Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (26 page)

It took a village to derive the modern theories of climate change and the Ice Age. Isolated speculations on glacial theory in prior decades by James Hutton and others had gone nowhere, lost in that strange historical limbo of unrecognized truths. The chance meeting of Perraudin, Venetz, and Charpentier in the cold Tamboran spring of 1818 lit the initial fuse of speculation, while a second crucial meeting of glacialist minds occurred almost two decades later in the summer of 1836 when Louis Agassiz arrived with his family for a holiday at Charpentier’s mountain chalet at Bex. Charpentier had been careful to invite Venetz to join them, and after several all-night disputations on Alpine geology, the three men decided on a professional bet on the merits of glacial theory. They abruptly left their families behind for a months-long scientific expedition across the Alps.

Agassiz, who thought Venetz’s notions “bizarre,” set out in the conviction that he would win the wager. He returned with the equally ardent conviction that he had been wrong. Venetz and Charpentier had converted the most influential scientist in Europe, for whom glacial theory would become an obsession for the remainder of his glittering career. Unlike either Venetz or Charpentier, Agassiz worked quickly and decisively, and had a talent for publicity. The very next year he delivered his famous address at Neuchâtel in which he surprised his audience of academic worthies—who were expecting a satisfying discourse on fossils—with claims that the very place in which they were sitting had once been covered by a vast ocean of ice that stretched from the North Pole to the Mediterranean Sea. Like Perraudin and Venetz before him, it was now Agassiz’s turn to be gazed upon with pity and irritation by respected men of science, as if he had just that minute gone stark raving mad.
²⁵

Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” has long been a favorite of the undergraduate classroom. Generations of English professors have presented it as a manifesto of Romantic thought in which the poet exalts the human mind as a god-like vessel of the world. Shelley’s poem boasts one of the most celebrated openings in Romantic literature: “The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves.” History is full of coincidences in which “the everlasting universe of things” flowing through the human mind takes the same course through several minds at once. So it was with theories of glaciation in the Tambora period 1815–18. A Swiss engineer, a mine supervisor, and a chamois hunter each experienced his own version of Shelley’s vision of a glaciated Europe. Together they embarked on a halting, intermittent collaboration that would evolve, two decades later, into a formal theory of climate change and cyclical Ice Ages, ideas that constitute the foundation stone of both modern geology and climate science.

Shelley’s image of the mind’s “rapid waves” of impression reappears later in “Mont Blanc” in his account of the Bossons glacier, where the same aquatic imagery turns abruptly sinister. In section 4 of the poem, the “flow” and “waves” of the creative imagination become the destructive actions of the glacier, before whose immense power human beings shrink “in dread.” Here the advancing Bossons glacier is not an image of human imaginative power, let alone a picture-postcard vista, but rather “a city of death,”

… distinct with many a tower

And wall impregnable of beaming ice,

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

Its destined parth, or in the mangled soil

Branchless and shattered stand; the rocks, drawn down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown

The limits of the dead and living world,

Never to be reclaimed. (105–14)

The remorseless glacier of Shelley’s imagination destroys all plant and wildlife—“The dwelling-place / Of insects, beasts, and birds”—obliterating “life and joy” and all trace of human community: “The race / Of man, flies far in dread; his work and dwelling / Vanish.” Shelley’s great poem, at once a celebration of human creative powers, is haunted at the same time by the specter of universal glaciation, which would bring about an historical end to all human “works,” including, inevitably, Shelley’s own poetry. Hence the mood of gloom from which the poem never quite escapes.

Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”—like the atmosphere of icy doom in volume 2 of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
—prefigures the glacial disaster that took place two summers after their Alpine tour along the same chain of mountains. The catastrophic inundation of the Val de Bagnes in June 1818, which destroyed villages and farmland across one of the most picturesque valleys of the Alps, was a singular geoclimatological event, being the remote consequence of a volcanic eruption half a world away and three years in the past. In an uncanny way, the Val de Bagnes flood reenacted the destruction of the Sanggar peninsula on Sumbawa by Tambora’s boiling pyroclastic flows in April 1815. In the Alpine case the agent of destruction was instead a “lava” of water, ice, and mud issuing from the unstable mountain gorge.

The link between Tambora and the Val de Bagnes was not, of course, understood at the time. Now, however, scientists are able to analyze such relationships through the prism of teleconnection: the complex causal relationships that knit apparently disparate climatic and geophysical events around the globe. In this chapter I have extended the physical principle of teleconnection to the world of ideas. In terms of its importance to the history of science, the 1818 Swiss debacle was no ordinary natural disaster. The drastic Tamboran cooling of 1815–18, by extending the range of the massive Giétro glacier and spawning a disastrous
jökulhlaup
in the Swiss Alps, imprinted the ghostly image of long-ago glaciation on the pioneering mind of Ignace Venetz. From this sketchy intuition evolved, by fits and starts, a founding truth of the modern earth sciences: climate change.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE

There are no walls can stop hunger.
—IRISH SAYING

It is important to remember that the misery of the Tambora period in Europe—years of famine, disease, and homelessness—was borne overwhelmingly by the poor, who left scant record of their sufferings. For the middle and upper classes—including the Shelleys and their circle—the social and economic upheaval of those years presented only minor inconveniences. By contrast with the illiterate underclass, these affluent Europeans left voluminous accounts of their lives and impressions, including great poems like “Mont Blanc.” To look at only their documentary record, therefore, can leave one with the misleading idea that the Tambora years were not exceptional in the turbulent history of the early nineteenth century. We must scrutinize closely what they wrote for clues to the experience of the silent millions who suffered displacement, hunger, disease, and death in the eruption’s wake. From the bubble of privilege within which the Shelleys and their peers composed their brilliant verse and letters, it is possible to catch gleams of this benighted other world through which they mostly passed oblivious.

