Year Without a Summer

In 1816, a volcano eruption in Sumbawa, Indonesia, along with several other factors, created an unusual -- and catastrophic -- series of weather events. Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy and I'm Holly Frying. So perhaps you
have heard of Mary Robinett Kal maybe you're a listener

(00:22):
to this podcast. She has written, among other things, a
series of novels that are known as The Glamorous Histories.
And these are basically Jane Austen novels with magic. So
if that sounds delightful to you and you have not
read them, you will probably be delighted because they are
pretty charming and touching and funny. And the third one

(00:42):
was some of my most recent airplane reading while I
was on a flight, and that book is called Without
a Summer. It's said in eighteen sixteen, And in addition
to several running mentions of past podcast subjects the Luddites,
there's ongoing this cussion about about whether that year's unseasonably

(01:03):
cold weather is caused by magic. Basically, so this is
not unseasonably cold like chillier than normal. It's unseasonably cold
like it's snowing in July and all of the crops
have frozen in the ground. So in spite of the
similarities and their names. I was so absorbed in this
book that it wasn't until the very end that I

(01:25):
made the connection that this unseasonably called fictional setting is
the same as the real world event the Year Without
a Summer, which is also a listener request from listener Cecile.
So Cecil, you can thank Mary Robin at Koal for
for bumping this to the top of the list, because
after we landed, I was like, I want to learn

(01:47):
more about that and what really happened. So this story
actually starts with a volcano. And the volcano, which was
Tambora on the island of Simbawa, Indonesia, was probably not
the only factor in eighteen sixteen of bizarre weather, and
we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but
it was definitely a very significant major part of it,

(02:09):
and it had immediate devastating effects in Asia and the
tropical Pacific, and a lot of these are unfortunately really
glossed over when people talk about the Year Without a Summer.
There were several major volcanic eruptions in the early eighteen teens.
One was suffer Air on St. Vincent Island in the
Caribbean in eighteen twelve. Mount Mayon and the Philippines erupted

(02:32):
in eighteen fourteen. And then there was an immense explosion
from Tambora which started on April five, eighteen fifteen, and
went on for days, with the worst of the eruption
really getting going on the tenth. And in the memoir
of Sir Stamford Raffles, the British Lieutenant Governor of Java
at the time, quote, the first explosions were heard on

(02:53):
this island in the evening of the fifth of April.
They were noticed in every quarter and continued at intervals
until the following day. The noise was in the first
instance almost universally attributed to distant cannon, so much so
that a attachment of troops were marched from Joke, Jakarta,
in the expectation that a neighboring post was attacked, and

(03:13):
along the coast boats were in two instances dispatched in
quest of a supposed ship in distress. On the following morning, however,
a slight fall of ashes removed all doubt as to
the cause of the sound, and he goes on to
say that it sounded so close that they really all
believed it was a volcano. That was actually much closer
to them than Tambora. When the eruptions started, eyewitnesses on

(03:36):
the island of Zimbabwa reported three extremely tall, very distinct
columns of flame that came up from the volcanoes crater,
and then they kind of crashed into one another high
up above it before cascading back down. Stones that were
on average the size of a walnut also rained down,
along with tons and tons of ash. Also falling in

(04:00):
the vicinity of the mountain were trees and even animals
that had been on the upper slopes, which were torn
apart by the eruption. The eruption of Tambora, in case
you could not surmise this from Tracy's description, was huge.
It was much bigger and much deadlier than the far
more well known eruption of Krakatoa that happened almost seventy

(04:21):
years later. People reported hearing it as far away as Sumatra,
which is more than a thousand miles away from where
it was happening. There was also so much ash in
the air that it, was, according to reports, dark for
three days or three hundred miles around the volcano. After
the eruption peaked, the volcano itself also got a lot shorter.

(04:45):
It lost almost a third of its pre eruption height,
dropping from four thousand, two hundred to two thousand, eight
hundred meters. Not Surprisingly, the island of Simbabwa was devastated.
More than ten tho Bill died in the eruption itself.
The entire island was covered in ash, and this ash

(05:07):
had an average depth of between fifty and sixty centimeters,
so between twenty and thirty of ash. The ash was
deeper the closer you got to the volcano, and so
much of it fell that buildings collapsed under its weight,
and a two thousand four archaeological expedition found a village
that was buried under an ash layer ten feet thick.

