Happy Saturday, since the Year Without a Summer got a very brief mention in our roller Coaster episode, we were bringing that out as Today's Saturday Classic. And this episode kicks off with us talking about author Mary robin At Kawal, who has actually been on the show since this episode came out. We interviewed her in twenty eighteen about her Lady Astronaut Duology. Tracy did that interview that is set during an alternate version of the Space Race. So we talked about things like how she avoided anachronisms and various real world historical people and events that played a role in the books. So if folks are interested in hearing that, it's a really great talk. It came out on August twentieth, twenty eighteen. This episode came out on January twelfth, twenty fifteen, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy and I'm Holly Frying. So perhaps you have heard of Mary Robinett Kalal. Maybe you're a listener to this podcast. She has written, among other things, a series of novels that are known as the glamorous histories, and these are basically Jane Austen novels with magic. So if that sounds delightful to you and you have not read them, you will probably be delighted because they are pretty charming and touching and funny. And the third one was some of my most recent airplane reading while I was on a flight, and that book is called Without a Summer. It's said in eighteen sixteen, and in addition to several running mentions of past podcast subjects the Luddites, there's ongoing discussion about about whether that year's unseasonably cold weather is caused by magic. Basically, so this is not unseasonably cold like chillier than normal. It's unseasonably cold like it's snowing in July and all of the crops have frozen in the ground. So, in spite of the similarities in their names, I was so absorbed in this book that it wasn't until the very end that I made the connection that this unseasonably called fictional setting is the same as the real world event the year Without a Summer, which is also a listener request from listener Cecile, so Cecil, you can thank Mary Robinett Koal for bumping this to the top of the list, because after we landed, I was like, I want to learn more about that and what really happened. So this story actually starts with the volcano. And the volcano, which was Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, was probably not the only factor in eighteen sixteenth bizarre weather, and we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but it was definitely a very significant major part of it, and it had immediate devastating effect in Asia and the tropical Pacific, and a lot of these are unfortunately really glossed over when people talk about the year without a summer. There were several major volcanic eruptions in the early eighteen teens. One was Sufferrare on Saint Vincent Island in the Caribbean in eighteen twelve. Mount Mayon and the Philippines erupted in eighteen fourteen, and then there was an immense explosion from Tambora which started on April fifth, eighteen fifteen, and went on for days, with the worst of the eruption really getting going on the tenth. And in the memoir of Sir Stamford, Raffles, the British Lieutenant governor of Java at the time, quote, the first explosions were heard on this island in the evening of the fifth of April. They were noticed in every quarter and continued at intervals until the following day. The noise was in the first instance almost universally attributed to distant cannon, so much so that a detachment of troops who were marched from Joke Jakarta in the expectation that a neighboring post was attacked, and along the coast boats were in two instances dispatched in quest of a supposed ship in distress. On the following morning, however, a slight fall of ashes removed all doubt as to the cause of the sound, and he goes on to say that it sounded so close that they really all believed it was a volcano that was actually much closer to them than Tambora. When the eruption started, eyewitnesses on the island of Zimbawa reported three extremely tall, very distinct columns of flame that came up from the volcano's crater, and then they kind of crashed into one another high up above it, before cascading back down stones that were on average the size of a walnut also rained down, along with tons and tons of ash. Also falling in the vicinity of the mountain were trees and even animals that had been on the upper slopes, which were torn apart by the eruption. The eruption of Tambora case you could not surmise this from Tracy's description, was huge. It was much bigger and much deadlier than the far more well known eruption of Krakatoa that happened almost seventy years later. People reported hearing it as far away as Sumatra, which is more than a thousand miles away from where it was happening. There was also so much ash in the air that it was, according to reports, dark for three days for three hundred miles around the volcano. After the eruption peaked, the volcano itself also got a lot shorter. It lost almost a third of its pre eruption height, dropping from four thousand, two hundred to two thousand, eight hundred meters. Not surprisingly, the island of Sumbawa was devastated. More than ten thousand people died in the eruption itself. The entire island was covered in ash, and this ash had an average depth of between fifty and sixty centimeters, so between twenty and thirty inches of ash. The ash was deeper the closer you got to the volcano, and so much of it fell that buildings collapsed under its weight, and a two thousand and four archaeological expedition found a village that was buried under an ash layer ten feet thick. Ash spread to the north and northwest, blanketing the sea and the neighboring islands. British vessels reported patches of ash in the sea around Indonesia that was several feet deep and had to be essentially plowed through. Two of Simbawa's prinstoms were completely destroyed and their common languages became extinct, and the influx of volcanic material into the ocean also spawned a tsunami that struck other parts of the island as well as neighboring islands, so that people who had survived the initial eruption wound up being killed in the tsunami. Afterward, most of the crops in the surrounding area were destroyed, and, as is so often the case when such a massive natural disaster, famine and disease spread and its wake, including among livestock and wild animals. People became so hungry that they resorted to eating their horses, which were working animals that were necessary for transportation and for work. And all of this wasn't limited just to the island of Simbawa. People in neighboring islands starved to death as volcanic ash killed their rice crops. There was a massive migration to other islands, and some of those islands could not sustain the needs of all of these newcomers that were causing their economies and their food supplies to collapse. And many of those islands were facing famines and epidemics of their own in the wake of the volcano. Bali and Lombach were particularly hard hit. Estimates of the total death toll in Indonesia really vary, but sources generally agree that it was at least one hundred seventeen thousand people who died in the eruption and its aftermath. It took more than five years before crops could be harvested again. On the most affected parts of Sumbawa, recovery was extremely slow. Two government officials wrote that the princetoms of Sumbawa and Dampo were quote beginning to recover in eighteen twenty four, so we're talking about almost a decade later. Other Prinstoms were, in their words still quote a desolate heap of rubble. The whole thing had an extremely long lasting effect on the island's ecology. You could probably even say that it was permanently changed. And places ash made the ground were fertile, but it was also drier. So Bali and lomboch So neighboring islands wound up with really bountiful rice harvests a few years later thanks to all the ash and the soil. But on Sumbawa, the volcano and the ash destroyed all the vegetation, and the streams and springs that the vegetation had been sheltering consequently dried up, so while the soil was richer, it was also a lot drier. Sumbawa didn't get quite the same benefit as some of the other outlying islands did once it had started to recover. The dust from the ash spread around the world, caused brilliant sunsets, and it also reaked havoc with the weather over the following months. In the US, dust in the air was reported in the Washington, d c. Daily National Intelligencer on May first of eighteen sixteen, and in the Norfolk, Virginia American Beacon on the ninth. The editor of the Boston Columbia Sentinel remarked that the sun itself seemed dimmer on July fifteenth, which he thought was because of sun spots, and while there was a lot of sunspot activity, it was almost certainly because of all of the ash in the atmosphere. So we are going to talk about exactly what that ash caused in terms of the weather after a brief word from a sponsor, so to return to Tambora. Before we talk about how this eruption affected the weather in parts of the world, we have a couple of caveats. One is that the measurement and record keeping related to weather statistics have really improved dramatically in the years since all of this happened. Most of the places that we're talking about did not have any sort of methodical pattern of observing the weather and writing it down, which is something we pretty much take for granted today. So that means a lot of the records that we have are erratic and subjective, but there is a ton of documentation overall in the historical record, in the form of newspapers, letters, journals, diaries, and other documents. So there's so much of it that we know just from that part that this was a real event and not just somebody overreacting about a cold snap. Also, we have a lot of documentation about eighteen sixteens weather in North America and Europe and parts of Asia. But while it's pretty logical to conclude that the weather was completely weird everywhere as a consequence of all of this volcanic activity, we have much less in the way of actual records from Africa, South America, and Australia. So when we walk through what we know, it is mostly from North American, European and Asian points of view. In North America, particularly on the east coast, stretching from the Carolinas all the way up through what's now Ontario and Quebec, the spring of eighteen sixteen was overall cooler and drier than normal, although there were some big warm spells mixed in, Temperatures kind of swung wildly from balmy to freezing and back again. Then the summer had three extreme cold spells in June, July, and August the first huge cold wave stretch. From June fifth to June eleventh, Temperatures in New England dropped from the eighties to the forties in the wake of a thunderstorm, and that actually became the high for the next several days. Eighteen inches of snow was reported in Cabot, Vermont, on the eighth, and a hard frost that stretched well into the south on the eleventh killed most of the crops that had managed to survive up until that point. People started to talk about the real possibility of a famine. Within weeks, New England temperatures were really unseasonably hot, again, breaking one hundred in parts of Massachusetts, which doesn't happen all that often, especially not this early in the season. Another four day cold snap hit eastern North America starting on July sixth. In this case, frosts killed the replanted crops, although it was not as snowy this time around. Most of the snow reported in the US was in the mountains of Vermont, but further north in Montreal, bodies of water completely froze over with a layer of ice. This snap also reached even farther south, causing cold weather and frosts in places that had