Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (2 page)

Forster, Turner, and Friedrich—all committed skywatchers—saw the imprint of major atmospheric changes in the North Atlantic. But neither Forster’s London sky “on fire” in September 1815 nor the nearly three years of destructive global cooling that ensued inspired anyone to the realization that a faraway volcanic eruption had caused it all. Not until the Cold War—and the development of meteorological instruments to measure nuclear fallout—did scientists begin study of the atmospheric residency of volcanic aerosols. The sun-blocking dust veil of a major eruption, it was concluded, might linger above the earth for up to three years. Two centuries after Franklin’s first tentative speculations, the geophysical chain linking volcanism and climate could at last be proven.

I dwell on this point for good reason. The formidable, occasionally mind-bending challenge in writing this book has been to trace cataclysmic world events the cause of which the historical actors themselves were ignorant. Generations of historians since have done little better. The Tamboran climate emergency followed hard upon the devastations of the Napoleonic Wars and has always remained in the shadows of that epochal conflict. Out of sight and out of mind, Tambora was the volcanic stealth bomber of the early nineteenth-century. Be it the retching cholera victim in Calcutta, the starving peasant children of Yunnan or County Tyrone, the hopeful explorer of a Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean, or the bankrupt land speculator in Baltimore, the world’s residents were oblivious to the volcanic drivings of their fate. Equally challenging for me as an environmental historian has been to capture the physically remote relation between cause and effect in measuring Tambora’s impact on the global commons of the nineteenth century. Volcanic strife traveled great distances and via obscure agents. But it is only by tracing such “teleconnections”—a guiding principle of today’s climate and ecological sciences—that the
worldwide
tragedy of Tambora can be rescued from its two-century oblivion.

Climate change is hard to see and no less difficult to imagine. After a day’s climb through the dense forests of Sumbawa Island, drenched in tropical rains, I almost didn’t succeed in seeing at firsthand the great Tambora’s evacuated peak. Then, at daybreak on the second morning, the clouds suddenly lifted, and we were able to complete our ascent along the treeless ridges. Nearing the summit, we clambered over flat pool tables of tan, serrated rock and left our boot prints in the black volcanic sand. Almost without warning, we found ourselves at the rim of a great inverted dome of earth, with sheer rock walls leading down to a pearl-green lake a kilometer below. My camera whirred as puffclouds of sulfur performed lazy inversions in the still, separate universe of Tambora’s yawning caldera. Its six-kilometer diameter might as well have been a thousand. My swimming eyes performed no better than my camera in taking measure of the volcano’s unhealed intestinal canyon, let alone in imagining its once pristine peak a mile above me in what was now open sky. Sleepless and damp in our tents the night before, we had felt rumblings from deep in the earth. Now, we smelled the distinct odor of sulfur in the morning air. Looking down for a moment to recover my senses, I realized I was standing on a sponge-like rock that, but a blink before in geological time, had been adrift among the brewing magma of Tambora’s subterranean chamber.

Gazing out across that dizzying crater, I felt no better equipped than pioneer meteorologist Thomas Forster in 1815 to grasp the catastrophic impact of a single mountain’s explosion on the history of the modern world. It was a calm sunrise. The straits of Teluk Saleh to the south came into view over the treetops, its postcard blue waters dotted with islands in the milky sunlight. Stretching behind us, the forests of the Sanggar peninsula appeared at perfect peace. Did an event of world-changing violence truly happen here? Like the shivering audience in that Manchester hall two centuries ago, trying to make sense of Franklin’s ramblings about cold weather and an Iceland volcano, I could hardly believe in Tambora’s global reach.

It has taken five years of research into the science of volcanism and climate, collaboration with scholars across many disciplines, and much dogged detective work to remake that morning’s ascent of Tambora in my imagination: to articulate, in book-length form, the years-long impact of the massive 1815 eruption on the world in the critical period after the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Forster, I have had the advantage of modern scientific instruments and data through which to “see” the otherwise invisible teleconnections linking
tropical eruptions, climate change, and human affairs. Climbing Tambora, by this route, one could not mistake its greatness.

Tambora belongs to a dense volcanic cluster along the Sunda arc of the Indonesian archipelago. This east-west ridge of volcanoes is a segment, in turn, of the much larger Ring of Fire, a hemisphere-girdling string of volcanic mountains bordering the Pacific Ocean from the southern tip of Chile, to Mount St. Helens in Washington State, to picturesque Mount Fuji in Japan, to Tambora’s near neighbor Krakatau, due to explode into global fame in 1883. Along its almost 40,000 kilometers length, the Ring of Fire boasts lofty, cone-topped volcanoes located exclusively on coastlines and islands. Tambora sits some 330 kilometers north of a tectonic ridge in the trans-Pacific Ring of Fire known as the Java Trench, which marks a curvilinear course south of the islands of Sumbawa and its neighbors Lombok and Sumba.

After perhaps a thousand years’ dormancy, Tambora’s devastating evacuation and collapse in April 1815 required only a few days. It was the concentrated energy of this event that was to have the greatest human impact. By shooting its contents into the stratosphere with such biblical force, Tambora ensured its volcanic gases reached sufficient height to seriously disable the seasonal rhythms of the global climate system, throwing human communities worldwide into chaos. The sun-dimming stratospheric aerosols produced by Tambora’s eruption in 1815 spawned the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years.

A dramatic story unto itself. But a more urgent motivation has driven my history of Tambora. The great Sumbawan volcano is the
most recent
volcanic eruption to have had a dramatic impact on global climate. Considered on a geological timescale, Tambora stands almost insistently near to us, begging to be studied. On the eve of Tambora’s bicentenary and facing multiplying extreme weather crises of our own, its eruption looms as the richest case study we have for understanding how abrupt shifts in climate affect human societies on global scales and decadal time frames. The Tambora climate emergency of 1815–18 offers us a rare, clear window onto a world convulsed by weather extremes, with human communities everywhere struggling to adapt to sudden,
radical shifts in temperatures and rainfall, and a flow-on tsunami of famine, disease, dislocation, and unrest.

For three years following Tambora’s explosion, to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry. In New England, 1816 was nicknamed the “Year without a Summer” or “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” Germans called 1817 the “Year of the Beggar.” Across the globe, harvests perished in frost and drought or were washed away by flooding rains. Villagers in Vermont survived on hedgehogs and boiled nettles, while the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march.

One such group of English tourists, at their lakeside villa near Geneva, passed the cold, crop-killing days by the fire exchanging ghost stories. Mary Shelley’s storm-lashed novel
Frankenstein
bears the imprint of the Tambora summer of 1816, and her literary coterie—which included the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron—will serve as our occasional tour guides through the suffering worldscape of 1815–18. As one literary historian has observed, “there was never a more documented group of people” than Mary Shelley’s circle of friends and lovers. The paper trail of impressions they left of the late 1810s will lead us back again and again to Tambora.
⁴

In the early nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the world’s population were subject (unlike Dr. Frankenstein) to the unforgiving regime of nature: most people depended on subsistence agriculture, living precariously from harvest to harvest. When crops worldwide failed in 1816, and again the next year, starving rural legions from Indonesia to Ireland swarmed out of the countryside to market towns to beg for alms or sell their children in exchange for food. Famine-friendly diseases, cholera and typhus, stalked the globe from India to Italy, while the price of bread and rice, the world’s staple foods, skyrocketed with no relief in sight.

Across a European continent ravaged by the Napoleonic Wars, tens of thousands of demobilized veterans found themselves unable to feed their families. They gave vent to their desperation in town-square riots
and military-style campaigns of arson, while governments everywhere feared revolution. Human tragedies rarely unfold without blessings to some. During this prolonged global dearth that ended only with the bumper harvests of 1818, farmers in Russia and the American western frontier flourished as never before, selling their grain at stratospheric prices to desperate buyers in the Atlantic trade zone. But for most people, worldwide, this was “the worst of times.”