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

by William K. Klingaman

  On the first Monday in September, Maine held a special election to vote on its separation from Massachusetts. A referendum in March had produced a slight majority in favor of statehood, but Massachusetts law required a majority of more than 60 percent before Maine could obtain its independence. Agitation for separation came primarily from the interior, from small farmers who wanted more equitable taxation and lower government expenses. Merchants and businessmen in coastal areas generally were content to remain safely and profitably within Boston’s commercial orbit. In September, the Massachusetts General Court dropped the statehood requirement to a five-ninths majority, but again the advocates of separation fell slightly short of victory.

  Temperatures in early September recovered to slightly above normal levels over most of the Eastern United States, but the drought dragged on. In Philadelphia, the Schuylkill River fell to a lower level than anyone could remember—“it may be crossed on foot at the Falls, without wetting the feet,” claimed the Farmer’s Cabinet—endangering the crops in the surrounding counties.

  The Richmond Enquirer warned that “never has there been in America, especially in Virginia, so gloomy a prospect. It appears, that it is more than probable that there will be very short crops of Corn, on account of which, people in general are very much alarmed.” The newspaper urged its readers to keep their grain and flour within the state, rather than selling to merchants who might send it out of Virginia. “Although it is true, that if any were like to starve, and we could assist them, we ought to do so,” reasoned the Enquirer, “but to use a scripture phrase, ‘he that provides not for his own, especially those of his own household, hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’” A letter writer to the Enquirer who signed himself “A Starving People” suggested that Governor Wilson Cary Nicholas ask the General Assembly to reduce taxes until the crisis abated.

  Relief arrived in Virginia on September 6 in the form of a heavy rainstorm—possibly the residue of a hurricane—that traveled slowly up the coast, reaching Philadelphia and New York on September 8, and Boston shortly thereafter. Farmers did not rejoice for long. Accompanied by high winds that wrought considerable damage to shipping in coastal areas, the rain continued for a week, drenching fields in low-lying areas, particularly in the South. Petersburg, Virginia, reported that “every part of the town and the adjacent country was under water,” with streams overflowing their banks to create a scene “grand, awful and devastating.”

  While the storm battered coastal areas, it left inland areas of New England virtually untouched. Much of Vermont received no rain at all; indeed, in some areas of the state there had been no measurable precipitation other than snow for more than three months. “A failure of the crops generally was therefore certain,” concluded the American Advocate. At Brunswick, Maine, an observer measured less than half an inch of rain for all of September. Not surprisingly, a number of forest fires ravaged the parched woodlands of northern New England, blackening the skies with thick acrid smoke.

  Then a cold wave struck on the evening of September 10, bringing frost followed by snow that covered mountaintops in northern Vermont. Farmers hurried to harvest whatever potatoes survived, even if they had not yet ripened. In Sutton, New Hampshire, “corn froze to the centre of the cob, and apples froze upon the trees.” The same cold front brought frost to Concord, New Hampshire, and left two to three inches of snow on the ground at Springfield, Massachusetts. “It is believed,” reported one Boston newspaper, “that no person can recollect a summer so inconsistant [sic] and fluctuating.”

  Across the border, Quebec inched closer to famine. Hard-pressed by a short growing season in the best of times, Canadian farmers found their last hopes for a decent harvest—crops planted belatedly after the June snows—shattered by sharp frosts in September. Some cut their wheat before it was ripe, to save it from freezing. Others gambled that the warmer temperatures of late July and August would persist, and lost. Between two-thirds and four-fifths of the hay crop was ruined; “the corn is said to be cut off; and the wheat to be much injured, even in that most Southern district of the two Canadian provinces.” Farmers sold their milch cows to buy bread; instead of their usual summertime diet of bread and milk, some reportedly subsisted on wild herbs.

