by Brian Fagan
Storm activity increased by 85 percent in the second half of the sixteenth century, mostly during cooler winters. The incidence of severe storms rose by 400 percent. From November 11 to 22, 1570, a tremendous gale moved slowly across the North Sea from southwest to northeast at about 5 knots. The storm, remembered for generations as the All Saints Flood, coincided with the unusually high tides of the full moon. As the tempest progressed northeastward, heavy rains deluged the low-lying coast. Frontal passage caused the wind to shift to the northwest. Enormous sea surges cascaded ashore, breaching dikes and flattening coastal defenses. At Walcheren Island in the Low Countries (now in the southern Netherlands), the dikes gave way between 4 and 5 o'clock on November 21, just as dark was gathering. By late evening, much of Rotterdam was under water. Salt water surged into Amsterdam, Dordrecht, and other cities, drowning at least 100,000 people. In the River Ems, sea levels rose four and a half meters above normal.
The depressions that affected the Spanish Armada.
Data compiled from Hubert Lamb and Knud Frydendahl, Historic Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwestern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
The storminess continued through the 1580s, to the discomfort of the Spanish Armada, which endured a "very great gale at SW' off Scotland's east coast in August 1588: "we experienced squalls, rain and fogs with heavy sea and it was impossible to distinguish one ship from another." Sir Francis Drake reported a "very great storm considering the time of year" in the southern North Sea on the same day. A month later, a strong cyclonic depression advanced northeast from the region of the Azores, perhaps the descendant of a tropical hurricane on the other side of the Atlantic. The leading ships of the retreating Armada encountered the storm in the Bay of Biscay on September 18. Three days later, the same westerly gale blew with great fury off western Ireland, where the stragglers of the great fleet found themselves on a hostile lee shore. "There sprang up so great a storm on our beam with a sea up to the heavens so that the cables could not hold, nor the sails serve us and we were driven ashore with all three ships upon a beach covered with fine sand, shut in one side and the other by great rocks." The Armada lost more ships to this episode of bad weather than in any conflict with the English.17
The weather records in the logs of Armada captains have been subjected to rigorous meteorological analysis. Modern estimates place the maximum wind squalls as high as 40 to 60 knots, approaching hurricane strength. On several occasions, the jet stream upper wind strengths between July and September 1588 exceeded the maxima recorded during the equivalent months between 1961 and 1970 and, probably, over a much longer period of the twentieth century. The unusually windy and stormy weather coincided with a strong thermal gradient caused by a vigorous southward extension of polar ice off East Greenland and Iceland and south of Cape Farewell. Elizabethan explorer John Davis, searching for the elusive Northwest Passage, found the seas between Iceland and Greenland blocked by ice in 1586 and 1587. Similar conditions probably continued into 1588.
The 1590s were the coldest decade of the sixteenth century. The poor harvests of 1591 to 1597 hit England hard three years after the triumphant defeat of the Spanish Armada. An observer wrote: "Every man complains against the dearth of this time." Food riots erupted in many counties, as the poor vented their anger over the enclosing of common lands to create larger, more productive farms. The towns suffered worst. In Barnstaple, Devon, one Philip Wyot wrote in 1596: "All this May has not been a dry day and night.... Small quantity of corn is brought to market [so] townsmen cannot have money for corn. There is but little comes to market and such snatching and catching for that little and such a cry that the like was never heard."ls In towns like Penrith in the northeast, famine mortality rose to as much as four times normal.
England's Tudor monarchs presided over 3 million subjects and were constantly fretting about the possibility of grain shortages and famine. England was a country of subsistence farmers, whose methods and implements of tillage had little changed from medieval times. The government had ample cause for concern, for crop yields were low. On prime land. two bushels of wheat were reasonably expected to yield between eight and ten at harvest time, which left precious little margin for crop failure. The farmers gathered "good" harvests about 40 percent of the time, with sequences of three or four good years, then a cycle of as many as four poor harvests before a change in the weather pattern brought improved yields.'`' Grain prices fluctuated accordingly. The price changes hit the poor hardest of all and engendered a deep distrust of farmers among the growing urban population. At times of crop failure and grain shortages, suspicions of hoarding were rife. Preachers denounced hoarders from their pulpits with a text from Proverbs: "He that witholdeth corn, the people shall curse him," but with little effect.20 England, like the rest of Europe, still lacked a large-scale infrastructure for moving grain from country to town, or from one region to another, to relieve local famines. Even after the last widespread famine in southern England in 1623, hunger was never far from the door.
Farming was just as difficult in the fledgling European colonies in North America. Bald cypress tree rings along the Blackwater and Nottoway rivers in southeastern Virginia may help explain why most people in the southeastern United States speak English rather than Spanish.21 The cypresses document several severe drought cycles between 1560 and 1612, just as Europeans were settling along the Carolina and Virginia coasts.
