The Year Without Summer (38 page)

Conditions in the southern German states and neighboring regions of the Austrian empire,
however, rivaled those in Switzerland. Grain yields in Württemberg in 1816 were 15
percent lower than the previous year, but so much of the harvested grain was damaged
that the effective yield was closer to 50 percent of a normal year’s harvest. Bavaria
and Baden experienced similar problems, and by the end of 1816, grain prices in Bavaria,
Baden, and Württemberg had nearly doubled from their 1815 levels—then they rose by
a similar amount over the following six months. Some towns witnessed even greater
inflation in food prices; in Geradstetten, in Württemberg, the price of wheat more
than doubled between November 1816 and July 1817, while the price of oats tripled,
and the cost of potatoes quadrupled.

Governments in these areas moved more slowly and reluctantly than their counterparts
in the north to respond to the crisis. The result was widespread starvation. Contemporaries’
reports spoke of peasants eating rotting grain, or boiled weeds known as “pig’s ears,”
or bread made from sawdust and straw, or the decaying flesh of dead animals. Some
killed their own dogs and ate them. Traveling through Eifel (in the western Rhineland)
in the spring of 1817, the noted Prussian military officer and theorist Carl von Clausewitz
described “ruined figures, scarcely resembling men, prowling around the fields searching
for food among the unharvested and already half rotten potatoes that never grew to
maturity.”

Local authorities attempted to purchase foreign grain, but the minimal amounts they
imported fell far short of the public need. Bans on exports of grain failed to provide
relief when the poor could not afford to purchase the wheat and oats that remained.
When officials tried to set maximum prices for wheat, supplies often dried up as farmers
and merchants withheld their grain from market. In the town of Laichingen, where nearly
80 percent of the population lacked the resources to purchase bread or grain, officials
refused to distribute wheat from the state granaries until the citizens threatened
a violent hunger march. (Meanwhile, the wealthier citizens of Laichingen withheld
donations to the fund for poor relief, and instead loaned money to the needy, and
took advantage of the crisis to purchase property from their impoverished neighbors.)

Towns that provided effective relief in the form of Rumford soup kitchens or subsidized
bread found themselves overwhelmed with vagrants—“beggars appeared from all directions,
as if they had crawled out of the ground.” There were few organized food riots, but
desperation bred contempt for law and order among individual beggars. A visitor to
Württemberg saw “persons who looked like cadavers, and among them multitudes of children
crying out for bread. Hunger and unnatural food produced wretched and chronic ill
health among some, outbreaks of frenzy among others; those in the most desperate condition
deemed themselves no longer bound by the laws that are adopted for the protection
of private property.”

In some German states, the death rate rose by more than 20 percent. In the region
surrounding the Transvylvanian town of Arad, an estimated eighteen thousand people
died of starvation. The famine in three counties in the mountains of eastern Hungary
took another 26,000 lives. In Württemberg, deaths in 1817 outnumbered births by 3,000.

Northern Italy also suffered substantially from famine and disease. In the higher
elevations of Lombardy, the wheat harvest failed almost completely in 1816. Tuscany
and Bologna also experienced dearth conditions. Authorities imported significant amounts
of grain, but primitive transportation systems prevented effective distribution. Here,
too, beggars thronged the highways, often carrying disease with them. “A contagious
malady, analogous to typhus fever, which at present afflicts a great part of Italy,
has taken its source in crowded meetings of beggars and wretched persons, whose numbers
are very great,” reported
The
Times
of London in April 1817. “It is attributed to famine and the use of bad aliment.”
Deaths mounted throughout the region; in Bologna, the official death rate rose by
80 percent.

