THE POMPEII OF THE EAST - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 8

A worse fate met those unable to resort to the slave market. As a response to abolitionist
legislation recently enacted by the British Parliament, the governor of Java, Stamford Raffles,
had outlawed the slave trade in the capital Batavia (now Djakarta), unwittingly eliminating
the only social safety net his subjects knew. 21 One wonders if Raffles ever understood the
unforeseen consequences of that progressive policy, whether reports reached him of child
corpses lining the beaches on Bali, killed by parents unable to sell them for food and presum-
ably unwilling to watch them suffer the slow starvation they themselves faced. 22
Months after the eruption, the atmosphere remained heavy with dust—the sun a blur.
Drinking water contaminated by fluorine-rich ash spread disease and with 95% of the rice
crop in the field at the time of the eruption, the threat of starvation was immediate and uni-
versal. In their desperation for food, islanders were reduced to eating dry leaves and their
much-valued horseflesh. By the time the acute starvation crisis was over, Sumbawa had lost
half its population to famine and disease, while most of the rest had fled to other islands.
As late as 1831, sixteen years after the eruption, northeast Sumbawa still resembled a war
zone, as if the disaster had just occurred. A Dutch official sailing along the coast observed
through his eyeglass “a horrendous scene of devastation … in its fury, the eruption … has
spared, of the inhabitants, not a single person, of the fauna, not a worm, of the flora, not
a blade of grass.” 23 A recent tree-ring study has shown that the entire Java region suffered
a drastic period of cold, drought conditions in the aftermath of the eruption. 24 On account
of the wholesale deforestation of the island, the Sumbawan micro-climate changed radically,
becoming far drier. The longer-term social impacts were just as dismal. A half century later,
a visitor found Sumbawa populated mostly by slaves descended from survivors of Tambora
who had sold themselves into bondage. As a result of these flow-on disasters, the Sanggar
peninsula has never been fully repopulated, and Sumbawa Island as a whole never recovered.
History records that four years after Tambora's eruption—his colonizing ambitions for
Java dashed and the region's climate returned to normal—Stamford Raffles founded a new
colony at Singapore. With that one stroke, he transformed the balance of trade and power in
Britain's favor in the East Indies. But on Sumbawa, where the light of Western historiography
barely shines, the local people still refer to the apocalyptic eruption of 1815 as the moment
their world changed forever. Just as the Holocaust is Shoah to the Jews, so the Tambora disas-
ter bears its own sanctified name for the Sumbawans: zaman hujan au (time of the ash rain). 25
As I traveled across the island two centuries later, over barely passable roads and through
meager townships without clean water or sanitation, it was evident that Sumbawa still lived
in the shadow of Tambora. The year following my visit, at least twenty Sumbawan children
were reported as having died from malnutrition. 26 On the long, bumpy drive back from Tam-
bora to Bima, my guides—from the more prosperous neighboring island of Lombok—made
endless fun of the backwardness and poverty of the locals.
But was it always so? International forestry companies dominate the Sumbawan economy
today. This, in addition to rampant illegal logging, is gradually repeating the process of de-
forestation wrought by Tambora in a single day two hundred years ago. In 1980, a forestry
company came upon the remains of a “lost kingdom” of Tambora on the western slopes of the
mountain. Beneath a thin humus layer of new-growth forest on Tambora sits a meter of com-
pacted ignimbrite deposited by the 1815 eruption. Beneath that, loggers uncovered a cache
of Chinese-patterned pottery shards and burned human bone fragments. Locals soon showed