(05:29):
Ash spread to the north and northwest, blanketing the sea
and the neighboring islands. British vessels reported patches of ash
in the sea around Indonesia that was several feet deep
and had to be essentially plowed through. Two of Zimbabwa's
princedoms were completely destroyed and their common languages became extinct,

(05:51):
and the influx of volcanic material into the ocean also
spawned a tsunami that struck other parts of the island
as well as neighboring islands, so that people who had
survived the initial eruption wound up being killed in the tsunami. Afterward,
most of the crops in the surrounding area were destroyed,
and as is so often the case when there's such

(06:11):
a massive natural disaster, famine and disease spread and its wake,
including among livestock and wild animals. People became so hungry
that they resorted to eating their horses, which were working
animals that were necessary for transportation and for work. And
all of this wasn't limited just to the island of Sumbawa.
People in neighboring islands starved to death as volcanic ash

(06:34):
killed their rice crops. There was a massive migration to
other islands, and some of those islands could not sustain
the needs of all of these newcomers that were causing
their economies and their food supplies to collapse, and many
of those islands were facing famines and epidemics of their
own in the wake of the volcano. Bali and Lombach
were particularly hard hit. Estimates of the total death toll

(06:58):
in Indonesia are really very but sources generally agree that
it was at least one hundred seventeen thousand people who
died in the eruption and it's it's aftermath. It took
more than five years before crops could be harvested again.
On the most affected parts of Sumbawa, recovery was extremely
slow to Government officials wrote that the princedoms of Sumbawa

(07:21):
and Dambo were quote beginning to recover in eighteen twenty four,
so we're talking about almost a decade later. Other princedoms were,
in their words, still quote a desolate heap of rubble.
The whole thing had an extremely long lasting effect on
the island's ecology. You could probably even say that it

(07:41):
was permanently changed in places. Ash made the ground more fertile,
but it was also drier, So Bali and Lombox so
neighboring islands wound up with really bounciful rice harvests a
few years later, thanks to all the ash and the soil.
But on Sumbawa, the volcano in the ash destroyed all
the veted tatian, and the streams and springs that the

(08:03):
vegetation had been sheltering consequently dried up. So While the
soil was richer, it was also a lot drier, so
why it didn't get quite the same benefit as some
of the other outlying islands did once it had started
to recover. The dust from the ash spread around the world,
caused brilliant sunsets, and it also reaked havoc with the

(08:25):
weather over the following months. In the US, dust in
the air was reported in the Washington, d c. Daily
National Intelligencer on May one, eighteen sixteen, and in the Norfolk,
Virginia American Beacon on the ninth. The editor of the
Boston Columbia Sentinel remarked that the sun itself seemed dimmer
on July fift which he thought was because of sun spots,

(08:47):
And while there was a lot of sun spot activity,
it was almost certainly because of all of the ash
in the atmosphere. So we're going to talk about exactly
what that ash caused in terms of the weather after
a brief word from a sponsor, and now let's get
back to the slightly less peppy discussion of the year

(09:08):
without a summer, So to return to Tambora before we
talk about how this eruption affected the weather in parts
of the world. We have a couple of caveats. One
is that the measurement and record keeping related to weather
statistics have really improved dramatically in the years since all
of this happened. Most of the places that we're talking
about did not have any sort of methodical pattern of

(09:31):
observing the weather and writing it down, which is something
we pretty much take for granted today. So that means
a lot of the records that we have are erratic
and subjective. But there is a ton of documentation overall
in the historical record, in the form of newspapers, letters, journals, diaries,
and other documents. So there's so much of it that

(09:52):
we know just from that part uh that this was
a real event and not just somebody overreacting about a
cul snap. Also, we have a lot of documentation about
eighteen sixteens, whether in North America and Europe and parts
of Asia. But while it's pretty logical to conclude that

(10:12):
the weather was completely weird everywhere as a consequence of
all of this volcanic activity, we have much less in
the way of actual records from Africa, South America and Australia.
So when we walk through what we know, it is
mostly from North American, European and Asian points of view.
In North America, particularly on the east coast, stretching from

(10:33):
the Carolinas all the way up through what's now Ontario
and Quebec, the spring of eighteen sixteen was overall cooler
and drier than normal, although there were some big warm
spells mixed in. Temperatures kind of swung wildly from balmy
to freezing and back again. Then the summer had three
extreme cold spells in June, July, and August. The first

(10:56):
huge cold wave stretch from June five to June eleven.
Temperatures in New England dropped from the eighties to the
forties in the wake of a thunderstorm, and that actually
became the high for the next several days. Eighteen inches
of snow was reported in Cabot, Vermont on the eighth,
and a hard frost that stretched well into the south
on the eleventh killed most of the crops that had

(11:18):
managed to survive up until that point. People started to
talk about the real possibility of a famine. Within weeks,
New England temperatures were really unseasonably hot again, breaking one
hundred in parts of Massachusetts, which doesn't happen all that often,
especially not this early in the season. Another four day
cold snap hit eastern North America starting on July six.

(11:42):
In this case, frosts killed the replanted crops, although it
was not as snowy this time around. Most of the
snow reported in the U s was in the mountains
of Vermont, but further north in Montreal, bodies of water
completely froze over with a layer of ice. This snap
also reached even farther south was in cold weather and
frosts in places that had escaped in the June wave.

(12:06):
The cold weather came back again on August one, causing
more snow in the Vermont Mountains, along with frosts as
far south as North Carolina and as far west as
Kentucky and Ohio. Just as alarming at this point was
a drought which had affected much of the southern and
eastern US, and it's estimated that up to half of

(12:27):
the cotton crop in the south failed because of this
dry weather. Grain prices skyrocketed and the drought didn't break
until September, after the cold weather was over, only to
be about to start again. Because it was heading into autumn.
The price of flour rose from four dollars a barrel
to between eleven and twenty dollars per barrel. The wholesale

(12:47):
price of wheat nearly doubled, and the price of virtually
every food staple shot up. There was also a huge
increase in migration of farmers from the Eastern United States
into the West, as people hoped that they would find
better growing conditions and because the West really hadn't seen
the kind of unseasonable cold that the East Coast had.

(13:09):
About twice as many people decided to move west that year,
as was typical at that point. In several states, including
New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, people called for
a ban on distillery because of the grain shortage. When
people couldn't afford grain to feed their livestock and they're
working animals, they ate the animals instead. So that was

(13:33):
North America's eighteen sixteen summer. In Europe, the summer was
similarly wintry, but it also seemed like it got all
the rain that North America had been missing. Western Europe
was the most affected, but crops failed all over the
continent thanks to the fields being flooded and later frozen.
Crops that are sensitive to having too much water. Like wine,

(13:55):
grapes really suffered in their quality when they managed to survive. Plus,
all the incessant rain made things generally wet and moldy.
Because horses were the main source of transportation and grain
became so much more expensive, the cost of travel in
Europe skyrocketed. Famine spread in Switzerland and Ireland. In Switzerland,

(14:17):
the government had to distribute information about how to tell
poisonous plants from ones that were safe to eat as
people try to scavenge what they could from out in
the woods or the wilds. In Ireland, a typhus epidemic
spread in the wake of the famine. The story that
sticks in a lot of people's minds about how this
played out in Europe is that the infamous evening in

(14:38):
which George Gordon Lord Byron proposed that all of his
guests at his Lake Geneva villa write a story. That's
the visit in which Mary Shelley wound up writing Frankenstein.
That all happened in the middle of this cold, wretched summer,
and also written during this uh was Byron's poem Darkness,
and that poem begins. I had a dream which was

(15:01):
not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, 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. Morn came and went and came
and brought no day, and men forgot their passions in
the dread of this, their desolation, and all hearts were

(15:23):
chilled to a selfish prayer for light in Asia. Moving
on to the third big place that we have lots
of information about, the volcano disrupted the monsoon cycle in
India and Korea, so things were dry when they were
supposed to be wet, and then way wetter than they
were supposed to be once the rain actually arrived. This

(15:43):
caused rice crops, which really rely on that monsoon cycle,
to fail all over. The change in the weather also
affected which bacteria could thrive in the Bay of Bengal,
and unfortunately, one species that did thrive was a new
strain of cholera, which people had less resistance too than
previous strains. Bengal Colora spread out of India to the

(16:04):
rest of the world in eighteen seventeen, and the strain
killed tens of millions of people. There's actually some debate
in the scientific community about just how much of this
shift had to do with the volcano and Unon province
in southwestern China, crops failed in the face of just
a bitter bitter cold and a much wetter season than normal,

(16:25):
and the book Tambora, The Eruption That Changed the World,
author Gillan Darcy would connects this and this massive crop
failure and famine to the rise of opium growth in
Union as farmers turned to it in desperation is a
way to try to just make enough money to survive
when the rest of their crops had failed. A huge

(16:45):
famine swept through southwest China and it lasted for years.
Neighboring parts of China had an influx of refugees, and
much of the nation faced a serious social unrest. So
before we talk about some of the theories at the
time for what was going on, let's have another pause
for a word from a sponsor, and now back to

(17:07):
the year without a summer. So, unsurprisingly, there were many
many explanations at the time for what was going on
and what was causing this just bizarre weather. These actually
start with a story about why the volcano erupted in
the first place. The population of Zimbabwe was largely Muslim,
and there was a folk tale explaining the event, and

(17:29):
that was that a prince had fed a devout Muslim
a dog and then killed him, and the volcanoes eruption
was an act of divine retribution for that act. A
range of explanations for the weather cropped up in North
America and Europe as well. A primary theory was sun spots.
As we mentioned briefly earlier, there were a number of

(17:50):
extremely large sun spots that year, some of which were
visible to the unaided eye, and people thought these darker
areas of the sun were colder, which is true, and
a colder sun meant colder weather. Not everyone was on
board with this idea, though, since the timing of the
sun spots did not always match up with the coldest weather.
There's actually a lot of continued study and discussion about

(18:13):
exactly how much sun spots can affect the Earth's weather
and climate. Uh And it's partly because this all happens
on such a huge scale, and the sun spots cycle
itself is so long that it's almost impossible to isolate
just sun spots from all of the other stuff in
the world that's going on while the sun spots cycle

(18:34):
is peaking. Yeah, you can't really turn off the sun
to get a control group without it. Yeah, And you
can't turn off the volcanoes to study just the sun.
It's so I really tried to find a definitive answer
of good sun spots I've been and that there's not
a definitive answer. Another theory at this time is that
it had something to do with ice in North America.

(18:55):
I seem to persist in the Great Lakes for longer
than normal, and a number of ships for poorted huge
ice floes floating in the North Atlantic. People thought that
all of this ice was actually sucking the heat out
of the atmosphere. This is really more of a cause
and effects situation. There was more ice on the Great
Lakes because it was colder than normal, uh, But then

(19:17):
there was more ice floating in the Northern Atlantic because
this whole time actually caused a warming uh trend over
the poles, and so a lot of polar ice broke
up and floated away, so that it was more of
a cause and effects situation than the ice sucking the
heat out of the air. Also, a series of pretty

(19:37):
large earthquakes had struck various points on the Earth in
the eighteen teens, and people also blamed the weather on this.
The idea was that the Earth's motion had somehow caused
some kind of fluid equilibrium between the surface of the
Earth and the atmosphere, and that until something broke that equilibrium,

(19:57):
that there would not be enough war available for crops
to grow. Other scapegoats that were named as the cause
of all of these problems Benjamin Franklin's lightning rods. They
were stealing electricity and disrupting the weather, because you know,
he did invented them in the mid seventeen hundreds, and
they'd become more commonplace since then. So clearly, since that

(20:19):
happened before the weather, it must have caused this terrible weather.
There's so many explanations sound yet there. I mean, we
still see this today when people don't totally understand something,
and they'll feel like that because one thing happened before
another thing, that the first thing caused the second thing,
and it's often not true at all, Right, It's that

(20:43):
like chronological causality attribution that's not not always valid. So
the prevailing theory today is that the volcanic activity, including
that from Tambora and the other eruptions that were mentioned
at the top of the show, was it lea one
of the primary contributors. And this was actually something that
people did discuss a little bit at the time. It

(21:04):
was certainly not a widespread theory, but there were people
who were like, you know, maybe all this ash in
the atmosphere, which is from a volcano is making it colder.
Like people are pretty smart that way. Um. However, eighteen
sixteen was not the only year in that time period
that had weird weather. In general, it was colder than

(21:24):
normal in a lot of places from eighteen twelve to
eighteen seventeen, to the point that people took notice, and
by studying things like ice cores and tree rings and
that kind of long term documentation that the earth leaves
of itself, scientists know that this was not really just
a little five year window of a cold snap. The

(21:45):
eighteen hundred spell at the end of a relative cool
snap that lasted around the world for almost five hundred years,
starting in fourteen hundred and ending in around eighteen sixty
at least in the US. The year without US Summer
prompted people to start making more routine observances and recordings
of weather conditions. The Commissioner General of the Land Office,

(22:08):
Josiah Meggs, sent out a memo to all of his
registers at twenty different land offices instructing them to make
and record a number of observations about everything from the
weather to animal migrations. The military also started making and
recording weather observations at the direction of Joseph Lovell, the
Surgeon General of the Army, and the Patent Office and

(22:28):
the Smithsonian Institution got in on the action as well,
and consequently, the first published weather forecasts came out in
the US in eighteen forty nine. So when I started
researching this episode, I kind of expected it to be
a little bit like The Long Winter Part two. So
we talked about the Long Winter, which Laura Angeles Wilder
wrote about last time about this time of year, and

(22:51):
that was the weather was really cold, things were really hard. Uh,
things were tough, but overall everything worked out okay for
the most part. And I sort of thought this was
going to be similar to that. Uh. I was not
expecting all of the famines and deaths and the extreme
scale of how deadly the volcano was a lot of um.

(23:16):
Like a lot of people who have written to suggest
the topic or other things that I've seen about it,
kind of go this was a year that had terrible weather,
a volcano caused it, and the that's sort of all
that said about the volcano, as though the volcano was
on an island that was totally uninhabited, right, uh, and
that is not the case at all. This episode gives

(23:39):
me um flashbacks to when I was a kid in
Mount Saint Helen's erupted because I lived in Washington State
at the time, so I am very familiar with being
covered with ash. Yeah, I've never lived near an active volcano,
so I have not had that experience. Those are wild times.
I remember my biggest concern, and again I was a
child at the time, so my biggest concern was that

(24:00):
all the animals have been killed. I was really upset
about the animals that may have lost our lives, even
though probably most of them fled before the activity actually started.
I'm sure some still lost our lives, but that was
my big focus as a child. I did not care
that there was crap all over everything we owned and
like a half inch of ash sitting everywhere. I was like,
what about the deer? I was really that was my focus? Wow.

(24:26):
So uh, I have some listener mail that is cheerier
than this episode. I actually actually have two pieces. This
is we are recording this episode as literally one of
the last things before for the holidays, and it's gonna
be a while before it's my turn for listener mails.
So I'm doubling up today so that things don't get
overlooked later on. Uh. They are both about our episode

(24:49):
about the Gnomes Theorem run. And this person was from Karen.
Karen says, I listened to your podcasts during the hundreds
of hours literally that I spend on the trails training
my long distance dog team. I am not making that up.
I love that me too. Imagine my delight today to

(25:09):
queue up your Wednesday podcast and find it on a
subject near and dear to my heart, the Serum run. See.
I have competed in the Iditarod Trail sled dog race
eleven times. I have run dogs through Nanana, up the
Yukon River, through Nulatto, across the very intimidating Norton Sound
and into Gnome. Each of my pure bred Siberian Huskies

