March 25, 2023 • 26 mins
The 2015 episode covers a volcano eruption in Sumbawa, Indonesia in 1816, that combined with several other factors to create an unusual -- and catastrophic -- series of weather events.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, since the Year Without a Summer got a
very brief mention in our roller Coaster episode, we were
bringing that out as Today's Saturday Classic. And this episode
kicks off with us talking about author Mary robin At Kawal,
who has actually been on the show since this episode
came out. We interviewed her in twenty eighteen about her
Lady Astronaut Duology. Tracy did that interview that is set
(00:25):
during an alternate version of the Space Race. So we
talked about things like how she avoided anachronisms and various
real world historical people and events that played a role
in the books. So if folks are interested in hearing that,
it's a really great talk. It came out on August twentieth,
twenty eighteen. This episode came out on January twelfth, twenty fifteen,
(00:46):
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy and I'm Holly Frying. So perhaps you
(01:07):
have heard of Mary Robinett Kalal. Maybe you're a listener
to this podcast. She has written, among other things, a
series of novels that are known as the glamorous histories,
and these are basically Jane Austen novels with magic. So
if that sounds delightful to you and you have not
read them, you will probably be delighted because they are
(01:28):
pretty charming and touching and funny. And the third one
was some of my most recent airplane reading while I
was on a flight, and that book is called Without
a Summer. It's said in eighteen sixteen, and in addition
to several running mentions of past podcast subjects the Luddites,
there's ongoing discussion about about whether that year's unseasonably cold
(01:52):
weather is caused by magic. Basically, so this is not
unseasonably cold like chillier than normal. It's unseasonably cold like
it's snowing in July and all of the crops have
frozen in the ground. So, in spite of the similarities
in their names, I was so absorbed in this book
(02:12):
that it wasn't until the very end that I made
the connection that this unseasonably called fictional setting is the
same as the real world event the year Without a Summer,
which is also a listener request from listener Cecile, so Cecil,
you can thank Mary Robinett Koal for bumping this to
the top of the list, because after we landed, I
(02:35):
was like, I want to learn more about that and
what really happened. So this story actually starts with the volcano.
And the volcano, which was Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia,
was probably not the only factor in eighteen sixteenth bizarre weather,
and we'll talk about that a little bit more later,
but it was definitely a very significant major part of it,
(02:58):
and it had immediate devastating effect in Asia and the
tropical Pacific, and a lot of these are unfortunately really
glossed over when people talk about the year without a summer.
There were several major volcanic eruptions in the early eighteen teens.
One was Sufferrare on Saint Vincent Island in the Caribbean
in eighteen twelve. Mount Mayon and the Philippines erupted in
(03:21):
eighteen fourteen, and then there was an immense explosion from
Tambora which started on April fifth, eighteen fifteen, and went
on for days, with the worst of the eruption really
getting going on the tenth. And in the memoir of
Sir Stamford, Raffles, the British Lieutenant governor of Java at
the time, quote, the first explosions were heard on this
(03:42):
island in the evening of the fifth of April. They
were noticed in every quarter and continued at intervals until
the following day. The noise was in the first instance
almost universally attributed to distant cannon, so much so that
a detachment of troops who were marched from Joke Jakarta
in the expectation that a neighboring post was attacked, and
along the coast boats were in two instances dispatched in
(04:05):
quest of a supposed ship in distress. On the following morning, however,
a slight fall of ashes removed all doubt as to
the cause of the sound, and he goes on to
say that it sounded so close that they really all
believed it was a volcano that was actually much closer
to them than Tambora. When the eruption started, eyewitnesses on
the island of Zimbawa reported three extremely tall, very distinct
(04:30):
columns of flame that came up from the volcano's crater,
and then they kind of crashed into one another high
up above it, before cascading back down stones that were
on average the size of a walnut also rained down,
along with tons and tons of ash. Also falling in
the vicinity of the mountain were trees and even animals
(04:52):
that had been on the upper slopes, which were torn
apart by the eruption. The eruption of Tambora case you
could not surmise this from Tracy's description, was huge. It
was much bigger and much deadlier than the far more
well known eruption of Krakatoa that happened almost seventy years later.
People reported hearing it as far away as Sumatra, which
(05:15):
is more than a thousand miles away from where it
was happening. There was also so much ash in the
air that it was, according to reports, dark for three
days for three hundred miles around the volcano. After the
eruption peaked, the volcano itself also got a lot shorter.
It lost almost a third of its pre eruption height,
(05:38):
dropping from four thousand, two hundred to two thousand, eight
hundred meters. Not surprisingly, the island of Sumbawa was devastated.
More than ten thousand people died in the eruption itself.
The entire island was covered in ash, and this ash
had an average depth of between fifty and sixty centimeters,
(05:59):
so between twenty and thirty inches of ash. The ash
was deeper the closer you got to the volcano, and
so much of it fell that buildings collapsed under its weight,
and a two thousand and four archaeological expedition found a
village that was buried under an ash layer ten feet thick.
Ash spread to the north and northwest, blanketing the sea
(06:22):
and the neighboring islands. British vessels reported patches of ash
in the sea around Indonesia that was several feet deep
and had to be essentially plowed through. Two of Simbawa's
prinstoms were completely destroyed and their common languages became extinct,
and the influx of volcanic material into the ocean also
(06:43):
spawned a tsunami that struck other parts of the island
as well as neighboring islands, so that people who had
survived the initial eruption wound up being killed in the tsunami. Afterward,
most of the crops in the surrounding area were destroyed, and,
as is so often the case when such a massive
natural disaster, famine and disease spread and its wake, including
(07:06):
among livestock and wild animals. People became so hungry that
they resorted to eating their horses, which were working animals
that were necessary for transportation and for work. And all
of this wasn't limited just to the island of Simbawa.
People in neighboring islands starved to death as volcanic ash
killed their rice crops. There was a massive migration to
(07:28):
other islands, and some of those islands could not sustain
the needs of all of these newcomers that were causing
their economies and their food supplies to collapse. And many
of those islands were facing famines and epidemics of their
own in the wake of the volcano. Bali and Lombach
were particularly hard hit. Estimates of the total death toll
in Indonesia really vary, but sources generally agree that it
(07:52):
was at least one hundred seventeen thousand people who died
in the eruption and its aftermath. It took more than
five years before crops could be harvested again. On the
most affected parts of Sumbawa, recovery was extremely slow. Two
government officials wrote that the princetoms of Sumbawa and Dampo
were quote beginning to recover in eighteen twenty four, so
(08:15):
we're talking about almost a decade later. Other Prinstoms were,
in their words still quote a desolate heap of rubble.
The whole thing had an extremely long lasting effect on
the island's ecology. You could probably even say that it
was permanently changed. And places ash made the ground were fertile,
but it was also drier. So Bali and lomboch So
(08:38):
neighboring islands wound up with really bountiful rice harvests a
few years later thanks to all the ash and the soil.
But on Sumbawa, the volcano and the ash destroyed all
the vegetation, and the streams and springs that the vegetation
had been sheltering consequently dried up, so while the soil
was richer, it was also a lot drier. Sumbawa didn't
(09:00):
get quite the same benefit as some of the other
outlying islands did once it had started to recover. The
dust from the ash spread around the world, caused brilliant sunsets,
and it also reaked havoc with the weather over the
following months. In the US, dust in the air was
reported in the Washington, d c. Daily National Intelligencer on
(09:22):
May first of eighteen sixteen, and in the Norfolk, Virginia
American Beacon on the ninth. The editor of the Boston
Columbia Sentinel remarked that the sun itself seemed dimmer on
July fifteenth, which he thought was because of sun spots,
and while there was a lot of sunspot activity, it
was almost certainly because of all of the ash in
the atmosphere. So we are going to talk about exactly
(09:46):
what that ash caused in terms of the weather after
a brief word from a sponsor, so to return to Tambora.
Before we talk about how this eruption affected the weather
in parts of the world, we have a couple of caveats.
(10:08):
One is that the measurement and record keeping related to
weather statistics have really improved dramatically in the years since
all of this happened. Most of the places that we're
talking about did not have any sort of methodical pattern
of observing the weather and writing it down, which is
something we pretty much take for granted today. So that
means a lot of the records that we have are
(10:29):
erratic and subjective, but there is a ton of documentation
overall in the historical record, in the form of newspapers, letters, journals, diaries,
and other documents. So there's so much of it that
we know just from that part that this was a
real event and not just somebody overreacting about a cold snap. Also,
(10:53):
we have a lot of documentation about eighteen sixteens weather
in North America and Europe and parts of Asia. But
while it's pretty logical to conclude that the weather was
completely weird everywhere as a consequence of all of this
volcanic activity, we have much less in the way of
actual records from Africa, South America, and Australia. So when
(11:14):
we walk through what we know, it is mostly from
North American, European and Asian points of view. In North America,
particularly on the east coast, stretching from the Carolinas all
the way up through what's now Ontario and Quebec, the
spring of eighteen sixteen was overall cooler and drier than normal,
although there were some big warm spells mixed in, Temperatures
(11:36):
kind of swung wildly from balmy to freezing and back again.
Then the summer had three extreme cold spells in June, July,
and August the first huge cold wave stretch. From June
fifth to June eleventh, Temperatures in New England dropped from
the eighties to the forties in the wake of a thunderstorm,
(11:56):
and that actually became the high for the next several days.
Eighteen inches of snow was reported in Cabot, Vermont, on
the eighth, and a hard frost that stretched well into
the south on the eleventh killed most of the crops
that had managed to survive up until that point. People
started to talk about the real possibility of a famine.
Within weeks, New England temperatures were really unseasonably hot, again,
(12:20):
breaking one hundred in parts of Massachusetts, which doesn't happen
all that often, especially not this early in the season.
