The Star of the Sea (6 page)

‘No tenant of mine has been put off the land without compensation.’

‘Because there’s hardly anyone left to put off it, since your father evicted half of his tenants. Consigned them to the workhouse or death on the roads.’

‘Dixon, please,’ said the Captain quietly.

‘How many of them are in Clifden Workhouse tonight, Lord Kingscourt? Spouses kept apart as a condition of entry. Children younger than your own torn from their parents to slave.’ He reached into the pocket of his tuxedo and pulled out a notebook. ‘Did you know they have names? Would you like me to list them? Ever once visited to read a bedtime story to
them
?’

Merridith’s face felt as though it were sun-scorched. ‘Do not dare to impugn my father in my presence, sir. Never again. Do you understand me?’

‘David, calm down,’ his wife said quietly.

‘My father loved Ireland and fought for her freedom against the vicious scourge of Bonapartism. And I have used what you term “my position”, Mr Dixon, to make strenuous argument for reform of the workhouses. Which would not be there at all to offer what help they do were it not for the likes of my father.’

Dixon gave a barely audible scoff. Merridith’s tone was becoming more strident.

‘I have spoken about the matter frequently, in the House of
Lords and other places. But I shouldn’t suppose your readers would be interested in that. Rather tittle-tattle and muck-raking and simplistic caricatures.’

‘I represent the free press of America, Lord Kingscourt. I write as I find and I always will.’

‘Don’t delude yourself, sir. You represent nothing.’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ the Captain sighed. ‘I implore you. We have a long voyage ahead, so let us leave aside our differences and remain good friends and companions together.’

Silence settled over the discomfited company. It was as though an uninvited guest had sat down at the table but everyone was too embarrassed to mention the fact. A dribble of unenthusiastic applause sounded through the saloon as the harpist finished a sentimental Celtic melody. Dixon pushed his plate away desultorily and downed a glass of water in three quick gulps.

‘Perhaps we shall postpone the political discussion until later in the evening when the ladies have retired,’ the Captain said, forcing a laugh. ‘Now. More wine, anyone?’

‘I have done all I can to improve the situation of those in the workhouses,’ Merridith said, trying to keep his tone steady. ‘I have lobbied, for example, to relax the conditions for admission. But this is a very difficult question.’ He allowed himself to meet Dixon’s now unmeasurable gaze. ‘Perhaps you and I can have a talk about it on another occasion.’ He added once more: ‘it’s a difficult question.’

‘It certainly is,’ Merridith’s wife said suddenly. ‘Unless strict conditions are imposed they take advantage of the help offered them, David. The conditions should be a great deal stricter, if anything.’

‘That is not the case, dear, as I have told you previously.’

‘I believe it is,’ she calmly continued.

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Merridith. ‘And I have corrected you on this question before.’

‘Otherwise we merely encourage that same idleness and dependency which have only led to their present misfortune.’

Merridith found his anger rising again. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll be given lectures on idleness by your good self, Laura. Damned, I say.
Do you hear me now?
’

The Captain put down his cutlery and gazed bleakly at his plate.
At the next table the Methodist minister turned to give an owlish stare. Dixon and the Mail Agent sat very still. The Surgeon and his sister bowed their heads. The Maharajah continued quietly eating his soup, a soft whistle through his teeth as he blew on it.

‘Permit me to apologise,’ Lady Kingscourt said hoarsely. ‘I am feeling a little unwell this evening. I believe I shall go to take some air.’

Laura Merridith rose stiffly from the table, dabbing her lips and hands with a napkin. The men half-stood and bowed as she went, all except her husband and Maharajah Ranjitsinji. The Maharajah never bowed.

He removed his spectacles, breathed carefully on to the lenses and began wiping them scrupulously on the hem of his golden scarf.

The Captain waved over one of the stewards. ‘Go after the Countess,’ he quickly muttered. ‘Make sure she stays behind the First-Class gates.’

The man nodded his understanding and left the saloon.

‘Natives restless, are they?’ the Mail Agent smirked.

Josias Lockwood made no reply.

‘Tell me something, Captain,’ said the Maharajah with a perplexed frown. Everyone at the table gaped at him now. It was as though they had forgotten he was capable of speech.

‘That pretty young lady who is at present playing the harp?’

The Captain gave an embarrassed look.

‘You shall enlighten me, I know, if I am speaking in error.’

‘Your Highness?’

‘But isn’t she actually … the Second Engineer?’

Everyone turned or stretched to stare. The harpist’s hands were sweeping across the loom of strings, weaving a climax of ardent arpeggios.

‘By the holy powers,’ said the Mail Agent uneasily.

The Surgeon’s sister made an attempt at laughter. But when nobody joined in, she suddenly stopped.

‘It didn’t seem right to have a man,’ the Captain murmured. ‘We do like to keep up appearances on the
Star
.’

