
back door. Defeat brought yet more terrible oppression. Munster was
reduced to ruin, the herds swept away, the fields left untilled, and
famine came to devour what the sword had left. An officer reported:
There hath died by famine only, not so few as thirty thousand in this
province in less than half a year, besides others that are hanged and
killed.
Edmund Spenser, who wrote most of his Faerie Queen during the
eighteen years he lived in Ireland, saw some of this:
Where the praties grow
Out of every quarter of the woods and glynnes, they came creeping
forth upon their hands, for their leggs could not beare them; they
looked like anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of
their graves; they did eate the dead carrions, happy where they could
find them; yea, and one another soone after . . . and if they found a
plot of water-cresses or shamrocks there they flocked as to a feast
for a time, yet, not able long to continue therewithall; that in a short
space there were none left, and a most populous and plentiful country
suddenly left voyde of man and beast.Yet sure, in all that warre, there
perished not many by the sword, but all by the extremities of famine,
which they themselves had wrought.
And truly who had seen them would have said they had been rather
ghosts than men, for pitifully looked they, pyned away from want of
foode and altogether ghastly with fear.
It is the Black potato (not that the pulp is black, but that the skin
is very dark), that is most valued by those who know it: the pulp
affords a stronger invigorating diet to the labourer: it keeps till
potatoes come again . . . Since the people of this country found the
peculiar goodness of this potato they will scarce cultivate any other.
They will grow so large, as that some of them have measured four
inches in diameter.
Chapter Ten
Seeds of famine
Cornelius was the last to plant his potatoes during our stay in Ballynew
in . Mike OHalloran in the Sheeauns had been first, down in
the garden behind the cottage, turning over the lazy-beds before even
February was out. The brothers John and Patrick Coyne could never
agree on much, but worked together amicably enough on a joint
potato crop, and along with everyone else had their patch planted out
by just after St Patricks Day. And here it was April and still Cornelius
had not even got the ground cleared. Fuchsia was bursting into leaf
along the boreens; violets and primroses were relieving the monotony
of celandines under the hedgerows; lambing was almost finished and
there would be swallows under the eaves any day soon. Cornelius was
known to be laid back, idiosyncratic and not someone who believed
hard work was good for body and soul, but this lack of attention to
the staple crop was unusual even for him, and had the village buzzing.
The tension was more than had been known since John Coynes cow
got herself stuck chest-deep in a ditch. And Cornelius enjoyed every
minute of it.
Then came the day when he moved the milch cow from the field
onto which she had been turned out on good days through the winter
. . . he had left the gate open too, the villages keen-eyed observers
noted, and later that morning Tom King drove his tractor up the road
from Cleggan and had the whole field ploughed over and ridged up
in time for tea. Cornelius was setting out his potatoes the next day.
Each tuber a boots-length apart, and given a kindly sprinkling of lime
before the adjacent ridge was raked over.
Come harvest, there was no sign his crop had suffered from the
delayed planting. Could be the potatoes had benefited, Cornelius said,
Potato
from the soil being that much warmer when he planted them. In any
event, he had a more than ample harvest stored in a clamp behind the
house before the frosts came. They were big oval potatoes, most of
them, and floury. Call at the Mullen house midday or at teatime and
Cornelius was often to be found feasting on a bowl of potatoes straight
from the pot. They were boiled with the skins on, then opened up for
a pinch of salt and a knob of butter (or a dash of milk) to be mashed
in. Delicious. We had them like that the Sunday we were invited to
dinner (a midday meal in Connemara). It was to be a grand meal his
mother was doing especially for us, Cornelius had said.They had bought
half a leg of mutton, and boiled it for most of the morning. Pieces of
meat were set beside the potatoes on our plates, and the water in which
it had boiled poured over, the mutton-fat congealing as the liquid spread
to the edges of the cold plates. A memorable meal indeed; the more
so for the glass of hard stuff (poteen illicit whiskey) with which
Cornelius plied us after we had eaten.
Like most of Ballynew in those days, the Mullens cooked over the
open fire, and did not hold with fussing too much about how it was
done. Virtually everything that came into the house was set down to
boil: vegetables, porridge, eggs, fish, meat even bacon was deemed
best as a boiled joint rather than as rashers. There was no stove or range;
no oven except the cast-iron pot they used to set on the coals to bake
soda-bread in times past, with more coals heaped on the lid. But the
old lady rarely did that while we were there. No fridge; no rack of
pots and pans just a kettle hanging from the hook over the fire, always
filled and simmering, and a heavy long-handled saucepan alongside.
That was in the s. Hardly changed from centuries before when
the culinary skills of Irelands rural population did not extend very far
beyond those required for boiling potatoes.
Potatoes the praties with a field of potatoes you could raise a
family on a sub-division of the family holding, or on a vacant stretch of
bog or steep mountainside. Lazy-beds were the universally preferred
method of cultivation until hiring a tractor became an option. Lazy-beds
may be the name, but there had been nothing lazy about the toil of
manuring the metre-wide strips, setting the seed potatoes on them, then
opening trenches on either side and laying the sods of turf face-down
over the potatoes. More earth from the trenches on top, then more again
as the green shoots came through. That was hard work, but it was also
the best way of bringing waterlogged and poor land into cultivation.
And the rewards were outstanding really good food, and lots of it.
Seeds of famine
It has been said that the potato was to the Irish what the coconut
was to the South Sea islanders an ambrosian food. Not that it brought
a life of halcyon luxury; simply that by improving the quality and
volume of the diet, an abundance of potatoes supported a population
of fecund young women and sexually vigorous young men. And as
an eighteenth-century traveller delicately remarked, Irish young
couple[s] pass not their youth in celibacy for want of a nest to produce
their young in.
They married young. The church encouraged it, but wretched living
conditions were an incentive too. Marriage could not make thing worse,
and shared wretchedness might be easier to bear. What else was there?
A young man knew that no amount of effort and thrift would improve
his lot. Unlike an apprentice, he had no incentive to delay marriage
until he was qualified; nor, by waiting, could he hope to accumulate
the capital that would secure his familys future. But now, right now,
he could have potatoes, the company of a wife and children.
Their nest might be a corner of the parental home to start with
though no great outlay of energy or funds was required to erect a new
house. The cottiers dwelling had originally been comfortable and well-
suited to the prevailing conditions, we are told. But that was before
the extortions of landlords and middlemen had stripped away both the
means and the incentive to put up an adequate dwelling. The typical
cottiers home of the eighteenth century consisted of four walls,
commonly made of sods or mud, sometimes with a few runs of stone
at the base; a roof of branches, covered with turves and straw, rushes,
or potato stalks; and an earthern floor with a central hearth around
which the family gathered. No window, no inside partitions.
The manner in which the poor of this country live, I cannot help
calling beastly, a visitor reported.For upon the same floor, and frequently
without any partition, are lodged the husband and wife, the multi-
tudinous brood of children, all huddled together upon the straw or
rushes, with the cow, the calf, the pig, and the horse, if they are rich
enough to have one. Another visitor found it hard to imagine that
human beings could exist in such conditions: Their cabins scarcely
contain an article that can be called furniture; in some families there
are no such things as bedclothes, the peasants showed some fern, and
a quantity of straw thrown over it, upon which they slept in their
working clothes.
But so long as they had potatoes they were better fed than much
of Europe. A couple of acres would produce all the potatoes a family
Potato
could eat and in even an average year there would be enough left
over to feed a pig. The diet was monotonous, but never less than filling.
There are dozens of accounts from the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries of the quantities that people consumed. A farmer from
Co. Down reckoned that pounds a day was little enough for a
working man, and the bishop of Kildare thought that in hours a
labouring man will require at least three half-stones of potatoes, that
is pounds. More modestly, the historian Kenneth H. Connell puts
the average consumption for an adult Irishman at around pounds
of potatoes a day. And if he ate nothing else and drank only water he
was not undernourished. If, as was customary, he had a cup of milk
with each meal, then the biochemist if not the gourmet would say
that his needs were admirably satisfied. Such a diet of potatoes and milk
would provide , calories a day, compared with the recommended
,; plus all the protein, calcium and iron a man needed, and a suffi-
ciency of the listed vitamins.
The typical cottier and his family were oppressed by predatory land-
lords, clothed in rags and not infrequently sharing their living accom-
modation with pigs and chickens, but they were very well nourished
and thus able to sustain a birth rate approaching the physical maximum.
Potatoes kept young couples healthy, sexually active and fertile. They
married early, and their respect for Catholic prohibitions encouraged
uninhibited sex. Potato mashed with buttermilk made early weaning
possible, thus shortening birth intervals by reducing the contraceptive
effects of breast-feeding. Potatoes fed husbands and children prodi-
giously; generous amounts of healthy food kept mortality at bay. Further-
more, the demands of potato cultivation locked people onto the land,
where they avoided the epidemics that ravaged the cities from time to
time. More babies were born, fewer died before adulthood; and so
succeeding generations contained a proportionately larger cohort of
potential parents. Two million, million, million, , , and million:
Irelands population rise was as spectacular as the expansion of potato
cultivation. The former tracked the latter; the latter fed the former
cause and effect.
Such rampant population growth could not continue indefinitely.
There would have to be some redress, and a sober warning of the form
it might take came in . William Wildes Table of Irish Famines,
compiled in , reports that an early, severe and prolonged winter
destroyed the countrys entire potato crop that year. The shortage of food
was aggravated by the difficulty of grinding corn while watermills were
Seeds of famine
rendered inoperable by frozen rivers, and by the poor summer that
followed when the corn failed to ripen and the grass to grow.
Want and misery were in every face, the rich unable to relieve the
poor, the roads spread with dead and dying; mankind of the colour
of the weeds and nettles on which they feed; . . . whole villages were
laid waste. If one in every house in the kingdom died, and that is
very probable, the loss must have been upward of , souls.
In Youngs view, Irish cottiers were better fed than Englands cottagers:
If any doubts the comparative plenty which attends the board of the
poor natives of England and Ireland, let him attend to their meals;
the sparingness with which our labourer eats his bread and cheese
is well known; mark the Irishmans potato bowl placed on the floor,
the whole family upon their hams around it, devouring a quantity
almost incredible, the beggar seating himself to it with a hearty
welcome, the pig taking his share as readily as the wife, the cocks,
the hens, turkies, geese, the cur, the cat, and perhaps the cow and
all partaking of the same dish. No man can often have been a witness
of it without being convinced of the plenty, and I will add the cheer-
fulness, that attends it.
The balance was tuned to perfection: new tasty and productive potato
varieties, plenty of land, and an agricultural workforce of robust good
health and compliant demeanour. Ironically, the potato, which had
enabled the cottiers to survive and cheerfully multiply under the oppres-
sion and exploitations of the landlords feudal regime, had now set them
up to be the energy base of Irelands burgeoning contribution to inter-
national commerce. So long as cottiers could feed themselves on
potatoes, landlords could require them to work more intensively on
the production of commodities for export.
Grain was the most attractive proposition. Not least by virtue of
Fosters Corn Law, which provided for a bounty to be paid on Irelands
grain exports, and a duty levied on imports. Introduced in with
the intention of encouraging farmers to produce a sufficiency of grain
for the country and then a surplus for export, in a few years, it changed
the face of the land, and made Ireland to a great extent an arable instead
of a pasture country. The change was swift and wide-reaching. Figures
on the acreage involved are elusive, but Arthur Young remarked that
Belfast, which imported grain until the year before his tour, had become
an exporter; and the fact that wheat exports increased twentyfold, and
oats tenfold in the fifty years after must confirm that a good deal
Seeds of famine
of pasture had been converted to tillage. And not just grain kept the
cottiers busy: soaring demands for linen meant that the flax (a variety
of linseed, Linum usitatissimum, with long fibrous stems) from which it
was woven had to be sown and reaped too, and weaving became a
cottage industry that contributed significantly to the rise in exports of
Irish linen from million yards of cloth per year in the s to over
million in the s. Forty million yards over , miles; almost
enough to girdle the planet, every year.
And, indeed, Irish linen did girdle the planet in the late eighteenth
century as the billowing sails of ships deployed by the European
powers as they vied for control of foreign parts and lucrative trade
routes. This was the age of sail, and there were young colonies to be
provisioned in America, the West Indies, South Africa and Australia.
Wars to be fought too, as Napoleon challenged Europe. All of this
meant that Europes farmers were being called upon to do more than
simply service and feed the home countries they were required to
provision the navies, merchant fleets and distant colonies as well. And
a disproportionate share of this burden fell on the Irish.
Take just one example: Ireland supplied per cent of Englands food
imports in the early nineteenth century. This was all very well for the
bosses and the bankers, but what about the farm labourers who were
producing the wealth? They had the potato, but its advantages were
counting against them now. Because potatoes were so cheap, labour was
cheap, and so output could be raised simply by employing more labour.
And because the labour market was choked with cheap workers, there
was no incentive to improve their terms of employment, and insuffi-
cient demand in Irelands home market to stimulate economic change:
the workers had no buying power. But as long as prices were steady or
rising in response to demand from England and elsewhere, farmers,
middlemen and landlords prospered; and while potatoes flourished, the
labourers were healthy and hard-working. But it could not last.
Already, two or more generations had grown up on the potato,
healthy and fecund. Where a single couple had married and reared a
conservative five children fifty years before, there could be at least
mouths to feed now. Land to be sub-divided yet again; bog to be
reclaimed; improbable mountain slopes to be tackled with the spade:
lazy-beds, indeed! And yet there was still rent to be paid. Shoes were not
a priority, even in the fiercest winter, but some clothes, tools, utensils
and salt were required. There had to be money for them; something
to sell. And too often now it was the supplements that had hitherto
Potato
made a potato diet more adequately nutritious that were sold. The pig
was a source of protein and essential fats, but had to go to market:
The golden age of the potato had not lasted long fifty or sixty
years, perhaps. Its beginnings lay somewhere in the two decades after
the Great Frost of , and its close was confirmed by the end of
the Napoleonic wars in , which sent grain prices tumbling and
farmers looking for other ways of paying the inflated rents they had
agreed upon while the market was booming. They looked to the land.
It is not enough to say that land is desired in Ireland, wrote an observer;
it is envied and coveted; it is torn to pieces, and the pieces are fiercely
contested: when it cannot be occupied by fair means it is seized by
crime. In Connaught, the competition for land was especially cruel.