Another four day cold snap hit eastern North America starting
on July sixth. In this case, frosts killed the replanted crops,
although it was not as snowy this time around. Most
of the snow reported in the US was in the
(12:41):
mountains of Vermont, but further north in Montreal, bodies of
water completely froze over with a layer of ice. This
snap also reached even farther south, causing cold weather and
frosts in places that had escaped in the June wave.
The cold weather came back again on August twenty first,
causing more snow in the Vermont Mountains, along with frosts
(13:03):
as far south as North Carolina and as far west
as Kentucky and Ohio. Just as alarming at this point
was a drought which had affected much of the southern
and eastern US, and it's estimated that up to half
of the cotton crop in the South failed because of
this dry weather. Grain prices skyrocketed and the drought didn't
(13:24):
break until September, after the cold weather was over, only
to be about to start again because it was heading
into autumn. The price of flour rose from four dollars
a barrel to between eleven and twenty dollars per barrel,
The wholesale price of wheat nearly doubled, and the price
of virtually every food staple shot up. There was also
(13:44):
a huge increase in migration of farmers from the Eastern
United States into the West, as people hoped that they
would find better growing conditions, and because the West really
hadn't seen the kind of unseasonable cold that the East
Coast had about twice as many people decided to move
west that year, as was typical at that point. In
(14:07):
several states, including New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey,
people called for a ban on distillery because of the
grain shortage. When people couldn't afford grain to feed their
livestock and their working animals, they ate the animals instead.
So that was North America's eighteen to sixteen summer. In Europe,
(14:27):
the summer was similarly wintry, but it also seemed like
it got all the rain that North America had been missing.
Western Europe was the most affected, but crops failed all
over the continent thanks to the fields being flooded and
later frozen. Crops that are sensitive to having too much water,
like wine grapes, really suffered in their quality when they
(14:48):
managed to survive. Plus, all the incessant rain made things
generally wet and moldy. Because horses were the main source
of transportation and grain became so much more expensi of
the cost of travel in Europe skyrocketed. Famine spread in
Switzerland and Ireland. In Switzerland, the government had to distribute
(15:09):
information about how to tell poisonous plants from ones that
were safe to eat as people try to scavenge what
they could from out in the woods or the wilds.
In Ireland, a typhus epidemic spread in the wake of
the famine. The story that sticks in a lot of
people's minds about how this played out in Europe is
that the infamous evening in which George Gordon, Lord Byron,
(15:31):
proposed that all of his guests at his Lake Geneva
Villa write a story. That's the visit in which Mary
Shelley wound up writing Frankenstein. That all happened in the
middle of this cold, wretched summer, And also written during
this was Byron's poem Darkness, And that poem begins, I
had a dream which was not all a dream. The
(15:54):
bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling
in the eternal space Raylists and Athlas, and the icy
earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn
came and went and came and brought no day, and
men forgot their passions in the dread of this, their desolation,
and all hearts were chilled to a selfish prayer for
(16:15):
light in Asia. Moving on to the third big place
that we have lots of information about the volcano disrupted
the monsoon cycle in India and Korea, so things were
dry when they were supposed to be wet, and then
way wetter than they were supposed to be once the
rain actually arrived. This caused rice crops, which really rely
(16:36):
on that monsoon cycle, to fail all over. The change
in the weather also affected which bacteria could thrive in
the Bay of Bengal, and unfortunately, one species that did
thrive was a new strain of cholera, which people had
less resistance too than previous strains. Bengal Kolera spread out
of India to the rest of the world in eighteen seventeen,
(16:57):
and the strain killed tens of millions of people. There's
actually some debate in the scientific community about just how
much of this shift had to do with the volcano
and Unon Province in southwestern China, crops failed in the
face of just a bitter bitter cold and a much
wetter season than normal, and the book Tambora, The Eruption
(17:18):
That Changed the World, author Gillen Darcy Wood connects this
and this massive crop failure in famine to the rise
of opium growth in Unon as farmers turned to it
in desperation is a way to try to just make
enough money to survive when the rest of their crops
had failed. A huge famine swept through southwest China and
(17:38):
it lasted for years. Neighboring parts of China had an
influx of refugees, and much of the nation faced a
serious social unrest. So before we talk about some of
the theories at the time for what was going on,
let's have another pause for a word from a sponsor
that sounds grand. So unsurprisingly, there were many many explanations
(18:09):
at the time for what was going on and what
was causing this just bizarre weather. These I actually start
with a story about why the volcano erupted in the
first place. The population of Simbabwe was largely Muslim, and
there was a folk tale explaining the event, and that
was that a prince had fed a devout Muslim a
(18:29):
dog and then killed him, and the volcano's eruption was
an act of divine retribution for that act. A range
of explanations for the weather cropped up in North America
and Europe as well. A primary theory was sun spots.
As we mentioned briefly earlier, there were a number of
extremely large sunspots that year, some of which were visible
(18:50):
to the unaided eye, and people thought these darker areas
of the sun were colder, which is true, and a
colder sun meant colder weather. Not everyone was on board
with this idea, though, since the timing of the sun
spots did not always match up with the coldest weather.
