The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History

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The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History Page 10

by William K. Klingaman


  With European grain production disarranged by the Napoleonic Wars, U.S. exports of both wheat and corn boomed as prices soared in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The growth of Pennsylvania’s towns and cities provided an expanding domestic market, and advances in agricultural machinery helped alleviate the state’s chronic shortage of farm labor. Although Pennsylvania farmers were notoriously reluctant to adopt new techniques, wealthy “gentlemen farmers” in the east pioneered new techniques that increased yields per acre, such as planting red clover as a cover crop, and spreading lime and gypsum to reduce soil acidity.

  Farmers could supplement their incomes if they were fortunate enough to discover a seam of coal on their property. Often the coal lay just under the surface of the soil, uncovered the first time a plough cut through the earth. Typically a farmer would mine the coal himself whenever he could spare the time from other chores, although the lack of machinery prevented him from digging past the level where water flooded the mine. In western Pennsylvania, where coal seemed to be everywhere, it sold for six cents a bushel in the spring of 1816; local residents preferred to use it instead of wood for fuel, “the blaze being so brilliant as to supersede the use of candles, even for sewing.”

  Farms located near substantial deposits of iron (most often in central Pennsylvania) earned additional profits from selling wood to the ironmongers—who needed it for charcoal to smelt iron—or simply by leasing their woods to the iron manufacturers, who cut and transported the timber themselves and then returned the cleared land to the farmer. Since larger furnaces employed upwards of one hundred workers, they required a wide range of support services (food, supplies, and building materials for the walls, desks, and benches of schoolhouses) that farm families willingly provided.

  Livestock, especially sheep, represented yet another opportunity for Pennsylvania farmers to augment their income, and in the summer of 1816 a speculative bubble in Merino sheep was about to burst. A fine-wool breed native to the Iberian peninsula, Merino sheep first appeared in quantity in the United States in 1810, after Napoléon’s conquest of Spain loosened restrictions on their sale. A frenzied pursuit of the aristocratic Merinos ensued, as Americans frantically bid up the price of breeding stock. Merino wool tripled in value in two years; in eastern Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, “full-blooded Merinos sold as high as $300 to $500 each and in a few instances they brought $1,000.… A man in this county sold his wheat crop, 200 bushels, at $3.00 a bushel and gave the whole of it for one sheep.” Prices peaked in the early months of 1816; by June they had begun to weaken.

  Prices of the imported goods that farmers purchased remained high, however. Cut off from regular sources of supply during the war against Britain, Pennsylvanians found themselves paying thirty-three cents per pound for sugar, and forty cents for a pound of coffee. (Some enterprising consumers substituted rye for coffee, and drank the brew unsweetened.) The prices of cotton and woolen goods also had skyrocketed at a time when many farm families who used to make all their own clothes—as well as their shoes, saddles, cabinets, and just about anything else they needed—were beginning to spend more time raising crops for market and less on household crafts.

  Pennsylvanians were as likely as any other Americans to see God’s hand in the June cold wave, although the expression of organized religion had been dampened by the effects of Enlightenment philosophy and the rationalism of the French Revolution. Moreover, several religious denominations had suffered setbacks during and immediately after the Revolution: Quakers whose pacifism led them to remain neutral in the struggle for independence often lost the respect and trust of their patriot neighbors, and never quite regained it; Anglicans—with the King of England at the head of their church—found themselves under attack by mobs and the courts during the revolutionary struggle; and Presbyterians, who overwhelmingly supported the rebel cause, lost both clergy (who served as chaplains) and members of their congregations to the military effort. But by the start of 1816, religious enthusiasm was making a comeback in western Pennsylvania, and the events of the summer would provide considerable momentum.

