The First Wise Traveler to the West - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 22

ulation increased by 172 percent from 1779 to 1840. By 1845, the population had swelled
to eight million. Then disaster struck. In the years 1845, 1846, and 1848, a fungus attacked
the potato. Rotting, inedible plants were everywhere. Starving families walked the roads
and lanes begging for food, with desperate mothers clutching dead babies as they traveled.
Families, too weak to move, lay dead in the doorways of their huts. By the end of the
Great Hunger, more than a million had died of starvation and starvation-induced disease.
And one million more emigrated, mostly to Canada and the United States. Desperate to es-
cape death, those who could borrow the four or five pounds' passage against future wages
crammed aboard poorly provisioned, unseaworthy ships—coffin ships, they were called.
Just one example of their toll: of the 89,738 people who sailed to Canada in 1847, 15,330
perished. Those who accomplished the Great Migration carried, and their descendants still
carry, bitter memories of the English landlords and the British government that did too little
and too late to stem the rising tide of death during the Great Famine.
FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD
Corn is another life-sustaining gift from the New World. Originally cultivated in Middle
America, corn is that rare plant that nourishes both humans and livestock. Corn is so adapt-
able (and welcome as foodstuff) that it made its way (by routes unknown) into China in the
early 1500s. And maize, as corn is called in many parts of the world, became an important
source of food in the high Balkan Mountains. Sustaining Greek and Slavic populations in
mountain valleys, corn served to feed and fuel the Balkans revolts against their Ottoman
overlords. One might claim poetically that Greek independence in the 1820s began centur-
ies earlier in corn-cultivating Middle America.
The list of the New World's food bounty unfolds rhythmically: tomatoes, squash,
pumpkin, sweet potatoes, peanuts (now a leading cash crop of Africa), and pecan and
cashew nuts. Chili peppers, cultivated in Mexico before 3500 BCE, were brought to Spain
by Columbus to bolster his claim that he had reached the pepper-rich Indies. Sunflowers,
source of another alternative to cooking with olive oil, is among the New World's gifts to
the rest of the world, as are the far-roving pineapple, avocado, and blueberry.
To this list we add flora of pleasure and pain. Tobacco and cocoa are American gifts.
So, too, is quinine, an antidote for malaria and the first effective agent for reducing fever.
Quinine is derived from the powdered bark of an Amazon tree, the Cinchona. Given to
Jesuits by the Indians, the powdered bark was long known as Jesuit powder. Oliver Crom-
well, ill with fever, refused to have anything to do with Popish medicine and died as a
consequence. King Charles II had no such concerns. He took the powder from an illiter-
ate peddler, Robert Talbot, and when the powder made the king well, he appointed Talbot
Royal Physician, no doubt the beginnings of a long tradition wherein doctors' prescriptions
are set down in a seeming illiterate scrawl. And perhaps as a penultimate benefit of Jesuit's