The Year Without Summer (39 page)

J
AMES
Madison spent his retirement at Montpelier, supervising the operations of his plantation
while also serving as rector (succeeding Jefferson) and a member of the Board of Visitors
of the University of Virginia. In 1819, he helped found the American Colonization
Society, dedicated to the gradual abolition of slavery and the return of freed slaves
to Africa. Ten years later, at the age of seventy-eight, Madison was elected a delegate
to the Virginia Constitutional Convention. He died at Montpelier in June 1836.

From his home at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson completed his plans for the University
of Virginia, chartered by the state legislature in 1819. Jefferson designed most of
the university’s buildings and supervised its construction, selected its faculty,
and oversaw the acquisition of books for its library. Troubled by the growing rift
between North and South over the issue of slavery, and fearful of the expanding power
of the presidency, Jefferson sought solace in the visits of friends and family to
Monticello. His generosity and lavish entertainments forced him to mortgage nearly
everything he owned—including most of his remaining slaves—and he died deeply in debt
on July 4, 1826.

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J
AMES
Monroe ran for reelection in 1820. The Federalist Party, by now virtually extinct,
did not bother to nominate anyone to run against him. The final electoral vote was
231 to 1. The only elector to vote against Monroe was Governor William Plumer of New
Hampshire.

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T
HE
legal struggle between the trustees of Dartmouth College and the New Hampshire state
legislature reached the United States Supreme Court in 1819. By a vote of 6 to 1,
the court sided with the trustees. The majority decision, written by Chief Justice
John Marshall, argued that the college’s charter from the king remained a valid contract,
and that the state could not impair the obligation of the contract without violating
the United States Constitution. The decision proved a boon to the nation’s business
community by rendering corporations and institutions of higher learning less vulnerable
to state interference.

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L
ORD
Byron remained in Italy, writing poetry (including “Don Juan” and the fourth canto
of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”) and several plays. In the summer of 1823 he traveled
to Greece to help the Greeks in their fight to gain independence from the Ottoman
Empire. He contracted a fever in February 1824 which worsened after Byron was caught
in a cold, drenching rain in early April. He died at Missolonghi on April 19, at the
age of thirty-six.

Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, left England in 1818—along with Claire Clairmont
and Alba—and settled in Italy, where they renewed their acquaintance with Lord Byron.
Over the following four years, Shelley composed most of his major works, including
Prometheus Unbound
. Nevertheless, Shelley sank into a gradually deepening state of depression, caused
in part by the deaths of his son William and his youngest child, Clara. On July 8,
1822, Shelley drowned when a sudden storm struck as he was sailing in the schooner
Don Juan
from Leghorn to La Spezia. He was only twenty-nine years old.

Mary Shelley returned to England in the fall of 1823 with her only surviving child,
Percy. She continued to write, publishing several more novels before turning to short
stories, essays, biographies, reviews, and travel writing. She also oversaw the publication
of several volumes of her late husband’s poems and wrote extensive notes for some
of them. She died of a brain tumor in February 1851.

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K
ING
Louis XVIII of France remained in power until his death in 1824. Following the death
of his brother, the Ultra-Royalist Duc de Berry, Louis’ government became increasingly
dominated by reactionaries as the king grew isolated from dissenting opinions. “History
will state that Louis XVIII was a most liberal monarch reigning with great mildness
and justice to his end,” wrote King Leopold I of Belgium more than a decade later.
But in reality, Leopold added, “Louis XVIII was a clever, hard-hearted man, shackled
by no principle, very proud and false.”

Madame de Staël continued to encourage opposition to the Bourbon dynasty until she
suffered a stroke in the summer of 1817 and died in Paris on July 14—Bastille Day.

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T
HE
British economy gradually revived as harvests improved after the fall of 1817. Nevertheless,
Lord Liverpool’s government maintained its repressive policy against popular meetings
in favor of parliamentary reform, although Parliament did repeal the suspension of
habeas corpus in 1818. In August 1819, approximately 60,000 demonstrators gathered
in St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester to hear Henry Hunt speak in favor of reform. When
local magistrates and the militia attempted to seize Hunt, the crowd resisted; the
militia, aided by mounted troops, then attacked the protestors, killing eleven and
wounding nearly 400 more. Several months later, Parliament passed another series of
repressive measures known as the Six Acts. When discontent rose in Ireland in 1822,
the British government reacted with similarly harsh legislation.

Meanwhile, a small group of extremists hatched a plot to assassinate the entire Cabinet—to
behead them as they dined together—along with George IV (the former Prince Regent
who had succeeded to the throne following George III’s death on January 31, 1820)
and then seize the Tower of London, with its storehouse of weapons, and establish
a provisional government. The plan was betrayed to the authorities by one of Sidmouth’s
spies, who clearly had played a major role in organizing the plot in the first place.
Five of the conspirators were hanged, and five more were transported.

Liverpool remained in office until he suffered a paralytic stroke in February 1827.
He stepped down two months later, and died on December 4, 1828.

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S
IR
Robert Peel resigned as Chief Secretary of Ireland in 1818 and spent the next four
years out of office. In 1822, he accepted the post of home secretary, and spent much
of the next six years reforming the British legal code—repealing over 250 laws he
considered outdated, and reducing substantially the number of offenses that carried
the death penalty. In 1829 he organized the Metropolitan Police Force for the city
of London, who were thenceforth known familiarly (and not always in a complimentary
sense) as “Bobbies” or “Peelers.”

While the Whig Party held power for much of the 1830s, Peel served briefly as prime
minister from December 1834–April 1835, and then returned to office in 1841. Determined
to put a more humane face on the Tory Party, Peel sponsored legislation to establish
minimum safety standards in dangerous industries, to prohibit the employment of women
and children in underground mines, and to limit the working hours of women and children
in factories. When the Great Famine struck Ireland in 1845, Peel initially failed
to grasp the severity of the crisis; subsequently, however, he forced through Parliament—against
the wishes of a majority of his own party—a bill to repeal the Corn Laws, in part
to provide cheaper food to the starving Irish. The measure split the Conservative
Party, and led to Peel’s resignation in 1846. He continued to serve in Parliament
for four more years, until he suffered fatal injuries when his horse stumbled and
fell on top of him. He died on July 2, 1850.

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J
OSEPH
Smith and his family continued to live and farm in the Palmyra area as religious
enthusiasm steadily escalated throughout upstate New York. In 1820, fourteen-year-old
Joseph Jr. claimed that God and Jesus had appeared to him while he was praying to
warn him that none of the Christian churches that currently existed represented the
true church. Three years later, Joseph purportedly received the first of numerous
visitations from the angel Moroni, who told him of ancient records written on golden
plates and buried in a hill several miles from the Smith farm. Those records, which
Moroni said were the history of the peoples who had lived in North America two thousand
years earlier, along with the “everlasting Gospel” delivered to those people, were
subsequently translated by Joseph and published as
The Book of Mormon
. In 1830, Joseph Smith Jr. organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
popularly known as the Mormon Church.

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S
IR
Thomas Stamford Raffles left England in November 1817 as the newly appointed lieutenant-governor
of Sumatra. At the behest of the governor general of India, Lord Hastings, Raffles
began searching for a suitable location for a fortified port somewhere east of the
Straits of Malacca, to extend British influence in the region and protect the growing
British trade with China. At the end of January, 1819, he landed on the island of
Singapore, and negotiated a treaty with its rulers to establish a British trading
mission on the sparsely settled island.

Over the next five years, Raffles’ relations with the East India Company deteriorated
once again, and he returned to England in declining health in February 1824. Much
of his remaining years were spent organizing the Zoological Society of London and
founding the London Zoo. He died of a brain tumor on July 5, 1826.

