The Year Without Summer (2 page)

But more than anything else, France—and the rest of Europe—desperately needed a breathing
space. A year earlier, the Marquis de Caulaincourt had written that “the need for
rest was so universally felt through every class of society, and in the army, that
peace at any price had become the ruling passion of the day.” Napoléon’s return from
Elba only deepened the prevailing exhaustion. “Our objective is to make sure that
our children have years of peace,” noted the Austrian general Karl Schwarzenberg,
“and that the world has some repose. The Emperor Napoléon had shown all too plainly
of late that he desires neither of these things.”

*   *   *

A
ROUND
seven o’clock on the evening of April 10, Mount Tambora erupted once again, this
time far more violently. Three columns of flaming lava shot into the air, meeting
briefly at their peak in what one eyewitness termed “a troubled confused manner.”
Almost immediately the entire mountain appeared to be consumed by liquid fire, a fountain
of ash, water, and molten rock shooting in every direction. Pumice stones—some walnut-sized
but others twice the size of a man’s fist—rained down upon the village of Sanggar,
nineteen miles away. After an hour, so much ash and dust had been hurled into the
atmosphere that darkness hid the fiery mountaintop from view.

As the ash clouds thickened, hot lava racing down the mountain slope heated the air
above it to thousands of degrees. The air quickly rose, leaving behind a vacuum into
which cooler air rushed from all directions. The resulting whirlwind tore up trees
by the roots and swept up men, cattle, and horses. Virtually every house in Sanggar
was flattened. The village of Tambora, closer to the volcano, vanished under a flood
of pumice. Cascading lava slammed into the ocean, destroying all aquatic life in its
path, and creating tsunamis nearly fifteen feet high which swept away everything within
their reach. Violent explosions from the reaction of lava with cold seawater threw
even greater quantities of ash into the atmosphere, and created vast fields of pumice
stones along the shoreline. These fields, some of which were three miles wide, were
light enough to float; they drifted out to sea where they were driven west by the
prevailing winds and ocean currents. Like giant icebergs, the pumice fields remained
a hazard to ships for years after the eruption. The British ship
Fairlie
encountered one in the South Indian Ocean in October 1815, more than 2,000 miles
west-southwest of Tambora. The crew initially mistook the ash for seaweed, but when
they approached they were shocked “to find it [composed of] burnt cinders, evidently
volcanic. The sea was covered with it during the next two days.” As there was no land
for hundreds of miles (and evidently being unable to believe that the pumice could
have traveled that far) the crew attributed the field to an underwater eruption of
unknown location.

At ten o’clock the magma columns—which now consisted almost entirely of molten rock
and ash, most of the water having boiled away and evaporated—collapsed under their
own weight. The eruption destroyed the top three thousand feet of the volcano, blasting
it into the air in pieces, leaving behind only a large crater three miles wide and
half a mile deep, as though the mountain had been struck by a meteor. Propelled by
the force of the eruption, gray and black particles of ash, dust, and soot rose high
into the atmosphere, some as high as twenty-five miles above the crumbling peak of
the mountain, where the winds began to spread them in all directions. As they moved
away from the eruption, the largest, heaviest particles lost their momentum first
and began to fall back towards the ground. This gave the ash cloud the shape of a
mushroom or an umbrella, with the still-erupting Tambora as the fiery shaft. The lightest
particles in the cloud, however, retained their momentum and remained high in the
air; some even continued to rise.

By eleven o’clock, the whirlwind had subsided. Only then did the explosions commence.
At Bima, on the northeast coast of Sumbawa about forty miles east of Tambora, the
British resident reported that the blasts sounded like “a heavy mortar fired close
to his ear.” A rain of ash poured down upon the villages, heavy enough to crush the
roofs of houses, including the resident’s, rendering them uninhabitable. Waves surged
in from the sea, flooding houses a foot deep and ripping fishing boats from their
moorings in the harbor, tossing them high up onto the shore. In place of dawn, there
was only darkness.

