Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (20 page)

On his return to England in August, Captain Scoresby, eager to justify himself in the eyes of his disappointed investors, published a short account of the circumstances of the poor whaling season in a Liverpool newspaper.

As we have seen, news of Arctic sea-ice loss reached the vigilant eye of Sir Joseph Banks, who had built his extraordinary career in the public promotion of British science on looking always to the next frontier. If Scoresby’s reports were true, an ice-free Greenland sea was certainly a major development in the world of science, one the British nation should be quick to exploit. Banks dashed off a letter to Scoresby—whom he knew already as one of his many hundreds of correspondents on scientific subjects—asking for more “particulars.” Even in this initial letter, Banks showed himself eager to theorize a synoptic connection between the melting of the polar ice cap and “the frosty springs and chilly summers we have been subject to” in 1816 and 1817.
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Scoresby’s tale dovetailed tantalizingly in Banks’s mind with numerous reports of icebergs seen floating unnaturally far south in the Atlantic. A mile-long iceberg had been sighted off the Grand Banks while ghostly convoys of ice drifted past the coasts of Ireland and New York, and even, it was said, into the tropical Bahamas.
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The miserable “Year without a Summer,” so fresh in the memory, might be explained (Banks conjectured) by massive chunks of polar ice now drifting southward, cooling air temperatures along the way. Of greater national importance, of course, were the implications of an ice-free Arctic for a northwest passage to Asia.

Scoresby’s reply to Banks’s excited speculations was satisfyingly direct: “I found about 2000 square leagues [61,000 km
²
] of the surface of the Greenland sea, between the parallels of 74° and 80° north, perfectly void of ice, which is usually covered with it…. Had I been so fortunate as to have had the command of an expedition for discovery, instead of fishing, I have little doubt but that the mystery attached to the existence of a north west passage might have been resolved.”
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If Banks was thrilled at this report, what were the feelings of John Barrow, who had so recently staked his public reputation on the feasibility of a northwest passage? It must have seemed like manna from heaven. The two
powerful bureaucrats soon joined forces to transform Barrow’s wishful projections in his February review article into a fully funded reality. And in that moment, a famous Royal Society memo—holy writ to the modern climate denialist—was born.

In addition to Scoresby’s account of an ice-free north, rumors filtering in from foreign sources were perfectly designed to light an Arctic fire under the Admiralty. The German navigator Otto von Kotzebue, in the employ of the Russian government, had been commissioned to explore the possibilities for a north
east
passage across the Arctic’s Russian coast. In the mostly disastrous summer of 1816—the summer New Englanders called “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death”—Kotzebue and his Russian crew, by contrast, enjoyed “delightful weather” and a clear passage through the Bering Strait, north of Alaska. As he records in his subsequent published account, on August 2, 1816, Kotzebue “sent a sailor to the mast-head [where] he announced that there was still nothing but open sea to the east … at which our joy was indescribable.” Kotzebue clearly thought himself on the brink of a major geographical achievement, one that would place him in the ranks of Cortez and Cook: he “cherished the hope of discovering a passage into the Frozen Ocean, more particularly as the strait appeared to run without impediment to the horizon.”
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He was foiled, in the end, only by the shallowness of the local waters ahead that made further northeastward navigation impossible.

News of Kotzebue’s near-success sent a shiver through the Admiralty. It would not do for Britain’s navy, the most powerful in the world, to concede the prestige of Arctic discovery to a crew of Russian Johnny-come-latelies captained by a German mercenary. Would Britain, who had poured men and treasure into northwest passage exploration since the days of Queen Elizabeth, allow herself to be pipped at the post in the race to the Arctic? Clearly Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty, thought it must not be. He promptly gave his blessing to the Banks-Barrow plan to outfit two expeditions for the Arctic, the huge expense to be justified for “the national advantages which they involve but also for the marked attention they [call] forth.”
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In other words, profits and prestige. After all, the Royal Navy, with Nelson long dead
and the French defeated, stood in desperate need of a new mission and fresh heroes to maintain its preeminence in the public eye.

Armed with the First Lord’s stamp of approval, Barrow rushed back into print to announce the new naval missions to the Arctic. The issue of the
Quarterly Review
that appeared in February 1818 sold twelve thousand copies on its first day of publication, a record amount. Barrow’s article—its major selling point—displays all the giddy self-confidence one might expect from a man who, having recently floated the notion of a passage through the Arctic, hears that vast territories of ice have promptly vanished, as if a slave to his own genius and will. Now, in the blink of an eye, a flotilla of ships crowded with glory-hungry men stood at his command.

It is with Faustian bravura, then, that Barrow’s article presents a sweeping scientific and historical rationale for the government-funded polar enterprise. He proclaims to the British public the news of the permanent melting of the polar ice cap and the commencement of a new Golden Age of planetary warming:

Among the changes and vicissitudes to which the physical constitution of our globe is perpetually subject, one of the most extraordinary, and from which the most interesting and important results may be anticipated, appears to have taken place in the course of the last two or three years, and is still in operation…. The event to which we have alluded is the disappearance of the whole, or greater part of th[e] vast barrier of ice.
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Barrow proceeds on an ambitious survey of the history of climate of the last millennium, beginning with what is called today the Medieval Warm Period, when “vineyards were very common in England” and colonists from Denmark and Norway settled the south coast of Greenland. When the Little Ice Age subsequently descended on Europe and North America, a new regime of cooler temperatures enlarged the empire of northern ice, cutting off the Nordic settlements and closing the northwest passage. Since 1815, Barrow continues, a further drastic drop in temperatures has killed crops across the hemisphere and fueled the Alpine glaciers (he is well-informed of developments to be described in
the next chapter). But this last “deterioration of climate,” Barrow argues, is cause for celebration because it represents the last gasp of the four-hundred-year cooling regime over Europe.

How did Barrow reach this original conclusion? “It can scarcely be doubted,” he argues, that Europe’s recent string of cold summers has been owed to the presence of Arctic icebergs drifting southward en masse in the Atlantic. Once these ice floes have melted in the southern latitudes, as they must, and the Arctic is ice free, his readers might look forward to “once again enjoying the genial warmth of the western breeze, and those soft and gentle zephyrs, which, in our time, have existed only in the imagination of the poet.”
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An open Arctic will transform foggy England into a sunny Arcadia.

Barrow should not bear full responsibility for his trumped-up utopian views of climate change in 1817. Percy Shelley himself had dared to imagine something very similar only a few years prior in his revolutionary poem
Queen Mab
. Shelley’s Fairy Queen looks forward to an era of global warming in which ice caps are “unloosed,” and changing wind and ocean circulation usher in a new climatic regime “full of bliss” for humankind:

Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled

By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,

Where matter dared not vegetate or live,

But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude

Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed;

And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles

Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls

Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand,

Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet

To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves

And melodize with man’s blessed nature there.
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Barrow’s conservative
Quarterly Review
loathed Shelley’s radical poetry; the editors called it “satanic.” But by 1817, the educated classes were steeped in the new earth science of Buffon and Cuvier, who promoted
the idea that Earth’s long history included episodes of radical environmental change. Pastoral images of perpetual summer and polar gardens proved irresistible to writers of all political persuasions. An unfrozen north meant prosperity and freedom, perhaps even a revolution in consciousness. Few except those with firsthand knowledge of the brutal polar seas—plus natural skeptics like Mary Shelley—stood outside the Arctic climate change consensus of the late 1810s.

Barrow spends little time in his remarkable essay exploring what has caused the “revolution” in the Earth’s climate since 1815. He borrows Benjamin Franklin’s theory of electrical atmosphere to suggest the aurora borealis may be responsible for melting the ice, but he soon throws up his hands. It is “enough,” he concludes, “to consider it as the result of one of those prospective contrivances, which are appointed to correct the anomalies, and adjust the perturbations of the universe.”
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Beneath the cocksure rhetoric lies a set of hollow presumptions. For example, Barrow offers no evidence for his assumption that the prior four centuries of cooler temperatures—the Little Ice Age—constituted a climatic anomaly, nor for asserting that the current trend toward diminished sea ice, based on a slim few years’ sample, might represent a permanent benign change. In place of reason, as Mary Shelley well saw, Barrow offered only gauzy romance—a grand illusion papered over with shreds of truth.

BERNARD O’REILLY: THE FORGOTTEN MAN

The accounts of Scoresby and Kotzebue of open Arctic waters in 1816–17, gift-wrapped by John Barrow as a glorious prize to be claimed for the nation, was sufficient to launch a flurry of polar discovery teams in the years that followed. Naval officers John Ross, David Buchan, William Edward Parry, and John Franklin had all embarked upon highly publicized expeditions by the decade’s end. Their extreme experiences en route and fluctuating reputations on their return set the terms of heroism, ignominy, suffering, and inconclusive defeat that were to drive the British Arctic narrative for the next half century. But in all the hoo-ha,
one vital account of the highly unusual state of the Arctic in the aftermath of Tambora has been almost entirely forgotten (thanks to John Barrow). This polar journal, from the summer of 1817, is especially important since it provides eyewitness testimony of open waters in the aftermath of Tambora’s eruption to the
west
of Greenland, in Baffin Bay, whence the iconic expeditions of Ross, Parry, and Franklin would later begin their quests for the northwest passage.

It is too often a crutch for historians to describe a little-documented figure from the past as “obscure.” Obscure to whom? But there can be few other words to describe Bernard O’Reilly, a young Irish naturalist of unknown lineage who bobs up into public view in the 1810s. Traces of O’Reilly’s stillborn scientific career may be found in the archives of the Dublin Royal Society. But his major bid for fame takes the form of a book, a single volume published in London in 1818, boldly titled
Greenland, the Adjacent Seas, and the North-West Passage to the Pacific Ocean
. From the opening page, O’Reilly announces his ambition for the book to redress the scandalous “want of scientific information on the northern climates.”
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As we have seen with William Scoresby’s 1817 summer voyage—plying the waters east of Greenland on a fruitless search for whales spooked by lack of ice—Bernard O’Reilly, hitching a ride on a British whaler, had chosen a strange, historic year to explore the Arctic. He found the western waters off Greenland—Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, and Lancaster Sound—equally void of ice. The polar ice cap was clearly visible to the north beyond 78°, but in the direction of the putative passage to the Pacific, with “all the broken field ice having drifted down to the southward … the sea remain[ed] as clear as the Atlantic, blue, and agitated by a considerable swell from the north-west!”

In one tantalizing passage from O’Reilly’s account, he records the experience of a veteran captain that summer who, having ventured farther northwest than any whaler before him, observed in amazement from the masthead an unprecedented invitation to “proceed as far north as he pleased” across Melville Bay, on a “heavy open sea” with “no obstruction.”
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History turns on small moments, with no band playing.
Just then, the captain remembered his sacred whaler’s oath to pursue no object but whales and so turned his ship about.

Even so, O’Reilly was able to confirm Scoresby’s account: that “owing to some convulsions of nature, the sea was more open and more free from compact ice than in any former voyage they ever made … that, for the first time for 400 years, vessels penetrated to the west coast of Greenland, and that they apprehended no obstacle to their even reaching the pole.”
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Bernard O’Reilly’s book should have made him famous. But the new field of Arctic literature had quickly gotten crowded, and he found himself elbowed sharply from the scene by the powerful figure of John Barrow, who himself published a book on the Arctic in 1818.

Barrow’s achievements as an Admiralty bureaucrat over the previous twelve months had been impressive to say the least. In that time, he had turned a book review and a few whalers’ reports into two fully manned expeditions to the Arctic Ocean and a spectacular publicity coup for the Royal Navy. Swapping on his naturalist’s hat, he had also publicly announced a new benign era of global warming. As the Arctic expeditions, under the command of Captains Ross and Buchan, made their preparations in Portsmouth at the beginning of 1818, Barrow had only loose ends to tie up.