Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (36 page)

5
. James F. Warren, “A Tale of Two Centuries: The Globalization of Maritime Raiding and Piracy in South East Asia at the End of the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in
A World of Water: Rain, Rivers, and Seas in South-East Asian Histories
, ed. Peter Boomgaard (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2001), 133.

6
. John Crawfurd,
A Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Islands and Adjacent Countries
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 437.

7
. M. J. Hitchcock, “Is This Evidence for the Lost Kingdoms of Tambora?”
Indonesia Circle
33 (1984): 34.

8
. Bernice de Jong Boers, 38.

9
. Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, “Socio-political Structures and the South-East Asian Ecosystem: An Historical Perspective up to the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in
Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Critical Approach
, ed. Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1995), 27.

10
. The most accessible account of the eruption that consolidates scientific and historical research on Tambora is found in Clive Oppenheimer,
Eruptions That Shook the World
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 295–319. The volcanological description of the eruption that follows, here and in
chapter 2
, is likewise drawn from the following key sources in the scientific literature: Stephen Self et al., “Volcanological Study of the Great Tambora Eruption of 1815,”
Geology
12 (November 1984): 659–63; Richard B. Stothers, “The Great Tambora Eruption in 1815 and Its Aftermath,”
Science
224 (June 15, 1984): 1191–98; J. Foden, “The Petrology of Tambora Volcano: A Model for the 1815 Eruption,”
Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research
27 (1986): 1–41; Haraldur Sigurdsson and Steven Carey, “Plinian and Co-ignimbrite Tephra Fall from the 1815 Eruption of Tambora Volcano,”
Bulletin of Volcanology
51 (1989): 243–70; Sigurdsson and Carey, “Eruptive History of Tambora Volcano,”
Mitteilungen Geologisch-Palaeontologische Institut
(University of Hamburg) 70 (1992): 187–206; Stephen Self, Ralf Gertisser, et al., “Magma Volume, Volatile Emissions, and Stratospheric Aerosols from the 1815 Eruption of Tambora,”
Geophysical Research Letters
31 (2004): L20608; and Ralf Gertisser, Stephen Self, et al., “Processes and Timescales of Magma Genesis and Differentiation Leading to the Great Tambora Eruption in 1815,”
Journal of Petrology
53.2 (2012): 271–97.

11
. J. T. Ross, “Narrative of the Effects of the Eruption from the Tomboro [
sic
] Mountain in the Island of Sumbawa,”
Batavian Transactions
8 (1816): 1–25. This collection of eyewitness reports, commissioned by Raffles, constitutes the sole contemporary account of the eruption.

12
. The epic poem from Bima from which these lines are taken was first transcribed in Malay about 1830. The full poem appears in a modern French edition: Henri-Chambert Loir, ed.,
Syair Kerajaan Bima
(Jakarta: Ecole Française D’Extreme-Orient, 1982). The stanza on Tambora quoted here appears in Boers, “A Volcanic Eruption,” 37 [translation modified].

13
. “ ‘Pompeii of the East’ Discovered,” BBC News, February 28, 2006. The volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson coined the phrase “Pompeii of the East,” prompting a flurry of media reports.

14
. Estimates have varied greatly. Oppenheimer sets the likely range at 60,000–120,000 victims of the eruption, including those who succumbed to disease and starvation in its immediate aftermath (
Eruptions That Shook the World
, 311).

15
. In the words of one contemporary Javanese chronicler: “Awe-inspiring (
langkung huébat
) to behold, they are as though protected by the very angels (
lir pinayungan malékat
) and they strike terror into men’s hearts.” Peter Carey, ed.,
The British in Java, 1811–1816: A Javanese Account
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17, 79.

16
. Ross, “Narrative of the Effects of the Eruption,” 3–4, 13.

17
. Ibid., 14–15.

18
. J. H. Moor,
Notices of the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries
(Singapore, 1837), 95.

19
. Ross, “Narrative of the Effects of the Eruption,” 9.

20
. Peter R. Goethals,
Aspects of Local Government in a Sumbawan Village
(Ithaca: Cornell University Department of Far Eastern Studies, 1961), 19.

