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The year without summer

ON APRIL 5 1815, soldiers on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies heard a
prolonged rumbling which they took to be cannon fire. They went looking for a
battle but eventually returned to barracks without firing a shot. They were not to
know that the noise was coming from a volcano called Mount Tambora on the
island of Sumbawa, hundreds of miles away, which had just erupted after 5,000
years of silence.
By Simon Edge , Daily Express, London
PUBLISHED: 00:00, Wed, May 2, 2012

Storms battered Britain in 1816 []

That eruption was a mere curtain-raiser. Five days later a second blast tore the top off the
13,000ft mountain, reducing its height by half. A plume of smoke and gas soared 25 miles into
the sky, while incandescent ash poured down the slopes at 100 miles an hour and huge floating
rafts of pumice trapped ships in their harbours. The biggest eruption of the past 10,000 years 10
times bigger than the more famous Krakatoa 68 years later killed 10,000 people instantly. A
further 80,000 inhabitants of Sumbawa and the neighbouring island of Lombok died later, mainly
of starvation.
Throughout Europe astronomers reported that the stars were dimmer than usual in the ensuing
months. But with wireless telegraphy yet to be invented, the Western world remained unaware of
the spectacular cataclysm.
That did not mean its presence went unfelt. With a vast cloud of sulphur dioxide shrouding the
planet, sunlight was blocked out and temperatures in the northern hemisphere began to fall. The
climatic disruption reached its peak in the middle of 1816, which scientists and historians still
recall as the year without a summer.

Non-stop rain for eight weeks destroyed crops In Britain and Europe far more rain than usual fell
throughout the summer months. In Ireland it rained non-stop for eight weeks, destroying the
potato crop and creating famine. Riots, arson and looting were recorded in cities all over Europe
as floods and frosts ruined crops and whole populations grew hungry. The violence was worst in
Switzerland, where a national emergency was declared.
One historian has called the continental famine the last great subsistence crisis in the Western
world and as many as 200,000 people died of hunger or the typhus epidemic that followed.
The most graphic accounts came from the north-eastern United States and Canada. In Danville,
Virginia, where June temperatures nowadays average 86F, the North Star newspaper wrote on
June 15: Some account was given in last weeks issue of the unparalleled severity of the
weather. It contin- ued without any essential amelio- ration... freezing as hard five nights in
succession as it usually does in December. Saturday the weather was more severe than it
generally is during the storms of winter.
An amateur meteorologist in New Hampshire reported foot-long icicles in the noon shade. In
July and August lake and river ice were observed as far south as Pennsylvania. Newly shorn
sheep perished in the cold and birds fell dead from the sky. The late frosts killed most of the corn
in New England, with only about 10 per cent fit to harvest. The hardship even extended to
Thomas Jefferson, who had retired to his Virginia estate after completing his second term as
president. He had such a poor corn crop that he applied for a $1,000 loan.
For many farmers, who had previously been considering migrating westwards, the catastrophic
summer- that-never-happened was the final straw. Thousands left in search of what they hoped
would be a more hospitable climate on the far side of the Ohio River, the migration led to the
establishments of Indiana and Illinois. Among those who moved were the family of Joseph
Smith, setting off a chain of events that would lead to the publication of the Book Of Mormon
and the creation of the Church of Latter-day Saints.
On this side of the Atlantic one of the best-known results of the non-summer of 1816 was
cultural. In May the young Mary Godwin travelled with her common-law husband Percy Shelley
and their baby son to Geneva, where they planned to spend the summer with Lord Byron and two
others. While these privileged travelers would be untroubled by food shortages their holiday
nevertheless proved a wash-out. Mary Shelley (as she would eventually become) complained: It
proved a wet, ungenial summer and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.
Sitting around a log fire the party amused themselves by reading German ghost stories,
prompting Byron to suggest they each write their own horror tale. Marys was a short story
called Frankenstein, which she would later expand into the classic novel about the disastrous
consequences of man interfering with nature.
Today, as the arguments bounce back and forth over whether or not our present climate is the
result of man-made emissions, that piece of literature retains all its symbolic power to
frighten.But the one thing we can say for certain about the catastrophic weather that spawned the
book was that it was undoubtedly the work of nature itself, at its most destructive.