BLUE DEATH IN BENGAL - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 38

CHAPTER FOUR
BLUE DEATH IN BENGAL
APOLLO'S DEADLY ARROWS
Homer's epic war poem, the Iliad , long honored as the originating text of Western literature,
opens with an invading army encampment devastated by disease. The god Apollo, angered by
the Greeks' poor treatment of one of his priests, descends on the beach of Troy “angered in his
heart”:
He came as night comes down and knelt then
apart and opposite the ships and let go an arrow.
Terrible was the clash that rose from the bow of silver …
The corpse fires burned everywhere and did not stop burning. 1
Given the classical education of the British empire's medical men, it is not surprising that the
epic-sized nineteenth-century literature on cholera opens similarly, with the story of Indian
governor Lord Hastings's “Grand Army,” in late 1817, brought to its knees by a deadly epidem-
ic that seemed to come from the malignant skies. Again and again, British writers on cholera
over the coming decades would return to the near-rout of British forces in that Tambora year
to comment upon and analyze the cholera, as if it were a famous scene in an Homeric poem or
Shakespearean tragedy.