In 1565, Spanish colonists settled at Santa Elena on the South Carolina coast during an exceptionally dry decade. The settlement struggled from the beginning, then succumbed to a second, even more severe drought in 1587-9. The capital of Spanish Florida was moved to Saint Augustine. The evacuation came as British colonists were trying to establish a settlement at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, to the north. The Roanoke colonists were last seen by their British compatriots on August 22, 1587, at the height of the driest growing season in eight hundred years. Even as their compatriots departed, the colony's native American neighbors were concerned about the poor condition of their crops. The drought persisted for two more years and created a serious food crisis both for the local Croatan people and the colonists. Since the latter were heavily dependent on the Croatan, this very dependence must have aggravated already serious food shortages. Many historians have criticized the Roanoke colony for poor planning and for a seeming indifference to how they were going to feed themselves in the face of apparent disinterest from England. But even the best planned colony would have been challenged by the 1587-89 drought.
Further north, at Jamestown, the colonists had the bad luck to arrive at the height of the driest seven-year period in 770 years. Of the original 104 colonists who came in 1607, only 38 were still alive a year later. No fewer than 4,800 of the 6,000 settlers who arrived between 1607 and 1625 perished, many of them of malnutrition in the early years of the set Clement. Like their predecessors at Roanoke, the colonists were expected to live off the land and off trade and tribute from the Indians, a way of life that made them exceptionally vulnerable during unusually dry years. They also suffered from water shortages when the drought drastically reduced river levels. Jamestown's archives make frequent references to the foul drinking water and the illnesses caused by consuming it, especially before 1613, when the drought ended.
In 1600, hunger was still a familiar threat to anyone cultivating the soil, whether European peasant or English colonist on the edge of North America. But the first stirrings of an agricultural revolution were underway, stimulated by explosive city growth.
THE END OF THE "FULL WORLD"
They are made up of many small terminal moraines, laid against and on top of each other, as is clearly shown in instances where individual moraines lie spread out in a series one behind another, with concentrically curving crests. They record for each glacier many repeated advances, all of approximately the same magnitude. How many centuries of glacial oscillation are represented by these moraine accumulations it is difficult to estimate.
-Francois Matthes, "Report of Committee on Glaciers, " 1939
The vines look as if they had been swept by fire. The poor people are obliged to use their oats to make bread. This winter they will have to live on oats, barley, peas, and other vegetables.
-A government official at Limousin, France,
October 18, 1692
will always remember the sights, smells, and sounds of subsistence agriculture in Africa-rows of women hoeing newly cleared woodland, the scent of wood smoke and the hazy, ash-filled autumn skies, the endless thumping of wooden pestles pounding grain for the evening meal. I recall leisurely conversations by the fire or sitting in the shade of a hut, the talk of rain and hunger, of scarce years, of plentiful times when grain bins burst with maize and millet. The memories of October are the most vivid of all: the countryside shimmering under brutal, escalating heat, the great clouds massing on the afternoon horizon, anxious women watching for rain that never seemed to fall. When the first showers finally arrived with their marvelous, pungent scent of wet earth, the people planted their maize and waited for more storms. Some years there was no rain until December, and the crops withered in the fields. Stored grain ran out in early summer and the people faced scarcity. The specter of hunger was always in the air, never forgotten. I received a firsthand lesson in the harsh realities of subsistence farming, the brutal ties between climatic shifts and survival.
Surprisingly few archaeologists and historians have had a chance to observe subsistence farming at firsthand, which is a pity, for they sometimes fail to appreciate just how devastating a cycle of drought or heavy rainfall, or unusual cold or warmth, can be. Like medieval farmers, many of today's subsistence agriculturalists in Africa and elsewhere have virtually no cushion against hunger. They live with constant, often unspoken, environmental stress. The same was true in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, where well over 80 percent of the population was engaged in subsistence agriculture, by definition living barely above subsistence level, and at the complete mercy of short-term climatic shifts. The five centuries of the Little Ice Age were defined by these shifts: short periods of relatively stable temperatures were regularly punctuated by markedly colder or wetter conditions that brought storms, killing frosts, greater storminess, and cycles of poor harvests. While Europe's subsistence farmers muddled by in good years, such sudden changes brought great stress to communities and growing cities that were on the economic margins in the best of times. These stresses were not only economic; inevitably they were political and social as well.
Until recently, historians have tended to discount short-term climate change as a factor in the development of preindustrial European civilization, partly because we lacked any means of studying annual or even decadal climatic variations. French scholar Le Roy Ladurie argued that the narrowness in temperature variations and the autonomy of human phenomena that coincided with them in time made it impossible to establish any causal link. He reflected a generally held view, with only a few dissenters, among them the English climatologist Hubert Lamb, who was convinced climate and human affairs were related and was much criticized for saying so. I The ghosts of environmental determinism-discredited assumptions of three-quarters of a century ago that invoked climatic change as the primary cause of the first agriculture, the emergence of the world's first civilizations, and other major developments-still haunt scholarly opinion. Environmental determinism is an easy charge to level, especially if one is unaware of the subtle effects of climatic change.
