The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

by Brian Fagan

  Trouble came first on the English side of the Channel, when, following excess rainfall in East Anglia during May 1816, grain prices rose rapidly and rural employment opportunities shrank. Marauding crowds of farmworkers attacked the houses of those who offended them, burned barns and grain stocks, and marched around armed with iron-studded sticks and flags bearing the words "Bread or Blood." They demanded a reduction in bread prices until the militia confronted them and read the Riot Act, which threatened the death penalty. The summer was quiet until the poor harvest and renewed price rises brought more trouble. A crowd of 2,000 in Dundee, Scotland, plundered more than a hundred food shops, then looted and burned a grain merchant's house. Once again, the militia had to be called in to restore order.

  The British disturbances had far more than merely the food dearth as an agenda. Stagnation in trade and manufacturing, widespread unemployment, and the social stresses of rapid industrialization and emerging class consciousness were major forces behind the rioting and behind the accompanying Luddite movement. In March 1817, for example, a meeting of 10,000 Manchester weavers resolved to send a hunger march of 600 to 700 protestors, each with a blanket on their backs, to petition the Prince Regent for measures to relieve the depressed cotton trade. The pathetic march, though apparently apolitical, was soon dispersed. Only one "blanketeer" eventually reached London.

  The food shortages were even more severe in Ireland, a country now heavily dependent on the potato. Hundreds of smallholding families in County Tyrone abandoned their homes in spring 1817 and lived by begging. They searched for nettles, wild mustard, and cabbage stalks. Food was so scarce that "seed potatoes were taken up from the ground and used for the support of life; nettles and other esculent vegetables eagerly sought after to satisfy the cravings of hunger.... The whole country was in motion.°9 At least 65,000 people perished despite urgent relief efforts.

  Bread riots afflicted France by late 1816. In November, an enraged Toulouse crowd, incensed by price increases, prevented shipments of wheat from leaving the town and imposed a "fair" price of 24 francs a hectoliter. Although there were no grain shortages in the region, the people were afraid of what would happen if all stocks were exported elsewhere. A company of dragoons eventually dispersed the rioters. Policemen and soldiers protecting grain wagons on their way to market in the Loire Valley found themselves fighting with hungry villagers. By midwinter 1817, many magistrates had given up searching for thieves. Serious disturbances broke out around Paris, where grain imports and subsidies kept prices down, while those outside the city worried about food deprivation. Thousands of immigrants from the countryside poured into the city in search of cheaper food. An 1817 census classified no less than 11.5 percent of Parisians as "destitute" out of a total population of 713,966. Large vagrant bands wandered the countryside, seizing control of the town of Chateau-Thierry, emptying the food storehouses, and intercepting grain barges along the Marne river. When the military took control of the town, the rebellion spread to the countryside amidst rumors of an impending Napoleonic coup.

  The subsistence crisis triggered massive emigration throughout Europe. A quarter-century of war had pent up a generation of potential emigres. Tens of thousands of people journeyed down the Rhine from the German states into Holland, hoping to cross to America. Conditions in Amsterdam were so deplorable that many would-be immigrants tried to return home. Hundreds begged for ship berths. Even those with money for the fare could not find space. The authorities tried returning the destitute to their homelands and stopping them at the frontier, with little success.

  Even the emigrants' home countries worried about the exodus. Switzerland, already famous for its watches and textiles, and fearful of losing vital industrial secrets, had frowned on emigration in 1815. But increasing pauperization and high food prices caused thousands to leave. Tens of thousands of Englishmen, mainly from Yorkshire, migrated to the United States between 1815 and 1819 for the same reason, as did 20,000 Irish in 1818. How many of these people were specifically fleeing hunger rather than general deprivation is unclear, but it is certain that more than 20,000 Rhinelanders emigrated to North America between 1815 and 1830 to escape a miserable life of subsistence farming on highly fragmented land holdings where the margin of risk was simply too high and wage earning opportunities were too rare.

  During the summer of 1816, Professor Jeremiah Day, President of Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, was responsible for maintaining temperature records at the university, a continuous weather chronicle that dated back to 1779. The task involved rising at 4:30 each morning to read the instruments, even in the dead of winter. Day's readings for June 1816 are astoundingly low, averaging 18.4°C, about 2.5°C lower than the mean for 1780 to 1968. New Haven was no warmer that month than Quebec City in Canada. It was the coldest June ever known.

