Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (35 page)

Evidence for the extraordinary folly of this idea is to be found on every page of this book. How ironic if a series of Tambora-sized eruptions were—by some dubious miracle of international cooperation—to be authorized, and we were to relive the weather chaos of 1815–18 not as a natural disaster but a staged volcanic catastrophe (à la Surrey Gardens) of our own making? On the other hand, for a technology-rich civilization addicted to photoshop realities and spectacular special effects—and little versed in the teleconnections of climate and human society—a supersized artificial volcano blast might make for an appropriate
climax … or finale. But in such cynical reflections, as King Lear warns us, “madness lies.”

Further complicating the project of artificial aerosol cooling is recent evidence that naturally occurring volcanic eruptions are already having an intermittent chilling effect on the impacts of man-made global warming. Even four relatively minor eruptions in the 2000–2010 period—in Indonesia, Ecuador, Papua New Guinea, and Montserrat—increased the stratospheric aerosol load sufficient to offset man-made warming by 25%.
³
Unfortunately, however, there is no volcanic solution—natural or artificial—to twenty-first-century climate change, since volcanoes explode unpredictably, while human carbon emissions remain on an inexorable upward trajectory.

• • •

A celebrated seventeenth-century painting by the landscapist Nicolas Poussin shows shepherds of antiquity in an idyllic rural setting under temperate blue skies, clustered about a stone tomb. They are pondering the enigmatic inscription on the tomb, which reads “Et in Arcadia Ego.” Death appears to be saying: “I am with you here, even in paradise.” The virile shepherds and a beautiful, well-dressed woman look on the mausoleum with curiosity and respect—and a healthy dose of disbelief. But life is so good here! they seem to say. The painting portrays the inevitability of death even as it celebrates, in loving rendering of the Arcadian landscape, the equable, life-sustaining climate that vitalized human civilization in the Mediterranean for thousands of years. Scientists call it the Holocene—the roughly twelve millennia of temperature stability since the last glacial epoch during which human agriculture flourished and with it human arts and culture. The cultural wealth of our Holocene legacy is embodied in Poussin’s exquisite painting itself, even as its serene atmosphere offers us a window onto a now vanished climatological past.

It was also Paul Crutzen, would-be climate engineer, who popularized the term “Anthropocene” to distinguish the benevolent Holocene of Poussin’s Arcadia from our modern fossil-fuel era. The Anthropocene designates the age of accelerated urban-industrial development and population increase since 1750 that has wrought ever-increasing changes on the Earth’s biosphere, and witnessed the contamination and depletion of its natural resources.
⁴
Where the deep time modulations of geology or Darwinian natural selection might be said to have long ruled unchallenged, we are now at the point, Crutzen and others have argued, where human beings have assumed the principal levers of control over biophysical conditions on planet Earth.

The Anthropocene came often to my mind as I sailed through open Arctic waters in the summer of 2012, on my intermittent global quest to retrace, in sublunary fashion, the course of Tambora’s volcanic plume from the tropics to the poles. On a journey of some 2,500 nautical miles from the west coast of Greenland to northwestern Canada, our sturdy
Russian arctic vessel encountered a solitary thin film of sea ice.
⁵
The cruise ships and oil companies had already moved in, while the few polar bears we saw prowled along sandy beaches. I had come to see The Arctic!—but was already too late. This was not the smooth-running air-conditioner of our Holocene planet as I should have found it but a new Arctic altogether—the doomed-to-be-ice-free Arctic of the Anthropocene. When the summer ice does disappear altogether—a decade or two from now—the Arctic will be an open sea for the first time in a million years. Lounging on deck in a light cotton jacket, it was difficult to imagine the terrible privations of Ross or Franklin’s crews in these waters: beset for years, frostbitten, starving. But for the flowering Arctic tundra on the shore, we might have been cruising the Hudson or the Rhine. “Et in Arcadia ego,” I thought.

Because if death is always with us, according to Poussin—even in sunny, serene Arcadia—how much more true is this of a weather world in extremis, such as the Tambora-driven hell of 1815–18? The global death toll from Tambora was likely in the millions—or tens of millions if we include the worldwide cholera epidemic its eruption almost certainly triggered. Reflecting on Tambora’s three-year extreme weather regime of the early nineteenth century, we cannot predict what the mortality rates of our own extended climate emergency will be in the Anthropocene age. Advanced infrastructure, technology, and communications guarantee first-world citizens far greater resilience against weather disasters than that available to the global peasantry of 1815–18. On the other hand, the unsustainable consumption rates of the West and high population growth in developing countries increase humanity’s vulnerability overall. Already, the stresses on human food, water, and public health systems worldwide from a changing climate are immense and dangerously unpredictable.

Whatever the historical variables separating 1815 and 2015, the Tambora case study allows us, at the very least, to appreciate the scale of the current threat to human civilization. If a three-year climate change event in the early 1800s was capable of such destruction and of shaping human affairs to the extent I have described in this book, then the future impacts of multidecadal climate change must be truly off the
charts. It’s difficult to think of any aspect of our lives and societies that won’t be transformed in the coming decades, and for the worse.

