“THIS END OF THE WORLD WEATHER” - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 31

In Germany, the descent from bad weather to crop failure to mass starvation conditions
took a frighteningly rapid course. Carl von Clausewitz, the military tactician, witnessed
“heartrending” scenes on his horseback travels through the Rhine country in the spring of
1817: “I saw decimated people, barely human, prowling the fields for half-rotten potatoes.” 25
In the winter of 1817, in Augsburg, Memmingen, and other German towns, riots erupted over
the rumored export of corn to starving Switzerland, while the locals were reduced to eating
horse and dog flesh.26 26
Meanwhile, back in England, riots broke out in the East Anglian counties as early as May
1816. Armed laborers bearing flags with the slogan “Bread or Blood” marched on the cathed-
ral town of Ely, held its magistrates hostage, and fought a pitched battle against the militia. 27
In Somersetshire, three thousand coal miners took over the local mine in their desperation
over sky-high bread prices. When asked what they wanted, they replied, “full wages, and
that they were starving.” The local magistrate responded by reading the Riot Act, threaten-
ing all malingerers with death, and sending in the militia to attack the crowd with “immense
bludgeons.” 28 On an even larger scale, in March 1817 more than ten thousand demonstrated
in Manchester while in June the so-called Pentrich Revolution involved plans to invade and
occupy the city of Nottingham. The army was called in to quell similar disturbances in Scot-
land and Wales. The government of Lord Liverpool responded to the desperation of the people
with draconian force. It suppressed publication of agricultural quarterly reports and suspen-
ded habeas corpus. Provincial jails filled to overflowing across the kingdom, while scores of
hungry rioters were hanged or transported overseas to penal colonies. 29
In his magisterial account of the social and economic upheaval in Europe during the
Tambora period, historian John Post has shown the scale of human suffering to be worst in
Switzerland, home to Mary Shelley and her circle in 1816. Even in normal times, a Swiss
family devoted at least half its income to buying bread. Already by August 1816, bread was
scarce, and in December, bakers in Montreux threatened to cease production unless they
could be allowed to raise prices. 30 Subsequently, when the price of grain almost tripled in
1817, a basic subsistence diet was suddenly out of the reach of hundreds of thousands of
Swiss, not only in the agricultural regions but in industrial towns where “the weekly earnings
of a hand-spinner in 1817 … were less than the price of a pound of bread.” 31 With imminent
famine came the threat of “soulèvements”: violent uprisings. Bakers were set upon by starving
mobs in the market towns and their shops destroyed. The English ambassador to Switzerland,
Stratford Canning, wrote to his prime minister that an army of peasants, unemployed and
starving, was assembling to march on Lausanne.
As historical coincidence would have it, Stamford Raffles spent that woeful summer trav-
eling in Europe, having left his governor's post in Java. He thus holds the dubious distinction
of being the only person to leave an account of both Tambora's eruption in the Dutch East
Indies in 1815 and the subsequent years of extreme weather and famine in Europe, on the
other side of the world. To Raffles and his brother Thomas, who traveled with him and kept
a diary, the provincial villages of France appeared like ghost towns:
We could not but notice the almost total absence of life and activity…. There was an air of
gloom and desertion pervading them. The houses had a cheerless and neglected appearance.
No one was seen in the streets—they looked as if deserted by their population.