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

by William K. Klingaman

  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.

  * * *

  WHILE 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

  THE 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.

  * * *

  JAMES 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.

  * * *

  JAMES 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.

  * * *

  THE 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.

  * * *

  LORD 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.

  * * *

  KING 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.

  * * *

  THE 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.

  * * *

  SIR 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.

  * * *

  JOSEPH 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.

  * * *

  SIR 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.

  * * *

  IN 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 expl
osion 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.