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

by William K. Klingaman

  News of grain shortages in Ireland reached Parliament shortly thereafter. On March 7, the House of Lords debated whether to prohibit the distillation of grain alcohol in Ireland in order to make more grain available for food. Several days later, the Commons discussed a similar proposal brought in a petition from the people of Belfast, which sought to outlaw distillation in the whole of the United Kingdom. The measures elicited considerable debate. Lord Liverpool believed that suspending distillation would only shift production to the black market, resulting in no increase in grain supplies but a substantial rise in alcohol prices. Liverpool refused to acknowledge that the disorder in Ireland was widespread or warranted government intervention: as the Morning Chronicle pointed out, “there was therefore no general measure wanted, the difficulties in Ireland were altogether local.” In such situations, Liverpool believed government interference “frequently did more harm than good.”

  Faced with mounting public discontent and multiple riots, Peel did not have the luxury of Liverpool’s caution. As grain stocks in Ireland reached precipitously low levels in March, Peel decided to import low-quality oats to be sold as seed at a fixed price of two shillings and six pence per stone (fourteen pounds). Farmers needed seed oats both to plant for the coming season—most had eaten their entire stocks over the winter, leaving no grain to plant in the spring—and to release for consumption the stocks of better-quality oats that remained. “Several cargoes of oats are on their way from abroad to the North of Ireland,” reported the Bury and Norwich Post, “which will be a considerable help to the farmers, who are greatly in want of seed.”

  Peel’s plan met with disaster. When the ships arrived in Ireland, the oats proved of even lower quality than seed oats: Some were already spoiled, and others were black-colored oats that farmers knew they would be unable to sell on the market. The government’s price also proved far too high. Ultimately, Peel was forced to sell the unpalatable oats for a far lower price and admit that his scheme had done little to ease the country’s grain shortage.

  As the typhus epidemic continued to spread across Ireland, Peel turned to direct financial intervention. He established a seven-member committee, financed with £50,000, to distribute aid to the poor and starving. To avoid any accusations of religious prejudice, the committee included two Quakers and a Catholic. Peel instructed the committee to buy and sell grain, set up “soup shops,” and provide handouts where necessary. This support paled in comparison to the contributions of private charitable concerns, however, which relied upon contributions from local landowners and other wealthy individuals. One estimate of these organizations’ finances puts their combined budgets at £300,000, or six times that of the government relief fund. It was not until the passage of the Poor Employment Act in June 1817 that the British government provided substantial funds for alleviating Irish poverty. Of a total budget of £1.75 million across the United Kingdom, the act allowed the lord lieutenant to spend up to £250,000 to employ Irish workers, mostly on infrastructure projects such as building roads, bridges, churches, and schools.

  Peel’s response to the typhus epidemic followed the same strategy as his response to the food shortages. He set up a national relief committee that received and evaluated applications from local committees for funds, but by the time the epidemic subsided in 1819, the national committee had spent less than £20,000. The government again left the bulk of the charitable work to private committees, relying on the Irish national tradition of generosity.

  An 1821 survey by Francis Barker and John Cheyne estimated that the typhus epidemic killed 65,000 Irish and rendered another 1.5 million—roughly one out of every four people on the island—seriously ill. Although the epidemic had ended, the disease never completely left Ireland. Periodic outbreaks occurred throughout the 1820s and 1830s, generally associated with poor harvests and famines in particular regions. With each period of “distress,” London became steadily more involved in providing relief to the Irish. Although the food shortages in 1822 were not as severe as those in 1817, the government sent nearly £200,000 of assistance, four times Peel’s original budget. Nevertheless, each round of famine and epidemic reduced the resilience of the Irish poor and depressed their standard of living still further. The events of 1816 and 1817 accelerated a vicious cycle of hunger, sickness, and poverty that would culminate in the disaster of the Great Famine in 1845.

