The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History

by William K. Klingaman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

  6.

  THE LOST SUMMER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Opportunities for members of different social classes to mix were limited primarily to public occasions such as markets, fairs, feast days, weddings, or county funerals. Even during these events, however, it proved difficult for the wealthier Irish to communicate with the poor, since most of the laboring class (semiliterate at best) still spoke only Irish, and most of the landed classes spoke English—increasingly the language of politics and business. The bane of public gatherings in the early nineteenth century was the faction fight, an organized brawl in which two opposing sides assaulted each other wielding clubs, blackthorn sticks, stones, or, less frequently, swords. The factions might have divided along family lines, or parishes, or by trade, or religion; motives for fighting included arguments over property, family vendettas, personal insults or perceived slights, tensions between competing economic groups, or religious antagonism. A few notorious fights involved several thousand combatants; most numbered several hundred. Enough men died or suffered serious injuries during these brawls that the Catholic Church stoutly condemned the custom and threatened to excommunicate anyone who joined in. Nonetheless, landlords sometimes encouraged faction fights as a safety valve, to allow their laborers and tenants to vent their frustrations and anger on other members of the lower class.

  Irish diets improved along with the economy, although the rising standard of living set the stage for future disaster. Laborers and the poorest farmers subsisted entirely on potatoes and water, and occasionally a bit of salt fish or meal; those who could afford a more varied diet typically added milk, then oatmeal and wheat bread. Whiskey, beer, and tobacco also were relatively inexpensive. But potatoes remained the foundation of the Irish peasantry’s diet; indeed, it was one of the main causes of the increase in population in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spanish merchants had introduced potatoes to Europe in the late sixteenth century, but widespread public resistance to their cultivation and consumption restricted their use to animal fodder for more than a century. (Some Europeans feared the ugly tubers were the fruit of the devil, while others scorned any food that grew under the soil.) By the late eighteenth century, however, physicians and government officials recognized their exceptional nutritional value (high in potassium and vitamin C), and potatoes became a staple of the Europeans’ diet, particularly among the poor. Even a child could cultivate them, and they required little effort to cook or store. No wonder that Adam Smith, the renowned Scottish philosopher and classical economist, concluded that potatoes were “particularly suitable to the health of the human constitution.”

  Hence the population of Ireland embarked upon a dramatic increase, as did much of western and central Europe. Potatoes provided significantly more nutrients than the Irish peasantry’s previous grain-based diets, and since a family of five or six could subsist for a year on the potatoes grown on a few acres of land, Irish peasants began to marry earlier and produce more children. And since a potato diet m
itigated the prevalence or effects of many of the diseases that afflicted the Irish peasantry—scurvy, dysentery, tuberculosis—the infant mortality rate and the overall death rate both declined.

  Prosperity brought new complications in its wake, however. As the Irish population swelled, and the price of agricultural products rose, the value of land soared as well. Many landowners raised their rents accordingly; others evicted their tenants and enclosed their lands as pasture for even more profitable sheep or cattle. Tenants who found themselves unable to pay the higher rents were thrown off their land, and a steady stream of dispossessed farmers headed for the cities—by 1816, Dublin’s population had grown to about 200,000 residents—where they joined unemployed rural laborers who had lost their jobs to farm machinery or the new water-powered textile looms in the linen industry. Still, most of the unemployed remained in the countryside. And many of those who did have jobs were underemployed; in an average year, by one estimate, nearly half a million Irish were employed for six months or less.

  Parliament’s recent decision to bind Ireland more tightly to Britain created additional problems. The Act of Union of 1800, which established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, disbanded the Irish Parliament and provided seats for Irish representatives in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. This removed one of the few reasons for the Protestant gentry to spend any time whatsoever in Ireland; accordingly many of them settled in England and became absentee landlords. Distance diminished their sense of responsibility for the welfare of their tenants—it was said that they traded their Irish sympathies for English prejudices—and in many cases their estates in Ireland deteriorated from neglect. For its part, Parliament preferred to ignore Irish affairs altogether whenever possible. Since their only representatives were Protestant members of the propertied class, the Irish people at large were left with no voice in their government at all.