National Geographic Magazine/Volume 32/Number 1/Fearful Famines of the Past

History Will Repeat Itself Unless the American People Conserve Their Resources

By Ralph A. Graves

“Give us bread!” is the despairing cry which today comes across the seas to America in a score of tongues from three hundred million people who stand on the brink of the abyss of starvation.

All the resources of the nations of Europe and Asia Minor have been diverted for three years from gainful pursuits to the destructive activities of war. Men have been forced to put aside the hoe and scythe; fertile fields have been gashed by trench and blasted by shrapnel until they can serve no purpose save as graves for the slain; the plowshare has been beaten into the sword, the fertilizer converted into high explosives.

Thus have the agencies of plenty been made to breed havoc over land and sea.

What is in store for mankind if America fails to respond with all her food resources to this call for help?

The fearful famines of history reveal to us what may happen—nay, what inevitably must happen—now, as in the past, with the difference that whereas famines of a bygone age took their toll in thousands, the famine of today, if it materializes, will compute its death roll in millions.

Grim, gaunt, and loathsome, like the three fateful sisters of Greek mythology, war, famine, and pestilence have decreed untimely deaths for the hosts of the earth since the beginning of time. A veritable trinity of evil, the three are as one scourge, equal in their devastating power and in their sinister universality.

Twentieth century civilization, with science and industry for its allies, grappled with these potent forces of destruction, and there were those who, as recently as the early summer of 1914, believed that the good fight had been won; that never again would the pleasant places of earth be baptized in the blood of a peaceful people; that never again would ravening plague, following through the fields harvested by cannon, claim its victims by the tens of thousands; that never again would the silent specter of hunger stalk through the world with but one nation to stay its progress.

But the era of permanent peace is yet to be won by the sword of democracy, and science finds that she still has her battles to wage against the armies of contagion mobilized in the charnel houses of ravaged nations.

America alone can defeat man's third foe

There is still a chance, however, to defeat mankind's third great foe—famine.

Is the struggle to feed the world worth the sacrifice which America will be called upon to make? Here are presented a few pages from history's black chronicle of the suffering and the degradation which famine has wrought in every clime and among every people. If to save mankind from a recurrence of these horrors is a goal worthy the industry and the resources of our republic, the answer is plain.

A survey of the past shows that war, pestilence, and famine always have been related, sometimes one and sometimes another being the cause, and the other two the effect. Where one of the trio has occurred the others, sometimes singly, but usually together, have followed.

The primary cause of famine almost invariably has been a failure of food crops. This failure has often resulted from a variety of natural causes—long-continued drought, blasting hot winds, insect armies, earthquakes, severe and untimely frosts, and destructive inundations.

But war also brings in its train crop shortage by withdrawing from the fields the men required to till the soil, and by devastating harvest land in order that an enemy may be vanquished through starvation.

Even when the fires of conflict have burned themselves out, the grip of famine frequently has remained upon a land because the husbandman either cannot or will not immediately resume his productive function. Oftentimes a whole people's industrial fiber has been impaired by the hardships of war and by moral degeneracy incident to camp life, so that a full generation has been required to restore their country's thrift and enterprise.

Pestilence is the inevitable handmaiden of both famine and war, for the dead of the battlefield breed contagion which finds easy victims among those whose powers of resistance have been sapped by lack of nourishment.

Thus the three great agencies of wholesale destruction constitute a terrible triangle, each force coördinating with the other two; and famine is the base line.

Earliest record of a famine

Among the earliest authentic records of history is the famous “stele of famine,” recently discovered carved on a tomb of granite on the island of Sahal, in the first cataract of the Nile. Egyptologists differ as to its exact antiquity, but there is evidence to prove that it was chiseled in the time of Tcheser (or Tosorthrus), who held sway over Egypt nearly two thousand years before the time of Abraham.

“I am mourning on my high throne,” lamented this monarch of ancient times, “for the vast misfortune, because the Nile flood in my time has not come for seven years. Light is the grain; there is lack of crops and of all kinds of food. Each man has become a thief to his neighbor. They desire to hasten and cannot walk. The child cries, the youth creeps along, and the old man; their souls are bowed down, their legs are bent together and drag along the ground, and their hands rest in their bosoms. The counsel of the great ones of the court is but emptiness. Torn open are the chests of provisions, but instead of contents there is air. Everything is exhausted.”

Thus runs the first chronicle of mankind's suffering in days of famine.

A period greater than that which stretches between the Crucifixion and the present day elapsed after the famine of Tcheser's reign before Joseph arrived to hold sway over this same land of Egypt. As the chief administrator for one of the Hyksos Pharaohs, he prepared for seven lean years which were to drive his brothers and his aged father, Jacob, out of Canaan, down into the valley of the Nile in search of corn.

The famine of Joseph's day

While the suffering which accompanied this famine was perhaps in no degree comparable to the devastation wrought by the failure of crops in subsequent periods of the world's history, no other has a stronger hold upon the imagination of western civilization, for the details of the dearth are set forth in Biblical records of engrossing interest.

It was during Joseph's administration that there was inaugurated the system of land rentals in Egypt which has survived to this day in many parts of the earth, notably in India. By the end of the second year of the famine the people had given to the Israelite all of their money and all of their cattle in exchange for corn. They had naught else with which to purchase food except their land. This they eventually surrendered and the Pharaohs became the great land-owners of the Nile Valley, while the peasants became serfs, paying thereafter to their masters a full fifth of the yield of their farms each year.

In all, ten famines are recorded in the Bible; but none, save this in which Joseph plays so important a rôle, was of more than restricted significance, either as to territory or influence on history.

