Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (28 page)

In one sense, the louse has gotten a bad rap in all this. After all, it is we, as the natural reservoir of the typhus rickettsia, who first infect
it
. The louse ingests the disease bacteria from the blood of its human host, the rickettsia carrier, whereupon it is mortally infected. Between infection and death, however, lies the window of opportunity for the louse to spread the contagion. If the host falls ill, the louse—highly sensitive to febrile body temperature—will seek out a new host. In prosperous times, where sanitary conditions prevail, this search will be fruitless. But if the louse is fortunate enough to find itself in a humid environment among a human community in crisis—housebound families unable to wash or change their clothes, sharing what coats they have, and huddling together under blankets for warmth—it will successfully migrate to an alternate body. Its bite is not its death warrant; rather, its dry and powdery feces, laden with typhus bacteria, infect the bite wound. As the bacteria multiply in the bloodstream, massive cellular damage affects the vital organs and gastrointestinal tract. Internal hemorrhages ensue. The victim, confused and feverish throughout an ordeal that may last as long as two weeks, endures painful edematic swelling, organ failure, and ultimately death in at least one in four cases. From there, it is only a matter of time and statistics. If the weather remains bad and the living conditions of the human community do not improve, the typhus is essentially unstoppable.

William Carleton recalled the fatal evolution of the 1816 famine into “universal” epidemic disease the following year in the Clogher Valley:

the gloom that darkened the face of the country had become awful…. Typhus fever had now set in, and was filling the land with fearful and unexampled desolation. Famine, in all cases the source and origin of contagion, had done, and was still doing, its work.
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When typhus struck, the resources of rural Irish communities, already hard-pressed by critical food shortages, were stretched to the breaking point. The English travel writer John Trotter paints a pitiful picture of villages, not necessarily remote, that found themselves beyond the reach of charity or government assistance in 1817, simply abandoned to their fate:

Poor mud cottages were scattered along the road-sides, and we learned, with heartfelt sorrow, that fever was spreading everywhere among them. When this infectious malady enters his cottage, the Irish peasant and family are the most wretched of human beings! Unable to procure medical, or any other aid,—provided with no matters useful for the sick,—and becoming objects of terror in the midst of their poor and uninfected neighbours,—they sicken, linger, and die in their habitations.

Everywhere he went, walking along deserted streets, Trotter could hear the groans of people dying abandoned and alone, or entire families perishing together once the last nurse among them had fallen ill. “The heart sickens,” he wrote, “under the repeated observation of so great a mass of human wretchedness, and our toilsome way has been frequently made insupportably painful to us by it.”
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Trotter wondered, as we do in reading his account, where was the help for these pitiful victims, dying in their tens of thousands across the Irish countryside?

Unfortunately for the suffering rural population of Ireland, no effective system of relief existed. The numbers of English absentee landlords, who drew profits from their Irish estates only to spend the money in London and elsewhere, meant a fatal breach of the feudal contract: the gentry weren’t present to witness the suffering of their tenants and so felt minimally motivated to help them. Nor had the government, which complained loudly about absenteeism, moved to supply the deficiency. In Cork, the liberal reformer William Parker lamented at the outset of the famine in 1816 of “nearly a total absence of all legislative provision for our Poor.” As climate refugees flocked into the city, Parker called the “mass of distress” on the streets of Cork “a disgrace to a nation professing the principles of the Christian Religion.”
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Such appeals were to no avail. In February 1818, after almost three years of rapid economic decline culminating in a full-blown famine and
epidemic, a group of desperate Cork citizens petitioned the British Parliament “to protect them from that ruin into which all ranks appear to be fast sinking.”
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The petition was tabled without comment. Less than a year before, the same Parliament had involved itself in lengthy debate on the prospects for Catholic Emancipation. That no corresponding attention was paid to the very present disaster of Irish poverty and disease shows the tragic consequences of a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish political discourse dominated by sectarian arguments. While Parliament wrangled over Irish souls, across the Irish Sea the body count was steadily mounting.

John Gamble, a minor society writer from County Tyrone, living in London, never enjoyed the literary fame of William Carleton, his fellow Ulsterman. But on a return visit to his hometown of Strabane in the summer of 1818, he recorded unforgettable impressions of Ulster at the tail end of the Tambora disaster: “Since I was last here, this town and neighbourhood have been visited by two almost of the heaviest calamities which can befall human beings. Fever and famine have been let loose, and it is hard to say which has destroyed the most.”
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Gamble’s reaction echoes that of the doctor William Harty, who enumerated how the 1817–18 typhus epidemic impacted Irish society far beyond the raw numbers of infected and dead:

The loss to society from the interruption given to productive labour; the expense incurred by providing for the sick; the debility and weakness of constitution induced by the disease; the mortality which must attend it, and is most frequent where it is most injurious, namely, among men advanced in life, who are often the heads and support of families; the increase of poverty and mendicity, together with the agonizing mental distress to which it must give rise, are consequences of this epidemic that must occur to every humane and reflecting mind.
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Harty’s point: survivors of the epidemic faced a brutally diminished existence marked by poverty, dislocation, and family breakdown.

