Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (19 page)

In short, faced with multiyear food shortages in the Tambora years of 1815–18, Yunnan’s farmers found they could neither grow rice nor buy it when they most needed it. Circumstantial evidence suggests that they subsequently settled on an opium solution to their chronic food security problem, hence the explosion of poppy farming in Yunnan from the late 1810s. First, the mountain fields of bean and wheat were converted en masse to opium production. Thereafter, poppy growers made their way brazenly to the central valleys, to colonize the choice arable land of the province. Fast forward a century later, and Yunnan was growing almost nothing but opium, importing most of its rice from Southeast Asia. At this time, ethnic hill tribes from Yunnan, such as the Hmong, began to drift southward into the Mekong delta, to the mountains of modern-day Burma, Thailand, and Laos. With generations of experience in opium farming behind them, they brought with them the seeds and technologies to establish a new global capital of opium production in these remote highlands of the “golden triangle.”

Thus the Tambora period marks not only the beginning of a complete transformation of Yunnan’s agricultural economy from staple
grains to an opium cash crop but also the first emergence of the modern international illicit drug trade. That this evolution began in the aftermath of the Tambora emergency shows the sinuous correlation that can exist between high-impact climate change events—such as a three-year famine—and social disruption on global scales and centennial time frames.

As the secretary-general of the National Anti-Opium Association of China reflected in 1935, in the midst of China’s long, tumultuous civil wars following the collapse of the empire in 1911, “the weakening of the race and the rapid increase of social evils can in the last analysis be traced back to their source in opium.”
²³
The early twentieth century was a time when China held the dubious honor of exporting over 80% of the world’s narcotics. In the same period, in the onetime Confucian stronghold and Qing-era boom state of Yunnan, 90% of adult males were drug users, half of them addicts. A Western observer gives a graphic account of the human tragedy of opium in early twentieth-century China at the village level:

The roofs of the houses are dilapidated and full of holes…. No one is selling vegetables in the road, and the one or two shops which the village possessed are closed. In the shadow of the houses a few men and women are lying or squatting—apparently in a stupor. Their faces are drawn and leathery, their eyes glazed and dull…. Even some of the babies the women carry in their arms have the same parched skins and wan, haggard faces. And the cause of all this is opium.
²⁴

This description of an opium-afflicted community reads like a “Seven Sorrows” poem in the spirit of Li Yuyang. This long-suffering, long-forgotten writer—whose poems appear here for the first time in English—fulfilled his destiny as a Confucian poet of the people in memorializing the Great Yunnan Famine of 1815–18. But he spent the remainder of his life in scholarly seclusion, as if in bitter meditation on the disturbing changes afoot in Yunnan and the national humiliation in store for his beloved China.

CHAPTER SIX

THE POLAR GARDEN

From the flooded mountain pastures of Yunnan, we must now travel thousands of miles aboard Tambora’s sulfate plume to the melting ice cap of the polar north. As we have seen, the Arctic has been, since the 1960s, a key repository of scientific evidence for reconstructing Tambora’s eruption and climate impacts. But in the years immediately following the 1815 eruption in Britain, “scientific” interest in the Arctic was inseparable from the twin political agendas of government and the Royal Navy: namely wealth and glory. How Tambora conspired to both excite and thwart the Arctic dreams of a generation of British bureaucrats and explorers makes for what is, in many ways, the strangest of all Tambora’s strange tales.

A musty memo from a Royal Society council meeting in November 1817 would seem unlikely to resurface, two centuries later, as a text of quasi-biblical importance on the blog pages of the climate change denial community. But such is our own topsy-turvy world of politics, science, and Internet-driven opinion in the century of climate change. The Royal Society minute in question is attributed to none other than Sir Joseph Banks, aging lion of the British scientific establishment. In it he refers, in excited terms, to newspaper reports of a rapidly melting Arctic ice cap.

The audience for the memo was the First Lord of the British Admiralty, for whom Banks painted a seductive picture of an open polar sea
through which the navy’s ships might sail in quest of scientific discovery, Asian trade routes, and national glory:

A considerable change of climate inexplicable at present to us must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been, during the last two years, greatly abated. This affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened, and gives us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them, not only interesting to the advancement of science, but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.
¹

In fact, these words were probably not composed by Joseph Banks at all but written
for
him by a senior bureaucrat at the Admiralty—the Machiavellian Second Secretary, John Barrow—for reasons that will become soberingly clear. Authorship questions notwithstanding, prominent climate denial bloggers have trumpeted Banks’s description of Arctic warming in 1817 as historical proof that “the ebb and flow of Arctic ice extent and mass is nothing new” and, even more definitively, that “climate change is not a new phenomena [
sic
].”
²

My main purpose in this chapter is to tell the story of Arctic environmental change in the aftermath of Tambora’s eruption and its remarkable formative influence on the history of British polar exploration. But a bonus of the research presented here will be the opportunity to lay to rest—among the legion of moldy myths with which the Arctic north has for centuries been encrusted—the false notion that the ice-free polar seas of 1817 were a product of natural variability of climate and that, accordingly, we should think nothing of the catastrophic ice declines of the early twenty-first century.