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  “JULY of 1816 was a particularly unusual month concerning both rainfall and temperature,” wrote José Manuel da Silva Tedim, a lawyer and priest in Braga, Portugal. “I am 78 years old and I have never seen so much rain and cold, not even in winter months.” August in Portugal was only slightly warmer and drier. In Barcelona, the Baron of Malda decided that summer seemed more like spring. On August 18, he noted in his diary that the cool air reminded him of May; but then August 22 turned even colder, resembling the weather of April. (The baron ascribed the drop in temperature in Barcelona to a recent snowfall—it may actually have been a hailstorm—in central Spain.)

  Conditions on the Iberian peninsula that season varied little from those in France, Germany, or Britain. While the decade of 1811–1820 as a whole was wet and cool in Spain and Portugal, the summer of 1816—notably July and August—was especially cold, with an average temperature two to three degrees Celsius below normal. Precipitation totals for July and August 1816 also were considerably higher than usual. In fact, summer rain typically is so scant in both countries that several successive rainy days in August 1816 struck observers as quite remarkable.

  Perhaps not as remarkable, though, as a monarchy without a monarch. Portugal’s royal family had fled the country when Napoléon invaded in 1807, and spent the rest of the war years in Brazil. Like Britain, its close ally, Portugal was officially ruled by a regent in 1816; Queen Maria had been declared incurably mad in 1799—she was, in fact, treated by Dr. Francis Willis, one of the physicians who had attended King George III during his episode of madness in 1788–89—and her son, John, ruled in her stead. Upon learning of Napoléon’s surrender in 1814, John had made plans to return to Portugal, but he reconsidered when he heard that Napoléon had returned from Elba. Even after Maria died on March 20, 1816, and the regent was crowned as King John VI, he decided to remain comfortably ensconced in Brazil. In his absence, British officials carried out much of the day-to-day administration of Portugal.

  That arrangement provided Portugal with a considerably more competent government than Spain, where King Fernando VII held sway. In the words of one historian, Fernando was “in many ways the basest king in Spanish history”; among other traits, he appeared “cowardly, selfish, grasping, suspicious, and vengeful.” In 1808, Napoléon replaced Fernando on the Spanish throne with the emperor’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, disdainfully nicknamed “Pepe Botellas”—“Joe Bottles”—by Spaniards for his fondness for drink. For the next five years, Fernando remained under guard in a French château while British soldiers and Spanish irregulars battled Napoléon’s troops in a savage cycle of guerilla attacks and reprisals.

  Meanwhile, the Bonapartist government launched a series of legal and administrative reforms of Spanish society, including the abolition of monasteries and distribution of their property. Recognizing that the fluid political situation provided them with an opportunity to carry out even more radical reforms, Spanish liberals convened a legislative assembly in the southern port of Cadiz, under the protection of the British Navy, and drafted a new constitution in 1812 that stripped the monarchy of most of its powers and finally brought a formal end to the Inquisition. The new regime did not last long. Upon his return to Spain in 1814, Don Fernando supported an army coup that rescinded the new constitution, thereby turning back the clock to 1808 and leaving Spain deeply divided into hostile political camps.

  A decade of political turbulence and military conflict, exacerbated by the incompetence and corruption of Don Fernando’s government, severely dislocated the Spanish economy. Ongoing rebellions in Spain’s colonies in the Western Hemisphere—Argentina was the latest to declare its independence, in July 1816—aggravated the difficulties by depriving Spai
n of vital markets and materials. The last thing Spaniards needed in the summer of 1816 was a widespread failure of the harvest.

  Reliable evidence of weather phenomena in the summer of 1816 is scarcer for Spain and Portugal than for other countries in Western Europe. Nevertheless, military and medical personnel recently had started to gather and publish data, for much the same reason as their counterparts in other European nations and the United States. In December 1815, a Portuguese scientist, politician, and naval officer named Marino Miguel Franzini began to regularly record meteorological observations from his station at Lisbon, initially to provide a local doctor with data to evaluate the relationship between changes in the weather and the state of public health. In Madrid, a group of scientists and medical officials maintained similar records, taking three temperature readings per day; additional observations (albeit on a less consistent basis) were made at the Observatory of the Spanish Navy in Cadiz, and at Barcelona. Private individuals such as da Silva Tedim, of course, supplemented these records with their own informal evidence.

