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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 1816, the climate went berserk. The winter brought extreme cold, and torrential rains unleashed massive flooding in Asia. Western Europe and North America experienced a 'year without a summer', while failed harvests in 1817 led to the 'year of famine'. At the time, nobody knew that all these disturbances were the result of a single event: the eruption of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia - the greatest volcanic eruption in recorded history. In this book, leading climate historian Wolfgang Behringer provides the first globally comprehensive account of a climate catastrophe that would cast the world into political and social crises for years to come. Concentrating on the period between 1815 and 1820, Behringer shows how this natural occurrence led to worldwide unrest. Analysing events as diverse as the persecution of Jews in Germany, the Peterloo Massacre in the United Kingdom, witch hunts in South Africa and anti-colonial uprisings in Asia, Behringer demonstrates that no region on earth was untouched by the effects of the eruption. Drawing parallels with our world today, Tambora and its aftermath become a case study for how societies and individuals respond to climate change, what risks emerge and how they might be overcome. This comprehensive account of the impact of one of the greatest environmental disasters in human history will be of interest to a wide readership and to anyone seeking to understand better how we might mitigate the effects of climate change.
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CONTENTS
Cover
1 Introduction: The Tambora Crisis
Notes
2 The Year of the Explosion: 1815
The end to all wars and the reorganisation of the world in 1815
Explosions in the Far East: a new war?
The explosions of Mount Tambora: 5–15 April 1815
The disaster of the principalities on Sumbawa
The eruption as divine punishment
Consequences in the Indonesian archipelago
Volcanism as normality
The cool 1810s
Celestial events
Corn Laws
Notes
3 The Year without a Summer: 1816
‘A new year smiles kindly upon us today’
Sightings of sunspots with the naked eye
The cold spring of 1816
Unrest and the emergence of class society in England
The cold, rainy summer in Europe
The Yankee Chill
Goethe in the rain
The end of the world on 18 July 1816
Farmers watch their fields in horror
Warnings of crop failure foment government fears
The spectre of profiteering
Corn Jews
The crisis mechanism sets in
The structural crisis of the textile industry
The army of beggars grows
Polarisation between rich and poor
The rise in criminality: the prisons fill up
The Spa Fields riots: the invention of the mass demonstration
Export bans on basic foodstuffs
The economy comes to a standstill
‘Demoralisation and silent horror’: the public mood reaches a nadir
A new government in Württemberg
‘Silent night’: the winter of 1816/17
Notes
4 The Year of Famine: 1817
Experimenting with ersatz foods
Private versus state poor relief
Women’s associations
The triumphal march of Rumford’s soup
Work-creation schemes
The New York Society for the Prevention of Pauperism (SPP)
An International of social reformers
International solidarity with the disaster area in Switzerland
Flood disasters
Climate anomalies and famines in China
Demographic anomalies
Typhus
Pellagra
Limoctonia, or death from starvation
The beginning of the cholera pandemic in India
Foreign rule and misery in Italy
Rise in religiosity
Pöschlianism: the end of the world on 30 March 1817
The ‘woman clothed with the sun’ in Revelation and the war between rich and poor
Food riots in the spirit of the ‘moral economy’
France as the centre of social protest
Tumults in the kingdom of Bavaria
Existential crisis and a new era in Bavaria
An arson attack on the king?
Rebellions from Norway to Tunisia
Anti-colonial uprisings in Asia
Food prices reach a high point in June 1817
Corn associations
Grain purchases in Russia and the rise of Odessa
Russia, land of liberty
Go West! Emigration to North America
Morris Birkbeck as a prototypical emigrant
Emigration to Brazil
The search for the causes of ‘emigration mania’
Amsterdam as focal point
Internal migration in Europe
Internal migration in North America
Emancipation and antisemitism in the wake of famine
From the Munich Oktoberfest to the Cannstatter Wasen festival
Relief institutions and agrarian reforms in Württemberg
Celebrating the first harvest wagon in the summer of 1817
The inflation continues
The emergence of pauperism
‘From the Grand Society’: the Würzburg crisis at the end of 1817
Farewell to 1817
Notes
5 The Turbulent Years that Followed: 1818–1820
The beginning of 1818
Utopia realised: Korntal
From emigration to remigration
Return to the principle of self-administration
The inclusive constitutional state
The suicide attack on August von Kotzebue
Terror threats and the fear of revolution
The Hep-Hep riots in Würzburg
Continuing bloodlust
The pogroms spread
The Carlsbad Decrees
The depression of 1819
The Peterloo Massacre and the Six Acts
The Cato Street conspiracy
The final act of the Congress of Vienna
Notes
6 The Long-Range Effects of the Tambora Crisis
Cultural coping: memories of the ‘years of dearth’
Frankenstein and the vampires: the invention of the horror story
The growth of the glaciers
The flood disaster in the Val du Bagnes on 16 June 1818
The Tambora Crisis and the natural sciences
The invention of the weather map
From cloud classification to meteorology
The emergence of volcanology
Volcanic eruptions and sunsets in Romantic painting
The ‘rectification of the Rhine’
The building of the Erie Canal
The triumph of the steamer
Railway plans
The macadamisation of road construction
Automobility: from horse to draisine
On the way to a common economic area
The globalisation of cholera
Cholera riots in Russia
Cholera on every continent
Building the London sewer system
Saving energy in the wake of famine
Agricultural reform
Savings banks as keys to self-help
Boom in the insurance business
China’s decline: the great divergence
Mfecane: hunger, witch persecutions and migration in southern Africa
The invention of Australia
Genocide in Tasmania
Notes
7 Epilogue: From Meaningless to Meaningful Crisis
Notes
Abbreviations
Select Bibliography
Picture Credits
Index
End User License Agreement
Maps
Chapter 2
Map of Indonesia
Map of Sumbawa
Chapter 6
The Erie Canal, built 1817–1825, map5 from Thomas Curtis Clarke, ‘Waterways from…
Map showing the spread of cholera during the first pandemic, 1817–1822
Figures
Chapter 2
George Cruikshank, The Blessings of Peace or the Curse of the Corn Bill, London …
Chapter 3
Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten weather records, Washington, Library of Congress,…
Potato speculator, painted shooting target ‘To commemorate the famine of 1817’, …
The grain speculator Egidius Huggenberger, Oettingen, Heimatmuseum
Chapter 4
Nikolaus Hug, Flood waters from Lake Constance on the market square in Konstanz,…
A family facing death by starvation, 1817, illustration from the Montafon valle…
Inflation in Heilbronn in 1816/1817
Swiss emigrants to Brazil during the famine of 1816/17 crossing Lake Neufchâtel,…
