Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (39 page)

12
. Shelley,
Frankenstein
, 95.

13
. Ignace Mariétan, “La Vie et L’Oeuvre de L’Ingenieur Ignace Venetz, 1788–1859,”
Bulletin de la Murithienne: Société Valaisainne des Sciences Naturelles
73 (1956): 1–51.

14
. The fullest contemporary account of the Val de Bagnes flood is given by H. C. Escher, “A Description of the Val de Bagnes in the Bas Valais, and of the Disaster which Befell It in June, 1818,”
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
(October 1818–March 1819): 87–95; see also Philippe-Sirice Bridel,
Seconde Course à la Vallée de Bagnes, et Détails sur les Ravages Occasionnés par L’Ecoulement du Lac de Mauvoisin
(Vevey: Loertscher et Fils, 1818).

15
. Benn and Evans,
Glaciers and Glaciation
, 117.

16
. F. A. Forel, “Jean-Pierre Perraudin de Lourtier,”
Bulletin Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles
35 (1899): 104–13.

17
. H. Lebert, “Biographie de Jean de Charpentier,”
Actes de la Société Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles
(August 1877): 140–64.

18
. Jean de Charpentier,
Essai sur les Glaciers
(Lausanne, 1841), 421.

19
. Escher, “A Description of the Val de Bagnes,” 91.

20
. William Brockedon,
Illustrations of the Alps
(London, 1828), 1:3.

21
. Frank F. Cunningham,
James David Forbes: Pioneer Scottish Glaciologist
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1990), 44.

22
. Benn and Evans,
Glaciers and Glaciation
, 9.

23
. Ignace Venetz, “Mémoire sur les variations de la température dans les Alpes de la Suisse,”
Mémoires des Société Helvetique des Sciences Naturelles
1.2 (1833): 38.

24
. The Charpentier paper first appeared in English in 1836, as “Account of One of the Most Important Results of the Investigations of M. Venetz, Regarding the Present and Earlier Condition of the Glaciers of the Canton Vallais,”
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
21 (April–October 1836): 210–20.

25
. Jean-Paul Schaer, “Agassiz et les Glaciers: Sa Conduite de la Recherche et Ses Merites,”
Eclogae Geologicae Helvetique
93 (2000): 231–56.

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE

1
.
Letters of John Keats
, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:321–22.

2
. William Carleton,
The Life of William Carleton
, ed. David O’Donoghue (London, 1896), 57.

3
. William Carleton,
The Black Prophet: A Tale of Irish Famine
(London, 1847), vi.

4
. Thomas Flanagan,
The Irish Novelists, 1800–1850
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 321.

5
. Carleton,
Black Prophet
, 24, 22.

6
. William Harty,
An Historic Sketch of the Causes, Progress and Present State of the Contagious Fever Epidemic in Ireland
(Dublin, 1819), 113–15.

7
. William Kidd, “A Concise Account of the Typhus Fever, at Present Prevalent in Ireland, as it Presented Itself to the Author in One of the Towns in the North of that Country,”
Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal
14 (1818): 145.

8
. Francis Barker and John Cheyne,
An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Fever Lately Epidemical in Ireland
(Dublin, 1821), 31.

9
. Harington,
The Year without a Summer
, 368.

10
. Barker and Cheyne,
An Account of the Rise
, 30; Carleton,
Black Prophet
, 23.

11
. Ibid., 247.

12
. Howard,
Climate of London
, 2:6.

13
. L. A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford,
Feast and Famine: Food and Nutrition in Ireland, 1500–1920
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87.

14
. D. J. Corrigan,
Famine and Fever as Cause and Effect in Ireland
(Dublin, 1846), 17.

15
. Carleton,
Black Prophet
, 26.

16
. Harington,
The Year without a Summer
, 498.

17
. Kidd, “A Concise Account of the Typhus Fever,” 146.

18
. Francis Rogan,
Observations on the Condition of the Middle and Lower Classes in the North of Ireland, as It Tends to Promote the Diffusion of Contagious Fever, etc.
(London, 1819), 80.