There were consolidations of previously fragmented land, as farmers
sought the economies of scale. Thousands of cottiers and their families
were evicted, and left with no choice but to join the pleading crowds
wherever land was still to be had. More sub-division ensued, more short
leases on exorbitant rents. Cottiers would promise anything, hoping
that potatoes would keep them alive, but eventually even the limit of
the potatos generosity was breached. The fields were full, but the
new varieties which breeders had introduced, though more productive,
were less nutritious and more susceptible to disease.
The Lumper, introduced in the early s, was per cent more
productive than the varieties which had fuelled Irelands spectacular
population growth the Black, the Apple and the Cups but its short-
comings were clear. Indeed, the inquities of the Lumper ring like a
funeral bell through the literature:
The root, at its first introduction, was scarcely considered food enough
for swine, it neither possesses the farinaceous qualities of the better
Seeds of famine
varieties of the plant, nor is it as palatable as any other, being wet
and tasteless, and, in point of substantial nutriment, little better, as
an article of human food, than a Swedish turnip. A wretched kind;
of a soft watery quality . . . both unwholesome and unpalatable even
crows rejected them if a Cup was to be had.
The laws penalising cottiers simply for being Catholics had been
repealed, but the government did nothing to avert disaster, and made
no arrangements for relieving the destitute should the prophesies become
reality until the s, when it was decided that a version of Englands
Potato
recently introduced Poor Law should be applied to Ireland. It was to
be a more stringent version, however, in that relief would be admin-
istered only to whole family units and only within the confines of a
workhouse, and once a workhouse was full, no relief would be avail-
able for those turned away. No outdoor relief and, furthermore, it was
deemed that a well-run workhouse should deter people from applying
for relief and discourage inmates from staying too long.
To ensure the equitable distribution of the Poor Law workhouse
facilities, Ireland was divided into administrative units known as
unions, each of which would have its own workhouse. Each work-
house was to be administered by an elected Board of Guardians and
financed by rates locally levied. Thus the unions were to be self-
financing (though loans were provided for construction of the build-
ings). While the unions were being demarcated and the workhouses
built, teams of commissioners were sent out to investigate local diets
around the country, the idea being that whatever diets were served in
the workhouses should be worse (and cheaper) than anything available
outside. This proved difficult, for across a wide swathe of the country
men were eating four or five pounds of potatoes at breakfast, dinner
and supper, with milk or buttermilk, and the commissioners could not
imagine a diet worse than that. They investigated diets in about two-
thirds of the , parishes in Ireland and found that potatoes were
not only the sole diet of the poor, but had also made advances into
the eating patterns of better-off farmers. Oatmeal, milk, cabbage, herrings,
bacon and beef had not been entirely swept from the tables of the rural
middle class, but they had been converted into luxuries that were eaten
just a few times during the year.
The speed at which the workhouses were built and opened was
impressive, and the government doubtless drew some comfort from the
fact that were operational by the autumn of , when Irelands
potato crop began to wilt and die from a hitherto unknown disease.
Crop failures had caused localised hardship before, so officials probably
felt that the new arrangements would be capable of relieving any distress
the failures might bring. But this was a totally new order of disease,
which swept across the fields like wildfire seemingly on the wind
and left hardly a single plant uninfected.
The country had been expecting a bumper harvest: . million acres
had been planted with potatoes per cent more than in the previous
year. Cottiers were grateful and contented; farmers were in the height
of good spirits; the country was happy and prosperous in anticipation
Seeds of famine
of a bright and glorious era in the history of Ireland. A harvest of
million tons was predicted enough to meet all demands. The only
ones not overjoyed with the prospects were some commercial farmers
who regretted having gone to the expense of sowing potatoes when
they promise to be so cheap and plentiful.
The disease arrived without warning in September and spread
remorselessly across the country, destroying in a few days fields of pota-
toes which until then had been proudly resplendent in all their pomp
of dark green leaf and purple bloom. Nothing but black and withered
stalks were left above ground, while below ground the tubers were
stained and beginning to rot. Even potatoes which had been harvested
earlier and were already in store became rotten and useless within a
few weeks they were reduced to an inedible stinking mess.
Nothing like the calamity which struck Ireland had been known in
Europe since the Black Death of the fourteenth century. The destitu-
tion to which the country was reduced continued through when
the disease devastated crops again, and went on into and
because farmers had virtually given up planting potatoes (only ,
acres in ), leaving survivors of the first onslaughts to struggle for
other sources of sustenance. In just a few years, the population was
reduced by over million. At least one million died of starvation and
famine-related disease, while another million emigrated.
Cleggan village had been on the north side of the bay at the time
of the famine, huddled under the headland on which a sturdy stone
signal-tower had been built during the Napoleonic wars one of the
chain erected along the west coast of Ireland to ensure that Englands
back door stayed shut. The ruined tower was still prom-
inent on the skyline in the s, drawing the eye across the
acres that a scion of the Twining tea family had bought after the
famine; but little of the old Cleggan village remained. Even the name
had gone across the bay to Knockbrack, where the Post Office had
established a district office and called it the Cleggan Post Office, thus
ensuring that Knockbrack eventually became Cleggan.
Potato
The flight of Cleggan across the bay was an episode of local history
that John James McLoughlin had once mentioned when I met him
where the road turns away from the shore and cuts back towards
Ballynew. John James now owned the site where old Cleggan had stood,
and lived across the road from it in a fine two-storey house his father
had built with stone and slate retrieved from the village after buying
the site, perhaps half a century before. Now old Cleggan was a few
lines of broken-down walls and a roofless stable on an acre or two of
meadow where John James grazed cattle. The rocks on the shoreline
below were encrusted with mussels, whelks and winkles. There were
always dunlins and oystercatchers picking through the shingle and kelp,
and in early spring salmon struggled through the shallow estuary to
lake Anillaun and their spawning beds in the Sheeauns stream above.
Grand place for a village, John James would say of the old site. South-
facing and sheltered by the hill. The villagers had worked on the farm,
grew potatoes and kept cattle and sheep over on the north side. They
fished, and there had been a slipway and a pier for their boats. When
the Twinings came they had taken the village over and built dressed-
stone cottages for their workers, with slate roofs, he said. But there had
been many more cottages before then the traditional kind: thatched
and small with fireplaces that filled one wall, dry-stone walls with mud
plaster to keep the draughts out; lime-washed and small windows, beaten
earth floors and low ceilings that kept the warmth in. And do you
know the cromleac, down yonder?
I did. It was a rectangle of upright boulders with a single large slab
of rock balanced on top that stood prominently above the shore a few
hundred yards beyond old Cleggan. A Celtic burial mound. Long since
stripped of its contents and earth covering but still a powerful reminder
of Cleggans most ancient inhabitants. A memorial. No inscription, no
neat descriptive panel on a post just a tangible piece of local history
that you learned about by word of mouth.
Chapter Eleven
I know nothing more imposing than the view which the Thames
offers during the ascent from the sea to London Bridge. The masses
of buildings, the wharves on both sides, especially from Woolwich
upwards, the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer
and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in
the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers
shoot by one another; all this is so vast, so impressive, that a man
cannot collect himself, but is lost in the marvel of Englands great-
ness before he sets foot upon English soil.
The wear and tear of a slave, it has been said, is at the expense of
his master, but that of a free servant is at his own expense. [Further-
more] [t]he fund for replacing or repairing, if I may say so, the wear
and tear of the slave, is commonly managed by a negligent master
or careless overseer. That destined for performing the same office
with regard to the free man, is managed by the free man himself
. . . It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations,
I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end
than that performed by slaves.
Adam Smith was writing in , before the full effects of the potato
on Europes population growth rate had become evident. Friedrich
Engels arrived in England just as those two factors free labour and
a burgeoning population found common purpose in the potential
and demands of the Industrial Revolution. Manchester, and Engelss
status in the textile industry, gave him a first-hand view of what was
likely to happen when there were more people clamouring for work
than there were jobs for them to do: perversely, in such circumstances,
manufacturers could employ fewer of them simply by exploiting the
labourers competition among themselves. If a manufacturer custom-
arily employed ten workers for nine hours daily, for instance, he could
employ just nine by requiring each to work ten hours daily for the
same wages. The threat of being the one thrown out of work was
enough to ensure that all agreed to work for less. Costs were reduced,
the workforce shrank and the pool of available labour grew larger.
Whether or not Ermen and Engels indulged in such practices, the
prevailing ethics of mid-nineteenth-century industry obliged Engels
himself to live a double life in Manchester: committed to his fathers
firm of capitalist exploiters on the one hand, while simultaneously
accumulating the evidence he would use to call for an end to such
exploitation. It was not a combination that could be easily sustained.
In fact, Engels soon left the family firm and barely two years after he
had first sailed up the Thames published a compilation of facts, notes
Woe the sons of Adam!
and observations entitled The Condition of the Working-Class in England
in . The book was written and published in German; tellingly, an
English translation did not appear until , though it is a damning
indictment of English society and, more particularly, an often moving
account of how a very large number of people in early Victorian England
lived.
Engels describes the scenes he has witnessed on visits to Englands
industrial cities the filth and horrors then in respect of one
Manchester district in particular wonders if the description is:
Engels believed that the industrial epoch had inflicted more inhu-
manity and debasement than slavery ever did. He quotes figures on the
excesses of child labour, and scoffs at the minor relief afforded by the
Factory Act of , which limited the working day of nine- to
thirteen-year-olds to nine hours, and to twelve hours for children
between fourteen and eighteen. Children grow up like wild weeds, he
wrote, while their parents worked unlimited hours in conditions that
Potato
few survived beyond the age of forty. Indeed of , people working
in the factories he surveyed, only were more than forty-five years
old. And their options? None. Workhouses were supposed to provide
a refuge for those without a job and unable to support themselves, but
operated more to deter than attract those most in need of their serv-
ices. If God punished men for crimes as man punishes man for poverty,
a commentator quoted by Engels declares, then woe to the sons of
Adam!
But cost-cutting industrialists and grasping landlords were not the
only factors that Engels held responsible for the plight of Englands
workforce. He (and many others) also blamed the Irish, thousands of
whom had been leaving their homes for England every year since the
potato had begun to boost Irelands population. So England was doubly
afflicted by the potato-driven population boom, having to contend with
a sizeable proportion of Irelands surplus as well as with its own. The
Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in England, Engels
declared, and from the time when it became known in Ireland that
the east side of St Georges Channel offered steady work and good pay
for strong arms, every year brought armies of the Irish hither. More
than one million had immigrated already, he declared, and the influx
continued at the rate of about , per year. They were not welcome.
Indeed, they were despised, as Thomas Carlyle, one of the Victorian
eras most influential social commentators, made clear in :
Crowds of miserable Irish darken our towns. The wild Irish features,
looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery and mockery
salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as
he whirls past, lashes the Irishman with his whip, curses him with
his tongue; the Irishman is holding out his hat to beg. He is the
sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing
savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere
strength of hand and back; for wages that will purchase him pota-
toes. He needs only salt for condiment; he lodges to his mind in
any pighutch or doghutch, roosts in outhouses; and wears a suit of
tatters, the getting off and on of which is said to be a difficult opera-
tion, transacted only in festivals and the hightides of the calendar.
The Saxon man if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work.
He too may be ignorant; but he has not sunk from decent manhood
to squalid apehood: he cannot continue there . . . the uncivilised
Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives
Woe the sons of Adam!
out the Saxon native, takes possession in his room. There abides he,
in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as
the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder. . . . We have
quarantines against pestilence; but there is no pestilence like that;
and against it what quarantine is possible? . . . The wretchedness of
Ireland, slowly but inevitably, has crept over to us, and become our
own wretchedness.
What hope was there for the English working man, Engels asked,
when faced with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a
civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any
other? Wages were forced down, and the mere presence of the Irish
exercised a strong degrading influence upon their English companions
in toil:
For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers
are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish
filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status
in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great
part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to under-
stand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered
by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still
more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.
But the Irish were not wholly to blame for the conditions under which
they lived and worked in England nor indeed, for the circumstances
Potato
which had driven them to leave Ireland. As Carlyle magnanimously
affirmed:
We English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long centuries of injus-
tice to our neighbour Island. Injustice, doubt it not, abounds; . . .
England is guilty towards Ireland; and reaps at last, in full measure,
the fruit of fifteen generations of wrong-doing.
England could not expect their Irish brothers to stay at home and
starve, he continued.
It is just and natural that they come hither as a curse to us. Alas, for
them too it is not a luxury. It is not a straight or joyful way of
avenging their sore wrongs . . . Yet a way it is, and an effectual way.
The time has come when the Irish population must either be
improved a little, or else exterminated.
If left to itself this fearful state of things would have remedied itself:
for had the people the control of their own community, and had
the potato crop failed to the extent to which it has this year [],
these people . . . would have been left to their own resources, which
being destroyed would have left them without food. Millions of
human beings, desperate with hunger and untutored in laws, would
have devastated the country; this would have aggravated the misery,
and at last large numbers would have perished of starvation, and the
material relations of the survivors would have been re-established.
But, as Smee notes, the Irish had a rich and powerful neighbour
who sympathised with their distress and was also desirous of allevi-
ating their suffering. Desirous? In fact the government had no choice.
After centuries of religious, military, economic, social and political
Woe the sons of Adam!
dissension, the Irish problem had acquired a humanitarian dimension
of unparalleled proportions. Millions were starving; thousands were
dying all of them subjects of Queen Victoria and entitled to the care
and attention of her government.
Robert Peel was Prime Minister at the time, leading a Conservative
government elected principally to serve the interests of a landed gentry
whose instinctive sympathies probably aligned with those of Alfred
Smee. There was also the opinion of the countrys powerful industrial
leaders to consider; as well as that of agitators clamouring for workers
rights and fair wages; and, not least, the widespread conviction that
Irelands problem was born of its own iniquities. As Redcliffe Salaman
reports, when the distress of the famine moved Queen Victoria to
proclaim a day of prayer and intercession, even the prayer composed
for the occasion echoed this belief. In church, chapel and synagogue
alike, congregations prayed for the removal of those heavenly judgments
which our manifold sins and provocations have most justly deserved,
and with which Almighty God is pleased to visit the iniquities of the
land by a grievous scarcity and dearth of divers articles of sustenance
and necessaries of life.
Sir Robert Peel was described by those who knew him as deliberate in
manner, careful and cautious in conversation, and possessing a singularly
chilly smile, like the silver plate on a coffin. The diarist Charles Greville
noted that he had no popular or ingratiating qualities, but although it
may have been difficult to like the man, it was impossible not to respect
him. Conscientiousness and a sense of justice were his leading qualities,
which he deployed with consummate skill as politician and adminis-
trator. He had a loving wife and seven children, and a circle of close
friends who cared for him deeply. When he died in at the age of
sixty-two, tragically, following a fall from his horse, the nation mourned
from the queen to the humblest labourer in an entirely unexpected
outburst of affection. Charles Greville remarked that while he knew Peel
had a great hold on the country, he had no idea it was so deep and
strong and general as now appears. Carlyle wrote of the nations affec-
tionate appreciation of this man which he himself was far from being
sure of, or aware of, while he lived. The Duke of Wellington, though
he could hardly speak for tears, told the House of Lords of Peels passion
for truth as though it was a quality not usually encountered among politi-
cians. Former critics surprised even themselves. Once I little thought I
should have cried for his death, wrote Thomas Macaulay.
Potato
As a man whose father had been one of the countrys first (and
richest) manufacturers of cotton cloth, already employing some ,
people in the s and paying over , annually in government
duty and taxes, Robert Peel knew a great deal about the issues affecting
manufacturing prosperity, while the familys elevation to the aristoc-
racy in with concomitant country estate gave him more than
a passing familiarity with landed interests too. Since boyhood, Peel had
been accustomed to luxury. He was a wealthy man who, after his fathers
death in , had an income of more than , a year. His enter-
taining was renowned for its quality and style twenty or thirty guests
waited upon by a platoon of servants in orange and purple. A biog-
rapher reports that even the irreverent Disraeli was impressed:the dinner
was curiously sumptuous, he reported to his sister, the second course
of dried olives, caviare, woodcock-pie, foie gras, and every combination
of cured herring, etc. was really remarkable.
First intimations that Ireland was threatened with starvation as a
consequence of diseased potato crops reached Peels government in
August , in response to an enquiry about the likely size of the
years crop that Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, had circulated.
This was customary practice, a means of assessing the countrys food
supply for the coming winter, but as reports came in of fearful destruc-
tion and crops entirely destroyed in south-east England and around
London, concern was aroused. There was news of similarly disastrous
outbreaks on the Isle of Wight, and in Belgium, Holland and France.
A fatal malady has broken out among the potato crop, the respected
Gardeners Chronicle declared on August. On all sides we hear of the
destruction that has overtaken this valuable product, excepting in the
north of England. In Belgium the fields are said to have been entirely
desolated; there is hardly a sound sample in Covent Garden Market . . .
The authorities knew that if the destruction spread to the north and
farther afield the consequences would be calamitous; three weeks later
their worst fears were confirmed. Printing of the Gardeners Chronicle for
September was interrupted to insert the news: We stop the Press
with very great regret to announce that the Potato Murrain [or Pesti-
lence] has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. The crops around
Dublin are suddenly perishing . . . where will Ireland be, in the event
of a universal potato rot? Where, indeed?
For the next week or two it was still possible to hope. The govern-
ment received a number of favourable reports on the situation in
Ireland, and in early October the Home Secretary felt confident
Woe the sons of Adam!
enough to record his belief that the potato crop, tho damaged, is not
so much below the average as some of the exaggerated reports from
Ireland have led us to apprehend. Meanwhile, all officers of the Irish
Constabulatory had been directed to make weekly reports on the
state of crops in their districts, and their news was not good. Harvest-
time came, and there were few constables who could report anything
other than total loss of the potato crop.
With the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Heytesbury, reporting
from Dublin that the situation was serious and required the govern-
ments immediate attention, Peel dispatched a scientific commission to
investigate Dr John Lindley, the botanist (and editor of the Gardeners
Chronicle), and two professors of chemistry, Dr Lyon Playfair and Sir
Robert Kane. They lost no time; indeed, no great depth of investiga-
tion was required for them to conclude that half of Irelands potato
crop was either destroyed already or soon would be. The account is
melancholy and it cannot be looked upon in other than a serious light,
Playfair wrote to Peel in late October. We are confident that the
accounts are under-rated rather than exaggerated . . . I am sorry to give
you so desponding a letter, but we cannot conceal from ourselves that
the case is much worse than the public supposes.
Meanwhile, Peel and his Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, were
exchanging views on how mass starvation in Ireland could be relieved
if the potato crop was completely destroyed. Peel reviewed the options
in a memorandum of October , concluding that corn would
have to be provided and, therefore, The removal of impediments to
import is the only effectual remedy. On the same day, Graham advised
Peel that:
Indian corn might be obtained from the United States readily, and on
cheap terms, [but] if we open the ports to maize duty-free, most
popular and irresistible arguments present themselves why flour and
oatmeal, the staple of the food of man, should . . . be restricted in its
supply by artificial means, while Heaven has withheld from an entire
people its accustomed sustenance. Could we with propriety remit
duties . . . ? Can these duties, once remitted . . . , be ever again imposed?
Ought they to be maintained with their present stringency, if the
people of Ireland be reduced to the last extremity for want of food?
With the Cabinet on his side there was now Parliament to convince
including the many members of Peels own party who remained
implacably opposed to repeal. News of Peels intention had been leaked
to the press, provoking accusations of betrayal. In Parliament and on
landed estates throughout the country, none had forgotten that less
than six months before Peel had specifically opposed what he now
intended to propose. The occasion had been a debate on the motion
calling for total abolition of the Corn Laws that was put before Parlia-
ment each year; it was an annual event, and so certain to be defeated
that senior members of the government hardly needed to attend, let
alone speak. But Peel himself, the Prime Minister, had spoken out against
the motion. Standing at the Despatch Box he had announced that
Considering the great importance of the subject, and the position in
Woe the sons of Adam!
which I stand, I am unwilling to give a silent vote upon the imme-
diate question before the House, and proceeded with a disquisition
which it must be said was not so much in support of the Corn
Laws as against the arguments for its repeal. I shall give my decided
vote against the proposition, he concluded. The motion was defeated
by a majority of .
That was in June ; now it was January , and the people of
Ireland were starving. Peel in effect was using the Irish crisis as justi-
fication for a radical shift in policy that was as significant in its time
as the Battle of Hastings or Magna Carta. Repeal of the Corn Laws
ushered in the era of free trade that established the viability of Englands
industrial economy in the late nineteenth century; in fact, it marked a
crucial point in Englands transformation from a small agricultural nation
into a wealthy industrial power. This was historic in its own right, but
also an outstanding instance of a major political event being brought
about by the potato.
Peel himself denied that it was the resistless hand of famine in Ireland
which had brought him to his resolve that the Corn Laws ought to
be abolished, claiming that he grew into the conviction that they were
bad in principle. Maybe so, but one of his contemporaries felt it prob-
able that if the Irish famine had not threatened, the moment for intro-
ducing the legislation might have been indefinitely postponed, and it
is certainly true that Peels eloquent speeches drew heavily on the news
from Ireland as a means of persuading a reluctant Parliament to vote
for abolition, culminating in a masterful outburst from the Despatch
Box on March :
The Bill abolishing the Corn Laws (with compensation for affected
landowners) was passed in May by a majority of with two-
thirds of the governing Conservatives voting against it and the entire
opposition voting in favour. An even more remarkable turnaround was
Potato
achieved in the House of Lords (which could have vetoed the Bill),
where the Duke of Wellington converted a majority of the country
gentlemen to his belief that the security of a good government was
more important than the Corn Laws. And, in any case, if they did not
pass the Repeal Bill now, he pointed out, the issue would only come
up again in the next Parliament.
While engaged with the political struggle, Peel had not neglected
Irelands distress. Even before his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws had
been put before Parliament, Peel was making arrangements for grain
to be shipped to the most distressed areas of Ireland. On his authority
alone, without the approval of either his Cabinet or Parliament, Peel
persuaded the banker Sir Thomas Baring to buy maize to the value of
, from America secretly, for shipment to Ireland as the first
consignment of the governments relief programme. The grain duly
arrived, and distribution began in March , two months before the
Bill that would have authorised its duty-free importation was passed.
Ironically, within weeks of repeal the price of corn reached heights
rarely seen in the days of the Corn Laws simply because of the huge
demand that relief for Ireland put on the markets. In all, England spent
a total of million on corn for Ireland, according to a contempor-
ary writer quoted by Redcliffe Salaman. Speculation was rife as the
worlds corn-bins were scraped for wheat, oats, rice and maize any
food-grain that the starving Irish would eat. Dealers bought futures in
corn from home and abroad at two and three times the price of a few
months before (when the Corn Laws were still in place), draining the
countrys gold reserves and threatening the stability of the Bank of
England already under considerable strain from the financial demands
of what even the most sober-minded commentators were calling Railway
Mania.
The worlds first commercial line had opened between Stockton and
Darlington (a distance of kilometers) in and, after a slow start,
railways were carrying over million passengers a year by the early
s. That figure was destined to rise twenty- and thirtyfold over the
next decades. The vision of what a nationwide mechanised transport
system could do for an industrial economy had infected the country
and over per cent of Englands gross domestic investment was tied
up in railways during the mid-s, when Railway Mania was at its
peak. The stock market was driven to a frenzy by people gambling
on the expectation of quick and easy returns.
Woe the sons of Adam!
After the first wave of railway construction, most of the projects
inviting investment consisted of plans to build rail links between local
towns and the main arterial routes but adventurous speculators were
looking further afield. They are throwing an iron girdle around the
globe itself, D. Morier Evans, a financial journalist, reported. Far off
India woos them over its waters, and China even listens to the voice
of the charmer. The ruined hills and broken altars of Old Greece will
soon re-echo the whistle of the locomotive. There was even a scheme
for bringing the benefits of railway transport to the islands of the
Caribbean, St Kitts for instance: Fifteen miles long and four broad,
with mountains in the middle, whence rivulets flow, and between high
mountains dreadful rocks, horrid precipices, thick woods, and sulphurous
springs . . .
The frenzy peaked in the autumn of : projects were regis-
tered in September alone, and another in October, bringing the
total for the year to ,. As the Times descanted upon the nations
madness, the impossibility of it all was becoming apparent. In all, ,
railway companies with a paper value of ,, had been regis-
tered by November. Three-quarters of them were worthless, the Times
opined, but all:
Right and left the infatuated dupes were cut down as grass
under the mowers scythe . . . Persons who perchance had written
and pledged their responsibility for shares in a particular
company, with the expectation of getting twenty, or ten or, as had
been previously the case, not more than five shares, were without
further prelude, honoured with the whole number first applied
for.
Potato
And obliged to pay for them. For many, bankruptcy was the only
option and worthless companies faded away while the few viable
survivors merged into companies that would henceforward dominate
the industry.
Railways were of course being laid and brought into operation even
as the speculative mania raged. Plans for , miles were sanctioned
in the s , of them in . By mid-, , miles of
track were under construction in Britain, employing , workers
and stimulating a massive increase in coal, iron and brick production
all very good for a developing industrial economy, but stretching the
countrys financial resources to within a whisker of breaking point. In
the railways were spending . million of share capital and
borrowed funds on average each month.
Then, as the good fates would have it, there came news that Irelands
potato crop was doing well. Only about one-eighth of the area previ-
ously devoted to potatoes had been planted (with seed supplied by
growers in Scotland, who had been spared the devastations of ).
The weather conditions in Ireland were perfect throughout the growing
season of ; the potatoes flourished which restored peoples faith
in the potato and convinced most of them that the failures of previous
years had been due to exceptionally wet, overcast and mild conditions.
The corn harvests of also promised to be better than average, and
prices tumbled in anticipation of bountiful supplies, just as the corn
bought ahead months before at inflated rates began arriving in the
ports.
Dealers who had gambled on prices remaining high now found them-
selves unable to recoup their investments and, with the banks themselves
under pressure, were left with no alternative but bankruptcy.Twenty firms
of substance were brought down in September with total liabilities
approaching million. Another ninety-nine collapsed in October as
the crisis spread, bringing down eleven country banks and three of the
biggest in Liverpool. All the London banks survived, but every sort of
commercial failure occurred as the effects of the crisis worked their way
through the system in corn, stockbroking, insurance-broking, silk dealing
and all branches of overseas trade.
Bringing the crisis under control and restoring the efficacy of the
financial markets was ultimately the responsibility of the Bank of England.
In his history of the Bank published in , Sir John Clapham writes
eloquently and at length on the strategies which were adopted. Not
all the Banks actions were approved by the Treasury Committee that
Woe the sons of Adam!
subsequently investigated the crisis, however, and it is on a defensive
note that Sir John claims the Bank could be held only partially respon-
sible for the calamitous state of business in . The Banks poli-
cies and failures may have been contributing factors, he admits, but the
Bank was not responsible for the Railway Mania, nor in any way respon-
sible for such Acts of God as crop failure and Irelands potato famine,
which, he declared, were the immediate causative factors of the catas-
trophe of .
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Part Three
The World
Chapter Twelve
The potato was foremost among the plants to which the Society
directed attention, but progress on the acquisition of fresh stock was
thwarted by a paucity of information on wild potatoes. It was certain
that the cultivated potato had initially been brought from South America
by the Spanish in the sixteenth century but precisely where its wild
antecedents might be acquired in the nineteenth century remained a
matter of speculation.
Wild forms were said to have been seen growing in Chile; but
Alexander von Humboldt, who had crossed the Andes from east to
west in the course of his South American explorations (),
reported that while the cultivated potato occurred in all the temperate
regions of South America, the wild potato was not indigenous to Peru
The fatal malady
or any part of the tropical Cordilleras; nor had he seen or heard of it
in Mexico or the south-western region of North America.
Humboldt was seriously (and uncharacteristically) misleading in
respect of the wild potato, for the numerous species occur throughout
the region and must have been there in Humboldts day too we can
only assume he missed them.
Meanwhile,Thomas Knight drew attention to how rapidly the potato
was becoming established as the staple food of Englands agricultural
workforce. In their diet consisted of bread, cheese and garden
produce (mainly cabbage), he reported, but within ten years the potato
had become dominant. An acre of potatoes could provide as much food
as acres of wheat or forty of pasture, Knight told a meeting of the
Horticultural Society in and the good news was that the potato
had brought about a considerable improvement in general health; people
were living longer. But there were grounds for concern here too. With
chilling prescience Knight expressed alarm at the rate by which the
population was expanding on the basis of the potato, especially in
Ireland.
