A History of Chowder by Robert S. Cox

Author:Robert S. Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Sitting flush with the deck, a prism could illuminate the underbelly of a ship with natural light from above.

In the midst of this rampage, Drake may have helped introduce the potato to England. Although the event is unrecorded, it seems possible that Drake became acquainted with the potato during his devastation of the Pacific (which, after all, paralleled the heartland of the tuber), and there is evidence that he and others soon grasped the food’s value for ships’ stores. Off the coast of Chile in November 1578, Drake reported that people flocked to his ships to offer potatoes and fat sheep, and off Concepción, Chile, in 1587, Master Perry, accompanying the expedition of Thomas Cavendish, similarly wrote of receiving “cases of straw filled with potato rootes, which were very good to eat, ready made up in the store houses for the Spanish against they should come for this tribute.” Kept relatively dry, the potato lasted well aboard ship and provided a nutritious, versatile and satisfying meal for the crew. In other words, the potato planted itself in ships’ larders.

Precisely when the potato arrived in England is a bit less clear. The careful botanist Clusius failed to notice potatoes when he visited Drake in England in 1581, suggesting that our piratical Prometheus did not bring them directly home from the Pacific (assuming even that they could survive). The decade, however, was a crucial one for English attempts at building an Atlantic empire, and there were other opportunities for the potato to make its way to the green and pleasant land. In 1585, Thomas Harriot accompanied Richard Grenville on the second English expedition to Virginia, a voyage financed by the queen’s favorite, Sir Walter Raleigh, and after a year at Roanoke Island, he and most of his party were whisked back home by Drake, just returning from his sack of Cartagena. The 107,000 ducats Drake had won for ransoming the city may have been accompanied by an even more valuable prize: the potato. Raleigh himself, Salaman speculates, may have introduced the potato into Ireland in 1586 or 1588.

It was not long before proper descriptions of the potato began to appear in print. “Herbals,” compendia of botanical knowledge intended for use in medical applications, as well as gardening and farming, were an ancient genre of book and wildly popular. The first published notice of the potato came from the English botanical pirate, John Gerard, who reported growing the potato in his garden in Holborn in 1596. One year later, in December 1597, he described the potato at length in his Herbal, which became one of the most widely read English herbals of the century. “It groweth naturally in America,” Gerard wrote, “where it was first discovered as reports C. Clusius, since which time I have received roots thereof from Virginia, otherwise called Norumbega, which grow and prosper in my garden as in their native country.” Before the first permanent English settlement in North America, before Jamestown, the potato was counted as a fruit of new world conquest.

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