Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (29 page)

Into the first week of September 1817, newspapers in the southern towns continued to hold the line against panic. “There is no ground whatever for alarm,” the
Kilkenny Moderator
reassured its readers, while the
Sligo Journal
quoted the opinion of a “professional gentleman” who firmly believed that “the symptoms and operation of the existing fever are of a very mild description, and merely such as usually occur at this period of the year.” In Dublin on September 11, the
Evening Post
considered itself “authorized to declare it as their opinion,
that the Epidemic Fever of the Country does not pervade this City!
” Even from their tone, it is clear the editors doth protest too much. For by this time, the newspapers in the north of the country were reporting “unprecedented numbers now dying of Fever.” Typhus was “raging” in Enniskillen, while from Strabane, in County Tyrone, came reports of a shortage of carpenters for building coffins. By mid-September the game was up, and subscribers to the
Dublin Evening Post
were called upon to digest the following solemn announcement: “We regret to learn, that the Fever, in the vicinity of Dublin, has assumed a very
malignant type
.” Two months later, the editors had abandoned all rhetorical restraint: they reported the typhus “deepening and spreading with the rapidity and ravages of a Plague.”
³⁶

Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize–winning economic theorist of famine, has identified “the nature and freedom of the news media” as critical to whether food shortages will escalate into general famine. If information about localized problems flows freely, and media pressure is applied to governments to act, many incipient famines may be prevented.
³⁷
No such responsible fourth estate existed in the Ireland of the late 1810s. But if the journalists of Ireland emerged with little credit from the disaster—whipsawing from denial to doom-filled pronouncements—the same cannot be said of the clergy and medical men, many of whom risked their lives to organize relief and personally care for the sick. Thirteen priests died attending typhus victims in Carleton’s hometown of Clogher alone, while for the medical profession, still in its infancy, the Tambora crisis was their finest hour.
³⁸
As rising members of the civic establishment, prominent Dublin doctors such as Francis Barker (the amateur meteorologist) and William Harty urged new public health
initiatives upon the recalcitrant Irish elite and their English colonial masters.

As part of their improvised insurgent strategy, the doctors attached themselves to the new Association for the Suppression of Mendicity (street begging) in Dublin. As self-appointed members of the “subcommittee of health” in early 1818, they began to agitate for an enlarged public health system and anti-poverty measures to be introduced to address the root causes of both beggary and disease. Harty and Barker’s progressive agenda did not meet with a ready welcome in the offices of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, however, who distanced himself from the association and bluntly refused to provide government funds to alleviate the crisis. The doctors’ plans, he averred, “can be more effectually carried into execution by private exertions and parochial subscriptions.”
³⁹
In other words, the usual organs of charity and the church should bear the burden of humanitarian relief, as they had under the Old Regime.

The doctors were undeterred, however. Through the desperate weeks of early 1818 the health committee continued to publish embarrassing resolutions calling the government response “totally insufficient” to the magnitude of the ongoing crisis. Decades ahead of their time, these Dublin doctors preached “a preventive system … calculated to avert an immense accumulation of wretchedness and poverty.” They went so far as to call the Lord Lieutenant’s expressed reliance on private charities a “fatal delusion”—strong language that, in 1818, retained more than a whiff of Jacobin revolutionary spirit about it. They expressed outrage at the rejection of their plan to mandate the cleaning of houses infected with fever and bitterly denounced the efforts of Dublin authorities to downplay the extent of the epidemic for fear of its impact on trade. “Can we,” they railed, “with such examples before our eyes, vilify Mahometans, and abuse their stupid indifference (under better motives) to the desolating devastations of the Plague?”
⁴⁰

The coup de grâce of the militant doctors’ campaign came in September 1818, when the Association for the Suppression of Mendicity evicted the vast number of beggars it had itself accommodated and let them loose upon the affluent neighborhoods of Dublin. Their goal?
To shame the government and wealthy citizens of the city into coughing up relief donations. In what was for that time a remarkable public demonstration of class inequity and resentment, two thousand ragged beggars—many of them emaciated and sick—marched from the association’s headquarters on Hawkins Street through the leafy squares of Dublin’s elite, stopping to yell abuse at the houses of those known to have refused charitable aid. The impact of this daring piece of political theater was dramatic: almost ten thousand pounds in private donations, a huge sum, flowed into the association’s coffers in the following days.
⁴¹

At the height of the typhus epidemic, in September 1817, the Dublin doctors could loudly warn of “the ruin that awaits us, if every heart and hand are not speedily roused to exertion.”
⁴²
Even as late as October 1818, with typhus spread across the British Isles, the medical establishment in Edinburgh expressed alarm at “the state of continued fever … in our time we have never known it extend so generally over the Empire, or continue so long.”
⁴³
By the end of 1818, however, the worst of the epidemic was over, and with it the doctors’ platform for agitating for public health reform.