escaped in the June wave. The cold weather came back again on August twenty first, causing more snow in the Vermont Mountains, along with frosts as far south as North Carolina and as far west as Kentucky and Ohio. Just as alarming at this point was a drought which had affected much of the southern and eastern US, and it's estimated that up to half of the cotton crop in the South failed because of this dry weather. Grain prices skyrocketed and the drought didn't break until September, after the cold weather was over, only to be about to start again because it was heading into autumn. The price of flour rose from four dollars a barrel to between eleven and twenty dollars per barrel, The wholesale price of wheat nearly doubled, and the price of virtually every food staple shot up. There was also a huge increase in migration of farmers from the Eastern United States into the West, as people hoped that they would find better growing conditions, and because the West really hadn't seen the kind of unseasonable cold that the East Coast had about twice as many people decided to move west that year, as was typical at that point. In several states, including New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, people called for a ban on distillery because of the grain shortage. When people couldn't afford grain to feed their livestock and their working animals, they ate the animals instead. So that was North America's eighteen to sixteen summer. In Europe, the summer was similarly wintry, but it also seemed like it got all the rain that North America had been missing. Western Europe was the most affected, but crops failed all over the continent thanks to the fields being flooded and later frozen. Crops that are sensitive to having too much water, like wine grapes, really suffered in their quality when they managed to survive. Plus, all the incessant rain made things generally wet and moldy. Because horses were the main source of transportation and grain became so much more expensi of the cost of travel in Europe skyrocketed. Famine spread in Switzerland and Ireland. In Switzerland, the government had to distribute information about how to tell poisonous plants from ones that were safe to eat as people try to scavenge what they could from out in the woods or the wilds. In Ireland, a typhus epidemic spread in the wake of the famine. The story that sticks in a lot of people's minds about how this played out in Europe is that the infamous evening in which George Gordon, Lord Byron, proposed that all of his guests at his Lake Geneva Villa write a story. That's the visit in which Mary Shelley wound up writing Frankenstein. That all happened in the middle of this cold, wretched summer, And also written during this was Byron's poem Darkness, And that poem begins, I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space Raylists and Athlas, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn came and went and came and brought no day, and men forgot their passions in the dread of this, their desolation, and all hearts were chilled to a selfish prayer for light in Asia. Moving on to the third big place that we have lots of information about the volcano disrupted the monsoon cycle in India and Korea, so things were dry when they were supposed to be wet, and then way wetter than they were supposed to be once the rain actually arrived. This caused rice crops, which really rely on that monsoon cycle, to fail all over. The change in the weather also affected which bacteria could thrive in the Bay of Bengal, and unfortunately, one species that did thrive was a new strain of cholera, which people had less resistance too than previous strains. Bengal Kolera spread out of India to the rest of the world in eighteen seventeen, and the strain killed tens of millions of people. There's actually some debate in the scientific community about just how much of this shift had to do with the volcano and Unon Province in southwestern China, crops failed in the face of just a bitter bitter cold and a much wetter season than normal, and the book Tambora, The Eruption That Changed the World, author Gillen Darcy Wood connects this and this massive crop failure in famine to the rise of opium growth in Unon as farmers turned to it in desperation is a way to try to just make enough money to survive when the rest of their crops had failed. A huge famine swept through southwest China and it lasted for years. Neighboring parts of China had an influx of refugees, and much of the nation faced a serious social unrest. So before we talk about some of the theories at the time for what was going on, let's have another pause for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand. So unsurprisingly, there were many many explanations at the time for what was going on and what was causing this just bizarre weather. These I actually start with a story about why the volcano erupted in the first place. The population of Simbabwe was largely Muslim, and there was a folk tale explaining the event, and that was that a prince had fed a devout Muslim a dog and then killed him, and the volcano's eruption was an act of divine retribution for that act. A range of explanations for the weather cropped up in North America and Europe as well. A primary theory was sun spots. As we mentioned briefly earlier, there were a number of extremely large sunspots that year, some of which were visible to the unaided eye, and people thought these darker areas of the sun were colder, which is true, and a colder sun meant colder weather. Not everyone was on board with this idea, though, since the timing of the sun spots did not always match up with the coldest weather. There's actually a lot of continued study and discussion about exactly how much sunspots can affect the Earth's weather and climate. And it's partly because this all happens on such a huge scale, and the sunspots cycle itself is so long that it's almost