George Cruikshank, ‘All among the Hottentots Capering ashore’!! or the Blessing…
J.S. Dirr, Procession of thanksgiving in Überlingen on 4 August 1817, Karlsruhe,…
Chapter 5
Johann Michael Voltz, The Hep-Hep riots in Frankfurt am Main, August 1819
George Cruikshank, A Radical Reformer, (ie) a Neck or Nothing Man! Dedicated to …
George Cruikshank, A Free Born Englishman! The Admiration of the World!!! And th…
George Cruikshank, The Cato Street Conspirators, on the Memorable Night of the 2…
Chapter 6
Carl Hohfelder, The inflation time from 1816 to 1817, Neuburg an der Donau, Stad…
Johann Thomas Stettner, Medals commemorating the famine year 1816/17, medals 1 a…
The Rhône Glacier, 1817, from Jean de Charpentier, Essai sur les glaciers, Lausa…
Tables
Chapter 2
Ultra-Plinian Eruptions Worldwide, 1800–1820
Chapter 4
Mortality in July in the département of Meurthe (Lorraine)
Development of Wheat Prices in Bavaria and Franconia, 1816–1818
Official Emigration from the Kingdom of Württemberg
Destinations of Emigrants from Württemberg, 1816–1818
Emigration from the United Kingdom, 1815–1821
The Expansion of the USA, 1800–1840
Population Growth in the New US States, 1800–1820
Chapter 6
Development of Transportations from Britain to Australia
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Tambora and the Year without a Summer
How a Volcano Plunged the World into Crisis
Wolfgang Behringer
Translated by Pamela Selwyn
polity
First published in German as Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer © Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, Munich, 2016
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2552-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Behringer, Wolfgang, author.Title: Tambora and the year without a summer : how a volcano plunged the world into crisis / Wolfgang Behringer.Other titles: Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer. EnglishDescription: English edition. | Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2019] | Originally published in German as: Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer : wie ein Vulkan die Welt in die Krise sturzte. Based on 3rd German edition (Munchen : C.H. Beck, 2016). | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018038779 (print) | LCCN 2018040297 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509525522 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509525492 (hardback)Subjects: LCSH: Tambora, Mount (Indonesia)--Eruption, 1815. | Volcanic eruptions--Social aspects--History--19th century. | Weather--Effect of vocanic eruptions on--Case studies. | Climatic changes--History. | World politics--Environmental aspects.Classification: LCC QE523.T285 (ebook) | LCC QE523.T285 B4413 2019 (print) | DDC 363.34/95--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038779
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For my mother, Margit Behringer (1925–2015), who taught me the joy of exploring new things.
I would like to thank Dr Justus Nipperdey, Johanna Blume, Judit Ruff, Sebastian Weiß, Pascal Steinmetz, Johanna Ungemach and Areti Karanikouli for their assistance during corrections to the German edition.
1INTRODUCTION: THE TAMBORA CRISIS
Would anyone be interested in reading a book about a volcanic eruption? In the case of Tambora, there is good reason to believe they would. This book is less about geology than about the societal reactions to an event that affected the climate worldwide – the largest volcanic eruption in human history. The explosions of April 1815 were so powerful that they could be heard thousands of kilometres away. The lava and pyroclastic flow devastated the immediate surroundings, and cyclones, tsunamis, ash fall and acid rain the adjacent region. The explosion cloud reached a height of 45 km. Large parts of Asia suffered for months under a ‘dry fog’ that obscured the sun. Upper winds distributed the gas and suspended particles around the world. The aerosols reduced solar radiation and led to a global cooling. The winter of 1815/16 was one of the coldest of the millennium. Glaciers expanded. Torrential rains caused flooding in China and India. In Europe and North America, 1816 became the ‘year without a summer’.1 In many parts of the world, 1817 became the ‘year of famine’.2
The years that followed were devoted to coping with the results of the crisis. Epidemics paralysed entire regions; mass migration shifted social problems to other corners of the globe; and mass demonstrations, uprisings and suicide attacks generated a pre-revolutionary mood. The eruption of Tambora served as a great experiment in fields where we normally cannot conduct experiments: the economy, culture and politics. The question is, how do different countries, legal systems and religions respond to a sudden worsening of living conditions imposed by external forces? To changes in nature, failed harvests, inflation, famine, epidemics and social unrest? As the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted, climatic events are uniquely suited to being viewed from a global perspective.3
Throughout the world, the volcanic eruption forced the affected societies to confront a current problem using their own specific mechanisms for coping with an unexpected change in the climate that – whether through cold, drought or constant rain – challenged their usual means of supplying the population with basic necessities. Nearly all societies in the world had to demonstrate virtually simultaneously how capable they were of managing such a subsistence crisis, which almost always coincided with a spiritual crisis. Some of them seemed to do so effortlessly.4 The Tambora Crisis caused others to slide into a protracted decline.5 The sudden and simultaneous appearance of acute problems worldwide has the character of an experiment whose design we cannot determine, but can reconstruct. From the distance of two centuries, this allows us to analyse the vulnerability and resilience of the societies of the time when faced with sudden climatic turmoil.6
That is the topic of the present volume, which is interested not in the volcanic eruption as such, but in its cultural consequences as well as the capacities of societies at the time to respond to sudden climate change. The time period of this study is 1815 to 1820, dates that are familiar from political history as well. In 1815, participants in the Congress of Vienna resolved to reorganise the world, and in 1820, the Final Act of the Viennese Ministerial Conference integrated the intervening experiences of crisis into a set of regulations. The future US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) wrote his doctoral thesis about this period, in which an excess of wars and crises led, through diplomatic negotiations, to a political order that assured peace and stability for a generation.7 The European post-war politician Robert Marjolin (1911–1986) also wrote a study of this period, one devoted specifically to the unrest and revolts unleashed by famine in France.8 The struggle for political stability took place in domestic politics as well, without some knowledge of which one cannot truly understand the foreign policy of the time. The domestic policy of these years was coloured by the climate crisis.
