Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (6 page)

The result of this frenzy of scholarly activity has been called the first “classic of South East Asian historiography.”
³⁰
The two volumes of Raffles’s
History of Java
(1817) aim at a comprehensive account of Javan culture in the Western enlightenment style, organized under rubrics of geology and geography, agriculture and manufacturing, language and customs, history and government. For all its apparatus of scholarly objectivity, however, the
History of Java
promotes a specific political agenda at every turn. Interwoven with botanical descriptions and historical accounts are vivid threads of travelogue propaganda, anti-Dutch polemic, and reformist colonial policy, all designed to promote the cause of continued British administration of the Javan archipelago, including Sumbawa.

To his East India Company superiors, Raffles paints a lyrical picture of the Java region as an Eden of agricultural possibility, ripe for European development:

Nothing can be conceived more beautiful to the eye, or more gratifying to the imagination, than the prospect of the rich variety of hill and dale, of rich plantations and fruit trees or forests, of natural streams and artificial currents … it is difficult to say whether the admirer of landscape, or the cultivator of the ground, will be most gratified by the view. The whole country, as seen from mountains of considerable elevation, appears a rich, diversified, and well-watered garden.
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The economic theorist Adam Smith, whom Raffles frequently quotes, abominated the Dutch colonial monopoly. He advised administrators of the rising British empire to abandon monopolist economics in favor of a free-trade system, so as “to open the most extensive market for the produce of his country, to allow the most perfect freedom of commerce … to increase as much as possible the number and competition of buyers.”
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Java and its surrounding islands were thus not a lost cause, Raffles argued, but a natural laboratory for free-market economics and a golden opportunity for a progressive colonial power to enrich both itself and its subjects.
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All good in theory, of course, except for the small matter of volcanoes. Raffles’s challenge in 1815, as a self-styled imperial visionary, was to adapt his hothouse modern ideas of free trade and political liberty to a wholly different cultural ecology: one in which everything—from the fertile soil beneath his feet, to the omnipresent mountains set against the sky, to the periodic matter of that sky itself—was volcanic, and whose inhabitants measured history by the remembered cataclysm of eruptions.

In Batavia, on the morning of April 11, 1815, Raffles woke late in darkness, having dreamed his nightly fill of British dominion over the East Indies. By the time he was wading through knee-high ash in his vice-regal garden, ten thousand of his Sumbawan subjects were already dead. His initial response to the catastrophe was in character as both a modern bureaucrat and a scholar: he demanded full written reports of the event from his regional subordinates. But the full extent of the devastation appears to have dawned fatally slowly on the British governor. It was not until August, on hearing reports of famine on Sumbawa, that he sent a ship laden with rice as a form of disaster aid, with Lieutenant Owen Phillips in charge of relief operations. Raffles takes pride in this act in his
History
, though by our modern reckoning his humanitarian gesture was pitifully inadequate: a mere few hundred tons of rice, capable of feeding perhaps twenty thousand survivors on Sumbawa for a week.

Given the cataclysmic scale of Tambora, it is also accorded strangely minimal space in Raffles’s
History of Java
. His narrative of the eruption is not to be found in the long chapters on Javan history or even in the generous section on volcanoes. Rather, it is squeezed into a lengthy footnote between essays on Java’s “Mineralogical Constitution” and its “Seasons and Climate” as an episode that “may not be uninteresting” to his readers. Raffles thus stands as the first in a long line of Western historians to miss, or in his case willfully deny, Tambora’s impact. His reticence on Tambora is easily explained. Raffles represents Tambora
as no more than a natural wonder, a volcanic sound-and-light show, because his argument for a British Java could only be undermined by its proximity to giant volcanoes capable of plunging the entire regional economy into ruin in the course of a few hours.

Tambora thus begins as a natural disaster story—a Pompeii of the East or a hundredfold Hurricane Katrina—whose fate was to remain largely unwritten. Raffles had assembled the beginnings of a “Temboran” dictionary shortly before the eruption, which he included as a kind of epitaph in an appendix to his
History of Java
. But like Raffles’s dictionary, the Tambora story has only ever been told in notes and sketches, with enormous gaps left unfilled. In place of a world-historical narrative, the colossal eruption on Sumbawa Island in 1815 has survived—in faraway countries and other languages—only as a weather folktale: the fabled “Year without a Summer.” As the following chapters will show, however, Tambora’s world-altering reach requires an epic telling far beyond the frosted memories of a single long-ago summer.

CHAPTER TWO

THE LITTLE (VOLCANIC) ICE AGE

THE VOLCANO LOVERS

On a clear winter’s day in early 1819, Mary and Percy Shelley visited the ruins of Pompeii, outside Naples. “I stood within the city disinterred,” as Percy remembered it.
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The excavation of Pompeii, a half century before, had brought volcanism alive to the imaginations of Europeans. The unearthed city presented a stunning image of human calamity in the face of a major eruption. The Shelleys wandered among the grand theaters, villas, and neatly designed streets of an advanced society that vanished overnight in AD 79. That Vesuvius had recently awoken from a period of dormancy to offer belching reminders of its power perfected the scene for the Romantic tourist. Shelley observed Vesuvius “rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke,” prompting his active imagination to conjur the terrifying fate of the inhabitants of Pompeii. Trying his hand at popular volcanology in a letter to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley theorized that “the mode of destruction is this. First an earthquake shattered it & unroofed almost all its temples & split its columns, then a rain of light small pumice stones fell, then torrents of boiling water mixed with ashes.”
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Volcanic eruptions were all the rage in the early nineteenth century. The travel writings of pioneer earth scientist Alexander von Humboldt—published the year of Tambora’s eruption—offered English
readers breathless accounts of the majestic Cotopaxi in the Andes and the smoking volcanic peak of Tenerife. The Scottish naturalist George Steuart Mackenzie, meanwhile, had published his own account of the volcanoes of Iceland, where he came upon the devastated landscape marking a recent eruption:

The scene now before us was exceedingly dismal. The surface was covered with black cinders; and the various shallows enclosed by high cliffs and rugged peaks destitute of every sign of vegetation, and rendered more gloomy by floating mist, and a perfect stillness, contributed to excite strong feelings of horror.
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Because volcanoes stood for so tantalizing a cocktail of emotions—a mix of horror and pleasure, shaken and stirred—they became staple images of poetic description in the Romantic age. Thanks to the vivid firsthand accounts of Sir William Hamilton—amateur volcanologist and British envoy to Naples in the 1760s and 1770s—the ascent of Vesuvius became a highlight of the Grand Tour. The celebrity scientist Humphry Davy climbed the boiling summit fourteen times in 1819–20, taking samples of lava for chemical analysis: “its surface appear[ed] in violent agitation, large bubbles rising, which, in bursting, produced a white smoke.”
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Only months before, the Shelleys had prepared for their ascent by reading Madame de Staël’s popular Vesuvian novel
Corinne
(1806), whose more magmatic style may be judged by the following excerpt: “The river of fire flowing from Vesuvius was revealed by the darkness of night, and it seized and bound the imagination of Oswald. Corinne used this impression to turn him from recollections that tormented him, and she hastened to lead him with her away from the inflamed lava.”
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Meanwhile, half a world away, in the Louisiana Territory, an old Mississippi River flatboatman was heard to blame the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes, the worst in American history, on “old Vesuvius himself.”
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The power of Vesuvius, as cultural icon, was truly hemispheric.

Back in England, entertainment entrepreneurs offered a variety of volcanic productions for those unable to afford a sojourn to Italy. In the popular pleasure gardens of London sideshow engineers repackaged their pyrotechnic displays as volcanic paroxysm, treating patrons to nightly effusions of smoke, cacophonic rumbles, and fiery lights jetting from giant plaster Vesuvian cones. “The Eruption of Vesuvius Vomiting Forth Torrents of Fire!” promised a typical newspaper advertisement. Surrey Gardens, which boasted its own lake, could re-create the entire Bay of Naples in its Vesuvius show. The fireworks’ reflections in the water enhanced the wow-factor of the spectacle, putting the gardens’ managers one step ahead of the competition.
⁷

With the violent upheavals of the French Revolution, a new layer of symbolism became adhered to volcanic spectacle.
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On October 17, 1793, at the height of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Queen Marie Antoinette faced the guillotine in front of a heaving Jacobin mob in the newly christened Place de la Révolution in Paris. The following day, the nearby Theatre de la République premiered a play titled
Le jugement dernier des rois
(
Day of Judgement for the Kings
), authored by hard-core revolutionary journalist Sylvain Maréchal. In the play, a wretched assembly of deposed European monarchs, together with the pope, is deposited on a tropical island under the loom of a belching volcano. After some valedictory abuse from their Jacobin captors, they are left to be consumed in a river of molten lava symbolizing the insurgent wrath of the French people. One Parisian newspaper encouraged the public to attend, promising “you will see all the tyrants of Europe obliged to devour one another and be swallowed up, at the end, by a volcano. There’s a show made for republican eyes!” Audiences greeted the tyrannicidal scene with laughter and applause. Revolutionary officials were so impressed with Maréchal’s play they distributed thousands of copies to the troops and requisitioned precious gunpowder to keep the volcanic fires of revolution burning through an extended season.
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From an historical point of view, the iconic Vesuvius thus represents more than a mere “special effect” of the Revolutionary period, 1789–1830. Volcanism loomed large in the early nineteenth-century European imagination as a readymade symbol for the wave-upon-wave of social crises ordinary people experienced first as an upsurge of violence near at hand: in dead bodies on the street, soldiers pillaging farms, or smashed windows in the market square. The destructive spasms of the erupting volcano seemed the most apt image for the unprecedented bloodletting and upheaval that swept civilian Europe in the decades after 1790.