impossible to isolate just sunspots from all of the other stuff in the world that's going on while the sun spot cycle is peaking. Yeah, you can't really turn off the sun to get a control group without it, Yeah, And you can't turn off the volcanoes to study just the sun. Yeah. So I really tried to find a definitive answer of good sun spots I've been and that there's not a definitive answer. Another theory at this time is that it had something to do with ice in North America. Ice seemed to persist in the Great Lakes for longer than normal, and a number of ships reported huge ice floes floating in the North Atlantic. People thought that all of this ice was actually sucking the heat out of the atmosphere. This is really more of a cause and effect situation. There was more ice on the Great Lakes because it was colder than normal, But then there was more ice floating in the Northern Atlantic because this whole time actually caused a warming trend over the poles, and so a lot of polar ice broke up and floated away, so that it was more of a cause and effect situation than the ice sucking the heat out of the air. Also, a series of pretty large earthquakes had struck various points on the Earth in the eighteen teens, and people also blamed the weather on this. The idea was that the Earth's motion had somehow caused some kind of fluid equilibrium between the surface of the Earth and the atmosphere, and that until something broke that equilibrium, that there would not be enough warmth available for crops to grow. Other scapegoats that were named as the cause of all of these problems, Benjamin Franklin's lightning rods, they were stealing electricity and disrupting the weather, because you know, he'd invented them in the mid seventeen hundreds and they'd become more commonplace since then. So clearly, since that happened before the weather, it must have caused this terrible weather. That there's so many explanations that logic is sound yet there. I mean, we still see this today when people don't totally understand something, and they'll feel like that because one thing happened before another thing, that the first thing caused the second thing, And it's often not true at all, right, It's that like chronological causality attribution that's not always valid. So the prevailing theory today is that the volcanic activity, including that from Tambora and the other eruptions that were mentioned at the top of the show, was at least one of the primary contributors. And this was actually something that people did discuss a little bit at the time. It was certainly not a widespread theory, but there were people who were like, you know, maybe all this ash in the atmosphere, which is from a volcano, is making it colder. People are pretty smart that way. However, eighteen sixteen was not the only year in that time period that had weird weather. In general, it was colder than normal in a lot of places from eighteen twelve to eighteen seventeen, to the point that people took notice, and by studying things like ice cores and tree rings and that kind of long term documentation that the earth leaves of itself, scientists know that this was not really just a little five year window of a cold snap. The eighteen hundred spell at the end of a relative cool snap that lasted around the world for almost five hundred years, starting in fourteen hundred and ending in around eighteen sixty. At least in the US, the year without a summer prompted people to start making more routine observances and recordings of weather conditions. The Commissioner General of the Land Office, Josiah Meiggs, sent out a memo to all of his registers at twenty different land offices instructing them to make and record a number of observations about everything from the weather to animal migrations. The military also started making and recording weather observations at the direction of Joseph Lovell, the Surgeon General of the Army, and the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution got in on the action as well, and consequently, the first published weather forecasts came out in the US in eighteen forty nine. So when I started researching this episode, I kind of expected it to be a little bit like The Long Winter Part two. So we talked about the Long Winter, which Lara Engels Wilder wrote about last time about this time of year, and that was the weather was really cold, things were really hard, things were tough, but overall everything worked out okay for the most part, and I sort of thought this was going to be similar to that. I was not expecting all of the famines and deaths and the extreme scale of how deadly the volcano was. The a lot of like a lot of people who have written to suggest the topic or other things that I've seen about it, kind of go, this was a year that had terrible weather, a volcano caused it, and the that's sort of all that said about the volcano, as though the volcano was on an island that was totally uninhabited, right, and that is not the case at all. This episode gives me flashbacks to when I was a kid and Mount Saint Helen's erupted because I lived in Washington State at the time, so I am very familiar with being covered with ash. Yeah, I've never lived near an active volcano, so I have not had that experience. Those are wild times. I remember my biggest concern, and again I was a child at the time, so my biggest concern was that all the animals have been killed. I was really upset about the animals that may have lost our lives. Even though probably most of them fled before the activity actually started. I'm sure some still lost our lives, but that was my big focus as a child. I did not care that there was crap all over everything we owned and like a half inch of ash sitting everywhere. I was like, what about the deer? I was, really, that's my focus. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcast Steph You Miss in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday, since the Year Without a Summer got a very brief mention in our roller Coaster episode, we were bringing that out as Today's Saturday Classic. And this episode kicks off with us talking about author Mary robin At Kawal, who has actually been on the show since this episode came out. We interviewed her in twenty eighteen about her Lady Astronaut Duology. Tracy did that interview that is set during an alternate version of the Space Race. So we talked about things like how she avoided anachronisms and various real world historical people and events that played a role in the books. So if folks are interested in hearing that, it's a really great talk. It came out on August twentieth, twenty eighteen. This episode came out on January twelfth, twenty fifteen, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy and I'm Holly Frying. So perhaps you have heard of Mary Robinett Kalal. Maybe you're a listener to this podcast. She has written, among other things, a series of novels that are known as the glamorous histories, and these are basically Jane Austen novels with magic. So if that sounds delightful to you and you have not read them, you will probably be delighted because they are pretty charming and touching and funny. And the third one was some of my most recent airplane reading while I was on a flight, and that book is called Without a Summer. It's said in eighteen sixteen, and in addition to several running mentions of past podcast subjects the Luddites, there's ongoing discussion about about whether that year's unseasonably cold weather is caused by magic. Basically, so this is not unseasonably cold like chillier than normal. It's unseasonably cold like it's snowing in July and all of the crops have frozen in the ground. So, in spite of the similarities in their names, I was so absorbed in this book that it wasn't until the very end that I made the connection that this unseasonably called fictional setting is the same as the real world event the year Without a Summer, which is also a listener request from listener Cecile, so Cecil, you can thank Mary Robinett Koal for bumping this to the top of the list, because after we landed, I was like, I want to learn more about that and what really happened. So this story actually starts with the volcano. And the volcano, which was Tambora on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, was probably not the only factor in eighteen sixteenth bizarre weather, and we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but it was definitely a very significant major part of it, and it had immediate devastating effect in Asia and the tropical Pacific, and a lot of these are unfortunately really glossed over when people talk about the year without a summer. There were several major volcanic eruptions in the early eighteen teens. One was Sufferrare on Saint Vincent Island in the Caribbean in eighteen twelve. Mount Mayon and the Philippines erupted in eighteen fourteen, and then there was an immense explosion from Tambora which started on April fifth, eighteen fifteen, and went on for days, with the worst of the eruption really getting going on the tenth. And in the memoir of Sir Stamford, Raffles, the British Lieutenant governor of Java at the time, quote, the first explosions were heard on this island in the evening of the fifth of April. They were noticed in every quarter and continued at intervals until the following day. The noise was in the first instance almost universally attributed to distant cannon, so much so that a detachment of troops who were marched from Joke Jakarta in the expectation that a neighboring post was attacked, and along the coast boats were in two instances dispatched in quest of a supposed ship in distress. On the following morning, however, a slight fall of ashes removed all doubt as to the cause of the sound, and he goes on to say that it sounded so close that they really all believed it was a volcano that was actually much closer to them than Tambora. When the eruption started, eyewitnesses on the island of Zimbawa reported three extremely tall, very distinct columns of flame that came up from the volcano's crater, and then they kind of crashed into one another high up above it, before cascading back down stones that were on average the size of a walnut also rained down, along with tons and tons of ash. Also falling in the vicinity of the mountain were trees and even animals that had been on the upper slopes, which were torn apart by the eruption. The eruption of Tambora case you could not surmise this from Tracy's description, was huge. It was much bigger and much deadlier than the far more well known eruption of Krakatoa that happened almost seventy years later. People reported hearing it as far away as Sumatra, which is more than a thousand miles away from where it was happening. There was also so much ash in the air that it was, according to reports, dark for three days for three hundred miles around the volcano. After the eruption peaked, the volcano itself also got a lot shorter. It lost almost a third of its pre eruption height, dropping from four thousand, two hundred to two thousand, eight hundred meters. Not surprisingly, the island of Sumbawa was devastated. More than ten thousand people died in the eruption itself. The entire island was covered in ash, and this ash had an average depth of between fifty and sixty centimeters, so between twenty and thirty inches of ash. The ash was deeper the closer you got to the volcano, and so much of it fell that buildings collapsed under its weight, and a two thousand and four archaeological expedition found a village that was buried under an ash layer ten feet thick. Ash spread to the north and northwest, blanketing the sea and the neighboring islands. British vessels reported patches of ash in the sea around Indonesia that was several feet deep and had to be essentially plowed through. Two of Simbawa's prinstoms were