(25:30):
can trace their roots back to dogs on Sappala's Serum
run team, which was Togo, who we talked about in
the episode. I just wanted to let you know that
I thought you did a very excellent job of covering
the subject. The pronunciations you were worried about were spot on,
and you did a more accurate job with the subject
than about anyone I've heard. Well done. Oh and I
wanted to say that you are right minus fifty is

(25:52):
ridiculously cold, and sled dogs are indeed amazing, the most
amazing creatures on the planet if you ask me. I've
running dogs for over twenty years and they still amazed
me every day. Sincerely, Karen, and then I'm going to
read another one. This one is from Marie, and Marie says,
it was positively delightful to see some Alaskan history pop

(26:14):
up in my podcast this morning. Even if it isn't
an event I missed in history class, it was still
an interesting listen. I won't lie. Part of the fund
was listening to you both try really hard to say
incredibly difficult Alaskan words correctly. I'm not surprised you could
not find any pronunciation guides online. I am a lifelong Alaskan.
My father was born in Anchorage before Alaska became a state,

(26:36):
and wonder sometimes if the difficult names are purposeful to
point out who uh, to point out those who have
not lived here. I wanted to say thank you for
talking about how important dogs and dogs letting are to
the history of Alaska and its current culture. So many
outside the state it is difficult to comprehend the vastness
and sheer impassibility of a lot of the terrain, particularly

(26:58):
north of the Bricks Range. To give you an idea
of the distances involved, Nome is just over five hundred
air miles from Anchorage. That is roughly the same distance
from as from Atlanta, Georgia to Pittsburgh, Washington, d C.
And Chicago. I say air miles because that is the
most common way to get to know It is not
connected to the Alaska Highway system and does not have

(27:18):
a ferry service. The Iditarod Race, which you reference in
the podcast, is about a thousand miles, give or take
a few dozen, depending on checkpoint locations. Even if this
were an actual highway, it would be the equivalent of
driving from Montreal, Canada to Atlanta Georgia. That's about twenty
one hours of driving, according to travel math dot com.
I do want to say a word of caution that

(27:39):
I hope is out to your listeners. Sled dogs are
amazing creatures and incredible athletes. They are bread to work
hard in cold weather, have remarkable endurance, and the ability
to persevere in circumstances that most animals would block out.
These same qualities mean that they are not always suited
to be pets. While many breeds do make good pets,
it is in important with any working breed of dog

(28:02):
to consider the traits that make them special also make
them challenging. A dog bread for cold weather is not
as well suited to a hot climate. Dog spread to
run long distances can become hyperactive when you confined to
a yard. As amazing as these animals are, please consider
carefully before bringing one into your home. Not every house
or family is suited to an animal that is the

(28:23):
canine equivalent of a an Olympic athlete. Thanks for your
knowledge and keep up the good work. Marie. Thank you
so much. Karen and Marie. I love both of those
email an I love them both so much too, and
I do want to have kind of a full disclosure.
They both said that we did a good job on
saying things other people have said that we did not
do a good job. Um, I pronounced Nanana as Nanana

(28:46):
again because we've gotten three different pronunciations. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I think I said Nanana in the show, and we've
heard Nanana, Nana, and Nanana. I don't know which is
the right one. So um. This is the case with

(29:07):
many things that we try to say correctly in the show.
So uh, I just want to talk about dogs somewhere.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, you can. We're at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook,
Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter
at MS and history. Our tumbler is miss in history

(29:28):
dot tumbler dot com, and we're on Pinterest at pentress
dot com slash miss in History. We have a spreadshirt
store full of shirts another good eat that is at
miss in history dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would
like to learn more about what we talked about today,
you can come to our parent company's website, which is
how stuff works dot com. You can put the word
volcano in the search bar and you will find the
article how Volcanoes Work. You can also come to our website,

(29:51):
which is missing history dot com, where we have an
archive of every single episode we have ever done, show
notes for all the episodes that Holly and I am on,
the blog posts for past hosts of the podcast, all
kinds of cool stuff. So you can do all that
and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot
com or miss a history dot com. For more on

(30:15):
this and thousands of other topics, is that how stuff
Works dot com. M