Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (30 page)

I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.

A eugenic loathing characterizes all of Frankenstein’s interactions with the Creature. From that visceral “hatred” engendered by his repulsive appearance, Frankenstein arrives at the same conclusions on the monster’s proper fate as the British government did with regard to Ireland’s “superabundant” population in the early nineteenth century: they should be encouraged to emigrate if possible, and they should
not
be allowed to reproduce. Accordingly, the Creature offers to leave Europe for South America, while Frankenstein later destroys his half-made bride. “Thou didst seek my extinction,” the Creature cries in his parting words to his dead creator, “that I might not cause greater wretchedness.”
⁵³

That said, the class politics produced by the Tambora emergency were not all reactionary and inhumane. Both Robert Peel and Charles Grant, for all their foot dragging and parsimony in terms of humanitarian relief, were moved by the Irish famine and epidemic of 1816–18 to begin conceiving a modern public health bureaucracy to cope with emergencies on a national scale. Peel empaneled a national fever committee that evolved under Grant to become the first Board of Health in the British dominions. In 1817, the British Parliament in turn passed the landmark Poor Employment Act, which authorized a process for public loans to fund privately managed infrastructural projects to alleviate unemployment. After 1817, public works programs became a standard feature of economic policy.
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Nineteenth-century Ireland, in ways good and bad, served as Britain’s social laboratory. “It is no exaggeration to say,” concludes one historian, “that the welfare state in England was foreshadowed by events in Ireland in this period.”
⁵⁵

The same generally progressive trend occurred on the Continent. The French and Prussian governments spent massively on grain imports in 1816–17 and intervened in the marketplace by selling their own food reserves at throwaway prices. In northern Germany, private co-operatives, led by the affluent elite, bypassed sluggish authorities to import grain
directly from Russia to feed the starving in their communities. Vitally, for the subsequent long-term stability of Europe in the nineteenth century, the sheer scale of the humanitarian disaster of 1816–18 initiated the reeducation of the ruling classes in their moral responsibilities to the broader citizenry. In the process, it weakened the grip of the extreme laissez-faire ideology that had characterized the first phase of European industrial modernization. Patrick Webb of Tufts University, an authority on nutrition and food security, has pointed to 1817 as a watershed year in the evolution of modern humanitarian theories of governance. Desperate relief measures adopted during the Tambora emergency “contributed to a growing public acceptance of government action in times of crisis, while establishing a variety of viable approaches that continue to be used today.”
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Out of the global tragedy of Tambora, then, emerged the rudiments of the modern liberal state? It would not do to overestimate the pace of progress. In many cases, new welfare laws were not enforced, and the evolving humanitarian rhetoric of the nineteenth century remained just that. Moreover, no progressive argument whatever can be made for Britain’s colonial dominions in Asia and Africa, in which racism and Malthusian ideology combined to inflate the human toll of climate-related disasters throughout the Victorian period.
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Even close to home, typhus continued to afflict Ireland long after it had been eradicated from the rest of Europe. One thing is certain: the haphazard evolution of humanitarian ideals in the nineteenth century did not advance quickly enough for the twice-damned children of the Tambora emergency in Ireland, who survived that trauma only to perish in their hundreds of thousands in the Great Famine of the 1840s.

CHAPTER NINE

HARD TIMES AT MONTICELLO

From Indonesia to India, from China to the Alps, from the Arctic wastes to the villages of Ireland, our Tambora story has contained multitudes. We have sailed hemispheres and crisscrossed domains of earth, sea, and sky. Now finally we turn to North America, where the folk memory of the Year without a Summer has, arguably, endured longer than anywhere else. Writing in 1924, meteorological historian Willis Milham could nominate the disastrous growing season of 1816 as the most “famous … written about” weather event in American history: “If all the statements in climatologies, in books on the weather, in biographies, in histories, and in the periodical literature were collected, they would form a sizable volume.”
¹
Even at the the end of the twentieth century, 1816 continued “to be a topic of great popular interest,” particularly in the newspapers and journals of New England.
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Fascination with the lost summer of 1816 has, for two hundred years, been shared between meteorologists and popular historians, with a shelf-load of commentary to show for it.

The conspicuous gap that remains—and which this chapter aims to fill—is to rewrite the fabled Year without a Summer as a
nationwide
teleconnected narrative of weather disasters, demographic upheaval, and economic boom-and-bust that helped shape a full decade of the social history of antebellum America. The Tamboran deep freeze also signaled an end of the early republican era of strident climate optimism,
embodied in the patriotic figure of Thomas Jefferson. Approaching the bicentenary of Tambora’s world-altering eruption, it is time to rescue the Year without a Summer from the dusty back pages of American folklore: to reimagine the late 1810s in the United States as a multiyear period of extreme weather with cascading social and political effects—and hence marked relevance to the twenty-first century. In this chapter, the old weather legends revive again to haunt us, this time as premonitory images of our own emerging climate dystopia.

EIGHTEEN-HUNDRED-AND-FROZE-TO-DEATH

Residents of the isolated community of Annsville, New York, placed a high value on formal education, a scarce resource in rural America in the early nineteenth century. A schoolteacher’s arrival was like “an angel’s visit,” a rare and precious event.
³
In the summer term of 1816, Annsville had been blessed by just such a visit, and the children of the scattered settlement in Oneida County dutifully set out each morning for the long walk to the schoolhouse. The unusually bitter, frosty mornings of early June did not dull the enthusiasm of two outlying Annsville households for educating their offspring. Nor did the fact their four children had one pair of shoes between them for the three-mile walk, and no stockings. What happened to this unlucky group of schoolchildren in the Year without a Summer became the stuff of fireside legend for generations of upstate New Yorkers.