The period from 1815 to 1820 will be treated here as a coherent period of crisis – I call it the Tambora Crisis, to define it by its triggering factor. When the literature refers repeatedly to a crisis in the wake of the ‘European wars’,9 it reveals more than the authors’ refusal to meet the challenge of a worldwide crisis that was precisely not rooted in the political or military processes so familiar to them. It is almost touching to watch the same historian trying over and over again to attribute the same crisis to a different cause in every European country.10 After all, this crisis had no logical cause. The volcanic eruption could just as easily have occurred a few years earlier or later, and it could happen again today or tomorrow. It was an event ‘external’ to human society. This presents historians and sociologists with a methodological problem. The universal ‘rule of sociological method’ that it is ‘in the nature of society itself that we must seek the explanation of social life’11 does not apply here. Emile Durkheim’s ‘social facts’ are abrogated when the conditions are set not by Napoleon or the bourgeoisie but by a volcano.
From the standpoint of global history, it is easy to see that the traditional explanations do not work everywhere anyway. Why should there be famines in China and South Africa or a cholera outbreak in India because Napoleon lost a war, the British Army demobilised its troops or more machines were used in European industry? Even in Europe, one would be hard-pressed to find documents showing that anyone connected the constant rain, floods and failed harvests or the unrest that followed with the wars and their end, or with nascent industrialisation. Historians who nonetheless make this claim have used the simple facts of chronology to draw a causal connection, along the lines of the post hoc fallacy, which psychologists call a logical fallacy.12
The dimensions of the Tambora Crisis were so extraordinary because its roots lay in nature, in processes of geology, atmospheric physics and meteorology. These forces of nature respect no borders. Their effects are not merely global, but also on a very particular scale. Without knowing anything about Tambora, contemporaries recognised the unusual character of this crisis by comparing it to earlier ones. According to the Swiss professor of theology and writer on poor relief Peter Scheitlin (1779–1848), ‘In 1760 people in the country earned handsomely and all foodstuffs were extremely cheap – in 1771 they earned handsomely and all foodstuffs were very dear – in 1817 they earned nearly nothing but the inflation was terrible – in 1819 they earned nearly nothing but everything was very cheap. What a strange diversity! What an interesting distribution of all the possible cases in a period of 50–60 years, that is within a human lifetime!’13 As we shall see, ‘famine year’ does not mean that there was no food available, but merely that it was unaffordable for the many people who, as described by the Indian economist Amartya Sen, had no access to it.14
The theme of climate and history has gained in influence ever since the world’s scientists agreed that we are living in an age of global warming.15 When climate change was put on the international agenda there were still fears of an immediately impending ice age, but by the time the international summits on climate change became established the broad consensus was that the problem for coming generations would be warming, not cooling. Since 1990, reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have regularly informed the public about the state of research in the field.16
In the 1960s, when the idea of studying the climate systematically emerged in the United Nations, a series of long, severe winters left an impression on western societies. In connection with the eruption of the Gunung Agung volcano on Bali, data was gathered for the first time from an airplane that proved that its emissions changed the composition of the air as high up as the stratosphere.17 These were important additions to the first global study of a volcanic eruption in the wake of the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.18 One hundred years previously, following the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) had already observed that the same weather phenomena occurred in Europe and North America.19 However, the obvious hypothesis that Gunung Tambora had been the catalyst for worldwide climatic phenomena was not proven until 1913, in a study by the American atmospheric physicist William Jackson Humphrey (1862–1949).20
The research on volcanoes and their eruptions has progressed in the meantime. One of the principles of climate science is that violent volcanic eruptions can change the composition of the atmosphere through their emissions of ash, gases and fine particles, which can affect the climate worldwide.21 The number of volcanoes was determined, and, based on ice cores,22 tree rings23 and sediment analyses, a chronology of volcanic eruptions over a period of several hundred million years was established.24 Using the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), the strength of volcanic eruptions was classified in seven stages, measured by the amount of matter emitted and the height of emissions.25 The scale was calibrated according to the oldest precisely described larger volcanic eruption, that of Vesuvius in 79 CE (= VEI 5).26 Even larger volcanic eruptions are described as ‘ultra-Plinian’ events. Their influence can be enormous. The eruption of the volcano of Thera/Santorini (= VEI 6) more than 2,650 years ago probably led to the extinction of the Minoan culture.27 The eruption of Toba (= VEI 8) in present-day Indonesia some 70,000 years ago nearly led to the extinction of humankind.28 The eruptions of supervolcanoes, for instance those under Yellowstone National Park or the Phlegraean Fields near Naples, surpass any scale. They could lead to a ‘volcanic winter’, a global cooling, which due to feedback effects could last for decades or even centuries.29
The eruption of Tambora (= VEI 7) in 1815 was the largest eruption in human history – with history traditionally defined here as the period from which we have written sources, that is, approximately the last 5,000 years. This eruption brought summer snowfalls in many areas, but there was no danger of a ‘volcanic winter’.30 The characterisation of the year as ‘eighteen hundred and froze to death’ is found just once in an undated poem from the USA.31 It reads
Months that should be summer’s prime
Sleet and snow and frost and rime
Air so cold you see your breath
Eighteen hundred and froze to death.32
The designation ‘year without a summer’ is an exaggeration, although it has gained a certain currency.33 Today, with the help of land weather reports and ships’ log books, we can reconstruct historical weather maps globally.34 They show a varied range of weather anomalies for 1816. In some areas it was much too wet (e.g. western Europe and China), in others too dry (USA, India, South Africa), in most too cold, but in some also warm (e.g. Russia). These years appeared to be ‘unnatural’ in the eyes of contemporaries and anomalous in the analyses of modern climate scientists.35
The eruption of Tambora and its effects were only studied in greater detail in the 1980s. The research was strongly influenced by Anglo-American scientists: Henry Stommel (1929–1992) was an oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,36 Charles Richard Harrington (b. 1933) was a zoologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature,37 Clive Oppenheimer (b. 1964) is a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge,38 and the American Nicholas P. Klingaman is a meteorologist at the University of Reading.39 The recent study by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, a professor of English literature at the University of Illinois, is the first to include selected international cultural aspects, for example the emergence of vampire literature.40 Alongside this there exist a number of very good studies that explore the crisis of 1816/17 on a local or regional level.41 There is no lack of work on individual aspects such as the origins of the global cholera outbreak.42 Many events such as the fall of governments, the discussions surrounding constitutions for newly founded states, political murders, pogroms and planned coups have not thus far been viewed in connection with the Tambora Crisis. And yet, as I shall argue here, they are virtually impossible to understand without this context.
