The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (33 page)

In New Haven, the last spring frost came on June 11, twenty days later
than any other year of the decade. The earliest fall freeze came thirty-five
days early, on August 22. Ignoring the freak July frost, 1816's growing
season was fifty-five days shorter than the usual 155, in large part because
of the Tambora eruption on the other side of the world.

While many farmers salvaged fruit and vegetable crops, the real casualty
of the summer was maize, the staple of nineteenth-century New England.
No more than a quarter of the 1816 corn harvest was fit for human consumption. The rest was unripe and moldy, barely good enough for cattle
or pigs. Money was always scarce in small rural communities, and the poor
harvest compounded the cash shortage as winter descended. Many
parishes in Quebec ran out of bread and milk. According to the Halifax
Weekly Chronicle, poor farmers in Nova Scotia supported "a miserable existence by boiling wild herbs of different sorts which they eat with their
milk; happy those who have even got milk and have not yet sacrificed this
resource to previous pressing wants."13 In Saint John's, Newfoundland,
nine hundred potential immigrants were sent back to Europe because
there was little food in the town. The governor of New Brunswick forbade
grain export or distillation of cereals into spirits of any kind.

Prices for food of all kinds skyrocketed. Seed corn from sheltered farms
in northern New England commanded up to four dollars a bushel-and
farmers were glad to obtain it at that outrageous price. Maine potatoes
rose from forty cents a bushel in spring 1816 to seventy-five cents the fol lowing year. Thomas Jefferson's finances were stretched so thin by the
poor corn harvest at Monticello, in Virginia, that he was forced to borrow
$1,000 from his agent, an enormous sum at the time. Even further south,
crop yields in North and South Carolina were a third of normal in places.

The effects of the cold of 1816 rippled on for years. While the federal
government did little to ameliorate the crisis, the New York legislature
recognized the need for improved transportation systems for moving food
to and from rural areas, at the time accessible only by the crudest of cart
tracks. The Erie Canal, which linked the Hudson River with Lake Erie,
was begun in April 1817. On October 25, 1825, the entire 523 kilometer-long canal was opened with great public fanfare. Canal boats were a
slow and cumbersome way of transporting goods or food, so the waterway was soon superseded by railroads.

The subsistence crisis of 1816/17, triggered by catastrophic harvest failures in 1816, was the last truly extensive food dearth in the Western
world. Its effects ranged from the Ottoman Empire, to parts of North
Africa, large areas of Switzerland and Italy, western Europe, and even
New England and eastern Canada. The crisis was due not only to failed
harvests but also to soaring food prices at a time of continued political
and social unrest after the Napoleonic wars.

In the west, more deaths resulted from social conditions than from actual hunger caused by a cycle of very cold years. In Switzerland, the death
rate in 1816 was 8 percent higher than in 1815; a year later it was 56 percent higher. In England and France, the rises were more moderate, because some effective steps were taken to curb rising food prices. As in
1740, most deaths resulted from infectious diseases fostered by malnutrition. Historian Alexander Stollenwerk quotes from a contemporary journal: "Many individuals have died, if not of hunger, at least of the insufficiency and bad quality of the food. . . . Such vegetables as grow wild in
the fields might afford great relief; but the idea of eating grass like animals
appears dreadful to these people."14 The large numbers of beggars in Italy,
Switzerland, and Ireland contributed to a high mortality in those coun tries, largely from typhus and the diseases of famine and hunger. "It is
horrible to see emaciated skeletons with voracious appetites gulping
down the most loathsome and unnatural foods-carcasses of dead animals, cattle fodder, leaves of nettles, swine food."15

The harvest failure of 1816 brought on typhus and relapsing fever epidemics in Britain. Glasgow witnessed 3,500 deaths from these infections
in 1818, and some 32,000 cases in a population of 130,000. An outbreak
of typhus in autumn 1816 among Spitalfields silk workers in London
spread rapidly to the poor districts of the city. Poorhouses were overflowing with "half starved beings, many of them deriving their sole claim to
relief from having slept in the streets of the parish, and who were already
seized with fever." Thomas Bateman, the medical superintendent of the
London House of Recovery, theorized that the epidemic was a barometer
of economic conditions, that "deficiency of nutriment is the principal
source of epidemic fever."bG

When the cold spring, summer, and fall weather and constant rain saturated peat and firewood, making hearths hard to keep alight, the Irish
poor crowded together for warmth in filthy hovels and at soup kitchens,
passing typhus-bearing body lice feces among them. The desiccated and
infected fecal dust clung to woolen fabrics such as cloaks and blankets,
which were often the only source of warmth for people. In 1817/18,
850,000 people in Ireland were infected by the epidemic.

