The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History
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On May 14, the cold wave struck crops in Virginia (the National Register reported frost in the vicinity of Richmond), and by one account reached as far south as Tennessee, ruining substantial quantities of cotton. The severe cold exacerbated the effects of a prolonged drought throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southern states, a highly unusual occurrence at that time of year. In Virginia, the Norfolk Beacon reported that farmers were “ploughing up and re-planting the corn. The temperature of the weather with us is very fluctuating—the evenings and mornings generally so cold as to render a fire quite agreeable.” As the cold persisted, ice formed nearly an inch thick on rivers and ponds from Maine to Buffalo. “The season continues extremely unfavorable to Agriculture,” mused a Quebec correspondent. “Masses of snow still lie in the fields, and very little wheat has yet been sown in this district.”
Seasonably warm temperatures returned on May 19, but only briefly. Nine days later, another front swept down upon Quebec from the northwest, bringing more snow and leaving ice a quarter of an inch thick. As the cold advanced through New England, it killed corn in the fields in central Maine. Snow fell in Vermont; the “remarkable cold” froze the ground an inch deep. Cattle could not forage in the pastures, and farmers had to use part of their corn supplies as fodder. “The last spring and the present,” noted the New England Palladium, “are certainly the most backward of any for the last 25 years.” Again the frost reached as far south as Richmond, and as far west as Cincinnati, where blossoms shriveled on the fruit trees.
David Thomas, a farmer in Cayuga County, New York, left his home on May 21 on a journey to explore the lands along the Wabash River in the territory of Indiana, which had recently applied to Congress for admission as a state. As he departed, Thomas wrote in his journal that “the season has been unusually cold, and vegetation proportionally retarded.” Two days later, he noted that “the morning was rainy, cold, and uncomfortable, with wind from the north,” the sort of wind by which “our deepest snows have been borne along.” As he approached the town of Buffalo, he felt a breeze “so damp and chill that instantly we stopt, and put on our great coats.” The following morning (May 25), “was so cold that we shivered in a winter dress, with great coats and gloves.” According to local residents, the spring had been so frigid that the ice along the shore of Lake Erie had disappeared only five days earlier.
Conditions did not improve as Thomas continued westward. He found Chautauqua Lake “wrapt in the drapery of winter,” and a cold rain delayed him for three hours as he neared the border with Pennsylvania on May 28. “This morning was very frosty,” he wrote in his journal on May 29, “and ice covered the water one-fourth of an inch thick.” A brisk breeze from the northeast convinced Thomas to don his great coat again. The next morning he observed “a severe frost”; then “the clouds rolled on heavily to the eastward, and portentously to those who have neither home nor shelter.”
“When the last of May arrived,” wrote a Maine chronicler, “everything had been killed by the cold,” although not much had been planted anyway. “The whole of the month has been so cold and wet,” complained New Hampshire farmer Adino Brackett, “that wheat could not be sown ’til late and then the ground could not be well prepared.” “Everybody complains of the present ‘strange weather; this unnatural weather; this unseasonable weather,’” noted the Chambersburg [Pennsylvania] Democratic Republican. Spring was “at least a month later than usual.” Instead of the usual warm, nourishing showers of April and May, the Eastern United States was experiencing “general aridity, the mountains are covered with snow, the valleys with ice, and the fruits of the earth are stunted and withered. Weather-wise people are at a loss to account for this ‘strange weather.’”
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PARIS, too, shivered through a cold and wet springtime, but in May 1816 Louis XVIII appeared to face considerably more pressing problems than the dreary weather. Following Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Allied sovereigns had reinstalled the corpulent Louis on the throne of France; critics jibed that he had been “brought back in the baggage of the Allies.” But they also had imposed upon Louis the stringent terms of the second Treaty of Paris. France was reduced to its borders of January 1790, which meant the loss of about 5,000 square kilometers and 300,000 citizens; the French people would also have to repay all foreign debts incurred by previous French governments—including, of course, Napoléon’s. Far more damaging were the reparations France would have to pay the Allied victors: 700 million francs over a period of five years, plus the entire cost of feeding and sheltering an Allied occupation force of 150,000 (stationed mostly in eastern France) for at least three years. Adding the annual costs of the indemnity and the occupation troops to the regular budget, Louis’s government in the spring of 1816 was facing short-term obligations of nearly 1,500 million francs, a sum which would require both substantial tax increases and cuts in government spending.
