0 Forces Driving More
sunlight and temperatures were falling. By June, as the cold ruptured
the cell walls of plants, newly planted fields intended to provide next
year’s food were failing.
For a moment, imagine that you were a farmer living in New En-
gland. Two weeks before the summer solstice, snow was again coming
down. Before it ended, eighteen inches covered the fields, burying
beneath it your efforts of the last four months. Your entire world was
turned upside down. Farming had never been easy. You always hoped
for nature’s cooperation, but there were never assurances it would al-
ways come.
If you had started too soon in the spring and temperatures had
dropped below freezing, newly planted crops and vegetables would not
have survived. If there had been too much rain in the fields, saturating
the ground, your now-waterlogged seeds from last year’s harvest would
not have germinated. Yet if you waited too long, and planted late in
the spring, an early autumn frost would have shortened the season and
reduced the harvests by possibly more. In good years, you cashed in
your extra for more meat or flour, maybe a few extra chickens. In bad
years, you drew on what was left over from the last harvest and you and
your neighbors helped each other out.
Across New England, theories about what had happened ran wild.
Some said the extensive tracts of forests were preventing the sunlight
from reaching the ground.^ Others asserted the reverse; destroying the
forests had allowed cold winds to sweep across open areas, which gener-
ated great quantities of ice that melted and lowered ambient tempera-
tures.^ But the most fervent explanations attributed the climatic shift to
sunspots,^ or simply to divine will—direct communication from God
to his people.
Over the next year food was scarce. Homesteads survived by sacrific-
ing livestock and rationing what was left in root cellars. New Englanders
learned that around the world other communities and families were like-
wise barely coping. Those hardest hit lived in the northern latitudes. In
Europe, the peace that followed Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was cut
short by riots that broke out when wheat yields plummeted and bread
disappeared.^ In northern China, rice crops failed and water buffalo
died. Extreme monsoons and flooding in India dispersed cholera all the
way from the Bengal region to Moscow.