The young London poet John Keats, for example—a peripheral but admired member of the Shelley Circle—set out on a walking tour of
Scotland and Ireland in the Tambora summer of 1818. In Scotland, he dedicated sonnets to Robert Burns and danced a reel with the local girls, but his experience in famine-stricken Ireland, on the roads around Belfast, left him disgusted and dismayed. “We had too much opportunity,” he wrote to his brother Tom, “to see the worse than nakedness, the rags, the dirt and misery of the poor common Irish.” In a passage that shows Keats struggling to adapt his abundant powers of lyric expression to scenes of grotesque poverty, he describes his surreal encounter with an old woman seated in an improvised sedan chair held aloft by two beggar children, as if in grotesque parody of aristocratic manners:

The Duchess of Dunghill—it is no laughing matter tho—Imagine the worst dog kennel you ever saw placed upon two poles … In such a wretched thing sat a squalid old Woman squat like an ape half starved from a scarcity of Buiscuit [
sic
] in its passage from Madagascar to the cape—with a pipe in her mouth and looking out with a round-eyed skinny lidded inanity—with a sort of horizontal idiotic movement of her head—squab and lean she sat and puff’d out the smoke while the two ragged tattered Girls carried her along—

Keats, like any young writer might, weighs up the literary possibilities of the scene: “What a thing,” he wonders, “would be a history of her Life and sensations.”
¹
What a thing indeed—except, of course, he didn’t write that history, and neither did anyone else. This is not simply from a deficit of sympathy—Keats, like other middle-class tourists in Ireland in those years, expresses “absolute despair” at what he encounters—rather, it speaks to the yawning social gulf that existed between the educated metropolitan classes of Europe and the poor rural masses in the early nineteenth century.

Much emphasis in recent historiography has been placed on the problematic European encounter with different races and nations around the world in the colonial period. This focus can mute our sense of the heterogeneity of the European order itself, and the extraordinary mutual alienation that existed between geographic regions
within
Europe, even before the mass industrialization of the cities for which
Marx developed his theory of class struggle. Even to a sensitive, liberal-minded city poet such as Keats, the poor Irish peasant appeared barely human, “like an ape half starved.” Can it be any wonder then that the English rulers of mostly rural Ireland, with less than poetic souls, were able to justify to themselves their indifference to the deaths of tens of thousands of their Irish subjects during the Tambora emergency of 1816–18?

“A SEASON DREADFUL AND MELANCHOLY”

William Carleton, the most popular Irish writer of the first half of the nineteenth century, had already overcome his humble beginnings in the rural north to achieve literary celebrity in Dublin when, in 1847, he made a return pilgrimage to his birthplace in the Clogher Valley. There, among the mountain villages of County Tyrone, he found tragic signs of the Great Famine. Landlords had taken advantage of the penury of their smallholding farmers to launch wholesale evictions on their properties, literally casting their tenants out to the wind and weather. One once populous village near Carleton’s childhood home, called Ballyscally, “was now a scene of perfect desolation. Out of seventy or eighty comfortable cottages, [the landlord] had not left one standing.”
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Carleton’s rage and despair over the fate of the inhabitants of Ballyscally, and the millions of others of his countrymen in the grip of the Great Famine, fired his literary imagination. Instead of writing a novel about the current crisis, however, he looked back to the period of famine and pestilence of which he had firsthand experience, the Tambora years of 1816–18, which he had passed as an itinerant witness to the suffering of the rural poor in Ulster. He dedicated his 1847 novel,
The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine
, to the British prime minister Lord John Russell because he

knew that the approaching destitution and misery would require all possible sympathy from every available source; and he hoped … that by placing before the eyes of those who had only
heard of
such inflictions, faithful and
unexaggerated pictures of all that the unhappy people suffer under them, he might, perchance, stir that sympathy into active and efficient benevolence.
³

Carleton’s plea fell on deaf ears. It is a matter of historical record that Lord Russell—encouraged by an influential laissez-faire ideologue in Treasury named Charles Trevelyan—allowed a million British subjects to perish on the doorstep of the most powerful and affluent empire on Earth in the years 1845–49. It was a providential corrective—Trevelyan not-so-secretly believed—to the imperial burden of Irish overpopulation and underdevelopment.

Residual outrage at this near-genocidal event is nourished by the vast Irish diaspora now spread across the world. For all the nostalgic attachment to the motherland and its history, however, the life and culture of “pre-famine” Ireland eludes recapture. In early nineteenth-century Ireland, most peasants were illiterate, spoke Irish exclusively, and left no records of their lives and sufferings. This includes the traumatic events of 1816–18, for which even official records are scant.
The Black Prophet
, then—written by an Irish son of the land who “crossed over” into the metropolitan, English-speaking world of the empire—stands alone as a literary monument to that doleful chapter of Irish history, written from the viewpoint of the peasantry themselves. In that novel, Carleton set himself a melancholy, monumental task: to record “all the final terrors of a people on the edge of extinction.”
⁴

Carleton’s account of the 1816–18 tragedy begins, as all Tambora stories must, with the Frankenstein weather of the Year without a Summer. He witnessed the same skies over the British Isles that attracted the scientific interest of Luke Howard and awoke Turner and Constable to the sublime subject of sunsets and clouds:

The sun, ere he sank among the dark western clouds, shot out … a light so angry, yet so ghastly, that it gave the whole earth a wild, alarming and spectral hue, like that seen in some feverish dream.

Carleton, writing three decades after the event, has awarded the red volcanic skies of 1815 the retrospective power of famine and fever, collapsing them in his narrative memory with a very different canvas of sky—the relentless bitter cold and rain of 1816: