26 Part I: Land and Language
Unlike Krakatoa, Tambora’s eruption was hardly noted in Europe in these pretele-
graph times. No one understood that global temperatures had lowered by one degree,
though they were dismayed by frosts and snowfalls in June and July of the following
year. Crops worldwide failed in 1816, a year later, as volcanic aerosols circled the
globe in the jet streams, darkening the sun, and creating disastrous weather patterns.
In Shanxi, China, summer frosts destroyed crops and provoked mass immigration and
starvation. In Yunnan, China, “Famished corpses lay unmourned on the roads; moth-
ers sold their children or killed them out of mercy, and human skeletons wandered the
fields, feeding on white clay” (Wood 2014:98). In India, the monsoons failed, and chol-
era swept the subcontinent, which over the next years became a global pandemic. In
Ireland, that same summer saw cold and ceaseless rain that fell week after week,
month after month, in the “Year without a Summer,” as the wheat crop failed and pota-
toes rotted in saturated soil. The next year, 1817–1818, there was a typhus epidemic.
Artists, poets, and writers around the world responded to these global conditions
with paintings, poems, and stories that reflect—unbeknownst to them—the global
impact of the Tambora eruption. There were spectacular skyscapes by J. M. W. Turner
and John Constable portraying vivid turbulence dominating human life. A small group
of English poets happened to spend the summer of 1816 holed up in a mansion in
Lake Geneva, Switzerland. They included the rock star poet, Lord Byron, his friends
Mary and Percy Shelley, and Byron’s lover Claire Clairmont. They passed the time tell-
ing ghost stories, out of which came Mary Shelley’s famous Frankenstein, created on
a dark and stormy night just like the ones they were enduring. Byron wrote a long
apocalyptic poem called “Darkness,” which began:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’ed, and the stars
did wander darkling in the eternal space,
rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
swung blind and blackening in the moonless air....
Meanwhile in China, a 32-year-old poet named Li Yuyang living in Yunnan Province
recorded the suffering around him in a series of poems:
Outside, the starved corpses pile high,
While in her room the young mother
Waits upon her child’s death. Unbearable
Sorrow. My love, you cry to me to feed you—
But no one sees my tears. Who can I tell which aches
More? My heart or my body wasting away?
She takes her baby out to the deep river.
Clear and cool, welcome water...
She will care for that child in the life to come.
(Quoted in Wood 2014:114)
These global experiences brought about by the great volcanic eruption of Mt. Tam-
bora have only recently been pieced together by scholars from a variety of disciplines,
showing how interconnected our world has been for longer than we have been aware.
For more on the Tambora eruption and aftermath, see Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Ta m b o r a , T h e
Eruption that Changed the World, Princeton, 2014.