The Year Without Summer (17 page)

The same sunspots that fascinated Americans in the spring and summer of 1816 created
even more consternation in Europe. Sometime in the late spring, an astronomer in Bologna
(alternately referred to in some news reports as “a mad Italian prophet”) proclaimed
that the extraordinary size and number of sunspots meant that the sun would soon be
extinguished, an event that would bring life on Earth to an end on July 18. The forecast
provoked so much anxiety among the local populace—already shaken by darkly colored
snow and unusually cold, wet spring weather—that government officials reportedly locked
the astronomer in jail to silence him.

Other self-appointed prophets sounded similar alarms. In Naples, a priest announced
that the city would soon be destroyed by a rain of fire that would last for four hours,
“and those who escaped the fire were to be devoured by serpents.” He, too, was placed
under arrest.

Nevertheless, news of the prediction spread rapidly throughout Europe, prompting a
variety of panicked responses. “Old women have taken the alarm,” scoffed
The Times
of London on July 13, “and the prediction is now a general subject of conversation.”
Outside Vienna, frightened residents of several towns gathered together for protection;
afraid that the crowds signaled the start of an insurrection, local authorities dispatched
troops to prevent any disorder. From Ghent came a report of frightened women crowding
into churches, “to prepare themselves against this dreadful catastrophe.” On the evening
of July 11—“the weather was gloomy, the thunder roared, and flashes of lightning furrowed
the dark clouds accumulated over the town”—a regiment of cavalry which had recently
arrived in Ghent sounded the retreat at 9
P.M.
by several blasts of trumpets, as usual. Nervous bystanders, however, thought the
sounds had come from the Seventh Trumpet, the apocalyptic signal prophesied in the
New Testament Book of Revelation. “Suddenly cries, groans, tears, lamentations, were
heard on every side,” recalled a witness. “Three fourths of the inhabitants rushed
forth from their houses, and threw themselves on their knees in the streets and public
places. It was not without infinite trouble that the cause of this extraordinary terror
was discovered.” On the same day in Liège, “an enormous mass of clouds appearing …
in the shape of a huge mountain over the city” created a similar panic.

Nor were France and Britain exempt from the hysteria. “In France as well as in this
country, and generally throughout Europe,” acknowledged
The Times
, “the prediction of the mad Italian prophet, relative to the end of the world, had
produced great dread in the minds of some, so that they neglected all business, and
gave themselves up entirely to despondency.” And in Britain, the newspaper’s editor
claimed, anxiety over the sunspots—“added to the severe distress to which the country
is otherwise reduced”—had “infused into the minds of the people generally the greatest
apprehension and alarm.” In the United States, the prophecy received considerably
less publicity, although one writer in the
Atheneum
noted that it had “fairly frightened some of our own old women out of their lives.”

Newspapers published scholarly articles from professors and professional astronomers
to reassure their readers, but to no avail. As the panic spread, skeptics mocked the
gullible public. On July 9, the
London
Chronicle
dismissed the prophecies as “outrageous fooleries,” and later lamented that “the
multitude are more ignorant and credulous than in the most barbarous times.”
The Times
of London referred to “the Italian mountebanks” who circulated the prophecy, and
hinted that they had darker motives, perhaps attempting to foment revolution. The
London
Examiner
agreed that the prophecy was “not unconnected with political circumstances, and the
naturally wondering spirit to which the events of the time have given rise.”
The Times
also pointed out that the prophecy was most likely false, because everyone familiar
with the Book of Revelation knew that “the end of the world is to be announced by
the Anti-Christ, and there are yet no accounts of his appearance.” On July 17, numerous
papers in London and Paris published satirical guides with outlandish recommendations
on how to prepare for the end of the world. For his part, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
lamented to a friend that “this end of the World Weather [i.e., more cold rain] is
sadly against me by preventing all exercise.”