The Societys secretary, Joseph Sabine, subsequently enlarged upon
these concerns, noting in that, with the exception of wheat and rice,
the potato had become (on a world basis) the vegetable most employed
as the food of Man, with a prospect of soon becoming the chief staple
of life. This could lead to a great extension of the population, he told the
Society, though not necessarily to an increase in happiness since the
potato was very liable to injury from casualties of season and could not
be stored for more than a few months. He warned that a general failure
of the years crop, whenever it shall have become the chief or sole support
of a country, must inevitably lead to all the misery of famine, more dreadful
in proportion to the numbers exposed to its ravages.
Sabine urged the Society to locate and import fresh stock, with the
intention of selecting and obtaining varieties of Potatoes, not only with
superior qualities in flavour and productiveness, but which shall be less
subject to injury by changes of weather when in growth, and which
may possess the quality of keeping for a length of time . . . Corres-
pondents in the Americas were informed of the Societys quest, and
several batches of wild and cultivated potatoes duly arrived from Chile,
Peru and Mexico during the s, s and s. They flourished in
the Societys gardens, but attempts to improve Europes cultivated potato
by crossing it with wild species foundered chiefly because the wild
species being used were completely sterile.
Potato
Attempts to turn the wild potatoes themselves into a cultivated form
by growing them in rich soil with plenty of manure and other fertilisers
were equally unsuccessful. The plants flourished well enough, forming
dense bushes smothered with flowers, but tubers were few, none larger
than the seed of kidney beans.
By then, though, the tragedy Thomas Knight had warned of
more than thirty years before had become a reality and the Royal
Horticultural Societys efforts to find and breed potatoes capable of
withstanding the onslaughts of disease were dimmed to insignifi-
cance by the catastrophe in Ireland.
Lindley was certain that the wet, cold and cheerless summer of
was to blame:
Potato
During the present season . . . the Potatoes have been compelled to
absorb an unusual quantity of water; the lowness of temperature has
prevented their digesting it, and the absence of sunlight has rendered
it impossible for them to get rid of it by perspiration. Under these
circumstances it necessarily stagnated in their interior; and the
inevitable result of that was rot . . . If we had had sunlight with the
rain it would not have happened; and, perhaps it would not have
occurred had the temperature been high, instead of low, even although
the sun did not shine, and rain fell incessantly. It is the combination
of untoward circumstances that has produced the mischief.
The potato was not the only vegetable affected the ash, the oak,
the poplar, the hazel, the vine, the apple, the pear, and the plum, but
more particularly, the walnut, the French bean, mangold wurzel,
carrots and turnips suffered alike. We have a walnut tree here gener-
ally remarkable for the firmness of its fruit; yet . . . there was not
one nut with the least symptom of a healthy kernel, the leaves
exhibiting the same appearance as that of the potato.
There are two theories which, in the present position of the subject,
seems to us tenable . . . and although we are certainly disposed to
lay the greatest stress upon the [fungal theory], . . . we acknowledge
that there are great difficulties about it, and such as to make it far
from becoming to speak dogmatically.
It is sobering to note that among the comment and letters which the
devastations of the potato crops in and provoked, reports from
Wales which gave a clue as to how a potato crop might be protected,
and saved, from late blight were not followed up. On September ,
an observant gentleman by the name of Matthew Moggridge wrote to
the Gardeners Chronicle from his home in Swansea:
There! . . . copper smoke does protect the Potato crop, and effec-
tually! John Lindley exclaimed, one miasma has had the power of
repelling another from the Potato field. Having thus commented on
the letter from Mr Moggridge, Lindley then drew attention to evidence
of potatoes having been saved by the shelter of trees or hedgerows, or
as part of a mixed crop going on to stress the role of atmospheric
influence in all this, but saying no more about the ingredient which
appeared to have protected crops around the Swansea smelting works:
copper. Indeed, Mr Moggridges highly pertinent observations received
none of the attention that hindsight would have them deserve. Forty
The fatal malady
years would pass before anyone would investigate the use of copper as
a means of controlling late blight.
The delay is puzzling. After all, a copper preparation had been
protecting wheat seed from a fungus infection since the early s.
The Bunt or Stinking Smut of wheat was an endemic rather than an
epidemic disease; it did not sweep across the countryside as the blight
had done, but regularly caused heavy losses, here one year, there the
next, very bad in some fields, almost totally absent in others. It was in
this context that Bndict Prvost, a professor of sciences at Montauban
who had already recognised that the spores of a microscopic fungus
were in some way responsible for the disease, was invited by a friend
to inspect a crop of wheat which was remarkably free of bunt, unlike
other fields thereabouts. Passing through the farmyard, Prvost noticed
an old perforated copper vat and was told it was used for soaking the
wheat seed before planting. Filled with seed, the vat was then dunked
in a solution of sheeps urine and lime.
Lime was commonly used by farmers, who believed it would protect
the seed but with mixed results. Was it possible that, on his friends
farm, contact with the copper vat had made the lime solution poisonous
to bunt spores? It was a long shot, but testable, and, sure enough,
Prvost found that the spores he put in dishes along with a small
square of polished copper died soon after germinating. He repeated
the experiment with various forms of copper and found that the
cheapest of them copper sulphate was equally effective. Even a
dose of one part in a million was enough to protect seed soaked in
the solution for a few hours. Copper, so little poisonous to humans
and animals that pumps and waterpipes were made of it, was deadly
to bunt spores.
News of Prvosts discovery spread with the publication of his memoir
in . Fifty years later, while blight attacked potatoes, the practice of
soaking wheat seed in a copper sulphate solution had become a tradi-
tion among English farmers. Dissolve one pound of copper sulphate
in ten gallons of water; soak the seed; pitch it on the floor of the barn
and shovel over dry slaked lime, which encrusted the seed with a protec-
tive coat and dried it in readiness for sowing. Since a copper prepara-
tion was known to protect wheat seed, in the curator of Dublins
Botanic Garden, David Moore, soaked some seed potatoes in a copper
sulphate solution before planting them out. The results were entirely
negative. In another experimenter tested numerous preparations:
from plain boiling water to sulphuric acid, coal-tar, lime and dung-
Potato
water, soot, salt, potash and fat and all were equally ineffective.
The problem was that the experiments were all treating the seed pota-
toes rather than the growing leaves and stems above ground, which in
this case were the first parts of the plant to be attacked by the airborne
spores of the fungus. By the time spores reached the tuber even a
protective coating of copper was useless the plant was diseased beyond
saving by then.
So although Matthew Moggridge had noticed in that potato
plants growing under the smoke from a copper smelting plant were
blight-free, potato fields generally would remain unprotected until
another fortuitous happenstance brought the lethal effect of copper
on a fungus to view in thirty-six years after his letter had
been published. But this time the potential of copper to control blight
on growing vegetation, as well as seed, was fully recognised and
exploited.
. . . the treated vines show normal growth. The leaves are healthy
and of a beautiful green, the grapes are black and perfectly ripe. The
vines that were not treated present, on the contrary, the most wretched
appearance, the majority of the leaves have fallen; the few that remain
are half dried up; the grapes, still red, will not be fit for anything
except sour wine.
Chapter Thirteen
Co-opting science
For all the distress that late blight had caused in the mid-s, there
were benefits too. The disease broke the potatos hold on the economic
and social structures of Europe. For Ireland, in particular, the potato
famine forced the British government to confront the iniquities of land-
holding practices in the country. Successive Land Acts were passed,
giving tenants greater security and the right to acquire larger holdings.
Meanwhile, massive emigration diminished competition for land in
Ireland; rising incomes meant that enterprising farmers could afford to
till their land with a plough, rather than a spade; agricultural wages
doubled; and when a heavy attack of late blight struck Irish potato
fields in (when the use of Bordeaux Mixture was still unknown
in Ireland), there was far less absolute dependence on the crop. Pockets
of severe deprivation were still to be found in the west, but the time
when the people were entirely dependent on the potato has long gone
by, a commission of enquiry reported, and in every part of the west,
bread, tea, stirabout, milk and sometimes salt fish and eggs form items
of daily consumption.
Elsewhere, and especially in the industrial centres of Britain, Europe
and America, the potato was becoming less of an arbiter between bare
sufficiency and starvation and more a food that was eaten because it
was liked, rather than because it was the only option.
Enter Londons Baked Potato Man, and his cry: Baked taturs! baked
taturs! All ot, all ot!
According to the journalist Henry Mayhew, whose writings on
Londons street traders are a fascinating record of the entrepreneurial
activities that kept a significant number of the citys residents alive in
Victorian times, vendors of hot baked potatoes were plying their
Co-opting science
trade on the streets and in the markets of London in , jostling for
space and customers with equally numerous bands of fruit and vegetable
sellers, fish sellers, game, poultry and dairy produce sellers, match girls,
flower girls, pie-men, coffee and cocoa stalls, oyster-men and even
those specialising in the sale of nutmeg-graters, peppermint water, dogs
collars and rhubarb.
Selling baked potatoes on the streets of London was a seasonal job,
extending from when the new seasons potatoes were of a reasonable
size which would be around the middle of August in most years,
until late April, when potatoes not already consumed were already
sprouting and no good for baking. This suited labourers and artisans,
who were often without a job during the winter months. The pota-
toes were baked seventy-five or so at a time in the ovens of an amenable
baker (for a charge) then sold from the potato can essentially a large
tin box on four legs, with a fire heating a water jacket that kept the
potatoes hot and compartments for salt and butter at one end and
charcoal at the other. The cans were painted and polished to shine
bright as silver; some were items of impressive craftsmanship too, and
the handsomest Mayhew saw was made of brass mounted with German
silver, with coloured-glass lamps attached. Engraved brass nameplates
identified the proudest including the Original Baked Potatoes, and
the Old Original Baked Potatoes.
The Baked Potato Mans customers came from all walks of life, says
Mayhew, though he found that those from the working classes bought
the most. Irishmen were particularly fond of them but were a nuisance,
he was told, because they always wanted the largest potato in the can.
Women bought the greatest number, sometimes to eat in the street,
but more often to take home; and even children with a halfpenny to
spare would treat themselves to a hot baked potato. Mayhew calculated
that total sales of Londons baked potato vendors added up to about
tons per day; with each vendor selling an average of or so pota-
toes at a halfpenny each and making an average profit of around
shillings per week. A vendor on Smithfield Market made at least double
that, Mayhew was told, and was so busy on Fridays that he had a fresh
basket of potatoes brought from the bakers every fifteen minutes.
In terms of average earnings, shillings in is equivalent to a
weekly income of just over , today. Only for six months of the
year, admittedly, and for standing out on the street all winter, but hardly
to be sniffed at and an indication of how the potato had moved on
from the cooking pots of the poor to become a commodity that all
Potato
sorts of people have appreciated ever since and not only for its nutri-
tional attributes. Redcliffe Salaman remarks that if you were in central
London with a lady on a cold night in the early s, a potato vendor
was certain to suggest you should buy one of his wares for the lady to
put in her muff and keep her hands warm.
Salaman does not say how much a baked potato cost in his time, but
we know from Mayhew that they cost a halfpenny each in , which,
in terms of average earnings, is equivalent to pence today. Cheaper
than a McDonalds hamburger but still a sizeable portion of any childs
pocket-money and an expensive option, one would imagine, for the
housewife rushing to put a family meal on the table. Fresh potatoes
were available too, of course, and a lot cheaper, but at the equivalent of
pence per pound even they were more expensive than she need pay
in supermarkets today. Clearly, the potato was moving upmarket, with
a helpful nudge from the most famous cookbook in the English language
Mrs Beetons Book of Household Management. The book was published
in and had sold nearly million copies before the decade was out,
so Mrs Beetons praise for what she dubbed a valuable esculent will
not have passed unnoticed. From no other crop that can be cultivated
does the public derive so much benefit, she noted. Her recipes included
one for potato rissoles, preparations in the French Fashion (thin slices
fried in dripping) and a German Method (thick slices simmered in
gravy), but mostly gave precise instructions on how potatoes should be
baked, boiled, steamed or mashed. The valuable esculent had moved
upmarket but was still some distance from the day when Truman Capote
would declare that the only way to eat them was baked, smothered with
sour cream, heaped with the freshest, biggest-grained beluga caviar, and
washed down with -proof Russian vodka.
Fortunately for the potato and its consumers, blight never again wiped
out crops in Europe so completely as it had in the s. Devastating
local outbreaks occurred; there were severe regional shortages, but imports
were always available to redress the balance (albeit at a price). In point
of fact, although spores of Phytophthora infestans are present virtually
everywhere, the conditions under which they can start an outbreak of
late blight are very much dependent on the weather. Until the discovery
of Bordeaux Mixture all that growers could do was to hope that the
weather would be kind or that the claims of plant-breeders offering
new blight-resistant varieties of potato would turn out to be true.
Potato-breeding is actually a misleading description of the process
Co-opting science
by which new varieties were then produced. There was as much luck
as judgement to it selection rather than deliberate breeding. In those
early days, new cultivars came not from hybrid seed produced by delib-
erately crossing known parents, but from the seed of random crosses
between a number of varieties. The trick was to select promising
seedlings and their tubers for clonal propagation and some remark-
able results were achieved. In the United States, for instance, a New
York preacher with interests in horticulture, the Reverend Chauncy
Goodrich, picked out a cultivar with good characteristics from among
the self-pollinated seedlings of tubers sent to him from South America.
The selection fulfilled its promise, and was widely grown after its release
as the Garnet Chile potato in . Eight years later, under the nurturing
hands of a gentlemen in Vermont, Garnet Chile begat Early Rose,
which in its turn became very popular indeed.
That might have been the end of the line, for Early Rose was not
known to produce seeds, but in a young amateur botanist by the
name of Luther Burbank spotted a seed berry among his mothers crop
of Early Rose on the family plot in Massachusetts. This was unusual
enough for him to collect and plant its twenty-three seeds in the
greenhouse. They all germinated and were grown on to produce tubers
the following season. One and only one among the twenty-three
produced significantly larger and more numerous tubers than its Early
Rose parents. Burbank kept these to plant out the following year
(propagating by tuber now, rather than seed) and the results confirmed
that he had a viable and valuable new potato. It was a long, smooth-
skinned, white-fleshed variety, high-yielding and well-adapted to long
day-length; just what growers and consumers wanted. Burbank sold
the rights to a seed company and used the proceeds for a move to
California, where he established a nursery, greenhouse, and experimental
farm that became world famous. The potato kept his name, however,
and subsequently mutated into an even more valuable esculent the
Russet-Burbank, better known as the Idaho potato, superb for baking
and frying, and the first choice of Americas fast food chains.