One of the other nine, however, is worthy of mention for its romantic interest—a ten-year famine which drove Naomi and her husband out of the land of Judah into the country of the Moabites. At the end of the decade of crop failures, when the widowed and child-bereft sojourner decided to return to her own people, the literature of the world was enriched for all time by Ruth's matchless expression of woman's loyalty and devotion to woman in her “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee.”

Two other biblical famines are noteworthy as preludes to the depravity to which hunger brought mankind in succeeding generations. The first authentic record of cannibalism as a result of famine is found in the sacred recital of the siege of Samaria by Ben-hadad, King of Syria, in the ninth century before the dawn of the Christian era:

“And as the King of Israel was walking upon the wall,” so runs the account in the Second Book of Kings, “there cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my lord, O King. . . . This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him today, and we will eat my son tomorrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him; and I said unto her the next day, Give thy son that we may eat him; and she hath hid her son.”

It was in this same famine that it is recorded an ass's head was sold for four-score pieces of silver (probably about $50) and “the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung [a pint] for five pieces of silver.”

A hundred years after the Samarian famine Rome's dawn upon the horizon of history was signalized, according to Plutarch, by a frightful pestilence and famine. Blood or crimson-colored insects fell from the clouds; disease, starvation, and the sword ravaged all Campania.

From this baleful beginning Rome's early history was punctuated by a succession of famines, pestilences, and wars; but none marked by any outstanding severity or event which focuses human interest until the middle of the fifth century before the Christian era. Beginning 450 B. C., however, there was a series of famines extending over a period of nearly twenty years.

In one season of particular severity thousands of desperate people flung themselves into the Tiber to escape the terrible suffering of hunger.

It was to such distress that the plebeian knight, Spurius Maelius, ministered, importing corn and selling it at low rates or giving it away to the starving. This charity made him the idol of the common people and therefore an object of suspicion to the patrician class. The latter professed to see in such bounty an attempt on the part of the public benefactor to make himself king.

The Roman Joseph slain

In this supposed extremity an appeal was made to Cincinnatus, who had recently returned to his farm and his plow after his brief dictatorship, during which he had saved Rome. Maelius refused to appear before the dictator; whereupon Servilius Ahala, Cincinnatus' master of horse, discovering the knight in the crowd in front of the forum, struck him dead.

Thus perished the Roman counterpart of Joseph, with the difference that Maelius was perhaps a self-seeking philanthropist, whereas the Israelite in the land of the Pharaohs sought no personal aggrandizement, but profit for his king.

Some fifty years after the death of Maelius, the Gauls, led by Brennus, brought all three of the great scourges of mankind—war, pestilence, and famine—within the very walls of Rome. Concerning this period the historians of a later era wove a series of heroic legends as picturesque as the Arthurian tales.

It was at this time that the Roman senators, after the defeat of their army at Allia, put on their robes of office and seated themselves in their accustomed places to await in silence the arrival of the barbarians and their own death. The imposing austerity of the city fathers for a moment struck the invaders with awe; but when one of the soldiers plucked the beard of a senator and was smitten by the outraged patrician, all the inhabitants were put to the sword and the city reduced to ashes.

Marcus Manlius and a faithful band still occupied the citadel, however, and for seven months they held it in the face of dire famine. The ranks of the invaders in the meantime were ravaged by pestilence, caused by their failure to bury the bodies of their victims. It was during this siege that the Roman youth, Pontius Cominius, swam the Tiber “on corks,” and by a secret path scaled the garrison hill, bringing important news to Manlius.

In the morning the path was discovered by the enemy, and the following night the Gauls began the ascent, their secret attack being frustrated only through the cackling of the geese in the temple of Juno, which awakened Manlius in time for him to hurl the leading assailant down upon his comrades and thus save the citadel.

Famine and pestilence continuing, the Romans finally agreed to ransom their desolated city for a thousand pounds of gold. In the process of weighing the treasure they protested against the cheating of the barbarians; whereupon the Gallic leader cast his sword into the scale, crying, “Vae victis” (Woe to the conquered), an admonition which, as the present European conflict proves, has not lost its significance in the more than twenty centuries which have rolled over the war-racked world since that direful day.

One of the earliest chiefs of systematic famine relief work was Augustus Cæsar, who was at war with the Parthians when summoned back to Rome by the disaster of 23 B. C., when the Tiber overflowed, causing wide-spread suffering.

The starving plebeians proclaimed him dictator and urged him to assume control of the corn supply, which he did with exceptional skill and industry. He sent ships to many quarters of the Mediterranean to collect corn, and placed his grandson, Tiberius, in charge of the work of unloading the grain at Ostia and transporting it to the capital, all of which was done with great dispatch.

Ships and military highways safeguarded rome from famine

From the time of Augustus, throughout the days of the empire, Rome seldom suffered from famine—a striking contrast to the frequency of this affliction in the days of the infant republic. The nation's sources of supply were now so numerous and her far-flung provinces so fruitful that when crops failed in one quarter there was sure to be a bountiful harvest in some other part of the Roman world. Two other factors which contributed materially toward preventing shortage in food supplies throughout the empire were the excellence of the military highways and the splendid fleets which sailed the Mediterranean.

In striking proof of the manner in which the empire's transportation system served to check the ravages of famine, Pliny relates that when, during Trajan's reign, Egypt experienced a low Nile which threatened a great dearth, immediately corn ships were dispatched from other provinces and wide-spread suffering was prevented.

“This vain and proud nation,” writes the Roman historian, “boasted that though it was conquered it nevertheless fed its conquerors. But this most fruitful province would now have been ruined had it not worn Roman chains.”