Credulity sometimes brought tragic results. In London, an elderly cook who was prone
to bouts of depression decided to hang herself “in a fit of melancholy,” as John Quincy
Adams observed, “at the prospect of the world’s coming to an end. Such is human credulity!”
(The coroner’s inquest brought in a verdict of insanity occasioned by the notorious
prediction.) And on the morning of July 18, an eight-year-old girl living in Bath
chose to awaken her aunt, a devout believer in the prophecy, by screaming “Aunt, Aunt,
the World’s at an end!” The words so startled the poor woman that she fell into a
coma, and remained insensate throughout the following day.

Any sighs of relief when July 18 came and went were short-lived; the heavy rains continued.
“Another wet morning,” recorded British diarist Joseph Farington. “The season very
remarkable.” As a severe storm approached Lancashire in northwest England on July
21, villagers in Longpark saw “a dense whitish cloud … which advanced with great rapidity,
and, on its nearer approach, presented the appearance of the waves of the sea tumultuously
rolling over each other.” Within ten minutes, jagged hailstones up to one inch in
diameter had shattered windows and destroyed virtually all the vegetation in the area.
The nervous residents dropped to their knees and began to pray, fearing the apocalypse
had arrived just a bit off schedule. The same storm produced almost total darkness
in Argyllshire, Scotland, setting off a similar bout of terror of impending annihilation.
And in France, a workingman in L’oise who had just returned from mass suddenly began
shouting that he, too, was a prophet, and that the end of the world was indeed approaching.

*   *   *

O
NE
Vermont farmer decided to give up and head west even before the summer was over.
Since 1814, Joseph Smith and his wife, Lucy, and their nine children had been renting
a farm in Norwich, Vermont. More than a decade earlier, Smith had owned his own land,
but a bad business investment in 1803 forced him to sell and become a tenant farmer,
moving frequently with his family, back and forth across the Vermont–New Hampshire
border, looking for the best deal. They had lived for a while in Sharon, Vermont—where
his fourth son, Joseph Jr., was born in 1805—and then in Royalton; in 1811 they moved
to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and finally Norwich. Besides working the land they rented,
Joseph and his older sons hired themselves out as farmhands at harvest time, or performed
odd jobs in town. For a while one of the boys, Hyrum, attended Moor’s Charity School
in Hanover. Lucy helped earn extra cash by painting oilcloths used as table coverings.

The Smith family’s stay in Norwich proved disappointing. In 1814, their crops failed.
The following year brought another poor harvest. “The next year [1816] an untimely
frost destroyed the crops,” Lucy later recalled, “and being the third year in succession
in which the crops had failed, it almost caused a famine.” And it persuaded Joseph
to emigrate. Several of Joseph’s brothers already had moved to northern New York State,
and the Vermont newspapers regularly carried advertisements for land in the Genesee
Valley available for two to three dollars an acre. “This was enough,” noted Lucy.
“My husband was now altogether decided upon going to New York. He came in, one day,
in quite a thoughtful mood, and sat down; after meditating some time, he observed
that, could he so arrange his affairs, he would be glad to start soon for New York.”

Joseph chose to leave alone, and promised to send for his family—which now included
a three-month-old baby, Don Carlos—once he established himself. He settled in Palmyra,
a small town of about fifteen hundred people twenty miles south of Rochester, where
he opened a small shop that sold “cake and beer”: light refreshments such as gingerbread,
pies, boiled eggs, and root beer. Joseph’s family joined him soon thereafter. It was
a region, as Joseph Jr. subsequently pointed out, of “unusual excitement on the subject
of religion.… Indeed, the whole district of country seemed affected by it, and great
multitudes united themselves to the different religious parties.”

6.

THE LOST SUMMER

“A belief begins to prevail among the many in all countries that there is something
more than natural in the present state of the weather…”

A
SEEMINGLY ENDLESS
series of storms struck Ireland in July. “The month was, without, perhaps, the exception
of a single day, a continuity of showers of hail or rain, and at the same time very
cold,” reported
The Times
of London. “A great blight in the wheat crop, particularly in Wicklow and Tipperary.
The rain was so severe that scarcely any corn was left standing.”

