The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

by Brian Fagan

  The glaciers seemed to retreat for a while, then advanced again, prompting renewed devotions and sermons at Chamonix and elsewhere. Ice loomed on every side. In 1669, a visiting salt tax collector wrote in disappointment to a lady friend: "I see here three mountains which are just like yourself... five mountains of pure ice from head to foot, whose coldness is unchanging."13 The 1670s saw the maximum advance in the eastern Alps in modern historical times, especially of the Vernagt glacier, sketched by a Capuchin monk sent there to plead for divine mercy. After the advancing glacier blocked the Rofenthal Valley, a vagrant suspected of practicing black magic was arrested and burned at the stake by hysterical villagers. For five summers in a row, the ice barrier burst, flooding the valley below. The glacier tongue did not retreat more than a few meters until 1712.

  Disasters continued. In July 1680, the Mattmarksee lake, blocked by the growing Allalin glacier, flooded huts in the surrounding mountain pastures. The summer was very hot. In July, the lake broke through the weakened ice barrier and ravaged the valley beneath. The people swore they would deflect divine wrath by abstaining from banquets, festivities, balls, and card playing for forty years. The chronicler of Zurbruggen remarked that "people are always very clever and provident after the event-after the disaster has happened, after the horse has bolted, after the glacier has broken its bounds."14

  After 1680 the glaciers retreated somewhat. Bishop Jean d'Arenthon of Geneva wrote of the gratitude of the people of Chamonix for his predecessor's visitation. They had invited him back at their expense in his old age to witness how the threatening ice had withdrawn some eighty paces. The old man duly visited the village and repeated his blessing. "I have a sworn benediction.... The glaciers have withdrawn an eighth of a league from where they were before and they have ceased to cause the havoc they used to do." However, the retreat was a small one, in no way comparable to that of the past century and a half. It was, as Le Roy Ladurie remarks, "only an oscillation, a little local trough in the great secular high tide."15 This did not prevent the Chamoniards from petitioning their monarch, the King of Sardinia, for tax relief, their pleas accompanied by harrowing descriptions of tumbling rocks, floods, and falling ice.

  Even with this temporary retreat, the glaciers of the Alps were much larger in the time of King Louis XIV than today. In 1691, Philibert Amedee Arnod wrote an account of the passes and peaks of the Alps. A talented judge as well as a military engineer and a skilled climber, he spent much of his career inspecting mountain fortifications protecting the state of Savoy. Blessed with strong curiosity, Arnod organized a climbing party of three hunters with "climbing irons on their feet and hooks and axes in their hands" to verify a rumor that there was an ancient icefree pass over the Alps from Savoy to Chamonix. Despite the latest mountaineering equipment, his party was forced to turn back when ice blocked their way. In Arnod's day, glaciers flowed low into the Val Veni and other alpine valleys where today only glacial moraines remain. The ice has retreated deep into the mountains and the pass is clear.

  By 1716, the inhabitants of Chamonix were again complaining of governmental neglect, of glacier-caused floods, and villages in great danger of destruction. The Gurgler glacier in the Otzthal region entrapped a large lake, which soon measured a thousand paces long and five hundred wide. In 1718, the local villagers organized a solemn procession to the glacier and celebrated mass on a rocky platform near the ice sheet. The mass had no visible effect, but the lake never flooded the land downstream. The organizers of the procession had heard about the disaster that hit the village of Le Pre-du-Bar in the Val d'Aosta the year before. On September 12, the village had vanished under a glacier-caused landslide so sudden that it was said that even birds perched in trees were immolated. In the same year, the front of the Triolet glacier collapsed in a cataclysm of boulders, water, and ice that rushed downstream with great force, covering "in the depths all moveable chattels, one hundred and twenty oxen or cows, cheeses, and men to the number of seven who perished instantly."16

