The Great Frost of 1740 recalled

THIRTY-EIGHT islanders from Inishkea ended up in Castlebar gaol, charged with deliberately breaching and plundering a brig from Antigua ‘richly laden with sugar, cotton and ginger’, an incident that apparently happened during the Famine.

But it was not during the Great Famine of 1845 to 1851, as is highly documented, but an earlier, much-forgotten famine.

Somewhere in the range of 310,000 and 480,000 people, out of the 2.4 million population, are believed to have perished during the extreme weather conditions which swept across the country between 1739 and 1741, according to the book Arctic Ireland, by author David Dickson, a Trinity College professor.

He said the frost encountered then ‘remains to this day, the longest period of extreme cold in modern European history’.

The cold weather was the cause of utter devastation in Ireland, leading to food riots, famine, epidemic and death.

The Great Frost of 1740 is believed to have been partly caused by the volcanic eruptions on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia, which sent thousands of tons of dust into the atmosphere. According to Dickson’s book, the Irish population endured ’21 months of bizarre weather’ that was ‘without known precedent and defied conventional explanation’.

The cold snap continued for almost two years, in which extreme frost, bitter winds, freezing temperatures and drought were regular features.

It was shortly after Christmas, on December 29, 1739, that the Great Frost began and ‘introduced a cold so penetrating that liquids froze indoors and ice floes appeared at the river mouths’.

There was new year mayhem around the coast. Three vessels were lost in Dublin Bay - a French ship laded with brandy, a fly-boat with flaxseed, and a Liverpool sloop with salt, earthenware and passengers; all the latter were drowned, the body of the sloop’s master found on Merrion Strand ‘covered over with ice’.

Temperatures plummeted to levels where the rivers Lifffey, Slaney, Boyne and parts of the Shannon froze over, as well as several lakes throughout the country.

Large volumes of fish also perished and were found along the shores of Strangford Lough and Lough Neagh.

Despite the conditions, some people were simply delighted by the novelty of it all. What were in effect carnivals or banquets on ice were held at many venues across Ireland.

A municipal sheep-roasting took place on the Boyne at Navan where the locals roasted a whole sheep and their wives performed ‘several country dances on ice’ being attended by a large band of music. North Tipperary gentry roasted whole sheep on the top of 19 inches of Shannon ice near Portumna, ‘at the eating of which they had great mirth, and drank many loyal toasts’; afterwards ‘a match of hurling’ was played between two gentlemen’s teams.

Disruption to coal imports being brought from across the Irish Sea caused coal prices to soar, resulting in hedges, fine trees, and nurseries around Dublin being stripped bare as desperate people searched for substitute fuel.

The frost also plunged the streets of Dublin into darkness at night, for not only were there problems in milling the rape-seed to make the customary lamp oil, but even fully serviced lamps were being snuffed out by the intense cold, according to the book.

The situation worsened when the frost virtually wiped out the potato crop the following spring and widespread drought killed sheep and cattle. The following October blizzards hit the east coast, followed by widespread flooding in December and a snowfall which led to mini icebergs careening down the river Liffey.

Tens of thousands of small farming and labouring families, as they shivered in their cabins across the country, had to come to terms with the sudden loss of the principal winter foodstuff. The ripened potatoes, left in apparent security in gardens and fields where they were grown, had now been rendered quite inedible as a direct result of being frozen.

The weather continued to play strange tricks. There had been a violent storm at the end of August 1740 on the eve of the harvest, followed by a far more than unusual tempestuous September.

Blizzards swept along the east coast in late October depositing ‘prodigious’ amounts of snow on Belfast, and there were repeated heavy falls of snow across most of the country in the following weeks.

At least two storms came in the course of November, again followed by rain, snow and frost. And a massive downpour on December 9 culminated in widespread floods; several houses and ‘whole trees were washed into the Liffey and reports came from Navan of the greatest flood in the River Boyne that was never known in the history of man’.

The most apocalyptic accounts of death and destruction primarily date from the terrible spring of 1741 when dysentery and typhus were scything through district after district. The disaster was reaching its profligate zenith.

The story of the Great Frost ends as it had begun - with a meteorological bang.

In early September 1741 exceptional floods in Leinster bought down bridges, damaged mills, swept away cabins and houses. It was perhaps the last straw for some.

Others, however, saw in the event the purging of the fever at the end of famine and a return to public health.

And so, for a while at least, it was to be. The quality of the 1741 harvest was very mixed - winter-sown grains cut in July and August were abundant, but oats and potatoes were in many districts inadequate, thanks to the early summer drought.

But there was no longer a food crisis. As happened so often in the wake of a famine, seasons of rare plenty were to follow over the next two years.