Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (18 page)

Europe's wet June continued into July, when a strange disease began to destroy the potato crop, the primary staple of the rural poor across the continent, in a province in King Leopold's Belgium. Wind blew the stench of the rotting plants with the destructive spores and soon it spread to Prussia and France. In September, it appeared on the Isle of Wight in southern England, where Victoria and Albert were vacationing at the royal residence at Osborne that they had just purchased, and where Victoria would die more than half a century later. “Another fine morning, when we walked down to the beach, where
the Children were playing about happily,” she writes September 13. That day, the potato blight was first reported in Ireland. It was the start of what would be remembered in Europe as the Hungry Forties.

Ireland was then ruled from London, and nearly half of its 8 million overwhelmingly rural people depended solely on the New World tuber for their primary sustenance. Life was already hard in a country where most Irish eked out a living as tenants on land owned primarily by wealthy English and Scottish landlords. An 1845 government report issued before the disastrous fall harvest said “it would be impossible to describe adequately the privations which they and their families habitually and patiently endure.”

The commission, appointed by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, found “that in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water” and that “a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury.” One English lord warned the prime minister that the Irish peasant was supported solely by a quarter acre of potatoes. “Deprive him of this, or let his possession be uncertain, and what interest has he in preserving the peace of the country?”

At Windsor on November 6, Victoria and Albert walked to the aviary after breakfast and took a drive on an unusually sunny and warm day, welcome after the dreary summer. She was relieved to hear later from Peel that the situation in Ireland was not as bad as he had first feared. “Indeed, I think the alarm must have been exaggerated,” Victoria writes in her diary. But while Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium acted quickly to import grain and regulate prices in their own lands, Parliament dithered. A month and a day later, a frustrated Albert sent a harsh memo to the government criticizing the inaction. “Half of the potatoes were ruined by the rot, and . . . no one could guarantee the remainder,” he complains.

That winter, outraged Irish journalist John Mitchel, later convicted of treason and exiled, warned that a devastating famine had begun among his people as they watched “heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all
sail for England.” In London, those ships were seen as essential for the industrializing heartland. Without the Irish larder, factory workers would face food shortages that easily could explode into revolution. Meanwhile, the landed gentry opposed repealing laws that imposed steep tariffs on grain and other foods from abroad. And there was more than corn and grain flowing out of Ireland. In 1841, the Irish sent an estimated 150,000 cattle, 400,000 sheep, and 1 million live pigs to England and another 400,000 pigs that had been slaughtered and turned into pork and bacon.

An unknown number of chickens were also exported. “Eggs also constitute a by no means unimportant article of commerce,” one contemporary British writer notes. “The largest supplies to the English markets are obtained from Ireland.” In 1835, 72 million eggs were sent to England. That figure grew throughout the famine of the 1840s and, by the early 1850s, “it is estimated that we yearly receive one hundred and fifty millions. Of this number London and Liverpool respectively consume twenty-five millions each.”

On February 23, 1846, the House of Lords bemoaned the state of Ireland, but the focus was on the country's lawlessness rather than the hunger at its root. Meanwhile, desperate people eating rotting potatoes suffered from terrible bowel disorders. Fever spread in County Cork. A relief commission warned that what was left of the noninfected potatoes would last only until April. The Royal Dublin Society, an organization created to keep the struggling island abreast of the latest agricultural, industrial, and scientific advances, decided to act by voting to offer a gold medal and twenty pounds for the best essay on the potato crop blight.

Then the society officers moved on to plan their large spring exhibition. Prize cattle and other domestic animals from across the United Kingdom were to be judged for size and beauty. Prince Albert, who had recently become a patron of the society, made plans with Walter to ship some of the exotic and crossbred birds across the Irish Sea to show at the exhibition in the Irish capital.

The potatoes didn't last until April. Food riots broke out by March. Lord Heytesbury, the British representative in Ireland, counseled
calm, and grain, beef, and poultry continued to be exported from Irish harbors to English markets. On March 23, as Albert helped Walter design the cages to transport three of the crossbred hens and one cock from Windsor to Dublin, a man in Galway was reported to have died of starvation. A million more deaths were to come, while another million would flee the country, most destitute. Those survivors would clamber aboard what became known as coffin ships that transported the sick, starving, and suffocating people to Canada and the United States.

The first famine death went unnoticed in London, but the Cochin fowl's journey to Ireland made the news. A London paper reported on April 17 that the four exotic chickens had arrived in Dublin “perfectly free from injury.” The landlords and well-to-do farmers who attended the show were in awe of the queen's entries presented by Walter on the Dublin fairgrounds. He explained to a rapt audience that one of the hens, Bessy, had laid 94 eggs in 103 days, an extraordinary record at a time when half that number would have been notable. There were skeptics. “But if this be a fact,” said one wag of Walter's claim, then “there is no limit to the improvement, of which these double-barreled Hens are capable, till by the aid of forcing and extra diet, they become, like Mr. Perkins's steam gun, able to discharge Eggs at the rate of several dozens in a minute.”

The birds “created such a sensation, from their immense size and weight, and the full, deep tone of the crowing of the cock, that everybody was desirous to possess the breed, and enormous prices were given for the eggs and chickens,” according to the contemporary poultry aficionado Walter Dickson. “With respect to beauty,” he adds, “they have certainly nothing to boast of.” And those were the cocks. “The hens are still more ugly.” Meanwhile, one exhibit-goer watched with horror as hungry locals crept into pens to steal what was left of raw turnips rejected by the well-fed prize cattle.

