Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous
one, and full of horrible phenomena; for, besides the alarming
meteors and tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and
distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar
haze, or smoky fog that prevailed for several weeks in this
island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its
limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything
known in the memory of man. By my journal I find I had
noticed this strange occurrence from June 23rd to July 20th
inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every
quarter without any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon,
looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured,
ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was
particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All
the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could
hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies
swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the
horse half frantic, and riding irksome. The country people
began to look with a superstitious awe at the red, lowering
aspect of the sun; and indeed there was reason for the
most enlightened person to be apprehensive; for, all the
while, Calabria and part of the Isle of Sicily were torn
and convulsed with earthquakes; and about that juncture
a volcano sprung out of the sea on the coast of Norway.²5
The footnote to this letter in the 1941 edition of
The Natural
History of Selborne
, edited by the naturalist James Fisher, inno-
cently states that the 'peculiar haze' and all that followed was
'probably due to a great volcanic explosion far away'.
Another portentous year was 1816. In April 1815, when
Europe was preoccupied with political and military cataclysms
of its own, Mount Tambora exploded on the island of Sumbawa,
east of Java. This distant volcano on the other side of the world
killed 10,000 people almost immediately, destroyed the Tambora
and Sanggar kingdoms, eradicated the Tambora language and
brought famine and disease in its wake. Once the local after-
effects had run their course, at least 117,000 people had died.²6
