Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (10 page)

Passing through Switzerland, Howard traveled the same scenic routes taken by Mary Shelley and her circle of friends. While Byron and the Shelleys exchanged ghost stories, Howard’s professional eye was drawn to the startling summer accumulation of snow on even the lower elevations of the alpine mountains:

I saw the snows of the preceding winter lying in very large masses, in hollows on the chain of the Jura, and on the Mole near Geneva, from whence they usually vanish in summer; and this at a time when the new snows had already begun to fall on the same summits.

Back in England in the autumn of 1816, Howard recorded more apocalyptic weather. Around lunchtime on October 7, he experienced a “loud explosion of electricity”—a bolt of lightning—that shook the ground at Tottenham for several seconds. “Thunder in long peals and vivid lightning” then continued for more than an hour. On November 6, a dense cloud of Tambora’s volcanic dust enveloped Chester in the west of England. At noon, amid impenetrable darkness, citizens of
the cathedral town lit candles and carried lanterns through the streets. Hail, frost, and snow two feet deep followed in the succeeding days. The same conditions prevailed over London later in the month, where Howard recorded a noontime temperature of 2°F and the daytime darkness required coachmen to dismount to light the way for their horses.

The creeping terror inspired by Tambora’s unnatural weather regime was due to its unrelenting delivery of extreme conditions. Entering the second winter after Tambora’s explosion, Howard continued to gather reports of storm systems of “a severity almost beyond example.” In December, he listed hailstorms, gales of “an excessive degree of violence,” and earth tremors caused by lightning—just in Tottenham. Like the painter Turner, he also noted what was, unbeknown to him, the startling effect of Tambora’s aerosol cloud on the atmospheric spectrum. On December 27th, in the midst of storm clouds, the setting sun appeared before him like an angry giant, “fiery red, and much enlarged.”

With the cold, wild year of 1816 at last at an end, Howard was able to assess its severity on a hard statistical basis. The results must have shocked even this mild-mannered Quaker and put him in mind of the vengeance of the Lord. In his previous nine years of temperature observations, 1807–15—an already below-average sample owing to the impact of the 1809 Unknown eruption—the average daily temperature in London had been 50°F. In 1816, the average fell by 12 degrees, to 38°F.
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The “Year without a Summer” appears too mild a description for the meteorological annus horribilis that was 1816. More like the “Year without a Sun.”

In the pre-Tambora sections of his
Climate of London
, Howard’s interests are distinctly parochial, limited to weather observations in the British Isles and greater London in particular. Following his firsthand experience of volcanic weather conditions in continental Europe, however, Howard takes care to keep track of reports from abroad. His 1817 almanac lists “hurricanes” in Hamburg and Amsterdam, hailstorms across France, “excessive cold” in Lisbon, and continued “inundations” in Switzerland. In the widened horizons of an amateur weather enthusiast in 1816–17, then, we see the origins of modern synoptic meteorology,
which understands weather as a cross-continental phenomenon and not simply the variation of local conditions.

In Germany, another budding meteorologist—the polymath Heinrich Brandes—had arrived at the same conclusion about the broader geographical scales of weather. Out of the trauma of middle Europe’s “Year of the Beggar”—and no doubt humiliated at the destruction by flood of dykes he himself designed on the River Weser in Lower Saxony—Brandes promoted a continental overview of weather patterns. Looking back over the disastrous year, Brandes argued in a letter dated December 1816 that “more precise reports of the weather, even if only for the whole of Europe, would surely yield very instructive results. If one could draw maps of Europe according to the weather for all 365 days of the years, then it would of course show, for instance, where the boundary of the great rain-bearing clouds, which in July covered the whole of Germany and France, lay.”
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Acting on this notion, Brandes began to design and compile the world’s first weather maps, published in 1820, the same year as Howard’s landmark
Climate of London
.
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Call it intellectual teleconnection. Tambora’s eruption was a mother to global suffering on an epochal scale; but it must count, likewise, as a major birth event in modern meteorology. Catastrophic climate change generates world-changing ideas as well as global-scale trauma.

Howard’s observations of wild weather continue through 1817. Hailstones “large as hazelnuts” and “pigeon’s eggs” rained down through the summer while, for the third straight year, winter storms descended upon the British Isles with millennial ferocity, concluding with an epic tempest on March 4, 1818, that cut a violent swath across the south of England. Included in the destruction was a famous tree in Plymouth, the newspaper account of which reads very much like the lightning strike passage in
Frankenstein
, first published the month of this memorable storm:

The effects of the late thunderstorm [were] the most extraordinary that ever occurred in this county…. The tree in question has long been admired for its girth and noble proportions, being more than 100 feet high and nearly 14 feet in girth; but it exists no longer, having been literally shivered to
pieces by the electric fluid. Some of the fragments lie 260 feet from the spot, and others bestrew the ground in every direction, presenting altogether a scene of desolated vegetation, easier to be conceived than described.
²³

The following month—Tambora’s three-year anniversary—another bizarre spring storm raged across the environs of London, unroofing houses and blowing down walls. On Hampstead Heath—sometime residence of the Shelleys, Coleridge, Keats, and painter Constable—dozens of trees were blown up from their roots.

The litany of climate change destruction post-Tambora is exhausting to read and almost numbingly repetitive. So many trees blown down, fields flooded, and crop-killing frosts and snows. But unlike twenty-first-century climate change, which has no end in sight but only a relentless acceleration, Tambora’s weather emergency did eventually pass. By June 1818, Luke Howard was able to report “clear hot sunshine” that brought with it the warmest stretch of weather since 1808, and “a period unequalled in dryness since the beginning of 1810.” Walking the semi-rural environs of Tottenham, Howard observed “the deeper green of the foliage and the richer colour of many flowers.”
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With Tambora’s global dust cloud lifting, it seemed like the refreshment of the world. The
greenness
of leaves and flowers at full blush—everyday glories almost forgotten—now resumed for Howard their wonted niche in the cherished visible world. Then in the autumn, the tender nasturtiums and horse chestnuts returned like old friends, untormented by early frosts. What a soul-lifting sight it must have been for the observant Quaker, attentive to signs of God’s mercy.

EUROPE’S LAST FAMINE

Tambora’s shaping influence on human history does not derive from extreme weather events considered in isolation but in the myriad environmental impacts of a climate system gone haywire. As I have argued, the popular moniker awarded 1816, the “Year without a Summer,” sounds altogether too benign, no more than the inconvenience of
donning an overcoat in July, when, in fact, “no summer” meant “no food” for millions of people. As a result of the prolonged poor weather, crop yields across the British Isles and western Europe plummeted by 75% and more in 1816–17. Tambora’s calling card in Germany, where it is remembered as the “Year of the Beggar”—or in Switzerland, as “L’Année de la misère” and “Das Hungerjahr”—better captures the atmosphere of social crisis during the extreme weather onslaught of 1815–18. In the first summer of Tambora’s cold, wet, and windy regime—the “atmospheric sarabande” of 1816—the European harvest languished miserably. Farmers left their crops in the field as long as they dared, hoping some fraction might mature in late-coming sunshine. But the longed-for warm spell never arrived and at last, in October, they surrendered. Potato crops were left to rot, while entire fields of barley and oats lay blanketed in snow until the following spring.