  The maximum came between 1740 and 1750, also the years when wealthy tourists discovered the glaciers of the Alps. In 1741, English nobleman George Windham became the first foreign tourist to visit Chamonix. He entered the area with some trepidation, having been advised that "we shall scarcely find any of the Necessities of Life in those Parts." His party traveled with heavily laden horses and a tent, "which was of some use to us." Windham described how, from the village itself, the glacier fronts "looked like white rocks or rather enormous blocks of ice."17 His guides told him the glaciers "went on increasing every year." Windham made his way cautiously to the ice front over loose rock and dry, crumbling earth. A year later, French traveler Pierre Martel climbed up to the source of the Arveyron stream at the foot of the Le Bois glacier. "It issues from beneath the ice through two icy caves, like the crystal grottoes where fairies are supposed to live. . . . The irregularities of the roof, over eighty feet high, make a marvellous sight.... You can walk underneath, but there is danger from the fragments of ice which sometimes fall off."18 The Arveyron cave became a popular tourist attraction, a cavern "carved by the hand of nature out of an enormous rock of ice." The changing sunlight made the ice change from white and opaque to transparent and "green as aquamarine." The retreat of the Le Bois glacier over the next century and a half caused the cave to vanish in about 1880.

  Glaciers also swelled elsewhere. Between 1742 and 1745, Norwegian glaciers were several kilometers in advance of their present positions, destroying farms and burying valuable summer pasture. Icelandic glaciers also advanced, their movements complicated by volcanic eruptions, like that at Oraefi in 1727, which caused the Skeidararjokull glacier to oscillate violently, "spouting from its foundations innumerable rivers, which appeared and vanished again almost instantaneously." Spectators had to take refuge on a sandbank and no one could travel in the vicinity for months. 19

  The glacial "high tide" in the Alps lasted from about 1590 to 1850, before the ebb began that continues to this day. These two and a half centuries at the climax of the Little Ice Age straddle momentous changes in European society.

  When the land is inclosed, so as to admit of sowing turnips, clover, or other grass seeds, which have an improving and meliorating tendency, the same soil will, in the course of a few years, make nearby double the return it did before, to say nothing of the wonderful improvements which sometimes result from a loam or clay; which will, when well laid down, often become twice the permanent value in pasture, that it ever would as ploughed ground.

  -Nathanial Kent, General View of the Agriculture

  of the County of Norfolk, 1796

  ondon has never forgotten the summer of 1666. By then, the sprawling metropolis had burst the bounds of the ancient medieval town. The City of London itself was a densely populated maze, with no less than 109 parish churches and the magnificent halls of the livery companies standing amidst narrow alleyways and squalid hovels. A place of extremes of wealth and poverty, London was a busy and overcrowded seaport and mercantile center where disease, crime, and violence were rampant. In 1665, bubonic plague had killed at least 57,000 people and left few families unscathed. The plague subsided during the cold winter of early 1666, which gave way to an intensely hot, dry summer. By September, London's wooden houses were tinder-dry. Diarist Samuel Pepys wrote: "After so long a drought even the stones were ready to burst into flames." Every Londoner was well aware of earlier fires that had swept through the city, but no one, least of all the authorities, was prepared for the firestorm that broke out on Sunday, September 2, 1666.1

  The North Atlantic Oscillation was probably in a low mode, causing a persistent anticyclone over northern Europe. For weeks, an and northeasterly wind had been blowing across the North Sea, further drying out an already parched city. The persistent "Belgian winds" had the authorities on high alert, for England was at war with the Dutch and the breeze favored an attack from across the North Sea. In the small hours of September 2, a fire broke out in the house of the Roy
al Baker in Pudding Lane, then burst outward across the street to a nearby inn. By 3 a.m., fanned by the strong wind, the fire was spreading rapidly westward. Flames already enveloped the first of more than eighty churches. The Lord Mayor of London distinguished himself by observing the fire and remarking casually: "Pish, a woman might piss it out."2 He returned to bed while over three hundred structures burned. By morning, the fire was spreading through the wooden warehouses on the north bank of the river. Dozens of houses were pulled down in vain attempts to stem the flames. Huge cascades of fire leapt into the air and ignited roofs nearby, while rumors spread that invading Dutch had started the conflagration. Such fire engines as there were got stuck in narrow alleys. Samuel Pepys walked through the city, "the streets full of nothing but people; and horses and carts loaden with goods, ready to run over one another, and removing goods from one burned house to another." Hundreds of lighters and boats laden with household goods jammed the Thames. By dark Pepys saw the blaze "as only one entire arch of fire ... of above a mile long. ... The churches, houses, and all one fire, and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the crackling of houses at their ruin."3

