THE LITTLE (VOLCANIC) ICE AGE - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 14

CHAPTER TWO
THE LITTLE (VOLCANIC) ICE AGE
THE VOLCANO LOVERS
On a clear winter's day in early 1819, Mary and Percy Shelley visited the ruins of Pompeii, out-
side Naples. “I stood within the city disinterred,” as Percy remembered it. 1 The excavation of
Pompeii, a half century before, had brought volcanism alive to the imaginations of Europeans.
The unearthed city presented a stunning image of human calamity in the face of a major erup-
tion. The Shelleys wandered among the grand theaters, villas, and neatly designed streets of
an advanced society that vanished overnight in AD 79. That Vesuvius had recently awoken
from a period of dormancy to offer belching reminders of its power perfected the scene for
the Romantic tourist. Shelley observed Vesuvius “rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke,”
prompting his active imagination to conjur the terrifying fate of the inhabitants of Pompeii.
Trying his hand at popular volcanology in a letter to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, Shel-
ley theorized that “the mode of destruction is this. First an earthquake shattered it & unroofed
almost all its temples & split its columns, then a rain of light small pumice stones fell, then
torrents of boiling water mixed with ashes.” 2
Volcanic eruptions were all the rage in the early nineteenth century. The travel writings
of pioneer earth scientist Alexander von Humboldt—published the year of Tambora's erup-
tion—offered English readers breathless accounts of the majestic Cotopaxi in the Andes and the
smoking volcanic peak of Tenerife. The Scottish naturalist George Steuart Mackenzie, mean-
while, had published his own account of the volcanoes of Iceland, where he came upon the
devastated landscape marking a recent eruption:
The scene now before us was exceedingly dismal. The surface was covered with black cinders;
and the various shallows enclosed by high cliffs and rugged peaks destitute of every sign of
vegetation, and rendered more gloomy by floating mist, and a perfect stillness, contributed to
excite strong feelings of horror. 3
Because volcanoes stood for so tantalizing a cocktail of emotions—a mix of horror and
pleasure, shaken and stirred—they became staple images of poetic description in the Romantic
age. Thanks to the vivid firsthand accounts of Sir William Hamilton—amateur volcanologist
and British envoy to Naples inthe 1760s and 1770s—the ascent ofVesuvius became ahighlight
of the Grand Tour. The celebrity scientist Humphry Davy climbed the boiling summit fourteen
times in 1819-20, taking samples of lava for chemical analysis: “its surface appear[ed] in viol-
ent agitation, large bubbles rising, which, in bursting, produced a white smoke.” 4 Only months
before, the Shelleys had prepared for their ascent by reading Madame de Staël's popular Ve-
suvian novel Corinne (1806), whose more magmatic style may be judged by the following ex-
cerpt: “The river of fire flowing from Vesuvius was revealed by the darkness of night, and it
seized and bound the imagination of Oswald. Corinne used this impression to turn him from re-
collections that tormented him, and she hastened to lead him with her away from the inflamed