21
. Raffles, at the encouragement of his superior in Calcutta, Lord Minto, interpreted the Slave Felony Act of 1811 as prohibiting the import of slaves to any British possession, a regulation he tightened in the period leading up to the eruption. See H.R.C. Wright, “Raffles and the Slave Trade at Batavia in 1812,”
Historical Journal
3.2 (1960): 184–91; Susan Abeyasekere, “Slaves in Batavia: Insights from a Slave Register,” in
Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia
, ed. Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 289; and Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “The Volcano Lover: Climate, Colonialism and Slavery in Raffles’s
History of Java
,”
Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies
8.2 (2008): 33–54.

22
. Boers, “A Volcanic Eruption,” 49.

23
. Quoted in ibid., 47.

24
. Roseanne D’Arrigo et al., “Monsoon Drought over Java, Indonesia, during the Past Two Centuries,”
Geophysical Research Letters
33 (2006): L04709.

25
. Boers, “A Volcanic Eruption,” 38.

26
.
Jakarta Globe
, October 17, 2012.

27
. Hitchcock, “Is This Evidence for the Lost Kingdoms of Tambora?” 30–33.

28
. My narrative of this legend is drawn from conversations and interviews conducted with Sumbawans and residents of surrounding islands during my visit there in March 2011.

29
. Munshi Abdullah,
Autobiography
, trans. W. G. Shellabear (Singapore, 1918), 51–52.

30
. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles,
The History of Java
, intro. John Bastin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 1:7.

31
. Ibid., 1:119.

32
. Adam Smith,
The Wealth of Nations
(New York: Modern Library, 1937), 602.

33
. In the pungent phraseology of his Dedication to the Prince of Wales, Raffles’s goals for the British administration in Java were “to uphold the weak, to put down lawless force, to lighten the chain of slave … to promote the arts, sciences, and literature, to establish humane institutions.” See C. E. Wurtzburg’s comprehensive account of Raffles’s career,
Raffles of the Eastern Isles
, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

CHAPTER TWO
THE LITTLE (VOLCANIC) ICE AGE

1
. “Ode to Naples” (1820), l. 1.

2
.
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley
, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 2:491.

3
. Alexander von Humboldt,
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804
, trans. Helen Maria Williams (London, 1815); George Steuart Mackenzie,
Travels in the Island of Iceland, during the Summer of 1810
(London, 1811), 111–12.

4
. Humphry Davy, “On the Phenomena of Volcanoes,” in
Collected Works
, ed. John Davy (London, 1840), 6:346.

5
. Madame de Staël,
Corinne; or, Italy
, trans. Emily Baldwin and Paulina Driver (London, 1906), 224.

6
. Arch Johnston and N. K. Moran, “John Weisman Accounts of the Earthquakes” (Memphis: Center for Earthquake Research and Information),
http://:www.ceri.memphis.edu/compendium/eyewitness/wiseman.html
.

7
. Richard Altick,
The Shows of London
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 96.

8
. See Nicholas Daly, “The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage.”
Victorian Studies
53.2 (Winter 2011): 255–85.

9
. See Mary Ashburn Miller, “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,”
French Historical Studies
32.4 (Fall 2009): 555–85.

10
. See Richard B. Alley,
The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

11
. Jihong Dai et al., “Ice Core Evidence for an Explosive Tropical Volcanic Eruption 6 Years Preceding Tambora,”
Journal of Geophysical Research
96 (September 1991): 17361–66.

12
. Ellen Mosley-Thompson et al., “High Resolution Ice Core Records of Late Holocene Volcanism: Current and Future Contributions from the Greenland PARCA Cores,”
Volcanism and the Earth’s Atmosphere
139 (2003): 153–64. A 2006 paper, based on ice core results from the Yukon that showed chemically distinct 1809 tephra deposits from those found at the poles, offers an alternative scenario, namely two separate 1809 eruptions: a major tropical eruption coinciding with a minor northern hemisphere eruption. If substantiated, this would necessarily have implications for the modeling of 1809’s climatic impact. See Kaplan Yalcin et al., “Ice Core Evidence for a Second Volcanic Eruption around 1809 in the Northern Hemisphere,”
Geophysical Research Letters
33 (2006): L14706.