Back in the devastated town of Strabane, the “humane and reflecting mind” of John Gamble saw few familiar faces and received no joyful
welcome. Heartbroken, he looked across the empty streets and contemplated the massive depopulation that had occurred in his home county. Some had emigrated, while many more had died of starvation and disease. Where a few years earlier he had seen a bustling high street full of shops doing brisk wartime trade, now all was eerily quiet. “I walk therefore,” he wrote, “nearly as much alone as I should in the wilds of America.”
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During the previous two years, one-and-a-half million Irish had been infected with typhus, with probably in excess of 65,000 deaths. Up to 80,000 had perished the previous year, 1816–17, from the famine that preceded the epidemic. An unknown number, too, had fled the country as the last best means of escaping the deadly pincer grip of these tragedies. Perhaps expecting a hero’s return to his old town, Gamble instead stumbled into the desolated landscape of the new Ireland—a famished, traumatized Ireland—the Ireland of the nineteenth century.

“THE AMIABLE PECULIARITY OF THE IRISH CHARACTER”

The fact that there are almost no official statistics on the Irish famine of 1816–17, while the typhus epidemic of the subsequent two years produced a veritable library of reports and treatises, signifies that the ordinary suffering of the Irish peasantry mattered little to their urban compatriots, and even less to their British rulers. But once the malnourished masses took to the roads, bringing contagion with them, the privileged metropolitan classes and their agents in the government and media rose up in alarm. Parliamentary debates characterized the typhus epidemic of 1817–18 as a security threat rather than a public health crisis, thereby ignoring the systemic issue of Irish poverty and famine’s close relation to disease.

Along the length and breadth of Ireland in 1817, typhus fever had spread “to an extent unprecedented in the recollection of any person living.”
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And as the epidemic reached the cities, so did its refugees. Exact numbers are unknown, but certainly hundreds of thousands of Irish abandoned their homes and took to the open roads in 1816–18, a demographic upheaval that fully exposed the fragility and stark
inequities of British Ireland under the Act of Union. A countryman of William Carleton’s reported that during the first wave of the refugee crisis, “many hundred families, holding small farms in the mountains of Tyrone, have been obliged to abandon their dwellings in the spring of 1817, and betake themselves to begging as the only resource left to preserve their lives.”
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Reports from Limerick were that “the whole country is in motion,” while in Derry, “almost the entire population” of the rural districts had left their homes for the towns.
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The emergence of mass refugeeism in almost every region in Ireland spurred a vigorous government reaction. Everywhere, city authorities floundered. Tullamore officials posted soldiers on all routes into the town to turn away the indigent crowds while, back in the imperial metropole of London, Parliament acted decisively. The “Act to Establish Regulations for Preventing Contagious Diseases in Ireland” is a legislative document of class panic and spectacular inhumanity, endowing health officials with powers “to apprehend all idle poor persons, men, women, or children, and all persons who may be found begging or seeking relief … and to direct and cause all such idle persons, beggars, and vagabonds to be removed and conveyed out of and from such parish and place.” There is no word in the act on where these “idle” infected masses might then go, or be provided for. The peculiar indifference of the government to the fate of the Irish poor themselves did not pass unnoticed. Advocates for Ireland suspected the influence of genocidal ideology in the British government’s legislative response to the crisis, bitterly denouncing “those pseudo-philanthropists, who can contemplate, not only without pain but with complacency, pestilence thinning the ranks of our ‘superabundant’ population; or who, to use the philosophic phraseology of our Malthite disciples, can, with unalloyed satisfaction, behold fever ‘doing its business.’ ”
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While the poor in Ireland had at least a handful of advocates in Parliament, however ineffectual, they had no voice at all in the media. The metropolitan newspapers in Ireland, taking their cue from the government, systematically misrepresented the crises of 1816–18. First, the rural famine went largely unreported for fear of prompting speculation in the grain markets. Then, in early 1817, as typhus ravaged rural
Ireland, newspapers in urban centers such as Dublin and Cork labeled the rumors of epidemic as “alarmism,” shilling for a metropolitan merchant class concerned about the disruption of trade and possible quarantines. Even in the autumn of 1817, when typhus had reached the cities and its presence could no longer be denied, little sympathy was spared for the rural victims of famine and disease. Instead, the city papers demonized the starving refugees, calling upon authorities to bar the city gates against the typhus-bearing hordes. In Dublin—the metropolitan hub of Irish government and public opinion—editors railed against those “vagrants and beggars, who have emerged from receptacles of disease, and spread themselves in various directions.” They demanded the government crack down on the beggary “which prevails to such a disgusting, and in the light we are now considering it, dangerous degree.” In the grip of their paranoia of contagion, the newly arrived beggar, their countryman, was worse than a leper: “his touch, to whomsoever given—nay, even the very air which is about him, are pestiferous.”
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On the outskirts of blockaded Irish towns in 1817, “fever huts” cropped up everywhere—“wretched structures of mud or stone” with straw roofs hastily erected along roadsides and in fields for fever victims with nowhere else to go. There the refugees “struggled with a formidable disease on the damp ground, with little covering but the miserable clothing worn by day, and scarcely protected from the inclemency of the weather.” For the homeless, there was competition even for these pitiful dwellings. According to one account from Kanturk near Cork, a refugee family found a fever hut too small to accommodate their number, whereupon two daughters were forced to live outside on the open ground. When the father succumbed to typhus, his daughters then fought to take his place in the hut, the stronger one winning out against her sibling.
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This book includes many stark vignettes of human wretchedness during the Tambora period, but surely none more obscene than this. More important is the general truth it elicits. To quote an Irish doctor of the time, “nothing short of extreme misery could have wrought so sudden and complete a change in the feelings of a people, whose attachment to their offspring and relatives is proverbial.”
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