The Year Without Summer
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Authors: William K. Klingaman,Nicholas P. Klingaman
Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Science, #Earth Sciences, #Meteorology & Climatology
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To Janet and Emma
CONTENTS
1.
THE VOLCANO
J
UST BEFORE SUNSET
on April 5, 1815, a massive explosion shook the volcanic island of Sumbawa in the
Indonesian archipelago. For two hours, a stream of lava erupted from Mount Tambora,
the highest peak in the region, sending a plume of ash eighteen miles into the sky.
More than eight hundred miles away, Thomas Stamford Raffles, the lieutenant-governor
of Java, heard the blast at his residence and assumed it came from cannon firing in
the distance. Other British authorities on the island made the same mistake. Fearing
a neighboring village was under attack, the commander of the city of Djogjokarta,
in central Java, dispatched troops to repel the invaders. Officials along the coast
interpreted the sounds as signals from a ship in distress, and launched rescue boats
to look for survivors.
At Makassar on the southwestern tip of Sulawesi, 240 miles northeast of Tambora, the
commander of the
Benares
, a cruiser of the British East India Company, reported “a firing of cannon” on April
5. The explosions appeared to come from the south; as they continued, “the reports
seemed to approach much nearer, and sounded like heavy guns occasionally, with slighter
reports between.” Assuming that pirates were in the area, the
Benares
put to sea and spent the next three days scouring nearby islands for any signs of
trouble, but found nothing. Nearly five hundred miles farther to the east, the British
resident on the island of Ternate heard “several very distinct reports like heavy
cannon,” and sent another cruiser, the
Teignmouth
, to investigate. It, too, returned empty-handed.
British authorities might have been excused for assuming that the threatening sounds
came from potential enemies rather than the earth itself. They were not yet accustomed
to the frequent volcanic eruptions that plagued the Indonesian islands. Britain had
gained control of Java and the surrounding islands less than four years earlier, when
British troops overwhelmed a vastly outnumbered band of French defenders who themselves
had held Java for only a short time, having taken it from the Dutch when France conquered
the Netherlands in 1794. By the spring of 1815, neither the government in London nor
the British East India Company was entirely certain that they wanted to keep the island,
since the expense of administering and defending it had outweighed the commercial
benefits thus far.
Responsibility for British policy on the scene lay squarely with Raffles himself.
The son of a ship’s captain, Raffles—who actually was born at sea, off the coast of
Jamaica—dreamt of a British maritime empire throughout South Asia, an “Eastern insular
Empire” that would provide new markets for English cotton and woolen textiles, and
a profitable supply of coffee and sugar for Europe. It was Raffles who had persuaded
the governor general of India, Lord Minto, to seize Java in the first place. Raffles
also hoped to use Java as an avenue to improve relations with Japan, which he viewed
as a rising Asiatic power. Meanwhile, heeding Minto’s advice to “do as much good as
we can” while governing Java, Raffles reformed the colonial administration of the
island, limiting the powers of the great landowners over their tenants and ameliorating
the worst abuses of slavery while banning the importation of slaves under fourteen
years of age.
But Raffles’ interests in the region extended beyond politics and commerce. After
years of study, he was sufficiently fluent in the Malay language to conduct discussions
directly with local chieftains. He regularly employed botanists and zoologists to
obtain—at his own expense—specimens of local flora and wildlife, some of which he
had preserved in spirit and shipped back to Britain. In his capacity as president
of the Batavian Society, dedicated to the study of Java’s natural history, Raffles
frequently toured the island and recorded his observations of geological phenomena.
Several weeks before Mount Tambora erupted, Raffles became the first European to ascend
a nearby mountain known as Gunong Gede; by using thermometers to measure the difference
in temperature between the base and the peak, Raffles and his companions determined
that they had climbed at least seven thousand feet. “We had a most extensive prospect
from the summit,” he subsequently wrote to a friend. “The islands all round were quite
distinct and we traced the sea beyond the southernmost point of Sumatra; the surf
on the south coast was visible to the naked eye.”
So Raffles’ scientific curiosity was piqued when the cannonlike explosions from the
southeast continued throughout the night of April 5 and into the morning hours. Shortly
after dawn, a light rain of ash provided evidence that a volcano somewhere in the
region had erupted. Few suspected Mount Tambora. It was generally believed that Tambora
was extinct, although natives living in the nearest village had reported rumblings
from deep inside the mountain during the past year. Besides, few on Java believed
that such powerful sounds could have come from a volcano several hundred miles away.
As Raffles subsequently noted, “the sound appeared to be so close, that in each district
it seemed near at hand, and was generally attributed to an eruption either from the
mountains Merapi, Klut, or Bromo.”
As a fog of ash drifted across Java, the sun faded; the warm, humid air grew stifling,
and everything seemed unnaturally still. The oppressive pressure, Raffles noted, “seemed
to forbode an earthquake.” Over the next several days, however, the explosions gradually
subsided. Volcanic ash continued to fall, but in diminishing quantities. Relieved,
Raffles returned to his routine administrative duties.
* * *
F
AR
from Tambora and the island of Java, a different sort of shock greeted the rulers
and citizens of Europe in April 1815: Napoléon had returned to Paris.