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  NO country on the European continent suffered more than Switzerland from the disastrous effects of the summer of 1816. The mountainous eastern cantons, including St. Gall, Glarus, and Appenzell, were particularly hard-hit. By April 1817, the price of wheat in that region had risen to 350 percent of the average level of 1815. Wages of weavers and cotton spinners, meanwhile, continued to fall, until many workers earned less for a full day’s work than the price of a one-pound loaf of bread.

  Widespread famine ensued. The misery was exacerbated by the political structure of the Swiss federation, as canton officials jealously guarded their own supplies and established barriers to the shipment of grain outside their boundaries. Most canton governments purchased grain abroad, typically from Russia or Egypt, but with no sea or ocean ports, the importation of food stocks proceeded even more slowly than in nations such as France or the Netherlands. In the meantime, authorities obtained whatever grain they could and provided it to their indigent citizens at prices below market, or else gave bakers subsidies to produce cheaper bread. Some cantons put a fraction of the unemployed to work on public works projects. Town governments also established soup kitchens to feed their poor, and private charities raised funds to care for local orphans and widows, but the task seemed overwhelming when more than 20 percent of the population of St. Gall and Appenzell were classified as paupers, and when “nearly one-quarter of the population of Glarus lacked means of subsistence.”

  Thousands of Swiss peasants took to wandering and begging, sometimes in vast throngs that stretched out along the highways. One writer noticed “the paleness of death in their cheeks”; another noted “a wild, benumbed look of desperation in their eyes.” When Louis Simond reached the town of Herisau in Appenzell in June 1817, he discovered that “the number of beggars, mostly women and children, is perfectly shocking … Manufactures are without work, and it is impossible for them to procure food: they are supported by private and public charities, and distributions of economical soup (made with oatmeal and a little meat) in quantities scarcely sufficient to sustain life. We see nothing but meadows and pastures, not a patch of potatoes or grain, not even a garden.” The following day, Simond arrived in the village of Wattwyl, where he found fewer beggars—but only because “many distressed people are dead, if not absolutely of hunger, yet of the consequences. After supporting for some time a miserable existence, on scarcely any thing but boiled nettles and other herbs, their organs became impaired … and they perished in a few days.”

  Few riots shook Switzerland, but crimes against property soared. Burglary, theft, embezzlement, arson—“crimes multiply with wants,” noted one traveler, “the prisons are full, and executions frequent.” In the spring of 1817, The Times of London published reports of “the perpetually increasing crowd of mendicants and vagabonds who menace the rights of property, and endanger the public health and safety.” Still the price of bread continued to rise; by the summer of 1817, it peaked at four to five times the price in 1815. “The general impression,” observed The Times, “is that the mass privation seems in no wise to diminish, and that hardships and sufferings may fairly be anticipated more grievous than have been experienced by the poor.”

  Local authorities responded with vicious punishments. Louis Simond reported that officials in the town of Appenzell had sentenced two convicted criminals to death by beheading—“one for setting fire to a barn, the other for repeated robberies.” Eight others had recently been whipped. “There is,” Simond concluded, “nothing Arcadian in all this.” Yet even the harshest penalties appeared to have little effect. “Neither sentries n
or bailiffs nor policemen nor begging-ordinances were any longer respected; not even severe penalties were feared—hunger and misery, instinct of self-preservation, and gross, often base temper engendered a far stronger command, which despised harsh measures as mere child’s play.”

  Frequently canton officials encouraged emigration to reduce the poor rolls; nevertheless, the best estimates indicate that fewer than 20,000 Swiss left the country. Most either headed for southern Russia, or traveled down the Rhine to the Netherlands ports, where they took passage on ships bound for North America. A substantial number of Swiss settled in the Midwestern United States, including a community of Swiss Mennonites who bought land in the hill country of Ohio and Indiana, purportedly because it “reminded them of their former Swiss homeland.” Others settled in Canada, where the Earl of Selkirk recruited Swiss mercenaries to defend his Red River Colony in Manitoba from native attacks. Meanwhile, negotiations commenced between the canton of Fribourg and the royal government of Portugal to establish the first Swiss colony in Latin America: the settlement of Nova Friburgo, in Brazil.