There's actually a lot of continued study and discussion about
exactly how much sunspots can affect the Earth's weather and climate.
(19:14):
And it's partly because this all happens on such a
huge scale, and the sunspots cycle itself is so long
that it's almost impossible to isolate just sunspots from all
of the other stuff in the world that's going on
while the sun spot cycle is peaking. Yeah, you can't
really turn off the sun to get a control group
(19:35):
without it, Yeah, And you can't turn off the volcanoes
to study just the sun. Yeah. So I really tried
to find a definitive answer of good sun spots I've
been and that there's not a definitive answer. Another theory
at this time is that it had something to do
with ice in North America. Ice seemed to persist in
the Great Lakes for longer than normal, and a number
(19:56):
of ships reported huge ice floes floating in the North Atlantic.
People thought that all of this ice was actually sucking
the heat out of the atmosphere. This is really more
of a cause and effect situation. There was more ice
on the Great Lakes because it was colder than normal,
But then there was more ice floating in the Northern
Atlantic because this whole time actually caused a warming trend
(20:20):
over the poles, and so a lot of polar ice
broke up and floated away, so that it was more
of a cause and effect situation than the ice sucking
the heat out of the air. Also, a series of
pretty large earthquakes had struck various points on the Earth
in the eighteen teens, and people also blamed the weather
(20:41):
on this. The idea was that the Earth's motion had
somehow caused some kind of fluid equilibrium between the surface
of the Earth and the atmosphere, and that until something
broke that equilibrium, that there would not be enough warmth
available for crops to grow. Other scapegoats that were named
(21:02):
as the cause of all of these problems, Benjamin Franklin's
lightning rods, they were stealing electricity and disrupting the weather,
because you know, he'd invented them in the mid seventeen
hundreds and they'd become more commonplace since then. So clearly,
since that happened before the weather, it must have caused
this terrible weather. That there's so many explanations that logic
(21:23):
is sound yet there. I mean, we still see this
today when people don't totally understand something, and they'll feel
like that because one thing happened before another thing, that
the first thing caused the second thing, And it's often
not true at all, right, It's that like chronological causality
attribution that's not always valid. So the prevailing theory today
(21:49):
is that the volcanic activity, including that from Tambora and
the other eruptions that were mentioned at the top of
the show, was at least one of the primary contributors.
And this was actually something that people did discuss a
little bit at the time. It was certainly not a
widespread theory, but there were people who were like, you know,
maybe all this ash in the atmosphere, which is from
a volcano, is making it colder. People are pretty smart
(22:11):
that way. However, eighteen sixteen was not the only year
in that time period that had weird weather. In general,
it was colder than normal in a lot of places
from eighteen twelve to eighteen seventeen, to the point that
people took notice, and by studying things like ice cores
and tree rings and that kind of long term documentation
(22:34):
that the earth leaves of itself, scientists know that this
was not really just a little five year window of
a cold snap. The eighteen hundred spell at the end
of a relative cool snap that lasted around the world
for almost five hundred years, starting in fourteen hundred and
ending in around eighteen sixty. At least in the US,
(22:56):
the year without a summer prompted people to start making
more routine observances and recordings of weather conditions. The Commissioner
General of the Land Office, Josiah Meiggs, sent out a
memo to all of his registers at twenty different land
offices instructing them to make and record a number of
observations about everything from the weather to animal migrations. The
(23:17):
military also started making and recording weather observations at the
direction of Joseph Lovell, the Surgeon General of the Army,
and the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution got in
on the action as well, and consequently, the first published
weather forecasts came out in the US in eighteen forty nine.
So when I started researching this episode, I kind of
expected it to be a little bit like The Long
(23:39):
Winter Part two. So we talked about the Long Winter,
which Lara Engels Wilder wrote about last time about this
time of year, and that was the weather was really cold,
things were really hard, things were tough, but overall everything
worked out okay for the most part, and I sort
of thought this was going to be similar to that.
(24:02):
I was not expecting all of the famines and deaths
and the extreme scale of how deadly the volcano was.
The a lot of like a lot of people who
have written to suggest the topic or other things that
I've seen about it, kind of go, this was a
year that had terrible weather, a volcano caused it, and
the that's sort of all that said about the volcano,
(24:25):
as though the volcano was on an island that was
totally uninhabited, right, and that is not the case at all.
This episode gives me flashbacks to when I was a
kid and Mount Saint Helen's erupted because I lived in
Washington State at the time, so I am very familiar
with being covered with ash. Yeah, I've never lived near
(24:48):
an active volcano, so I have not had that experience.
Those are wild times. I remember my biggest concern, and
again I was a child at the time, so my
biggest concern was that all the animals have been killed.
I was really upset about the animals that may have
lost our lives. Even though probably most of them fled
before the activity actually started. I'm sure some still lost
(25:08):
our lives, but that was my big focus as a child.
