Chapter 1 Asia as Cultured Space 25Sixty-eight years earlier an even more devastating eruption occurred,
whose global destruction has only recently come to be understood. We know
now that bad as Krakatoa was, it was only half the magnitude of Tambora, on a
nearby island. (See box 1.4.)
But Krakatau and Tambora were exceptional events (Tambora was a
“thousand-year eruption”); most people in the island regions live near poten-
tially dangerous active volcanoes and simply get used to the danger. To the east
of Java is the small island of Bali (only 90 by 50 miles wide), which has its own
chain of volcanic mountains. The highest (3,142 meters) of these peaks is Mt.
Agung (which erupted in November 2017) and is presided over by a male god
who has power over fire. A lower but perhaps more sacred cone is Mt. Batur, a
young volcano in the heart of an ancient crater. Part of this crater is Lake
Batur, home of the Goddess of the Lake. Both of these deities, it is said, were
given authority over Bali by the great god of Mt. Mahameru (i.e., Kailash),
Shiva, on the Indian continent. These deities preside over highly active volca-
noes, which erupt with disastrous frequency, burying whole villages but often
miraculously sparing temples.Box 1.4 1816: The Year with No Summer
Benjamin Franklin was the first person to suggest that extreme weather could be
linked to volcanism. In 1783–84 he speculated that a universal fog and cold that blan-
keted Europe could have something to do with the recent eruption of Iceland’s Laki
volcano. No one else thought that could be true. The subject was dropped.
Two decades later the largest volcanic eruption in a thousand years on planet
Earth occurred on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies (a small island just east of Bali
in Indonesia). Hardly anyone outside those islands, other than a few passing ships,
took note, although over 10,000 people died on the first day alone. What followed
over the next three years was a painful demonstration of the global nature of many
natural forces, although even the best scientific minds of the period 1815–1818 had
no idea of the interconnection of the disasters that assaulted societies around the
planet. Only in the last few decades as meteorology has had the computerized data to
understand global weather patterns, along with other scientific investigations (such as
analysis of ice core data), have the pieces of the Tambora puzzle been fit together.
In 1815, Tambora was a “dormant” volcano that had begun to rumble a bit and
send out dark clouds of ash. Local folk thought the gods might be celebrating a mar-
riage, or maybe one of them was angry. On April 10, whole villages and 10,000 people
were consumed within “a vertical hell of flames, ash, boiling magma, and hurricane-
strength winds” (Wood 2014:17). The raja of Sanggar escaped, with his family, to tell
the tale of the local destruction. In the following weeks, some 40,000 people died from
sickness and starvation as their wells were poisoned by ash and their crops destroyed.
The raja of Sanggar’s report to a lieutenant of the British Royal Navy is the sole eyewit-
ness account.
(continued)