  If sunspots and cataclysmic weather had seemed to presage the end of the world in the summer of 1816, the appalling spectacle of famine and misery in 1817 gave further evidence of an approaching apocalypse, and provided momentum to a revival movement that already was under way in Switzerland. The most notorious champion of divine reckoning was the Baroness de Krüdener, a Russian writer and mystic who had gained notoriety through her relationship with Tsar Alexander I in 1815. Convinced that corruption and evil governed Europe in the post-Napoleonic world, de Krüdener predicted that God would soon intervene and restore justice for the poor. “The Rhine rots with corpses; people, contrary to the law, are buying blood at butcher shops. Misery is rampant and menaces all our security,” she wrote in January 1817. “The time is approaching when the Lord of Lords will reassume the reins. He himself will feed his flock. He will dry the eyes of the poor. He will lead his people, and nothing will remain of the powers of darkness save destruction, shame, and contempt.”

  Well-known for her benevolence, de Krüdener spent the spring of 1817 moving from one part of eastern Switzerland to another, dispensing food to the hordes of vagrants and beggars who followed her, and denouncing the wealthy and powerful who ignored the plight of the poor. “It is a disgraceful falsehood of the newspapers to talk of idle vagabonds at a time when no one has any work to do, and when thousands come and implore me to give them work; when all the factories are closed in consequence of the punishments inflicted on cupidity and selfishness,” de Krüdener insisted. “Far from hearing of robberies as the papers declare, the only wonder is that the whole country is not given up to brigandage.” Alarmed by her gospel of social radicalism, and fearful of the crowds of starving paupers she attracted, police officials—enthusiastically supported by local residents—drove de Krüdener from village to village, dispersing and expelling her followers. By the end of the summer she had been driven out of Switzerland altogether, into Breisgau in southwestern Germany.

  A fair harvest finally brought grain prices down in the autumn, but so many Swiss perished in the Hungerjahre of 1817 that the nation recorded more deaths than births for one of the few years in its history.

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  PRUSSIA escaped the worst of the devastation. The summer’s weather wreaked slightly less damage upon its crops in 1816 than the states to the south, and a more efficient system of political administration, along with a strong tradition of active government intervention, limited the effects of the grain shortages that appeared in 1817. Officials moved aggressively to purchase foreign grain, even at inflated prices, and the leading citizens of numerous Prussian cities (including Coblenz, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt) established Kornvereine—cooperatives funded by local businessmen and landowners that purchased grain abroad and then sold tokens that residents could redeem for bread at prices about twenty-five percent below the market price. (Some of these tokens subsequently became collectors’ items for numismatists.)

  Conditions in the southern German states and neighboring regions of the Austrian empire, however, rivaled those in Switzerland. Grain yields in Württemberg in 1816 were 15 percent lower than the previous year, but so much of the harvested grain was damaged that the effective yield was closer to 50 percent of a normal year’s harvest. Bavaria and Baden experienced similar problems, and by the end of 1816, grain prices in Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg had nearly doubled from their 1815 levels—then they rose by a similar amount over the following six months. Some towns witnessed even greater inflation in food prices; in Geradstetten, in Württemberg, the price of wheat more than doubled between November 1816 and July 1817, while the price of oats tripled, and the cost of potatoes quadrupled.

  Governments in these areas moved more slowly and reluctantly than their counterparts in the north to respond to the crisis. The result was widespread starvation. Contemporaries’ reports spoke of peasants eating rotting grain, or boiled weeds known as “pig’s ears,” or bread made from sawdust and straw, or the decaying flesh of dead animals. Some killed their own dogs and ate them. Traveling through Eifel (in the western Rhineland) in the spring of 1817, the noted Prussian military officer and theorist Carl von Clausewitz described “ruined figures, scarcely resembling men, prowling around the fields searching for food among the unharvested and already half rotten potatoes that never grew to maturity.”