completely destroyed and their common languages became extinct, and the influx of volcanic material into the ocean also spawned a tsunami that struck other parts of the island as well as neighboring islands, so that people who had survived the initial eruption wound up being killed in the tsunami. Afterward, most of the crops in the surrounding area were destroyed, and, as is so often the case when such a massive natural disaster, famine and disease spread and its wake, including among livestock and wild animals. People became so hungry that they resorted to eating their horses, which were working animals that were necessary for transportation and for work. And all of this wasn't limited just to the island of Simbawa. People in neighboring islands starved to death as volcanic ash killed their rice crops. There was a massive migration to other islands, and some of those islands could not sustain the needs of all of these newcomers that were causing their economies and their food supplies to collapse. And many of those islands were facing famines and epidemics of their own in the wake of the volcano. Bali and Lombach were particularly hard hit. Estimates of the total death toll in Indonesia really vary, but sources generally agree that it was at least one hundred seventeen thousand people who died in the eruption and its aftermath. It took more than five years before crops could be harvested again. On the most affected parts of Sumbawa, recovery was extremely slow. Two government officials wrote that the princetoms of Sumbawa and Dampo were quote beginning to recover in eighteen twenty four, so we're talking about almost a decade later. Other Prinstoms were, in their words still quote a desolate heap of rubble. The whole thing had an extremely long lasting effect on the island's ecology. You could probably even say that it was permanently changed. And places ash made the ground were fertile, but it was also drier. So Bali and lomboch So neighboring islands wound up with really bountiful rice harvests a few years later thanks to all the ash and the soil. But on Sumbawa, the volcano and the ash destroyed all the vegetation, and the streams and springs that the vegetation had been sheltering consequently dried up, so while the soil was richer, it was also a lot drier. Sumbawa didn't get quite the same benefit as some of the other outlying islands did once it had started to recover. The dust from the ash spread around the world, caused brilliant sunsets, and it also reaked havoc with the weather over the following months. In the US, dust in the air was reported in the Washington, d c. Daily National Intelligencer on May first of eighteen sixteen, and in the Norfolk, Virginia American Beacon on the ninth. The editor of the Boston Columbia Sentinel remarked that the sun itself seemed dimmer on July fifteenth, which he thought was because of sun spots, and while there was a lot of sunspot activity, it was almost certainly because of all of the ash in the atmosphere. So we are going to talk about exactly what that ash caused in terms of the weather after a brief word from a sponsor, so to return to Tambora. Before we talk about how this eruption affected the weather in parts of the world, we have a couple of caveats. One is that the measurement and record keeping related to weather statistics have really improved dramatically in the years since all of this happened. Most of the places that we're talking about did not have any sort of methodical pattern of observing the weather and writing it down, which is something we pretty much take for granted today. So that means a lot of the records that we have are erratic and subjective, but there is a ton of documentation overall in the historical record, in the form of newspapers, letters, journals, diaries, and other documents. So there's so much of it that we know just from that part that this was a real event and not just somebody overreacting about a cold snap. Also, we have a lot of documentation about eighteen sixteens weather in North America and Europe and parts of Asia. But while it's pretty logical to conclude that the weather was completely weird everywhere as a consequence of all of this volcanic activity, we have much less in the way of actual records from Africa, South America, and Australia. So when we walk through what we know, it is mostly from North American, European and Asian points of view. In North America, particularly on the east coast, stretching from the Carolinas all the way up through what's now Ontario and Quebec, the spring of eighteen sixteen was overall cooler and drier than normal, although there were some big warm spells mixed in, Temperatures kind of swung wildly from balmy to freezing and back again. Then the summer had three extreme cold spells in June, July, and August the first huge cold wave stretch. From June fifth to June eleventh, Temperatures in New England dropped from the eighties to the forties in the wake of a thunderstorm, and that actually became the high for the next several days. Eighteen inches of snow was reported in Cabot, Vermont, on the eighth, and a hard frost that stretched well into the south on the eleventh killed most of the crops that had managed to survive up until that point. People started to talk about the real possibility of a famine. Within weeks, New England temperatures were really unseasonably hot, again, breaking one hundred in parts of Massachusetts, which doesn't happen all that often, especially not this early in the season. Another four day cold snap hit eastern North America starting on July sixth. In this case, frosts killed the replanted crops, although it was not as snowy this time around. Most of the snow reported in the US was in the mountains of Vermont, but further north in Montreal, bodies of water completely froze over with a layer of ice. This snap also reached even farther south, causing cold weather and frosts in places that had