Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (27 page)

The sky was obscured by a heavy canopy of low dull clouds that had about them none of the grandeur of storm, but lay overhead charged with those wintry deluges which we feel to be so unnatural and alarming in autumn, whose bounty and beauty they equally disfigure and destroy…. The whole summer had been sunless and wet—one, in fact, of ceaseless rain, which fell day after day, week after week, and month after month, until the sorrowful consciousness had arrived that
any
change for the better must now come
too late
, and that nothing was certain but the terrible union of famine, disease, and death which was to follow.
⁵

Ireland’s western, ocean-bound situation placed it in the vanguard of the brutal westerly storm systems tailing in from the Atlantic in the summer of 1816. The combination of weather deterioration and widespread preexisting poverty among the rural population meant a perfect storm of calamity for the Irish people. It being both wet
and
cold that summer conspired to kill their subsistence crops while also encouraging the spread of typhus-bearing lice, which attacked en masse their already weakened frames.

First, the weather report. During Ireland’s “Year without a Summer,” unwelcome Arctic ice lingered off the west coast, while 31 inches of rain fell over 142 days, mostly in the crop-growing months between May and October.
⁶
In Drogheda, ducks were reported swimming across the fields sown with oats and potatoes, while someone mailed a damp husk of green corn in protest to Robert Peel, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, at Dublin Castle. One doctor in the north of Ireland called 1816 a summer “to which I believe the memory of man furnished no parallel, being wet, cold, and in every respect incongenial to the growth or maturation of the fruits of the earth.” The wheat crop failed, the grain small and blighted, or bursting its husk prior to germination. Bread made from the affected flour was inedible, so children took to rolling the damp lumps into balls and throwing them against the walls where they stuck like gum. Draught horses fell dead in their harnesses from the paltry nourishment of the season’s oats.
⁷

As we saw in the example of James Jameson’s report on the Bengal cholera in
chapter 4
, members of the medical profession served as de facto meteorologists in the early nineteenth century. For the Tambora period in Dublin, the task of scientifically assessing the miserable weather was taken up by Dr. Francis Barker, who commented closely on the haywire dynamics of wind and rain:

At this period the weather did not seem to depend on the direction of the wind so much as usual. In general, winds blowing from the northern points are, in this country, attended by dry weather; but during the summer and autumn of these years, from what quarter soever the wind came, it was accompanied by rain.
⁸

The mean temperature in Dublin between February and October 1816 fell 3.5°F below average, while the rainfall in July, the heart of the growing season, was more than four times the amount of the corresponding month a year prior. With rain-saturated depressions churning above month after month, some parts of the island experienced double or more their average rainfall.
⁹
According to Barker, “the humidity of the atmosphere was almost incessant” through 1816, while in the opening pages of
The Black Prophet
William Carleton describes a sinister haze over the land that seemed to prefigure the end of the world:

Long black masses of smoke trailed over the whole country, or hung, during the thick sweltering calms, in broad columns that gave to the face of nature an aspect strikingly dark and disastrous…. A brooding stillness, too, lay over all nature; cheerfulness had disappeared, even the groves and hedges were silent, for the very birds had ceased to sing.
¹⁰

One characteristic of the biblical apocalypse is that all things are transformed into their opposites, rendering the familiar world an object of terrifying strangeness. Such was the emotional impact of the weather of 1816, during which “all those visible signs which prognosticate any particular
description of weather, had altogether lost their significance.”
¹¹
For most of the world’s population, dependent as they were on subsistence agriculture and the benign, predictable progress of the seasons, Tambora’s bizarre weather must have induced a stomach-churning bewilderment and anxiety. The reactions of the Irish peasantry to their climate crisis traversed the spectrum from violent rage to drawn-out despair. In this, their moods mirrored the dark impulses of the skies overhead.

“THE TERRIBLE REALITIES OF 1817”

The unprecedented wet, stormy weather of 1816 continued into the following year. In February, newspapers reported “a storm, of singular awfulness, raged over the city of Dublin the whole of Thursday morning last, accompanied with loud peals of thunder, frequent and vivid lightnings, and the heaviest showers of hail and rain.”
¹²
As conditions grew desperate through 1817, men walked tens of miles to buy cattle feed for the family table. When the money ran out, they sold their livestock, furniture, and finally their clothes. In a tragic irony, the peasants’ rational preference for food at the expense of clothing worked against their survival. As their clothes turned to rags and blankets grew scarce, typhus-bearing lice were able to circulate freely within and between households, spreading disease at a breathtaking rate.

Poverty and intermittent famine had been a chronic issue in Ireland for centuries, but the scale of destitution in the 1815–18 period, owing to an increased population, came as a severe shock because the just-concluded Napoleonic Wars had been a time of relative prosperity. The late eighteenth century had witnessed a general upward trend in commodity prices, while the rapid industrial expansion of Britain created rising demand for Irish goods. Then, in wartime, when Britain faced significant restraints on her trade, Irish grain and linens fetched high prices. Standards of living improved, and the population continued its steady increase. But two entirely unconnected, epochal events of mid-1815—the eruption of Mount Tambora in April followed by the final
defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in May—combined to destroy Ireland’s fragile economic growth. As one famine historian puts it, “the fall in agricultural prices after 1815 punctured the veneer of wealth and exposed the frailties beneath.”
¹³

Families that had enjoyed an affluence unknown to their own grandparents were suddenly cast into poverty in 1815 and 1816. That fine Sunday suit was quickly sold or worn every day until it hung like rags. Thus, when the bad weather came in the summer of 1816, it fatally amplified already severely depressed social conditions. “Seldom,” reflected another eyewitness of the post-Tambora misery in Ireland, “had such a multiplication of evils come together.”
¹⁴

In
The Black Prophet
, William Carleton offers a vivid description of the impact of crop-destroying rains in 1816: “[They] took a short path across the fields, whilst at every step the water spurted up out of the spongy soil, so that they were soon wet nearly to the knees, so thoroughly saturated was the ground with the rain which had incessantly fallen.”
¹⁵
From Kerry to Cork, and Donegal to Clare, the unfortunate farmers of 1816 witnessed the full gamut of rain-damaged crops, including waking to find their corn crop caked in red volcanic dust.
¹⁶
Most direful of all, the saturated soil created a toxic environment for the peasantry’s subsistence food, the usually hardy potato. In damp ground, the watery film on a growing tuber’s surface will restrict oxygenic diffusion. But once depleted of air, the cell membranes of the plant begin to collapse and leak, reducing resistance to infection, at which point a multitude of pathogens may stake their claim. Blackleg, soft rot, white mold, and powdery scab are just some of the picturesque names given to potato blight in overirrigated conditions. In short, the extended periods of heavy rain during the summer of 1816 first exposed the fallibility of the Irish potato crop. Tragically, few measures were subsequently taken to reduce Irish reliance on potatoes, with calamitous consequences in the 1840s.

Ironically, the potato was widely considered a breakthrough subsistence crop in Europe because it was less vulnerable to meteorological variability. What this view did not take into account, however, was climate change—when the potato crop faced a sustained period of
extreme weather events outside the range of natural variability. In good years, the rural population subsisted on meals of potato, buttermilk, and oatcakes, but in 1816 and early 1817 even these subsistence foods became scarce and expensive. Starving people roamed the woods in search of “ramps”—a wild onion considered disgusting in ordinary times. Girls shaved their heads and sold their hair to peddlers for a pittance, while families bled their half-starved cattle, feeding on the blood mixed with a little barley—truly a soup of the damned.
¹⁷

In 1816, the soaked earth also ruined the quality of peat soil on which the peasantry relied for heating their cabins. No dry straw to sleep on—instead just the damp earth. It was thus in the first winter after Tambora that the disease ecology specific to typhus began to emerge from the deteriorated living conditions of the Irish poor. Clothes turned filthy from overwear, while threadbare coats and blankets were shared among the family. As the cold weather settled in and with no fuel to burn, families huddled together in their cabins for warmth, often not venturing out of their beds for days at a time. One doctor in County Tyrone reported to have “frequently found all the members of the family laid in the same bed with a patient labouring under fever, owing to their having but one or two blankets.”
¹⁸
Even as famine conditions subsided with the improved harvests of 1817, the Irish peasantry faced the even greater horror of epidemic disease. In their already weakened condition, they had few resources to fight it.

ONE LOUSE, TWO LICE

As any parent of schoolchildren knows, the louse is always with us. Indeed, the shared history of humans and lice constitutes a remarkable instance of co-evolution.
¹⁹
Five million years ago, when the ancestors of modern human beings diverged from the chimpanzee, a new species of lice (
pediculus humanus
) joined us on our evolutionary adventure. A second historically monumental divergence occurred when human beings began to wear clothing. Ambitious lice migrated to the human body (
pediculus humanus humanus
), where they developed the nifty
expedient of depositing their eggs in human clothes and taking up residence there. Striking evidence of our close, co-evolutionary relation with the louse is its slim genetic signature, characterized by a deficit of genes associated with environmental sensing and precious little metabolic engineering. The domesticated louse has no need for receptors of smell or taste, and possesses the smallest number of detoxification enzymes of any insect. Why wander about, when the human body and its vestments offer the coziest possible accomodation?
²⁰

It is unclear exactly how and when the modern typhus bacterium (
rickettsia prowazekii
) emerged to fatally complicate the host-parasite relation between humans and lice. Some argue that the famous plague of Athens described by the historian Thucydides was in fact typhus. More likely, however, is that typhus resulted from the chaotic biological exchange initiated by European colonization of the Americas in the fifteenth century. One conventional hypothesis traces the typhus pathogen from the Far East to Spain in the fifteenth century and from there to the Americas and a global imprint. But the recent discovery of a nonhuman reservoir for typhus in the American flying squirrel suggests an inverted etiology, namely that—like yellow fever, cholera, and syphilis—typhus originated as a colonial disease brought
back
to Europe from the New World. The deadly typhus, according to this scenario, “was born in the chance meeting of an American rickettsia and a Spanish louse.”

The impact on modern human history of this freak biological union is incalculable. Typhus decimated Napoleon’s army on his disastrous retreat from Moscow. A century later, during the revolutionary period 1917–25, twenty-five million Russians contracted typhus, killing an estimated three million. More recently, in the 1990s, typhus reasserted itself as a major global threat, infecting over one hundred thousand people during the civil war in Burundi. In terms of sheer numbers of victims, louse-borne typhus has not only been decisive in the outcome of major military conflicts during the last five hundred years, it has in that time “killed more people than all conflicts combined.”
²¹
The typhus epidemic that swept across peacetime Europe in 1817–18 is thus but one episode in a five-hundred-year biological disaster: an example of the
vulnerability of human communities to modern, globalized pathogens in times of material distress, be it war, famine, or an ecological breakdown precipitated by climate change.