Just the same, industrial revolutions did support the population rise. What they did was put more money in the hands of millions. Think of what the poor could now afford to buy, and how these things could help them to escape an early death. If they purchased more and better food, their bodies could resist disease. If they dwelled in dryer houses, and slept in several beds instead of crowded all in one, they might escape tuberculosis. If they purchased cotton clothes, which are easier to wash than woolens, they might escape the lice that carried typhus. If they ate on shiny dishes, mass-produced in mills, they could wash them cleaner than the old ones made of wood or earthenware, and banish dysentery.
Prosperity alone does not explain why Europeans multiplied. Obscure events, observed by no one, also cut the death rate. Here is an important example. As we saw (five chapters back), the sickness known as plague once slaughtered millions, but no one understood just why. They knew only that when plague appeared the best thing was to flee.
But then, quite quickly, plague left Europe. At the time, no one knew what made it vanish.
Centuries later, men and women using microscopes learned what plague is all about. Despite appearances, it is a disease not of humans but of rodents, chiefly rats, and the villains are bacteria. If a rat infected with plague should die, fleas will leave his cooling corpse and look for other rats. Many of these fleas will have drunk his blood, and therefore carry plague bacteria. If they can’t find other rats to live on, then they may move onto human beings (reluctantly, no doubt; we aren’t so furry). When they bite these human hosts, they infect them, and from them the disease may spread to other humans and kill them by the thousands. But this is only incidental to a rodent epidemic.
Historians have a theory on the disappearance of plague from Europe. It runs like this: In the centuries when plague was common, European towns were homes to Rattus rattus, the black rat. These rodents often lived quite close to humans, perhaps in roofs of straw, or rubble walls, or underneath the floorboards. Since these rats were such near neighbors, when they got sick with plague their fleas could easily move to humans. Rat epidemics caused human ones.
In the 1700s, Europe had a rattus revolution. Apparently, it started in the east. Russians noticed Asian rats, brown ones, swimming west across the Volga River, and in Europe these brown immigrants replaced the black natives. (They are known as Rattus norvegicus; it’s not clear why Norway gets the credit for them.) But the newer rats were not at ease with humans, like the black ones; they lived apart, at greater distances. So (the theory goes) if brown rats suffered an epidemic of plague, they were far less likely to pass it on to humans. As a consequence, this lethal illness, scourge of cities, disappeared from Europe. (It lingered elsewhere until the nature of the disease was understood.)
Europeans clearly can’t take credit for the rout of plague, but cholera is another story. Unlike plague bacteria, those of cholera are found in food or water. In a human body, they can swiftly lead to diarrhea, dehydration, and decease. In the 1800s six cholera pandemics (nearly global epidemics) led to many deaths.
A London doctor, John Snow, discovered in 1849 that in one neighborhood where many died of cholera, the source was in their drinking water. They drew their water from a surface well by means of a hand-operated pump. When Snow explained this to the local board of guardians they asked him what to do, and Snow replied, “Take the handle off the Broad Street pump.” They did so, and cholera epidemics stopped.
In other places, too, experts found that dirty water led to cholera. Meanwhile, governments in several countries began to see that public health should be a public care. In many towns and cities, local governments laid pipes beneath the streets to bring in clean water, and other pipes to carry sewage out. Where this happened, cholera vanished.
Another English doctor, Edward Jenner, studied smallpox, which was once a leading cause of death. He had heard the widespread observation that a person who caught cowpox (Latin name: vaccinia), a harmless disease caught from cattle, did not catch smallpox. So Jenner, in a daring test, injected in a little boy some vaccinia “matter” from the lesions on a milkmaid’s finger. The boy developed cowpox. Six weeks later Jenner broke his skin again, but this time he injected smallpox matter. The dread disease did not appear; somehow vaccinia had saved the boy from harm; it “vaccinated” him. In 1798 Jenner publicized what he’d learned, and knowledge of his findings spread.
Smallpox would remain a killer, however, until governments got active, as they had in fighting cholera. It took a war in 1870–71 to show the need of vaccinating one and all. The Germans vaccinated troops for smallpox but the French did not, whereupon the Germans lost 300 men to smallpox while the French lost more than 20,000. However, Germans on the home front were not vaccinated, and 130,000 of them died of smallpox. German rulers drew the obvious conclusion and required vaccination for everyone.
AS PROSPERITY INCREASED and medicine improved, populations rose. And as the hungry mouths increased, so did the need for food. Could farmers grow enough to feed the rising numbers?
One way to produce more food, of course, was to grow more food per acre. But a major problem was that fields could not be cultivated every year; if they were, they lost their fertility. The custom therefore was to use a field for crops a couple of years, then leave the field unused a year, and then plant again. That year of resting fallow let the field recover.
