THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 101

nothing was certain but the terrible union of famine, disease, and death which was to fol-
low. 5
Ireland's western, ocean-bound situation placed it in the vanguard of the brutal westerly
storm systems tailing in from the Atlantic in the summer of 1816. The combination of weather
deterioration and widespread preexisting poverty among the rural population meant a perfect
storm of calamity for the Irish people. It being both wet and cold that summer conspired to
kill their subsistence crops while also encouraging the spread of typhus-bearing lice, which
attacked en masse their already weakened frames.
First, the weather report. During Ireland's “Year without a Summer,” unwelcome Arctic
ice lingered of the west coast, while 31 inches of rain fell over 142 days, mostly in the crop-
growing months between May and October. 6 In Drogheda, ducks were reported swimming
across the fields sown with oats and potatoes, while someone mailed a damp husk of green
corn in protest to Robert Peel, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, at Dublin Castle. One doctor in
the north of Ireland called 1816 a summer “to which I believe the memory of man furnished
no parallel, being wet, cold, and in every respect incongenial to the growth or maturation of
the fruits of the earth.” The wheat crop failed, the grain small and blighted, or bursting its
husk prior to germination. Bread made from the affected flour was inedible, so children took
to rolling the damp lumps into balls and throwing them against the walls where they stuck
like gum. Draught horses fell dead in their harnesses from the paltry nourishment of the sea-
son's oats. 7
Figure 8.2. A synoptic weather map for July 7, 1816, based on reconstructions by pioneering historical
climatologist Hubert Lamb. The map shows a storm-rich low-pressure system—remarkable for its un-
seasonality—centered directly over Ireland. (C. R. Harington, ed., The Year without a Summer? World
Climate in 1816 [Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Nature, 1992], 363; Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of
Nature.)
As we saw in the example of James Jameson's report on the Bengal cholera in chapter 4 ,
members of the medical profession served as de facto meteorologists in the early nineteenth
century. For the Tambora period in Dublin, the task of scientifically assessing the miserable
weather was taken up by Dr. Francis Barker, who commented closely on the haywire dynam-
ics of wind and rain: