THE POLAR GARDEN - Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World - page 68

CHAPTER SIX
THE POLAR GARDEN
From the flooded mountain pastures of Yunnan, we must now travel thousands of miles aboard
Tambora's sulfate plume to the melting ice cap of the polar north. As we have seen, the Arctic
has been, since the 1960s, a key repository of scientific evidence for reconstructing Tambora's
eruption and climate impacts. But in the years immediately following the 1815 eruption in
Britain, “scientific” interest in the Arctic was inseparable from the twin political agendas of
government and the Royal Navy: namely wealth and glory. How Tambora conspired to both
excite and thwart the Arctic dreams of a generation of British bureaucrats and explorers makes
for what is, in many ways, the strangest of all Tambora's strange tales.
A musty memo from a Royal Society council meeting in November 1817 would seem un-
likely to resurface, two centuries later, as a text of quasi-biblical importance on the blog pages
of the climate change denial community. But such is our own topsy-turvy world of politics, sci-
ence, and Internet-driven opinion in the century of climate change. The Royal Society minute
in question is attributed to none other than Sir Joseph Banks, aging lion of the British scientific
establishment. In it he refers, in excited terms, to newspaper reports of a rapidly melting Arctic
ice cap.
The audience for the memo was the First Lord of the British Admiralty, for whom Banks
painted a seductive picture of an open polar sea through which the navy's ships might sail in
quest of scientific discovery, Asian trade routes, and national glory:
A considerable change of climate inexplicable at present to us must have taken place in the
Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed
the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been, during the
last two years, greatly abated. This affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been
opened, and gives us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible
than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them, not
only interesting to the advancement of science, but also to the future intercourse of mankind
and the commerce of distant nations. 1
In fact, these words were probably not composed by Joseph Banks at all but written for him by
a senior bureaucrat at the Admiralty—the Machiavellian Second Secretary, John Barrow—for
reasons that will become soberingly clear. Authorship questions notwithstanding, prominent
climate denial bloggers have trumpeted Banks's description of Arctic warming in 1817 as his-
torical proof that “the ebb and flow of Arctic ice extent and mass is nothing new” and, even
more definitively, that “climate change is not a new phenomena [ sic ].” 2
My main purpose in this chapter is to tell the story of Arctic environmental change in the
aftermath of Tambora's eruption and its remarkable formative influence on the history of Brit-
ish polar exploration. But a bonus of the research presented here will be the opportunity to
lay to rest—among the legion of moldy myths with which the Arctic north has for centuries
been encrusted—the false notion that the ice-free polar seas of 1817 were a product of natural