Thousands of families escaped the devastation by leaving their homes and traveling
down the Rhine to the ports of the Netherlands, or down the Danube to the Russian
border. The band of religious extremists who had emigrated from Württemberg in September
of 1816 and wintered in Grossliebental finally continued along the Black Sea coast
to Rostov and Stavropol, crossing the Caucasus Mountains in the summer of 1817 and
establishing the new village of Marienfeld, outside of Tiflis (Tbilisi). When word
of their arrival reached their brethren in Württemberg, another 8,000 desperate people—not
all of them members of the same separatist sect—gathered in Ulm to make the same journey.
Nearly half of them died along the way; over a thousand reportedly perished from disease
in a single day. Others simply gave up and settled wherever they stopped. About 5,000
survivors finally reached Bessarabia, recently ceded to Russia by its former Ottoman
rulers, where they founded their own new villages.

Perhaps 15,000 Germans emigrated to Russia between the summer of 1816 and the end
of 1817. Another 20,000—primarily from Baden and Württemberg—landed in the United
States. They were the fortunate ones. An even greater number, perhaps as many as 30,000,
reached Dutch seaports—especially Amsterdam—and discovered that they lacked sufficient
funds to buy passage across the Atlantic, or that there was no room even on the vastly
overcrowded ships. Forced to retrace their steps, they begged or stole their way back
through the Rhineland, driven on at every turn by the local authorities.

*   *   *

O
N
December 10, London police removed the lifeless body of a young woman from the Serpentine
River in the West End. They subsequently identified her as Harriet Shelley, the estranged
wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Harriet had disappeared a month earlier; although an
inquest declared only that she had been “found drowned,” her death was presumed to
be a suicide. Her husband blamed Harriet’s death on “her abhorred and unnatural family,”
and particularly her sister, whom Shelley claimed had driven Harriet to kill herself.

Less than three weeks later, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married in London. The ceremony,
Shelley informed Byron, was “simply with us a matter of convenience,” performed primarily
to please Mary’s father. The couple soon returned to Bath, where Mary continued to
work on the manuscript of her novel. In January, Claire Clairmont gave birth to a
daughter, whom the Shelleys named (albeit temporarily) “Alba,” a play on their nickname
for Byron (“Albe,” from his initials, “L.B.”).

Byron spent the winter on the Continent. From Milan he traveled back to Geneva, and
then to Venice. Although Shelley informed him of the birth of his daughter, and asked
his intentions for the girl in several different letters, Byron refused to accept
any responsibility for the care of the child at that time.

In March, the Shelleys moved into a house in Marlow. Shelley was spending an increasing
amount of time with Leigh Hunt, a radical reformer and author who had become a vocal
champion of Shelley’s poetry. Their friendship encouraged Shelley in his own liberal
political views. Beyond his own personal charitable donations to the unemployed laceworkers
in and around Marlow—he purportedly once gave away his shoes and walked home barefoot—Shelley
contributed a pamphlet entitled “A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout
the Kingdom,” and signed it “The Hermit of Marlow.”

To no avail. As Liverpool’s government shepherded its program of repressive legislation
through Parliament, Shelley could only lament the nation’s misfortune. “You will have
heard that the ministers have gained a victory,” Shelley informed Byron on April 23,
“which has not been disturbed by a single murmur; if I except those of famine, which
they have troops of hireling soldiers to repress.”

Summer passed peacefully, although Shelley complained about the cold, wet weather
in July. “At present we have little else than clouds and rain,” he wrote to a friend
in London. “We have a water chariot drawn by the oursers of Notus, but except some
fine warm days … which lost their way in this abominable climate as they were crossing
from Italy to Greece, it has been of little use to us. I hope you coming will be like
that of Alcuone in storms, to this wintry season.”

A month later, a London firm agreed to publish Mary Shelley’s novel. The first printing
of
Frankenstein
—a total of 500 copies—was scheduled for early 1818.

