Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (23 page)

Evidence from the text of
Frankenstein
suggests that Mary found material for the Walton character in one passage from the
Quarterly Review
article in particular, in which Barrow mockingly recounts the misadventures of a low-ranked naval officer named Duncan who, in 1790, set out to explore the northern reaches of Hudson Bay in Canada. “Never,” wrote Barrow, “was man more sanguine of success in any undertaking than Mr. Duncan.”
Frankenstein
, likewise set in the 1790s, correspondingly opens with Walton’s airy optimism: he dreams he will discover an open Arctic sea “where frost and snow are banished … a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe … a perpetual splendour.” But Shelley’s Walton, like his historical counterpart Duncan, soon finds himself beset by ice, misfortune, and a mutinous crew. Barrow’s contemptuous description of Duncan’s failed efforts—“grief and vexation so preyed on his mind as to render a voyage which promised every thing, completely abortive”—in turn offered Mary Shelley the perfect model for Walton’s shame at the conclusion of
Frankenstein
, when he abandons his quest for the Edenic North Pole of his imagination, acutely “disappointed” and quasi-suicidal.
³²

In the concluding drama surrounding the abandonment of Walton’s polar quest, Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein is made to sound like John Barrow himself. In an impassioned speech he delivers to Walton’s crew,
Frankenstein implores them not to abandon their “glorious expedition” but to “return as heroes who have fought and conquered” the terrors of the Arctic. His patriotic rhetoric, like Barrow’s on the British public, has a spellbinding effect: “when he speaks, they no longer despair; he rouses their energies, and, while they hear his voice, they believe these vast mountains of ice are mole-hills, which will vanish before the resolutions of man.”
³³
For the reader, however, Frankenstein’s speech, like his scientific idealisms, rings hollow. We take leave of Shelley’s novel persuaded that the romantic quest for a northwest passage stands second only to the reawakening of corpses with electricity as an example of extreme human folly. Her friend and fellow polar skeptic, Lord Byron, put it with customary pith:

…voyages to the Poles,

Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,

Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.
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It was to be many decades before Mary Shelley’s Arctic warnings were heeded—decades of frostbite, starvation, lost ships, and lost men. At an early point, public fascination with the polar quest became untethered from any worldly measure of success. Instead, the enterprise took on the characteristics of a neo-Arthurian cult, to which Britain’s finest knights would naturally be sacrificed in search of the elusive grail. Barrow’s mythology of the northwest passage took hold of the public imagination in ways beyond his wildest dreams. Thousands of newspaper column inches chronicled the British polar expeditions between 1818 and 1860, not to mention a veritable blizzard of stories, plays, panoramas, songs, political speeches, paintings, prints, and photographs. The Arctic explorers themselves—Parry, Ross, Franklin, and their suffering bands of brothers—enjoyed massive celebrity: the narratives of their bleak, often nightmarish journeys were devoured by millions worldwide. The bitter, gothic romance of polar exploration, first to the Arctic then to Antarctica, evolved into a defining cultural symbol of the Victorian period in Britain.

Given the dozens of history books devoted to the significance of British polar exploration, how poignant then to learn that none of it might have occurred at all—or, at least, that the polar history of the nineteenth century would have taken a vastly different course—were it not for the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815, which wrought temporary but radical environmental changes on the Arctic Circle. Tambora’s volcanic dust might have vanished from the atmosphere a few years after 1815, but the Edenic prospect it opened—of an unfrozen north of “perpetual splendour”—persisted a full century in restless British fancies. Only the definitive failure of Robert Scott in the Antarctic in 1912—coupled with the triumphant expeditions of Roald Amundsen who claimed the Northwest Passage and both poles for Norway—at last drove a stake through the dead heart of John Barrow and his fever dreams of British polar dominion. The subsequent trauma of World War I—which put an end to Victorian fantasies of many kinds—ensured that this time there would be no full-fledged revival, no new Franklin (or Frankenstein) to sacrifice himself gloriously on the ice.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ICE TSUNAMI IN THE ALPS