On board the
Benares
, still moored at Makassar, sailors heard the explosions—far louder than those of
the previous eruption—throughout the night. “Towards morning the reports were in quick
succession,” noted the ship’s commander, “and sometimes like three or four guns fired
together, and so heavy, that they shook the ship, as they did the houses in the fort.”
As soon as a semblance of dawn broke, the cruiser again set sail southward, to determine
the cause of the blasts.

But the sky troubled the
Benares
’s captain. “By this time,” he noted, “which was about eight
A.M.,
it was very apparent that some extraordinary occurrence had taken place. The face
of the heavens to the southward and westward had assumed the most dismal and lowering
aspect, and it was much darker than when the sun rose.” What appeared to be a heavy
squall on the horizon quickly took on a dark red glow, spreading across the sky. “By
ten it was so dark that I could scarcely discern the ship from the shore, though not
a mile distant.” Ash began to fall on the decks of the
Benares
. An hour later, nearly the entire sky was blotted out.

By this time, Tambora’s umbrella ash cloud extended for more than three hundred miles
at its widest point. As the cloud spread, the heavier clumps of ash within it drifted
to the ground, but the rest remained aloft. “The ashes now began to fall in showers,”
the ship’s captain wrote, “and the appearance altogether was truly awful and alarming.”
By noon, the darkness was complete, and the rain of ash—which one sailor described
as a tasteless “perfect impalpable powder or dust” that gave off a vaguely burnt odor—covered
every surface on the ship. “The darkness was so profound throughout the remainder
of the day,” continued the commander, “that I never saw any thing equal to it in the
darkest night; it was impossible to see your hand when held up close to the eye.”
Ash continued to fall throughout the evening; despite the captain’s efforts to cover
the deck with awnings, the particles piled as much as a foot high on many surfaces.
At six o’clock the following morning, there was still no sign of the sun, but the
accumulated weight of the ash—which one officer estimated at several tons—forced the
crew to begin tossing the powder overboard. Finally by noon on April 12, a faint light
broke through, and the captain was struck by the thought that the
Benares
resembled nothing more than a giant calcified pumice stone. For the next three days,
however, he noted that “the atmosphere still continued very thick and dusky from the
ashes that remained suspended, the rays of the sun scarce able to penetrate through
it, with little or no wind the whole time.”

A Malaysian ship from Timor sailing through the region also found itself in “utter
darkness” on April 11. As it passed by Tambora, the commander saw that the lower part
of the mountain was still in flames. Landing farther down the coast to search for
fresh water, he found the ground “covered with ashes to the depth of three feet,”
and many of the inhabitants dead. When the ship departed on a strong westward current,
it had to zigzag through a mass of cinders floating on the sea, more than a foot thick
and several miles across.

On the island of Sumatra, over a thousand miles west of Tambora, local chieftains
heard the explosions on the morning of April 11. Fearing a conflict had broken out
between rival villages, they hurried down to Fort Marlborough, the British encampment
in Bengkulu. Other tribal chieftains on Sumatra and the neighboring islands also assumed
the sounds presaged some sort of invasion, but once they received reassurance on that
score, they ascribed the explosions to supernatural causes. “Our chiefs here,” reported
an official at Fort Marlborough, “decided that it was only a contest between Jin (the
very devil), with some of his awkward squad, and the manes of their departed ancestors,
who had passed their period of probation in the mountains, and were in progress towards
paradise.”

At Gresik on eastern Java, natives decided that the blasts were the “supernatural
artillery” of the venerated South Java Sea spirit queen Nyai Loroh Kidul, fired to
celebrate the marriage of one of her children; the ash was “the dregs of her ammunition.”
If so, her ammunition made most of April 12 utterly dark in the village. When the
British resident in Gresik awoke that morning, he had the impression that he had slept
through a very long night. Reading his watch by lamplight, he discovered that it was
8:30
A.M.
, and pitch-black outside from the cloud of ashes descending. He breakfasted by candlelight
at 11:00 and thought he could see a faint glimmering of light, but at 5
P.M.
he still could “neither read nor write without candle.” In the nearby village of
Sumenep, ash fell about two inches thick, and “the trees also were loaded with it.”