  No one disagreed that the summer of 1816 brought exceptionally cold, wet weather that damaged crops across the Iberian peninsula. Tedim noted that “July had only three clear days,” and the highest temperature in Braga that month was only 77 degrees—eight degrees lower than the high temperature in July 1814. August provided only ten clear days, with the mercury never advancing beyond 79 degrees.

  Frigid temperatures killed some fruit on the trees and ruined much of the rest. In central Portugal, “the unusual cool weather in summer had evil consequences on fruit, that was unpleasant to taste,” noted Senhor Franzini. “Grapes have suffered for the same reason and never got ripe and as a consequence the wine was of inferior quality.” In Spanish vineyards, too, only a small percentage of grapes ever matured, producing a scant and unpalatable harvest. Olive trees, always sensitive to cold, lacked the heat to produce quality fruit.

  In the wheat fields of Spain, the harvest commenced much later than usual. “I note here as something strange and worthy of comment that throughout the months of June and July it was not at all hot,” noted one resident of Arenys de Mar, just outside of Barcelona. “If anything it was cold, because of the excessively cool sea air caused by the hail that fell in Mallorca and other places. This delayed the wheat harvest … which meant that threshing was also late, because there was no sun and it was misty all day and clear all night, quite the opposite of what was needed.” Workers painstakingly separated ripe, dry grain from immature green seeds, a process that required significantly more labor and drove up the price of bread.

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  FROM a meteorological diary in Paris, August 31: At five o’clock in the morning, cloudy with rain; at noon, rain; at three o’clock in the afternoon, rain with thunder. “A cold and humid temperature has succeeded the too few days we have had of fine weather,” reported a French correspondent in the first week of September. “The thermometer has fallen from 16 and 20 degrees [Celsius] to 8 and 9; and it is said that one of these nights there was frost in the country.”

  As the temperature declined, concerns for the harvest rose along with the price of bread. A loaf that cost sixteen sous in the springtime cost thirty or thirty-two sous in August. Fruit of any kind grew scarce. In the Norman town of Dieppe, the poor already were in such distress that the police requisitioned bread to distribute among them. And still the rain continued to pour down, especially in the northern departments. “The state of the weather is now almost as interesting a political topic as can well occur,” remarked The Times of London, “considering the effect which it must have upon the contentment and tranquility of States for a year to come.”

  Against this ominous and sodden backdrop, King Louis formally signed the ordinance dissolving the Chamber of Deputies on September 5. In its brief existence, the Chambre introuvable had solved none of France’s critical difficulties; instead, it had tried to restore aristocratic and religious privileges inimical to the interests of the nation’s masses. “Such a set of venal, merciless, and ignorant bigots and blockheads never were collected in any assembly,” concluded a British visitor in Paris. The French public appears to have greeted the call for new elections with relief; certainly the Allied governments welcomed it. The Duke of Wellington responded by reducing (slightly) the size of the army of occupation, partly to relieve pressure on the French treasury, but also to ease tensions at a time when reports of Gallic insults to English tourists appeared in newspapers nearly every day. Wellington also agreed to postpone the autumn maneuvers of the Allied occupation force—ostensibly because of the shortage of food in the most hard-pressed departments, but also to avoid arousing antigovernment sentiment during the election campaign.

  Ultra-Royalists and moderate monarchists alike spent September canvassing the countryside. Although France’s electoral qualifications had not changed, the government clearly hoped that voters who had abstained from the previous election would exercise their franchise this time. Government officials in the provinces received orders from Paris to encourage voters to reject extremists (i.e., Ultras) and support only “pure but moderate” candidates “who do not believe that loving the king and serving him well exempts them from obeying the laws.” Local officials who supported the Ultras exerted their own pressure on voters to return the incumbent deputies. With the king firmly aligned with the moderates, erstwhile revolutionaries were heard shouting “Vive le Roi!” as they passed Ultras in the street.

