The Year Without Summer (10 page)

Farther south, visitors to Salem, Massachusetts, found ice in the well at the toll
house on the turnpike on the morning of June 9, and frost again in the evening. Fearing
the worst for his congregation in South Windsor, Connecticut—and for his own crops—the
Reverend Thomas Robbins decided to preach a sermon that morning on the parable of
the Barren Fig Tree (Luke 13: 6–9): “A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard;
and he came seeking fruit on it, and found none.” Two days later, Robbins concluded
that the corn in his fields had been “killed to the ground.”

“Another frost, cold day,” noted Benjamin Harwood in his diary on June 10, “indeed
obliged to thrash our hands while hoeing.” Harwood’s corn, which had emerged less
than a week earlier, was “badly killed—difficult to see it—gloomy weather.” Professor
Dewey, too, recorded a severe frost on June 10: “Indian corn, beans, cucumbers, and
the like, cut down.” The morning temperature in Malone, New York, dipped to 24 degrees,
the coldest temperature recorded during the entire storm. Even towns along the New
England coast reported below-freezing temperatures for eight of the first twelve nights
in June, and the snow flurries that swirled into Boston on June 7–8 were the latest
recorded seasonal instance of snowfall in the city’s history.

David Thomas was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when the cold front arrived on June
6. “For three days we had brisk gales from the north-west, of unusual severity for
summer,” he wrote in his journal. “The surface of the rivers was rolled into foam,
and each night was attended by considerable frost.” As Thomas made his way through
the farmlands of Washington County the following week, he encountered extensive orchards
of apple and peach trees, “but the fruit has been chiefly destroyed by the late frosts”—the
only year it had failed in the past decade. The orchards in southeastern Ohio fared
no better; the frosts of June 6–10 left them nearly barren of fruit. “We saw neither
peaches nor apples till we approached this [Little Miami] river; and, indeed even
here, these fruits are scarce. Dead leaves, in tufts, are hanging on the papaw, and
on most other trees—the first growth of this spring having been entirely destroyed.
This remark will apply to much of the state where we travelled.”

When warmer weather finally returned late on June 11 (following another frost in the
morning), farmers took stock of the cold wave’s cost. “The trees on the sides of the
hills, whose young leaves were killed by the frost, presented for miles the appearance
of having been burned or scorched,” wrote Chester Dewey. “The same appearance was
visible through the country—in parts, at least, of Connecticut—and also, on many parts
of Long Island, as I was told by a gentleman of undoubted veracity, who had visited
the island.” From Dutchess County in the Hudson Valley came a warning that “the crops
of wheat and rye, in this county, which are usually so abundant are almost entirely
destroyed.” In Albany, the editor of the
Daily Advertiser
feared that “great damage has been done by the frosts, which have been so severe
as to make ice of considerable thickness.… The prospect to the farmer, as far as we
have heard in the country, is, at present, very gloomy.”

Maine farmers reported corn crops “totally destroyed … and even of the sheep that
had been shorn, many perished,” even though they had been sheltered in barns. In Portland,
the
Eastern Argus
reported that “a check is given to all vegetation, and we fear the frost has been
so powerful as to destroy a great portion of the young fruit that is put forth.” Central
Maine suffered significant damage to fruit blossoms, and “in some instances the corn
is totally destroyed, the plant being frozen to the seed; in most places it has been
cut off to the surface of the ground,” although residents hoped it could still sprout
again.

“What is to become of this country, it is impossible to divine—distressing beyond
description,” wrote a correspondent from Jackson. “Farms that usually cut from Thirty
to Forty tons of Hay, by their present appearance will not cut Five, and to all appearance,
this part of the Union is going to suffer for bread and everything else.” In Worcester,
Massachusetts, “expectations have in a measure been blasted … and the frost has cut
down and destroyed many very valuable fruits of the earth.… A destruction of the crops
of grain as also of every species of fruit is fearfully anticipated.” The
Brattleboro Reporter
agreed that “the most gloomy apprehensions of scarcity are entertained by those who
witnessed the phenomena.”

To emphasize the unprecedented nature of the cold spell, news reports repeatedly asserted
that the oldest living residents in their community could not remember such violent
winter storms in the month of June. The
Albany
Argus
, for instance, declared that “the weather, during the last week, has exhibited an
intensity of cold, not recollected to have been experienced here before in the month
of June.” In Rutland, Vermont, “the oldest inhabitants in this part of the country
do not recollect to have witnessed so cold and unfavorable a season as the present,”
and in Middlebury, “never before, we are informed, was such an instance known, by
even the oldest inhabitants now living amongst us.”

In the absence of reliable weather statistics, individual human memory—and the collective
recollections of a community—were the only means of comparison to previous seasons.
But this method clearly had its limitations; as the editor of the
Albany Daily Advertiser
pointed out, “we are very apt to misrecollect the state of the weather from time
to time. Memory is certainly not safely to be relied on relative to this subject,
for any great length or time.” Hence the
Advertiser
urged that regular journals of weather observations should be kept throughout the
nation. “A great mass of useful information might be collected concerning our climate,
and seasons,” the editorial concluded, “if gentlemen who possess the necessary instruments,
would be careful to devote a few minutes in each day to mark the state of the weather,
and the temperature of the atmosphere.” Even a modest effort on the part of these
individuals, the
Advertiser
predicted, would provide data which “would be of great and lasting importance.”

