Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Devastation far away caused, first of all, extraordinarily vivid
sunsets in Europe. Luxurious light effects were soon followed by
months of appalling weather: it poured with rain all night before
the battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815, creating appalling muddy
conditions to add to the chaos and horror of the day. Lord Byron
used the state of the weather to emotive effect in verses in
Childe
Harold 's Pilgrimage
:
The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent
The earth is covered thick with other clay,
Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,
Rider and horse, - friend and foe, - in one red burial blent.²7
It rained all the next summer too: 'Rain Rain Rain', the painter
J.M.W. Turner complained when he was stuck with his horse
for weeks in rutted roads in Yorkshire.²8
The decades around the turn of the nineteenth century were
ones of very high volcanic activity worldwide, with eruptions in
Italy, Iceland, Java and, in 1812, on the island of St Vincent in
the Windward islands of the West Indies. It is significant that
this intense geological activity coincided with decades of revo-
lution in Europe; indeed, the two phenomena, geological and
political, have many distinctive links. The Laki eruption of 1783
devastated crops all over Europe, which raised the price of bread,
one of the triggers of the French Revolution six years later. Never
before had scientific and literary observations on volcanic activity
been so comprehensively and effectively catalogued. Immediate
responses scribbled or painted in the heat of the moment led to
more measured scientific writing, based on data collected on the
spot and then considered far away, at leisure. The naval oicer
Thomas Cayley witnessed the eruption on 30 April 1812 of Souf-
frière, a volcano on St Vincent. He described himself to his sister,
in a letter written four months after the blast, as being 'confused
and scattered by the horrors of the ever memorable eruption'.
Such is the terror and violence of serious eruptions that all who
write about them in this period seem to suggest that the event
that they have witnessed is worse than any other. Themes recur in