While John Barrow peddled his theories of global warming to a gullible Admiralty in late 1817, others put a more commonsensical gloss on the cold, violent weather of the Tambora period. The world was getting permanently colder across the entire hemisphere: a frightening age of glaciation was underway. In a long essay baldly titled “Climate,” a writer for the
Morning Chronicle
in London reflected gloomily on the deteriorating atmosphere:

In America, as well as in Europe, the climate and temperature of the air seem to have undergone an equal vicissitude within the last few years. The changes are more frequent, and the heat of the sun is not so early or so strongly experienced as formerly … verify[ing] the theory of those observers of nature, who have said that the extreme cold of the north is gradually making encroachments upon the extreme heat of the south.

Contra Barrow, this writer interprets the increased presence of ice floes in southerly latitudes as evidence that the polar ice cap is rapidly
expanding
, not breaking up. In addition to the authority of reliable “observers of nature,” the author draws his readers’ attention to “authentic reports of the best informed travellers” to the Alps, where the glaciers “continue perpetually to increase in bulk.” An obvious connection must exist, he
argues, between the increase in polar ice and the menacing advance of Alpine glaciers.

The
Chronicle
’s climate prognosticator fears the worst and concludes his article with a general appeal to the authorities to “make every effort, to which human ingenuity and strength are competent … for the purpose of counteracting the growing evil.” Because he views the deteriorating climate in hemispheric terms, the writer advocates international cooperation. As a starting point, he suggests, the navies of the world might usefully combine to “navigat[e] these immense masses of ice into the more southern oceans.”
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While John Barrow dreamed of sending his heroic officers on a northward cruise into balmy polar seas in 1817, our author charts a diametrically opposite course for the British navy. Their post-Napoleonic mission? To chaperone titanical icebergs in the direction of the tropics.

“THE RACE OF MAN FLIES FAR IN DREAD”

“The best informed travellers” the London journalist quotes regarding Swiss glaciers in 1817 could not have included the obscure continental tourists Mary and Percy Shelley. But the Shelleys, on a tour of the Alps in July 1816, were keen eyewitnesses to the alarming glaciation of the Tambora period, and their imaginative reflections on the subject have long outlasted those of the
Morning Chronicle
’s sources. In the summer of 1816, the Shelleys entered an Alpine landscape in the throes of atmospheric cooling wrought by Tambora’s eruption half a world away. As we have seen, the average Swiss temperatures for the summer months that year reached historic lows, around 14°C. The summer’s maximum “warmth” in July and August was barely that of a very cold June day in today’s terms. Moreover, these months were extremely wet, making life miserable for both villagers and tourists, and smothering the mountaintops in record snows. Accustomed to the summer pasturing of their cattle on the Alpine meadows, the highland farmers could only look on anxiously as the low winter snow line persisted into the spring.
Huge avalanches, normally a feature of the springtime melt, continued through August.
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The Shelleys observed at close quarters the ecological impacts of the volcanic summer of 1816 across the Alpine landscape. Riding mules for the ascent to the tourist hub of Chamonix, they barely negotiated a raging torrent that, three days before, had “descended from the snow & torn the road away.” The ever-present clouds of that summer obscured the airy summit of Mont Blanc as they passed into the valley of Chamonix, but this minor disappointment was soon assuaged by another highly gratifying expression of the mountains’ elemental power:

Suddenly we heard a sound as of a burst of smothered thunder rolling above…. Our guide hastily pointed out to us a part of the mountain opposite from whence the sound came.—It was an avalanche. We saw the smoke of its path among the rocks & continued to hear at intervals the bursting of its fall—It fell on the bed of a torrent which it displaced & presently we saw the torrent also spread itself over the ravine.
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The thunderous avalanche signaled a glacier on the march. The smoky deluge of snow, soon to harden into ice, marked a glacier’s first claim upon its extended frontier. Glaciers are “sensitive barometers of climate change,” capable of rapid and dramatic response to fluctuations in atmospheric temperatures and precipitation. Summer temperatures are especially decisive, accounting for 90% of interannual growth in glacier mass.
⁴
As the Shelley party would soon learn, the Alpine ice had been particularly aggressive that year, locking up valuable highland pastures and advancing menacingly upon the populated valleys. The empire-hungry Napoleon, who had in 1800 marched his armies across these mountains to conquer Italy, now languished in exile, but the cold, snowy years of 1815–18 had stirred the territorial ambitions of an even greater force of nature.