  Pennsylvanians—and particularly the Pennsylvania Dutch—took a backseat to no one in ascribing spiritual or supernatural (the line often blurred) causes to natural phenomena. For the ordinary farmer who needed to feel at least minimal control over the fate of his crops and livestock, superstitions governed every aspect of farming. The movement of the moon, planets, and stars provided a blueprint for success, even among well-educated Pennsylvanians. “Gather apples on the day of the moon,” recommended one farm journal; sow grain only when the moon was waxing; plant potatoes only in the “dark of the moon”; slaughter cattle during a full moon. Signs of the zodiac carried nearly as much weight as the moon, especially among German-American farmers who relied heavily on an almanac-like publication known as the Kalender-Aberglaube.

  Almanacs were nearly as ubiquitous as Bibles in Pennsylvanian farm households in the early nineteenth century. Besides providing practical wisdom on agricultural and personal matters, they served as farmers’ only source of weather forecasts authored by humans. (Certain animals were also afforded the power to predict the weather. If a rooster crowed after 10 P.M., or if mice or rats scurried about more noisily than usual, it would rain the following day; or if a groundhog saw its shadow on February 2, there would be six more weeks of winter. Even donkeys got into the act: “Hark! I heard the asses bray,” ran one piece of prognosticative verse, “I think we’ll have some rain today.”) Almanac writers typically took credit for making a correct prediction, though they deferred the blame if nature proved them wrong. A farmer in southeastern Pennsylvania who embarked upon a lengthy journey based on his almanac’s forecast of fair weather found himself forced to stop short of his destination due to heavy rains. When he complained, the almanac’s author replied that “although I made the almanac, the Lord Almighty made the weather.”

  And that included the cold wave that swept over Pennsylvania on June 7. Those days of subfreezing temperatures seemed especially ominous to those farmers who, encouraged by wartime’s high prices for grain and corn during the war, had ignored the warnings of their cautious neighbors and purchased additional acreage and machinery, often with borrowed funds.

  Based upon David Thomas’s observations, farmers in western Pennsylvania already were walking a thin line between prosperity and disaster. “Agriculture is at its lowest ebb, both in theory and practice,” Thomas wrote in his journal as he traveled through the region in the first week of June, “and we have never seen its operations so miserably conducted throughout the same extent of country.” He passed scores of small farms that had been deserted, their solitary buildings (or their burnt remains) deteriorating in the saddening countryside. The emaciated appearance of pigs and dogs on the local farms—a sight which Thomas felt was “truly indicative of habitual scarcity”—confirmed his negative impressions. Thomas blamed the poverty of the region on ignorance, rather than laziness. Western Pennsylvania farmers appeared unaware of the benefits of planting clover or scattering stable manure or gypsum, and they often plowed only a few inches below the surface of the soil, preventing roots from gaining a firm hold. When cold weather struck on June 7, moisture on the surface froze and expanded, dislodging their plants.

  Pittsburgh, on the other hand, impressed Thomas with its vitality and industry. Already known as the “Birmingham of America” for its manufacturing capabilities, Pittsburgh was not a lovely city—there were still many ramshackle wooden buildings scattered among the brick structures, and few of its streets were paved, so that rain turned the roads into dark, heavy mud. And the residents, according to Thomas, displayed a disconcerting proclivity to employ profanity at every available opportunity. But the city boasted a broad array of industrial enterprises: iron mills, nail factories, paper mills, cotton and woolen factories, flour mills, and glass factories, powered largely by steam and fueled by the coal mines surrounding the city. The burning coal that drove the econom
y also fouled the air; day and night, thick black smoke filled the atmosphere. “Often descending in whirls thro’ the streets,” Thomas noted, “it tarnishes every object to which it has access.” Housewives who hung their clothes outside to dry sometimes had to pull them down and wash them again before they dried. But when the cold front struck Pittsburgh in June, the heat from the burning coal helped save the fruit trees around the city. “The peach, the plumb [sic], the apple and the cherry, abound on the branches,” Davis remarked with surprise, “though the frosts have been very severe.”

