We are fast approaching the 170th anniversary of 1847. Big deal, says you. Haven’t we had enough of centenaries and grand anniversaries? That’s as maybe but, to my mind, 1847 is a stand-alone year that wholly deserves to be closely examined by anyone with a curiosity about the past.

170 years. Or, put it another way, two 85-year-olds. In a way, my new book, 1847 – A Chronicle of Genius, Generosity & Savagery, is an offspring of the Vanishing Ireland project, which has seen myself and photographer James Fennell travel all over Ireland over the last 16 years, interviewing and photographing more than 200 men and women who were born in the first decades of the 20th century.

It continually astounded us how many of them revealed that their grandparents had been children, if not teenagers, at the time of the Great Famine.

1847 is not strictly about the Famine but inevitably that appalling catastrophe cast a dark shadow over much of the world in a year that became known in Ireland as Black ’47.

Having been educated in Scotland, I didn’t learn much about the Famine until I tuned into Christy Moore singing The City of Chicago. The song was written by his brother Luka Bloom, who gallantly launched 1847 at the chq Building in Dublin on September 29th, with a beautiful rendition of his song. The first verse begins:

“1847 was the year it all began,

Deadly pains of hunger drove a million from the land.”

As I dove into the history books in Scotland to learn more, I was staggered by the impact of the Famine. The statistics are almost impossible to comprehend. In 1847 alone, some 400,000 men, women and children are believed to have died through disease or starvation, and nearly 250,000 fled, primarily to Britain and North America. Such a mass exodus inevitably shaped the contours of foreign lands. The population of Toronto, for instance, trebled to 60,000 over the course of 1847, with the newcomers almost exclusively from Ireland.

The Famine, or the Great Starvation as some call it, still makes people deeply upset. Understandably so, because what happened during that time was shocking, heart-breaking and almost entirely indefensible. However, the purpose of my book is not to rake over the coals of that appalling era. Indeed, I think our energies would surely be better channelled into helping the 30 million people presently on the cusp of famine in Yemen and the Horn of Africa. And by all means despise the hideous coffin-ships that swirled in the waters off Grosse Isle back in 1847, but try to refine your rage and instead help resolve the calamity that has resulted in the drowning of over 10,000 migrants in the Mediterranean in the last 2½ years.

1847 is a history of the world and where it looks at the Famine, it does so primarily in terms of the philanthropy it generated amongst a disparate group of contemporaries. The generosity of the Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma to the “starving Irish” is a story that has been told before but I have sought to contextualise it through the Armstrong brothers, the sons of an Enniskillen solider, who were with the Choctaw during the bitter Trail of Tears.

Sultan Abdülmecid of the Ottoman Empire also made a well-known donation, creating a curious bond between Constantinople and Drogheda, but, for the young sultan, 1847 was also about listening to Franz Liszt’s piano recitals and using Samuel Morse’s new magnetic telegraph to transmit a message to his harem, where he kept four hundred concubines.

Remarkable people brought help to Ireland from the seas, not least Rodney Baxter, a grizzled seadog from Cape Cod who sailed a small schooner into Sligo laden with supplies. Of similar bent was “Black Ben” Forbes, a Boston merchant who made his fortune selling opium to the Chinese. In 1847 Forbes persuaded the US government to loan him a warship that Irish emigrant stevedores in Boston then stuffed to the gills with food supplies. The opium magnate personally sailed the ship into Cobh, unloaded its gratefully received cargo and then embarked on a grand tour of famine-ravaged County Cork with no less a guide than Fr Theobald Mathew, the Apostle of Temperance.

I chose to write 1847 for a number of reasons, many personal. Indeed, it’s tempting to say the year chose me. Lisnavagh, my family home in Co Carlow, was built in 1847. So too was Glenalmond, the school I went to in Scotland. I read Wuthering Heights and observed that Emily Bronte wrote it in 1847, the same year her sisters published Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey. I looked at my family tree; three of my direct ancestors were born in 1847. I poured a Carlsberg and noted the brewery was established in 1847.

The crunch point came in Mexico City when I found myself standing on the very spot where the San Patricios had been executed in 1847. This was a battalion of mostly Irish soldiers who had fought for the Mexican army against the US during a brutal war that raged across Mexico that year. I determined to stop the clock and write a book about the world in 1847. As a travel writer who had lived in places such as Hong Kong, Australia and the USA, I felt this broader picture might somehow assist our understanding of what happened in Ireland in 1847.

As such, 1847 is not just about Ireland, or the Irish. The year simply provides the backdrop for 36 stories that took place all across the planet that year and, specifically, on the dramatis personae who were embroiled in these occurrences. The French bomb Vietnam, the Mormons reach Salt Lake Valley, Mary Anning hunts for dinosaur skeletons, Ignaz Semmelweiss tackles the medical elite in Vienna, German émigrés go head to head with Comanche and Kenesary Khan wreaks brutal vengeance on his enemies in the wilds of Western Siberia.

The world was every bit as small in 1847. When the Cunard liner, Cambria, left Liverpool for New York that spring, its passengers included the iconic circus showman PT Barnum and his diminutive cousin, a two-foot high performer called General Tom Thumb. The American duo had made a fortune in Europe when the youngster entertained over 5 million people.

The next time Cambria sailed from Liverpool, she carried the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. On the run from slave-catchers in the USA, Douglass had embarked on a 16-month tour of Britain and Ireland, during which he received a temperance badge from the afore-mentioned Fr Mathew and forged a close friendship with Daniel O’Connell. Shortly after he reached New York, Douglass was distraught to learn of O’Connell’s death in Genoa in May 1847.

Entertainers like Lola Montez, Pablo Fanque, Tom Thumb and the equestrian circus stars of St Petersburg all trod upon much the same boards. The world of classical music, represented in these pages by Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt and the soprano Jenny Lind, must have been startled by the innovative strumming of guitar and banjo strings that was carried on the air from the American West.

Another nautical loop involves the tale of Henry Kellett, a naval officer from Fethard, Co. Tipperary, who was dispatched to survey the west coast of the Americas in 1847, homing in on the Galapagos islands and Mexican California where a maverick priest from Co Clare had been trying to establish a colony called New Ireland.

Kellett’s survey came to an end when he was sent up to the North West Passage to join the hunt for Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition. Franklin and 129 men had sailed from England in 1845 but had not been seen since. Kellett could not find Franklin but it would emerge that the explorer and his crew had been trapped in the ice and died in 1847. The story made front page news again this September when Franklin’s ship was discovered submerged under the ice where it has lain for the past seventeen decades.

There is much to chew on in 1847 but I hope that this chronicle of famine, warfare, scandal and gumdrops will provide a little insight into the minds of some of those who walked this earth in 1847.

1847 – A Chronicle of Genius, Generosity & Savagery is published by Gill