Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (15 page)

Mortality throughout the East Indies was catastrophically high. Hitching a ride along the routes of trade, the cholera then spread north to the Philippines, Japan, and China, westward over land and sea to Persia in 1822, and from there by caravanserai to the southern borders of Russia. Medical historians disagree on what happened next: whether the 1817 cholera merely slowed before gaining renewed strength in 1829 when it reached Moscow, or whether a new epidemic began in Bengal in 1826, reaching the Russian capital three years later. Either way, on an implacable westward march that inspired as much fear in those awaiting its coming as misery in those already afflicted, cholera reached Paris in 1830, England in 1831, and finally American shores the following year.

The eerie predictability of cholera’s progress, because of its perfect alignment with the global web of human commerce, “created panic on a scale not seen since the great plague epidemics of the seventeenth century.”
²⁸
For all the anticipation, however, cholera’s first strike was always shockingly sudden. In April 1832, the poet and journalist Heinrich Heine wrote about his experience at a masquerade ball in Paris at which a guest, dressed as a harlequin, suddenly collapsed on the dance floor. Panic ensued. Dozens of other victims fell to the floor until the ballroom resembled a battlefield. These fresh cholera victims,
who had begun their evening dancing at a carnival ball, ended it rudely tossed into makeshift graves still dressed in their masquerade costumes.

The fact of cholera’s essential mystery and resistance to treatment only amplified its power over the nineteenth-century imagination. An extraordinary number of speeches were given, orders issued, and weighty words written giving voice to these universal anxieties. Cholera is accordingly the best-reported disease in history and boasts a vast medical and popular literature. In the twentieth century only AIDS approaches cholera in terms of the volume of research and public opinion produced. As part of this same cultural phenomenon, cholera was the first disease to come under modern public health surveillance and gave rise to entire new bureaucracies across the European nation-states. Cholera operated, historian Christopher Hamlin has suggested, “like the conscience of the nineteenth century,” drawing the plight of the newly urbanized European poor into stark focus and helping bring into being the modern apparatus of professionalized public health.
²⁹
The first British Board of Health was established in 1831 in response to the cholera epidemic, while in 1851 the first International Sanitary Conference was held in Paris—cholera its sole subject. By century’s end, the modern sciences of microbiology and epidemiology had formed around the iconic image of a white-coated cholera scientist peering through his microscope in a laboratory, while sanitarianism assumed its status as the global orthodoxy of disease prevention, which it still holds today.

The worldwide cholera epidemic originating in Bengal in 1817 also changed the character of European colonialism and global race relations. Writings on the impact of climate on human physiology and character post-1817 show a marked shift from an optimistic theory of acclimatization—in which even European skin color might naturally be expected to change—to a rigid hereditarian model, whereby distinct races were tied to their respective environments by virtue of their indigeneity—that is, their long-term, continuous habitation of a place. History, according to this new logic, became biology, and eighteenth-century environmental determinism began its insidious evolution toward nineteenth-century biological theories of race. The susceptibility
of Britons to tropical disease, horrifyingly exposed as never before in 1817–18, and then later in the European cholera panic of the 1830s, helped consolidate views of India as a dangerous, alien environment to which Europeans could never adapt.

According to the simple, linear model of disease transmission dominant in the nineteenth century, mobile human populations were the exclusive carriers of cholera. Indians naturally blamed the British army and merchants for spreading the disease, but Europeans chose religious pilgrimages as the principal culprit. In India, the seasonal traffic of thousands toward sacred rivers captured the suicidal folly of Eastern idolatrous practices. Closer to home, and thus more politically inflammatory, was the pilgrimage to Mecca, site of dozens of cholera outbreaks through the nineteenth century beginning in 1831 and the source of rabidly anti-Muslim editorializing in Europe and North America. Perversely, then, despite its global presence and indiscriminate path, cholera spawned ways of thinking about the
differences
between East and West. For Europeans, the racialization of cholera converted an inexplicable and frightening cultural threat into a blame narrative with a readily identifiable human enemy. As such, cholera discourse became a cornerstone of Western orientalism, the racist legacies of which continue to pervade geopolitics in the twenty-first century.

It is thus difficult to overstate the impact of nineteenth-century epidemic cholera—a deadly product of Tambora-era climate change—on world history. The disease was “an insult to progress” itself, undermining bourgeois confidence across Europe, North America, and the colonial dominions by exposing both the vulnerability of the new global marketplace to disease and the gross economic inequalities evident in the slums that harbored it.
³⁰
The connection between cholera and class struggle is borne out in the revolution-rich dates coinciding with major outbreaks—1831–32, 1848, 1871, and so forth. The Tambora-driven cholera of the middle 1800s thus echoes the cataclysmic Black Death event of the fourteenth century, which was marked by riots and civil uprising. Cholera was the Victorian age’s worst nightmare. Its symptoms exposed the excretory functions of the private body in the most
humiliating way imaginable, while its victimizing the poor and oppressed exposed the thin veneer of polite, prosperous modern society. Just as the abolition debate politicized race, cholera politicized class, so that sanitation emerged with slavery as the premier social justice issues of the nineteenth century.