  * * *

  COLD rains pelted western Europe throughout June. A low-pressure system settled over northern Germany and Denmark, pulling in frigid air from the north and northwest, and sea ice still floated in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Iceland. From Lancashire in northwestern England came reports that “the character of the present season has been on the whole ungenial,” with temperatures averaging five degrees colder than the previous year. “The atmosphere still seems as cold as in March or November,” observed the Lancaster Gazetteer on June 8. “For above a week past, the weather here has been very cold for the season, with high winds and rain.” Two days earlier, a storm had brought snow to the hills of northern Lancashire, “a circumstance not within the recollection of the oldest person living in that neighbourhood.” On June 9, the area received another “considerable fall of snow.” Parts of Bavaria received sufficient snow on June 7 to cover the ground for several days. Up and down the Italian peninsula, the cold damp weather threatened the silk harvest.

  Traveling from Belgium through northern France, Lady Caroline Capel (sister of the Marquess of Anglesey, one of Wellington’s leading commanders at Waterloo) found herself soaked from “the torrents of rain that have fallen every day.” “France is quite dreadfull,” she informed her mother, Lady Uxbridge, “& the Incessant rain, or rather Water Spouts, that fell during our whole journey till we entered this Country was really melancholy; Not a day passed that three of the party were not drenched to the skin, so that we are well off to have escaped without some real illness.”

  As the downpours persisted, the Ultra-Royalist pursuit of radicals in France gathered momentum, aided by clerics, prefects, and informants. Anyone who openly rejoiced in the government’s difficulties was subject to arrest; some zealous reactionaries wished to make simple possession of a tricolor banner evidence of treason. Academics were not exempt from persecution. The Royal Academy of Sciences, recently reestablished by Louis XVIII, purged from its ranks “all scientists, writers or artists whose names recalled unpleasant memories of the Republic or the Empire,” and launched a program designed to support the monarchy.

  This was only the latest volley in the continuing battle between scientific research and politics in France, to the detriment of meteorological studies. In late-eighteenth-century Europe, Enlightenment scholars had proposed the systematic gathering of meteorological observations, hoping to discover that weather variations were the result of “predictable forms of behaviour.” The primary impetus for meteorological research at this time came from the medical profession. The prevailing theory among physicians was that disease was caused in large measure by the effects of the physical environment—climate, living conditions, topography—on the human body. (When the French spoke of the “temperature” of the air in the late eighteenth century, they usually referred not to the heat in degrees, but to the “temperament” of the atmosphere—e.g., cold and wet, or warm and dry—as if it had a constitution similar to that of humans.) In an attempt to improve public health by correlating disease and the outbreak of epidemics with weather patterns, the Société Royale de Médecine established a network of weather observation stations across France in 1778. Throughout the 1780s, more than 150 provincial physicians compiled a substantial quantity of climate data throughout France; unfortunately, officials never managed to analyze the data before the Revolutionary authorities disbanded the Société Royale, along with other institutions of the Ancien Régime, in 1793.

  Few were gathering statistics in early June 1816 as weeks of incessant rain in Saxony caused the Saale River to flood, threatening the inhabitants of Halle (the birthplace of Georg Friedrich Händel), and inundating the surrounding countryside. “The only object visible above water was our lofty bridge,” reported one resident from Halle. “Many cattle have been drowned. The price of bread and other articles of subsistence is rising among us in the same proportion as the number of poor is on the increase.”

  Swiss almanacs predicted a wet, stormy summer, and to Mary Godwin’s dismay, they were right. By the middle of June, Mary and Percy Shelley had settled into their château, the Maison Chapuis, in Cologny, on the southern edge of Lake Geneva. Her infrequent forays into Geneva left her in a sullen mood. There was nothing in that city, Mary wrote to a friend, “that can repay you for the trouble of walking over its rough stones. The houses are high, the streets narrow, many of them on the ascent, and no public building of any beauty to attract your eye, or any architecture to gratify your taste.” A high wall with three gates surrounded the town, she added, and each evening promptly at ten o’clock the town authorities locked the gates. Shelley seemed equally unimpressed. “Geneva is far from interesting, & is a place, which for the sake of scenery I should never have made my habitation,” he decided.