13
. Luke Howard,
The Climate of London: Deduced from Meteorological Observations, Made at Different Places, in the Neighbourhood of the Metropolis
(London, 1820), vol. 1, table 44, n.p.

14
. A. V. Eliseev and I. I. Mokhov, “Influence of Volcanic Activity on Climate Change in the Past Several Centuries: Assessments with a Climate Model of Intermediate Complexity,”
Izvestiya: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
44.6 (2008): 671–83.

15
. Jihong Cole-Dai et al., “Cold Decade (AD 1810–19) Caused by Tambora (1815) and Another (1809) Stratospheric Volcanic Eruption,”
Geophysical Research Letters
36 (2009): L22703; Rosanne D’Arrigo et al., “The Impact of Volcanic Forcing on Tropical Temperatures during the Past Four Centuries,”
Nature Geoscience
2 (2009): 51–56.

16
. George Mackenzie,
The System of the Weather of the British Islands
(Edinburgh, 1821), table VII, n.p.

17
. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Fancy in Nubibus; or, the Poet in the Clouds,”
Blackwood’s Magazine
(November 1819), l. 9.

18
. See Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “Clouds, Constable, Climate Change,”
Wordsworth Circle
38.1–2 (2007): 25–34.

19
. See
Nature Geoscience
, October 9, 2011 [press release].

20
. Alan Robock, “The ‘Little Ice Age’: Northern Hemisphere Average Observations and Model Calculations,”
Science
206 (December 1979): 1402–4. For a more thorough rebuttal of the solar variability theory, see G. Hegerl et al., “Detection of Volcanic, Solar, and Greenhouse Signals in Paleo-Reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere Temperature,”
Geophysical Research Letters
30.5 (2003): 1242. On the volcanic source of the “Dalton Minimum” period, see Sebastian Wagner and Eduardo Zorita, “The Influence of Volcanic, Solar, and CO
₂
Forcing on the Temperatures in the Dalton Minimum (1790–1830): A Model Study,”
Climate Dynamics
225 (2005): 205–18.

21
. Thomas J. Crowley et al., “Volcanism and the Little Ice Age,”
PAGES News
16.2 (April 2008): 22–23.

22
. As the first eruption observed with modern scientific instruments, Pinatubo has been vital to research on connections between tropical volcanism and global climate, and hence on the development of scholarship on Tambora.

23
. Christopher G. Newhall and Stephen Self, “The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI): An Estimate of Explosive Magnitude for Historical Volcanism,”
Journal of Geophysical Research
87 (February 1982): 1231–38; Lee Siebert, Tom Simkin, and Paul Kimberley,
Volcanoes of the World
, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2010).

24
. See Alan Robock and Melissa P. Free, “Ice Cores as an Index of Global Volcanism from 1850 to the Present,”
Journal of Geophysical Research
100 (June 1995): 11549–67, and the recent follow-up paper coauthored by Robock: Chaochao Gao et al., “Volcanic Forcing of Climate over the Past 1500 Years: An Improved Ice Core–Based Index for Climate Models,”
Journal of Geophysical Research
113 (2008): D23111.

25
. For a summary and development of the theory of Santorini’s biblical connections, see Barbara J. Sivertsen,
The Parting of the Sea: How Volcanoes, Earthquakes, and Plagues Shaped the Story of the Exodus
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

CHAPTER THREE
“THIS END OF THE WORLD WEATHER”

1
.
The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
, ed. Betty B. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 1:17;
The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin
, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1:48. That same wet summer in nearby Hampshire, Jane Austen, housebound and ailing, was writing her late masterpiece,
Persuasion
, in which the melancholy heroine must reconcile herself to a Tambora-style future with no “second spring.”

2
.
Letters of Mary Shelley
, 1:20.

3
. Paul Henchoz, “L’Année de la Misère (1816–17) dans la Région de Montreux,”
Revue Historique Vaudoise
42 (1934): 72.

4
. Post,
The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World
, 21.

5
. Henchoz, “L’Année de la Misère,” 83.

6
.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
, III:860–61, 864–66, 873–77.