Of course, there were some exceptions to this general rule. There was, for example, that terrible period of suffering from 79 to 88 A. D., when the Roman world seemed to be shaken to its physical foundations. In addition to the devastating drought and famine which swept over the Italian peninsula, during which 10,000 citizens are said to have died in one day at Rome, there followed the shock of earthquakes and the cataclysmic eruption of volcanoes. Herculaneum and Pompeii were overwhelmed with volcanic ash and lava at this time, and Syria and Africa were blighted by pestilence and famine.

Tacitus left grim pictures of the distress and suffering which afflicted the civilized world in that era, when houses were filled with dead bodies and the streets with funerals.

A peculiar feature of the famine and pestilence which visited the Roman province of Apulia a hundred years later was the amazing swarm of locusts which filled the air and covered the ground. Sicinius was dispatched with an army to try to battle with the winged pests. Thousands of peasants lay down to die on the highroads, and so dire was the pestilence which accompanied the famine that even the vultures refused to feed upon the fallen.

This scourge of starvation and pestilence extended as far west as England. During a brief period 5,000 people died daily in Rome, where the only method of combatting disease was the practice of “filling the noses and ears with sweet-smelling ointments to keep out the contagion.”

It is not improbable that the suffering of this time was a “flareback” from the pestilence of 166 A. D., which had been borne to Rome from Arabia, where, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, it had emanated from the foul air which escaped from “a small box opened by a Roman soldier, Pandora-like, at the capture of Seleucia.”

Not only did famine and pestilence spread from Arabia to the banks of the Rhine, but also “inundations, caterpillars, vapors, and insects,” leaving in their wake decayed and deserted villages throughout Gaul.

Egyptian famines under Mohammedan rule

Probably in no other country in the world has a people been brought to such a low ebb of morality or become so completely lost to all semblance of rational humanity as in the series of famines which swept over Egypt during the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, under Mohammedan rule.

A low Nile in 967 A. D. resulted in a famine the following year, which swept away 600,000 people in the vicinity of the city of Fustat. G'awhar, a Mohammedan Joseph, founded a new city (the Cairo of today) a short distance from the stricken town and immediately organized relief measures.

The Caliph Mo'izz lent every assistance to his lieutenant, sending many ships laden with grain; but the price of bread still remained high, and G'awhar, being a food controller who had no patience with persuasive methods, ordered his soldiers to seize all the millers and grain dealers and flog them in the public market place. The administrator then established central grain depots and corn was sold throughout the two years of the famine under the eyes of a government inspector.

In taking these steps to mitigate the suffering of the Egyptians the Mohammedan viceroy was far in advance of the European rulers of his day, but in allowing the natives to cast their hundreds of unburied dead into the Nile, thereby tainting the waters all the way to the sea, he failed to evince any glimmer of understanding of the laws of sanitation.

Terrible punishment for a rebel

During this famine and the subsequent plague a petty official of lower Egypt revolted against G'awhar. The rebellion was suppressed with some difficulty, but the leader was finally captured in Syria. As an example of the fate which would befall all rebel leaders in times of national calamity, G'awhar made the unhappy captive drink sesame oil for a month, after which his skin was stripped from him and stuffed with straw, then hung upon a beam and displayed throughout the country.

There was no G'awhar to conduct the relief work during the next Egyptian famine, which came in 1025, during the Caliphate of Zahir. The suffering, therefore, was much more wide-spread. It became necessary to prohibit the slaughter of cattle, and there was no meat to be had anywhere, as fowls, the common meat of Egypt, had quickly disappeared.

The stronger among the population turned brigand and began to prey upon the weaker members of society. Caravans and pilgrims were attacked and Syrian bands began to invade border towns.

People flocked to the palace in masses, crying piteously for relief at the hands of the Commander of the Faithful; but no help was to be had in that quarter, for the palace itself was so short of provisions that when the banquet for the Feast of the Sacrifice was spread the slaves of the royal household broke in and swept the tables. Slaves began to rise in revolt in all parts of the country and it became necessary for citizens to organize committees of safety for self-protection, the government granting permits to kill the bondmen. The vizier, el-Gargarai, was himself imprisoned in his own house. With an ample Nile in 1027, however, the period of suffering came to an end.

A third and far more terrible famine came in 1064, and, like that which afflicted the land in the days of Tcheser and of Joseph, lasted for seven fearful years. To the hardships of starvation were added the miseries of civil warfare. Nasir-ed-dawla, commander-in-chief of the Fatamid army, upon being deposed by the Caliph Mustansir, quickly gained the support of bands of Arabs and Berbers. Black regiments were soon in control of all upper Egypt.

Forty thousand horsemen of the Lewata Berbers descended upon the delta of the Nile and swept all before them, cutting dikes and destroying canals with the malign purpose of spreading starvation. Both Fustat and Cairo were cut off from supplies, and to add to all these tribulations the Nile failed to come to a flood in 1065. The result was indescribably terrible.

The peasantry, not daring to venture into their fields for fear of the armed bands of brigands, were unable to carry on any agricultural pursuits; so that the dearth of one year's harvest was prolonged into seven. Prices soared to heights probably never before reached in the Near East.

A single cake of bread sold for 15 dinars (the value of a dinar is slightly more than $2.50), five bushels of grain sold for 100 dinars, and eggs were scarce at a dinar each.

Cats and dogs brought fabulous prices, and women, unable to purchase food with their pearls and emeralds, flung the useless jewels into the streets. One woman, according to a historian of the time, gave a necklace worth 1,000 dinars for a mere handful of flour. The caliph's stable, which had numbered 10,000 horses and mules, was reduced to three scrawny “nags.”

Human flesh sold in open market

Rich and poor suffered on equal terms. Finally the desperate people resorted to revolting cannibalism. Human flesh, which was sold in the open market, was obtained in the most horrible manner. Butchers concealed themselves behind latticed windows in the upper stories of houses which looked out upon busy thoroughfares. Letting down ropes to which were attached great meat hooks, these anglers for human flesh snared the unwary pedestrians, drew their shrieking victims through the air, and then prepared and cooked the food before presenting it for sale in the stalls on the street level.