Tambora’s history, then, like Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, ultimately tells a cautionary tale. Both warn against the technological hubris of our modernity through figures of intense and widespread suffering. “All men hate the wretched,” laments the Creature, Shelley’s literary projection of the homeless, starving poor of Europe in Tambora’s aftermath.
⁶
Two centuries on, the global ranks of the wretched are set to increase exponentially in coming decades at the hands of our own climate “Frankenstein,” a monster who feeds on carbon waste and grows more violent by the year. Failure to draw down the carbon emissions and rampant deforestation that drive climate change brings us ever closer to the traumatized world of 1815–18 writ large. Imagine, if you can bear it, the “Seven Sorrows” of Tambora scaled to a planet of ten billion, and lasting for centuries. While the cautionary tale of Tambora’s eruption has here been told at last, to write a history of the global climate breakdown of our early third millennium—with its relentless attrition of human well-being across all latitudes—might be beyond the capacity of any future historian, whose chaotic world it is.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My grateful thanks, first of all, to my editor at Princeton, Ingrid Gnerlich, for her enthusiastic support for this project. She never flinched from the challenge of our highwire crossing between the sciences and humanities and has been a consistent and generous advocate. If our interdisciplinary ambitions have been realized here, others at Princeton University Press likewise share in that success, including Alison Kalett, Eric Henney, Debbie Tegarden, and Jennifer Backer—consummate professionals all.

At the outset of my Tambora research, indispensable help in grappling with the scientific literature on Tambora came from climatologist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) coauthor Don Wuebbles and his graduate student Darienne Curio-Sanchez. Other scientists in the fields of volcanology and climatology provided illumination at crucial points, including Michael Schlesinger, Stephen Self, Bob Rauber, and anonymous readers at Princeton University Press. The guidance of all the above was vital for a humanist entering into the sometimes difficult terrains (and atmospheres) of the physical sciences.

The mostly unglamorous detective work required to bring the global
Tambora
story to light involved tracking down a vast range of nineteenth-century sources across multiple continents. This could not have been done without the magnificent library at the University of Illinois at my disposal and a host of expert staff. I wish to thank, in particular, Shuyong Jiang of the Asian Library, Adam Doskey in the Rare Book Room, and the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office who dealt
with my intermittent hailstorm of requests with great patience and efficiency. For research tips on “The Panic of 1819,” richly layered with moral support, my sincere thanks to David Brady in Springfield, Illinois.

As a recovery mission in early nineteenth-century global history, the writing of this book involved significant transnational challenges, of which China was the greatest for me as a nonspecialist. I take the opportunity here to thank the librarians at Yunnan University for their hospitality and aid during my research trip in 2011, Professor Rong Guangqi of Wuhan University for his first draft translations of Li Yuyang’s (now) unforgettable poetry, and a cohort of graduate students in Asian studies at Illinois who assisted at various stages of the Yunnan famine research project. For the Bengali side of the story, gratitude goes to my colleague Anustup Basu for his introduction to cholera folklore. And last, but by no means least, for the transformative experience of climbing Mount Tambora itself, I wish to thank my guide, Ma-cho, the crew from Lombok, and my Sumbawan hosts at various stations on the journey.

Final thanks and love go to my wife, Nancy, and the children I left at home on my various Tamboran wanderings (Sumbawa, India, China, the Arctic …). The quality of souvenirs I brought home for Lucas and Clara was spotty at best, but this book of many fathers will, I hope, compensate in time for the absence and other deficiencies of the one.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION
FRANKENSTEIN’S WEATHER

1
. Benjamin Franklin, “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures,”
Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester
2 (1784): 357–61; see also
Works of Benjamin Franklin
, ed. John Bigelow (New York, 1888), 8:486–89.

2
.
The Philosophical Magazine and Journal
46 (July–December 1815): 231.

3
. C. S. Zerefos et al., “Atmospheric Effects of Volcanic Eruptions as Seen by Famous Artists and Depicted in Their Paintings,”
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
7 (2007): 4027–42.

4
. Janet Todd,
Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle
(Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2007), xiii.

5
. The standard popular transatlantic history—Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel’s
Volcano Weather: The Story of 1816, the Year without a Summer
(Newport, RI: Seven Seas Press, 1983)—has recently been superseded by a more detailed narrative,
The Year without Summer: 1816
and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History
(New York: St. Martin’s, 2013), by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman. The latter has the advantage of greater meteorological detail, though its geographical range and social themes do not extend beyond the terms set by John D. Post’s marvelous scholarly history,
The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

CHAPTER ONE
THE POMPEII OF THE EAST

1
. Quoted in Adam Zamoyski,
Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna
(New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 477.

2
. Bernice de Jong Boers, “The ‘Arab’ of the Indonesian Archipelago: The Famed Horse Breeds of Sumbawa,” in
Breeds of Empire: The “Invention” of the Horse in Southern Africa and Maritime South East Asia, 1500–1950
, ed. Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009), 51–64.

3
. Bernice de Jong Boers, “A Volcanic Eruption in Indonesia and Its Aftermath,”
Indonesia
60 (October 1995): 37–60.

4
. Charles Assey,
On the Trade to China, and the Indian Archipelago, with Observations on the Insecurity of British Interests in That Quarter
(London, 1819), 13–14. For a recent historical account of indigenous piracy in the region, see James F. Warren,
Iranun and Balangingi: Globalization, Maritime Raiding and the Birth of Ethnicity
(Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2002), and note 5 below.