  The great Fire of London burned out of control for more than three days, traveling right across the city and destroying everything in its path. King Charles II himself assisted the firefighters. On September 5, the northeasterly wind finally dropped, but the fire did not finally burn itself out until the following Saturday. A hot and exhausted Pepys wandered through a devastated landscape: "The bylanes and narrow streets were quite filled up with rubbish, nor could one possibly have known where he was, but by the ruins of some church or hall, that had some remarkable tower or pinnacle standing."4 The city surveyors totted up the damage: 13,200 houses destroyed in over 400 streets or courts; 100,000 people were homeless out of a population of 600,000. Astonishingly, only four Londoners died in the flames. The first rain in weeks fell on Sunday, September 9, and it poured steadily for ten days in October. But embers confined in coal cellars ignited periodically until at least the following March.

  No one blamed the long drought and northeast winds for turning London into an and tinderbox. The catastrophe was laid at the feet of the Lord. October 10 was set aside as a fast and Day of Humiliation. Services were held throughout the country to crave God's forgiveness "that it would please him to pardon the crying sins of the nation, especially which have drawn down this last and heavy judgement upon us."5 The City was rebuilt on much the same street plan, but with one important difference. A regulation required that all buildings now be constructed of brick or stone.

  The late seventeenth century brought many severe winters, probably from persistent low NAOs. Great storms of wind occasionally caused havoc with fishing boats and merchant vessels. On October 13, 1669, a northeasterly gale brought sea floods a meter above normal in eastern Scotland, where "vessels were broken and clattered.... A vessel of Kirkcaldie brake loose out of the harbour and spitted herself on the rocks." 6 The land itself was on the move. Strong winds blew formerly stable dunes across the sandy Brecklands of Norfolk and Suffolk, burying valuable farmland under meters of useless sand. The sand crept forward for generations. In 1668, East Anglian landowner Thomas Wright described "prodigious sands, which I have the unhappiness to be almost buried in" in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The sand had originated about eight kilometers southwest of his house at Lakenheath, where some great dunes "broken by the impetuous South-west winds, blew on some of the adjacent grounds." They moved steadily across country, partially burying a farmhouse, before stopping at the edge of the village of Stanton Downham in about 1630. Ten or twelve years later, "it buried and destroyed various houses and overwhelmed the cornfields" in a mere two months, blocking the local river. Some 100,000 to 250,000 tons of sand overwhelmed the village, despite the use of fir trees and the laying of "hundreds of loads of muck and good earth." 7 Not until the 1920s was the area successfully reforested.

  On January 24, 1684, the diarist John Evelyn wrote: "Frost ... more & more severe, the Thames before London was planted with bothes [booths] in formal streets, as in a Citty. . . . It was a severe judgement on the Land: the trees not onely splitting as if lightning-strock, but Men & Catell perishing in divers places, and the very seas so locked up with yce, that no vessells could stirr out, or come in."8 The cold was felt as far south as Spain. The following summer was blazing hot, only to be followed by another bitter winter with a frozen Thames, then more summer heat. The twenty years between 1680 and 1700 were remarkable for their cold, unsettled weather at the end of a century of generally cooler temperatures and higher rainfall.