This seven years' reversion to savagery induced by starvation had its companion period of suffering and degradation in the same country during the years 1201 and 1202. A gruesome picture of the harrowing events has been preserved in the writings of Abd-el-Latif, a learned Bagdad physician who lived in Cairo during the days which he describes in such horror-awakening detail.

Whole quarters and villages became deserted during the famine which followed the low Nile of 1200 and 1201, according to this chronicler, who maintains that the starving populace ate human flesh habitually. True, the punishment meted out to those detected in the crime was death at the stake, but few criminals were caught, and the custom could be practiced with impunity by parents who subsisted on their own children. Men waylaid women in the streets and snatched babies from their mothers' arms, and the literal physician recites at length the various dishes into which the murderous kidnappers converted their infant forage.

The very graves of Egypt were ransacked for food. The roads became death traps, while flocks of vultures and packs of hyenas and jackals mapped the march of the cannibal outlaws. Of course, the piles of unburied dead bred pestilence of a virulent type.

It is recorded that in a single month one piece of property in Cairo passed to forty heirs in rapid succession, so sweeping was the mortality.

In this famine man seems to have plunged to the utmost depths of degradation and suffering.

Vastly different were the scenes which accompanied the severe Egyptian famine of 1264, chiefly because there had arrived in the country a man of rare administrative ability—Bibars, a native of Kipchak, between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian. It is well to study Bibars, for, coming shortly after the two anthropophagous debauches of the Egyptians, his conduct of affairs demonstrates what a firm hand might have been able to accomplish in the preceding emergencies.

A tall, robust figure, Bibars won from a historian of that period the tribute that “as a soldier he was not inferior to Julius Cæsar, nor in malignity to Nero.” Yet he was a sober, energetic, and resourceful executive, just to his own people and lenient toward his Christian subjects.

This former slave, who brought only £20 when sold at auction, because of a cataract on one of his eyes, was the real founder of the Mameluke Empire. He met the famine situation promptly and vigorously, regulating the sale of corn wisely, and compelling his officers and emirs to support the destitute for three months.

Nor did he stop with these measures. With astonishing forethought, considering the age in which he lived and the people over whom he ruled, he attempted by scientific isolation to eradicate contagious diseases. Brothels and taverns were closed and many other measures were taken looking toward a healthier and a cleaner Cairo.

Famines in England

The story of famines in England has been a gloomy one from earliest times. At the beginning of the eighth century a dearth, which extended to Ireland, drove men to cannibalism. It was not until the reign of Aethelred the Unready, however, that “such a famine prevailed as no man can remember,” from 1005 to 1016.

Those chroniclers who were wont to see bad conditions at their worst declared that half the population of the larger island perished. But it must be remembered that much of the mortality of this period was occasioned by the wars between Aethelred and Sweyn the Dane, the latter being forced by the famine to retire from England for a time.

Naturally, the era following the advent of William the Conqueror was one of wide-spread starvation and pestilence among the English peasantry. During the last thirty years of the eleventh century, nine were years of dire distress.

So great was the dearth in 1069 that the peasants of the north, unable longer to secure dogs and horses to appease their hunger, sold themselves into slavery in order to be fed by their masters. All the land between Durham and York lay waste, without inhabitants or people to till the soil for nine years, says Beverly, and another writer accuses the destitute of cannibalism.

There were many sections of England which were unaffected by this famine, however, and had there been better means of communication and conveyance of supplies the suffering would have been greatly mitigated. A factor which contributed to the seriousness of the situation was the burden of taxes exacted by the conquerors. Peasants became discouraged, realizing that the fruits of their labor were taken from them as fast as earned.

There were sporadic periods of suffering during the succeeding reigns of William Rufus and Henry I, in the civil wars of Stephen's times, and under Henry II. But the next dearth which especially quickens the sympathy was that which befell the people in the days of Richard Cœur de Lion, the Crusader. There is a brief reference to the famine of this period in “Ivanhoe.”

Starvation was followed by a pestilential fever which sprang “as if from the corpses of the famished.” Ceremonial burial was omitted except in the cases of the very rich, and in populous places the victims were interred in shallow trenches, a practice followed at a later period when the Black Death killed its millions.

While backward seasons were contributing factors, the responsibility for the two great famines of Henry III's reign is to be laid at the door of the government itself. In the first of these (1235) 20,000 persons are said to have died in London alone. The suffering in 1257–1259 was even worse, for the whole kingdom had been drained of its coinage by the taxes which the king had levied to pay German troops and to buy electoral votes for his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, who was a candidate for the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire.

First curb on the middleman

It was during this famine that England for the first time imported from Germany and Holland grain to alleviate the suffering of her poorer classes. The Earl of Cornwall himself sent sixty shiploads of food, which was sold for his account to the starving. More grain was brought into the country than had been produced the previous season in three counties. The following year (1258) there was a bountiful harvest, but destructive rains caused the heavy crops to rot in the fields, and even the grain which was gathered became mouldy.

The first ordinance in English history designed to curb the greed of the middleman was passed during this time of shortage in food supplies.

Few English kings have lived through greater periods of distress than Edward II, who was scarcely able to secure food for his own immediate household when the heavy rains of 1314 spoiled the harvests. Misery was wide-spread and intense; the dead lined the roadsides; everything imaginable was eaten—dogs, horses, cats, even babies. The jails were crowded with felons, and when a new criminal was thrown into a cell he was seized upon by the starving inmates and literally torn to pieces for food.