Compounding Louis’s financial woes was the presence of a zealously reactionary Ultra-Royalist majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Led by the Count d’Artois—the king’s brother, who was barely on speaking terms with Louis—the Ultra-Royalists were determined to seek out and punish the “accomplices” of Napoléon, and especially his most vocal supporters during the Hundred Days. Famously “more royalist than the king,” the Ultras knew they could not count on the indolent Louis (whom they privately mocked as “a crowned Jacobin, a King-Voltaire, a dressed-up comedian”) to carry out a thoroughgoing purge of French society. Accordingly, in late October 1815 the Chamber seized the initiative and passed the first of a series of measures that launched the “White Terror,” authorizing the arrest of individuals suspected of plotting against the restored monarchy, and the establishment of special courts to try them.
Doubtless the results disappointed the deputies. Authentic antiroyalist conspiracies were few and far between. “There are continual reports of insurrections and plots,” reported a British military officer in Paris in the spring of 1816, “but it is now well known that the most of them are ‘got up’ by the Ultras to entrap the unwary. The French people seem sunk in apathy and to wish for peace at any rate; nothing but the most extreme provocation will induce them to take up arms.” Meanwhile, the clergy sought to restore the Roman Catholic Church to its privileged pre-Revolutionary position, including the return of real estate that formerly belonged to the Church. Priests whipped up popular sentiment against the alleged enemies of the Church, reportedly forging communications from the Holy Ghost or claiming to have received letters dropped from heaven by Jesus. The result was a series of attacks by Catholic mobs on Protestants, particularly in the south of France; in Nimes, a mob massacred sixteen Protestants during a two-day riot.
Such tactics succeeded mainly in arousing anxiety among the populace, most of whom were willing to tolerate Louis but opposed any attempt to resurrect the Ancien Régime, particularly if it meant returning real estate to the Church. Fearful that the vengeful actions of obdurate reactionaries would alienate the French public to the point of threatening his throne yet again, Louis and his ministers repeatedly opposed the majority in the Chamber, until the nation was treated to the spectacle of Ultra-Royalists defending the prerogatives of the legislature against the king. After beating back an Ultra attempt to abolish divorce, the government at last decided to prorogue the Chamber. On April 29, the king declared the legislative session closed, and his ministers began to plan for new elections in the fall.
A week later, a lawyer named Jean-Paul Didier launched an abortive uprising in Grenoble that collapsed almost before it began. Supported by a force of several hundred peasants and retired soldiers, Didier purportedly sought to overthrow Louis and replace him with Napoléon’s infant son, the King of Rome. Government troops easily quashed the feeble uprising and executed twenty-one alleged conspirators, including a sixteen-year-old boy; Didier, who fled to Savoy, was subsequently captured and executed on June 8. Meanwhile, the police in Paris claimed to have uncovered another plot, this on
e led by a small group of working men.
To make matters worse, the price of bread was rising due to a shortage of grain from the war and the need to provision the Allied army of occupation. Well aware that he could ill afford to alienate the poor of Paris, who depended upon cheap bread, Louis issued an ordinance permitting foreign vessels to import grain without paying the usual duties. Then he hoped for a plentiful harvest.