The same sort of thing had been happening on the other side of
the Atlantic, where growers in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and
Germany were also vying to develop varieties that would find wide
national approval. In Germany alone, though only five varieties were
known in , there were forty in and by . Britains
favourite in the s was the aptly named The Fluke raised from
the seed of an old eighteenth-century favourite variety, Pink Eye, in a
Potato
cottage garden near Manchester. And The Fluke in turn produced
the Victoria, Britains most popular potato of the nineteenth century
and its name a sign of converging affections for the monarchy and
the potato. The Prince Albert was another popular variety. There was
also a British Queen, an Irish Queen, a Prince of Wales and, later, King
Edward VII, Majestic, Red King and a Purple-Eyed King Edward. And
as though to confirm that the entire nation had taken the potato to
its heart, as well as to its stomach, Queen Victoria let it be known that
her namesake was to be served at the royal dining table.
The Victoria had been raised in the early s by William Paterson,
a wealthy enthusiast from Dundee whose large-scale breeding and selec-
tion programmes became common practice among a select band of
growers during the late nineteenth century. Some notable successes
were achieved, but still using methods that were based more on selec-
tion than on deliberate hybridisation. These men were not guided by
any science of heredity or immunity; they based their selection on
yields, and on the quality and appearance of the tubers. Was it luck, or
an innate affinity, that determined their success or failure? Traditional
growers paid a lot of attention to the character and form of the plant,
for example. They rejected tall or straggly specimens out of hand and
concentrated on those with full, soft foliage which, as the season
advanced, would fill out the rows. And this, science has subsequently
shown, is just the sort of potato plant that does best.
And so the potato moved on to become an item of interest to
science, a growing appreciation of its nutritional and economic bene-
fits combining with the greater understanding of hereditary principles
that the work of William Bateson and others was uncovering. Bateson
was a pioneer of genetics (he coined the term in ); he was also a
friend of Redcliffe Salaman, under whose direction the potato would
soon be subjected to genetic investigation. But not before the Great
Potato Boom of and had finally and irrecovably damaged
the reputation of traditional breeding methods.
The Potato Boom was another example of the credulity and greed
that had fuelled the Railway Mania fifty years before; not involving such
enormous sums, it is true, but still painful to its victims. Archibald Findlay,
an ambitious potato merchant turned grower, was at the root of it all.
He had begun raising new varieties in the s and produced several
good ones, though praise was tempered by suspicion that they were
merely selections from another growers pre-existing stock horticul-
tural plagiarism in other words, and significant because breeders retained
Co-opting science
rights on the varieties they released and were due royalties on the sale
of seed tubers. In he introduced Up-to-Date, which Redcliffe
Salaman described as one the finest table varieties that has ever been
grown. Here again there were suspicions that it was derived from another
named stock, but there was no denying its good qualities.
By the turn of the century Up-to-Date was a favourite with growers
and consumers alike, so when Findlay whispered to some of his best
customers that he now had an even better potato Northern Star
they believed him. But stock was limited. Thomas Kime, a respected
Lincolnshire merchant and grower on whose account of the Boom
these paragraphs are based, managed to get pounds for the exor-
bitant sum of (over , today in terms of average earnings).
Kime chitted the tubers and used every eye. He planted the sets a yard
apart each way and gave them everything they needed to grow well.
And grow they did, he reports, Splendidly . . . There was a magnifi-
cent yield of good-sized, clean-looking healthy tubers with a market
value of close to (, in todays money) not bad for a
investment.
A mark-up of such proportions inevitably generated excitement and
the attention of speculators. Findlay hastened to bulk up his stock in
anticipation of the demand and the following season was offering
Northern Star seed at per hundredweight with no discount for
quantity. Kime and other early customers paid for a ton, and as
the available stock dwindled, Findlay raised the price to , per
ton. The boom was well under way now, with all and sundry speaking
of the fortunes to be made from planting a field of potatoes but with
no harvest, as yet, to actually confirm Northern Stars outstanding qual-
ities. A good moment, then, for Findlay to cap his achievements with
another allegedly wonderful potato: Eldorado, the fortune maker! The
real gold mine!! The diamond mine!!!
As befits its name, Eldorado was even rarer than its predecessor. The
few growers who managed to get some tubers (Kime was not among
them he was in bed with pneumonia) brought them on very care-
fully indeed keeping the tubers warm, removing the sprouts as they
appeared, potting up the sprouts in the greenhouse, then taking cuttings
from the sprouts . . . and so on, until finally they had several dozen
plants from each tuber for planting out. Their harvests that year were
encouraging as seed material, but the small areas planted could not
produce a fraction of what was required to satisfy the demand of all
who had heard of this wonderful potato. Hundreds wanted them, and
Potato
some growers soon realised there was probably as much to be made
from selling their Eldorado seed as from planting it out. Kime reports:
Single tubers were sold for as much as each, and sprouts for as
much as each this first season, and holders who were in the first
run began to offer for delivery in the Spring of at fabulous prices,
namely, to per hundredweight, and buyers were plentiful,
and bought as freely as they were offered at these prices; that is at the
rate of , to , per ton! Think of it! . . . Scores of the most
substantial, level-headed, and best business men in the potato world
bought these potatoes, without any doubt whatever that they would
prove a splendid investment. Outsiders who knew nothing whatever
about potato growing, had heard about what was being done in this
potato business, and made up their minds to be in it somehow, and
so make their fortunes . . . What a game it was!
But the day of reckoning was at hand. The little rift within the lute
began to appear is how Kime put it. Experts whose examination of
the growing crops had given them grounds to suspect that Eldorado
was not all that Findlay had claimed, found their suspicions confirmed
when the potatoes were lifted. After the first years forced culture the
crops were wretched and valueless, said Kime; in most cases they were
not worth the trouble of digging up. Thousands upon thousands of
pounds had been lost. Eldorado was no gold mine. In fact, it was an
Co-opting science
undistinguished variety that had fallen from favour many years before
Evergood. There were denials and calls to cover up the truth until
outstanding commitments had been settled, but Thomas Kime himself
was quick to blow the whistle, with advertisements announcing that
Eldorado is not a new Potato and undertaking to return the deposits
of customers who had placed advance orders with him. He was sued
for his pains in the High Court, for , but the case was lost.
So too was all confidence in growers and their so-called new kinds of
potatoes. The trade in seed potatoes of any kind slumped to a stand-
still, both at home and abroad.
But the Potato Boom is notable for more than its revelations of
human credulity and greed. In fact, as Redcliffe Salaman writes, it
marks a turning point in the historic development of plant-breeding,
. . . the Eldorado boom marked the end of one epoch and the begin-
ning of a new and better one an epoch in which Salaman himself
was to play a pioneering role.
Chapter Fourteen
Men on a mission
With the District Officers guidance, they found wild potatoes growing
as weeds on a farm, and dug up lots of small tubers with the enthu-
siastic help of the farmers son. Then it began to rain and they were
invited into the farm for glasses of beer and a large bag of apples.
A few days later they were on a train which travelled so slowly that
in places they were able to get out and collect plants from beside the
track. They were high in the Andes now; at Tilcara they hired mules,
guides and camping equipment for a collecting expedition at even higher
elevations. At about , metres they came across a veritable carpet of
wild potatoes this was a tremendously exciting area, Hawkes recalled,
not only for the living plants but also for the large fossil corals and pieces
of Jurassic limestone lying around on the surface. A wild potato he had
named S. tilcarense (after the Tilcara region in which it was first found)
became commoner as they climbed, though varying in leaf form and in
the intensity of its flower colour. The weather deteriorated in the early
afternoon and by . p.m. they were ready to pitch camp for the night.
We found a camping site at about , metres, Hawkes wrote:
Hawkes recalls the next day as one of the worst he had ever experi-
enced:
The most exciting part was the temple, surrounded with massive
oblong stones set on end, each about five metres high. Outside this
was the so-called Gate of the Sun, formed from one massive block
and carved with curious figures supposed to be of calendaric signif-
icance. At the other end of the temple was a flight of four steps cut
out of enormous blocks of stone, the top two all of one block, some
six metres long and two metres wide. The whole city covered an
enormous area, and had wharves which were once at the edge of
Lake Titicaca.
Men on a mission
Altogether, the British Empire Potato Collecting Expedition to
South America collected , living specimens. After being carefully
examined for disease in the Cambridge laboratories, the material was
sterilised and planted out in glasshouses, to form the basis of a collec-
tion that has been harvested in the autumn and planted out again every
spring since then. Today, it is known as the Commonwealth Potato Col-
lection, and is held at the Scottish Crop Research Institute near Dundee
a precious resource which breeders and scientists are able to draw upon
for their work on all aspects of the potatos nature and potential.
Hawkes himself worked on the taxonomy and genetics of the
original material for his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge (in the course of
which he described thirty-one new wild species of potato, and five
new cultivated species) and thereafter worked with it extensively. His
scientific account of the expedition () was the first of papers,
monographs and books on the potato and related matters that he
published.
There is very little concerning the potato that Jack Hawkes did not
consider and write about; some of his conclusions have turned out to
be wrong but this was inevitable as the depth of knowledge has
increased and investigative methods have been refined. Of the new wild
and cultivated species of potato that Hawkes described from the
expedition, for instance, a number have since been subsumed into other
taxa, and his conclusions concerning exactly where in the Andes the
potato was originally domesticated, and which wild species were
involved, are also in doubt. But these instances do not diminish the
stature of Hawkes and his work in any way: they illustrate the manner
by which science progresses.
No scientist can work beyond the capacity of whatever methods and
technology are available. The early botanists set out a mode of botan-
ical investigation that distinguished one plant from another on the basis
of its physical structure and behaviour the shape and structure of its
flowers, its leaves and the manner of its growth.This has spawned dozens
of descriptive terms from acroscopic to xerophilous, via cuspidate,
glabrescent, imparipinnatisect, rachis, stipule and tomentose, to name
but a few which left ample opportunity for different botanists to put
the same plant in a different taxon on the basis of naturally occurring
variations in form (the specimen of Solanum sparsipilum that Hawkes
collected in is a case in point). The microscope added the cellular
characteristics of a plant to the mix, and advances in microscopy, together
Potato
with the study of genetics that was introduced to botany in the early
twentieth century, have brought further refinement and precision.
Modern researchers are working with the potatos DNA, using tech-
niques that not only enable them to distinguish one plant from another
at the genetic level, but also to investigate their evolutionary history
from ancestral species to modern descendant.
Jack Hawkess views on the origin and evolution of the potato were
set forth in his book The Potato: Evolution, Biodiversity and Genetic
Resources, published in . He was the first to acknowledge that
some of his conclusions were likely to be discounted or amended by
evidence as yet undiscovered, but in the meantime it is an authoritative
piece of work that cannot be ignored in fact, its mixture of hard fact
and brave summary makes it probably the most frequently cited work
on the potato.
The expedition had noted a concentration of modern culti-
vated species in the Lake Titicaca region and northern Bolivia, among
which Hawkes identified some primitive, wild-looking plants. On the
basis of this and more detailed laboratory investigation, he concluded
that the potato probably had been first domesticated around the southern
margins of Lake Titicaca some , to , years ago by a relatively
stable population of hunter-gatherers. At least four wild potato species
were involved, he said, and it was from their naturally occurring hybrids
that the worlds first domesticated potato appeared solanum stenotomum
(meaning narrowly cut, in reference to its narrow leaflets). But that was
only the beginning. As soon as people began attempting to cultivate
and produce larger quantities of S. stenotomum tubers than occurred
naturally, there would have been some cross-pollination between the
flowers of S. stenotomum and other wild species.Yet more hybrids would
have arisen, and it was from these, said Hawkes, that our original culti-
vated potato Solanum tuberosum arose.
The Hawkes scheme of things was not exclusive it allowed for
more than one instance of domestication, in more than one location
and acknowledged that there were gaps and shadowy sections which
only further research could illuminate. Even so, it has stood as the stan-
dard account of the evolution of wild and cultivated potatoes, widely
cited in academic papers and etched in the memory of every student
who studied the subject. But it was never going to be the last word.
And sure enough, in a group of geneticists published a study that
overturned most of what Hawkes had proposed.
This groundbreaking study aimed to obtain the genetic fingerprint
Men on a mission
of all the diverse potato species and varieties in the Commonwealth
Potato Collection. This would identify the wild potato species which
are most similar to the cultivated ones and thus enable breeders to make
better use of the Commonwealth Potato Collection in their search for
the perfect potato, just as Knight and Sabine,Vavilov and Hawkes, would
have advocated. A programme of such detailed genetic analysis was
certain to throw light on the origin and evolutionary relationships of
the cultivated potato as well. And it did: unequivocally identifying a
single domestication event, and eliminating the progenitors Hawkes had
proposed from contention. The new study broadly agreed with Hawkes
on the location of the domestication event, but replaced his several
progenitors with just three, one of which is the particularly beautiful
species, with delicate leaves and exquisite large blue-violet flowers
Solanum canasense that Hawkes had collected in April .
Chapter Fifteen
Global voyage
We saw a great, flat valley, possibly twenty miles wide and no telling
how many miles long, between two high mountain ranges, with a
very winding river meandering through it. . . . Below us were
evidences of a fertile soil and a teeming population a continuous
patchwork of gardens, laid off in neat squares like chess-boards, with
oblong grass houses, in groups of four or five, dotted thickly over
the landscape. Except for the grass houses, the view below resem-
bled the patchwork field of Belgium . . . an island of population so
effectively hemmed in by mountains that the rest of the world had
not even suspected its existence.
Though the natives are exceedingly fond of this root, they eat them
but sparingly, on account of their great value in procuring iron by
barter from European ships that touch at this part of the coast. The
utility of this metal is found to be so great that they would rather
suffer almost any privation, or inconvenience, for the possession of
it particularly when wrought into axes, adzes or small hatchets: the
potatoes are consequently preserved with great care against the arrival
of a vessel.
The vessels the Maori were trading with need not have come only
from Europe. American whalers were also sailing in their waters and
could even have been another means of the potatos introduction to
New Zealand, for some traditional Maori varieties have a striking resem-
blance to some Peruvian native potatoes: knobbly, deep eyes, speckled,
Global voyage
dark skins and purple flesh. American whalers are known to have regu-
larly reprovisioned at Callao in Peru. That they might have brought
Peruvian potatoes to New Zealand (and had Afro-Americans among
their crews) is implied by the Maori name given to an elongated variety
with a dark purple skin: Urenika, meaning Niggers dick.
But from whatever source, the Maori adopted the potato widely and
with alacrity. In the early nineteenth century, an area of hectares
devoted to potatoes was not uncommon. By the s more than ,
acres of potatoes were reported in just two localities, and the enter-
prising Maori were growing large quantities of potatoes for sale to the
rapidly expanding European populations of Auckland and Wellington.
In a naval officer saw a store of , bags (weight estimated at
tons) in a coastal village. In , nearly tons of seed potatoes
were included among the provisions of Maori families who colonised
the uninhabited Chatham Islands, and within twenty years they were
producing hundreds of tons, much of which was exported to Australia.
The potatos advantage in New Zealand was that it fitted so easily
into the Maoris existing agricultural system, gave higher yields and
could be stored for longer than their traditional kumara (sweet potato).
The same implements could be used and the same ceremonial rituals
of planting and harvest were applicable. Furthermore, it was not only
palatable, but also produced a reliable surplus and could be cultivated
wherever people had chosen to settle. It thrived at all altitudes, and was
particularly welcome in the southern regions of the South Island, where
kumara would not grow. But such widespread and enthusiastic adop-
tion of a new and superior staple food could not fail to have a signif-
icant impact on Maori society, as the anthropologist Raymond Firth
declared in :
The results of the introduction of the potato bring out with clarity,
the manner in which new culture items affected the economic life and
even the environment of the native. The potato is of such hardy nature
that it can be grown in all districts and moreover it is prolific, yielding
a plentiful return for the labour expended. Hence it was speedily intro-
duced into districts which . . . had formerly possessed no cultivated
foods and also tended to replace the kumara among other tribes.
Firth believed that, because potatoes required less time and atten-
tion than traditional crops, people had more time for other pursuits,
and an authority writing in goes even further, suggesting the
Potato
so-called Musket Wars that Maori tribes fought among themselves in
the early s might be more accurately named the Potato Wars. The
areas planted with potatoes were substantial by then, he pointed out.
Potatoes were exchanged for muskets, and since growing them required
less labour than traditional crops, more warriors were available to take
part in warfare expeditions. An army marched on its stomach, as
Napoleon noted, and the potato probably was as important in Maori
warfare as the musket.
The potato had a significant impact on the size of the Maori popu-
lation too just as it had in South America and throughout Europe.
Captain Cook estimated the Maori population at around , in
. This was almost certainly an underestimate (Cook did not see
what were probably more densely populated regions inland), but that
hardly dents the significance of there having been some , Maori
in New Zealand when Britain claimed sovereignty in , seventy
years later. Maori numbers tumbled after that, under the impact of
colonial settlement, land wars, economic marginalisation, disease and
massive social disruption.
But why did Maori fertility not decline earlier, demographers ask,
when the Maori had been exposed for so long to the influences and
diseases that pitched other newly encountered populations into precipi-
tous decline? The potato was a factor here. Though there are no census
or baptismal records to confirm a spurt in population growth such as
occurred in Europe and elsewhere, the circumstantial evidence indi-
cates that Maori birth rates rose following the potatos introduction, to
levels that compensated for losses caused by foreign influence.
Chapter Sixteen
Developing worlds
The Inuit have a saying; gifts make slaves as whips make dogs, and
this is something to bear in mind when considering the motives and
effectiveness of international aid, and the reaction of people receiving
it. Neither the altruism of donors nor the wholehearted gratitude of
recipients is guaranteed. As the Inuit so aptly noted, the act of giving
can denote an assumption of superiority on the part of the givers.
Add an element of colonial guilt, and even the faintest whiff of racial
prejudice, and it is not surprising that some major aid programmes have
been greeted with suspicion and a paralysing lack of enthusiasm from
the recipients. Misconceptions about what the people in need actually
need are often to blame. It is easy enough to see that starving commu-
nities need food, but what exactly should be done for an active and
healthy population that is producing more people than its available land
area can support such as the highlanders of Papua New Guinea and
agro-pastoralist communities of the Andes? They had managed their
affairs very well up to that point (not least by accepting the health care
that had reduced mortality rates), and were likely to resist suggestions
that they should manage them differently.
It was at this juncture that anthropologists and human ecologists
began to make some useful contributions in the s and s;
especially those who were interested not simply in human society as
a phenomenon in itself, but in the broader picture of people as an inte-
gral part of the environment that sustains them. By examining and
quantifying food production systems in terms of energy flows and inter-
actions, human ecologists have shown that the so-called primitive agri-
cultural systems of people in the developing world were often far more
efficient than was immediately apparent and, furthermore, perfectly
Potato
capable of maintaining the long-term productivity and ecological stability
of the environment.Their cultural practices and social organisation were
often directly related to environmental circumstance, and had evolved
to ensure continuous and sustainable production. The complex reli-
gious calendar in Bali, for instance, was precisely tuned to the timing
of activities that maintained rice production at optimum levels. Else-
where, marriage practices varied according to whether land-use was
extensive or intensive; and even Indias sacred cow an icon of absurd
and wasteful cultural practice in Western eyes was shown to have a
positive function in ecological terms as provider of fuel (dung), milk
and bullocks for tractive power.
From Pacific islands to Arctic tundra, studies in human ecology
demonstrated the ability of people to develop sustainable ways of life
in whatever environment they occupied. It is a talent that has taken
humanity into every inhabitable niche the world has to offer obvious
at the extremes of fishing communities and nomadic herders, but also
evident at every nuance of difference in between, be they Alpine pastoral-
ists, North American Indians, Pygmies in the African rainforest or even
the inhabitants of a modern city.
In the early s I visited a number of locations around the world
where the links between culture, social organisation and environmental
circumstance had been defined, following up the academic studies with
some eye-witness reporting and photography for a book on human
ecology. The locations included the highlands of Papua New Guinea
and the potato-growing regions of the Peruvian Andes.There and every-
where else it was clear that although the communities were described
in the literature as though they were closed and self-sustaining, most
had subsequently become more open and were now part of much
larger ecosystems. This did not matter so far as validity was concerned
it was still possible to describe a systems unique features even if it
no longer functioned to perfection but it mattered a great deal in
terms of the outside worlds attitude to such communities. If they were
now part of a larger system they deserved a share of its resources and
options but what was the foremost need? To raise living standards
with the introduction of new crops, technology and ideas; or to preserve
the unique traditions and customs which those introductions would
make redundant?
This dilemma has created conflicts of aspiration wherever com-
munities wanted the benefits of integration with the wider world while
at the same time continuing to follow their traditional way of life
Developing worlds
the two are not always compatible. The external influence of tourist
agencies encouraged the highlanders of Papua New Guinea, for instance,
to pursue their flamboyant traditions to extremes that would not have
been reached in a closed ecosystem with unhappy consequences; on
the Queen Charlotte Islands, off Canadas north-west Pacific coast, the
Haida Indians were completely divorced from their traditional ways as
a means of sustenance, but claimed their identity alone gave them rights
to a share of revenues from oil deposits beneath the seas they had once
fished.
There was understandable sympathy for these aspirations, and even
implicit agreement that traditional culture should be preserved for its
own sake whether or not it was of any practical value to the people
concerned. Partly this was because no one likes to admit their intrusion
can destroy the very thing they admire, partly because the spectacle of
people behaving differently is always fascinating, and partly because the
unique communities of the undeveloped world might know or possess
something that the developed world would find useful. Reports tended
to emphasise the issue of preservation as the story moved along a
continuum of exactitude from peer-reviewed journals to popular maga-
zines, television and tabloid newspapers. So, although rigorous in its
science, human ecology spawned a rose-tinted view of traditional cultures
and communities, creating a popular expectation that they should always
be considered worthy of preservation, and adding confusion to issues
of development what was its purpose: to preserve tradition for the
benefit of humanity as a whole; or to bring the benefits of the wider
world to people whose traditions were no longer enough?
This was especially evident when scientists and development agencies
began looking in depth at the potato-growing communities of the
Andes. The anthropological and human ecology studies which attracted
my attention to the region were based on research conducted in the
s and s. In the mode of the day they described an indigenous
agricultural system whose benefits and resilience testified to the ingenuity
of its creators. They showed how a carefully integrated pattern of agri-
culture and herding had evolved on the Altiplano. Herds of llamas and
sheep grazed the rangelands, converting widely dispersed and other-
wise worthless vegetation into easily digested and nourishing food
meat while regularly bringing back to the compound an ample supply
of concentrated nutrients and energy in the form of dung. Dung was
used both as manure for the crops and as fuel for the fires and so the
animals speeded up the nutrient cycle and energy flow of what was
Potato
otherwise a very slow-moving system. And then of course there were
the potato and the strategies that ensured continuous and sustainable
production.
To science and the wider world, the nurturing of native stock in
the Andes was a classic demonstration of indigenous talent. The phrase
vertical archipelago was coined, signalling commendation for a system
that exploited the different ecological zones of an ascending landscape
so fully and effectively. Admiringly, researchers watched farmers heaving
on the taclla, as they cultivated fields on the steep mountain slopes; like
innocents, they rummaged through the heaps of harvested tubers, sorting
out the most colourful specimens, the most odd-shaped and peculiar,
for the photographs that would illustrate the published report. All this
contributed to a distorted view of Andean potato-growers. The rele-
vance of their having been victims of oppression for centuries, who
farmed the high Andes because they had been forced to, or had no
other option, was not highly rated. The fact that only native potatoes
grow well at high altitude was similarly discounted even though
farmers themselves would tell you that the improved European-type
potatoes are more productive, bigger, easier to eat and socially more
acceptable than native varieties. And here is the crux of the matter: a
pragmatic eye, seeing native potatoes for the first time, will soon dismiss
their novel characteristics as a hindrance to wider appreciation of their
nutritional virtues. If ever there was a wild thing awaiting improve-
ment, the native potato is it.
Meanwhile, the developed world had recognised the value of native
potatoes as a source of genetic material from which desirable charac-
teristics might be bred into their commercial varieties. So, whatever
the Andean potato-growers might need, there was also a powerful motive
to preserve the native potatos existence and inherent diversity for the
benefit of the wider world. This resonated with alarm about the rate
at which all wild species animate and floral were becoming extinct.
Genetic resources must be saved before it is too late was the cry and,
since the most endangered species were located in the developing world,
activities designed to alleviate poverty while also preserving resources
would be doubly commendable. The International Potato Centre in
Lima was founded in to do just that in respect of the potato.
CIPs mandate was to preserve the genetic resources of the potato in
its Andean homeland and make the potato a twenty-first-century solu-
tion to hunger in the developing world. The potato is the forgotten
crop in a world with a grain mentality, CIPs director, Richard Sawyer,
Developing worlds
told me in . It was never seriously considered as part of the solu-
tion to world hunger. Our goal is to make the potato available and
inexpensive for everyone by the year .
When the year arrived, the realisation of Richard Sawyers
dream was still a good way off. Sawyer had moved on too. During his
twenty years at CIP he had assembled a dedicated team of scientists
and researchers, and the Center was helping farmers worldwide to
improve the quality and yield of their crops, but one of his greatest
accomplishments, he said, was the creation of CIPs World Potato
Collection, which ensured that the potatos genetic material was gath-
ered, maintained and made available to breeders around the world.
Potato yields in the developing world were never high but then did
not need to be for a crop that could comfortably feed a family on an
acre of land. Even with the inclusion of its commercial industry, Papua
New Guineas yield averaged only . tonnes per hectare in , and
has fallen since then probably as a result of disaffection among the
countrys small farmers as the problems (and cost) of maintaining the
crops productivity became evident. In , Papua New Guineas
farmers harvested an average of just . tonnes per hectare, one of the
lowest yields in the world. Meanwhile, New Zealands average yield
had risen, from . tonnes per hectare in to . tonnes per
hectare in . In other words, while Papua New Guineas average
potato yield had fallen by . per cent over twenty-five years, New
Zealands had risen by . per cent. Ironic that while serious disad-
vantages limit the potatos potential for improving the well-being of
poor and hungry people in undeveloped regions, it booms in the devel-
oped world where there is money to be made from exploiting its
potential to the full.
Chapter Seventeen
The social, economic and historical developments that took the potato
from subsistence food in the Andes to industrial commodity in America
and Europe stretched across three centuries. In China the process took
less than three decades and brought China world dominance in potato
production and consumption. During the same period, China also estab-
lished itself as the workship of the world; then moved from the status
For the price of apples
of mass producer to that of mass consumer. By , China had over-
taken the United States as the worlds leading consumer of everything
from steel, copper and aluminium to mobile phones, from fertilisers to
foodstuffs, and was scouring the planet for the raw materials and energy
resources it needed to fuel growth and feed the nations burgeoning
appetites.
In terms of food resources alone, alarmists have predicted that Chinas
growing population and shrinking harvests (as urban centres spread over
agricultural land) will make the country dangerously reliant on imports
just as the drive to produce biofuels reduces the amount of grain avail-
able on world markets thus forcing up global food prices and threat-
ening to strain international relations. From around the world, China
already imports vast quantities of grain, soybeans, iron ore, aluminium,
copper, platinum, phosphates, potash, oil and natural gas, forest prod-
ucts for lumber and paper not to mention cotton for its world-domi-
nating textile industry. Such massive imports have put China at the
centre of the world raw materials economy, driving up not only
commodity prices but shipping rates as well.
The detrimental effects that Chinas emergence could have on the
global environment, economic stability and balance of power in the
twenty-first century are clear enough. But the prospects are not all bad.
Improved standards of living also engender a sense of enlightened self-
interest, and thus give the beneficiaries a vested interest in the future
in China and around the world.
In the s, a typical Chinese housewife, Li Wen, shopped at her
local street market and rarely spent more than a week. Less than
twenty years later, she is a successful businesswomen and mother of
two in the booming city of Shenzhen in southern China, pushing a
trolley through her local Wal-Mart, piling it high with goods that are
not that much different from those a shopper in London or New York
might choose; nor is the amount she spends on the weekly shop: .