With the exception of the present world war, perhaps no other calamity that ever befell the human race can be compared with that of the Black Death and the accompanying famine, which afflicted all western civilization during the middle decade of the fourteenth century. Its toll has been variously estimated at from one-fourth to three-fourths of the entire population of Europe. Certainly it was not less than 20,000,000 people.

There always has been a certain degree of doubt as to the exact origin of this plague; but one of the most circumstantial hypotheses is that the seeds of destruction were sown in northern China, when a great inundation destroyed the crops and hundreds of thousands became the victims of starvation. Rats spread pestilence abroad.

One of the first places in Europe where the Black Death appeared was at a small Genoese fort in the Crimea, the western terminus of the overland Chinese trade route. The Tatars were besieging the fort at the time, and Chinese merchants took refuge there. The siege was lifted by the investing army, which fled from the plague, thus spreading the infection southward into Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. Ships from the Euxine carried the contagion to Constantinople and to Genoa, and thence it radiated, fanshape, throughout the Mediterranean littoral.

The Black Death in England

In August, 1348, England's first Black Death victim succumbed in Dorsetshire. By November it had reached London. By the summer of 1349 it had dragged its pall of putrefaction over the entire island, including Scotland. Norwich, which had been the second city of the kingdom, dropped to sixth in size, more than two-thirds of its population falling victims of the scourge.

Cultivation of the fields was utterly impossible, and there were not even enough able-bodied laborers to gather the crops which had matured. Cattle roamed through the corn unmolested and the harvest rotted where it stood.

Out of the situation which resulted from the impoverishment of the labor resources of the kingdom grew the first great clash in England between capital and labor. The peasants became masters of the situation. In some instances they demanded double wages, and whereas formerly land-owners had paid one-twelfth of every quarter of wheat as the harvesting wage, they were now forced to pay one-eighth.

Parliament hurriedly passed drastic laws in an effort to meet the new condition. Statutes provided that “every man or woman, bond or free, able in body and within the age of threescore years, not having his own whereof he may live, nor land of his own about which he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall require him to do so, provided that the lords of any bondsman or land-servant shall be preferred before others for his service; that such servants shall take only the wages which were customarily given in 1347” (the year prior to the first appearance of the plague).

Violation of the statute meant imprisonment; and it was further provided that any reaper, mower, or workman leaving service should be imprisoned. If workmen demanded more than the regulation wage, they were to be fined double, and the land-owner who paid more than the prescribed sum was to be fined treble that amount. Runaway laborers were to be branded with an “F” as a perpetual sign of their falsity. No bail was to be accepted for any of these labor offenses.

It is not within the province of this article to review the political turmoil which this legislation brought about. Suffice it to say that it resulted in precipitating one of the most distressing times in the history of constitutional government since the Magna Charta was wrested from King John.

Famines of France

No country of Europe suffered more from famine between the eighth century and the close of the eighteenth than France. The failure of crops from natural causes entailed far fewer hardships, however, than the gross injustice of the country's kings and courtiers. From 750 to the French Revolution, the land scarcely recovered from one period of dearth before some untoward event plunged it into new woes.

From 987 to 1059, during the early stages of feudalism, forty-eight famines devastated the peasantry—an average of a famine every eighteen months. The year 1000 was a time of extraordinary suffering, for the whole country was seized with a panic, fearing that the world would come to an end during this the millennial year. Thousands went on pilgrimages, deserting their homes and their fields and obstructing the whole normal course of existence. This was the first wave of the great national movement which found expression a century later in the Crusades.

The fear of the end of the world having passed with the end of the millennial year, it was revived with even greater intensity when the 1000th anniversary of the Crucifixion approached. The miseries of mankind in Gaul at that time were incredible. The whole course of nature seemed to be upset, and there was intense cold in summer, oppressive heat in winter. Rains and frosts came out of season, and for three years (1030 to 1032) there was neither seed time nor harvest. Thousands upon thousands died of starvation, and the living were too weak to bury the dead. There were many horrible instances of cannibalism, and human flesh is said to have been exposed for sale in the market at Tournas. In their maddened condition the peasants exhumed human bodies and gnawed the bones.

One of the harrowing incidents of the time, which will give some idea of the insanity which suffering induced, occurred in the wood of Chatenay, near the town of Macon. A traveler and his wife stopped at a hut supposedly occupied by a holy hermit. Scarcely had they entered the abode, however, when the woman discovered a pile of skulls in the corner. She and her husband fled to the town, and when an investigation followed it was found that the hermit had murdered and partly devoured 48 men, women, and children.

Grass, roots, and white clay were the ordinary articles of food for the poorer classes during these terrible years, and as a result the sufferers almost ceased to resemble human beings, their stomachs becoming greatly distended, while almost all the bones of their bodies were visible beneath their leathery skin. Their very voices became thin and piping.

Packs of raging wolves came out of the forests and fell upon the defenseless peasants. It seemed as if mankind in France could never recover. But suddenly the fields brought forth grain in abundance and the peasantry responded with astonishing virility.

Famine among the French crusaders

France suffered greatly from famine and pestilence during the Crusades, but like the other nations which participated in the eight attempts to wrest the Holy Land from the Mohammedans, the most spectacular instances of privation occurred among her armies in Palestine and Egypt rather than among the people at home. During the first crusade, plague, supplemented by famine, destroyed 100,000 men, women, and children between September and December of the year 1097.

During the crusade against the heretics in 1218, one-sixth of the assailants perished at the siege of the Egyptian city of Damietta, while only 3,000 (some historians say 10,000) of the 70,000 inhabitants of the beleaguered place survived. In the eighth and last crusade France lost her king, Louis IX, and his son, Jean Tristan, both of whom were stricken with the pestilence which broke out at Carthage.