“The uneasiness of the court is indescribable,” reported an American correspondent in Paris, “the palace at night may be said to exhibit the aspect of a camp or of a besieged palace. A double line of guards surround it on all sides.” Patrols of gendarmes and the national guard kept watch in every street; coffee houses were cleared at 11 P.M. The London Star reported that ships bound for the United States from French harbors were full of prospective émigrés. “There was a strange feeling of unrest in the country,” concluded one observer, “and there were rumours of the return of Napoléon and of the massacre of nobles and priests.”
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WHEN Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin arrived in Paris on May 8, she found her French hosts less than congenial. “The manners of the French are interesting, although less attractive, at least to Englishmen, than before the last invasion of the Allies,” she wrote to a friend; “the discontent and sullenness of their minds perpetually betrays itself.” Doubtless their resentment stemmed from the humiliation of 150,000 foreign troops on French soil, but Mary saw no reason why “they should regard the subjects of a Government which fills their country with hostile garrisons, and sustains a detested dynasty on the throne, with an acrimony and indignation of which that Government alone is the proper object.”
Mary was traveling with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, their infant son, William, and her stepsister, Claire (nee Clara Mary Jane) Clairmont. Nineteen years old in the spring of 1816, Mary Godwin had met Shelley in 1813, and the two fell in love at once. The daughter of William Godwin, a writer notorious for his free thinking and philosophical anarchism—Godwin believed advancing human knowledge and morality would eventually render government obsolete—and noted feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who died shortly after Mary was born), Mary grew up reading widely in the works of the philosophes, poets William Blake and Samuel Coleridge, and, of course, her parents.
For his part, Shelley was a child of privilege who attended Oxford until the authorities expelled him for his public defense of atheism. In 1811, at the age of nineteen, he had married Harriet Wentworth, then only sixteen herself. Shelley soon tired of monogamy and began to spend much of his time at the home of William Godwin, whose philosophy he admired and whose daughter he subsequently pursued. When he learned that his daughter had fallen in love with a married man, Godwin decided to fall back upon conventional morality and forbade Mary to see Shelley. In late July 1814, the lovers ran off to Europe. By the time they returned in early 1815, Mary was pregnant. The child, born premature, lived only eleven days; Mary later dreamed she could bring her daughter back to life.
Burdened by financial problems and wounded by the critical dismissal of an early poem, “Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude,” published in February 1816, Shelley decided to leave England. Accordingly, he and Mary (accompanied by Claire and three-month-old William) crossed the Channel in early May. Originally Shelley had planned to visit either Italy or Scotland, but Claire—who recently had become the lover of George Gordon, Lord Byron—convinced them to stay in Geneva instead, because that was where Byron would spend the summer. Shelley agreed; at least the cost of living in Geneva was lower than in England.
Their journey by coach from Paris to Geneva took them across the Jura Mountains; Shelley, like Mary, did not regret leaving France and the “discontent and sullenness” of Frenchmen. The weather in the middle of May was far worse than Mary expected. “The spring, as the inhabitants informed us, was unusually late,” she wrote to a friend, “and indeed the cold was excessive; as we ascended the mountains the same clouds which rained on us in the valleys poured forth large flakes of snow thick and fast.” Initially the snow stuck only to the overhanging rocks, but as the coach climbed higher it started to freeze on the road.
Evening fell; the party pressed on, snow pelting against the carriage windows as darkness descended. Then Mary could see Lake Geneva and, far in the distance, the Alps. “Never was scene more awfully desolate,” she noted. “The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road.”
They settled in a secluded villa known as the Maison Chapuis, a pleasant if humble two-story cottage on the south edge of the lake, facing what Mary termed the “dark frowning” Jura range. On the infrequent evenings that were pleasant and clear, they would sail upon the lake. “Unfortunately,” complained Mary in early June, “an almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house.… The thunderstorms that visit us are grander and more terrific than I have ever seen before.” One night a brilliant streak of lightning lit up the lake, “the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.”