I
N WHICH THE
A
UTHOR GIVES HIS FRANK ACCOUNT OF CERTAIN
C
ONTROVERSIAL AND
CALAMITOUS EVENTS
IN
IRELAND;
AND DEFENDS HIMSELF AGAINST
D
ENIGRATION BY A CERTAIN
L
ORD
.

THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE,
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 10, 1847

TODAY’S TALKING-POINT

WHY IS THERE A FAMINE IN IRELAND?

by Our London Bureau Assistant,
Mr. G.G. Dixon.

The present reporter demands to respond to the letter lately printed in this newspaper from a correspondent who signs himself “David Merridith of Galway” but who is also known as Lord Kingscourt of Cashel and Carna, on the subject of the Irish Famine.

The Apocalypse now raging through the Irish countryside has been detonated by the fearful conspiracy of four Death Riders. Natural disaster, crushing poverty, the utter dependency of the poor on one susceptible crop, and the utter indolence of their Lords and Masters; by the same terrible forces which wreak famine everywhere among the destitute. It is not “an accident” but an inevitable consequence. What but evil could sprout from such pestilent soil?

Anyone with the Oxford education Lord Kingscourt has received – paid for in full by his family’s tenants – must be presumed to know this fact. As with every deadly Famine, it has been preceded by many another. (Fourteen in the last thirty years in the case of Ireland, and a cataclysmic blight in the middle-18th century.) The spark for this tinderbox was the appearance two years ago of a fungal canker that annihilates the potato, the staple food of the Irish poor. The name of the disease is not known.

The name of the economic system within which the catastrophe is occurring is very well known indeed. It is called “The Free Market” and is widely reverenced. Like David Merridith of Galway it also has an alias. Many criminals do, and most aristocrats. Its
nom de guerre
is
“Laissez-Faire”
; which preaches that the lust for profit may regulate everything: including who should live and who should die.

This is the Freedom which permits Irish food merchants to quadruple their prices in hunger-struck areas; which allows cargoes of unblighted produce to be carted by Irish ranchers under armed protection to Dublin and London while their countrymen starve in the putrid fields. (There is notably little Famine in the dining rooms of Dublin’s wealthy, neither at the palace of My Lord Archbishop.)

No other manifestation of humanity may be allowed to
intervene in these magnificent workings of Freedom. Not man’s Imagination, which gave us the glories of the Renaissance. Neither his desire for Liberty which gave us America. Not his natural Sympathy to his suffering brother, but the grind of the Profit-Engine, first and last.

This is not an exaggeration. The contention that the one task required of the unemployed aristocracy might be to prevent those on whom it leeches from starving to death, is considered bizarre by My Lords of England and Ireland. Indeed it is
de rigueur
to chastise the poor for their poverty while regarding one’s own riches as a matter of Divine entitlement. Those who toil the hardest possess the least wealth; those who do nothing but eat have the most.

It is a matter of record that a great number of the powerful who are permitting the decimation of the Irish poor are British; and also that many are Irish themselves. Of those who are British much has been written already, but of those who are Irish, not nearly enough. Some have found it convenient to blame “Britain” for such a decimation; though it is not “Britain” which is inflicting it, nor “Ireland” which is suffering it. What is happening is more sophisticated but no less brutal.

Most of the British establishment abjures responsibility, while millions of those they rule in Ireland are left to the cruellest destruction in a long, cruel history; all the while many of the better-off Irish with whom the victims share nationality (if not much else) quietly look the other way. As Lord Kingscourt contends, in his memorable phrase: “Hunger kills the poor. It does not ask their flag.” Doubtless if the Famine were laying waste to Yorkshire the government’s response would be less dismally ineffective. But if anyone truly believes that the Right Honorable Lord John Russell (the British Prime Minister, the 1st Earl Russell, the Viscount Amberley of Amberley, the Viscount of Ardsalla, the third son of His Grace the 6th Duke of Bedford) would raise the tax on his Lordly “chums” in order to succor the famished of Leeds, he needs to have his butler run him a long cold bath.

Food has indeed been sent by the Russell government, as Lord Kingscourt’s recent epistle so proudly maintains. But too often it has been woefully insufficient in some way; poorly planned, poorly organized, poorly distributed, inadequate in quality to the point of uselessness; in the wrong places at the wrong times; far too little and far too late. And his many Irish
admirers – the very many indeed – must share the culpability with Lord Russell and his government.

Numerous Irish farmers of the richer class have done absolutely nothing to assist the hungry; indeed they have greatly augmented their wealth by fencing in holdings deserted by the poor. An army of landlords who claim to love Ireland’s people have in fact evicted thousands from their inherited fiefdoms. Lord Kingscourt’s own family is one such gang. He says he is “an Irishman, born and bred in Galway.” One wonders if he says it in his usual home at Chelsea.

It is maintained that “the people of Britain” are to blame for the Famine because they have supported governments that exert themselves so feebly to assist. This is measurably incorrect. Literally not one of the wealthless class of that kingdom has ever voted for the corrupt regime that is worsening the sufferings of Ireland’s hungry. The evidence is simple. The people have no vote.