“THIS END OF THE WORLD WEATHER” - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 32

Across France, grain crops rotted in the rain-soaked fields, while vintners in 1816 gathered
the most meager grape harvest in centuries of record keeping. Crossing into landlocked
Switzerland, where grain prices rose two to three times higher than in the coastal regions,
the Raffles brothers found the food shortage even more dire: “the great increase of beggars …
chiefly children … was truly astonishing.” 32
In dealing with the crisis, the Swiss authorities were disadvantaged by a fragmented polit-
ical structure. When serious dearth threatened, administrators of the tiny cantons panicked
and closed their frontiers to the export of grain, ensuring they themselves would be unable
to import emergency supplies. Public works programs and soup kitchens averted a greater
calamity, but thousands still died of starvation during continental Europe's “last great sub-
sistence crisis.” A priest from Glaris painted a lamentable portrait of the suffering in his dis-
trict: “It is terrifying to see these walking skeletons devour the most repulsive foods with
such avidity: the corpses of livestock, stinking nettles—and to watch them fight with animals
over scraps.” 33 Everywhere, desperate villagers resorted to a pitiful famine diet of “the most
loathsome and unnatural foods.” 34 Mortality in 1817 was over 50% higher than its already
elevated rate in the war year 1815, while deaths exceeded births in Switzerland in both 1817
and 1818, suggesting an excess mortality rate in the tens of thousands. Only intermittent,
timely shipments of grain from Russia, which had fortuitously escaped the worst post-Tam-
bora weather conditions, prevented Switzerland and much of Europe from collapsing into
full-scale famine.
Conditions were desperate enough even so. To tourists on the European continent in
1817, the legions of vagrant poor descending upon the market towns appeared like advancing
columns of an army on the march. The prefect of Brie described the flood of refugees into
his province as like “an invasion or perhaps the migration of an entire nation.” 35 In the ex-
tremity of their suffering, beggars lost all fear of the law. Waves of arson, assault, and robbery
swept the countryside. The Montreux diarist records widespread fears of a return to “scenes
from the age of the Goths and the Vandals.” 36 Inevitably, some Swiss authorities overreacted.
Thieves were beheaded and minor pilfery punished with whipping.
Most shocking of all was the fate of some desperate mothers. In horrific circumstances
repeated around the world in the Tambora period, some Swiss families abandoned their off-
spring in the crisis, while others chose killing their children as the more humane course. For
this crime, some starving women were apprehended and decapitated. Thousands of Swiss
with more means and resilience emigrated east to prosperous Russia, while others set off
along the Rhine to Holland and sailed from there to North America, which in 1817-19 wit-
nessed its first significant wave of refugee European migration in the nineteenth century. The
numbers of European immigrants arriving at U.S. ports in 1817 more than doubled the num-
ber of any previous year. 37
In political terms, the food shortages and social instability of the Tambora period spurred
governments to the authoritarian, rightward shift we associate with the ideological landscape
of post-Napoleonic Europe. In the words of Swiss liberal journalist Eusèbe-Henri Gaullieur (an
impressionable boy at the time of the crisis), “The gains made by the spirit of progressive lib-
eralism were substantially eroded … by the suffering arising from the disaster of 1816.” Fear
of agricultural shortfall also motivated political leaders to adopt protectionist policies. It is
during the Tambora emergency that tariffs and trade walls first emerged as standard features
of the European and transatlantic economic system. 38