In Germany, the descent from bad weather to crop failure to mass starvation conditions took a frighteningly rapid course. Carl von Clausewitz, the military tactician, witnessed “heartrending” scenes on his horseback travels through the Rhine country in the spring of 1817: “I saw decimated people, barely human, prowling the fields for half-rotten potatoes.”
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In the winter of 1817, in Augsburg, Memmingen, and other German towns, riots erupted over the rumored export of corn to starving Switzerland, while the locals were reduced to eating horse and dog flesh.
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Meanwhile, back in England, riots broke out in the East Anglian counties as early as May 1816. Armed laborers bearing flags with the slogan “Bread or Blood” marched on the cathedral town of Ely, held its magistrates hostage, and fought a pitched battle against the militia.
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In Somersetshire, three thousand coal miners took over the local mine in their desperation over sky-high bread prices. When asked what they wanted, they replied, “full wages, and that they were starving.” The local magistrate responded by reading the Riot Act, threatening all malingerers with death, and sending in the militia to attack the crowd with “immense bludgeons.”
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On an even larger scale, in March 1817 more than ten thousand demonstrated in Manchester while in June the so-called Pentrich Revolution involved plans to invade and occupy the city
of Nottingham. The army was called in to quell similar disturbances in Scotland and Wales. The government of Lord Liverpool responded to the desperation of the people with draconian force. It suppressed publication of agricultural quarterly reports and suspended habeas corpus. Provincial jails filled to overflowing across the kingdom, while scores of hungry rioters were hanged or transported overseas to penal colonies.
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In his magisterial account of the social and economic upheaval in Europe during the Tambora period, historian John Post has shown the scale of human suffering to be worst in Switzerland, home to Mary Shelley and her circle in 1816. Even in normal times, a Swiss family devoted at least half its income to buying bread. Already by August 1816, bread was scarce, and in December, bakers in Montreux threatened to cease production unless they could be allowed to raise prices.
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Subsequently, when the price of grain almost tripled in 1817, a basic subsistence diet was suddenly out of the reach of hundreds of thousands of Swiss, not only in the agricultural regions but in industrial towns where “the weekly earnings of a hand-spinner in 1817 … were less than the price of a pound of bread.”
³¹
With imminent famine came the threat of “soulèvements”: violent uprisings. Bakers were set upon by starving mobs in the market towns and their shops destroyed. The English ambassador to Switzerland, Stratford Canning, wrote to his prime minister that an army of peasants, unemployed and starving, was assembling to march on Lausanne.

As historical coincidence would have it, Stamford Raffles spent that woeful summer traveling in Europe, having left his governor’s post in Java. He thus holds the dubious distinction of being the only person to leave an account of both Tambora’s eruption in the Dutch East Indies in 1815 and the subsequent years of extreme weather and famine in Europe, on the other side of the world. To Raffles and his brother Thomas, who traveled with him and kept a diary, the provincial villages of France appeared like ghost towns:

We could not but notice the almost total absence of life and activity…. There was an air of gloom and desertion pervading them. The houses had
a cheerless and neglected appearance. No one was seen in the streets—they looked as if deserted by their population.

Across France, grain crops rotted in the rain-soaked fields, while vintners in 1816 gathered the most meager grape harvest in centuries of record keeping. Crossing into landlocked Switzerland, where grain prices rose two to three times higher than in the coastal regions, the Raffles brothers found the food shortage even more dire: “the great increase of beggars … chiefly children … was truly astonishing.”
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In dealing with the crisis, the Swiss authorities were disadvantaged by a fragmented political structure. When serious dearth threatened, administrators of the tiny cantons panicked and closed their frontiers to the export of grain, ensuring they themselves would be unable to import emergency supplies. Public works programs and soup kitchens averted a greater calamity, but thousands still died of starvation during continental Europe’s “last great subsistence crisis.” A priest from Glaris painted a lamentable portrait of the suffering in his district: “It is terrifying to see these walking skeletons devour the most repulsive foods with such avidity: the corpses of livestock, stinking nettles—and to watch them fight with animals over scraps.”
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Everywhere, desperate villagers resorted to a pitiful famine diet of “the most loathsome and unnatural foods.”
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Mortality in 1817 was over 50% higher than its already elevated rate in the war year 1815, while deaths exceeded births in Switzerland in both 1817 and 1818, suggesting an excess mortality rate in the tens of thousands. Only intermittent, timely shipments of grain from Russia, which had fortuitously escaped the worst post-Tambora weather conditions, prevented Switzerland and much of Europe from collapsing into full-scale famine.

Conditions were desperate enough even so. To tourists on the European continent in 1817, the legions of vagrant poor descending upon the market towns appeared like advancing columns of an army on the march. The prefect of Brie described the flood of refugees into his province as like “an invasion or perhaps the migration of an entire nation.”
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In the extremity of their suffering, beggars lost all fear of the law. Waves
of arson, assault, and robbery swept the countryside. The Montreux diarist records widespread fears of a return to “scenes from the age of the Goths and the Vandals.”
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Inevitably, some Swiss authorities overreacted. Thieves were beheaded and minor pilfery punished with whipping.