  Spring had been dry and late that year, with frosts in mid-May. Nevertheless, crops were planted and beginning to grow when three unseasonable cold waves swept down rapidly from Canada and spread over New England. For five days between June 5 and 10, bitterly cold winds blasted the region. Eight to fifteen centimeters of snow fell in northern New England before the weather moderated. Vermont was pounded with heavy rain, which turned to snow on June 9. The snowfall blanketed the hills and stranded dozens of sheep. Farmer Hiram Harwood of Bennington, Vermont, wrote in his journal of fields stiff with frost, of weather so cold that he wore mittens in the fields until midday. By June 10, his corn was "badly killed and was difficult to see."10 Hundreds of freshly shorn sheep perished in the cold. In Concord, New Hampshire, guests at the Inauguration Address of Governor William Plumer battled strong winds and snow flurries on their way to the meeting. Once seated, wrote guest Sarah Anna Emery: "our teeth chattered in our heads, and our feet and hands were benumbed."11 A friend's "troublesome tooth" ached unbearably in the cold.

  New York and southern New England fared little better. The Catskill Mountains were dusted with snow. Thousands of migratory birds fled their frozen country forests and flocked to New York City, where they dropped dead in the streets. In South Windsor, Connecticut, the Reverend Thomas Robbins, who farmed part time, preached to his congregation on the parable of the fruitless fig tree (Luke 13:6-9). A vineyard owner came to pluck fruit from the fig tree on his property, found none, and ordered his laborer to cut it down. The worker urged him to leave it alone and to cut it down the next year if it did not bear fruit. In other words, be patient, for this affliction will pass.

  The cold wave passed and farmers throughout New England planted anew. Just under a month later, a second, but less severe, cold spell brought heavy frost to Maine. Many lakes in southern Canada were still iced over. Widespread crop damage prompted fears of insufficient hay for the coming winter. Newspapers urged farmers to replant yet again and discussed possible substitutes, like potato tops, as winter fodder. The remainder of July and early August were warm and summerlike, except for a prolonged drought. The indefatigable Thomas Robbins thanked Providence for the wonderful change, but worried about rain. On August 20, he conducted a "solemn and interesting season of prayer" for rain. A shower fell the next day, coinciding with a sharp, unseasonal frost, which effectively ended any chance of a decent corn crop. Had the frost come two weeks later, the harvest would have been excellent. Despite the unusual weather, many farmers fared reasonably well. The Vermonter Hiram Harwood mowed his hay in early August, had his winter wheat in by August 23 and his oats a few days later, "as fine a crop of oats as is rarely seen."12

  In New Haven, the last spring frost came on June 11, twenty days later than any other year of the decade. The earliest fall freeze came thirty-five days early, on August 22. Ignoring the freak July frost, 1816's growing season was fifty-five days shorter than the usual 155, in large part because of the Tambora eruption on the other side of the world.

  While many farmers salvaged fruit and vegetable crops, the real casualty of the summer was maize, the staple of nineteenth-century New England. No more than a quarter of th
e 1816 corn harvest was fit for human consumption. The rest was unripe and moldy, barely good enough for cattle or pigs. Money was always scarce in small rural communities, and the poor harvest compounded the cash shortage as winter descended. Many parishes in Quebec ran out of bread and milk. According to the Halifax Weekly Chronicle, poor farmers in Nova Scotia supported "a miserable existence by boiling wild herbs of different sorts which they eat with their milk; happy those who have even got milk and have not yet sacrificed this resource to previous pressing wants."13 In Saint John's, Newfoundland, nine hundred potential immigrants were sent back to Europe because there was little food in the town. The governor of New Brunswick forbade grain export or distillation of cereals into spirits of any kind.

