Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (11 page)

Most shocking of all was the fate of some desperate mothers. In horrific circumstances repeated around the world in the Tambora period, some Swiss families abandoned their offspring in the crisis, while others chose killing their children as the more humane course. For this crime, some starving women were apprehended and decapitated. Thousands of Swiss with more means and resilience emigrated east to prosperous Russia, while others set off along the Rhine to Holland and sailed from there to North America, which in 1817–19 witnessed its first significant wave of refugee European migration in the nineteenth century. The numbers of European immigrants arriving at U.S. ports in 1817 more than doubled the number of any previous year.
³⁷

In political terms, the food shortages and social instability of the Tambora period spurred governments to the authoritarian, rightward shift we associate with the ideological landscape of post-Napoleonic Europe. In the words of Swiss liberal journalist Eusèbe-Henri Gaullieur (an impressionable boy at the time of the crisis), “The gains made by the spirit of progressive liberalism were substantially eroded … by the suffering arising from the disaster of 1816.” Fear of agricultural shortfall also motivated political leaders to adopt protectionist policies. It is during the Tambora emergency that tariffs and trade walls first emerged as standard features of the European and transatlantic economic system.
³⁸

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE REFUGEES

But it would not do to dwell on the macro-implications of post-Tambora chaos without giving proper memorial to its principal victims: the common people who faced the slow torture of death by starvation. Devastated by famine and disease in the Tambora period, the poor of Europe hurriedly buried their dead before resuming the bitter fight for their own survival. In the worst cases, children were abandoned by their
families and died alone in the fields or by the roadside. The well-born members of the Shelley Circle, of course, were never reduced to such abysmal circumstances. With credit to spare, they did not experience the food crises that afflicted millions among the rural populations of western Europe in the Tambora period. That said, chroniclers of Mary Shelley and her friends have been wrong to imagine their European existence as a charmed bubble of poetry, romantic villas, and sexual intrigue. The Shelleys’ celebrated writings were very much enmeshed within the web of ecological breakdown following the 1815 Tambora eruption, when a subsistence emergency weakened the European population and famine-friendly contagion took hundreds of thousands of lives.

Byron and Percy Shelley were companions on a weeklong walking tour of Alpine Switzerland in June 1816, during which they debated poetry, metaphysics, and the future of mankind but also found time to remark on the village children they encountered, who “appeared in an extraordinary way deformed and diseased. Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged throats.”
³⁹
In Mary’s novel
Frankenstein
, conceived that summer, the Doctor’s benighted creation assumes a similar grotesque shape: a barely human creature, deformed, crooked, and enlarged. As remarkable a feat of literary imagination as
Frankenstein
is, Mary Shelley was not wanting for real-world inspiration for her horror story, namely, the deteriorating rural populations of Europe post-Tambora.

On the thunderous night in Geneva that first inspired her ghost story, Mary Shelley pictured Frankenstein waking from a nightmare to find his hideous creation at his bedside, “looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”
⁴⁰
The description is reminiscent of Percy Shelley’s encounter with “half-deformed or idiotic” beggar children, presumably deranged with hunger. Numerous similar impressions could be cited. Another English tourist, traveling from Rome to Naples in 1817, remarked on “the livid aspect of the miserable inhabitants of this region.” When asked how they lived, these “animated spectres” replied simply, “We die.”
⁴¹
Rural Europe in 1816 descended into a land of the living dead. If their imaginations had not been exhausted by the creation
of Frankenstein and the vampire, someone in the Shelley Circle would surely have invented the zombie.

Mary Shelley’s imaginative conjuring of her famous Creature thus bears the mark of the famished and diseased European population by which she was surrounded that dire Tambora summer. Like the hordes of refugees spreading typhus across Ireland and Italy during Shelley’s writing of the novel, the Creature is a wanderer and a menace to civilized society. At his merest touch, healthy people drop dead like flies. In the novel, this murderous capability is attributed to the monster’s preternatural strength. But the terrifying atmosphere of his rampage, and his ability to strike at will across thousands of miles, seems more like the spread of a famine or contagion.

Like the hordes of refugees on the roads of Europe seeking aid in 1816–18, the Creature, when he ventures into the towns, is met with fear and hostility, while the privileged families of the novel, the De Lacys and the Frankensteins, look upon him with horror and abomination. If we look beyond the much-discussed scientific resonances of the monster’s creation, the lived experience of Mary Shelley’s creature most closely embodies the degradation of the homeless European poor during the Tambora period. The violent disgust of Frankenstein and everyone else toward him likewise mirrors the utter want of sympathy shown by many affluent Europeans toward the millions of Tambora’s climate victims suffering hunger, disease, and the loss of their homes and livelihoods. As the indigent Creature himself puts it, he suffered first “from the inclemency of the season” but “still more from the barbarity of man.”
⁴²

“THE BRIGHT SUN WAS EXTINGUISH’D”

In a letter written in the last days of July 1816, Lord Byron complained, as Mary’s friends all did, of “stupid mists—fogs—rains—and perpetual density.”
⁴³
In that litany of poor weather, however, one depressing day stood out, “a celebrated dark day, on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles lighted as at midnight.”
⁴⁴
This must have been
the same sun-canceling cloud reported over Leige on July 5, 1816, as “an enormous mass in the form of a mountain.”
⁴⁵
Most likely it belonged to the Tamboran weather pattern that, reaching into the stratosphere for a chunk of volcanic dust, dumped red snow on the southern Italian town of Taranto in early May, terrifying the inhabitants.
⁴⁶
Tambora’s global dust veil, or a very dense portion of it, had settled directly over western Europe.