The Tambora Crisis – and the present volume profits from this – occurred in a more modern media environment than any previous climate or subsistence crisis. In the early nineteenth century, when European expansion had reached its height, newspapers and periodicals already existed all over the world. Everywhere we find well-trained, curious and sometimes very opinionated government officials who wrote highly competent reports on all manner of subjects or events. To name but one example, the British governor of Java, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826), undertook a survey with a standardised questionnaire among all the British residents of the Indonesian archipelago to explore the causes and consequences of the explosion of Mount Tambora. Many economists, ‘political scientists’ and also theologians wrote expert testimonies or detailed accounts and analyses of the famine. Scientists from the emerging disciplines of geology, physics and chemistry sought explanations for the extraordinary natural phenomena. Agronomists and technicians, but also nutritionists, architects and town planners, looked for ways of mitigating the effects of the crisis and preventing future suffering. They presented their ideas for discussion in specialist journals. The correspondence, diaries, travel accounts and memoirs of politicians, artists and scholars afford profound insights into their thinking. Frequently, these commentaries came from well-known personalities such as the Russian Tsar Alexander I, the English poet Lord Byron, the Prussian diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense and his wife Rahel, née Levin, or the Weimar minister of state Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The task of the present volume is to construct a new synthesis, based on the rich contemporary sources, out of the many individual aspects. The aim is to redefine the Tambora Crisis as a part of world history, an event with a rightful place not just in natural history, but also in cultural and social history. Until now, regional or national histories have cultivated their own modes of dealing with this crisis because scholars have not been thinking outside the box. Often, it has also been swept aside because it apparently does not fit into our historical narrative of human progress from servitude to liberty. Readers need to leave such ideas behind if they are to dive into the complexities of the years 1815–1820.
The eruption of Mount Tambora was the beginning of an experiment in which all of humanity became involuntary participants. The reactions to the crisis offer an example of how societies and individuals respond to climate change, what risks emerge and what opportunities may be associated with it. This book shows how the climate crisis of the early nineteenth century was overcome. Anyone who is interested in the problems of current and future climate change should know about the historical example of the Tambora Crisis.
Notes
1.
Henry and Elizabeth Stommel,
Volcano Weather: The Story of the Year Without a Summer 1816
(Newport, RI, 1983).
2.
John Dexter Post,
The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World
(Baltimore, 1977).
3.
D. Chakrabarty‚ ‘The climate of history: Four theses’,
Critical Inquiry
35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.
4.
Carl Edward Skeen,
1816 America Rising
(Lexington, 2003).
5.
Kenneth Pomeranz,
The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
(Princeton, NJ, 2000).
6.
Dominik Collet and Thore Lassen (eds),
Handeln in Hungerkrisen. Neue
Perspektiven auf soziale und klimatische Vulnerabilität
(Göttingen, 2012).
7.
Henry Kissinger,
A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problem of Peace 1812–1822
(Boston, 1957). The author affirms the thesis of this work, which began as a PhD thesis at Harvard University in 1954, in his
World Order
(New York, 2014).
8.
Robert Marjolin,
Essai sur la crise de subsistence de 1816–1817
(Paris, 1931) and ‘Troubles provoqués en France par la disette de 1816–1817’,
Revue d’Histoire Moderne
8 (1933): 423–60.
9.
Dieter Langewiesche,
Europa zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1849
, 4th edn (Munich, 2004), 31.
10.
Gordon A. Craig,
Europe, 1815–1914
(New York, 1961), 57–9 (Austria), 77–8 (France), 101–5 (England).
11.
Emile Durkheim,
The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method
, ed. Steven Lukes (New York, 2013), 7.
12.
David. G. Myers,
Psychology
, 8th edn (New York and Basingstoke, 2007), chapter 1.
13.
Peter Scheitlin,
Meine Armenreisen in den Kanton Glarus und in die Umgebungen der Stadt St. Gallen in den Jahren 1816 und 1817, nebst einer Darstellung, wie es den Armen des gesamten Vaterlandes im Jahr 1817 erging. Ein Beytrag zur Charakteristik unserer Zeit
(St. Gallen, 1820), 14–15 (online edition).
14.
Amartya Sen, ‘Starvation and exchange entitlements. A general approach and its application to the Great Bengal Famine’,
Cambridge Journal of Economics
1 (1977): 33–59.
15.
Spencer R. Weart,
The Discovery of Global Warming
(Cambridge, MA, 2003).
16.
Wolfgang Behringer,
Kulturgeschichte des Klimas
(Munich, 2007), 254–64.
17.
Michael S. Rampino and Stephen Self, ‘Historic eruptions of Tambora (1815), Krakatoa (1883) and Agung (1963), their stratospheric aerosols and climatic impact’,
Quaternary Research
18 (1982): 127–43.
18.
Royal Society, Krakatoa Committee (eds),
The Eruption of Krakatoa, and Subsequent Phenomena
(London, 1888).
19.
Vilhjalmar Bjarnar, ‘The Laki eruption (1783/84) and the famine of the mist’, in Carl F. Bayerschmidt and Erik J. Friis (eds),
Scandinavian Studies
(Seattle, 1965), 410–21.
20.
William Jackson Humphreys, ‘Volcanic dust and other factors in the production of climatic changes, and their possible relation to ice ages’,
Bulletin of the Mount Weather Observatory
6 (1913): 1–34.
