Island on Fire Page 10
One of the haze’s strangest attributes was that it could sap moisture from the air. It did not burn off in the sun’s rays as a normal fog would. Another unusual trait was how long it lasted: people had seen fogs before, but never one that persisted day after day, for a month or longer.
Added to all these miseries was the intolerable heat that accompanied the haze. Anecdotal descriptions make it plain that 1783’s pervasive heat was extraordinary in every way. Gilbert White described it as being so intense ‘that butcher’s meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic and riding was irksome.’ Writing to the Countess of Ossory from England in mid-July, Horace Walpole described the unpleasantness:
I am sorry your Ladyship has suffered so much by the heat… Indeed, as much as I love to have summer in summer, I am tired of this weather – it parches the leaves, makes the turf crisp, claps the doors, blows the papers about, and keeps one in a constant mist that gives no dew, but might as well be smoke. The sun sets like a pewter plate red-hot; and then in a moment appears the moon, at a distance, of the same complexion, just as the same orb, in a moving picture, serves for both.
The astronomer Herschel, too, noticed the uncommon heat. On 2 August he recorded hourly temperature measurements in his observing log. The temperature at noon ‘in the shade [and in a] free current of air at the back of my gates in the garden’ was 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius). Not until 3 a.m. did the temperature fall to 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). For southern England, these were above-average readings.
The heat blanketed northern, western and part of central Europe. A letter from Vienna, published in London’s Morning Herald in September, claimed that ‘we have experienced here the greatest heat ever remembered in this country’ – as high as 31 degrees Celsius.
The combination of heat and volcanic haze conspired to unleash violent storms. Increased surface evaporation loaded the atmosphere with water vapour, while humidity-loving particles from Laki served as nucleating seeds around which clouds could readily form. Together, these conditions generated violent electrical storms, often accompanied by hail that pounded ships and farms, penetrated roofs and smashed windows. Sudden and violent floods washed soil off the fields. The Bristol Journal reported on one such terrifying evening in Leicester in its 19 July issue:
On Thursday night last the inhabitants of this place were alarmed with the most awful appearance of lightning… exhibiting a wonderful spectacle of dreadful magnificence; before eleven o’clock the whole firmament appeared on fire… this scene of inconceivable horror continued for near an hour.
The Sherborne Mercury reported on 21 July that a storm in London was:
violently alarming; the flashes of lightning were remarkably sulphureous, and peals of thunder loud and awful… The lightning fell towards the earth, which rendered its effects more alarming… As the storm came on in most places the thermometer kept rising. Where the rain fell, the thunder was most violent, where there was no rain the sulphureous stench remained in the air the greater part of the next day, when the heat was more intense than before.
In some cases, lightning strikes killed livestock and humans. Writing in the August 1783 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine, a correspondent suggested that there was ‘no year upon record when the lightning was so fatal in this island as present.’ Storm fatalities occurred all over the continent: the 27 June London Packet reported that much of the Corsican town of Saint-Florent ‘has been destroyed by fire which was occasioned by a storm of thunder and lightning.’ Tremendous storms were reported as far north as western Ireland and as far east as the village of Swidnica in southwestern Poland, where there had been ‘so dreadful a storm that there was no distinguishing it from an earthquake.’ The freakish weather did not relent for many weeks, lasting, in some parts, until September.
It’s no wonder that people became more and more apprehensive as the dreadful summer wore on. In a letter to the barrister Daines Barrington, Gilbert White vividly summed up his thoughts on the remarkable and unpleasant season:
The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunder-storms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man.
The summer of 1783 was indeed an amazing and portentous one, and the entire year would soon gain the title of annus mirabilis – a ‘year of wonders’. In February and March, a series of strong earthquakes had shaken the countryside around Calabria, Italy; at least 30,000 people had died. Some later made a connection between these earthquakes and the summer’s mysterious haze, as in the 29 July issue of the Leeds Intelligencer:
The foreign papers mention that the haziness, which has lately prevailed here, is general throughout all the southern part of Europe. It is even observed upon the most lofty of the Alps. In Italy, it has occasioned great consternation, as the same appearance of the air was remarked in Calabria and Sicily a little previous to those dreadful earthquakes that have destroyed so many cities. The people of France, too, began to forebode some dire calamity. The Paris Gazette mentions that the churches are most unusually crowded and the shrines of their saints uncommonly frequented.
Linking the haze with the earthquakes was not as far-fetched as it might seem. At the time, one leading theory of earthquakes held that they were born when trapped air rushed out suddenly from the Earth’s interior. Indeed, the great Lisbon quake of 1755 had also been preceded by a dry fog, possibly from Katla’s eruption that year. On 19 July 1783, the Norwich Mercury proposed that ‘air received such a concussion by the late earthquakes at Messina and elsewhere, that it became impregnated with sulphurous particles and had all the qualities of lightning without being inflammable.’
On 18 August 1783, a singular event occurred that ramped up the notion of impending cataclysm and added another wonder to the annus mirabilis. That evening, around nine o’clock, countless observers along a 1,500-kilometre path witnessed a brilliant, extraordinarily long-lived fireball arcing across the skies of the North Sea, eastern Great Britain and northern France, emitting an audible buzzing or crackling as it passed. Several minutes after it vanished from view, some witnesses claimed to hear a distant thunderous explosion.
In his report to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, William Cooper, Archdeacon of York, described the scene:
The weather, being for this climate, astonishingly hot… was sultry, the atmosphere hazy, and not a breath of air stirring… Toward nine o’clock at night it was so dark, that I could scarcely discern the hedges, road, or even the horses’ heads. As we proceeded, I observed to my attendants, that there was something singularly striking in the appearance of the night, not merely from its stillness and darkness, but from the sulphureous vapours which seemed to surround us on every side. In the midst of this gloom, and on an instant, a brilliant tremulous light appeared to the N.W. by N. At the first it seemed stationary; but in a small space of time it burst from its position, and took its course S.E. by E. It passed directly over our heads with a buzzing noise, seemingly at the height of sixty yards… At last, this wonderful meteor divided into several glowing parts or balls of fire, the chief part still remaining in its full splendour. Soon after this I heard two great explosions, each equal to the report of a canon [sic] carrying a nine-pound ball. During its awful progress, the whole of the atmosphere… was perfectly illuminated with the most beautifully vivid light I ever remember to have seen. The horses on which we rode shrunk with fear; and some people whom we met upon the road declared their consternation in the most expressive terms.
Herschel, too, witnessed the passage of the fireball that evening, the light of which ‘was so
brilliant that I could all the time distinguish everything around me, almost as visibly as if there had been a moderate flash of lightning of a long continuance.’ He noticed the simultaneous haze, which was so thick it interfered with his sky measurements and made bright stars overhead ‘barely visible to the naked eye’.
Paul Sandby depicted the great meteor of 18 August 1783 as it astonished witnesses on a terrace at Windsor Castle.
More bright meteor sightings followed over the coming months. Nevil Maskelyne, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, noted that after the 18 August apparition, fireballs appeared over England on 26 September and 4, 19 and 29 October. Other tallies later brought the number even higher.
The prevailing explanation for meteors was the one that Aristotle had proposed some two millennia earlier: that they were dry vapours exhaled by the Earth, which ignited near the top of the atmosphere. In 1714, Edmond Halley proposed an extraterrestrial origin, ‘a collection of atoms that formed in the ether’ that collided with the passing Earth. His theory did not meet with widespread acceptance, and Halley himself later came to reject it, in favour of Aristotelian vapours. Other explanations involved the aurora borealis or some form of electricity. (Today we know that fireballs are the flash of light caused by space rocks burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.)
