Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (12 page)

The full dimensions of Tambora’s impact on global human society in the nineteenth century, as I have argued from the outset, have never been properly understood. What historical research has been done—by both scholars and popular historians—has been confined to the North Atlantic zone—to Tambora’s impact on western Europe and the United States. Elements of the story I have told in this chapter have thus been presented elsewhere, though not synthesized, as I have done here, into a telling case study of the direful social effects of abrupt climate change. I will return to Europe in later chapters with a more detailed narrative of Tambora’s aftermath in Ireland and the Alps, before concluding with a history of the Tambora disaster as it unfolded in parts of the United States where this book was in fact written: the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.

But first we must travel to distant regions where no history of Tambora’s deadly grasp has ever been traced. The science on Tambora has been global in its descriptions for decades, while social history, confined to the Euro-American zone, has remained stubbornly parochial until now. From epidemic disease in the Bay of Bengal, to the withered rice fields of Yunnan, to a disintegrating Arctic ice pack, the fingerprints of Tambora’s killer plume are to be found worldwide through the late 1810s and beyond. Armed with twenty-first-century scientific instruments—and a global, teleconnected imagination—we are set to break this case wide open.

CHAPTER FOUR

BLUE DEATH IN BENGAL

APOLLO’S DEADLY ARROWS

Homer’s epic war poem, the
Iliad
, long honored as the originating text of Western literature, opens with an invading army encampment devastated by disease. The god Apollo, angered by the Greeks’ poor treatment of one of his priests, descends on the beach of Troy “angered in his heart”:

He came as night comes down and knelt then

apart and opposite the ships and let go an arrow.

Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver …

The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning.
¹

Given the classical education of the British empire’s medical men, it is not surprising that the epic-sized nineteenth-century literature on cholera opens similarly, with the story of Indian governor Lord Hastings’s “Grand Army,” in late 1817, brought to its knees by a deadly epidemic that seemed to come from the malignant skies. Again and again, British writers on cholera over the coming decades would return to the near-rout of British forces in that Tambora year to comment upon and analyze the cholera, as if it were a famous scene in an Homeric poem or Shakespearean tragedy.

After a long, hot march out of Bengal, the British Grand Army was encamped by the River Sinde in north-central India. From his position at the base of a thickly wooded range of hills, Hastings could guard the sole eastern access to the fortress town of Gwalior, bastion of the independent Maratha prince Scindia. Cut off from his allies, Scindia had just concluded a tense treaty with Hastings to withhold his support for the roving Pindaree militias, whom the British governor hoped to destroy.

In the early afternoon of November 8, soldiers brought two Indian stretcher-bearers to the tent of Frederick Corbyn, a medical officer attached to the Bengal regiment of Hastings’s army. The men’s skin was clammy and leaden, their eyes sunken, pulse almost imperceptible. When one of them vomited, the sight of the rice-colored odorless fluid prompted Corbyn to seek out the superintending surgeon, who told him to break camp immediately and find safer ground. Before he could act upon this order, however, an officer of the rear guard arrived to report that hundreds of camp followers and soldiers were already dead or dying along the line of march, their lips and fingers a telltale blue. Accompanied by a cavalry guard, Corbyn hurried to the road, where he found the Indian regiments and their followers in a terrible state. Whole families who, that same morning, he had seen set off in perfect health were lying dead by the streams near the road.
²

The next day, cholera swept through the camp of the British Grand Army with “indescribable violence.” Between November 15 and 20 alone, five thousand men, women, and children died. All military maneuvers ceased, as the camp transformed into a hospital and open-air morgue. An eerie quiet descended, broken only by the groans of the dying. The British kept to their tents, venturing out only to inquire about the state of sick friends, while the Indians bore the biers of their dead to the river in silence. At the height of the epidemic, even these rituals ceased. The victims were thrown into ravines or brought to the English tents and left there—the guilt for their deaths laid ceremonially at the door of the colonizing power. Many Indians blamed the epidemic on the slaughter of a cow to feed the British officers in a nearby grove sacred to Hardaul Lala, the deified ancestor of a local noble family. Hardaul Lala
subsequently became one of the new popular cholera deities, with temples as far away as Lahore.
³

By the time it was reconstituted, Hastings’s camp had lost half its numbers. Thirty thousand followers deserted, while some ten thousand died, many of them in the act of deserting. The roads for miles around were littered with the bodies of those who had not been able to outrun the blue death. In the commander’s tent, two Indian servants collapsed behind Hastings’s chair as he worked, while the general himself gave orders that in the event of his own perishing from the contagion he should be quietly buried inside the tent so as not to demoralize his troops or send hope to Britain’s prevaricating Indian allies that the terms of the recent treaty might be disregarded.