A tsunami reached eastern Java around midnight on April 10–11, and tremors struck
the central region of the island eighteen hours after the eruption. Between two and
three in the afternoon of April 11, a European observer in the village of Surakarta
(Solo) noticed “a tremulous motion of the earth, distinctly indicated by the tremor
of large window frames; another comparatively violent explosion occurred late in the
afternoon.… The atmosphere appeared to be loaded with a thick vapour: the Sun was
rarely visible, and only at short intervals appearing very obscurely behind a semitransparent
substance.” Surakarta remained in darkness for much of the following day, as well.
Raffles, too, reported that even at a distance of eight hundred miles, “showers of
ashes covered the houses, the streets, and the fields, to the depth of several inches;
and amid this darkness explosions were heard at intervals, like the report of artillery
or the noise of distant thunder.”

Twenty-four hours after Tambora erupted, the ash cloud had expanded to cover an area
approximately the size of Australia. Air temperatures in the region plunged dramatically,
perhaps as much as twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Then a light southeasterly breeze sprang
up, and over the next several days most of the ash cloud drifted over the islands
west and northwest of Tambora. By the time the cloud finally departed, villages within
twenty miles of the volcano were covered with ash nearly forty inches thick; those
a hundred miles away found eight to ten inches of ash on the ground.

Even a small quantity of ash could devastate plants and wildlife. One district that
received about one-and-a-quarter inch of ash discovered that its crops were “completely
beaten down and covered by it.” Dead fish floated on the surfaces of ponds, and scores
of small birds lay dead on the ground.

By the time the volcano finally subsided, Tambora had released an estimated one hundred
cubic kilometers of molten rock as ash and pumice—enough to cover a square area one
hundred miles on each side to a depth of almost twelve feet—making it the largest
known volcanic eruption in the past 2,000 years. Geologists measure eruptions by the
Volcanic Explosivity Index, which uses whole numbers from 0 to 8 to rate the relative
amount of ash, dust, and sulphur a volcano throws into the atmosphere. Like the Richter
Scale for earthquakes, each step along the Explosivity Index is equal to a tenfold
increase in the magnitude of the eruption. Tambora merits an Index score of 7, making
the eruption approximately one thousand times more powerful than the Icelandic volcano
Eyjafjallajökull, which disrupted trans-Atlantic air travel in 2010 but rated only
a 4; one hundred times stronger than Mount St. Helens (a 5); and ten times more powerful
than Krakatoa (a 6). Only four other eruptions in the last hundred centuries have
reached a score of 7. Modern scientists identify and measure past eruptions using
layers of volcanic debris found in ice cores, lake sediments, and other undisturbed
soils. Each eruption has a distinct chemical signature that, along with conventional
methods of carbon dating, can be used to associate each layer of volcanic material
with a particular eruption.

It was also by far the deadliest eruption in recorded history. As soon as the volcano
quieted, Raffles ordered the British residents to make a survey of their districts
to ascertain the extent of the damage. The reports that reached him detailed a horrific
picture.

Before the eruption, more than twelve thousand natives lived in the immediate vicinity
of Tambora. They never had a chance to escape. Nearly all of them died within the
first twenty-four hours, mostly from ash falls and pyroclastic flows—rapidly moving
streams of partially liquefied rock and superheated gas at temperatures up to 1,000
degrees, hot enough to melt glass. Carbonized remains of villagers caught unaware
were buried beneath the lava; fewer than one hundred people survived. “The trees and
herbage of every description, along the whole of the north and west sides of the peninsula,”
reported one British official, “have been completely destroyed.” Another found that
in the area surrounding Mount Tambora, “the cattle and inhabitants were nearly all
of them destroyed … and those who survived were in such a state of deplorable starvation,
that they would unavoidably share the same fate.” One village had sunk entirely, its
former site now covered by more than three fathoms (eighteen feet) of water. And the
Raja of Sanggar confirmed that “the whole of his country was entirely desolate, and
the crops destroyed.” The survivors of his village were living on coconuts, but even
the supply of that food was nearly exhausted.