Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (5 page)

When a semblance of sunlight returned at last sometime on April 13, the scattered bands of survivors on the Sanggar peninsula found themselves in an unrecognizable, barren landscape. In every direction, ash meters thick had buried their island home as they had known it. On the western slope of the mountain, where the kingdom of “Tambora” itself was submerged, an entire ethnic group disappeared, and with it their language, the easternmost Austro-Asiatic tongue. On nearby islands, conditions were almost as dire. Reports later surfaced of starvation and rat plagues on Lombok, while thousands of Balinese attempted to sell themselves or their children for handfuls of rice.
²⁰

A worse fate met those
unable
to resort to the slave market. As a response to abolitionist legislation recently enacted by the British Parliament, the governor of Java, Stamford Raffles, had outlawed the slave trade in the capital Batavia (now Djakarta), unwittingly eliminating the only social safety net his subjects knew.
²¹
One wonders if Raffles ever understood the unforeseen consequences of that progressive policy,
whether reports reached him of child corpses lining the beaches on Bali, killed by parents unable to sell them for food and presumably unwilling to watch them suffer the slow starvation they themselves faced.
²²

Months after the eruption, the atmosphere remained heavy with dust—the sun a blur. Drinking water contaminated by fluorine-rich ash spread disease and with 95% of the rice crop in the field at the time of the eruption, the threat of starvation was immediate and universal. In their desperation for food, islanders were reduced to eating dry leaves and their much-valued horseflesh. By the time the acute starvation crisis was over, Sumbawa had lost half its population to famine and disease, while most of the rest had fled to other islands.

As late as 1831, sixteen years after the eruption, northeast Sumbawa still resembled a war zone, as if the disaster had just occurred. A Dutch official sailing along the coast observed through his eyeglass “a horrendous scene of devastation … in its fury, the eruption … has spared, of the inhabitants, not a single person, of the fauna, not a worm, of the flora, not a blade of grass.”
²³
A recent tree-ring study has shown that the entire Java region suffered a drastic period of cold, drought conditions in the aftermath of the eruption.
²⁴
On account of the wholesale deforestation of the island, the Sumbawan micro-climate changed radically, becoming far drier. The longer-term social impacts were just as dismal. A half century later, a visitor found Sumbawa populated mostly by slaves descended from survivors of Tambora who had sold themselves into bondage. As a result of these flow-on disasters, the Sanggar peninsula has never been fully repopulated, and Sumbawa Island as a whole never recovered.

History records that four years after Tambora’s eruption—his colonizing ambitions for Java dashed and the region’s climate returned to normal—Stamford Raffles founded a new colony at Singapore. With that one stroke, he transformed the balance of trade and power in Britain’s favor in the East Indies. But on Sumbawa, where the light of Western historiography barely shines, the local people still refer to the apocalyptic eruption of 1815 as the moment their world changed forever. Just as the Holocaust is
Shoah
to the Jews, so the Tambora disaster bears its own sanctified name for the Sumbawans:
zaman hujan au
(time of the
ash rain).
²⁵
As I traveled across the island two centuries later, over barely passable roads and through meager townships without clean water or sanitation, it was evident that Sumbawa still lived in the shadow of Tambora. The year following my visit, at least twenty Sumbawan children were reported as having died from malnutrition.
²⁶
On the long, bumpy drive back from Tambora to Bima, my guides—from the more prosperous neighboring island of Lombok—made endless fun of the backwardness and poverty of the locals.

But was it always so? International forestry companies dominate the Sumbawan economy today. This, in addition to rampant illegal logging, is gradually repeating the process of deforestation wrought by Tambora in a single day two hundred years ago. In 1980, a forestry company came upon the remains of a “lost kingdom” of Tambora on the western slopes of the mountain. Beneath a thin humus layer of new-growth forest on Tambora sits a meter of compacted ignimbrite deposited by the 1815 eruption. Beneath that, loggers uncovered a cache of Chinese-patterned pottery shards and burned human bone fragments. Locals soon showed up with brass pots, jewelry, and eighteenth-century Dutch coins they said also belonged to the site—a blurry snapshot of the unrecovered Pompeii of the East.
²⁷

Sumbawans still fear their volcano and tell visitors that it will surely erupt again soon. For that reason they inhabit villages at a respectful distance from Tambora and maintain its legend through stories. They talk of the island’s great wealth before the
zaman hujan au
, when a rich king ruled the mountain from a palace of gold.
²⁸
The ghost of the Tambora king haunts the mountain forests, where his treasure is buried. He is of a wily and embittered disposition, and addicted to spells. If one must go to Tambora, Sumbawans say, be wary of this ghost king. No bad language; no speaking ill of others. And if a young man brings his girlfriend into the Tamboran forest, he must not think of making love to her there. For once the ghost king’s vengeful attention is roused, there can be no escape. At first, it will seem like a wonderful dream. The ghost king will reveal his lost kingdom with its palace of gold to your disbelieving eyes. Out of the jungle, trees bearing delicious fruit will appear in dazzling colors, promising bliss. And to complete the enchantment, the ghost king will send his own daughter, another phantom of 1815, to lure you ever deeper into the forest with her trilling laughter, until you can never find your way home. Many young Sumbawan men have been lost this way, they say.

We climbed the jungle slopes of Tambora late in the rainy season. Tormented by leeches and the razor-sharp leaves of a fern called
srra
, we came upon a trio of young Sumbawans hunting wild pig in the jungle. They were smoking cigarettes under cover of a small lean-to after a fruitless morning’s hunt. From a tinny cassette player in the dirt, a young woman sang songs of love in Arabic, accompanied by the jungle’s hum. The young hunters, good Sumbawans all, listened to her gentle pleadings in silence, unmoved. When we had rested—and picked each other clean of leeches—the men showed no inclination to join us on our climb. Only the occasional volcanologist or tourist now visits Tambora’s
sprawling cratered peak, while its peninsular surrounds are mostly populated by recent immigrants from other islands. Deserted but for these, the great headless mountain Tambora lives on as the lotus land of a traumatized Sumbawan imagination.

THE PHILOSOPHER KING OF JAVA

Arab traders in quest of spices were the first to arrive in the East Indian seas surrounding Mount Tambora. Their influence endures in the prevalence of Islam in the region. The Portuguese followed in the sixteenth century; then, as their maritime power waned, the Dutch asserted themselves as colonial masters. The Dutch East India Company established cash crop production—pepper, coffee, sugar—across the Java archipelago, while delegating daily management of the estates to Chinese middlemen who brutalized their laborers to meet production targets. The Dutch brought nothing to make or sell in the East Indies; instead they exploited it as a vast farm belt, its riches to be sold on the European market at fabulously inflated prices. The well-fed Dutch burghers who gaze contentedly from seventeenth-century portraits by Rembrandt and Frans Hals were the beneficiaries of this cascade of wealth emanating from the East Indies.

It is thus an historical fluke that places the British in control of Sumbawa at the time of Tambora’s sudden explosion in 1815. Britain’s rule of Java and its surrounding islands marks a brief interregnum in the centuries-long influence of Arab, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants. Nevertheless, Stamford Raffles’s imprint on Java was significant. After asserting control of the island by military force, Raffles handpicked local sultans to rule over the principalities of Java and appropriated vast acreages of land. Thus far, a familiar tale of European conquest. Raffles differed radically from his Dutch predecessors in one respect, however: he had a profound interest in East Indies culture.

Two centuries of Dutch rule produced scarcely a single paper on any aspect of Javan history, customs, or language. In the brief five years of Raffles’s tenure in Java, by contrast, he fashioned himself as a kind of philosopher king or, more accurately perhaps, as an anthropologist with a bottomless research account, a well-armed regiment at his disposal, and no professional protocols to bother him. He learned Javanese, in addition to his already fluent Malay, bought whatever historical manuscripts he could find, and employed fleets of local copyists to manufacture a library of Javanese source material. He sent an army of assistants into the field to collect flora, fauna, and geological specimens of all kinds, as well as artists to make drawings. Once news of the English governor’s mania for collecting spread, the prince of a nearby island sent him an orangutan, which Raffles dressed up like a man in coat and trousers and hat.
²⁹
Raffles would go on to become the founder and first president of the London Zoo.

The governor presided over this extensive menagerie and research factory as its prose synthesizer, a kind of mythmaker-in-chief of Javanese history. After entertaining his European colleagues over dinner, Raffles would repair to his study, where pen, ink, and paper lay ready for him, with two large candles lit. After pacing up and down for a time, he would lie on the table with his eyes closed as if asleep, then spring up and write furiously past midnight. In the morning, he read over what he had written, saving three sheets out of ten and tearing up the rest.