The great Age of Revolution that began in May 1754 when 22-year-old George Washington confronted the French at Jumonville Glen in western Pennsylvania would end in June 1815 with the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Belgian mire at Waterloo, to the great relief of a war-weary Europe. By the spring of 1815, even the earth itself seemed unable to bear any more. On this day in April 1815, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa just east of Java and Bali, the 14,000-foot-high Mount Tambora exploded and collapsed upon itself. It was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, and produced the most extreme short-term disruptions in the Earth’s climate since at least the sixth century. A later-estimated 10,000 people were killed by the eruption and related tsunamis, including aftershocks that ran into July. Probably ten times that number died of the resulting famine and disease. The local kingdoms of Tambora and Pekat were destroyed without a single survivor, and the Tamboran language itself became extinct.
A contrast to the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, situated at the opposite end of Java, illustrates how the world changed in the intervening 68 years. News of the 1883 eruption spread around the globe in hours, thanks to the telegraph, and was covered at length in newspapers in many countries. The noise of the eruption was heard thousands of miles away; reports of that sound in as many as fifty locations were compared soon after by people who knew what caused it. An early stage of the eruption was photographed from a nearby ship, resulting in a famous lithographic image. Barometers around the globe measured the resulting changes in air pressure in Calcutta, Mauritius, Melbourne, Sydney, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Munich, New York, Washington DC, and Toronto. Tidal stations on three continents measured the rise in ocean waves. The Royal Society of London convened a committee to study the eruption, which in 1888 produced a report running over 600 pages of data and observations.
The eruption of Tambora was ten times as explosive as that of Krakatoa. It produced enough debris to cover an area the size of Rhode Island in 183 feet of ash. Darkened skies and reduced global temperatures turned 1816 into “the Year without a Summer,” blighting harvests all over Europe, North America, and China. Ireland faced famine and an outbreak of typhus. Farmers fled New England, helping push Indiana and Illinois to statehood. Thomas Jefferson, driven to the brink of bankruptcy by crop failures at Monticello, had to raise money by selling his book collection to the government (replacing the Library of Congress burned in 1814). Mary Shelley, spending a gloomy summer in Switzerland, wrote Frankenstein. Even the first global cholera epidemic, originating in India in 1816, may have been tied to the eruption’s aftermath:
Before the large-scale eruption of the disease, cholera allegedly was endemic in the vicinity of a particular Hindu place of pilgrimage on the River Ganges in India. The bad weather of 1816 caused a number of crop failures in India. This weakened people’s resistance, making them more susceptible to disease. As a consequence a local cholera epidemic broke out in Bengal. The disease was spread further afield by British soldiers. First it moved to Afghanistan and Nepal, and thence gradually to Southeast Asia (reaching Indonesia in 1820) and the Caspian Sea (1823). A second epidemic, which broke out in India in 1826, spread to Moscow (1830) and western Europe (1831). From there it crossed the Atlantic Ocean, reaching New York in 1832. This worldwide epidemic claimed thousands of human lives and gave rise to flight and migration on a massive scale… It is quite likely that the flooding of vast tracts of land, the great irregularity of the seasons, and the subsequent famine in Bengal, which in 1816 gave rise to epizootics epidemics of known diseases in which numerous animal and human corpses remained unburied, are also to be regarded as the prime causes, through their combined action in 1817, of the origin of two new diseases in those regions, namely cholera Asiatica and the virulent form of contagious pharyngitis.
A great explosion that toppled a towering peak and left behind a world blanketed in ash: altogether a fitting conclusion to the era of Napoleon.
But nobody knew about it. The grim events of 1816 came and went before anyone in Europe or North America heard anything about a volcano in Indonesia. Only the action of Sir Stamford Raffles, the British governor of Java, preserved any news of the eruption for European consumption. Raffles, a bored widower and amateur naturalist of the sort common among British colonial representatives of the day, circulated a brief questionnaire to collect reports from the people of Java, and on his recall to London he published a book on the History of Java in 1817, which spent all of four pages on the eruption. (Raffles would later be known, albeit with a good deal of exaggeration, as the founder of British Malaya and Singapore). An 1850 text on geology noted: “I may remind the reader, that but for the accidental presence of Sir Stamford Raffles, then governor of Java, we should scarcely have heard in Europe of this tremendous catastrophe.”