I did not care that there was crap all over
everything we owned and like a half inch of ash
sitting everywhere. I was like, what about the deer? I was, really,
that's my focus. Thanks so much for joining us on
(25:30):
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff works
email address no longer works, and you can find us
all over social media at missed in History, and you
(25:53):
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Steph You Miss in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, since the Year Without a Summer got a
very brief mention in our roller Coaster episode, we were
bringing that out as Today's Saturday Classic. And this episode
kicks off with us talking about author Mary robin At Kawal,
who has actually been on the show since this episode
came out. We interviewed her in twenty eighteen about her
Lady Astronaut Duology. Tracy did that interview that is set
(00:25):
during an alternate version of the Space Race. So we
talked about things like how she avoided anachronisms and various
real world historical people and events that played a role
in the books. So if folks are interested in hearing that,
it's a really great talk. It came out on August twentieth,
twenty eighteen. This episode came out on January twelfth, twenty fifteen,
(00:46):
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy and I'm Holly Frying. So perhaps you
(01:07):
have heard of Mary Robinett Kalal. Maybe you're a listener
to this podcast. She has written, among other things, a
series of novels that are known as the glamorous histories,
and these are basically Jane Austen novels with magic. So
if that sounds delightful to you and you have not
read them, you will probably be delighted because they are
(01:28):
pretty charming and touching and funny. And the third one
was some of my most recent airplane reading while I
was on a flight, and that book is called Without
a Summer. It's said in eighteen sixteen, and in addition
to several running mentions of past podcast subjects the Luddites,
there's ongoing discussion about about whether that year's unseasonably cold
(01:52):
weather is caused by magic. Basically, so this is not
unseasonably cold like chillier than normal. It's unseasonably cold like
it's snowing in July and all of the crops have
frozen in the ground. So, in spite of the similarities
in their names, I was so absorbed in this book
(02:12):
that it wasn't until the very end that I made
the connection that this unseasonably called fictional setting is the
same as the real world event the year Without a Summer,
which is also a listener request from listener Cecile, so Cecil,
you can thank Mary Robinett Koal for bumping this to
the top of the list, because after we landed, I
(02:35):
was like, I want to learn more about that and
what really happened. So this story actually starts with the volcano.
And the volcano, which was Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia,
was probably not the only factor in eighteen sixteenth bizarre weather,
and we'll talk about that a little bit more later,
but it was definitely a very significant major part of it,
(02:58):
and it had immediate devastating effect in Asia and the
tropical Pacific, and a lot of these are unfortunately really
glossed over when people talk about the year without a summer.
There were several major volcanic eruptions in the early eighteen teens.
One was Sufferrare on Saint Vincent Island in the Caribbean
in eighteen twelve. Mount Mayon and the Philippines erupted in
(03:21):
eighteen fourteen, and then there was an immense explosion from
Tambora which started on April fifth, eighteen fifteen, and went
on for days, with the worst of the eruption really
getting going on the tenth. And in the memoir of
Sir Stamford, Raffles, the British Lieutenant governor of Java at
the time, quote, the first explosions were heard on this
(03:42):
island in the evening of the fifth of April. They
were noticed in every quarter and continued at intervals until
the following day. The noise was in the first instance
almost universally attributed to distant cannon, so much so that
a detachment of troops who were marched from Joke Jakarta
in the expectation that a neighboring post was attacked, and
along the coast boats were in two instances dispatched in
(04:05):
quest of a supposed ship in distress. On the following morning, however,
a slight fall of ashes removed all doubt as to
the cause of the sound, and he goes on to
say that it sounded so close that they really all
believed it was a volcano that was actually much closer
to them than Tambora. When the eruption started, eyewitnesses on
the island of Zimbawa reported three extremely tall, very distinct
(04:30):
columns of flame that came up from the volcano's crater,
and then they kind of crashed into one another high
up above it, before cascading back down stones that were
on average the size of a walnut also rained down,
along with tons and tons of ash. Also falling in
the vicinity of the mountain were trees and even animals
(04:52):
that had been on the upper slopes, which were torn
apart by the eruption. The eruption of Tambora case you
could not surmise this from Tracy's description, was huge. It
was much bigger and much deadlier than the far more
well known eruption of Krakatoa that happened almost seventy years later.
People reported hearing it as far away as Sumatra, which
(05:15):
is more than a thousand miles away from where it
was happening. There was also so much ash in the
air that it was, according to reports, dark for three
days for three hundred miles around the volcano. After the
eruption peaked, the volcano itself also got a lot shorter.
It lost almost a third of its pre eruption height,
(05:38):
dropping from four thousand, two hundred to two thousand, eight
hundred meters. Not surprisingly, the island of Sumbawa was devastated.
More than ten thousand people died in the eruption itself.
The entire island was covered in ash, and this ash
had an average depth of between fifty and sixty centimeters,
(05:59):
so between twenty and thirty inches of ash. The ash
was deeper the closer you got to the volcano, and
so much of it fell that buildings collapsed under its weight,
and a two thousand and four archaeological expedition found a
village that was buried under an ash layer ten feet thick.