  Wine harvests were generally late between 1687 and 1703, when cold, wet springs and summers were commonplace. These were barren years, with cold summer temperatures that would not be equaled for the next century. The depressing weather continued as the Nine Years War engulfed the Spanish Netherlands and the Palatinate and Louis XIV's armies battled the League of Augsburg. The campaigning armies of both sides consumed grain stocks that might have fed the poor. As always, taxes were increased to pay for the war, so the peasants had little money to buy seed when they could not produce enough of their own in poor harvest years.

  From 1687 to 1692, cold winters and cool summers led to a series of bad harvests. On April 24, 1692, a French chronicler complained of "very cold and unseasonable weather; scarce a leaf on the trees." 9 Alpine villagers lived on bread made from ground nutshells mixed with barley and oat flour. In France, cold summers delayed wine harvests sometimes, even into November. Widespread blight damaged many crops, bringing one of the worst famines in continental Europe since 1315 and turning France into what a horrified cleric, Archbishop Fenelon, called a "big, desolate hospital without provisions." Finland lost perhaps as much as a third of its population to famine and disease in 1696-97, partly because of bad harvests but also because of the government's lack of interest in relief measures.

  Unpredictable climatic shifts continued into the new century. Harsh, dry winters and wet, stormy summers alternated with periods of moist, mild winters and warmer summers. The cost of these sudden shifts in human lives and suffering was often enormous.

  The Culbin estate lies close to the north-facing shore of Moray Firth, near Findhorn in northeastern Scotland. During the seventeenth century, the Barony of Culbin was a prosperous farm complex lying on a low peninsula between two bays and curving round to enclose the estuary of the Findhorn river. The farms were protected by coastal dunes built up by prevailing southwesterly winds but had long been plagued by windblown sand, which threatened growing crops. Wheat, here (a form of barley), and oats grew easily in this sheltered location; salmon runs also brought prosperity.

  In 1694, the Kinnaird family under the laird Alexander owned the Barony of Culbin and its valuable 1,400-hectare estate. The laird himself lived in an imposing mansion, with its own home farm, fifteen outliers, and numerous crofts. A cool summer that year had given way to a stormy fall. Cold temperatures had already descended on London, where north and northwesterly winds blew for ten days in late October accompanied by frost, snow, and sleet. Sea ice had already advanced rapidly in the far north, propelled by the same continual northerly winds. The bere harvest was late and the estate workers were hard at work in the fields when, around November 1 or 2, a savage north or northwesterly gale screamed in off the North Sea. For thirty hours or more, storm winds and huge waves tore at the coastal dunes at strengths estimated at 50 to 60 knots, maybe much higher.

  The wind rushed between gaps in the dunes, blowing huge clouds of dust and sand that felt like hail. Loose sand cascaded onto the sheltered fields inland without warning. Reapers working in the fields abandoned their stooks. A man choking with blowing sand fled his plow. When they returned some hours later, both plow and stooks had vanished. "In terrible gusts the wind carried the sand among the dwelling-houses of the people, sparing neither the hut of the cottar nor the mansion of the laird."'() Some villagers h
ad to break out through the rear walls of their houses. They grabbed a few possessions and freed their cattle from the advancing dunes, then fled through the wind and rain to higher ground, only to find themselves trapped by rising waters of the nowblocked river. The resulting flood swept away the village of Findhorn as the river cut a new course to the sea. Fortunately, the inhabitants escaped in time. The next day, nothing could be seen of the houses and fields of the Culbin estate. Sixteen farms and their farmland, extending over twenty and thirty square kilometers, were buried under thirty meters of loose sand.

  A rich estate had become a desert overnight. Laird Alexander was transformed from a man of property to a pauper in a few hours and was obliged to petition Parliament for exemption from land taxes and protection from his creditors. He died brokenhearted three years later. For three centuries, the area was a desert. Nineteenth-century visitors found themselves walking on "a great sea of sand, rising as it were, in tumultuous billows." Hills up to thirty meters high consisted "of sand so light that its surface is mottled into delicate wave lines by the wind."' I Today there are few signs of the disaster. Thick stands of Corsican pines planted in the 1920s mantle the dunes, forming Britain's largest coastal forest.