That indefatigable Walloon chronicler, Froissart, gives a simple but effective account of the four years' famine which fell upon France in the middle of the fourteenth century. “During that time,” he writes, “the merchants nor others dared venture out of town to look after their concerns or to take any journey, for they were attacked and killed whatever road they took. The kingdom was so full of the Navarrois [adherents of the King of Navarre] that they were masters of all the flat countries, the rivers, principal towns, and cities. This caused such a scarcity of provisions in France that a small cask of herrings sold for 30 golden crowns. Many of the poor died of famine. The lower classes suffered particularly for salt, which was highly taxed in order to secure the money with which to pay the army.”

Of course, much of the suffering of this period in France was due to the fact that the whole country, like England, had had its vitality sapped by the ravages of the Black Death a few years previously.

“In 1437 a great famine swept over France and many other Christian countries,” records Enguerrand de Monstrelet. “It was a pitiful sight to witness multitudes in the large towns dying in heaps on dunghills. Some towns drove the poor out of their gates, while others received all unfortunates and administered to them as long as they were able. Foremost in this act of mercy was Cambray.”

This dearth lasted for two years, and it resulted in many strict regulations governing the sale and distribution of corn. Embargoes against the shipment of grain out of the communities in which it was raised were not unusual. The city of Ghent was especially active in dealing with the situation. An order was issued prohibiting the brewing of beer and all other liquors in which grain was used, and another conservation measure was the killing of all dogs belonging to the poorer people, in order that these classes might have the food that otherwise would have gone to the pets.

Suffering due to extravagance of the French court

The closing years of the reign of Louis XIV were marked by general suffering among the laboring classes throughout France, not so much on account of the failure of crops, but because of the oppressive burden of taxation necessitated by the extravagance and wastefulness of the French court. In some districts as much as three-sevenths of the peasant's daily wage was seized by the tax-gatherer. In the Duchy of Burgundy three-fourths of the people lived on barley and oaten bread. Emigration and death reduced the population until every seventh house was empty, and unusually small families held out little promise for the future rejuvenation of the country. The streets of towns and cities were thronged with beggars clad in indecent rags.

One of the greatest privations to which the peasants were subjected was the loss of their cattle, all of which were eaten. When a severe winter came, the wretched creatures were deprived of the warmth which they were accustomed to derive from sleeping side by side with the beasts.

Madame de Maintenon was accused, perhaps unjustly, of making a fortune out of France's miseries by trafficking in corn. She was mobbed in her carriage by the hungry crowd as she rode out of Versailles, where the living skeletons of men and women clamored daily for bread and could with difficulty be kept from the presence of the king. For a hundred years thereafter caricaturists depicted Frenchmen as tall, gaunt, lantern-jawed creatures, in contrast to the well-fed figure of the English John Bull.

The French Government officials made many sporadic efforts to better conditions, but their methods of dealing with the situation seemed only to magnify the distress. For example, they doubled the tolls on roads, and thereby put an end to what little commerce remained; ridiculous tariffs on foodstuffs aggravated the populace and many riots followed. Garrisons revolted and had to be given large bounties to return to their duties.

One of the most terrible periods of starvation which any city has undergone in modern times befell Paris during its siege in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Thousands of refugees had flocked to the capital from the surrounding districts as the Germans advanced, yet there was not sufficient food within the fortifications to feed the normal population of the city. No provision had been made for the possibility of military disaster; the French Empire's only expectation had been an immediate triumph of its armies in the field. The severity of the winter added its hardships to the horrors of famine. The civilian population was reduced to the most desperate straits. Dogs, cats, and rats were sold for food at extravagant prices and they were deemed rare luxuries by the starving. When the garrison finally capitulated and the Germans marched down the Champs Elysees, on March 1, many foreign nations joined in spirited rivalry to revictual the stricken city, but it was many weeks before the distress of the people could be relieved.

Ireland's many famine woes

Ireland has been a land of many woes, and not the least of these have been the famines which from time to time have taken such heavy toll of the island's manhood. As early as 963–964, an intolerable famine visited the country, and parents are said to have sold their children in order to get money with which to buy food. On at least three occasions the peasantry has been driven to cannibalism. The most notorious instance occurred during the dearth which accompanied the wars of Desmond, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth in England.

The poet Spenser, who was an eye-witness to the distress of the time, says that the famine slew far more than the sword, and that the survivors were unable to walk, but crawled out of the woods and glens. “They looked like, anatomies of death; they did eat the dead carrion and one another soon after, insomuch as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves. To a plot of watercresses and shamrocks they flocked as to a feast.”

Ireland's greatest hours of travail were postponed, however, until the two great famines of the nineteenth century, brought about in both instances by the failure of her potato crops.

The famine of 1822 was but a prelude to the desolation which swept over the island in 1845–1846. The earlier failure of the potato crop should have forewarned the people of the disaster which they were constantly inviting, and many reformers preached for years against the practice of neglecting the cultivation of all grains in favor of the American tuber.

“While the agriculturalists of the continent were suffering from overproduction, a grievous famine arose in Ireland in 1822, showing the anomalies of her situation, resulting from the staple food of her population differing from that of surrounding nations, or the limitation of her commercial exchanges with her neighbors,” says Wade's British History. “Her distresses from scarcity were aggravated by the agrarian outrages, originating in the pressure of tithes and rack-rents on the peasantry and small farmers. Several of the ringleaders of these disorders were apprehended by the civil and military powers and great numbers executed or transported.”

This period of stress in 1822 proved to be the rapids above the great cataract of calamity over which the Irish people plunged in 1845. In the latter year a pestilential blight of unexampled severity caused the whole potato crop to rot. Three-fourths of the population of the island was entirely dependent upon this staple for food at that time. The resulting suffering can scarcely be imagined.