Ash spread to the north and northwest, blanketing the sea
(06:22):
and the neighboring islands. British vessels reported patches of ash
in the sea around Indonesia that was several feet deep
and had to be essentially plowed through. Two of Simbawa's
prinstoms were completely destroyed and their common languages became extinct,
and the influx of volcanic material into the ocean also
(06:43):
spawned a tsunami that struck other parts of the island
as well as neighboring islands, so that people who had
survived the initial eruption wound up being killed in the tsunami. Afterward,
most of the crops in the surrounding area were destroyed, and,
as is so often the case when such a massive
natural disaster, famine and disease spread and its wake, including
(07:06):
among livestock and wild animals. People became so hungry that
they resorted to eating their horses, which were working animals
that were necessary for transportation and for work. And all
of this wasn't limited just to the island of Simbawa.
People in neighboring islands starved to death as volcanic ash
killed their rice crops. There was a massive migration to
(07:28):
other islands, and some of those islands could not sustain
the needs of all of these newcomers that were causing
their economies and their food supplies to collapse. And many
of those islands were facing famines and epidemics of their
own in the wake of the volcano. Bali and Lombach
were particularly hard hit. Estimates of the total death toll
in Indonesia really vary, but sources generally agree that it
(07:52):
was at least one hundred seventeen thousand people who died
in the eruption and its aftermath. It took more than
five years before crops could be harvested again. On the
most affected parts of Sumbawa, recovery was extremely slow. Two
government officials wrote that the princetoms of Sumbawa and Dampo
were quote beginning to recover in eighteen twenty four, so
(08:15):
we're talking about almost a decade later. Other Prinstoms were,
in their words still quote a desolate heap of rubble.
The whole thing had an extremely long lasting effect on
the island's ecology. You could probably even say that it
was permanently changed. And places ash made the ground were fertile,
but it was also drier. So Bali and lomboch So
(08:38):
neighboring islands wound up with really bountiful rice harvests a
few years later thanks to all the ash and the soil.
But on Sumbawa, the volcano and the ash destroyed all
the vegetation, and the streams and springs that the vegetation
had been sheltering consequently dried up, so while the soil
was richer, it was also a lot drier. Sumbawa didn't
(09:00):
get quite the same benefit as some of the other
outlying islands did once it had started to recover. The
dust from the ash spread around the world, caused brilliant sunsets,
and it also reaked havoc with the weather over the
following months. In the US, dust in the air was
reported in the Washington, d c. Daily National Intelligencer on
(09:22):
May first of eighteen sixteen, and in the Norfolk, Virginia
American Beacon on the ninth. The editor of the Boston
Columbia Sentinel remarked that the sun itself seemed dimmer on
July fifteenth, which he thought was because of sun spots,
and while there was a lot of sunspot activity, it
was almost certainly because of all of the ash in
the atmosphere. So we are going to talk about exactly
(09:46):
what that ash caused in terms of the weather after
a brief word from a sponsor, so to return to Tambora.
Before we talk about how this eruption affected the weather
in parts of the world, we have a couple of caveats.
(10:08):
One is that the measurement and record keeping related to
weather statistics have really improved dramatically in the years since
all of this happened. Most of the places that we're
talking about did not have any sort of methodical pattern
of observing the weather and writing it down, which is
something we pretty much take for granted today. So that
means a lot of the records that we have are
(10:29):
erratic and subjective, but there is a ton of documentation
overall in the historical record, in the form of newspapers, letters, journals, diaries,
and other documents. So there's so much of it that
we know just from that part that this was a
real event and not just somebody overreacting about a cold snap. Also,
(10:53):
we have a lot of documentation about eighteen sixteens weather
in North America and Europe and parts of Asia. But
while it's pretty logical to conclude that the weather was
completely weird everywhere as a consequence of all of this
volcanic activity, we have much less in the way of
actual records from Africa, South America, and Australia. So when
(11:14):
we walk through what we know, it is mostly from
North American, European and Asian points of view. In North America,
particularly on the east coast, stretching from the Carolinas all
the way up through what's now Ontario and Quebec, the
spring of eighteen sixteen was overall cooler and drier than normal,
although there were some big warm spells mixed in, Temperatures
(11:36):
kind of swung wildly from balmy to freezing and back again.
Then the summer had three extreme cold spells in June, July,
and August the first huge cold wave stretch. From June
fifth to June eleventh, Temperatures in New England dropped from
the eighties to the forties in the wake of a thunderstorm,
(11:56):
and that actually became the high for the next several days.
Eighteen inches of snow was reported in Cabot, Vermont, on
the eighth, and a hard frost that stretched well into
the south on the eleventh killed most of the crops
that had managed to survive up until that point. People
started to talk about the real possibility of a famine.
Within weeks, New England temperatures were really unseasonably hot, again,
(12:20):
breaking one hundred in parts of Massachusetts, which doesn't happen
all that often, especially not this early in the season.
Another four day cold snap hit eastern North America starting
on July sixth. In this case, frosts killed the replanted crops,
although it was not as snowy this time around. Most
of the snow reported in the US was in the
(12:41):
mountains of Vermont, but further north in Montreal, bodies of
water completely froze over with a layer of ice. This
snap also reached even farther south, causing cold weather and
frosts in places that had escaped in the June wave.