  Local authorities attempted to purchase foreign grain, but the minimal amounts they imported fell far short of the public need. Bans on exports of grain failed to provide relief when the poor could not afford to purchase the wheat and oats that remained. When officials tried to set maximum prices for wheat, supplies often dried up as farmers and merchants withheld their grain from market. In the town of Laichingen, where nearly 80 percent of the population lacked the resources to purchase bread or grain, officials refused to distribute wheat from the state granaries until the citizens threatened a violent hunger march. (Meanwhile, the wealthier citizens of Laichingen withheld donations to the fund for poor relief, and instead loaned money to the needy, and took advantage of the crisis to purchase property from their impoverished neighbors.)

  Towns that provided effective relief in the form of Rumford soup kitchens or subsidized bread found themselves overwhelmed with vagrants—“beggars appeared from all directions, as if they had crawled out of the ground.” There were few organized food riots, but desperation bred contempt for law and order among individual beggars. A visitor to Württemberg saw “persons who looked like cadavers, and among them multitudes of children crying out for bread. Hunger and unnatural food produced wretched and chronic ill health among some, outbreaks of frenzy among others; those in the most desperate condition deemed themselves no longer bound by the laws that are adopted for the protection of private property.”

  In some German states, the death rate rose by more than 20 percent. In the region surrounding the Transvylvanian town of Arad, an estimated eighteen thousand people died of starvation. The famine in three counties in the mountains of eastern Hungary took another 26,000 lives. In Württemberg, deaths in 1817 outnumbered births by 3,000.

  Northern Italy also suffered substantially from famine and disease. In the higher elevations of Lombardy, the wheat harvest failed almost completely in 1816. Tuscany and Bologna also experienced dearth conditions. Authorities imported significant amounts of grain, but primitive transportation systems prevented effective distribution. Here, too, beggars thronged the highways, often carrying disease with them. “A contagious malady, analogous to typhus fever, which at present afflicts a great part of Italy, has taken its source in crowded meetings of beggars and wretched persons, whose numbers are very great,” reported The Times of London in April 1817. “It is attributed to famine and the use of bad aliment.” Deaths mounted throughout the region; in Bologna, the official death rate rose by 80 percent.

  Thousands of families escaped the devastation by leaving their homes and traveling down th
e Rhine to the ports of the Netherlands, or down the Danube to the Russian border. The band of religious extremists who had emigrated from Württemberg in September of 1816 and wintered in Grossliebental finally continued along the Black Sea coast to Rostov and Stavropol, crossing the Caucasus Mountains in the summer of 1817 and establishing the new village of Marienfeld, outside of Tiflis (Tbilisi). When word of their arrival reached their brethren in Württemberg, another 8,000 desperate people—not all of them members of the same separatist sect—gathered in Ulm to make the same journey. Nearly half of them died along the way; over a thousand reportedly perished from disease in a single day. Others simply gave up and settled wherever they stopped. About 5,000 survivors finally reached Bessarabia, recently ceded to Russia by its former Ottoman rulers, where they founded their own new villages.

  Perhaps 15,000 Germans emigrated to Russia between the summer of 1816 and the end of 1817. Another 20,000—primarily from Baden and Württemberg—landed in the United States. They were the fortunate ones. An even greater number, perhaps as many as 30,000, reached Dutch seaports—especially Amsterdam—and discovered that they lacked sufficient funds to buy passage across the Atlantic, or that there was no room even on the vastly overcrowded ships. Forced to retrace their steps, they begged or stole their way back through the Rhineland, driven on at every turn by the local authorities.

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  ON December 10, London police removed the lifeless body of a young woman from the Serpentine River in the West End. They subsequently identified her as Harriet Shelley, the estranged wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Harriet had disappeared a month earlier; although an inquest declared only that she had been “found drowned,” her death was presumed to be a suicide. Her husband blamed Harriet’s death on “her abhorred and unnatural family,” and particularly her sister, whom Shelley claimed had driven Harriet to kill herself.