Bubonic plague, a frequent companion of earlier famines, appeared
here too. A severe plague outbreak had begun during a famine in central
and northwestern India in 1812. By 1813, the plague was widespread in
southeastern Europe, killing over 25,000 people in Bucharest. Strict
quarantine regulations were imposed in Adriatic and Mediterranean
ports, but outbreaks continued until 1822, with the Balearic Islands in
the western Mediterranean losing 12,000 people in 1820. The plague
never affected western Europe, despite the poor harvests and widespread
hunger, partly because of strict quarantine measures at eastern frontiers
and Mediterranean ports, but also because of critical improvements in
domestic hygiene such as the widespread use of masonry, brick, and tile
instead of wood, earth, and straw in towns and cities.

A well-founded fear of fire had prompted the change. After the great
fire of London, 9,000 brick houses replaced 13,200 wooden dwellings destroyed by the conflagration. Other cities like Amsterdam, Paris, and
Vienna slowly followed suit. The changeover also helped improve hygienic conditions by providing less favorable living conditions for fleas
and rats. Straw floor coverings disappeared, while private grain storage
bins gave way to better-built and -maintained public facilities, again providing a less favorable environment for insects and rodents. It was no coincidence that plague epidemics continued to ravage eastern Europe and
much of southwestern Asia, where most people continued to live in
earthen and timber dwellings. Clean, rat-free buildings were a key to
plague-free environments in cities. Today, bubonic plague is predominantly a disease of rural populations in areas like South America, where
housing conditions are often still appalling.

The cold years of 1812 to 1820 coincided with a cycle of poor grain and
potato harvests, food scarcities, and rapidly rising commodity prices in
societies that were already unsettled by changing economic conditions at
the end of the Napoleonic wars. Western commodity markets spun in
confusion as agricultural productivity fell rapidly. Real incomes declined.
Prices fluctuated wildly as a result of the cold weather, poor harvests, and
impulsive economic decisions about which crops to plant sometimes
made on the spur of the moment. Consumer demand shifted away from
industrial goods as people struggled to pay for food. Unemployment levels rose sharply, throwing the working poor onto the streets as purchasing
power shrank.

As the cost of living climbed beyond most working people's reach,
thousands became dependent on public or private charity or were reduced to begging. Some became vagrants, others tried to emigrate to
Eastern Europe or North America. Thousands more took to the streets
and turned to rioting and crime. Marriages and births declined. All this
happened at a time when Jacobin France was a more recent memory than
the Vietnam War is today. Governments were acutely aware of the danger
of revolution, of massive peasant rebellions. The threat of social disorder
and epidemic disease forced governments to take measures to provide public relief. The same threats frightened several European governments-like that of France-into conservative, even repressive, policies.
In the long term, there emerged a new commitment to rudimentary policies of social welfare that tried to offer basic security to the distressed in
times of economic crisis. These policies were the greatest legacy of the
Tambora eruption.

Ireland is famed for its crops of potatoes. . . . The culture of
this plant has been longer practiced there than with ... any
other European nation. . . . The Irish have always, very judiciously, looked upon this article as an object of the greatest importance.

Austin Bourke, `The Visitation of God'?

The Potato and the Great Irish Famine, 1993

The [sedan] chairmen, porters, coalheavers in London, and
those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the
strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the
British dominions, are said to be ... from the lowest rank of
people in Ireland, who are generally fed from this root. No
food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality,
or its being particularly suitable to the health of the human
constitution.

-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776,

on the Irish and potatoes

hanks to the Gulf Stream, Ireland enjoys a damp, moderate climate
with generally mild winters and springs. For centuries, the Irish subsisted
off butter, curds and whey in summer and off the fall oat crop in winter.
Raising cereals had never been easy, even when combined with cattle
farming. Excessive rainfall in spring and summer regularly damaged growing crops. Famines were commonplace and invariably followed by
plague and pestilence, which often killed more people than hunger. Both
high and low NAO indices could spell trouble for Irish farmers. A low index brought unseasonably cold winters and frosts; high indices the constant threat of heavy rain during the growing season. Here the link between excessive rainfall, poor oat crops, and winter hunger was brutally
direct.