Mrs Li and her trolley epitomise the transformation of China from an
inward-looking agricultural nation to an industrial behemoth in little
more than the span of one generation.
In , when Deng Xiaoping launched Chinas programme of social
and economic reforms, Shenzhen was a fishing village. Today it is a
free-trade zone of skyscrapers, factories and shopping malls. The citys
population has surged to million, average incomes are twice the
national level and many residents are very rich indeed. Li Wen is one
of them. Her family business, which deals in real estate and share trading,
Potato
has funded the purchase of a three-storey villa, the VW Touareg she
drives to the supermarket, and overseas travel at least three times a year.
She also spends a lot of money on clothes. Compared to years ago,
I feel I know more about how to lead a good life, she says.
And who would begrudge her a share of the good life, after the
poverty and subjugation previous generations had endured? A good
life, not just for clever and entrepreneurial individuals like her, but for
all.
George Bernard Shaw, the Irish author and ardent socialist, once remarked:
If at age you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age
you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains. And it is true that
while the selfless idealism of youth rarely survives the realities of adult
life, the tenets of capitalism do indeed offer an acceptable compromise
with pragmatism clearing a way through the tangle of moral issues that
the pursuit of personal advancement might engender, and recourse to
charity salving the discomfort of having set youthful idealism aside. China,
as a nation, has gone through a similar transformation; from the ideal-
istic visions of the revolution, to the recognition of communist failings,
and finally the pragmatic acceptance of capitalism as a viable means of
harnessing individual energy and ambition to the common good. Mao
was not wrong when he described Chinas peasant farmers as inherently
capitalistic but not only peasant farmers are inherent capitalists we all
are and now, at last, the Chinese are actively encouraged to pursue the
fundamental ambition that motivates virtually all human endeavour:
improvement, a better life, for individual and family; from potato field
to city apartment.
And the potato has been similarly transformed, from the knobbly
subsistence crop that hard-worked hands plant and harvest on the high
slopes of the Andes, to the improved varieties that enhance the inherent
qualities of the ancestral line delivering tubers that are variously suited
to all tastes and styles of home cooking; or ideal for the production of
potato crisps, frozen french fries and starch on an industrial scale. And
then there are the sleek thoroughbreds that NASA nurtures as an indis-
pensible element of its plans for the flight to Mars; a propitious escu-
lent indeed feeding humanity as we have taken this generous bundle
of nutrition from the Andes to the stars. It has been a long and often
difficult journey, but for the potato and for us, eminently worthwhile.
Notes
Part One
. To Mars from the Andes
. Wheeler, .
. Wheeler et al., .
. Davies, He, Lacey and Ngo, .
. Wheeler, , p. .
. http://www.potato.org/en/potato/origins.html. See also:
Ugent, Dillehay, and Ramirez, ; Spooner and Hetterscheid,
.
. Brush, . Brush, .
. Whitaker, , pp. .
. ibid., pp. , .
. These paragraphs draw on sources cited in Brown, .
. Quoted in ibid., p. .
. Whitaker, , p. .
. Cieza de Lon, /, pp. , .
. Whitaker, , pp. , .
. Mallon, , p. .
. Jacobson, , p. .
. Cited in ibid., p. .
. Fitzgerald, , p. .
. de Haan, Bonierbale, Burgos and Thiele (in press).
. ibid. http://www.geographyiq.com/ranking/ranking_Infant_
Mortality_Rate_aall.htm.
. http://www.hrcr.org/docs/OAS_Declaration/oasrights.html.
Notes to pages
. What exactly is a potato?
. Heiser, , p. .
. Salaman, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Hawkes, , p. vii.
. Ochoa, , p. xxix.
. Simmonds, , p. .
. Hijmans and Spooner, .
. Hawkes, , p. .
. Spooner et al., .
. ibid., p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Bradshaw, Bryan and Ramsey, , pp. .
. Hawkes, , p. .
. Lang, , p. , quoting International Potato Center Annual
Report , Lima , pp. , .
. Domestication
. Gregory, .
. Hall, .
. Papathanasiou, Mitchell and Harvey, , p. .
. Johns, , p. .
. Darwin, , p. .
. Ibid.
. Sahlins, .
. Lee, , p. .
. Harlan, , p. .
. Wenke and Olszewski, , p. .
. Darwin, , p. .
. These paragraphs on the development of agriculture follow a
review of the issues by Harlan, , chapters , and .
. These paragraphs summarise a review of the issues given with
references to original sources in Wenke and Olszewski, , pp.
.
. Hawkes, , pp. .
. Johns, , pp. . Johns, .
Notes to pages
. Whence have they come?
. Darwin, , p. .
. Ochoa, , p. .
. The quotations in the preceding paragraphs are taken from Darwin,
, pp. , , , .
. Rubies, , p. .
. Quoted in Ford, , p. .
. Jefferson, , p. .
. Dillehay, , p. .
. Meltzer, , p. .
. Dillehay, , p. xv.
. ibid., pp. .
. Ugent, Dillehay and Ramirez, .
. Meltzer, , p. .
. Fladmark, .
. Meltzer, , p. .
. Lee and DeVore (eds.), , pp. ix, , .
. ibid., p.
. Dillehay, , p. .
. Earlier dates are often quoted, but their accuracy is in doubt. Indeed,
material from a second occupation site at Monte Verde has been
dated at , years ago, but Dillehay himself declines to accept
this without more evidence or sites of comparable age elsewhere
in the Americas: see Dillehay, , p. .
. Engel, .
. Dillehay, , p. .
. Lumbreras, .
. Salaman, , p. .
. Winterhalder, Larsen and Brooke Thomas, .
. Morris, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Kolata, , pp. , .
. Morris, , p. .
. Protzen and Nair, .
. Wenke and Olszewski, , p. .
. Von Hagen, .
. Poma, , p. .
Notes to pages
. A dainty dish
. Stirling, , p. .
. Hemming, , p. .
. Lockhart, , pp. .
. ibid., pp. , .
. Hemming, , p. .
. Quoted in Lockhart, , pp. , .
. Bath, , pp. , . Vicens Vives, , p. .
. Braudel, , vol. . p. .
. Bakewell, .
. Hamilton, , pp. .
. Smith, /, p. .
. Super, , pp. .
. Stirling, , p. . Hemming, , p. .
. Hawkes, , pp. .
. Cieza de Lon, /, pp. , .
. ibid., pp. , .
. Quoted in Debenham, , pp. .
. Super, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Hemming, , p. .
. Super, , pp. , .
. ibid., pp. .
. Cook, , p. .
. Super, , p. .
Part Two
. The lonely impulse of delight
. Fletcher, , III, v.
. Harbage, , pp. , , .
. Names, figures and dates are from sources quoted in Hall, ,
p. .
. W. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor (), V, v.
. W. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (), V, ii.
. Salaman, , p. .
. Fletcher, , IV, iv. NB Eringoes were candied sea-holly and
cantharides a powdered dried beetle (Spanish Fly). Both were
considered to be aphrodisiacs.
. Harrison, .
Notes to pages
. Quoted in Salaman, , p. .
. Banks, , p. .
. For an engaging account see Arber, , reissued .
. Ogilvie, , p. .
. Arber, , reissued , p. .
. Ogilvie, , p. .
. Whittle, , chapter .
. Morton, , p. .
. Quoted in Ogilvie, , p. .
. Raven, , p. .
. Quoted in ibid., p. .
. Salaman, , p. .
. Gerard, , p. .
. Salaman, , p. .
. Hawkes, , pp. , .
. The translation of Clusius from which these paragraphs are taken
is in Salaman, , pp. .
. Ogilvie, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Hernndez, , p. .
. Lowood, , pp. .
. Ogilvie, , pp. , note . Ward and Lovejoy, .
. Drake, /, pp. , .
. Ogilvie, , p. .
. Hamilton, , p. , note
. Salaman, , p. .
. Hawkes, , p. .
. Hawkes and Francisco-Ortega, .
. Hawkes and Francisco-Ortega, .
. ibid., p. .
. ibid., p. .
. The way it was
. Netting, , p. .
. McNeill, .
. Harrison, , p. .
. Capp, , p. .
. Forbes, .
. Coleman, , p. .
. Wrigley, , p. . Cited in Kellum, Infanticide, p. .
Notes to pages
. Kellum, , pp. .
. Langer, , p. .
. Watts, , pp. .
. Kellum, , p. .
. Braudel, , p. .
. Tawney, , p. . Overton, , p. .
. Augon, , pp. , .
. Frank, .
. Watts, , p. .
. Bath, , p. .
. Watts, , p. .
. Reader, , pp. .
. Rackham, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Kowaleski, .
. Kowaleski, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Dyer, , pp. , , .
. Overton, , pp. .
. Mark :.
. Watts, , pp. .
. Braudel, , p. .
. Watts, , p. .
. Tawney, .
. Overton, , pp. , .
. Bath, , p. .
. Quoted in Overton, , p. .
. Overton, , p. .
. Bath, , pp. .
. Overton, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Drummond and Wilbraham, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Harrison, , p. .
. Burnett, , p. .
. Dyer, , p. .
. Appleby, , p. .
. Quoted in Appleby, , p. .
Notes to pages
. The demoralising esculent
. Wilson, , p. .
. See Salaman, , p. .
. McNeill, , p. .
. Drummond and Wilbraham, , p. .
. Previous and following paragraphs summarise Vandenbroeke, .
. Translated by Hugh Jones from the French quoted in Vanden-
broeke, , p. .
. The contentions of this and the following paragraphs follow
McNeill, , pp. .
. ibid., p. .
. See Vandenbroeke, , pp. .
. Quoted in Bruford, , pp. .
. Quoted in Kaplan, , p. .
. Kahn, , p. .
. Langer, , p. .
. Kahn, .
. Salaman, , pp. .
. ibid., p. .
. Rickman, , p. .
. Hobhouse, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. This and the following references to Forsters tract are taken from
the version printed in Forster, /.
. Quoted in Salaman, , p. .
. Lennard, , p. .
. Vandenbroeke, , p. .
. Drake, , pp. , .
. Malthus, , p. ; quoted in Drake, , p. .
. Langer, , p. .
. ibid.
. See ibid., pp. , .
. See ibid., p. .
. Netting, , chapter .
. Frer-Haimendorf, , p. .
. Drake, , chapter and p. .
. Brandes, , p. .
. Baten and Murray, .
. Vandenbroeke, , p. .
. Clarkson and Margaret Crawford, , p. .
Notes to pages
. Where the praties grow
. O Grda, , pp. .
. Edwards and Williams (eds.), .
. O Grda, , p. .
. Woodham-Smith, , p. .
. A verse by the Reverend John Graham, who died in , quoted
in Kahn, , p. .
. Quoted in Salaman, , p. .
. Froude, , pp. , .
. ibid., p. .
. From Wilde /, p. .
. Froude, , p. .
. Berresford-Ellis, .
. OFlaherty, /, p. .
. Maxwell, , pp. .
. Cullen, , p. .
. Dickson, , p. .
. Connell, , pp. .
. Connell, , pp. .
. Dickson, , pp. .
. Connell, , p. .
. Dickson, , p. .
. Connell, , p. .
. Quoted in Clarkson and Crawford, , p. . OFlaherty,
/.
. Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. Lucas, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Quoted in Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. Quoted in Froude, , p. .
. Salaman, , p. .
. Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. Trow-Smith, , pp. .
. Quoted in Salaman, , p. .
. Quoted in Bourke, , p. .
. Connell, , p. .
. O Grda, , pp. .
. Connell, , p. .
Notes to pages
. Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. Connell, , p. .
. Seeds of famine
. Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. Young, , vol. , p. .
. Salaman, , pp. .
. Quoted in Connell, , p. .
. Connell, , pp. .
. Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. From Wilde, /, p. .
. O Grda, , p. . Dickson, .
. Quotes from Bourke, , p. .
. Young, , vol. , pp. , .
. Quoted in Connell, , p. .
. Connell, , p. , Appendix III.
. Overton, , p. .
. Quoted in Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. Quoted in Connell, , p. .
. Bourke, , pp. .
. Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. Bourke, , p. . NB Bourke gives no date for his figures, but they
accord with an estimate for based on Connell, , p. .
. Woodham-Smith, , p. .
. Connell, , pp. . Clarkson and Crawford, , p. .
. Bourke, , p. .
. Turner, , pp. , .
. Michael Gibbons, personal communication , Clifden.
. Quoted in Villiers-Tuthill, , p. .
. Villiers-Tuthill, , pp. , .
. Quoted in ibid., p. .
. Villiers-Tuthill, , pp. , , , .
. Society of Friends, Distress in Ireland .
Notes to pages
. ibid., p. .
. Carlyle, , vol. IV, pp. , .
. Engels, , p. .
. ibid., pp. .
. Carlyle, , vol. IV, pp. .
. Smee, , p. .
. Salaman, , p. .
. Woodham-Smith, , p. .
. Gash, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Gardeners Chronicle, September , editorial.
. Woodham-Smith, , pp. , .
. McLean and Bustani, p. .
. McCarthy, , vol. , p. .
. Woodham-Smith, , p. .
. Quoted in Stakman, , p. .
. McLean and Bustani, , p. .
. Greville, , vol. , p. .
. Quoted in McLean and Bustani, , p. .
. Peel, , vol. , pp. .
. For an illuminating discussion of this issue see Lusztig, .
. McCarthy, , vol. , pp. , .
. Peel, , vol. , p. .
. McLean and Bustani, , p. .
. Salaman, , p. .
. Vance, , p. .
. Boot, , pp. and .
. Evans, , p. .
. Quoted in ibid., p. .
. Evans, , pp. , .
. Boot, , pp. .
. Evans, , p. .
. Clapham, , vol. , p. .
Part Three
. The fatal malady
. Glendinning, , p. .
. Knight, . NB for the sake of clarity, these extracts from Knights
address are in an order that differs from the published account.
Notes to pages
. Sturtevants Notes on Edible Plants, p. .
. Humboldt, , vol. , pp. , .
. Quoted in Glendinning, , pp. .
. Knight, .
. Joseph Sabine, , pp. .
. Hawkes, , p. .
. Lindley, , p. .
. Bourke, .
. Niederhauser, .
. Andrivon, .
. Trevelyan, , p. .
. National Archives at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Salaman,
, p. .
. Large, , p. .
. Lindley, .
. Cox, , p. .
. Bourke, , p. .