Today, no one seriously considers that climate change alone caused such major shifts in human life as the invention of agriculture. Nor do they theorize that the climatic shifts of the Little Ice Age were responsible for the French or Industrial revolutions or the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. But the spectacular advances of paleoclimatology now allow us to look at short-term climatic change in terms of broad societal responses to stress, just as archaeologists have done with much earlier societies. Climate variability leading to harvest failures is just one cause of stress, like war or disease, but we delude ourselves if we do not assume it is among the most important-especially in a society like that of preindustrial Europe, that devoted four-fifths of its labor just to keeping itself fed.
Observing subsistence farming at firsthand is a sobering experience, especially if you have spent all your life buying food in supermarkets. You learn early on that human beings are remarkably adaptable and ingenious when their survival depends on it. They develop complex social mechanisms and ties of obligation for sharing food and seed, diversify their crops to minimize risk, farm out their cattle to distant relatives to combat epidemic disease. These qualities of adaptability and opportunism came to the fore in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe, when adequate food supplies in the face of changeable weather conditions became a pressing concern. A slow agricultural revolution was the result.
The revolution began in the Low Countries and took root in Britain by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in France as a whole much later, and in Ireland as a form of hazardous monoculture based on the potato.2 The historical consequences were momentous-in England, food to feed the burgeoning population of the Industrial Revolution, along with widespread social decay and disorganization; in France, a slow decline in peasant living standards, bringing widespread fear and unrest at a time of political and social uncertainty; and in Ireland, catastrophic famine that killed over a million people when blight destroyed its staple crop and Britain neglected its humanitarian responsibilities.
The severe weather of the 1590s marked the beginnings of the apogee of the Little Ice Age, a regimen of climatic extremes that would last over two centuries. There were spells of unusual heat and of record cold, like the winter of 1607, when savage frosts split the trunks of many great trees in England. Atmospheric patterns changed too, as the polar ice cap expanded, anticyclones persisted in the north, and depression tracks with their mild westerlies shifted southward. These anticyclones brought many weeks of northeasterly winds, as opposed to the prevailing southwesterlies experienced by earlier generations. Dutch author Richard Verstegan remarked in 1605 how retired skippers in the Netherlands remembered that "they have often noted the voyage from Holland to Spayne to be shorter by a day and a halfe sayling than the voyage from Spayne to Holland."; In the century that followed, profound changes in European life were shaped, in part, by the coldest weather in seven hundred years.
The seventeenth century literally began with a bang. Between February 16 and March 5, 1600, a spectacular eruption engulfed the 4,800meter Huanyaputina volcano seventy kilometers east of Arequipa in southern Peru.4 Huanyaputina hurled massive rocks and ashy debris high into the air. Volcanic ash fell over an area of at least 300,000 square kilometers, cloaking Lima, La Paz and Arica, and even a ship sailing in the Pacific 1,000 kilometers to the west. During the first twenty-four hours alone, over twenty centimeters of sand-sized ash fell on Arequipa, causing roofs to collapse. Ash descended for ten days, turning daylight into gloom. At least 1,000 people died, 200 of them in small communities near the volcano. Lava, boulders, and ash formed enormous lakes in the bed of the nearby Rio Tambo. The water burst through and flooded thousands of hectares of farmland, rendering it sterile and unproductive. Many ranches lost all their cattle and sheep. The local wine industry was devastated.
The scale of the Huanyaputina eruption rivaled the Krakatau explosion of 1883 and the Mount Pinatubo event in the Philippines in 1991. The volcano discharged at least 19.2 cubic kilometers of fine sediment into the upper atmosphere. The discharge darkened the sun and moon for months and fell to earth as far away as Greenland and the South Pole. Fortunately for climatologists, the fine volcanic glass-powder from Huanyaputina is highly distinctive and easily identified in ice cores. It is found at high levels in South Pole ice layers dated to 1599-1604. The signal is also present, though less distinct, in Greenland ice cores. The sulphate levels are such that we know that the amount of sediment thrust into the stratos
phere was twice that of Mount Pinatubo and about 75 percent of the vast Mount Tambora eruption of 1815, probably the greatest sulfur-producing event of the Little Ice Age.
Huanyaputina ash played havoc with global climate.5 The summer of 1601 was the coldest since 1400 throughout the northern hemisphere, and among the coldest of the past 1,600 years in Scandinavia, where the sun was dimmed by constant haze. Summer sunlight was so dim in Iceland that there were no shadows. In central Europe, sun and moon were "reddish, faint, and lacked brilliance." Western North America lived through the coldest summer of the past four hundred years, with below-freezing temperatures during the maize growing season in