The literary members of the Shelley Circle, for all their differences in style, shared the talent of every serious writer: they transformed their ordinary lived experiences into art. Descriptions of events in their personal
letters very often show up, in altered form, in their poems or fiction. So it was with the Shelleys’ tour of the Mont Blanc glaciers in the cold summer of 1816. The night of their arrival in Chamonix, Shelley described in a letter to his friend Peacock in London his exhilarated wonder on first coming into view of Europe’s highest mountain range. “I never knew I never imagined what mountains were before,” he wrote, groping for words. “The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when suddenly they burst upon the sight, a sentiment of extactic [
sic
] wonder, not unallied to madness.”
⁵
The next day, housebound once again by rain, Percy revisited the experience in verse form as the poem “Mont Blanc,” with its famous concluding challenge to the Alpine summit:

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind’s imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

In other words, the highest peak in Europe would be nothing without Shelley there to exalt it.

Percy’s day trip to the glacier of Bossons, which skirts the southern slopes of Mont Blanc, had produced conflicting emotions. He was struck, as all Alpine tourists were, by the immense rivers of ice descending from the mountains to the valleys and by the contrast between “the green meadows & the dark woods with the dazzling whiteness of its precipices and pinnacles.” But he seems to have been genuinely appalled by his guide’s information that the glacier was
advancing
at the rate of a foot a day over the valley, swallowing up the pretty Swiss landscape like a giant white python: “These glaciers flow perpetually into the valley,” Shelley wrote that evening, “ravaging in their slow but irresistible progress the pastures & the forests which surround them, & performing a work of desolation in ages which a river of lava might accomplish in an hour, but far more irretrievably.” Poet-scientist that he was, Shelley could look over the white stillness of the Bossons glacier and intuit within it the rage of a volcano, like the slopes of Vesuvius he would climb two summers later. Shelley had read educated accounts of
the glaciers that theorized their perpetual advance and decay, but his guide assured him that the local people held a darker view—namely, that the glaciers would eventually smother the entire valley, as they had done in the ancient times.

The French-American travel writer Louis Simond, traveling through the same valley the following summer, observed that the winter of 1816–17 had been “remarkably mild” around Chamonix but that snowfall levels on the mountains were tremendous. As a result, the valley’s twin glaciers—the Bossons and the Mer de Glace—had advanced more than a hundred feet beyond their usual range. He gives a vivid account of the glacier’s slow-motion destruction in terms reminiscent of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”:

With slow, but irresistible power, the ice pushes forward vast heaps of stones, bends down large trees to the earth, and gradually passes over them…. Streams of water of a milky appearance, continually issuing from under the glacier, formed new channels through the adjacent meadows.

These meadows represented cultivated land, dotted with valuable farmhouses, barns, and mills, whose icy submersion the local farmers were powerless to prevent. Simond witnessed the quiet unfolding of this human tragedy in the Chamonix valley in 1817: “The miserable inhabitants, collected into melancholy groups, looked on dejectedly…. Several dwellings are actually under the glaciers, and others await the same destruction.”
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The dejection of the montagnards of Chamonix is understandable. The climate historian Christian Pfister has established a triangular correlation between cold summers, glacial advance, and historical peaks in grain prices in Switzerland.
⁷
For the Alpine peasantry, energized glaciers signified the risk of starvation, not merely an interesting geological phenomenon. By the end of the Tamboran cooling regime in 1818, the Bossons glacier had submerged some five hectares of farmland in the valley and threatened the village of Monquart. The hapless residents, taking a providential view of the glacier’s expansion, performed
a ceremony of appeasement in which they planted a large cross at its voracious rim.
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