THE OTHER IRISH FAMINE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 102

At this period the weather did not seem to depend on the direction of the wind so much as
usual. In general, winds blowing from the northern points are, in this country, attended by
dry weather; but during the summer and autumn of these years, from what quarter soever
the wind came, it was accompanied by rain. 8
The mean temperature in Dublin between February and October 1816 fell 3.5°F below av-
erage, while the rainfall in July, the heart of the growing season, was more than four times
the amount of the corresponding month a year prior. With rain-saturated depressions churn-
ing above month after month, some parts of the island experienced double or more their av-
erage rainfall. 9 According to Barker, “the humidity of the atmosphere was almost incessant”
through 1816, while in the opening pages of The Black Prophet William Carleton describes a
sinister haze over the land that seemed to prefigure the end of the world:
Long black masses of smoke trailed over the whole country, or hung, during the thick swel-
tering calms, in broad columns that gave to the face of nature an aspect strikingly dark and
disastrous…. A brooding stillness, too, lay over all nature; cheerfulness had disappeared,
even the groves and hedges were silent, for the very birds had ceased to sing. 10
One characteristic of the biblical apocalypse is that all things are transformed into their op-
posites, rendering the familiar world an object of terrifying strangeness. Such was the emo-
tional impact of the weather of 1816, during which “all those visible signs which prognost-
icate any particular description of weather, had altogether lost their significance.”11 11 For most
of the world's population, dependent as they were on subsistence agriculture and the benign,
predictable progress of the seasons, Tambora's bizarre weather must have induced a stomach-
churning bewilderment and anxiety. The reactions of the Irish peasantry to their climate crisis
traversed the spectrum from violent rage to drawn-out despair. In this, their moods mirrored
the dark impulses of the skies overhead.
“THE TERRIBLE REALITIES OF 1817”
The unprecedented wet, stormy weather of 1816 continued into the following year. In Febru-
ary, newspapers reported “a storm, of singular awfulness, raged over the city of Dublin the
whole of Thursday morning last, accompanied with loud peals of thunder, frequent and vivid
lightnings, and the heaviest showers of hail and rain.” 12 As conditions grew desperate through
1817, men walked tens of miles to buy cattle feed for the family table. When the money ran
out, they sold their livestock, furniture, and finally their clothes. In a tragic irony, the peas-
ants' rational preference for food at the expense of clothing worked against their survival. As
their clothes turned to rags and blankets grew scarce, typhus-bearing lice were able to circu-
late freely within and between households, spreading disease at a breathtaking rate.
Poverty and intermittent famine had been a chronic issue in Ireland for centuries, but
the scale of destitution in the 1815-18 period, owing to an increased population, came as a
severe shock because the just-concluded Napoleonic Wars had been a time of relative prosper-
ity. The late eighteenth century had witnessed a general upward trend in commodity prices,
while the rapid industrial expansion of Britain created rising demand for Irish goods. Then, in
wartime, when Britain faced significant restraints on her trade, Irish grain and linens fetched
high prices. Standards of living improved, and the population continued its steady increase.