Geoscience Reference
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the newspaper, Howard read naval reports in July of conditions at sea seeming more like the
worst of a wild winter, including “strong gales, ships on shore, and [the] loss of anchors.” For
Britons, the summer of 1816 was shaping up as a full-blown weather emergency: “From all
parts of the country we hear of damage done by the late storms, and floods occasioned by the
heavy rains.”
19
Likemany Englishmen ofmeans during thesummer of1816, LukeHoward took advantage
of the long-awaited end of the Napoleonic Wars to travel through Europe, off-limits to tourists
for two decades. It was a busman's holiday for Howard, whose meteorologist's eye was awe-
struck by the continental scale of the 1816 climate crisis:
From Amsterdam to Geneva, I had ample occasion to witness the fact that the excessive rains
of this summer were not confined to our own islands, but took place over a great part of the
continent of Europe. From the sources of the Rhine among the Alps, to its embouchure in
the German ocean, and through a space twice or thrice as broad from east to west, the whole
season presented a series of storms and inundations.
Everywhere he went, Howard saw villages under water and entire neighborhoods of large cit-
ies flooded. He came upon dikes destroyed and bridges reduced to ruins by flash floods. He
rode by vast fields of submerged crops and others simply borne away by torrents of water that
flowed relentlessly in all directions, transforming the pleasant tourist geography of agrarian
Europe in summertime into a continent-wide disaster zone.
Given the biblical flooding before his eyes, Howard was amazed to learn that to the north,
in Scandinavia, farm fields lay “parched with drought” and that churches in Danzig and Riga
were holding nightlong prayer vigils for rain. By shifting the latitudinal patterns of precip-
itation and intensifying weather systems across the board, Tambora brought both flood and
drought to the Europe of 1816-18, a pattern we will see repeated around the globe.
Passing through Switzerland, Howard traveled the same scenic routes taken by Mary Shel-
ley and her circle of friends. While Byron and the Shelleys exchanged ghost stories, Howard's
professional eye was drawn to the startling summer accumulation of snow on even the lower
elevations of the alpine mountains:
I saw the snows of the preceding winter lying in very large masses, in hollows on the chain
of the Jura, and on the Mole near Geneva, from whence they usually vanish in summer; and
this at a time when the new snows had already begun to fall on the same summits.
Back in England in the autumn of 1816, Howard recorded more apocalyptic weather.
Around lunchtime on October 7, he experienced a “loud explosion of electricity”—a bolt of
lightning—that shook the ground at Tottenham for several seconds. “Thunder in long peals
and vivid lightning” then continued for more than an hour. On November 6, a dense cloud
of Tambora's volcanic dust enveloped Chester in the west of England. At noon, amid impen-
etrable darkness, citizens of the cathedral town lit candles and carried lanterns through the
streets. Hail, frost, and snow two feet deep followed in the succeeding days. The same con-
ditions prevailed over London later in the month, where Howard recorded a noontime tem-
perature of 2°F and the daytime darkness required coachmen to dismount to light the way for
their horses.
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