  Prices for food of all kinds skyrocketed. Seed corn from sheltered farms in northern New England commanded up to four dollars a bushel-and farmers were glad to obtain it at that outrageous price. Maine potatoes rose from forty cents a bushel in spring 1816 to seventy-five cents the fol lowing year. Thomas Jefferson's finances were stretched so thin by the poor corn harvest at Monticello, in Virginia, that he was forced to borrow $1,000 from his agent, an enormous sum at the time. Even further south, crop yields in North and South Carolina were a third of normal in places.

  The effects of the cold of 1816 rippled on for years. While the federal government did little to ameliorate the crisis, the New York legislature recognized the need for improved transportation systems for moving food to and from rural areas, at the time accessible only by the crudest of cart tracks. The Erie Canal, which linked the Hudson River with Lake Erie, was begun in April 1817. On October 25, 1825, the entire 523 kilometer-long canal was opened with great public fanfare. Canal boats were a slow and cumbersome way of transporting goods or food, so the waterway was soon superseded by railroads.

  The subsistence crisis of 1816/17, triggered by catastrophic harvest failures in 1816, was the last truly extensive food dearth in the Western world. Its effects ranged from the Ottoman Empire, to parts of North Africa, large areas of Switzerland and Italy, western Europe, and even New England and eastern Canada. The crisis was due not only to failed harvests but also to soaring food prices at a time of continued political and social unrest after the Napoleonic wars.

  In the west, more deaths resulted from social conditions than from actual hunger caused by a cycle of very cold years. In Switzerland, the death rate in 1816 was 8 percent higher than in 1815; a year later it was 56 percent higher. In England and France, the rises were more moderate, because some effective steps were taken to curb rising food prices. As in 1740, most deaths resulted from infectious diseases fostered by malnutrition. Historian Alexander Stollenwerk quotes from a contemporary journal: "Many individuals have died, if not of hunger, at least of the insufficiency and bad quality of the food. . . . Such vegetables as grow wild in the fields might afford great relief; but the idea of eating grass like animals appears dreadful to these people."14 The large numbers of beggars in Italy, Switzerland, and Ireland contributed to a high mortality in those coun tries, largely from typhus and the diseases of famine and hunger. "It is horrible to see emaciated skeletons with voracious appetites gulping down the most loathsome and unnatural foods-carcasses of dead animals, cattle fodder, leaves of nettles, swine food."15

  The harvest failure of 1816 brought on typhus and relapsing fever epidemics in Britain. Glasgow witnessed 3,500 deaths from these infections in 1818, and some 32,000 cases in a population of 130,000. An outbreak of typhus in autumn 1816 among Spitalfields silk workers in London spread rapidly to the poor districts of the city. Poorhouses were overflowing with "half starved beings, many of them deriving their sole claim to relief from having slept in the streets of the parish, and who were already seized with fever." Thomas Bateman, the medical superintendent of the London House of Recovery, theorized that the epidemic was a barometer of economic conditions, that "deficiency of nutriment is the principal source of epidemic fever."bG

  When the cold spring, summer, and fall weather and constant rain saturated peat and firewood, making hearths hard to keep alight, the Irish poor crowded together for warmth in filthy hovels and at soup kitchens, passing typhus-bearing body lice feces among them. The desiccated and infected fecal dust clung to woolen fabrics such as cloaks and blankets, which were often the only source of warmth for people. In 1817/18, 850,000 people in Ireland were infected by the epidemic.

  Bubonic plague, a frequent companion of earlier famines, appeared here too. A severe plague outbreak had begun during a famine in central and northwestern India in 1812. By 1813, the plague was widespread in southeastern Europe, killing over 25,000 people in Bucharest. Strict quarantine regulations were imposed in Adriatic and Mediterranean ports, but outbreaks continued until 1822, with the Balearic Islands in the western Mediterranean losing 12,000 people in 1820. The plague never affected western Europe, despite the poor harvests and widespread hunger, partly because of strict quarantine measures at eastern frontiers and Mediterranean ports, but also because of critical improvements in domestic hygiene such as the widespread use of masonry, brick, and tile instead of wood, earth, and straw in towns and cities.