. ibid., pp. .
. Large, , p. .
. Smee, , p. .
. Quoted in Desmond and Moore, , p. .
. Darwin, , lines .
. Charles Darwin to J. S. Henslow, October .
. Bourke, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. Berkeley, /.
. Bourke, , p. .
. Quoted in Curtis and Barnes, , p. .
. Lindley, , p. .
. Large, , p. .
. Moore, .
. Thompson, .
. Millardet, , p. .
. Millardet, ibid., pp. , .
. Large, , p. .
. Burton, , p. .
. Fry and Smart, .
. International Potato Center Annual Report, Lima, , pp. , .
Notes to pages
. Co-opting science
. Quoted in Salaman, , p. .
. Mayhew, /, vol. , pp. .
. www.measuringworth.com.
. Salaman, , p. .
. Quoted in Kahn, , p. .
. The following paragraphs on potato breeding draw variously
on Salaman, , pp. ; Burton, , pp. ; Lang,
, p. .
. Burton, , p. .
. Kime, c. .
. www.measuringworth.com.
. Royal Society, . Mintz, , p. .
. These paragraphs draw on the preface to Salaman, .
. Salaman, .
. Laski, .
. http://www.eugenics-watch.com/briteugen/eug_sasl.html.
. Salaman, , p. .
. Edmondson, .
. Furet, .
. A full discussion of Vavilovs work and influence can be found in
the proceedings of a commemorative Centenary Symposium held
in and published as Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society,
vol. (), part .
. Vavilov, , p. xxiii.
. Hawkes, , p. .
. Hawkes, , p. .
. Vavilov, , p. xvii.
. www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups//sites/sakharov/AS/
biography/dissent.html.
. Hawkes, , p. .
. Men on a mission
. Throughout his life, John Gregory Hawkes () was known
to friends and colleagues as Jack.
. Hawkes, , p. .
. ibid., p. .
. ibid., p. .
. ibid., p. .
Notes to pages
. ibid., p. .
. ibid., pp. , .
. For an explanation of these terms see the Glossary in Hawkes,
.
. Hawkes, .
. Bryan et al., .
. Spooner et al., .
. Global voyage
. Conklin, .
. http:/www.Ianra.uga.edu/potato/asia/png.htm.
. National Statistical Office of Papua New Guinea, at http://www.nso
.gov.pg/Pop_Soc_%Stats/popsoc.htm.
. Bourke, .
. Harris and Nga Poai Pakeha Niha, .
. Savage, .
. Harris and Nga Poai Pakeha Niha, , p. .
. Quoted in ibid p. .
. Orange, , p. .
. Graham Harris, at http//slowfoodfoundation.org (n.d.).
. Trought, .
. Developing worlds
. Reader, .
. Chauvin, , p. .
. Sweet potatoes and other aspects of CIPs work were also applic-
able to the Millennium Development Goals, but are not relevant
here.
. CIP, Food, Livelihood and Health, International Potato Center Annual
Report , Lima (), p. .
. World Bank, .
. World Bank, .
. Figures on PNG and NZ production from http://faostat.fao.org.
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Index
307
Potato
Bang, Dr Sergi 241-2 Cape of Good Hope 246-7
Bank of England 186-7 carbohydrate 212
bankruptcies and bank failures 1857 Carlyle, Thomas 174-5, Z76, 177
Banks, Sir Joseph 78-9, 87 Carthusians 115
Bateson, William 218, 222, 225 Casma 50-1
Battle of the Boyne 140 Castellanos, Juan de 68
Bauhin, Gaspard 82, 83-4, 113 cattle, introduction to New World 72
Beeton, Mrs viii-ix, 216 Central Andean Hunting Tradition 49-
Belgium 115, 116, 194-5 50
Bering land bridge 44, 478 Centro International de la Papa 5,
Berkeley, Reverend Miles Joseph 201, 242-3, 256-7, 258-62, 275
202-4 cereal grains
Bhutan 246 as a commodity 1234, I25
Bible, lack of mention of potato in Corn Laws 179-84
biofuels 277 effect of Irish Famine on prices 184
biogeography 43 in European diet in
Bioregenerative Life Support System 3 instability of supply 123
Black Death 99 Ireland 146, 158-9
BLSS 3 CGIAR 258
Bolivia, Tiwanaku 525 Charles II 124-5
bonny clabber 145 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 115
Book of Household Management (Beeton) chicha 57-8, 67-8
viii-ix, 216 child labour 173
Bordeaux Mixture 209-11 child mortality 96
botany, history of 79-85 Chile
Botrytis farinacea 2012 Chonos Archipelago 39
Botrytis infestans 2026 Monte Verde 45-8, 49, 50
Boyle, Robert 126 chilli 86
breeding China 246, 265-78
for disease resistance 192-4, 224-5, China Modernisation Report 270
259-62 chuno 38, 51, 55, 69
and eugenics 223 Cieza de Leon, Pedro 68-9, 84, 85, 91
for European day length 112 CIP 5, 242-3, 256-7, 258-62, 275
inbreeding/outbreeding 24 clay ingestion with food 38
new varieties 1478, 21621 Cleggan 167-8
British Association for the Advancement Clifden 164-5, i<5<5
of Science 200-1 climate
British Empire Potato Collecting Expe- and famine 99
dition 231-7 post-glacial change 35-6
British Queen (potato variety) 218 Clovis culture 44-6, 47, 48, 49
Buckland, Mr 126 Clusius, Carolus 81-2, 84-5, 87, 91
Bukasov, Dr S.M. 227, 229, 233 cocoa 86
bunt 207 Cole, William 80-1
Burbank, Luther 217 collecting expeditions 227, 229, 2317
butter, in Irish diet 1456 collectivisation 271
Columbus, Christopher 42, 69-70, 79
Cajamarca 58, 59, 61-5, 71 Commonwealth Potato Collection 237,
Canary Isles 90-1, 112 239
Canchan variety 260 Communist Manifesto, The 171
308
Index
309
Potato
Exeter 102 Germany
eyes 23 adoption of potato 118-19
infanticide 97
Factory Act 1834 173 late blight 195
fallowing 114 potato varieties 217
famine 98-9, 108 glycoalkaloids 26, 29-30, 38
China 272-4 gold, Inca 10, 58, 59, 61-5
and climate 99 Goodrich, Reverend Chauncey 217
Ireland 133-6, 156-7, 161-8, 176-84, Gourlay, Dr William 'Bill' Balfour 231,
195-6, 272-3 235
Russia 225 Graham, Sir James 178, 181
and warfare 989 Great Hunger, The (Woodham-Smith)
Findlay, Archibald 218-21 131, 134, 135-6, 161
Flanders 118 Great Leap Forward 271-4
flax 159 Greville, Charles 177
Fletcher, John 77, 78 Grey, Lord 138
Flourball 224
Fluke, The 217-18 haciendas in the Andes 14-16
Forster, John, England's Happiness Haeckel, Ernst 225
Increased 124-5 Haida Indians 255
Forster, William 167 Hamilton, Earl J. 88-90
Foster's Corn Law 158 harvesting in the Andes 8-9
foundling hospitals 127-8 Hawkes, J.G. 'Jack' 24, 25, 89-91, 231-9
France haymaking 99
adoption of potato 119-22, 127 Heanue, Joseph 133, 150
Flour War 120-1 Heanue, Tom 134
foundling hospitals 127, 128 Henry VIII 103, 114
infanticide 97 Herball or Generall Historic of Plants
late blight 195, 201 (Gerard) 82-4, 113
riots 104, 120-1 Herbals 80-1
Francisco-Ortega, J. 89-91 History and Social Influence of the Potato,
Franklin, Benjamin 121 The (Salaman) viii, ix, 88
Frederick the Great 118-19 Hospital de la Sangre, Seville 88-90
free trade 196 Huancavelica 5, 8, 10-14, 17-18
freeze-drying 3 8 Huancavelica sickness 12-13
french fries 2678 Huanya Capac 58
French Revolution 104, 120 Huascar 58-9
Fuchs, Leonhardt 81, 86 human ecology 254-5
Humboldt, Alexander von 192-3
Galway Vindicator 165 hunter-gatherers 31-5
Garate, Caspar de 63-4 hunting 48-50, 51
Gardeners' Chronicle 178, 179, 197-8,
202, 206, 211 Idaho potato 217
Garnet Chile 217 illustrations of potato 82, 83-4, 87
Garret, James 84 inbreeding 24
genetics 222-9, 238-9, 251 Inca 9, 10, 55-9
genome sequencing 251 treasure 10, 58, 59, 61-5
geophagy 38 India 246, 254
Gerard,John 82-4, in, 113 Industrial Revolution 171-7
310
Index
311
Potato
McDonald's 267, 268 Nieuwpoort 115
McLoughlin, John James 168 Ninan 58
McNeiU,WilUainH. ix Northern Star 219
maize 57, 67, 68, 85-6, 184 Norton, John 83
Majestic 218 Norway 127
Malcolm, Sir John 246 nutritional value of potato 22
Malthus, Thomas 127, 128-9
Manchester 169, 172, 173 O' Flaherty, Edmond 140
Manco Capac 55, 58 O' Flaherty, Roderic, A Chorogmphical
Mao Zedong 271-5 Description of West or H-lar Connaught
Maori 247-51 139, H5
Marie Antoinette 121 O'Halloran, Mike 153
Marquina, Caspar de 634 openawk 87
Mars, colonisation 3-4 oral history 134-5
Marx, Karl 169, 171 origins of potato 4, 23-7, 237-9
Mattioli, Pietro 81, 86 outbreeding 24
mercury production in Peru 10-14
Merry Wives of Windsor, The (Shakespeare) papa maway 4
78 papa puna 4
middlemen 1423 papa ruki 4
Milestones in Irish History 135 Papua New Guinea 241-5, 255, 261-2,
milk, in Irish diet 145 264, 265
Millardet, Pierre 208-10 Paracelsus 80
Millennium Development Goals 257-8, Parmentier, Antoine-Augustin 120-2
263 Parr, Catherine 114
Millennium Summit 257 Pasteur, Louis 206
mining in Peru 1014, 66 Paterson, William 218
Mira 275-6 Peel, Sir Robert 177-8, 181-3, 184
mita 9, 13-14, 15 Penal Laws 1401
Moche people 51-2 Penghu Islands 246
Moggridge, Matthew 206, 208 Peru 7, 248-9
mongongo nut 32 Casma 50-1
Montagne, Jean Franfois Camille 201, mining 10-14, 66
202 Moche people 51-2
Monte Verde 45-8, 49, 50 see also Andes
Morren, Charles 199, 202 Peruvian chrysanthemum (sunflower) 86
Mullen, Cornelius vii, 133, 134, 135, pesticides 27
150, 153-4 Phylloxera 208
Munster 138 phytopathology 203
Phytophthom infestans 206, 211, 212, 216
Namur 116 see also late blight
Napoleon 122 Phytopinax (Bauhin) 82, 83-4
NASA 3-4 pigs
Native Americans introduction to New World 723
decline 73-4 Papua New Guinea 2445
settlement of Americas 42-8 Pink Eye 217-18
Nepal 246 Pizarro, Francisco 10, 58-9, 61-2, 63,
New World see Americas 71, 91
New Zealand 247-51, 264, 265 plantain 70-1
312
Index
313
Potato
Solarium tuberosum andigena 26 Triticum monococcum 32
Solarium tuberosum esculentum 82 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) 78
Solarium tuberosum tuberosum 267 Trotsky, Leon 227
South America, British Empire Potato true potato seed 258-9
Collecting Expedition 2317 tubers 23
Soviet Union see Russia Twining family 167, 168
space travel 3-4
Spain United Nations, Millennium Summit
Armada 86, 136 257
colonisation of the Americas 6774 United States
conquest of the Americas 1014, 58 late blight 194
9, 61-5 potato varieties 217
economic effects of Inca treasure 65- Up-to-Date 219
7, 88
introduction of potato 85-6, 88-91, van den Hecke, Abbe Edouard 198-9,
129 201
invasion of Ireland 138 Van Oye, Dr Rene 199, 201
Spenser, Edmund 1389 varieties 29
spontaneous generation 199-200, 205, breeding for 147-8, 216-21
206 grown in the Andes 45, 67
squash 86 Ireland 160-1
stinking smut 207 Victorian 217-21
stirabout 145 Vavilov, Nicolay Ivanovich 225-9, 2 3 2 >
storage 3 7 233
subspecies 26-7 Vavilov Centres 226
sunflower 86 vegetative propagation 23
sweet potato 22-3, 89, 90 vertical archipelago 256
introduction to Europe 79 Victoria (potato variety) 218
New Zealand 247, 249, 251 Victoria, Queen 177
North America 87 Vietnam 246
Papua New Guinea 244-5 Villa Hermosa 5-7, 16, 17
vine diseases 208-10
tadla 9 viral infection 191-2
Tahuantinsuyu 56 Virginia 84, 87, 136
Taiwan 246 vitamin B complex 21
Tasman, Abel 247 vitamin C 21
taxonomy 237 von Hohenheim, Theophrastus Bombast
Thirty Years War 118 (Paracelsus) 80
Tielt 115, 116
Tierra del Fuego 39, 41 Wallace, Alfred 200
tithes 115-16, 122 War of the Austrian Succession 118,
Titicaca, Lake 26, 38, 52, 53, 55, 236, 238 119
Tiwanaku 525 War of Bavarian Succession 11819
tobacco 86 War of the League of Augsburg 118
Toledo, Francisco de 13 War of the Spanish Succession 118
tomatoes 86 warfare
Torbel 93-5 benefits of potato growing during
TPS 258-9 116-20
Treaty of Limerick 140 and famine 98-9
314
Index
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) 124, 172 Wilde, William, Table of Irish Families
Wellington, Duke of 177, 182, 184 156-7
wheat 32 Woodham-Smith, Cecil 131, 134, 135,
diseases 207 161
production in the New World 71, 72 wool industry 102, 104, 105, 146
wild potato 4, 24 workhouses
and blight resistance 2245 England 174
breeding new varieties from 1924 Ireland 162, 164, 1656, 167
collecting expeditions 227, 229, 231-7 World Bank 262-3
Darwin's discovery 39 World Potato Collection 257
geographical distribution 24-5 World War I 232
outbreeding 24
Russian research 227, 229 Youghal estate 136-7
species 25-6 Young, Arthur 157-8
tubers 26
315