What caused the breakup of the polar ice cap in 1817 that to Sir Joseph Banks was so “inexplicable”? What were the strange “new sources of warmth” that held out the tantalizing promise of an open polar
sea? As the recent scientific literature on volcanism and climate clearly describes, Tambora’s massive eruption in 1815 precipitated—through an extended physical chain of dynamic events involving earth, sea, and sky—a freak, drastic, but
temporary
diminution of Arctic sea ice well outside the bounds of normal variability. Fossil-fuel emissions of our industrial age have the same warming impact on the Arctic as volcanic sulfate aerosols (albeit by different mechanisms), but the influence of volcanic dust possesses the decided advantage—to the Arctic and to humanity—of disappearing after a few years. Twenty-first-century anthropogenic warming, by contrast, has no foreseeable time horizon and has set us on an inexorable course, like the heedless explorers of yore, toward a once unimaginable ice-free polar sea.

GLOBAL WARMING, NINETEENTH-CENTURY STYLE

In the wake of the bloody, manic conclusion to
Hamlet
’s revenge plot, the fallen prince’s friend Horatio, surveying the Danish throne room littered with corpses, promises to “speak to the yet unknowing world / How these things came about.” It’s a difficult task given the confusion of what has just happened. Horatio alludes to “unnatural acts” and “accidental judgments,” to “casual slaughters” and “purposes mistook.”
³
In short, he emphasizes the contingency of events that have led to the royal massacre. The Tambora period, as I am chronicling that global tragedy in this book, is rife with such highly contingent events. The sudden outbreak of epidemic cholera in Bengal, for example, and the boom in opium production in the “golden triangle” region of southwest China post-1815 depended on a multitude of causes converging over time with an initial, triggering climate change event.

No episode in these calamitous years better conforms to Horatio’s description, however, than the British Admiralty’s decision to embark on a doomed quest for the northwest passage in 1818. Moreover, in Admiralty secretary John Barrow, we find an historical actor whose “accidental judgments” and “purposes mistook”—not to mention “unnatural acts” of journalistic propaganda—gave rise to a noble but ultimately tragic and fruitless Arctic adventure played out on the nineteenth-century stage.

Barrow, the most powerful bureaucrat at the Admiralty in the post-Napoleonic period, used the pages of the widely read
Quarterly Review
to advance his policy agenda for Britain’s navy. Mary Shelley was staying at the Hampstead cottage of her friend the radical journalist Leigh Hunt when, among tea tables cluttered with the latest books and
newspapers, she took up the February 1817 issue of the
Quarterly Review
to read a breathless review of the latest installment of Byron’s poem
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, which featured scenes from their recent Genevan summer. Sitting right next to the review of Byron was matter of even more relevance to the summer of 1816 and to her writing of
Frankenstein
: a review by John Barrow chronicling the heroic history of Britain’s quest for a northwest passage to Asia across the polar seas.

In the
Quarterly
article, Barrow floated his latest trial balloon from the backrooms of the Admiralty: that a select band of naval officers, legions of whom had languished in port since the defeat of Napoleon, should now be put to sea to renew the glorious search for a navigable passage to China across the uncharted top of the world. Despite centuries of failure in this quest, Barrow assured his readers that such an expedition would now be “of no difficult execution.” Sailing westward across the north of Canada to the Pacific could amount to no more than “the business of
three months
out and home.”
⁴

Then came the jaw-dropping coincidence with which this history truly begins. Only months after Mary Shelley read Barrow’s article in February 1817 calling for renewed exploration of a northwest passage, reports began reaching the Admiralty of a remarkable diminution of Arctic sea ice. The authority of these reports rested with the veteran whaler William Scoresby, who in 1815 had published the first scientific treatise on polar ice. The 1817 summer whaling season off the east coast of Greenland had been a ruinous disappointment. A frustrated Scoresby identified the cause in his journal: No ice!—

The fishery of the present season has been the most singular, partial, unsuccessful of any occasion witnessed of many years…. The ostensible reason of the scarcity of whales & their pecular [
sic
] habits, is the singular state of the ice which lies at a distance from the land greater than was ever known by any fisherman now prosecuting the business…. So thin is the ice dispersed through the country, that it is creditably asserted that a brig from the Elbe has penetrated without hindrance to the West land [the east coast of Greenland] and coasted along the shore to a vast distance & returned again eastward without difficulty, but without finding any whales!
⁵