Convinced the cause of the epidemic lay in their unhealthy situation by the River Sinde, surrounded by forest and swamp, Hastings ordered the removal of the army to higher ground. This process was hampered by the paralyzed state of the camp and the lack of vehicles with which to transport the sick. Carts, cattle, and elephants were recruited from the nearby villages, but even these proved insufficient. Many were left to die in the road. Hundreds more dropped during each day’s march, creating “the appearance of a field of battle and … an army retreating under every circumstance of discomfiture and distress.” Hastings, confiding his dismay to his journal, called the experience “heartbreaking” and “a most afflicting calamity.”
⁴

Finally, after a week of halting, harrowing progress, Hastings’s division encamped on the heights at Erich by the holy river Betwah, some fifty miles from the Sinde. The cholera, which had already begun its decline en route, now disappeared from the army’s ranks, confirming Hastings in his view, and that of subsequent reporters on the epidemic, that the cholera derived from local miasmatic causes and that the salvation of the army lay only with its “change of ground and climate.”
⁵
On November 22, Hastings heard the unfamiliar sound of laughter in the camp and breathed a sigh, knowing the crisis had passed. The British Army in India had narrowly escaped total destruction at the hands of this new, fearsome, “epidemical” cholera.

Percy Shelley’s literary-minded cousin, Thomas Medwin, served as an officer in Hastings’s army in that fateful campaign. His experience along the banks of the Sinde “haunted” him the rest of his life:

One march I shall never forget … I was in the rear-guard, and did not get to my new ground till night, and then left eight hundred men, at least, dead and dying, on the road. Such a scene of horror was perhaps never witnessed…. We lost a whole troop.
⁶

Sometime after that traumatic experience, perusing a street bookstall in Bombay, Medwin came across a volume of Shelley’s poems and resolved to renew his contact with his young relation, in whom he discerned the marks of poetic genius. After his discharge from the army, he joined the Shelleys at their new expatriate home in Pisa in October 1820.
⁷

One evening at the Casa Galetti in Pisa, when more high-minded themes were exhausted, Medwin turned the conversation to his terrifying experience with Hastings’s army in 1817. It must have seemed, to veteran members of the Shelley Circle, like a return to the creepy horror stories of the summer of 1816 in Geneva. We can imagine their stricken response to Medwin’s tale of a vast bustling camp reduced to the shocked silence of a morgue, healthy soldiers collapsing midsentence in their tents, and the nightly bonfire parades of Indian camp followers bearing their dead to the river. These stories of the Indian cholera made Claire Clairmont’s blood run cold, and she reflected harshly on Medwin’s conversational taste in her journal: “A bloody war, a sickly season, a field officer’s corpse.”
⁸

Cholera, alas, was never a sentimental disease well adapted for parlor conversation. When, that same year, the Shelleys’ friend John Keats succumbed to tuberculosis in Rome, the poet’s early death inspired Shelley’s elegiac masterpiece “Adonais.” Four years later—when Shelley himself was already dead—Lord Byron fell victim to a malarial fever in Greece, having joined the armed cause for independence. That was perhaps the definitive Romantic demise. Death by tuberculosis or malaria was well enough, but cholera, the most feared and written-about nineteenth-century disease, neither communicated an aura of wistful decline (Keats) nor sanctified the soul-endowed sufferer with tormenting fevers (Byron). Instead, it was utterly dehumanizing. In minutes, cholera turned a walking, talking person into a sluice. Microbial agents seized the body, drowned it, and drained its life-giving fluids before abandoning the corpse in its own waste. Romanticize that! The Marathan word for the cholera,
moredesheen
, was Frenchified by Europeans in India as
mort de chien
: to die like a dog. Medwin had brought the horrors of cholera home to the Shelleys for the first time (but not the last), and his ghastly tale must have made for a rare awkward silence at the Casa Galetti.

That night in Pisa in 1820, the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron all lay in the future. None of the company thought death was so near, just as they could not have imagined the geophysical teleconnections between the wet, stormy summer of 1816 they had spent together in
Geneva and the chilling war stories of cousin Thomas, returned all the way from India. Spellbound by cholera’s aura of a modern-day plague, Mount Tambora, if they had heard of it, could not have been further from their thoughts. Our situation is different, however. With the aid of recent, groundbreaking research into the dynamics of cholera and climate, Tambora will loom large in the history of the nineteenth century’s greatest killer.

THE YEAR WITHOUT A MONSOON

Beginning immediately after its eruption on April 10, 1815, Tambora’s volcanic dust veil, serene and massive above the clouds, began its westward drift aloft the winds of the upper atmosphere. Its airy passage to India outran the thousands of waterborne vessels below bent upon an identical course, breasting the trade winds from the resource-rich East Indies to commercial ports in the Indian Ocean. The vanguard of Tambora’s stratospheric plume arrived over the Bay of Bengal within days. In late April in Madras, on the southeast coast of India, the morning temperatures plummeted over the course of a single week from 50° to 26°F, a harbinger of Tambora’s profoundly disruptive effects on the weather systems of India.
⁹