Walter presented the birds as gifts to Lord Heytesbury from the queen before he departed with three gold medals for Windsor. Heytesbury regifted two of the birds to the Dublin poultry breeder James Joseph Nolan. He was impressed by the birds' large eggs and
tasty meat, and grew certain that such improved poultry could halt the mounting deaths across Ireland. Pigs were as dependent as humans on the potato plant, and they quickly starved or were slaughtered. Chickens, by contrast, could eat weeds and insects indigestible to humans who, in Ireland, had turned to consuming leaves and grass. Poultry was a vital defense against hunger, argued Nolan. Yet during the worst years of the blight, he watched in disgust as landowners continued to export a million pounds' worth of chickens and eggs to England. “Instead of persecuting the poor,” the gentry should procure the new productive chicken breeds and supply their tenants with eggs, he wrote in 1850. These could quickly proliferate. Then the landowners might be “respected, beloved, and venerated, and the strength and sinews of the land would not be crossing the Atlantic.”

By then it was too late, at least for Ireland. The slums of New York and Boston were already jammed with those who managed to escape the famine and survive the terrible voyage. Ireland's population fell by half and still has not returned to the levels of Victoria's early reign, a bleak testament to the long-lasting impact of a disaster that was as much political as biological. Nolan's vision of poultry as a savior for the rural poor was prescient, and was echoed by others in the decade that followed the Hungry Forties. What lay the foundation for the modern chicken was neither a contrite Irish gentry nor a remorseful British government, but a backyard chicken phenomenon known as “The Fancy” that makes today's movement pale in comparison.

In the decade between 1845 and 1855, Britain and America were gripped by an obsession with exotic chickens. The fad, like most economic bubbles, left many disillusioned and poorer, but it also aided Darwin in his attempts to explain evolution, transformed the lives of women, and led to the modern industrial chicken that feeds much of our species today.

“Events which are injurious while they take place, often leave good results behind them,” notes Elizabeth Watts, the first female editor of a regular English-language publication. Watts was referring to the railway bubble that, when it burst, devastated thousands of British investors in the late 1840s. Even Darwin and the writer Charlotte
Brontë felt its sting when companies failed by the dozens. All that speculation did result in new rail lines that made traveling easier, she added. As editor of the first regular publication devoted to chickens—
The Poultry Chronicle—
Watts was drawing a parallel with what some at the time derided as “hen fever.”

An unmarried and enterprising woman of means who lived in the fashionable London quarter of Hampstead, she was an early owner of Cochin China fowls and a player in the chicken mania. In 1854, Watts exchanged some of her Cochins for the Sultan breed of chicken from Istanbul. “They arrived in a steamer,” she writes. “The voyage had been long and rough; and poor fowls so rolled over and glued into one mass had never been seen.” The imports, said to have wandered in the tulip-studded gardens of the Ottoman sultan on the banks of the Bosporus, were an immediate hit in London. The snow-white feathers that reached to the toes and its spectacular puffball crown were a media sensation; Darwin later mentioned Watts's description of the bird admiringly.

What began as an eccentric royal hobby now was a national craze. “If you travel by a railway, poultry becomes the subject of conversation among your travelling companions; a crowing neighbour salutes you from another carriage, or perhaps a fine Cochin China is held up at the window to show the beauty of his points,” reads one editorial in the
Chronicle
. “If you lose sight for years of some acquaintance, you are pretty sure to meet him at a poultry show, or to encounter his name among the exhibitors.”

The 1846 fair in Dublin on the eve of the potato famine lit The Fancy's fuse. “The eggs having been freely distributed, with that gracious kindness for which Her Majesty and Prince Albert are so celebrated, the breed may now be easily obtained,” one contemporary author noted. Sleek clipper ships brought new varieties to Britain such as Cochins or Shanghais purchased by British sailors in the recently opened port of Shanghai. Unlike the tall and ugly Windsor bird, this one boasted feathers on its short legs, a small, soft tail, and a wide body as puffy as a pillow. Some were black, others white, and still others a delicate buff color. Their feathers were like soft clouds.
They weighed, on average, twice that of an English chicken. Unlike the scrappy Dorking, these were calm and gentle.

Collectors eagerly awaited the arrival of the next clipper ship. In December 1848, chicken and pig enthusiasts from around the British Isles gathered in the industrial city of Birmingham. At the time, Watts's publication noted, keeping poultry was still widely regarded as “an idle whim from which no good result could by possibility ­accrue.” Huge crowds packed the exhibition. “Cochins came like ­giants upon the scene; they were seen, and they conquered,” writes one nineteenth-century poultry historian. “Every visitor went home to tell tales of the new fowl that were as big as ostriches, and roared like lions, while [they] were gentle as lambs.”

And they were soon as expensive as precious metal. The next year, at the second Birmingham show, one vendor sold 120 birds for the equivalent of fifty thousand dollars today. A decade after Victoria built her royal henhouse, the
Times
reported that “poultry shows, and many of them upon a large scale, are being held now in all parts of the country.” At London's popular summer Bartholomew Fair, buyers snapped up Cochin China fowl with posh names like “Marie Antoinette,” “The Regent,” and “Richelieu” for the equivalent of ­twenty-five hundred dollars apiece. “People really seemed going mad for Cochins,” a contemporary writer noted. The satirical magazine
Punch
had a field day, publishing cartoons lampooning women walking their giant chickens on leashes.

An 1852 London exhibition under the patronage of Prince Albert drew more than five thousand people, and buyers had to beware of plumage tinting and hackle trimming that might disguise a plain bird as a more exotic creature. Eight detectives kept watch to prevent theft. There were, it was whispered, organized gangs of poultry swindlers at work. One woman paid the equivalent of two thousand dollars for a pair of Cochins. More than eighty thousand dollars changed hands in one day alone. The
Times
was disturbed by what it called “the seductions of this new mania” that “rages among us with epidemic fury.” By 1855, the fever broke and prices plummeted. In August of that year,
The Poultry Chronicle
was quietly folded into
The Cottage Gardener.