  Mary preferred to spend hours sailing with Shelley on the lake (Chapuis had its own private harbor) when the weather permitted, particularly in the evenings. As the days passed, however, she found herself spending less time with her lover. Percy had met Lord Byron, and the two men at once struck up an intimate friendship.

  George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron, was undoubtedly the most famous and controversial celebrity in Britain in 1816. Having grown up in modest circumstances in Aberdeen, Scotland, he inherited at the age of ten the estates and title of his great uncle. The family fortune enabled him to attend Harrow and Cambridge, where he commenced the dissolute lifestyle that earned him as much notoriety as his poetry. Byron published his first poems in 1807, at the age of nineteen, and cemented his literary reputation with the publication of the semiautobiographical “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” five years later. By that time he had completed a series of romantic affairs with older married women (including Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford) and the occasional distant relative. Meanwhile, his bank funds steadily diminished, despite the fact that even his less inspired works sold thousands of copies as soon as they were published.

  Partly to restore his finances, Byron proposed in 1812 to Annabella Milbanke, the twenty-year-old daughter of a wealthy landowner. Self-absorbed, chilly, and entirely devoid of any sense of humor, Milbanke initially rejected Byron. Two years later, she accepted his renewed offer, despite the fact that he proposed by letter rather than in person. By then Byron was drinking heavily, working only desultorily (and often in the early hours of morning), and sinking more deeply into debt. And he had begun to spend a great deal of time with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. The daughter of Byron’s father by a previous marriage, Augusta was wed to a cousin who preferred to spend his time at the racetrack. She and Byron found themselves quite compatible—Augusta, too, preferred pleasure to the dictates of conventional morality—and almost surely became lovers.

  Despite this increasingly close relationship—or perhaps because of it, given Byron’s highly developed sense of guilt and the fact that he always referred to Augusta as his sister—Byron and Annabella married on January 2, 1815. Their honeymoon was a nightmare. Annabella later claimed that as they drove away from the church, Byron confessed that the sound of wedding bells horrified him; that evening, she recalled, “he asked me with an appearance of aversion, if I meant to sleep in the same bed with him—said that he hated sleeping with any woman, but I might do as I chose. He told me insultingly that ‘one animal of the kind was as good to him as another’ provided she was young—and that with men, this was not any proof of attachment.” Unable to sleep, Byron allegedly spent the evening pacing
up and down the corridors outside their hotel room, carrying loaded pistols in his hands.

  Annabella hoped that she could “save” Byron, but he grew increasingly bored and depressed, and irritated with his wife. Five weeks after their daughter, Augusta, was born on December 10, 1815, Annabella left Byron to return to her parents. In February 1816, she informed her husband that she wanted a divorce. Her petition for a legal separation cited both Byron’s alleged incest, which was not a crime in Britain at the time, and sodomy, which was. (Byron likely had engaged in homosexual behavior on a few occasions, although more out of curiosity than conviction.) Unable to write, taking laudanum to alleviate the pain of a liver ailment, contemptuous of Lord Liverpool’s Tory ministry (they reciprocated his enmity), unable to repay his creditors—bailiffs frequently camped outside his house at Piccadilly Terrace—and harassed by the British public who, as J. B. Priestly noted, “never really knew what it was all about but was ready to hiss that villainous Byron in the streets or the theatre,” Byron decided to make a fresh start. On April 25, 1816, Byron left England, never to return. He was twenty-eight years old at the time.

  Traveling in a carriage modeled upon Napoléon’s (one of his idols), Byron made a brief stop at Waterloo to inspect the battlefield before arriving in Geneva on May 25. He was accompanied by an Italian physician and aspiring writer named Dr. John W. Polidori. Twenty-one years old in the spring of 1816, Polidori had obtained a sizable advance from Byron’s publisher to keep a journal of their travels in Europe, but his task was complicated by the constant browbeating he suffered from the poet. Byron sneered at Polidori’s literary ambitions, and dismissed him as “exactly the kind of person to whom, if he fell overboard, one would hold out a straw to know if the adage be true that drowning men catch at straws.”

 

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