BLUE DEATH IN BENGAL - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 41

One march I shall never forget … I was in the rear-guard, and did not get to my new ground
till night, and then left eight hundred men, at least, dead and dying, on the road. Such a
scene of horror was perhaps never witnessed…. We lost a whole troop. 6
Sometime after that traumatic experience, perusing a street bookstall in Bombay, Medwin
came across a volume of Shelley's poems and resolved to renew his contact with his young
relation, in whom he discerned the marks of poetic genius. After his discharge from the army,
he joined the Shelleys at their new expatriate home in Pisa in October 1820. 7
One evening at the Casa Galetti in Pisa, when more high-minded themes were exhausted,
Medwin turned the conversation to his terrifying experience with Hastings's army in 1817. It
must have seemed, to veteran members of the Shelley Circle, like a return to the creepy horror
stories of the summer of 1816 in Geneva. We can imagine their stricken response to Medwin's
tale of a vast bustling camp reduced to the shocked silence of a morgue, healthy soldiers col-
lapsing midsentence in their tents, and the nightly bonfire parades of Indian camp followers
bearing their dead to the river. These stories of the Indian cholera made Claire Clairmont's
blood run cold, and she reflected harshly on Medwin's conversational taste in her journal: “A
bloody war, a sickly season, a field officer's corpse.” 8
Cholera, alas, was never a sentimental disease well adapted for parlor conversation. When,
that same year, the Shelleys' friend John Keats succumbed to tuberculosis in Rome, the poet's
early death inspired Shelley's elegiac masterpiece “Adonais.” Four years later—when Shelley
himself was already dead—Lord Byron fell victim to a malarial fever in Greece, having joined
the armed cause for independence. That was perhaps the definitive Romantic demise. Death
by tuberculosis or malaria was well enough, but cholera, the most feared and written-about
nineteenth-century disease, neither communicated an aura of wistful decline (Keats) nor sanc-
tified the soul-endowed sufferer with tormenting fevers (Byron). Instead, it was utterly dehu-
manizing. In minutes, cholera turned a walking, talking person into a sluice. Microbial agents
seized the body, drowned it, and drained its life-giving fluids before abandoning the corpse
in its own waste. Romanticize that! The Marathan word for the cholera, moredesheen , was
Frenchified by Europeans in India as mort de chien : to die like a dog. Medwin had brought the
horrors of cholera home to the Shelleys for the first time (but not the last), and his ghastly
tale must have made for a rare awkward silence at the Casa Galetti.
That night in Pisa in 1820, the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron all lay in the future.
None of the company thought death was so near, just as they could not have imagined the
geophysical teleconnections between the wet, stormy summer of 1816 they had spent togeth-
er in Geneva and the chilling war stories of cousin Thomas, returned all the way from India.
Spellbound by cholera's aura of a modern-day plague, Mount Tambora, if they had heard of
it, could not have been further from their thoughts. Our situation is different, however. With
the aid of recent, groundbreaking research into the dynamics of cholera and climate, Tam-
bora will loom large in the history of the nineteenth century's greatest killer.
THE YEAR WITHOUT A MONSOON
Beginning immediately after its eruption on April 10, 1815, Tambora's volcanic dust veil,
serene and massive above the clouds, began its westward drift aloft the winds of the upper
atmosphere. Its airy passage to India outran the thousands of waterborne vessels below bent