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I
N
the summer of 1883, volcanic ash again darkened the skies over Indonesia. The island
of Krakatoa, essentially one large volcano, erupted periodically between May and August.
The cataclysmic final explosion on August 27 was heard in Perth, southwestern Australia,
more than 2,200 miles away, where—repeating Raffles’ mistake of nearly 70 years prior—the
residents assumed the sound to be cannonfire. Krakatoa produced less ash and sulfur
dioxide than Tambora, but the plumes still penetrated into the stratosphere, cooling
global temperatures by approximately two degrees until 1887.

As the temperatures fell, a wide range of scientific theories again emerged to account
for the changing climate. In the decades since Tambora, however, the invention and
proliferation of the telegraph had allowed news to travel much faster and farther.
The destruction caused by Krakatoa’s eruption—more than 35,000 died—made headlines
around the world. Meteorologists took notice of the coincidence of the eruption and
the cooling, but found themselves confronted by the same lack of data as their colleagues
in 1816. Although the telegraph had made it possible for scientists to collect observations
quickly, few weather stations reported data regularly for any length of time. And
with only one eruption to study, scientists could not be certain that the volcanic
ash and dust had caused the cooler temperatures.

Two more major eruptions followed Krakatoa relatively quickly: Santa Maria in Guatemala
in 1902 and Novarupta in southern Alaska in 1912. The American meteorologist William
Humphreys gathered temperature observations from immediately before and after each
eruption, as well as data from after Krakatoa. He published a paper on his findings
in 1913 that was one of the first to use observations and theories, instead of speculation,
to demonstrate that volcanic dust and ash cooled the climate. Humphreys went further,
however, arguing that large volcanic eruptions could initiate ice ages. Scientists
now know that ice ages, which develop over millennia, are fundamentally the result
of changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun, but Humphreys’ basic thesis linking rapid
cooling to volcanic eruptions proved accurate.

Many climate scientists did not accept Humphreys’ theory immediately. While his temperature
records were among the best available, they were patchy in many regions of the world
and covered only three eruptions. A dearth of volcanic activity through the middle
of the twentieth century provided few opportunities to collect supporting evidence;
there were no eruptions to rival Krakatoa between 1912 (Novarupta) and 1991 (Pinatubo
in Indonesia). Meteorologists tried to use industrial pollution as a surrogate for
volcanic dust, but could not agree on whether pollution cooled the climate by reflecting
sunlight or warmed it by trapping the heat radiating from cities. (The former outweighs
the latter.) A lack of long-term, reliable observations again proved a stumbling block.
Even as recently as 1977, a senior researcher in the field, Professor Sean Twomey,
wrote that “the time and energy put into discussion perhaps outweigh the time and
energy which have been put into measurements.”

With no volcanoes to study and at a roadblock with industrial pollution, scientists
turned to the only other source of energy powerful enough to force particles into
the stratosphere: nuclear bombs. By monitoring changes in sunlight after the nuclear-weapons
tests of the 1950s, meteorologists discovered that the fine dust driven into the stratosphere
could remain there and reflect sunlight for years. Meanwhile, newly available computer
simulations demonstrated that the volcanic sulfuric acid droplets were likely of a
similar size to those dust particles. Armed with this information and a growing database
of global temperature records, scientists closely monitored two relatively minor eruptions—Mount
Agung (Indonesia) in 1963 and Mount St. Helens (Washington State) in 1980—and confirmed
their hypotheses from the nuclear-weapons tests: Volcanic eruptions caused the climate
to cool by several degrees for two or three years. As scientists worked through the
history of volcanic eruptions, they were finally able to conclusively link the stratospheric
aerosol veil from Mount Tambora to the Year Without a Summer.

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M
OUNT
Tambora erupted again in 1819, albeit on a much smaller scale, registering only a
2 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Subsequently it has erupted twice more, once
sometime between 1847 and 1913 (the exact date is uncertain, since this and the following
eruption were confined to the caldera) and again in 1967. It is still active. A series
of earthquakes on Sumbawa in 2011 led the government of Indonesia to warn that Mount
Tambora may be preparing to erupt once more, although experts believe it very unlikely
that any explosion would approach the magnitude of the volcano’s eruption in April
1815.