  Rain, elections, cold, the rising price of bread—and then sunspots returned in the middle of September. “They are more considerable, and in greater numbers, than were remarked during the month of July,” noted the Gazette de France. This time they resembled two strings of beads: the first dominated by spots that looked like two large cherries, with a dozen other spots between them; the second consisting of seven or eight smaller spots strung together. To an English commentator, the accompanying diagram in the Gazette of the sun “with its cheeks all covered with spots” resembled caricatures of “the patches on a fashionable English lady one hundred years ago.”

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  “THERE has not been this whole summer one day of steady sunshine, not one day of heat, nor one night when a coverlet and blanket could have been thrown off with comfort,” wrote an exasperated John Quincy Adams in his diary in London on Wednesday, August 28. “There was not one of the forty days from St. Swithin’s [July 15], to a certainty, without rain, so that the old prediction”—if it rained on St. Swithin’s Day, it would rain for the next forty days—“seems to have been this year made good.” Adams recently had managed to get through one night without his flannel waistcoat, but was obliged to don it again the next day. The 28th actually turned out to be “warm and fine,” Adams noted, the day “most like summer” all season, despite a frost the previous evening. But Adams feared for the British harvest, whose prospects he termed “precarious.”

  Two days later, another powerful storm struck Britain. One report from Kent, in southeast England, described it as “one of the most violent storms of wind and rain … that has occurred at this period of the year within recollection.” Brutal winds tore up trees and broke them into pieces, leveled poles of hops, and left shocks of corn strewn over the ground. “In the orchards and gardens,” noted an observer, “the far greater portion of the fruit has been stripped from the trees.” Snow fell in Barnet, about forty miles north of London, and in the Sussex town of Lewes. “Snow in harvest is no common occurrence,” noted the Lewes Journal, “but it is a fact that it occurred here yesterday, as witnessed by several persons in the town.”

  When the gale reached Bury, outside of Manchester, it shattered trees and flattened fields of wheat and oats. The region around Newcastle suffered similar damage. In Cambridge and Huntingdonshire, “a considerable fall of snow” accompanied by a severe frost destroyed the area’s extensive market vegetable crops of French beans and cucumbers. A local newspaper in Essex reported that a combination of snow, a hailstorm,
and the “somewhat extraordinary” appearance of ice four inches thick threatened to completely ruin the second crop of hay. Even from Edinburgh, known for its sudden shocks of cold, wind, and rain, came complaints that “the weather here, for these eight days past, has been excessively cold and rainy; and this unfavourable change has considerably damped those hopes which the genial weather of the preceding fortnight had excited.” The price of grain in the city’s markets rose dramatically.

  “Indeed, the whole country is in a very disastrous state,” reported The Times of London, “as the little corn yet reaped is too green to be carried, and without more warmth and sunshine than we have at present, can never be completely ripened, and must prove of bad sample.” Unless the weather drastically improved, farmers feared their wheat would never ripen; “and still the weather is very cold and unseasonable.”

  “The gale has abated,” noted Adams on the evening of September 2, “and the weather this day was part of the day, fair, but with the decided character of autumn, and so cold that we had a fire again in the evening.” All the hopes for a good, albeit late harvest had vanished, Adams wrote. “They are now desperate.”

  Reports from across England confirmed Adams’ assessment. In Worcester, the cold nights had ruined the hops, and prices already had increased by nearly a third. At Chelmsford in Essex, potatoes, beans, peas, barley, and grapes were severely damaged by the “extraordinary visitation” of snow and ice, which “already remind us of the approaching winter.” The Hereford Journal reported substantial damage to the wheat from the continuous rains; and “the hops have been nearly destroyed in the course of the last week by the inclement season.” The cold nights left farmers in Worcestershire so little to harvest that they wondered if the profit would outweigh the expense of picking. The oat crop suffered significantly from the recent evening frosts, and hay already was scarce. And in Littleham, Exeter, a seventy-three-year-old farmer who had reaped wheat every summer for fifty-three years declared that “the present harvest is one month later than any year he has known.”