Almost a year after the beggar’s march in Dublin, Charles Grant, the new Chief Secretary for Ireland, felt comfortable in rising to his feet in Parliament to give the official government account of what had happened in Ireland over the preceding three years. Like Francis Barker and, later, William Carleton, Grant opened his narrative of the disaster with a meteorological description:

In the years 1816 and 1817, the state of the weather was so moist and wet, that the lower orders in Ireland were almost deprived of fuel wherewith to dry themselves, and of food whereon to subsist. They were obliged to feed on esculent plants such as mustard-seed, nettles, potato-tops and potato-stalks—a diet which brought on a debility of body and encouraged the disease more than anything else could have done.
⁴⁴

Where Barker’s interests in the weather were scientific, however, Grant’s were political. The bad weather was to be one of a suite of causes Grant
would offer for the death of some 150,000 of his Irish subjects from famine and disease in lieu of any acceptance of government responsibility for their deaths.
⁴⁵
These included a particularly arch tactic of sugarcoating the blame for the spread of the typhus epidemic, then directing that blame toward the victims themselves. Native hospitality, “that amiable peculiarit[y] of the Irish character,” had meant the sick were not quarantined as they ought, while the ritual waking of the dead exposed still more to the contagion. Also, the poor had failed to adequately “fumigat[e] their houses.”
⁴⁶

Unfortunately for the historical reputation of the British Parliament, these explanations were either patently false or irrelevant. In many cases, the Irish locked their doors against the sick and indigent, an attitude abundantly evident in the mass evictions of rural cottiers and the anti-beggary editorials of the Dublin press. To offer an example: Thomas Mellon, who was to become patriarch of one of the richest banking families in the United States, spent his boyhood on a moderately affluent farm in County Tyrone. Late in life, he remembered that when his parents left him to go to the market during the Tambora years, they left him strict instructions to bolt the farmhouse door and a fierce dog to help repel the “tramps” that were “numerous at that time.”
⁴⁷

Perhaps aware of the disingenuous nature of his tribute to Irish compassion, Grant moved quickly in his speech toward safer rhetorical ground: a glowing panegyric on Irish stoicism. The “patience” with which the Irish had borne their suffering was “truly admirable,” he declared to an approving parliament; in fact, it “was not to be paralleled by anything in history.” Despite their acute miseries, the population had not been moved to “the slightest tumult” or riot, while the “general benevolence” of the clergy and medical profession was “beyond all praise.” Only at the very end of his lengthy speech did Grant allude to the minimal actions of his own government during the crisis by restating the unalterable principle of laissez-faire economics that no government should interfere with the workings of the marketplace. Although a public works program might be temporarily introduced to relieve unemployment, “any permanent legislative enactment on such
a subject would be nothing more than a delusion.” With that, Charles Grant sat down, “amidst considerable cheering from both sides of the House.”
⁴⁸

While allowance should be made for the harsh ideology of Grant’s speech—laissez-faire notions of “political economy” stood unchallenged at the time—little excuse can be found for his premeditated falsehoods. The most egregious was his claim that there were no civic disturbances in Ireland during the height of the crisis of 1817–18. Grant would have known this to be untrue, and not simply from his privileged access to government documents and deliberations. As early as May 1817 newspapers had carried reports of riots in Kildare and of an entire county “bordering on rebellion.”
⁴⁹
Starving mobs looted the granaries and attacked food convoys on their way to Dublin for export. Similar violent incidents were reported in Cork, Limerick, and Waterford. On March 4, 1817, the
Times
of London reported a full-blown “rising” in Tullamore, where “carts and cars have been broken, potatoes and meal seized and forcibly sold; the luggage and provision-boats stopped on the canal; and menaces thrown out that the locks would be smashed and the banks thrown in if the provision-merchants attempted to convey the produce of the county to Dublin.” In Ballina, the army was called in to break up a riot over the export of oatmeal. The soldiers opened fire, killing three of the protestors and wounding many more.
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For William Carleton, the train of disasters that befell rural Ireland in 1816–18 followed an inexorable course from extreme weather to crop failure, to famine, to epidemic disease, to violent civic breakdown: “When a nation is reduced to such a state, no eye but the eye of God himself can see the appalling wretchedness to which a year of disease and scarcity strikes down the poor and working classes.”
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As history further records, the Tambora crisis in Ireland marked the end of a period of relative prosperity in that country, and the beginning of an era of intermittent food shortages and political instability culminating in the calamitous crop failures, mortality, and epic social disintegration of the Great Famine.

Both in popular memory and in scholarly histories, the famine of 1845–49 stands as zero hour of modern Irish history, when the country
faced a massive and traumatic depopulation from which it has never fully recovered. A million died in those years of the potato blight, while another million emigrated. This history, as indelible as it is, has tended to cast events prior to the 1840s disaster into the foggy netherland of “pre-famine Ireland.” As the Tambora-era record shows, however, a disaster of comparable dimensions, if not length, struck many regions of Ireland in 1816–18 when, for the first time, the subsistence potato crop failed across the country. In the large-scale famine, social breakdown, and epidemic conditions that ensued, the Tambora period offers a nightmarish prequel—a “black prophecy”—of the calamity that would shatter and transform Ireland a short generation later. Carleton, with the novelist’s power of metaphor, offers a graphic image of the deep symbiosis between climate change and human destiny in the dystopic Tambora period:

The very skies of heaven were hung with the black drapery of the grave; for never since, nor within the memory of man before it, did the clouds present shapes of such gloomy and funereal import. Hearses, coffins, long funeral processions, and all the dark emblems of mortality, were reflected, as it were, on the sky, from the terrible works of pestilence and famine, which were going forward on the earth beneath it.
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What are the lessons of the “forgotten” Irish famine of 1816–18? First of all, weather deterioration provides only the initial conditions for a humanitarian disaster. Much more depends in the longer term on the resilience of the communities affected, on their flexible will and capacity to adapt to drastic environmental changes, and on the resources of government. The nation-states of Europe—and particularly Britain in its responsibilities for Ireland—largely failed this test in Tambora’s aftermath, and were rescued only by the return of seasonable weather in mid-1818 and the subsequent bountiful harvests.

In Doctor Frankenstein’s ambivalent feelings toward his humanoid creation, we can trace the same dehumanizing impulse that allowed many among the metropolitan affluent classes of Europe to abandon legions of the rural poor to their miserable fate in 1816–18: