mountain collapsed under the debris. Sources of A year after the eruption, the effects were felt in the northeast-
ern United States, where vital corn crops withered from killing
fresh water, always scarce, became contaminated.
frosts.
Crops and forests died. All told, it was the deadli-
est eruption in history, killing an estimated 90,000 Climate experts say that 1816 wasn’t the cold-
people on Sumbawa and neighboring Lombok, est year on record, but the long cold snap that co-
most of them by starvation. The major eruptions incided with the June-to-September growing sea-
ended in mid-July, but Tambora’s ejecta would son was a hardship. “The summer of 1816 marked
have profound, enduring effects. Great quantities the point at which many New England farmers
of sulfurous gas from the volcano mixed with who had weighed the advantages of going west
water vapor in the air. Propelled by stratospheric made up their minds to do so,” the oceanographer
winds, a haze of sulfuric acid aerosol, ash and Henry Stommel and his wife, Elizabeth, wrote in
dust circled the earth and blocked sunlight. their 1983 book about Tambora’s global effects,
2
Volcano Weather. If the ruinous weather wasn’t as a warning not to overlook the consequences
the only reason for the emigration, they note, it of humanity’s tampering with nature. Fittingly,
played a major part. They cite historian L. D. Still- perhaps, the eruption that probably influenced
well, who estimated that twice the usual number the invention of that morality tale has, nearly two
of people left Vermont in 1816 and 1817—a loss of centuries later, taught me a similar lesson about
some 10,000 to 15,000 people, erasing seven years the dangers of humanity’s fouling our own at-
of growth in the Green Mountain State. mosphere.
In Europe and Great Britain, far more than After several hours of hard, slow climbing,
the usual amount of rain fell in the summer of during which I stopped frequently to drink water
1816. It rained nonstop in Ireland for eight weeks. and catch my breath, we reached the precipice
The potato crop failed. Famine ensued. The wide- that is the southern rim of Tambora. I stared in
spread failure of corn and wheat crops in Europe silent awe down the volcano’s throat. Clouds on
and Great Britain led to what historian John D. the far side of the great crater formed and re-
Post has called “the last great subsistence crisis formed in the light breeze. A solitary raptor sailed
in the western world.” After hunger came disease. the currents and updrafts.
Typhus broke out in Ireland late in 1816, killing Three thousand feet deep and more than
thousands, and over the next couple of years three miles across, the crater was as barren as
spread through the British Isles. it was vast, with not a single blade of grass in its
Researchers today are careful not to blame bowl. Enormous piles of rubble, or scree, lay at
every misery of those years on the Tambora the base of the steep crater walls. The floor was
eruption, because by 1815 a cooling trend was brown, flat and dry, with no trace of the lake that
already under way. Also, there’s little evidence is said to collect there sometimes. Occasional
that the eruption affected climate in the South- whiffs of sulfurous gases warned us that Tambora
ern Hemisphere. In much of the Northern Hemi- is still active.
sphere, though, there prevailed “rather sudden We lingered at the rim for a couple of hours,
and often extreme changes in surface weather talking quietly and shaking our heads at the
after the eruption of Tambora, lasting from one immensity before us. I tried to conceive of the
to three years,” according to a 1992 collection of unimaginable noise and power of the eruption,
scientific studies titled The Year Without a Sum- which volcanologists have classified as “super-
mer?: World Climate in 1816. colossal.” I would have liked to stay there much
In Switzerland, the damp and dark year of longer. When it was time to go, Rahim, knowing
1816 stimulated Gothic imaginings that still en- that I would probably never return, suggested I
tertain us. Vacationing near Lake Geneva that say good-bye to Tambora, and I did. He stood at
summer, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the rim, whispering a prayer to the spirits of the
his soon-to-be wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, and mountain upon whose flanks he has lived most
some friends sat out a June storm reading a col- of his life. Then we made our descent.
lection of German ghost stories. The mood was Looking into that crater, and having familiar-
captured in Byron’s “Darkness,” a narrative poem ized myself with others’ research on the conse-
set when the “bright sun was extinguish’d” and quences of the eruption, I saw as if for the first
“Morn came and went—and came, and brought time how the planet and its life-forms are linked.
no day.” He challenged his companions to write The material that it ejected into the atmosphere
their own macabre stories. John Polidori wrote perturbed climate, destroyed crops, spurred dis-
The Vampyre, and the future Mary Shelley, who ease, made some people go hungry and others mi-
would later recall that inspirational season as grate. Tambora also opened my eyes to the idea
“cold and rainy,” began work on her novel, Fran- that what human beings put into the atmosphere
kenstein, about a well-meaning scientist who may have profound impacts. Interestingly, scien-
creates a nameless monster from body parts and tists who study global climate trends use Tambo-
brings it to life by a jolt of laboratory-harnessed ra as a benchmark, identifying the period 1815 to
lightning. 1816 in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica
For Mary Shelley, Frankenstein was primar- by their unusually high sulfur content—signature
ily an entertainment to “quicken the beatings of of a great upheaval long ago and a world away.
the heart,” she wrote, but it has also long served