21.
Hubert H. Lamb, ‘Volcanic dust in the atmosphere. With a chronology and assessments of its meteorological significance’,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Meteorological Society
266 (1970): 425–533.
22.
Claus U. Hammer, H.B. Clausen and Willi Dansgaard, ‘Greenland ice sheet evidence of post-glacial volcanism and its climatic impact’,
Nature
288 (1980): 230–5.
23.
V.C. LaMarche and K. Hirschboeck, ‘Frost rings in trees as records of major volcanic eruptions’,
Nature
307 (1984): 121–6.
24.
Tom Simkin and Lee Siebert,
Volcanoes of the World. A Regional Directory, Gazetteer, and Chronology of Volcanism During the Last 10,000 Years
, 3rd edn (Berkeley, 2010), 215–327 (Holocene eruptions) and 361–70 (Pleistocene eruptions).
25.
Christopher G. Newhall and Stephen Self, ‘The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI): An estimate of explosive magnitude for historical volcanism’,
Journal of Geophysical Research
87 (1982): 1231–8.
26.
Haraldur Sigurdsson,
Melting the Earth: The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions
(Oxford and New York, 1999), 51–70. The Pliny text is cited on pp. 61–4.
27.
Floyd W. McCoy and Grant Heiken, ‘The late-bronze age explosive eruptions of Thera (Santorini), Greece: Regional and local effects’, in Floyd W. McCoy and Grant Heiken (eds),
Volcanic Hazards and Disasters in Human Antiquity
, Special Papers of the Geological Society of America 345 (Boulder, CO, 2000), 43–70.
28.
Michael R. Rampino and Stanley H. Ambrose, ‘Volcanic winter in the garden of Eden: The Toba supereruption and the late Pleistocene human population crash’, in McCoy and Heiken (eds),
Volcanic Hazards
, 71–82.
29.
Stanley H. Ambrose, ‘Late Pleistocene human population bottlenecks, volcanic winter and differentiation of modern humans’,
Journal of Human Evolution
34 (1982): 623–51.
30.
Michael R. Rampino, Stephen Self and Richard B. Stothers, ‘Volcanic winters’,
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science
16 (1988): 73–99.
31.
Patrick Hughes, ‘Eighteen hundred and froze-to-death’,
ESSA
15 (July 1970): 33–5.
32.
Lee-Lee Schlegel, ‘The year without a summer. 1816, in Maine’,
www.milbridgehistoricalsociety.org/previous/no_summer.html
.
33.
Charles M. Wilson, ‘The year without a summer’,
American History Illustrated
5 (June 1970): 24–9; Stommel and Stommel,
Volcano Weather
, and ‘1816. Das Jahr ohne Sommer’,
Spektrum der Wissenschaft
(1983): 96–103; Willie Soon and Steven H. Yaskell, ‘Year without a summer’,
Mercury
(May/June 2003): 13–22; Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders,
Volcanoes in Human History: The Far-reaching Effects of Major Eruptions
(Princeton, NJ, 2002).
34.
Ricardo Garcia Herrera et al., ‘Description and general background to ship’s logbooks as a source of climate data’,
Climatic Change
73 (2005): 13–36.
35.
Clive Oppenheimer, ‘Climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption, Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815’,
Progress in Physical Geography
27 (2003): 230–59.
36.
Stommel and Stommel,
Volcano Weather
.
37.
Charles Richard Harrington (ed.),
The Year Without a Summer? World Climate in 1816
(Ottawa, 1992).
38.
Oppenheimer, ‘Climatic, environmental and human consequences’, 230–59.
39.
William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman,
The Year Without
Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History
(New York, 2013).
40.
Gillen d’Arcy Wood,
Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World
(Princeton, NJ, 2014).
41.
Gerald Müller,
Hunger in Bayern, 1816–1818. Politik und Gesellschaft in einer Staatskrise des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts
(Frankfurt am Main, 1998).
42.
Myron Echenberg,
Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present
(Cambridge, 2011). The Year of the Explosion: 1815
2THE YEAR OF THE EXPLOSION: 1815
The end to all wars and the reorganisation of the world in 1815
The year 1815 witnessed the end of more than twenty years of warfare in Europe and beyond. Between 1792 and 1815, the Revolutionary Wars and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars fundamentally changed Europe.1 The French occupation of broad swathes of the continent under Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) had repercussions for the entire world. Thus, with the annexation of the Netherlands, Dutch colonial possessions passed to France. In order to prevent the French from regaining a foothold in ‘Farther India’, the United Kingdom took over the colonial possessions of the Netherlands in Southeast Asia, as well as Dutch Guiana in South America, the Cape Colony in South Africa and the island of Ceylon off the coast of India.