*   *   *

W
HILE
Tambora’s stratospheric aerosol cloud had its greatest impact on the Atlantic climate
during the year 1816, the thin veil of sulfuric acid droplets continued to affect
weather patterns for at least another two years. The delayed effect of the aerosol
on the North Atlantic Oscillation—due to tropical latitudes cooling more than the
poles—continued during the winter of 1816–17. The positive phase of the Oscillation
persisted throughout the season, with strong westerly winds bringing warm and moist
air from the Atlantic to western and central Europe. This warm air was able to overcome
the cooling from the aerosol cloud reflecting sunlight, such that the winter was one
or two degrees Fahrenheit milder than normal throughout Europe. By this point, the
amount of sulfuric acid in the stratosphere was beginning to decline. More than eighteen
months after the eruption, gravity was beginning to take its toll on the tiny droplets.
Chance collisions between the droplets caused them to coagulate into larger, heavier
droplets that were more quickly extracted from the stratosphere. Occasionally, intense
storm systems—such as those that produced colored snows across central Europe in the
winter of 1815–16—were able to penetrate into the stratosphere and drag a fraction
of the cloud into the troposphere and, from there, to the surface. Droplet by droplet,
the aerosol cloud lost its coherence; by the end of 1817, very little of it remained.

Just as the land and ocean—through their reservoirs of heat—delayed the cooling effect
of the aerosol cloud on global temperatures, they also opposed the climate’s return
towards its original, pre-Tambora balance of energies. Even though the aerosol cloud
was dwindling by the summer of 1817, Europe experienced yet another abnormally cold
season. The effect was not as dramatic as in 1816, though, due to the dissipating
stratospheric veil: The summer of 1817 was only two or three degrees Fahrenheit cooler
than normal, compared to the five- or six-degree cooling which Europe witnessed in
1816. Over the next year, as the aerosol cloud faded, the soil and oceans gradually
absorbed and stored heat. After a final particularly cold winter across northern Europe
and Scandinavia in 1817–18, the summer of 1818 saw temperatures on both sides of the
Atlantic return to something approaching normal.

EPILOGUE

T
HE ERUPTION OF
Mount Tambora disarranged weather patterns in Asia as well, although the scarcity
of available contemporary records makes a detailed analysis difficult. In India, unusually
low temperatures greatly reduced the summer monsoon rains, which typically arrive
in June, last through September, and provide up to ninety percent of the annual rainfall.
The monsoon winds that bring warm, moist air from the equatorial Indian Ocean to India
arise from the temperature difference between the ocean and the subcontinent: The
land warms more quickly than the ocean under the summer sun, when it shines directly
overhead at India’s latitude. The veil of stratospheric sulfuric acid from Tambora
cooled land temperatures around the world much more than ocean temperatures, at least
initially. This would have prevented the Indian landmass from heating up in the spring
and summer of 1816, reducing the temperature contrast between the land and the ocean.
While there are no accessible records of Indian land temperatures that summer, it
is likely that the cooling from Tambora weakened the monsoon winds and led to much
less precipitation than normal.

Much of the subcontinent remained parched until the end of the summer, although southern
India—which is often wet when the rest of India is dry, and vice versa—experienced
several torrential late-season downpours. As harvests failed, a combination of famine,
internal migration, and densely crowded settlements produced the world’s first cholera
pandemic. Although a disease similar to cholera had long plagued India (and Indonesia),
in the winter of 1816–17 the illness broke out of northeastern Bengal—where it killed
10,000 people in the course of several weeks—and spread rapidly across the peninsula.
British troops carried the disease into Nepal, whence it spread into Thailand, the
Philippines, Borneo, China, and Japan. By 1821 it had reached southern Iran; the following
year it entered Syria. When the pandemic finally subsided, hundreds of thousands of
people had died.

China also experienced unseasonably frigid weather in the summer of 1816. Summer snows
struck southeastern China and Taiwan, and destroyed much of the rice crop in China’s
southern provinces. The East Asian monsoon, too, was disrupted, leading to floods
in the Yangtze Valley in southern China but extreme drought in the north. Like its
counterpart in India, the East Asian monsoon winds rely upon the land-ocean temperature
contrast. Under normal conditions, the rains spread from south to north as the summer
progresses, drawn across China and towards Japan and Korea by the warm Asian landmass.
Substantially colder than normal land temperatures in 1816 might have led to the monsoon
stagnating in southern China, which would explain the heavy rains there and the dearth
of precipitation further north.

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