THE LAST MAN

And yet there is no great Victorian novel about cholera. This is surprising, at first, given the centrality of cholera to nineteenth-century social history. But novels are Romantic forms of art, in which empathic young heroes and heroines flower into self-consciousness and emerge as moral actors over time and hundreds of pages. Cholera was simply too brutal and disgusting a death for these narratives—even for punishment of the wicked. Cholera does not make stories; it ends them. Imagine Jane Bennet contracting cholera instead of a head cold at the beginning of Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
(1813) and infecting all of Meryton. No Darcy, no Elizabeth, no delights of Pemberley, just corpses in soiled sheets rolled up as terror grips Hertfordshire.

But if there is a nineteenth-century cholera novel, it is Mary Shelley’s
The Last Man
(1826). Shelley’s post-apocalyptic description of a world depopulated by epidemic disease, with a tiny rump human community meditating on the end of history, is more existential than romantic in character. This may account for the novel’s lack of popularity, especially when compared to the iconic
Frankenstein
. But in the aftermath of her own cascading personal tragedies in the period 1818–21—the death of three children, followed by the soul-emptying loss of her husband, Percy Shelley—Mary turned to descriptions of cholera coming out of India for her new novel and to the morbid tallies of its victims. In the novel, she locates the origin of the mysterious plague, as did James Jameson, in “perturbations” of the atmosphere. Cholera, a phantom agent of death that was brutal, unknowable, and potentially limitless in its reach, seemed to map her personal experience of mortality onto a vulnerable world.

However therapeutic the writing of
The Last Man
might have been for her, Mary Shelley found, as the scientific community has done, that cholera does not readily submit to description or catharsis. Just as the
v. cholerae
is a permanent cohabitant with us on our watery planet, so one can never be “done,” in mind or art, with cholera. Six years after her publication of
The Last Man
, Mary Shelley’s half brother, William, became one of the last cholera victims in London’s 1832 epidemic—his death a late installment in her lifelong litany of sorrows. William Godwin died of cholera in a polluted neighborhood of London. That much Mary could have known. But for us, the full cause of his death may only be properly measured across far wider vectors of time and space: from the fiery plume of the exploding Tambora in 1815, to the salty estuaries of the Bengal delta, to the humid intestines of merchants traveling the myriad trade routes of the nineteenth-century world in their ships and caravans. By the far narrower human accounting of literary history, not one but two of Mary Shelley’s novels may now be traced to Tambora. As a meteorological event in the summer of 1816, it helped inspire the celebrated
Frankenstein
. But it no less set the ecological conditions for Shelley’s
The Last Man
, a tale of global devastation by climate-driven disease.

The last word goes to the Bengalis, who have suffered the tragedy of cholera more than anyone. In one local cholera legend, a man travels on business from Calcutta to a village along the Ganges. He is welcomed into the house of his associate, where he dines and is entertained. He is surprised at the absence of servants—for who has cooked the meal? And when he requests a candle to lead the way to his sleeping quarters, it is fetched for him instantly without his hosts appearing to leave the room. Undressing for bed, the guest looks out the window, where he glimpses the dim figures of the man and his wife pass into the garden on a side of the house with no door. Consumed with terror, he is unable to sleep. At first light, he runs to the street. But there is nobody about. There it dawns on him that he has spent the night in a ghost town. All have died of the cholera, and the village is silent and empty.—He is the last man.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE SEVEN SORROWS OF YUNNAN

We know from a British emissary onboard a ship bound for Canton in the summer of 1816 that Chinese skies still bore their lurid volcanic imprint some fifteen months after Tambora’s eruption. The description is among the best we have of the most remarkable volcanic weather seen on Earth for perhaps thousands of years:

The evening of the 9th of July, the sky exhibited such novel though brilliant appearances, as led us to fear that they would be followed by formidable changes of weather. The course of the sun, as it sunk beneath the horizon was marked by a vivid glory expanding into paths of light of the most beautiful hues. They did not in the least resemble the pencils of rays which are often seen streaking in the sky at sunset, but were composed of sheets of glowing pink, which diverging at equal distances from the sun’s disk, darted upwards from the horizon, diminishing in intensity of colour, till they vanished in the azure of the surrounding atmosphere.
¹

This much can be said of Tambora’s plume: it was an attractive killer. A tragedy of nations masquerading as a spectacular sunset.

One of the many bureaucratic and intellectual achievements of China’s two-thousand-year empire is its meteorological record keeping,
which surpassed that of any other nation in historical reach and detail. The fact that climate was reckoned so closely with crop yields means that, in reconstructing the global impact of a large-scale climate event such as the Tambora disaster, China is a fruitful place to turn for close-grained, regional analysis of its environmental and social effects.
²

We know, for example, that the tropical latitude of the Chinese island of Hainan did not protect it from summer snows in the summer of 1815 or a severe winter in which more than half the forests perished. Eastern China likewise suffered from a suite of record low temperatures and crop failures in the Tambora period. In Shanxi, the crop-killing summer frosts of 1817 heralded mass emigration from the province, reminiscent of the large-scale refugeeism being played out across Europe and New England at the same time.

But no region in China, it appears, suffered so greatly as the southwest province of Yunnan.
³
When record low temperatures persisted with unprecedented severity over three successive growing seasons, prosperous Yunnan descended into a Confucian nightmare in which all sacred bonds of community were severed. Famished corpses lay unmourned on the roads; mothers sold their children or killed them out of mercy; and human skeletons wandered the fields, feeding on white clay.