The Russo-Turkish War was fought on the edges of Europe from 1806 to 1812, concurrently with the Napoleonic Wars, with the Ottoman Empire aiming to recapture the Black Sea coast. After their defeat, however, the Ottomans were forced by the Treaty of Bucharest to cede Bessarabia to Russia as well.2 The War of 1812 began around the same time.3 This war between the USA and their former colonial masters escalated to such a degree after the American invasion of British Canada that in August 1814 English troops captured the US capital Washington and burnt down the White House and the Capitol. President James Madison (1751–1836) was forced to flee to Virginia.4 When the Treaty of Ghent was signed in February 1815, the indigenous peoples also involved in the war were the actual losers.5
The Wars of Liberation against Napoleonic occupation ended in April 1814 with Napoleon’s defeat and deposition, followed by the First Treaty of Paris (30 May 1814). After his wraithlike return from banishment in March 1815, Napoleon was defeated a second time by the Grand Alliance (England, Russia, Prussia and Austria) at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. Even before these last hostilities had ceased, the Congress of Vienna (1 November 1814–11 June 1815) set the stage for the unfolding of the European drama in the years that followed. The term ‘Restoration’ has become established in the historical literature to refer to the results of these peace negotiations, as specified in the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna (9 June 1815), because they allegedly re-established the conditions of the period preceding the French Revolution. Restoration was, however, more of a battle cry of 1830s liberalism, for the Congress of Vienna restored literally nothing to its condition at any previous point in time. Instead, the negotiators sought new forms for the plethora of changes that had occurred in the preceding twenty-five years, with the aim of creating a lasting peacetime order.6 The objective was to prevent future wars and revolutions by establishing a new peacekeeping power and options for political participation. The Congress of Vienna thus served as a model for the negotiations following the First and Second World Wars.7
The political order created in Vienna was revolutionary, sweeping aside the ancien régime world of states, including the Napoleonic state system. Major new states were created which were supposed to guarantee a European peacetime order. Virtually none of these states – and this is important for our story – had ever existed in this form before.8 This had its price: in the period that followed, they suffered from serious legitimation problems and had first to gain the loyalty of their new populations. Within Germany, the tendencies to a realignment of state boundaries continued. The recasting of property relations in the preceding decades, the secularisation of ecclesiastical holdings and the ecclesiastical states, the mediatisation of the imperial cities, knights and counts and even of some principalities by the larger states remained in force. And these expropriations were joined by further annexations. Of the more than 300 territories that had existed under old German particularism, only thirty-four principalities and four city-states survived. They were combined to form a confederation of states, the ‘German Confederation’, whose parliament – the Federal Assembly – was to meet in Frankfurt. On 8 June 1815, the great powers signed the Deutsche Bundesakte (German Federal Act).9 Article 13 stipulated that all states were to provide themselves with constitutions. The Tambora Crisis contributed considerably to the speedy passage of these constitutions in many states, since the new parliaments were needed not just in order to pay off the state debts, but also to remove injustices by harmonising the national law of the various states and to pacify unrest in the individual regions.
Tsar Alexander I,10 patron saint of the German Wars of Liberation and the true victor over Napoleon, became the guiding spirit of the Holy Alliance, a coalition of the Christian monarchies of Russia, Prussia and Austria formed at a conference of the victorious powers in Paris on 26 September 1815. The monarch’s manifesto issued an appeal for Christian fraternity. England roundly rejected this religious claptrap, however, and refused all support. Apart from the pope, nearly all of the other European monarchies joined, including France, which had once again been accepted into the circle of the great powers in the Second Treaty of Paris on 20 November 1815. Thus all major hostilities had ended by late 1815. A golden age was supposed to ensue.
Explosions in the Far East: a new war?
The sound of heavy explosions could be heard in eastern Java on the evening of 5 April 1815 and continued at intervals throughout the night and into the next morning. They led to hectic activity among locals and in the garrisons of the British colonial power. People imagined cannon fire from a siege or a French invasion, since there had been news of Napoleon’s return and the resumption of hostilities in Europe. Troops marched out from Yogyakarta in anticipation of a possible enemy attack, as the governor of Indonesia reported in his memoirs. Then boats began to search along the coast for ships in distress.11
Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who had been appointed governor of Java at the age of thirty after a career in the service of the British East India Company,12 soon realised that the noise must have come from an extraordinarily large volcanic eruption. But where was this volcano located? At first, contradictory reports arrived, according to which the eruption had allegedly been noticed on the 1st of April in Banyuwangie, but not until the 6th in Batavia (present-day Jakarta). The ash fall began throughout the area between the 10th and the 14th of April. Raffles therefore ordered a systematic investigation. To this end he designed a questionnaire that was sent along with a circular letter to all British residents of Indonesia in May 1815. Question 1 related to the chronological and physical circumstances. It enquired after the day and the hour when people had noticed the ash fall, how long it had lasted, and what had been its chemical composition. Question 2 explored the medical and economic effects of the eruption, the impact on the health of people and animals and on the harvest, as well as the presumptive causes. Question 3 asked about the source. Where did they believe the eruption had occurred?
With his survey, Raffles elicited eyewitness accounts of immediate reactions to the volcanic eruption. Such accounts had existed for 2,000 years, beginning with the observation of Vesuvius by Pliny the Younger. Spanish colonial officials had reported on the explosion of Huaynaputina in Peru in 1600,13 while their Danish counterparts had written of the eruption of Laki in Iceland in 1783.14 But Raffles was not satisfied with the incidental or regular reports he received, and instead sought a systematic and structured overview. The quality of the responses to his survey can be surmised from the response of a resident of Surakarta (Central Java). People there had heard the first explosions on Thursday, 5 April, between four and six in the afternoon. With its clear and distinct thunderclaps, and the irregular intervals between them, the noise had resembled a military operation, sounding more like mortar fire than a cannonade. On 6, 7, 8 and 9 April there had been occasional sounds like distant thunder. During those days, however, an increasing opacity in the atmosphere had suggested the true reason, since it was familiar from previous volcanic eruptions. On 10 April the explosions had continued, and dust had begun to rain down lightly. On Tuesday, 11 April the explosions became more frequent and powerful, lasting all day, with an especially loud bang around two o’clock in the afternoon. For approximately one hour, the explosions were accompanied by a tremulous motion of the earth, making large windows vibrate. Late that afternoon people heard a second loud thundering noise, and the air was filled with such dense vapour that the sun was scarcely visible. From 5 to 18 April the sun appeared to have vanished, and when it was briefly visible, it was only through a dense fog. In early May the air was still hazy and visibility reduced. The mountain above Surakarta remained invisible throughout the month, and even nearby objects could only be seen as if through a veil of smoke.
The situation worsened on 12 April when dust began to fall more thickly. It stayed dark all day, and no work was possible indoors. At the same time the temperature dropped rapidly. At ten in the morning the thermometer showed only 75.5 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius). The earthquake and precipitation seemed to come from the west. Some of these phenomena were familiar from previous volcanic eruptions, but the sudden rise of the sea level was extremely unusual, occurring quite close in time to the most violent earth tremors. The day and hour had not been recorded precisely enough. The dust was ash grey with a brownish tinge, and almost imperceptibly fine, and when dissolved in water it smelled like clay. It was not magnetic, and its chemical composition differed from that of the ash produced by the eruptions of Guntur in 1803 and Kelut in 1811.