The cold weather came back again on August twenty first,
causing more snow in the Vermont Mountains, along with frosts
(13:03):
as far south as North Carolina and as far west
as Kentucky and Ohio. Just as alarming at this point
was a drought which had affected much of the southern
and eastern US, and it's estimated that up to half
of the cotton crop in the South failed because of
this dry weather. Grain prices skyrocketed and the drought didn't
(13:24):
break until September, after the cold weather was over, only
to be about to start again because it was heading
into autumn. The price of flour rose from four dollars
a barrel to between eleven and twenty dollars per barrel,
The wholesale price of wheat nearly doubled, and the price
of virtually every food staple shot up. There was also
(13:44):
a huge increase in migration of farmers from the Eastern
United States into the West, as people hoped that they
would find better growing conditions, and because the West really
hadn't seen the kind of unseasonable cold that the East
Coast had about twice as many people decided to move
west that year, as was typical at that point. In
(14:07):
several states, including New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey,
people called for a ban on distillery because of the
grain shortage. When people couldn't afford grain to feed their
livestock and their working animals, they ate the animals instead.
So that was North America's eighteen to sixteen summer. In Europe,
(14:27):
the summer was similarly wintry, but it also seemed like
it got all the rain that North America had been missing.
Western Europe was the most affected, but crops failed all
over the continent thanks to the fields being flooded and
later frozen. Crops that are sensitive to having too much water,
like wine grapes, really suffered in their quality when they
(14:48):
managed to survive. Plus, all the incessant rain made things
generally wet and moldy. Because horses were the main source
of transportation and grain became so much more expensi of
the cost of travel in Europe skyrocketed. Famine spread in
Switzerland and Ireland. In Switzerland, the government had to distribute
(15:09):
information about how to tell poisonous plants from ones that
were safe to eat as people try to scavenge what
they could from out in the woods or the wilds.
In Ireland, a typhus epidemic spread in the wake of
the famine. The story that sticks in a lot of
people's minds about how this played out in Europe is
that the infamous evening in which George Gordon, Lord Byron,
(15:31):
proposed that all of his guests at his Lake Geneva
Villa write a story. That's the visit in which Mary
Shelley wound up writing Frankenstein. That all happened in the
middle of this cold, wretched summer, And also written during
this was Byron's poem Darkness, And that poem begins, I
had a dream which was not all a dream. The
(15:54):
bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling
in the eternal space Raylists and Athlas, and the icy
earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn
came and went and came and brought no day, and
men forgot their passions in the dread of this, their desolation,
and all hearts were chilled to a selfish prayer for
(16:15):
light in Asia. Moving on to the third big place
that we have lots of information about the volcano disrupted
the monsoon cycle in India and Korea, so things were
dry when they were supposed to be wet, and then
way wetter than they were supposed to be once the
rain actually arrived. This caused rice crops, which really rely
(16:36):
on that monsoon cycle, to fail all over. The change
in the weather also affected which bacteria could thrive in
the Bay of Bengal, and unfortunately, one species that did
thrive was a new strain of cholera, which people had
less resistance too than previous strains. Bengal Kolera spread out
of India to the rest of the world in eighteen seventeen,
(16:57):
and the strain killed tens of millions of people. There's
actually some debate in the scientific community about just how
much of this shift had to do with the volcano
and Unon Province in southwestern China, crops failed in the
face of just a bitter bitter cold and a much
wetter season than normal, and the book Tambora, The Eruption
(17:18):
That Changed the World, author Gillen Darcy Wood connects this
and this massive crop failure in famine to the rise
of opium growth in Unon as farmers turned to it
in desperation is a way to try to just make
enough money to survive when the rest of their crops
had failed. A huge famine swept through southwest China and
(17:38):
it lasted for years. Neighboring parts of China had an
influx of refugees, and much of the nation faced a
serious social unrest. So before we talk about some of
the theories at the time for what was going on,
let's have another pause for a word from a sponsor
that sounds grand. So unsurprisingly, there were many many explanations
(18:09):
at the time for what was going on and what
was causing this just bizarre weather. These I actually start
with a story about why the volcano erupted in the
first place. The population of Simbabwe was largely Muslim, and
there was a folk tale explaining the event, and that
was that a prince had fed a devout Muslim a
(18:29):
dog and then killed him, and the volcano's eruption was
an act of divine retribution for that act. A range
of explanations for the weather cropped up in North America
and Europe as well. A primary theory was sun spots.
As we mentioned briefly earlier, there were a number of
extremely large sunspots that year, some of which were visible
(18:50):
to the unaided eye, and people thought these darker areas
of the sun were colder, which is true, and a
colder sun meant colder weather. Not everyone was on board
with this idea, though, since the timing of the sun
spots did not always match up with the coldest weather.
There's actually a lot of continued study and discussion about
exactly how much sunspots can affect the Earth's weather and climate.