In the summer of 1816, the Irish economy was struggling to adjust to the short-term
demands of peacetime and the long-term effects of five decades of economic growth.
Between 1765 and 1815, prices of the agricultural goods Ireland produced—primarily
wheat, oats, pork, beef, and butter—more than doubled. During the first part of this
period, much of the demand for Irish foodstuffs came from the British and French colonies
in the West Indies, facilitated by the increasing volume of trans-Atlantic shipping.
In the latter years, trade with Britain flourished to provide food for the expanding
population of factory workers in England and Scotland; between 1778 and 1798, the
value of Ireland’s exports (including linen, its main industrial product) shipped
across the Irish Sea quadrupled. The Napoleonic Wars brought even more prosperity
to Ireland, as the British government sought food for its armies while the normal
supplies of agricultural produce from the Continent were cut off.

Rising food prices led to the cultivation of ever-greater quantities of land throughout
Ireland. Landlords drained boglands and planted crops on mountainsides that were only
marginally productive. As in England, much of this expansion was carried out with
borrowed funds. So long as prices remained high, the benefits outweighed the costs,
but Irish landlords, like their English counterparts, carried an increasing load of
debt.

Ireland’s expanding economy also contributed to a substantial increase in population,
as the island’s birthrate rose and the death rate fell. In 1767, Ireland’s population
totaled 2.5 million; by 1816 it neared 6 million. A disproportionate share of this
growth occurred in the poorer classes, and primarily in rural areas.

In the early nineteenth century, more than 80 percent of the Irish population depended
on agriculture for a living. Nearly all of the land was owned by the Anglo-Irish gentry,
who spent the bulk of their profits building grand houses on vast estates. Overwhelmingly
Protestant, the great landowners dominated Irish political, economic, and social affairs.
They often served as the only employer in the area surrounding their estates, hiring
artisans, servants, and day laborers; sometimes they also owned the grain mills to
which their tenants would bring their harvest. Tradition demanded that the gentry
lighten the burdens of their neighbors by providing occasional entertainment to their
community, and so they hosted parties and organized hunting and fishing expeditions;
as their expenses mounted, many landlords found themselves sinking even deeper in
debt. Tradition also expected the gentry to fulfill the social obligations of the
propertied classes, notably by providing charity to the poor in times of need, but
in early-nineteenth-century Ireland these duties were increasingly ignored.

Just below the landlords on the social scale came the substantial tenant farmers,
who lived comfortably and displayed their wealth through a variety of household furnishings
and tailored clothing (waistcoats, knee britches, warm stockings, and sturdy boots).
If a prosperous farmer was a Protestant, he might hope that his son would rise into
the legal or medical profession, or perhaps obtain a position in the Anglican Church.
Catholics, on the other hand, were prohibited by the penal laws (passed by Parliament
a century earlier) from attending British universities or serving in Parliament, and
were likewise excluded from careers in the civil service, the law, or the armed forces.
Hence the priesthood or a position as a schoolteacher seemed the only avenues for
their advancement.

The great majority of Ireland’s rural population—probably between 75 and 80 percent—resided
in the poorer classes of small tenant farmers, cottiers, and laborers. They typically
lived in mud cabins, the meanest of which consisted of “a single room, a hole for
a window with a board in it, the door generally off the hinges, a wicker-basket with
a hole in the bottom or an old butter-tub stuck at one corner of the thatch for a
chimney, the pig, as a matter of course, inside the cottage, and an extensive manufacture
of manure … [taking place] on the floor.” Straw often sufficed for beds; the only
cooking utensil a large iron pot; and stumps of fir trees for chairs. The walls and
roof usually consisted of “rough stones and clay mortar; a few rough sticks, procured
generally out of the bogs, which serve to support a bad covering of straw; sometimes
interlined with heath for want of a sufficiency of straw, and seldom renewed while
it is possible to inhabit it.” Those slightly better off might live in a four-room
cabin, with a handmade table and wooden kitchenware, and a wardrobe of serviceable,
albeit well-worn and patched, clothing. Their less fortunate brethren owned no overcoats
at all, and women and children went barefoot all year-round.