The Emperor had spent the past year ruling the island of Elba, a rocky, desolate piece
of real estate of no discernible strategic importance off the coast of Italy. Sixteen
miles long and only seven miles across at its widest point, Elba in the early nineteenth
century was home mainly to goats, deserted ruins, a variety of vines and scraggly
shrubs on arid hillsides, and approximately twelve thousand impoverished peasants
with a well-deserved reputation for being “extremely irritable” and “almost universally
ignorant.” Its primary natural resource was rocks. One French observer who visited
Elba shortly before Napoléon’s arrival warned that the island’s unremittingly inhospitable
topography was likely to “fatigue the senses and impart sensations of sorrow to the
soul.”
Napoléon had been consigned to Elba by the victorious allied coalition of Britain,
Prussia, Austria, and Russia shortly after abdicating the French throne on April 6,
1814. (Perhaps as an ironic jest, they allowed him to retain the title of “Emperor.”)
But the Allied statesmen who gathered at Vienna to sort out the consequences of nearly
two decades of war neglected to provide a jailer, or even an effective network of
informants to keep them apprised of Napoléon’s movements. Encouraged by press reports
of widespread popular disaffection with the restored Bourbon monarchy in Paris, Napoléon
decided that his former subjects would welcome him back. And so on February 25, 1815,
accompanied by slightly more than a thousand troops, forty horses, and four cannon,
Napoléon sailed away from Elba unopposed.
Six days later he landed at Golfe Juan, about a mile west of Cannes. “Frenchmen! In
my exile I have heard your complaints and your wishes,” he exclaimed. “I have arrived
in spite of every obstacle, and every danger.” Napoléon marched north rapidly, opposition
crumbling as his entourage expanded at every town. “Taking towns at his liking and
crowns at his leisure / From Elba to Lyons and Paris he goes,” crowed Lord Byron,
who admired Napoléon and fancied himself an English counterpart of the Eagle. Although
many of Napoléon’s former subjects—particularly his troops—greeted him enthusiastically,
others responded more warily. Their caution reflected the heavy costs of Napoléon’s
previous quest for glory: more than 900,000 French soldiers dead, and a depleted national
treasury now saddled with millions of francs of reparations due the Allies. Napoléon
attempted to allay their anxieties by publicly disavowing any new imperial ambitions.
“I want less to be sovereign of France,” he told the people of Grenoble, “than the
first of her citizens.”
News of Napoléon’s flight reached Vienna on March 7. Stunned, the Allied representatives
decided within hours to send troops to oppose Napoléon, but they also embargoed the
news from France for several days until they were prepared to make a public statement.
Several days later, they jointly declared that by reappearing in France, Napoléon
had proved himself “an enemy and disturber of the peace of the world,” and that together,
“the sovereigns of Europe would be ready to give the King of France and the French
nation the assistance necessary to restore peace.”
King Louis XVIII would need all the help he could get. Twenty-two years after the
execution of his brother, Louis XVI, few Frenchmen outside of a die-hard circle of
royalists desired to return to the days of a pre-Revolutionary monarchy. Too much
land belonging to the king, the aristocracy, and the church had been dispensed to
too many members of the Third Estate to turn back the clock. Nor had a year of life
under the restored Bourbon dynasty endeared King Louis to his subjects. Facing an
immense national debt which he inherited from Napoléon, Louis’ ministers found it
necessary to slash the army budget, cancelling contracts for military supplies and
throwing nearly three hundred thousand soldiers out of work. The government also reduced
spending on public construction projects while maintaining an oppressive array of
taxes. As unemployment rose along with the price of bread, hungry citizens in Channel
ports rioted against the shipment of grain to Britain. “We are really going on very
badly,” wrote one government official, “and we must do better if we do not wish to
perish completely.”
Louis himself engendered little personal loyalty, or even respect; a British bishop
once said that the French king was “a man fit only to cook his own capons.” Fifty-eight
years old and so grossly overweight that he could not sit on a horse, Louis abhorred
hard work and delegated authority with alacrity. Despite a modest measure of charm
in private conversations, Louis never developed a compelling public presence. Certainly
he paled in comparison with the charismatic former emperor. As Napoléon hastened towards
the capital in March, covering two hundred miles in six days, Louis grew increasingly
anxious. Ominous strains of the incendiary
Marseillaise
rang through Paris streets; royal troops deserted en masse and went over to Napoléon;
and newspaper editorials likened the situation to the eve of the Terror, when nobles
and monarchists were slaughtered. Recognizing that, as one writer put it, “the Parisians
love for their King has so died down that barely a spark remains,” Louis decided on
the evening of March 18 to flee Paris.
Three days later, Napoléon entered the city without a shot being fired. By the first
week of April, however, it was clear that the weary and impoverished French public
lacked any appetite for ambitious schemes to restore the glory of the empire. Napoléon’s
proposals for new taxes to fund a revitalized army met with widespread opposition.
Visible signs of disaffection appeared; rallies in support of the emperor’s return
clashed with demonstrations demanding his ouster. To bolster his defenses against
the Allied assault he knew was coming, Napoléon issued orders on April 8 for a general
mobilization of the French nation. Meanwhile, he assured the sovereigns of Europe
(whom he formally referred to as “my brothers”) that he wanted nothing more than “the
maintenance of an honourable peace.”