When it came to the after-effects, the observer from Surakarta was remarkably optimistic. Buffaloes and cows were dying, but this could be the result of the continuing effects of a cattle epidemic. His enquiries had revealed that animal health more generally had not been damaged. Horses, sheep and goats were scarcely affected, but the rice crop might be. However, there had rarely been a year of such abundance. The mature rice was scarcely damaged, but an adverse effect on the growth of fresh plantings was to be expected. Depending on how heavy the precipitation had been, the clayey ash could cause the young plants to wither by absorbing needed water. The report’s author commended himself to the governor with a promise of economic profit, suggesting that the ash fall with its high clay content might be used to make pottery.
The explosions of Mount Tambora: 5–15 April 1815
Now that we have heard about the situation from the viewpoint of a contemporary, what had actually happened? Mount Gunung Tambora, or as many contemporaries called it, Tomboro, was no longer considered an active volcano, since it had not erupted in human memory. In 1812, however, a cloud had formed over the summit, though nobody had paid much attention to it because of the mountain’s great height, an estimated 4,200 metres. The cloud had remained ever since, growing darker as the months passed. It was thought to be a tropical storm cloud, but in later years the scholar John Crawfurd claimed to have seen a rain of ash even before the eruption, whilst travelling by ship to Macassar on the island of Celebes (now Sulawesi). In the weeks before the explosion people noted an increasing rumbling and trembling of the earth, and the fearful inhabitants of Sumbawa had asked the British Resident in Bima to investigate. He in fact sent a certain Mr Israel, who unfortunately travelled on the very day that Mount Tambora erupted. He was never heard from again.15
Map of Indonesia
The powerful explosions that could be heard for thousands of kilometres throughout the Indonesian archipelago began on 5 April 1815. On 14 April a Major Johnson reported from Solo on the main island of Java for the capital newspaper: ‘The explosions were extremely violent and very frequent, and resembled the discharge of mortars. It commenced on Wednesday the 5th in the evening with repeated explosions, and ceased about 8 o’clock. It again commenced on Monday night or Tuesday morning, and continued extremely violent until a late hour the next night. Yesterday the ashes fell so thick that it was quite uncomfortable walking out as it filled our eyes and covered our clothes.’16 And Crawfurd reported from Surabaya: ‘The day after the sounds and shocks of earthquake which accompanied them were heard at Surabaya, the ashes began to fall, and on the third day, up to noon, it was pitch dark; and for several days after I transacted all business by candlelight. For several months, indeed, the sun’s disk was not distinct, nor the atmosphere clear and bright, as it usually is during the southeast monsoon.’17
The climax of the eruption began on 10 April. One of the few survivors, the sultan of Sanggar – one of the six sultanates on Sumbawa – described it to Governor Raffles’ envoy Lieutenant Owen Phillips as follows: at five o’clock on the evening of 10 April three distinct pillars of flame could be seen erupting near the summit of the volcano, presumably from the volcano’s crater. They rose into the sky, coming together in turbulences at a great height. Viewed from Sanggar, the mountain afterwards appeared from all directions as a body of liquid fire. The flames could be seen raging until about eight o’clock, after which the mountain was obscured by the masses of falling ash and other ejected material. The stones that rained down on the relatively distant Sanggar consisted of debris ranging in size from a walnut to two fists. Between nine and ten o’clock ash rain began in Sanggar, and soon thereafter came a whirlwind that blew down nearly every house in the village, carrying off roofs and anything light. Even large trees were uprooted and flung through the air along with people, houses and animals. Then came the tsunami, which at 12 feet was higher than any seen before. The tsunami devastated the low-lying rice fields of Sanggar and everything else in its path.18
After its violent eruptive phase (5–15 April) the volcano remained active for several more weeks, albeit less powerfully so. From its original height of 4,200 metres, calculated from the reports of various captains who had passed it regularly before and after the explosion, only 2,850 metres remained after its peak blew off. This led to the formation of the six-kilometre wide caldera with a crater lake in the middle that Heinrich Zollinger found in 1847 during what is considered the first ascent of Mount Tambora.19 Estimates still accepted today suggest that the eruption ejected some 150 cubic kilometres of volcanic material.20 The release of aerosols into the atmosphere was far higher than that of any of the more recent volcanic eruptions that have been studied using better measurement techniques.21
The disaster of the principalities on Sumbawa
The island of Sumbawa measures some 280 km from east to west, ranges between 15 and 90 km wide and comprises approximately 15,550 square km in all. In the early seventeenth century the island was conquered by the sultan of Macassar in the south of the island of Celebes, the king of Gowa. The minor princes on Sumbawa ended up in a relationship of tributary dependency to him, and were forced to convert to Islam. Macassar was an international commercial centre with Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch, English, Spanish and Danish trading outposts. In 1669 the Dutch vanquished the kingdom of Gowa militarily, expelled the other Europeans and made Macassar a protectorate of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The British took over this protectorate in 1811 and the kingdom of the Netherlands in 1816. The eruption of Mount Tambora occurred during the reign of King Mappatunru I Manginyarang Karaeng Lembanhparang, known as Sultan Abdul Rauf (r. 1814–1825).22
Sumbawa itself was divided into six principalities. On a peninsula in the north lay the three small sultanates of Tambora (near the volcano), Pekat and Sanggar with the port city of the same name. On its own peninsula in the west of the island was the sultanate of Sumbawa (now the Sumbawa district of the Nusa Tenggarat Barat province, Indonesia). In the centre of the island lay the sultanate of Dompo with its capital city of the same name, and in the east the sultanate of Bima. According to the accounts of Dutch correspondents, before the eruption the population lived from the cultivation of rice, maize and beans. In a bay on the south coast of Dompo people dived for pearls. The salt flats of Bima provided the local people with that commodity. Exports included rice, horses, honey, beeswax, birds’ nests, pepper, salt, cotton, coffee, teak and sandalwood, the last of which was also needed for the production of red dye.23