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AS a member of a consortium of New England college professors who regularly made weather observations, Professor Chester Dewey of Williams College kept a thermometer suspended on the north side of his house, well protected from the sun. Three times a day (7 A.M., 2 P.M., and 9 P.M.), Dewey noted and recorded the temperatures, deducing the mean temperature each day from his observations. In the first few days of June, Dewey noticed the temperatures fluctuating wildly, as if on a roller coaster. June 1 and 2 were quite warm; the following two days were much cooler. June 5 brought sweltering heat: At noon Dewey’s thermometer soared to 83 degrees.
It was not an isolated reading. Montreal reported “hot and sultry” weather on June 5. To the east, Boston experienced a high of 86 degrees; at Waltham, the mercury reached 90 degrees; and at Salem, 92 degrees. The Vermont Mirror reported from Middlebury that June 5 was “the warmest day that has here been experienced during the season,” and the Rutland Herald noted “the intense summer’s heat.”
“The mild influence of the sun,” wrote a newspaper editor in eastern Massachusetts, “gave us fond anticipations (tho’ our seeds were but just springing out of the ground,) of a plentiful harvest.” A wave of thunderstorms passed through in the afternoon, cooling the region briefly before unusually high temperatures returned. At ten o’clock that evening, Albany recorded a temperature of 72 degrees, 15 degrees warmer than the normal overnight low temperature. A reporter in Danville, Vermont, could see heat lightning in the distance. “The night was so warm,” noted a resident of Bangor, Maine, “that one blanket was sufficient to keep a person comfortable.” Overnight, a steady rain developed.
The warm, humid air and rain in New England preceded a strong low-pressure system that was making its way across the Great Lakes on June 5. In the Northern Hemisphere, the winds around low-pressure systems spiral counterclockwise; as lows move from west to east, the winds drag warm air from the south ahead (i.e., to the east) of the low-pressure centers. When this warm air meets colder air, such as was present across New England on June 3 and 4, the warm air slowly rises, resulting in steady rain and occasionally in thunderstorms. While these warm fronts are usually benign, lows are often followed by sharp cold fronts, due to the winds pulling cold air from the north. It is cold fronts that most often cause thunderstorms and tornadoes, as the sudden influx of cold air causes the existing warm air to rise quickly.
Highly unseasonable, frigid air lurked behind the cold front of the low that crossed the Great Lakes on June 5. In a weather pattern more typical of winter than summer, a polar high-pressure system was following the low. In summer, Arctic air is usually contained north of Hudson Bay by the subpolar jet stream: strong westerly winds high in the troposphere that effectively
form a barrier to weather systems. Occasional southward excursions of this jet stream in winter can produce frigid, but often clear days across the Great Plains and Eastern United States. First in May and then again in June 1816, however, the jet stream dipped far to the south, forming a U-shape and allowing Arctic air to flow from northern Canada as far south as the Carolinas. The collision of this air with the warm, moist air masses that normally prevail in New England and eastern Canada produced powerful storms.
Limited weather observations from the early nineteenth century and the chaotic nature of the atmosphere make it difficult to determine with certainty why the jet stream moved so far south. One explanation is that a broad area of high pressure, a “blocking high,” had developed in late May in the central Atlantic. These systems impede the normal west-to-east flow of the jet stream, causing it to shift north and south to avoid the block. The effect then cascades backwards and forwards along the jet stream in waves, disrupting the jet stream for thousands of miles in each direction and forming the type of U-shaped bends that affected eastern North America in 1816. As with water moving through a clogged pipe, the block slows the movement of weather systems, stagnating the weather and allowing extreme conditions to persist for longer than they might otherwise. A slow, meandering jet stream is consistent with the impact of Tambora’s aerosol cloud on the North Atlantic Oscillation—a weak polar vortex and frequent incursions of Arctic air into the middle latitudes—in the summer of 1816. The aerosol cloud did not necessarily cause the early June storm that struck New England, but the stratospheric veil almost certainly cooled the air behind the storm and set the atmospheric circulation pattern that allowed the air to penetrate so unseasonably far south.