escaped in the June wave. The cold weather came back again on August twenty first, causing more snow in the Vermont Mountains, along with frosts as far south as North Carolina and as far west as Kentucky and Ohio. Just as alarming at this point was a drought which had affected much of the southern and eastern US, and it's estimated that up to half of the cotton crop in the South failed because of this dry weather. Grain prices skyrocketed and the drought didn't break until September, after the cold weather was over, only to be about to start again because it was heading into autumn. The price of flour rose from four dollars a barrel to between eleven and twenty dollars per barrel, The wholesale price of wheat nearly doubled, and the price of virtually every food staple shot up. There was also a huge increase in migration of farmers from the Eastern United States into the West, as people hoped that they would find better growing conditions, and because the West really hadn't seen the kind of unseasonable cold that the East Coast had about twice as many people decided to move west that year, as was typical at that point. In several states, including New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, people called for a ban on distillery because of the grain shortage. When people couldn't afford grain to feed their livestock and their working animals, they ate the animals instead. So that was North America's eighteen to sixteen summer. In Europe, the summer was similarly wintry, but it also seemed like it got all the rain that North America had been missing. Western Europe was the most affected, but crops failed all over the continent thanks to the fields being flooded and later frozen. Crops that are sensitive to having too much water, like wine grapes, really suffered in their quality when they managed to survive. Plus, all the incessant rain made things generally wet and moldy. Because horses were the main source of transportation and grain became so much more expensi of the cost of travel in Europe skyrocketed. Famine spread in Switzerland and Ireland. In Switzerland, the government had to distribute information about how to tell poisonous plants from ones that were safe to eat as people try to scavenge what they could from out in the woods or the wilds. In Ireland, a typhus epidemic spread in the wake of the famine. The story that sticks in a lot of people's minds about how this played out in Europe is that the infamous evening in which George Gordon, Lord Byron, proposed that all of his guests at his Lake Geneva Villa write a story. That's the visit in which Mary Shelley wound up writing Frankenstein. That all happened in the middle of this cold, wretched summer, And also written during this was Byron's poem Darkness, And that poem begins, I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space Raylists and Athlas, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn came and went and came and brought no day, and men forgot their passions in the dread of this, their desolation, and all hearts were chilled to a selfish prayer for light in Asia. Moving on to the third big place that we have lots of information about the volcano disrupted the monsoon cycle in India and Korea, so things were dry when they were supposed to be wet, and then way wetter than they were supposed to be once the rain actually arrived. This caused rice crops, which really rely on that monsoon cycle, to fail all over. The change in the weather also affected which bacteria could thrive in the Bay of Bengal, and unfortunately, one species that did thrive was a new strain of cholera, which people had less resistance too than previous strains. Bengal Kolera spread out of India to the rest of the world in eighteen seventeen, and the strain killed tens of millions of people. There's actually some debate in the scientific community about just how much of this shift had to do with the volcano and Unon Province in southwestern China, crops failed in the face of just a bitter bitter cold and a much wetter season than normal, and the book Tambora, The Eruption That Changed the World, author Gillen Darcy Wood connects this and this massive crop failure in famine to the rise of opium growth in Unon as farmers turned to it in desperation is a way to try to just make enough money to survive when the rest of their crops had failed. A huge famine swept through southwest China and it lasted for years. Neighboring parts of China had an influx of refugees, and much of the nation faced a serious social unrest. So before we talk about some of the theories at the time for what was going on, let's have another pause for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand. So unsurprisingly, there were many many explanations at the time for what was going on and what was causing this just bizarre weather. These I actually start with a story about why the volcano erupted in the first place. The population of Simbabwe was largely Muslim, and there was a folk tale explaining the event, and that was that a prince had fed a devout Muslim a dog and then killed him, and the volcano's eruption was an act of divine retribution for that act. A range of explanations for the weather cropped up in North America and Europe as well. A primary theory was sun spots. As we mentioned briefly earlier, there were a number of extremely large sunspots that year, some of which were visible to the unaided eye, and people thought these darker areas of the sun were colder, which is true, and a colder sun meant colder weather. Not everyone was on board with this idea, though, since the timing of the sun spots did not always match up with the coldest weather. There's actually a lot of continued study and discussion about exactly how much sunspots can affect the Earth's weather and climate. And it's partly because this all happens on such a huge scale, and the sunspots cycle itself is so long that it's almost