America among the first to aid the Irish

As soon as the seriousness of the situation was realized aid was rushed to the starving people from all quarters of the globe, America being among the foremost sending food. The British Government established relief works, and throngs of peasants rushed to get “the Queen's pay.”

In March and April, 1847, 2,500 died weekly in the workhouses alone. Thousands of starving peasants poured into England, many dying of famine fever while on board the emigrant ships. The total death toll was between 200,000 and 300,000.

Owing to deaths and emigration, the population of the island was reduced from 8,300,000 in 1845 to 6,600,000 six years later, and has been declining steadily ever since, until today it is about 4,300,000.

The pages of India's history are black with the blotches of famine. This vast and densely populated peninsula has been the very haunt of hunger for ages. Its peasants are among the most frugal in the world and its valleys are among the most fertile; but it has suffered more from lack of food than any other nation on the face of the earth, not even excepting China.

And yet, if so intelligent and discriminating a chronicler as Megasthenes, ambassador in India from the court of Seleucus between 317 and 312 B. C., may be believed, up to that time there had never been a famine in this land. The uncertainty of the seasons since the dawn of the Christian era develops a far different story.

Famine's terrible toll in India

In the ancient chronicles of Indian courts little space is given to the sufferings the common people; hence the early accounts of famine are meager; but occasionally a single sentence from a poem or a historical sketch is illuminating in its very brevity. For example, we find the line, “The flesh of a son was preferred to his love,” grimly suggesting the practice of cannibalism in times of dearth.

There are records of whole provinces being depopulated as early as 1022 and 1052 A. D., while at about the time that the Black Death was making its appearance in Europe a famine of such severity swept over Hindustan that the Mogul emperor himself was unable to obtain the necessaries for his household.

In 1630 a devastating drought afflicted the province of Gujarat and whole centers were depopulated. A Dutch merchant, returning from Swally, reported that of 260 families only 11 had survived, while in Surat, a great and crowded city, he saw hardly a living soul, but at each street corner found piles of dead with none to bury them.

Unlike the famines in other countries, where there is frequently a variety of factors contributing to the failure of crops, in India the shortage almost invariably results from an absence of rain. The country is wholly dependent for food upon its countless small farms, which are worked on practically no capital. Local credit is in the main unorganized, and in times of stress millions of laborers are thrown out of work.

The success of India's crops from year to year depends upon two monsoons—the southwest, or the rains, and the northeast, which brings the winter rains. For a month or two before the rains (April and May) the greater part of the peninsula fairly gasps in the heat. The soil is baked and cultivation is impossible. With June comes the monsoon, which continues until the latter part of September. After the first showers the peasants plow their fields and sow the autumn harvest of millet and rice. The spring harvest, which consists largely of wheat and barley, is sown in October and November. Not only do droughts disarrange this schedule, but prolonged rains, accompanied by east winds, cause the wheat to rust, while hot west winds cause the swelling grain to shrivel on the stalk.

The first of the Indian famines to attract wide-spread interest in the western world was the great catastrophe of 1769–1770, during which it is estimated that fully 10,000,000 souls, a full third of the population of Bengal, perished. Like all the famines, it resulted from a failure of rain, supplemented by maladministration on the part of the East India Company.

The famines which occurred from 1780 to 1790 are worthy of note, because it was during this period that the British began to organize relief for the destitute. Lord Cornwallis, by his administrative ability as governor general in this trying time, here managed to regain some of the laurels which he had lost by his defeat at the hands of the American colonists during the Revolutionary War.

In the twenty-two famines which occurred in India between 1770 and 1900 more than 15,000,000 natives perished, and some of the most terrible years—notably the famine in southern India in 1876–1878, when 5,200,000 starved in British territory alone—have befallen the empire just when the government believed it had almost mastered the problem of relief.

Caste complicates Indian famine relief

Great Britain has had many difficulties to overcome in handling the Indian food situation, not the least trying being the ever-recurring problem of caste.

Occupation is still preserved among the Indian natives by inheritance and tradition, so that the diversion of labor to industrial pursuits has been an almost impossible task. The supply of agricultural labor constantly outruns the demand, thus keeping the wage scale extremely low. Caste also prevents people from leaving crowded districts and going to sparsely inhabited regions, of which there are many.

In time of distress the restrictions which caste throws about rescue and relief work would be exasperating if they were not so tragic. For example, in the terrible Orissa famine thousands of Santals perished, in the midst of ample supplies furnished by the government, before it was discovered that there is a peculiar tenet of their faith which forbids them to touch food cooked by Brahmins. It was also discovered that skilled weavers would not go to the ordinary relief-work camps for fear that the hard labor would cause them to lose the delicacy of touch which they value so highly.

Chinese famine which started the Black Death

China is another land which famine seems to have marked for its own. Here the difficulty is not so much a matter of crop failures as the excess production of the human crop from year to year. Existence is a perpetual struggle for food in the Celestial Empire, and the smallest deviation from a maximum yield destroys the margin of safety between “barely enough” and “starvation.”

The four years between 1333 and 1337 constituted a period of unimagined suffering throughout China, and it is highly probable that it was in this era that the seeds of disaster were sown for Europe's Black Death, which appeared in the following decade. Famine and pestilence laid the whole country waste. Excessive rains caused destructive inundations, and according to Chinese records 4,000,000 people perished from starvation in the neighborhood of Kiang alone. Violent earthquakes occurred in many parts of the kingdom; whole mountains were thrown up and vast lakes formed. The fury of the elements subsided and the ravages of famine ceased in the very year that the Black Death reached England.

The four famines of 1810, 1811, 1846, and 1849 are said to have taken a toll of not less than 45,000,000 lives. In 1875–1878 four provinces in northern China, the district known as the “Garden of China,” suffered a failure of crops owing to lack of rain, and in an area about the size of France nine millions perished.