From his balcony at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Byron enjoyed a front-row view of the day Tambora’s ash cloud blocked the Alpine sun. As a memorial of that weird event, he wrote a long apocalyptic poem he called “Darkness.” Though written from the shell of aristocratic entitlement, Byron’s rich, humanistic imagination allowed him to combine the literal atmosphere of doom of that July day in 1816 with speculation on a social landscape transformed by environmental collapse. “Darkness” accordingly stands as a classic meditation on the human impacts of climate change. It begins portentously—

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came, and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light (ll. 1–9)

Byron imagines the erosion of human sociability in a toxic, degraded landscape. Traumatized victims of ecological catastrophe suffer a slew of social-emotional disorders, experienced in overwhelming feelings of “dread” and “desolation,” injustice and resentment, and a violent “selfishness.”

In Byron’s “seven sorrows” poem from Tambora’s aftermath, we see a thematic trajectory that parallels
Frankenstein
: in the midst of meteorological tumult, human sympathy fails. The “selfish prayer[s]” of the people lead to social breakdown, violence, and chaos. In the volcanic cooling of 1816, human hearts are “chill’d” along with the atmosphere. This is Byron’s
Apocalypse Now
. The fragile edifice of civilization has crumbled—no cities, no agriculture—leaving a traumatized human remnant to wander across a scene of biblical desolation:

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;

And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

The pall of a past world; and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d … (ll. 22–32)

Birds fall from the sky, animals are massacred, and wars break out—“no love was left.” Then, inevitably, arises the specter of universal Hunger:

All earth was but one thought—and that was death,

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails—men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh (ll. 42–45)

With a remarkable, prescient sympathy, Byron’s “Darkness” anticipates the full-blown humanitarian disaster as it was to unfold in Switzerland and around the world over the subsequent three-year global climate emergency. At a time when the modern media and information age were in their earliest infancy, Byron’s apocalyptic fantasy and Mary Shelley’s legendary horror story are notable examples of the European literate class’s symbolic response to the colossal social trauma unfolding around them in the Tambora crisis years of 1816–18. In their unforgettable works, Byron and Shelley imagined the experience of the starving and diseased millions who never enjoyed proper representation in the press and parliaments of Europe, but mostly sank into oblivion, unmourned.

THE BOLOGNA PROPHECY

Lord Byron was not alone in his apocalyptic speculations in 1816. In fact, a fever of the end times swept Europe as virulently as typhus in the post-Tambora period. In Bologna, Italy, an astronomer predicted the world would end on precisely July 18, 1816, with the breakup of the sun. The so-called Bologna Prophecy, reported in newspapers across
Britain and the Continent, became a lightning rod for millennialist panic surrounding the deteriorating weather and political instability in the aftermath of Waterloo.
⁴⁷
According to the “mad Italian prophet,” renewed sunspot activity pointed to an imminent “solar catastrophe” certain “to put an end to the world by conflagration.”
⁴⁸
For others, the sun’s unprecedented dimness gave rise to fears the life-giving orb might become “wholly incrusted, so as to plunge us at once into the unutterable darkness that characterized the primitive chaos.”
⁴⁹

The-End-Is-Nigh cranks are always with us. But in the atmosphere of heightened public concern about the aberrant weather, Bolognese officials took the precaution of throwing the doomsaying astronomer in prison. To no avail. For fifteen days, churches in Belgium were filled with penitents engaged in silent, preparatory prayers. On July 12—another stormy, thundery day—three-quarters of the inhabitants of Ghent (so it was said), on mistaking the martial music of a passing regiment for the trumpet call of the Day of Judgment, ran out onto the streets in loud “lamentation” and “threw themselves on their knees.” Meanwhile on the streets of Paris on July 17, one could purchase a pamphlet promising, in large type, “Détails sur la fin du monde!”
⁵⁰
In the words of one Swiss observer, the fear that a piece of the sun would break off and crash into the earth “gripped all of Europe.”
⁵¹
Newspaper editors in England zigzagged between gleeful mockery of the whole affair and warning each other not to feed public hysteria.
⁵²
July 18 came and went, but the religious atmosphere of the season did not abate. A week later, the Swedish queen herself presided over a march of six thousand peasants to the cathedral at Bex to pray for deliverance from God’s wrath.
⁵³
Back in Highgate, outside London, the poet Coleridge summed up the popular mood in calling the wave of violent summer storms “this end of the world weather.”
⁵⁴

Such was the chaotic scene across Europe in the first summer after Tambora’s eruption. Nor was the atmosphere of hysteria ill-founded. The sun may not have extinguished itself, but tens of thousands of Europeans would lose their lives in the following two years from malnourishment, outright starvation, or famine-driven diseases like typhus.
Hundreds of thousands more were displaced from their homes and communities, left to wander the highways of Europe.