(19:14):
And it's partly because this all happens on such a
huge scale, and the sunspots cycle itself is so long
that it's almost impossible to isolate just sunspots from all
of the other stuff in the world that's going on
while the sun spot cycle is peaking. Yeah, you can't
really turn off the sun to get a control group
(19:35):
without it, Yeah, And you can't turn off the volcanoes
to study just the sun. Yeah. So I really tried
to find a definitive answer of good sun spots I've
been and that there's not a definitive answer. Another theory
at this time is that it had something to do
with ice in North America. Ice seemed to persist in
the Great Lakes for longer than normal, and a number
(19:56):
of ships reported huge ice floes floating in the North Atlantic.
People thought that all of this ice was actually sucking
the heat out of the atmosphere. This is really more
of a cause and effect situation. There was more ice
on the Great Lakes because it was colder than normal,
But then there was more ice floating in the Northern
Atlantic because this whole time actually caused a warming trend
(20:20):
over the poles, and so a lot of polar ice
broke up and floated away, so that it was more
of a cause and effect situation than the ice sucking
the heat out of the air. Also, a series of
pretty large earthquakes had struck various points on the Earth
in the eighteen teens, and people also blamed the weather
(20:41):
on this. The idea was that the Earth's motion had
somehow caused some kind of fluid equilibrium between the surface
of the Earth and the atmosphere, and that until something
broke that equilibrium, that there would not be enough warmth
available for crops to grow. Other scapegoats that were named
(21:02):
as the cause of all of these problems, Benjamin Franklin's
lightning rods, they were stealing electricity and disrupting the weather,
because you know, he'd invented them in the mid seventeen
hundreds and they'd become more commonplace since then. So clearly,
since that happened before the weather, it must have caused
this terrible weather. That there's so many explanations that logic
(21:23):
is sound yet there. I mean, we still see this
today when people don't totally understand something, and they'll feel
like that because one thing happened before another thing, that
the first thing caused the second thing, And it's often
not true at all, right, It's that like chronological causality
attribution that's not always valid. So the prevailing theory today
(21:49):
is that the volcanic activity, including that from Tambora and
the other eruptions that were mentioned at the top of
the show, was at least one of the primary contributors.
And this was actually something that people did discuss a
little bit at the time. It was certainly not a
widespread theory, but there were people who were like, you know,
maybe all this ash in the atmosphere, which is from
a volcano, is making it colder. People are pretty smart
(22:11):
that way. However, eighteen sixteen was not the only year
in that time period that had weird weather. In general,
it was colder than normal in a lot of places
from eighteen twelve to eighteen seventeen, to the point that
people took notice, and by studying things like ice cores
and tree rings and that kind of long term documentation
(22:34):
that the earth leaves of itself, scientists know that this
was not really just a little five year window of
a cold snap. The eighteen hundred spell at the end
of a relative cool snap that lasted around the world
for almost five hundred years, starting in fourteen hundred and
ending in around eighteen sixty. At least in the US,
(22:56):
the year without a summer prompted people to start making
more routine observances and recordings of weather conditions. The Commissioner
General of the Land Office, Josiah Meiggs, sent out a
memo to all of his registers at twenty different land
offices instructing them to make and record a number of
observations about everything from the weather to animal migrations. The
(23:17):
military also started making and recording weather observations at the
direction of Joseph Lovell, the Surgeon General of the Army,
and the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution got in
on the action as well, and consequently, the first published
weather forecasts came out in the US in eighteen forty nine.
So when I started researching this episode, I kind of
expected it to be a little bit like The Long
(23:39):
Winter Part two. So we talked about the Long Winter,
which Lara Engels Wilder wrote about last time about this
time of year, and that was the weather was really cold,
things were really hard, things were tough, but overall everything
worked out okay for the most part, and I sort
of thought this was going to be similar to that.
(24:02):
I was not expecting all of the famines and deaths
and the extreme scale of how deadly the volcano was.
The a lot of like a lot of people who
have written to suggest the topic or other things that
I've seen about it, kind of go, this was a
year that had terrible weather, a volcano caused it, and
the that's sort of all that said about the volcano,
(24:25):
as though the volcano was on an island that was
totally uninhabited, right, and that is not the case at all.
This episode gives me flashbacks to when I was a
kid and Mount Saint Helen's erupted because I lived in
Washington State at the time, so I am very familiar
with being covered with ash. Yeah, I've never lived near
(24:48):
an active volcano, so I have not had that experience.
Those are wild times. I remember my biggest concern, and
again I was a child at the time, so my
biggest concern was that all the animals have been killed.
I was really upset about the animals that may have
lost our lives. Even though probably most of them fled
before the activity actually started. I'm sure some still lost
(25:08):
our lives, but that was my big focus as a child.
I did not care that there was crap all over
everything we owned and like a half inch of ash
sitting everywhere. I was like, what about the deer? I was, really,
that's my focus. Thanks so much for joining us on
(25:30):
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff works
email address no longer works, and you can find us
all over social media at missed in History, and you
(25:53):
can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcast
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