A number of Americans (besides Jefferson, of course) already had made sporadic attempts
to collect weather statistics in a systematic fashion, although a lack of uniformity
in instrumentation and methodology limited the usefulness of their data. In the 1740s,
Dr. John Lining—a Scottish-born physician living in Charleston, South Carolina—began
tracking changes in the weather with variations in his own physical processes, to
try to determine the relationship between climate and public health. “I began these
experiments,” Lining wrote, “[to] discover the influence of our different seasons
upon the human body by which I might arrive at some certain knowledge of the cause
of our epidemic diseases which regularly return at their stated seasons as a good
clock strikes twelve when the sun is on the meridian.” Several other physicians in
the United States maintained their own records comparing weather and public health
data in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but there was little coordination
of their efforts.

In 1778, Jefferson succeeded in compiling parallel weather observations between Monticello
and the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, courtesy of the president
of the college, who agreed to take daily readings of the temperature, winds, and barometric
pressure. The effort lasted for only six weeks, however. Although Jefferson persistently
encouraged the establishment of a national system of meteorological observation throughout
the last decades of his life, the best he could achieve was an occasional exchange
of information with like-minded souls in cities from Quebec and Philadelphia to Natchez
and London. The closest the nation came to achieving a coordinated program of weather
measurements before 1816 was the thrice-daily observation system established by the
consortium of New England colleges—notably Middlebury, Williams, Yale, and sometimes
Harvard—of which Chester Dewey was a member.

Such an accumulation of concrete statistical details was precisely the sort of empirical
scientific task that appealed to Americans in the early nineteenth century. As Gordon
Wood has pointed out, Americans were forsaking the Enlightenment’s fascination with
metaphysical principles and abstract generalities in favor of a harder-edged and utilitarian
approach to science. By 1816, science in the United States no longer was the preserve
of gentlemen with sufficient leisure to contemplate the moral grandeur of natural
laws, or pursue knowledge purely for its own sake. Anyone could gather data (assuming
one was armed with the proper measuring instruments), or make sense out of statistics
accumulated by others. When introducing his
Picture of Philadelphia
, a detail-laden snapshot of the city published in 1811, physician James Mease declared
that “the chief object ought to be the multiplication of facts, and the reflections
arising out of them ought to be left to the reader.” Americans increasingly believed
that these collections of scientific data should serve a useful purpose; the study
of chemistry, for instance, should produce better cider, cheese, or methods for marinating
meat. Perhaps the compilation of meteorological data might result in more efficient
agricultural practices. And if scientific investigations helped Americans in their
ceaseless pursuit of material wealth, so much the better.

*   *   *

I
N
the early nineteenth century, most meteorological instruments in the United States
and Europe were owned by gentleman scientists, who collected data for their private
diaries or to share with their colleagues in learned societies. Many of the rest of
the instruments were located on ships: British Royal Navy vessels, for instance, were
required to measure the air temperature, ocean temperature, wind speed and direction,
and the fraction of the sky covered by cloud four times a day. (In a testament to
British military discipline, navy logbooks reveal that ships continued to make regular
readings even when taking enemy fire.) Barometers and thermometers were the most common
instruments, having been developed over the previous 150 years. While some of the
earliest models provided results of questionable accuracy, by 1816 the designs of
both instruments had been refined so that they were able to provide precise and reliable
measurements of the atmospheric pressure and temperature, respectively.

Anemometers (for measuring wind speed) and hygrometers (for measuring humidity) were
far less common and less accurate. There was no standard method for measuring wind
speeds until Sir Francis Beaufort’s eponymous scale, developed in 1805, was adopted
by the Royal Navy in the 1830s, and wind forces would not be related to anemometer
measurements until the 1850s. It is nearly impossible to compare the readings from
earlier anemometers, since the designs of the instruments and the scales applied to
their measurements varied so widely. Most hygrometers of the early nineteenth century
were simply the combination of two thermometers: one kept dry and the other immersed
in water. As the water naturally evaporated, it cooled the wet thermometer; the temperature
difference between the two thermometers could then be used to determine the humidity.
In 1783, the Swiss physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure demonstrated the first hygrometer
based on the contraction and expansion of human hair due to changes in atmospheric
moisture. While his design would later become very popular, in 1816 it had not yet
been widely adopted. (Currently, the most accurate hygrometers are polished mirrors
that are cooled until water condenses onto them, an adaptation of a technique pioneered
by the British chemist John Frederic Daniell in 1820.)

Although barometers and thermometers were in widespread use throughout Europe and
the United States throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, many
weather diaries remained private; those records that have been published often contain
long gaps or end abruptly. The meteorological community was primarily composed of
amateurs, albeit enthusiastic ones, rather than professionals. Governments had not
yet established official agencies with the responsibility for monitoring or understanding
the weather—the Royal Meteorological Society in Britain, for example, was not founded
until 1850—and, as during the French Revolution, those that did exist could be disbanded
if they became politically unpopular. The information we have today about the climate
of the period is the result of the painstaking, meticulous reconstitution by modern
climatologists of fragmented data from disparate sources around the globe.

Those nineteenth-century scientists who had access to instruments and kept detailed,
regular records would have been aware of the connections between the variations in
temperature and pressure and the variations in local weather patterns. Such variations
had been noted for nearly two hundred years. Evangelista Torricelli, the Italian physicist
and mathematician who invented the mercury barometer in 1643, soon recognized that
the atmospheric pressure changed from one day to the next. Four years later, famed
French philosopher René Descartes made two identical paper scales for a barometer;
one he kept, the other he sent to his friend Marin Mersenne “so that we may know if
changes of weather and of location make any difference to [the readings].” In 1648,
the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal carried out a series of experiments
on mountain peaks, with the help of his brother-in-law, to demonstrate that air pressure
decreases with altitude. His findings astonished most contemporary scientists, who
assumed the atmosphere’s composition remained constant throughout its depth.