  A well-founded fear of fire had prompted the change. After the great fire of London, 9,000 brick houses replaced 13,200 wooden dwellings destroyed by the conflagration. Other cities like Amsterdam, Paris, and Vienna slowly followed suit. The changeover also helped improve hygienic conditions by providing less favorable living conditions for fleas and rats. Straw floor coverings disappeared, while private grain storage bins gave way to better-built and -maintained public facilities, again providing a less favorable environment for insects and rodents. It was no coincidence that plague epidemics continued to ravage eastern Europe and much of southwestern Asia, where most people continued to live in earthen and timber dwellings. Clean, rat-free buildings were a key to plague-free environments in cities. Today, bubonic plague is predominantly a disease of rural populations in areas like South America, where housing conditions are often still appalling.

  The cold years of 1812 to 1820 coincided with a cycle of poor grain and potato harvests, food scarcities, and rapidly rising commodity prices in societies that were already unsettled by changing economic conditions at the end of the Napoleonic wars. Western commodity markets spun in confusion as agricultural productivity fell rapidly. Real incomes declined. Prices fluctuated wildly as a result of the cold weather, poor harvests, and impulsive economic decisions about which crops to plant sometimes made on the spur of the moment. Consumer demand shifted away from industrial goods as people struggled to pay for food. Unemployment levels rose sharply, throwing the working poor onto the streets as purchasing power shrank.

  As the cost of living climbed beyond most working people's reach, thousands became dependent on public or private charity or were reduced to begging. Some became vagrants, others tried to emigrate to Eastern Europe or North America. Thousands more took to the streets and turned to rioting and crime. Marriages and births declined. All this happened at a time when Jacobin France was a more recent memory than the Vietnam War is today. Governments were acutely aware of the danger of revolution, of massive peasant rebellions. The threat of social disorder and epidemic disease forced governments to take measures to provide public relief. The same threats frightened several European governments-like that of France-into conservative, even repressive, policies. In the long term, there emerged a new commitment to rudimentary policies of social welfare that tried to offer basic security to the distressed in times of economic crisis. These policies were the greatest legacy of the Tambora eruption.

  Ireland is famed for its crops of potatoes. . . . The culture of this plant has been longer practiced there than with ... any other European nation. . . . The Irish have always, very judiciously, looked upon this article as an object of the greatest importance.

  Austin Bourke, `The Visitation of God'?

  The Potato and the Great Irish Famine, 1993

  The [sedan] chairmen, porters, coalhe
avers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be ... from the lowest rank of people in Ireland, who are generally fed from this root. No food can afford a more decisive proof of its nourishing quality, or its being particularly suitable to the health of the human constitution.

  -Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776,

  on the Irish and potatoes

  hanks to the Gulf Stream, Ireland enjoys a damp, moderate climate with generally mild winters and springs. For centuries, the Irish subsisted off butter, curds and whey in summer and off the fall oat crop in winter. Raising cereals had never been easy, even when combined with cattle farming. Excessive rainfall in spring and summer regularly damaged growing crops. Famines were commonplace and invariably followed by plague and pestilence, which often killed more people than hunger. Both high and low NAO indices could spell trouble for Irish farmers. A low index brought unseasonably cold winters and frosts; high indices the constant threat of heavy rain during the growing season. Here the link between excessive rainfall, poor oat crops, and winter hunger was brutally direct.

  Locations in Ireland mentioned in Chapter I I

  No one knows exactly when the potato came to Ireland, but it appears to have been during the last fifteen years of the sixteenth century' Irish farmers soon noticed that the strange tuber thrived in their wet and often sunless climate. Potatoes produced their greatest yields in years when oats were decimated by the rain from repeated Atlantic depressions. Planted in well-drained, raised fields, potatoes were highly productive and reliable, even on poor soils. Ireland's long growing season without temperature extremes was ideal for the early European potato, which sprouted growth and flowers during long summer days and tubers in frost-free autumns, conditions very similar to those in many parts of the Andes. Unlike cereals, the tubers were remarkably immune to sudden climatic shifts. This was true almost anywhere in northern Europe, but in Ireland the wet climate especially favored the potato. While other crops rotted above ground, potatoes quietly grew below the surface. Easy to cook and store, they seemed an ideal food for the Irish poor. Above all, they were an effective famine food. The potato-cereal combination offered a safeguard against the failure of either crop. As long as a balance was maintained between the two, the Irish had a reasonably reliable safety net against hunger.