19
. Didier Raoult et al., “The History of Epidemic Typhus,”
Infectious Diseases Clinics of North America
18 (2004): 127–40. For general information on lice and typhus, I draw also upon Didier Raoult and Véronique Roux, “The Body Louse as a Vector of Re-emerging Human Diseases,”
Clinical Infectious Diseases
29 (1999): 888–911, and Abdu F. Azad and Charles B. Beard, “Ricksettial Pathogens and Their Arthropod Vectors,”
Emerging Infectious Diseases
4.2 (1998): 179–86.

20
. Ewen Kirkness et al., “Genome Sequences of the Human Body Louse and its Primary Endosymbiont Provide Insights into the Permanent Parasitic Lifestyle,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
107.27 (July 2010): 12168–73.

21
. Raoult et al., “The History of Epidemic Typhus,” 137.

22
. Carleton,
Black Prophet
, 193.

23
. John Trotter,
Walks through Ireland in the Years 1812, 1814, and 1817
(London, 1819), 303.

24
. William Parker,
A Plan for the General Improvement of the State of the Poor in Ireland
(Cork, 1816), 2, 8.

25
. “Petition from Cork Complaining of the Increase of Poverty: From the Mayor, Sheriffs, & Several Inhabitants,”
Hansard
, February 27, 1818.

26
. John Gamble,
Views of Society and Manners in the North of Ireland, in a Series of Letters Written in the Year 1818
(London, 1819), 155.

27
. Francis Barker,
Medical Report of the House of Recovery and Fever Hospital in Cork Street, Dublin
(Dublin, 1818), 29.

28
. Gamble,
Views of Society and Manners
, 169.

29
.
Report from the Select Committee on the State of Disease and Condition of the Labouring Poor in Ireland
(London, 1819), 23.

30
. Rogan,
Observations on the Condition of the Middle and Lower Classes
, 93.

31
. Quoted in Timothy P. O’Neill, “The State, Poverty, and Distress in Ireland, 1815–45” (Ph.D. thesis, University College, Dublin, 1984), 56; see also O’Neill’s published article, “Fever and Public Health in Pre-Famine Ireland,”
Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland
103 (1973): 1–34; Barker and Cheyne,
An Account of the Rise
, 140.

32
. Harty,
An Historic Sketch
, vii.

33
.
Dublin Evening Post
, October 30, 1817.

34
. Barker and Cheyne,
An Account of the Rise
, 63–65.

35
. Rogan,
Observations on the Condition of the Middle and Lower Classes
, 76.

36
.
Dublin Evening Post
, November 20, 1817.

37
. Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, eds.,
The Political Economy of Hunger
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 42.

38
. Hugh Fenning, “Typhus Epidemic in Ireland, 1817–19: Priests, Ministers, Doctors,”
Collectanea Hibernica
41 (1999): 117–39.

39
. Harty,
An Historic Sketch
, 38.

40
. Ibid., 44–47, 93.

41
. Joseph Robins,
The Miasma: Epidemic and Panic in Nineteenth-Century Ireland
(Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1995), 58.

42
. Harty,
An Historic Sketch
, 102.

43
.
Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal
14 (October 1818): 529–30. This review section of the 1818 journal lists no fewer than eleven treatises on the typhus epidemic, all published that year in England or Scotland.

44
.
Hansard
, April 6, 1819.

45
. This figure is arrived at by combining the “moderate” estimate of fever deaths, 65,000, with high-end estimations of the excess mortality caused by famine in the dearth period of 1816–17, namely 80,000 (O’Neill, “The State, Poverty, and Distress in Ireland,” 61; Clarkson and Crawford
Feast and Famine
, 127).

46
.
Hansard
, April 6, 1819.

47
. Mary Louise Briscoe, ed.,
Thomas Mellon and His Times
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), 10.

48
.
Hansard
, April 6, 1819.

49
. O’Neill, “The State, Poverty, and Distress in Ireland,” 6.