On the morning of June 6, the four classmates, aged six to nine, set out as usual and arrived punctually at the schoolhouse. For a six-year-old to walk three miles barefoot in a frost must have been an ordeal unto itself. But worse lay in store. This strange, cold June day grew progressively
colder
, contrary to all the norms of summer in the Northeast. The temperature in the schoolhouse—none too comfortable at the best of times—had become intolerable. Then, like something out of a bad dream, it began to snow. Big, wet flakes. As snow accumulated under darkening skies, the mood of discomfort in the schoolroom turned to fear. The teacher dismissed the students, directing them to find refuge
immediately at the nearest house on their way. The barefoot students ran through the snow to a house they could see only a few hundred yards distant. But it was locked, and no one answered their hammering and cries. Drenched in the whirling snow, the four children felt the first gusts of panic. By this time, the schoolhouse was deserted, too. So, no going back.

With their survival now at stake, the nine-year-old boy, leader of the group, devised a complicated plan. Each of them would take a turn on his back with their feet in his jacket pockets while the others ran as far ahead as they could, stopping only when the cold of the snow became unbearable. He told them to rub each other’s feet while they waited for him. And so they rotated, a hundred or so yards at a time, over the course of two miles of rocky, icy road, with snow rising up to their knees. At last in hailing distance of the first house, the girls were rescued by their startled father, leaping like a deer across the snowdrifts. The young hero of the story survived a while longer in the storm before he too found a place at the open fire in the cabin. Sitting too close, the pain of his thawing body overwhelmed his senses, and he fell unconscious. His feet had been torn to ribbons on the icy sticks and pebbles of his frozen march, and he could not walk for days.

So goes one of the innumerable tales of common suffering arising from the summer of 1816, the year Americans came to call “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.” In a season marked by bizarre fluctuations of temperature, June 6—the day the Annsville schoolchildren found themselves caught in a snowstorm—stands as its surreal, wintry apex, an iconic day in the history of American weather. This unheard-of June snow, followed by other severe frosts through the summer, laid waste to staple crops and fruit stocks throughout the Atlantic states from Maine south even to the Carolinas. The cascading short- and medium-term impacts of this disaster—on food production, demography, and ultimately the entire U.S. economy—mark the 1816 summer as the most destructive extreme weather event of the nineteenth century.

The first signs of Tambora’s doom-filled arrival on American shores came in early May. Newspapers in Washington, D.C., reported the sudden appearance of choking dust clouds over the capital: “the whole atmosphere is filled with a thick haze, the inconvenience of which is not diminished by the clouds of impalpable dust which float in the air.”
⁴
The insinuating presence of Tambora’s aerosol cloud dimmed the sun across the entire North Atlantic region, wreaking havoc on the evolution of seasonally benign weather systems. The rogue snowstorm that almost killed the schoolchildren in upstate New York originated with an intense, stationary high-pressure system off the east coast of Greenland in late May. This effectively blocked the eastward trajectory of North American weather, funneling Arctic air southward—a system characteristic of deep winter. As this cold air encountered the warmer atmosphere to the south through the week of May 28–June 4, it brought wildly unstable conditions to New England and Canada. An exaggerated temperature gradient across the mid-Atlantic latitudes intensified the overall energy of the emerging system.
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Extreme weather was now guaranteed. A depression passing across the Great Lakes stalled abruptly over Quebec, where it developed into a massive trough, sucking cold air into New England. A sudden cold snap was followed by two seasonable days in excess of 80°F, then widespread frosts on the night of June 3–4. In a normal year, such a night would mark an exceptional minimum temperature for June. But not in the Tambora year, 1816. Riding its unnaturally southerly jet stream, the cold front, mixing with warmer air above, brought icy precipitation to upstate New York and destructive thunderstorms to Pennsylvania. North of Harrisburg, a thousand acres of oats and rye were destroyed. Meanwhile, down in Virginia, pioneer meteorologist Thomas Jefferson recorded another dry day at his Monticello farm and worried about the effects of the developing drought on his fragile wheat crop.

On June 5, weather along the Atlantic seaboard turned full topsy-turvy. The sky turned black with hailstones at what is now Winston-Salem in North Carolina, while, to the rear of the storm track, Boston baked in temperatures over 90°. In the wake of this depression, however, the high-pressure system asserted itself once more, ushering in the frigid, northwest winds that would bring unwelcome Christmas snows to New England on June 6 and 7: “the most gloomy and extraordinary weather ever seen,” in the words of one Vermonter.
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Farmers who had planted their major crops in the spring had already experienced the dreaded “black frost” in mid-May. The cold wave of June 5–11 that dumped a foot or more of snow across the Northeast fully devastated their corn and grain fields. The region’s orchards, where apple trees had only just blossomed, suffered massive losses. Birds fell stone dead out of trees, while farmers feared for the survival of their sheep, recently shorn. Frost conditions spread south to Richmond, Virginia, by June 9, and to the west as far as Cincinnati.