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than a natural wonder, a volcanic sound-and-light show, because his argument for a British
Java could only be undermined by its proximity to giant volcanoes capable of plunging the
entire regional economy into ruin in the course of a few hours.
Tambora thus begins as a natural disaster story—a Pompeii of the East or a hundredfold
Hurricane Katrina—whose fate was to remain largely unwritten. Raffles had assembled the
beginnings of a “Temboran” dictionary shortly before the eruption, which he included as a
kind of epitaph in an appendix to his History of Java . But like Raffles's dictionary, the Tam-
bora story has only ever been told in notes and sketches, with enormous gaps left unfilled.
In place of a world-historical narrative, the colossal eruption on Sumbawa Island in 1815 has
survived—in faraway countries and other languages—only as a weather folktale: the fabled
“Year without a Summer.” As the following chapters will show, however, Tambora's world-
altering reach requires an epic telling far beyond the frosted memories of a single long-ago
summer.
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