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First domesticated in South America more than 7,000 years ago, the potato was brought to Europe by the Spanish in the late 16th century after their conquest of the Inca. When a series of non-potato crop failures struck northern Europe in the late 18th century, millions of farmers in France, Belgium, Holland, and England switched to the potato as their staple crop.

The situation in Ireland was unfortunate for the native Irish. Under the Penal Laws, Irish Catholics were forbidden from owning land, so as a result, English and Anglo-English gentry owned most of the land in Ireland, leasing parcels to the Irish, who were tenant farmers who paid rent. In the mid-1700s, the landowners introduced one variety of potato, which quickly became a staple for both the Irish people and their livestock – cattle, which were largely exported to England. The “Irish lumper” could grow efficiently in poor soil on small farms (many were less than an acre), had three times the caloric value of grain, and were easy to store and slow to spoil – an ideal crop for hardworking farmers, many of whom consumed between 40 and 60 potatoes per day.

By the early 1800s, however, the potato crop had failed a few times, and what scientists now know to have been the plant pathogen Phytophthora infestans (or P. infestans) blighted crops across Europe; by late 1845, over one-third of Ireland’s crop had been ruined. The following year, three-quarters of the potato harvest was destroyed, and Irish were beginning to starve.

One of the underlying difficulties was that from 1801, when Ireland joined with Great Britain in the Act of Union in 1801, Irish Members of Parliament traveled to Westminster, and they were not the best advocates for the Irish farmers. Indeed, of the 105 Irish in the House of Commons and the 28 Irish Peers in the House of Lords, most were landowners or sons of landowners of British origin. They did petition Queen Victoria to repeal the Corn Laws (laws which inflated the prices of grain to protect English farmers), and this was done, but because Ireland lacked working mills to process grain, it wasn’t much use. Indeed, landowners continued to export livestock, peas, beans, rabbits, fish, honey, and dairy goods to England during the famine. Absentee British landlords evicted thousands of starving peasants when they could no longer pay rent, and the workhouses and charity institutions that were established to help the vulnerable were poorly managed and became centers of squalor and disease.

The potato blight continued for another six years, until 1852, with the result that 1 million Irish people – nearly one-eighth of the population! — died, and between 1 and 2 million were forced to emigrate to North America, Australia, and England. Many Irish made their way to Liverpool, the nearest English port across the Irish Sea; this is where I have Michael Corravan’s parents meet, as Saoirse takes a position as a maid and Patrick attempts to find work as a silversmith.

With the area around Liverpool’s Mersey River overrun with Irish, many opted to board “coffin ships” to Canada and America, so called because nearly 30% of the passengers died on them. It’s reported that sharks followed the ships because so many bodies were thrown overboard.

Those Irish who stayed behind, haunted by their country’s suffering, would form the basis of an attempt to return the Irish Parliament to Dublin (known as the push for Irish Home Rule), which underpins the plot of Under a Veiled Moon, and an independence movement that continued into the 20th century.