Potatoes in Ireland: The Endnotes

Some more details about the early European history of the potato and its impact on Ireland. Connected to our video on the Potato Battery

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos! Today, an extra bit of information from my video about the Potato — and if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.

According to one story, probably apocryphal, the potato first made it to Britain when Sir Francis Drake bartered for potatoes in Chile on his circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580, bringing them the long way around across the Pacific and around Africa back to England. But it’s unlikely they would have lasted such a long journey. Alternatively he might have picked them up later in an act of potato piracy when he sacked Cartagena in 1586. Another story is that the potato was brought to England by Sir Walter Raleigh from the Caribbean in 1588, or from the settlement at Roanoke Island (though potatoes weren’t grown there at the time), or that Raleigh got them from Drake. In any case, the story goes that Raleigh had the gardener at his Irish estate plant them, but when his cook served the toxic berries at dinner he had them all pulled up and disposed of, but his poor Irish tenants rescued the sustaining tubers from the trash. A more likely route from Spain to Ireland was in the ship’s stores of Basque fishermen who on their way home from fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland would stop off in Ireland to dry their catch. In any case, the potato certainly became a crucial staple crop of Ireland. This of course led to a boom in the Irish population, but also therefore great poverty with a growing population and no employment. The failure of English plans for grain farming in Ireland had led instead to commercial beef grazing, which made the English land owners wealthy but left little for the Irish people. And when the potato blight hit Ireland in 1845, a great famine ensued, and the country was further depopulated by a great diaspora of the Irish around the world, many of whom would go on to work in the factories.

As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!