August 7th, 1846: Almost overnight the new potato crop is wiped out.
Father Theobald Mathew, "the Apostle of Temperance", writes flatteringly from Cork to Charles Trevelyan. He first thanks him for helping his orphan nephew then continues.
"I am well aware of the deep solicitude you felt for our destitute people, and your arduous exertions to preserve them from the calamitous effects of the destruction of the potato crop last season. Complete success crowned your efforts Famine would have desolated this unhappy country were it not for your wise precautions.
"Divine providence, in its inscrutable ways, has again poured out upon us the vial of its wrath.
"A blot more destructive than the simoom of the desert has passed over the land, and the hopes of the poor potato cultivators are totally blighted, and the food of a whole nation has perished.
"On the 27th of last month, I passed from Cork to Dublin and this doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the 3rd instant I beheld, with sorrow, one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.
"In many cases the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless.
"It is not to harrow your benevolent feelings, dear Mr Trevelyan, I tell this tale of woe. No, but to excite your sympathy on behalf of our miserable peasantry.
"It is rumoured that the capitalists in the corn and flour trade are endeavouring to induce government not to protect the people from famine, but to leave them at their mercy.
"I consider this a cruel and unjustifiable interference.
"The gentlemen of the trade have nothing to do with Indian corn it is, I may say, a creation of the government, a new article of food, wisely introduced for the preservation and amelioration of the people of Ireland.
"Insidious efforts were even made to prejudice the people against this new food. Thank God they were in vain, and it is now a favourite diet and 10,000 blessings are hourly invoked on the heads of the benefactors who saved the miserable from perishing.
But Trevelyan, supported by the Whig political economists, persists in his policy of non intervention.
Sir James Dombrain, of the Coastguard Service, reports that, in a tour of 800 miles during the first week in August, "all is lost and gone" the stench from rotting potatoes is "perceptible as you travel along the road" in Cork the stench is "intolerable".
Col Knox Gore, lieutenant of Co Sligo, finds "from Mullingar to Maynooth every field was black". A steward of the Ventry estates writes that "the fields in Kerry look as if fire had passed over them".
The blight is reported to be universal in Ulster, and in Longford, Galway, King's County, Westmeath and Dublin.