But farmers in the Netherlands, where land was scarce and mouths were many, hated leaving any field unused so long. With a lot of trial and error, they found a better way to use a field. If they rotated different crops, instead of always planting one, and added fertilizer, they didn’t have to rest a field one year in three. A farmer might, perhaps, grow flax (for linen) for a year; then turnips; then oats; then clover. (Clover isn’t only cattle fodder; it also fertilizes, taking nitrogen from air and “fixing” it in soil.) After this rotation, without resting his field at all, the farmer might begin again with flax. With such rotations, land no longer went unused one year in three, and so production rose. Crop rotation farming spread in Europe and throughout the world.
Another way to feed more people was to plant potatoes. Since ancient times, the staple in the European diet had been bread, baked with flour from wheat and other grains. But grains were always hard to grow in places where the soils were damp and days were short.
The Spaniards who came to the New World with Pizarro got to know potatoes, which the Indians grew (and grow today) among the Andes. The Spaniards brought them back to the Old World, along with beans, tomatoes, and other plants. At first, Europeans decided that potatoes were for pigs, not for humans, but with time they changed their minds. They learned how trouble-free potato farming was, and that the poor could raise them even if they had no plows or horses. Using only spades, they dug some “lazy beds” and grew enough potatoes for themselves. An acre of potatoes feeds many more people than an acre of wheat.
Here is the good and bad that potatoes did to the Irish. In the 1700s, the potato plant became the center of the peasants’ way of life. A boy and girl would marry in their teens, occupy a scrap of land, build a hut of earth, and raise potatoes. In time the two would have a family, and all would live — not well, it’s true — largely on potatoes. The Irish people nearly tripled.
But, as everybody knows, disaster followed. Potato blight arrived in 1845 and 1846. With horror, Irish peasants found that their potatoes turned to mush. A million died of hunger, and a million others fled to England or America. But just the same, and not forgetting 1845 and ’46, potatoes played a major role in Ireland’s and in Europe’s population growth.
Another way to feed the growing numbers was to find more land on which to grow more food. This happened in Australia and in North and South America, where settlers and railroads opened vast and virgin plains. For Europe these new lands were windfalls, providing grain, meat, and wool just when the demand for food and clothing rose.
Australia had its semi-arid plains, the Outback, where
Aborigines had wandered no one knows how long ago. This is land so blank and empty (someone once observed) that it’s like a newspaper that has been completely censored. When Britons settled here they found the plains just barely moist enough for cattle, but later on Australia nourished many millions of sheep.
In southeast South America lay another windfall, the Pampas. European settlers were amazed by the immensity of these treeless, grassy plains, which sprawl across a third of a million square miles. Cowboys soon were tending giant herds of livestock on them, and the Pampas, like the Outback, were to play a major role in feeding Europe.
But they were nothing when compared to North America’s Midwest, where seas of grass flourished on a third of the continent. Before settlers from the east coast of Canada and the United States first entered it, they feared this unknown land might be a desert. They were pleased instead to find sufficient rain, and rich and loamy soil. The grass was like a forest, high enough to hide a horse. Its roots were tough and thick, and when a farmer’s plow “broke” through the virgin sod the roots would pop like wires. Except in regions where the rain was scarce, the new arrivals thrived, and the scale on which they farmed was huge. To harvest wheat they used enormous “combines” that could cut and thresh and clean the grain. Up to twenty horses pulled them.
On the dryer plains, farmers put together giant ranches. The land was simply endless, so cowboys couldn’t tend the scattered cattle. Instead they used a new device, the barbed wire fence. Behind these fences wandered herds of cattle often numbering about 2,500. Every spring the cowboys drove the surplus cattle to the nearest railroad, which was often hundreds of miles away. Their beef would help to feed the multiplying millions in America and Europe.
THOSE WHO LIVED in modernizing nations knew that they were witnessing astounding changes. One such change was how their number multiplied, and another was the new machines and all the things they made. What was most amazing, and the symbol of the age, was speed.
When the 1800s began, humans couldn’t travel very fast. A walking horse could carry someone on its back a little faster than a human walked: five miles an hour. The swiftest public transport was the stagecoach, which was pulled by teams of horses bred to do the work. Rested horses pulled a coach about ten miles per hour if the roads were good. However, roads were often bad, and people joked about the wooden-legged man hobbling down a road who refused a lift in a coach, saying, “No thanks, I’m in a hurry.”
The English led the way to speed. Miners had long been hauling coal on carts with wheels, that men or horses pulled on iron rails. The rails, which lessened friction, were all right, but men and horses weren’t efficient pullers, so mining engineers replaced them with locomotives equipped with steam engines. When this proved successful, someone saw that if engines could move coal, they could also move people. So engineers made railroad cars that looked like horse-drawn carriages on tracks. Their owners gave the locomotives winning names, such as Catch-Me-Who-Can, Puffing Billy, Comet, Rocket, Novelty, and Royal George. Rocket proved a great success, running an amazing thirty miles an hour, three times as fast as a stagecoach.
In 1830 British investors built a railroad from the textile town of Manchester to the port of Liverpool, and Frenchmen laid a railroad from their big textile town, Lyon, to nearby coal mines. In a few decades, trains were running forty, even fifty miles per hour in Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, and Australia. Canadians and Americans ran trains from sea to sea and, as we saw in chapter 15, Russia built the longest railroad in the world. The trans-Siberian ran from Moscow eastward to the Sea of Japan, an eight-day trip.
Railroads ran through regions of the world where no one lived as yet, though towns and cities soon would rise along the tracks. When the English writer Dickens rode a train through the American wilderness he wrote, “The train calls at stations in the wood, where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out, is only to be equaled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in. It rushes across the turnpike road where there is no gate, no policeman, no signal: nothing but a rough wooden arch, on which is painted: ‘WHEN THE BELL RINGS, LOOK OUT FOR THE LOCOMOTIVE.’ ”
Travel on the seas was also changing. In ancient times, when Rome was at its peak, it took two months to sail the length of the Mediterranean, and in the era of Columbus, it still took sixty days. But builders then improved the sailing ship, above all by adding sails. By the middle 1800s “clipper ships” — lofty, sharp-bowed vessels with many sails — could really move, especially when they carried Chinese tea to England. The captains knew that early-arriving cargoes of the yearly crop would bring high prices. In 1866, three “clippers” raced each other from Fu-chou to London. They reached the Thames on the same day, and docked on the same tide. In just below a hundred days, these ships had journeyed many times the length of the Mediterranean.
But steam did to sails what it also did to horses. An American had a steam-powered boat built for him in England, and shipped it home. In 1807 it puffed 150 miles upstream on the Hudson River, from New York to Albany, in under a day and a half. It looked, said someone, like the Devil in a sawmill, but it made a lot of money. It wasn’t long till puffing boats with paddlewheels were hauling goods and people on the rivers of America and Russia.
Travelers distrusted the early steamboats, and they had good reason, since the boats were made of wood and were prone to smash. Within some decades, though, builders made their boats of iron, then of steel. Steam was introduced on oceangoing ships, like the two that Perry sailed on to Japan, and when the 1800s ended steam had all but conquered wind. The newer vessels traveled faster even than the clipper ships that once had raced with tea from China. At the century’s end, the German liner Deutschland crossed the Atlantic Ocean at an average speed of twenty-five miles an hour.
As railroads bonded peoples, steamships hooked up continents. Just consider these travels of one British “tramp steamer.” Leaving home in 1910, it carried railroad rails and other goods to Australia’s western shore. There it picked up lumber and carried it to southeast Australia. With a load of farm machinery, it headed west to Argentina, where it loaded wheat. From there it sailed to India, and picked up jute (for making ropes and sacks). Next the freighter sailed to North America, and from New York it carried factory goods to Australia. It then returned to England with a load of sheep’s wool, wheat, and lead. In about a year and a half the ship had traveled 72,000 miles and visited six continents.1
1John P. McKay, Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler, A History of Western Society (4th ed., 1991), p. 826.
What the Irish famine was to the potato, the Titanic was to oceanic travel. This British liner started on her maiden voyage in April 1912, heading from Britain to New York. The Titanic was the biggest and most luxurious of ships, and was said to be an engineering triumph. She was powered not by one enormous engine but by two, and her hull was double-bottomed. The Titanic was, they said, “unsinkable.” But two nights later, steaming much too fast off Canada, she grazed an iceberg. Her vaunted hull plates buckled, and the ocean flooded in. The captain urged his crew, “Be British!” Down went the Titanic, and two-thirds of the passengers and crew.
Two annoying bits of land were major obstacles for ships that sailed from sea to sea. One was the Isthmus of Suez, a piece of desert that blocked the way between the eastern Mediterranean and the northern end of the Red Sea (which leads to the Indian Ocean). Because of it, ships that sailed between Europe, Asia, and Australia had to sail completely around Africa, the second largest continent. The other nuisance was the Isthmus of Panama, which linked North and South America. If only ships could somehow sail right through this slender thread of land, they would save themselves long voyages around South America.
A French promoter formed a Suez Canal Company, and the firm set out to dig a channel through the desert, sea to sea. The canal would pass through marshy lakes, and making it was not a complicated job. Just the same, it took ten years to dig a
nd dredge across a hundred miles of sand and marsh. When the task was finished in 1869, ships could quickly pass between the Asian and the European seas.
It was not a company but a nation that wished to make a channel through the other isthmus. The United States wanted to do this for both business and military reasons. As anyone could see, the place to cut the channel was in Panama, where (and this will twist your tongue) the isthmus was the thinnest. But Panama was a province of Colombia, in northern South America, and when the United States asked Colombia for consent, it refused the U.S. terms.
The U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt, was not to be denied. (He inspired a palindrome: A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA, which reads the same way backward.) Disregarding another nation’s rights, he sent a warship and some U.S. troops and encouraged the Panamanians to revolt. This they did, with the loss of the lives of a man and a mule. When Panama declared itself a nation, America was quick to recognize it, and the two agreed that the wealthy northern country would build a canal across the tiny Central American one.
The Human Story Page 29