Two recent periods of dearth in China which awakened wide interest and elicited generous contributions from the United States for relief work were the famines of 1906 and 1911, when floods in the Yangtze River basin affected 10,000,000 people residing in an area the size of the State of Kentucky.

During both of these famines parents found it necessary to sell their daughters, not only to obtain food for themselves, but in order that the children might not starve. They were usually sold to wealthy families, in which they became slave girls. Early in the period of distress girls of 10 to 15 years of age brought as much as $20 each; but when the food shortage was most severe the customary quotation in the slave market was 60 cents each, while in one instance a father is known to have accepted 14 cents and two bowls of rice in exchange for his child.

No other race is as docile as the Chinese in times of famine. Their resignation in the face of calamity is amazing. For instance, in the food shortage of 1906–1907 a starving army of 300,000 peasants camped beneath the walls of the city of Tsinkiangpu. The grain warehouses of the town, a place of 200,000 inhabitants, were overflowing with wheat, maize, and rice, and these supplies were constantly on display; yet there were no riots. The thousands outside the walls sat themselves down to die, while those within continued to transact the ordinary affairs of every-day life.

Hunger and the Russian peasant

Next to the proletariat of India and China, the Russian peasant feels the pinch of poverty and hunger more keenly and more frequently than any other citizen on earth.

One of the earliest famines in Russia of which there is any definite record was that of 1600, which continued for three years, with a death toll of 500,000 peasants. Cats, dogs, and rats were eaten; the strong overcame the weak, and in the shambles of the public markets human flesh was sold. Multitudes of the dead were found with their mouths stuffed with straw.

Three Russian famines of comparatively recent date were among the most severe in the history of the country. They occurred in 1891, 1906, and 1911. During the ten years following the first of these periods of dearth the government allotted nearly $125,000,000 for relief work, but the sums were not always judiciously expended.

In 1906 the government gave 40 pounds of flour a month to all persons under 18 and over 59 years of age. All peasants between those ages and infants under one year of age received no allowance, and it became necessary for the younger and older members of the family to share their bare pittance with those for whom no provision was made. The suffering was intense and the mortality exceedingly heavy, but the available statistics are not wholly reliable.

The famine of 1911 extended over one-third of the area of the empire in Europe and affected more or less directly 30,000,000 people, while 8,000,000 were reduced to starvation. Weeds, the bark of trees, and bitter bread made from acorns constituted the chief diet for the destitute. This was unquestionably the most widespread and most severe famine that has befallen a European nation in modern times.

Both North and South America have been happily ignorant of extensive famines since the days of Columbus. There is a more or less apocryphal account of a great drought in Mexico in the year 1051, which caused the Toltecs to migrate, and in 1877 a scarcity of rain exposed 200,000 people in the northern provinces of Brazil to suffering; but with these exceptions the pinch of hunger in the Western Hemisphere has been felt from time to time in restricted areas only.

From this kaleidoscopic picture of suffering undergone during some of the most direful periods of world history it is apparent that there is nothing grandiose or heroic about death from starvation; neither is there glory to be gained, nor medals of honor or military crosses to be won in the battle for food. The casualties in the struggle are enormous, the compensation nil. No monuments are raised to the victims, no pensions provided for decrepit survivors. The suffering of those who succumb is pitiful beyond description, and the individual's anguish inevitably is intensified by the necessity of witnessing the agony of his loved ones who perish with him.

America's task

To allay the pangs of world hunger and to banish famine from the earth is America's task and her determination.

Early last spring, when it became evident that all Europe would be largely dependent upon the United States for its food during the coming autumn and winter, an appeal was issued to the American people to utilize every available acre of ground in the production of foodstuffs. Farmers were urged to increase the yield of their fields by employing every agency of science and industry; dwellers in towns and cities were asked to plant vegetables in their garden plots; those who had no ground on which to produce foodstuffs were enlisted in the cause when they agreed to limit to their necessity the consumption of food.

But the object is only half achieved. Having grown the foodstuffs, it is imperative that all practical means be employed to gather and preserve the fruits of the soil and of man's labor. These “bumper” crops of vegetables, raised in places which formerly were unproductive, can play no part in feeding stricken Europe unless they supply our own needs, thus releasing non-perishable grains for exportation.

The Allies' needs and America's resources

It is estimated that the Entente Allies will require 550,000,000 bushels of wheat from America this year, if the efficiency of their armies on the battle fronts is to remain unimpaired and if the civilian populations of France, England, and Italy are to be maintained in full bodily vigor, in order that they may produce the munitions and supplies essential to the successful prosecution of the war against Germany.

If the United States should consume its normal amount of grain, the quantity available for export from the 1917 harvest would fall short of the requirements abroad by 250,000,000 bushels. But this deficit can be made good, without serious privation to Americans, by the exercise of economy, thrift, and ingenuity—economy, in avoiding all waste; thrift, in gathering the vegetables which have been produced in such abundance this summer, and ingenuity in preserving, curing, canning, and drying for winter use all the perishable foodstuffs and fruits not required for immediate consumption.

The goal in this great campaign against waste in America is the safeguarding of all humanity against the suffering and the social and moral degradation which a world-wide famine would entail.

The American Government is earnestly enlisted in this supreme effort, its food administration bureau having taken over the large problems of price control and regulation of the exportation of foodstuffs; but the essential, the vital problem of food conservation remains the responsibility of each household.

Only by the sacrifice which the individual American makes will the welfare of another individual across the Atlantic be assured. Never before in so literal a sense is each man in this country the surety and the keeper of his brother abroad.

Source: Ralph A. Graves (July 1917), “Fearful Famines of the Past”, The National Geographic Magazine 32(1): 69–90.