50
. Robins,
The Miasma
, 39.

51
. William Carleton,
Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry
(Boston, 1911), 4:364.

52
. Carleton,
Black Prophet
, 211.

53
. Shelley,
Frankenstein
, 142, 214.

54
. See M. W. Flinn, “The Poor Employment Act of 1817,”
Economic History Review
14 (1961): 82–92.

55
. O’Neill, “The State, Poverty, and Distress in Ireland,” 300.

56
. Patrick Webb, “Emergency Relief during Europe’s Famine of 1817: Anticipated Responses to Today’s Humanitarian Disasters,”
Journal of Nutrition
132 (2002): 2092S–2095S. See also John Post,
The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 66–67, 175.

57
. See Mike Davis’s groundbreaking study of the Indian famines of the 1870s,
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
(New York: Verso, 2001).

CHAPTER NINE
HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO

1
. Willis I. Milham, “The Year 1816—The Causes of Abnormalities,”
Monthly Weather Review
52.12 (December 1924): 563.

2
. William R. Baron, “1816 in Perspective: The View from the Northeastern United States,” in
The Year without a Summer
, ed. Harington, 124–44.

3
. Pomroy Jones,
Annals and Recollections of Oneida County
(Rome, NY, 1851), 79.

4
.
Daily National Intelligencer
, May 1, 1816, quoted in C. Edward Skeen, “ ‘The Year without a Summer’: An Historical View,”
Journal of the Early Republic
1 (Spring 1981): 61.

5
. Joseph B. Hoyt, “The Cold Summer of 1816,”
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
48 (1958): 118–31; Michael Chenoweth, “Daily Synoptic Weather Map Analysis of the New England Cold Wave and Snowstorms of 5 to 11 June, 1816,” in
Historical Climate Variability and Impacts in North America
, ed. L. A. Dupigny-Giroux and C. J. Mock (Berlin: Springer, 2009), 107–21.

6
. Quoted in David Ludlum,
Early American Winters, 1604–1820
(Boston: American Meteorological Society, 1966), 190.

7
. Stommel and Stommel,
Volcano Weather
, 37; Hoyt, “The Cold Summer of 1816,” 122.

8
. Skeen, “ ‘The Year without a Summer’: An Historical View,” 56; Stommel and Stommel,
Volcano Weather
, 42, 63.

9
. Thomas Jefferson,
Writings
, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–99), 10:64–65, 52.

10
. Thomas Jefferson,
Farm Book
, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 221.

11
. Jefferson,
Writings
, ed. Ford, 10:52.

12
. Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, “Des époques de la nature,”
Histoire Naturelle
(Paris, 1778), 5:239.

13
. Ibid., 5:168.

14
. Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,
Buffon’s Natural History, Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, etc.
(London, 1797), 7:43, 27, 40, 38.

15
. Ibid., 7:42, 48.

16
. On Shelley and Buffon, see Alan Bewell,
Romanticism and Colonial Disease
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 212–14.

17
.
Queen Mab
, 8:145–54.

18
. The most thorough scholarly account is by Italian historian Antonello Gerbi,
The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900
, trans. Jeremy Mole (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). See also James R. Fleming,
Historical Perspectives on Climate Change
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

19
. Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on the State of Virginia
, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 43–44.

20
. Ibid., 60.

21
. Thomas Jefferson,
Garden Book, 1766–1824
, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1944), 255; Robert Rogers,
A Concise Account of North America
(London, 1765), 194, 199.

22
. Daniel Webster,
Private Correspondence
, ed. Fletcher Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1857), 1:371.

23
. Buffon,
Buffon’s Natural History
, 10:48.

24
. In an 1862 lecture, Lord Kelvin reiterated the still-prevailing scientific consensus that “the earth is becoming on the whole cooler from age to age.” “On the Secular Cooling of the Earth,”
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
23 (1864): 167–69.

25
. Buffon, “Des époques,” 244.

26
. Webster,
Private Correspondence
, 1:371.