Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, page 1
TAMBORA
TAMBORA
THE ERUPTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
GILLEN D’ARCY WOOD
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright ©2014 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
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Jacket Art: Weymouth Bay, 1816 (oil on canvas), John Constable (1776–1837). Location: The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK. Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy.
Tambora : the eruption that changed the world / Gillen D’Arcy Wood.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-15054-3 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Tambora, Mount (Indonesia)—Eruption, 1815. 2. Weather—Effect of volcanic eruptions on—History—19th century. 3. Volcanoes—Environmental aspects—History—19th century. 4. Climatology—Observations—History—19th century. I. Title.
QC981.8.V65W66 2014
363.34′95—dc23
2013021152
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon Next LT Pro
Printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of Bess, Linnell, Monica, and Bessie—
And to Nancy, and a climate-stable future for our children
A fearful hope was all the world contained…
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept…
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world
LORD BYRON, “DARKNESS” (1816)
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xi
Note on Measurements xv
INTRODUCTION
Frankenstein’s Weather 1
ONE
The Pompeii of the East 12
TWO
The Little (Volcanic) Ice Age 33
THREE
“This End of the World Weather” 45
FOUR
Blue Death in Bengal 72
FIVE
The Seven Sorrows of Yunnan 97
SIX
The Polar Garden 121
SEVEN
Ice Tsunami in the Alps 150
EIGHT
The Other Irish Famine 171
NINE
Hard Times at Monticello 199
EPILOGUE
Et in Extremis Ego 229
Acknowledgments 235
Notes 237
Bibliography 259
Index 281
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURES
FIGURE 0.1
Map of global sulfate deposition 3
FIGURE 0.2
Caspar David Friedrich, Ships in the Harbor (1816) 4
FIGURE 0.3
Tambora caldera 6
FIGURE 0.4
Tambora caldera (aerial view) 7
FIGURE 1.1
Map of the East Indies (nineteenth century) 13
FIGURE 1.2
Map of Sumbawa 14
FIGURE 1.3
Diagram of plinian explosion and pyroclastic flow 19
FIGURE 1.4
Tambora eruption timeline 22
FIGURE 1.5
Map of Tambora ash fallout 23
FIGURE 1.6
Artifacts recovered from Tambora village 26
FIGURE 1.7
Portrait of Sir Stamford Raffles (1817) 28
FIGURE 1.8
Javan landscape (nineteenth century) 31
FIGURE 2.1
J.M.W. Turner, Mt. Vesuvius in Eruption (1812) 35
FIGURE 2.2
Sulfate deposition in ice core samples showing 1809 and 1815 eruptions 38
FIGURE 3.1
Portrait copy of Mary Shelley (1816) 47
FIGURE 3.2
Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819) 47
FIGURE 3.3
Diagram showing creation of volcanic sulfate aerosols 48
FIGURE 3.4
John Constable, Weymouth Bay (1816) 50
FIGURE 3.5
Annual frequency of gale days at Edinburgh (1789–1988) 53
FIGURE 3.6
Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati 68
FIGURE 4.1
Historical map of north-central India, scene of Lord Hastings’s Maratha campaign and the cholera outbreak of November 1817 73
FIGURE 4.2
A View of Erich above the River Betwah (1817) 76
FIGURE 4.3
Synoptic map of South Asian monsoon 80
FIGURE 4.4
William Hodges, The Ghauts at Benares (1787) 85
FIGURE 4.5
James Baillie Fraser, Calcutta Bazaar (1824–26) 91
FIGURE 4.6
Map of global cholera spread (nineteenth century) 92
FIGURE 5.1
Map of China agriculture (Qing dynasty) 100
FIGURE 5.2
Chinese rice fields (mid-1840s) 103
FIGURE 5.3
Chinese mother bringing her children to market for sale (mid-1870s) 112
FIGURE 5.4
Chinese opium den (mid-1840s) 118
FIGURE 6.1
Portrait of Sir John Barrow (circa 1810) 124
FIGURE 6.2
Portrait of William Scoresby Jr. (1821) 126
FIGURE 6.3
Scoresby’s “Marine Diver” 136
FIGURE 6.4
Map showing global thermohaline circulation 137
FIGURE 6.5
Global drought post–Pinatubo eruption 139
FIGURE 6.6
Portrait of Captain William Edward Parry (1820) 143
FIGURE 6.7
Discovery of Franklin expedition remains (1861) 145
FIGURE 7.1
J.M.W. Turner, Mer de Glace (1812) 156
FIGURE 7.2
Portrait of Ignace Venetz (1826) 158
FIGURE 7.3
Map of Val de Bagnes and Giétro glacier dam, 1818 160
FIGURE 8.1
The Black Prophet (title page) 175
FIGURE 8.2
Synoptic map of low-pressure system over British Isles, July 1816 177
FIGURE 8.3
Diagram showing typhus transmission 184
FIGURE 8.4
Illustration, The Black Prophet 196
FIGURE 9.1
Map of New England snowline, June 6–7, 1816 202
FIGURE 9.2
Historical graph, New England growing seasons 204
FIGURE 9.3
Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1821) 207
FIGURE 9.4
Portrait of Comte de Buffon (1753) 208
FIGURE 9.5
Transatlantic grain prices, post-Tambora period 222
FIGURE 9.6
View of Monticello (1825) 223
FIGURE E.1
Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego (1639) 232
NOTE ON MEASUREMENTS
This book deals much with science and the history of science, but I have not maintained a “scientific” adherence to metrical units of measurement. Instead I have been guided principally by context. Where the historical or cultural setting seems appropriate, I have used imperial measures of distance as well as the Fahrenheit temperature scale.
TAMBORA
INTRODUCTION
FRANKENSTEIN’S WEATHER
The War of Independence between Britain and America provisionally ended with the Treaty of Paris in December 1783. But official ratification of the peace accord was delayed for months by a mix of political logistics and persistent bad weather. The makeshift U.S. capital in Annapolis, Maryland, was snowbound, preventing assembly of congressional delegates to ratify the treaty, while storms and ice across the Atlantic slowed communications between the two governments. At last, on May 13, 1784, Benjamin Franklin, wrangling matters in Paris, was able to send the treaty, signed by King George himself, to the Congress.
Even while scrambling to bring the warring parties to terms, Franklin—tireless and mercurial—found time to reflect on the altered climate of 1783–84 that had played such a complicating role in recent events. “There seems to be a region high in the air over all countries where it is always winter,” he wrote. But perhaps the “universal fog” and cold that had descended from the atmosphere to blanket all Europe might be attributed to volcanic activity, specifically an eruption in nearby Iceland.1
Franklin’s “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures” amounts to no more than a few pages of disconnected thoughts, scribbled amid a high-stakes diplomatic drama. The paper’s unlikely fame as a scientific document rests on its being the first published speculation on the link between volcanism and extreme weather. Franklin hastily sent his paper on meteorology to Manchester, where the local Philosophical Society had awarded him honorary membership. On December 22, 1784, the president of the society rose to speak on Franklin’s behalf. No doubt dismayed at the paper’s thinness, he had no choice but to read the “conjectures” of the society’s celebrated new member to the crowded assembly. There, in a freezing Manchester public hall, the theory that volcanic eruptions are capable of wreaking climate havoc was given its first public utterance.
No one believed it for a moment. Even as the hall emptied, Franklin’s idea had entered the long oblivion of prematurely announced truths. But, of course, he was right. The eruption of the Iceland volcano Laki in June 1783 brought abrupt cooling, crop failures, and misery to Europe the following year, and created dangerously icy conditions for Atlantic shipping. Even so, Laki did not go global. Latitude is critical to the relation between volcanic eruptions and climate. As a high northern volcano, Laki’s ejecta did not penetrate the trans-hemispheric currents of the planet’s climate system, and its meteorological impacts were confined to the North Atlantic and Europe.
Two hundred years ago, no one—not even Benjamin Franklin—had grasped the potential global impact of volcanic emissions from the tropics, where, two decades after Laki, planet Earth’s greatest eruption of the millennium took place. When Mount Tambora—located on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies—blew itself up with apocalyptic force in April 1815, no one linked that single, barely reported geological event with the cascading worldwide weather disasters in its three-year wake.
Within weeks, Tambora’s stratospheric ash cloud had circled the planet at the equator, from where it embarked on a slow-moving sabotage of the global climate system at all latitudes. Five months after the eruption, in September 1815, meteorological enthusiast Thomas Forster observed strange, spectacular sunsets over Tunbridge Wells near London. “Fair dry day,” he wrote in his weather diary—but “at sunset a fine red blush marked by diverging red and blue bars.”2 Artists across Europe took note of the changed atmosphere. William Turner drew vivid red skyscapes that, in their coloristic abstraction, seem like an advertisement for the future of art. Meanwhile, from his studio on Greifswald Harbor in Germany, Caspar David Friedrich painted a sky with a chromic density that—one scientific study has found—corresponds to the “optical aerosol depth” of the colossal volcanic eruption that year.3
Figure 0.1. This 2007 model of Tambora’s sulfate cloud shows its global reach, with a band of high aerosol concentration at mid- to high latitudes in both hemispheres, notably over the North Atlantic and Western Europe. This model situates the volcanic cloud in the stratosphere, 24–32 kilometers above the Earth. (Chaochao Gao, “Atmospheric Volcanic Loading Derived from Bipolar Ice Cores: Accounting for the Spatial Distribution of Volcanic Deposition,”Journal of Geophysical Research 112 [2007]: D09109; © American Geophysical Union).
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.
Figure 0.2. Caspar David Friedrich, Ships in the Harbor (1816). Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam. (© Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY).
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.
Figure 0.3. Tambora’s caldera. The morning this photograph was taken (March 3, 2011), the mountain rumbled and the odor of sulfur was palpable. A few weeks later, the volcano began belching ash and smoke. By September that year, Indonesian seismologists had ordered evacuation of the surrounding area. Volcanologists do not expect an imminent eruption, however, on account of the geologically recent 1815 event. (Author photo).
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.
Figure 0.4. An aerial view of Tambora’s caldera taken from the International Space Station shows its terrific, lunar-like dimensions. (NASA).
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.