impossible to isolate just sunspots from all of the other stuff in the world that's going on while the sun spot cycle is peaking. Yeah, you can't really turn off the sun to get a control group without it, Yeah, And you can't turn off the volcanoes to study just the sun. Yeah. So I really tried to find a definitive answer of good sun spots I've been and that there's not a definitive answer. Another theory at this time is that it had something to do with ice in North America. Ice seemed to persist in the Great Lakes for longer than normal, and a number of ships reported huge ice floes floating in the North Atlantic. People thought that all of this ice was actually sucking the heat out of the atmosphere. This is really more of a cause and effect situation. There was more ice on the Great Lakes because it was colder than normal, But then there was more ice floating in the Northern Atlantic because this whole time actually caused a warming trend over the poles, and so a lot of polar ice broke up and floated away, so that it was more of a cause and effect situation than the ice sucking the heat out of the air. Also, a series of pretty large earthquakes had struck various points on the Earth in the eighteen teens, and people also blamed the weather on this. The idea was that the Earth's motion had somehow caused some kind of fluid equilibrium between the surface of the Earth and the atmosphere, and that until something broke that equilibrium, that there would not be enough warmth available for crops to grow. Other scapegoats that were named as the cause of all of these problems, Benjamin Franklin's lightning rods, they were stealing electricity and disrupting the weather, because you know, he'd invented them in the mid seventeen hundreds and they'd become more commonplace since then. So clearly, since that happened before the weather, it must have caused this terrible weather. That there's so many explanations that logic is sound yet there. I mean, we still see this today when people don't totally understand something, and they'll feel like that because one thing happened before another thing, that the first thing caused the second thing, And it's often not true at all, right, It's that like chronological causality attribution that's not always valid. So the prevailing theory today is that the volcanic activity, including that from Tambora and the other eruptions that were mentioned at the top of the show, was at least one of the primary contributors. And this was actually something that people did discuss a little bit at the time. It was certainly not a widespread theory, but there were people who were like, you know, maybe all this ash in the atmosphere, which is from a volcano, is making it colder. People are pretty smart that way. However, eighteen sixteen was not the only year in that time period that had weird weather. In general, it was colder than normal in a lot of places from eighteen twelve to eighteen seventeen, to the point that people took notice, and by studying things like ice cores and tree rings and that kind of long term documentation that the earth leaves of itself, scientists know that this was not really just a little five year window of a cold snap. The eighteen hundred spell at the end of a relative cool snap that lasted around the world for almost five hundred years, starting in fourteen hundred and ending in around eighteen sixty. At least in the US, the year without a summer prompted people to start making more routine observances and recordings of weather conditions. The Commissioner General of the Land Office, Josiah Meiggs, sent out a memo to all of his registers at twenty different land offices instructing them to make and record a number of observations about everything from the weather to animal migrations. The military also started making and recording weather observations at the direction of Joseph Lovell, the Surgeon General of the Army, and the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution got in on the action as well, and consequently, the first published weather forecasts came out in the US in eighteen forty nine. So when I started researching this episode, I kind of expected it to be a little bit like The Long Winter Part two. So we talked about the Long Winter, which Lara Engels Wilder wrote about last time about this time of year, and that was the weather was really cold, things were really hard, things were tough, but overall everything worked out okay for the most part, and I sort of thought this was going to be similar to that. I was not expecting all of the famines and deaths and the extreme scale of how deadly the volcano was. The a lot of like a lot of people who have written to suggest the topic or other things that I've seen about it, kind of go, this was a year that had terrible weather, a volcano caused it, and the that's sort of all that said about the volcano, as though the volcano was on an island that was totally uninhabited, right, and that is not the case at all. This episode gives me flashbacks to when I was a kid and Mount Saint Helen's erupted because I lived in Washington State at the time, so I am very familiar with being covered with ash. Yeah, I've never lived near an active volcano, so I have not had that experience. Those are wild times. I remember my biggest concern, and again I was a child at the time, so my biggest concern was that all the animals have been killed. I was really upset about the animals that may have lost our lives. Even though probably most of them fled before the activity actually started. I'm sure some still lost our lives, but that was my big focus as a child. I did not care that there was crap all over everything we owned and like a half inch of ash sitting everywhere. I was like, what about the deer? I was, really, that's my focus. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcast Steph You Miss in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.