Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (3 page)

Tambora’s aftermath, particularly the “Year without a Summer,” 1816, is rich in folklore and continues to be the subject of popular histories. But these accounts are confined to 1816 and to Tambora’s impacts in Europe and North America.
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None has engaged seriously with the robust and ever-increasing scientific literature on Tambora, volcanism, and global climate change. I learned about Mount Tambora in an atmospheric science seminar, not from a history book, and my first exhilarated thought was it was high time historians caught up with the climatologists on Tambora. This book, through all the byways of its creation, remains the product of that initial inspiration.
Tambora
is the first study of this iconic period to marry a volcanological account of the 1815 eruption with both the folklore of the “Year without a Summer” and the full range of biophysical sciences relevant to climate change. It is the first to treat the Tambora event not as the natural disaster of a single year, 1816, but as a three-year episode of drastic climate change whose downstream effects can be traced long into the nineteenth century.

I focus here on the human story of Tambora’s aftermath, while my engagement with the detailed discussion of the volcano to be found in recent scientific literature allows me to tell that story on multiple spatial scales, from the molecular to the global. My emphasis, from the point of view of method, is less on nature’s impact on history—far less a crude environmental determinism—but on Tambora as a case study in the fragile interdependence of human and natural systems. Put another way, this book considers the disparate human communities of 1815–18—and the climatic zones to which they were adapted—as a single, anthro-ecological world system on which Tambora acted as a massive, traumatic perturbation. After April 1815, many human societies were “changed, changed utterly”—to borrow from the poet
W. B. Yeats—altered, in radical ways, from their pre-eruption state. I have not traveled, in my fieldwork and research, to all continents. In some areas of the globe—notably Africa, Australia, and Latin America—the contemporary data are thin or archives nonexistent. But
Tambora
offers a rich and unique travelogue nonetheless, traversing the hemispheres to trace this epochal eruption’s shaping hand on human history.

Across Asia, for example—whose Tambora story has never been told—the volcano’s effects were arguably the most devastating of all. A celebrated ancient genre of Chinese verse is called Poetry of the Seven Sorrows. In a Seven Sorrows poem, the poet dramatizes the five bodily senses under assault, overlaid with the twin mental afflictions of injustice and bitterness: seven sorrows in all. The original work in the genre, from the third century, tells of a man forced by civil war from his home, a kind of Chinese Dante. The sorrowful poet, Wang Can, sees lines of corpses from the road and encounters an anguished woman who has abandoned her child in the barren fields. She cannot feed it, but she loiters nearby, listening to its cries. As we will see in
chapter 5
, the ancient poetic mode of Seven Sorrows enjoyed a renaissance in China in the Tambora period of 1815–18 because it captured so well the human suffering wrought by three successive years of climatic breakdown. A forgotten Chinese poet named Li Yuyang, it turns out, spoke as movingly as anyone for the weather-devastated world of the late 1810s.

The accounts of environmental breakdown and human tragedy left by survivors such as Li Yuyang must stand in for countless histories of individual and community trauma from the Tambora period that are lost forever. In the aftermath of a mega-disaster such as Tambora, the paucity of victim narratives itself tells us something both of the scale of the cataclysm and who bore the brunt of it: the poor and illiterate peasant millions of the early nineteenth-century world. Just as my vision failed me confronted by the dizzying vortices of Tambora’s vast caldera, so a complete panoramic view of the human crises it spawned lies out of reach. But with an eye committed to a twenty-first-century way of seeing—to tracing the complex teleconnections between earth, sky, and the fate of human beings—the haywire story of a two-centuries-old global climate crisis may at last be properly told and with it our own fate, in cautionary ways, foretold.

CHAPTER ONE

THE POMPEII OF THE EAST

TIME OF THE ASH RAIN

On April 10, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte, recently escaped from the island of Elba, was back in Paris and up to his usual tricks. While he charmed one old foe—the liberal journalist Benjamin Constant—into composing a new French constitution guaranteeing democratic rights, he bullied his friend General Davout into raising a half-million-man army. A reenergized Napoleon intended to reclaim full dictatorial powers over France and as much of Europe as possible.

Over in Vienna, on April 10, the aristocratic elite of Europe had cut short their endless round of balls and gourmandizing to hurry up the business of carving up the continent. Every minor prince and dispossessed count of the Old Regime was there to haggle for a fiefdom, while the Great Powers dealt land back and forth like cards in a game of baccarat. “We are completing the sad business of the congress which is the most mean-spirited piece of work ever seen,” wrote diplomat Emerich von Dalberg.
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Meanwhile, the Duke of Wellington, who had rushed from Vienna to organize the allied forces against Bonaparte, had just arrived in Brussels to find it devoid of troops and munitions. With both sides from the twenty-year conflict exhausted and in disarray, all of Europe awaited a messy conflagration, its outcome dubious.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the world, on Sumbawa—a remote island outpost of the European war in the blue seas east of Java—the beginning of the dry season in April meant a busy time for the local farmers. In a few weeks the rice would be ready, and the raja of Sanggar, a small kingdom on the northeast coast of the island, would send his people into the fields to harvest. Until then, the men of his village, called Koteh, continued to work in the surrounding forests, chopping down the sandalwood trees vital to shipbuilders in the busy sea lanes of the Dutch East Indies.

In the fields of Sanggar and the neighboring half-dozen island kingdoms, the people cultivated mung beans, corn, and rice, as well as cash crops for the lucrative regional market: coffee, pepper, and cotton. Others collected honey or tiny bird’s nests from the seaside cliffs, an aphrodisiac much sought after by wealthy, lovelorn Chinese. In the grassy fields of the village, meanwhile, Sumbawa’s famous horse breeders groomed their stock.
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For these commodities, the raja and his villagers traded a range of practical and luxury items, including cattle, salt and spices from the islands to the east, bronze bowls from China, and prettily decorated pots from what are now Cambodia and Vietnam.
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Sumbawa had been settled by people from the neighboring larger islands of Java, Celebes, and Flores about four hundred years earlier. These pioneers converted large stretches of the densely wooded landscape to rice paddies and grasslands for grazing cattle and horses. Pre-eruption Sumbawa boasted a great diversity of ethnicities and languages. The Sanggarese, for example, on the northeastern peninsula, looked nothing like their compatriots on the western side of Sumbawa; nor could they understand each other’s speech. Of the mother islands, Celebes had maintained the strongest influence on Sumbawa as a kind of vassal state, its powerful capital Macassar exacting crushing taxes upon the Sumbawans. Then, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch arrived to stake their claim upon the region. It was the good
fortune of the Sumbawans that the Dutch took little interest in their island while at the same time curbing the power of Macassar. The early nineteenth century, then, saw Sumbawa in a better position than it had ever known: economically integrated in the region but with a degree of political independence.

Even in the midst of this prosperity, however, the raja of Sanggar could never relax. Now that sailing conditions had improved after the abating of the rains, he kept a wary eye out for pirates from the Sulu islands to the north, who preyed upon coastal villages looking for human prizes for the slave market.
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With sleek sailboats carrying up to a hundred armed men, and a gift for surprise attack, the pirates were a terrible sight for the people of Sanggar. Given sufficient warning, the young men might escape deep into the forest. But everyone was vulnerable, and the raja could not have thought of his own children without anxiety. Once taken by pirates, their inherited privileges—and their happy village life on Sumbawa—would be lost forever. But slavery was a fact of life, nevertheless. While resources were abundant in the islands, labor was not. Human beings were thus the most valuable of commodities, and the oceangoing traffic in flesh was cruel and unrelenting. Between the 1770s and 1840s, several hundred thousand people passed through the slave markets of the East Indies, the largest slave system outside the Atlantic zone.
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Another source of anxiety lay closer at hand: the magnificent mountain Tambora, the tallest peak in an archipelago rich in cloudy, volcanic summits. The broad, forested slopes of Tambora dominated the Sanggar peninsula, and its distinctive twin peaks served as a major navigation point for shipping—and pirates. The long-dormant Tambora had for some years past begun to rumble periodically, sending forth dark clouds from its airy summit. A British ship captained by the diplomat and naturalist John Crawfurd sailed near the belching mountain in 1814:

At a distance, the clouds of ashes which it threw out blackened one side of the horizon in such a manner as to convey the appearance of a threatening tropical squall…. As we approached, the real nature of the phenomenon became apparent, and ashes even fell on the deck.
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Local opinion varied as to the cause of the mountain’s groggy awakening. Some thought it the celebration of a marriage among the gods, while others viewed it more darkly. The rumblings signified anger, they said. In a notorious incident, a Sumbawan chief had murdered a Muslim pilgrim. Another legend still popular in Sumbawa tells of a visiting “shaykh,” a holy man, who was outraged to find dogs loose in the local mosque. When the offended locals served him canine meat in revenge, the shaykh discovered the trick and began to pray. In an instant he vanished, the butchered dog reappeared in living form, and the volcano began to bellow.
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Still others believed the gods were angry that the people had allowed foreign white men with their ships and guns to enslave them on plantations on nearby Java and Macassar.
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The raja took all these opinions personally. Throughout the East Indies, volcanism served as a symbol of political power. Sultans, for example, represented themselves as offspring of the mountain god, Siva.
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Volcanic eruptions were accordingly viewed as mirrors of human affairs, as punishment for the poor administration of their rulers. Tambora’s rumblings were bad news for the raja; they unnerved his people and undermined his legitimacy in their eyes.

On the evening of April 5, 1815, at about the time his servants would have been clearing the dinner dishes, the raja heard an enormous thunderclap.
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Perhaps his first panicked thought was that the beach lookout had fallen asleep and allowed a pirate ship to creep into shore and fire its cannon. But everyone was instead staring up at Mount Tambora. A skyward jet of flame burst from the summit, lighting up the darkness and rocking the earth beneath their feet. The noise was incredible, painful.
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