As an agent of the Dutch East India Company emphasised in 1786, the principality of Tambora was located in the infertile, rocky part of the island, where not much grew in the mountains but rice. This principality east of the volcano even had to import rice from other parts of the island, in exchange for forest produce – honey, wood and birds’ nests – as well as horses. These products were so abundant that the sultan, nobles and subjects were in a position to compensate well for the barrenness of the land.24 Excavations have confirmed contemporary information about a certain level of wealth in the sultanate of Tambora and have expanded our knowledge of trade relations. Apart from objects of old Indonesian culture, the excavations also unearthed imported goods such as Chinese porcelain, glazed ceramics, precious stones, copper implements and iron tools. According to these findings, Tambora probably had trade relations with Indochina.25
Map of Sumbawa
The effects of the eruption proved catastrophic for the island of Sumbawa. Lava and pyroclastic flows devastated the area around the volcano. Pumice stone and ash rained down on the entire island. Near the volcano, the ash attained a height of 120 cm. The principalities of Tambora and Pekat were wiped off the map. In neighbouring Sanggar, too, most of the population – an estimated 10,000 people – were killed by the eruption, the subsequent cyclone or the tsunami.26 The sultan, however, miraculously survived and served as an eyewitness. Most survivors fled to the neighbouring principality of Bima. According to contemporary accounts, some 95 per cent of the rice harvest on Sumbawa was destroyed and the drinking water polluted. The result was famine and a wave of diarrhoea and fever, to which most of the remaining inhabitants of the principalities of Bima and Dompo succumbed.27 People were so desperate that they sold their children into slavery and opened graves to look for any items they could sell. An additional 38,000 people are estimated to have died on Sumbawa.28
The disaster on the island led to mass emigration. Some 36,000 people fled to the neighbouring islands of Bali and Java, with others leaving for the sultanate of Macassar on South Sulawesi or for smaller islands. They paid dearly. One Dutchman who visited the island of Ceram Laut (Moluccas) in 1824 found a number of Sumbawans there who had sold themselves to slave merchants in order to pay for the voyage and secure their survival.29 Zollinger – whose figures are still used by scholars today – estimated that after the mass death and emigration, fewer than 50 per cent of the original population of some 170,000 remained on the island.30 Nowadays, around 1.5 million people live on Sumbawa.
The anthropologist Peter R. Goethals has pointed out that life changed utterly for the remaining inhabitants. First of all, the economy collapsed. Horses disappeared along with bees and birds. The flooding of the lowlands rendered traditional villages uninhabitable. It became impossible to grow rice in the paddy fields. The forests were also devastated. For several years, survivors had to depend on rice imports from Java. The governor of the sultan of Macassar exempted the principalities of Sanggar, Bima and Dompo from paying tribute and taxes, and all treaties had to be renegotiated after 1817. The survivors – and later the returnees – had to search for new land and establish new villages. Goethals concluded that all present-day settlements on the island can be traced back to those newly founded after 1815. The ‘Tambora holocaust’ depopulated the island and completely altered the forms of settlement and economic activity. Today’s settlements are no longer located on the water, but on the mountainsides. Instead of paddy fields, the lower-yield method of dry rice cultivation was used. The first harvest in Bima was only possible five years after the disaster, and in the west of the island it took even longer. Nine years after the catastrophe, in 1824, the government officials Schelle and Tobias reported that the principalities of Sumbawa and Dompo were gradually recovering, but that Pekat and Tambora still resembled abandoned scenes of devastation.31 In 1847 Heinrich Zollinger noted that the port city of Bima had recovered, unlike the rest of the island. In the principality of Bima, tobacco, indigo and sugarcane were now cultivated, in addition to the earlier export products. One interesting detail: the locals believed that the climate had changed. There was less rain, it was hotter, and many springs had dried up. Zollinger attributed this to the loss of vegetation.32 To this day, Sumbawa remains drier and less fertile than neighbouring islands.
The eruption as divine punishment
After his first ascent of Mount Tambora in 1847, Zollinger learned that ‘the natives believed the eruption to be divine judgement of a wicked deed committed by the king of Tambora’. He had heard the following story from the inhabitants of Dompo. One day, the Arab trader Seid Idrus had found a dog outside the Tambora mosque. He became very angry and wanted to drive the dog away, but was prevented from doing so because he was told that this was the king’s dog. A dispute then erupted between the Muslim and the king and nobility of the principality. In the end the angered king ordered the foreigner to be killed at Mount Tambora. His subjects obeyed, carried the Arab off and set about killing him with spears, knives and clubs, and by stoning. They threw his body into a hole. But when the murderers tried to return to the city to report to the king, fire spouted from the mountain and followed them. In Zollinger’s rendering of the tale:
By the power of God the most high, who is to be praised in all eternity, the fire pursued the people wherever they fled, and even pursued them to the sea, so that the sea of Tambora was in flames. The fire on the mountain burned for several days, and also in the villages, on land and sea. And there was darkness and ash rain. Nothing saved the inhabitants of Tambora, many thousands were burnt to death. The city of Tambora sank and became part of the sea. To this day the ships can drop anchor on the spot where the city of Tambora lies.33
Many elements of this account in which Allah defends his mosque are familiar to narratologists from Wandersagen, fragments of folklore spread by casual diffusion, for instance the image of the sunken city. Since the stories were transmitted orally, there are numerous versions, for example one in which Seid Idrus was immortal and now lived in the mountain, or in which the king hid a treasure before his demise. Zollinger himself was at first suspected of being a treasure hunter. Stories also circulated about evil spirits or dragons dwelling in the mountain who must not be disturbed because they tried to devour anyone who dared to scale it. The last destination of Zollinger’s expedition was the small principality of Sanggar, which was completely buried in 1815 and had only re-emerged quite recently at the time of his visit. The raja of Sanggar, who had survived the disaster as a twelve-year-old boy, gave Zollinger some forty men to accompany him. Zollinger noted that they received a rousing welcome upon their return:
Many people touched our bodies and could not believe their eyes when they found us alive and unharmed. They had never imagined that we would return so hale and hearty and so soon. In the village we were received by the priest, who solemnly blessed me. It was a great celebration, all day and into the night … I had a buffalo slaughtered for the populace and rice distributed among them. Now they believed the land had been released from its curse, and the evil spirits banished. The misfortune of 1815 would never occur again, we hoped. The shooting, crowing and singing continued until the break of day.34
Consequences in the Indonesian archipelago
Apart from Sumbawa, the volcanic disaster also affected the other Lesser Sunda Islands. Because of the northwest wind, it had less