While the scientific explanations foundered, supernatural interpretations about fireballs were both well established and widely held. The sudden and startling appearances of meteors often induced terror among religious townsfolk, who saw them as signs of God’s displeasure or that the world was coming to an end – or both. Newspaper reportage of the summer’s extraordinary events likewise tended to suggest that divine forces lay behind the extreme weather and other atmospheric aberrations. In Gloucester, a violent storm on 2 July induced widespread panic. The Exeter Flying Post reported on the hysteria that ensued: ‘the women, shrieking and crying were running to hide themselves, the common fellows fell down on their knees to prayers, and the whole town was in the utmost fright and consternation.’ In a letter to Reverend John Newton on 29 June, poet William Cowper wrote: ‘Some declare that [the sun] neither rises nor sets where he did, and assert with great confidence that the day of Judgment is at hand.’
Frightened parishioners near Broué, in northern France, hauled their priest from his bed and forced him to perform a rite of exorcism on the smog. Such social agitation prompted the French astronomer Joseph-Jérôme de Lalande, of the Paris Academy of Sciences, to publish a somewhat condescending report carried by the Edinburgh Advertiser to ‘quiet the minds of the people.’
It is known to you that for some days past people have been incessantly inquiring what is the occasion of the thick dry fog which almost constantly covers the heavens? And, as this question is particularly put to astronomers, I think myself obliged to say a few words on the subject, more especially since a kind of terror begins to spread in society. It is said by some, that the disasters in Calabria were preceded by similar weather; and by others, that a dangerous comet reigns at present. In 1773 I experienced how fast conjectures of this kind, which begin amongst the ignorant, even in the most enlightened age, proceed from mouth to mouth, till they reach the best societies, and find their way even to the public prints. The multitude, therefore, may easily be supposed to draw strange conclusions when they see the sun of a blood colour, shed a melancholy light, and cause a most sultry heat.
This, however, is nothing more than a very natural effect from a hot sun, after a long succession of heavy rain. The first impression of heat has necessarily and suddenly rarefied a superabundance of watery particles, with which the earth was deeply impregnated, and given them, as they rose, a dimness and rarefaction not usual to common fogs.
This soothing explanation, however, was challenged by many natural scientists throughout Europe. And there’s little evidence that it calmed the minds of the people, especially when they had the chance to read about the year’s horrors in so many places.
The story of the amazing summer unfolded at a time when newspapers were proliferating throughout England and the rest of Europe. By 1783 print communication was moving well beyond the old broadsheets, pamphlets and posters advertising theatre programmes, auctions and shipping news. There were now dozens of newspapers in London, and many more circulating throughout England. As summer waned and autumn approached, many of these publications began reporting stories that fuelled a mood of terrible dread. People across England and France, it seemed, were dying in droves from some inexplicable illness, with symptoms that included headaches, eye irritation, breathing difficulties and fever.
In Umpeau, northern France, a priest reported:
Until the beginning of the thaw the parish of Champseru has been afflicted by a pestilential sickness. Patients were afflicted by a sickness of the throat. Many ignorant doctors treated [block]it by bleeding and applying emetics, and after 18 days there were 40 dead. The fogs of May, June, July and August that darkened the sun and turned it red as blood are believed to be the forecast of this curse. May God preserve my parish.
In England, Charles Simeon returned home to Cambridge in the autumn of 1783 to find an appalling scene: ‘Many whom I left in my parish well are dead, and many dying; this fever rages wherever I have been.’ William Cowper, writing on 7 September, noted that ‘such multitudes are indisposed by fevers in this country, that farmers have with difficulty gathered in their harvest, the labourers having been almost every day carried out of the field incapable of work, and many die.’ The following day Cowper wrote: ‘The epidemic begins to be more mortal as the autumn comes on… in Bedfordshire it is reported, how truly however I cannot say, to be nearly as fatal as the plague.’ Cowper, who had seen many of his acquaintances taken ill with the ‘fever’, feared that he was seeing the return of a previous contagion, such as the epidemic fevers that killed some 20,000 in London between 1726 and 1729, or even the Black Death that killed an estimated 100,000 Londoners between 1664 and 1666. Indeed, many people began referring to the mysterious 1783 epidemic as the Black Fever.
We will see in chapter eight just how wrong they were.
As if the heat, storms, meteors and deaths weren’t enough to cope with, next came the cold. The coming winter in Europe was to be one of the most severe in the last 250 years, with a mean temperature for January of -0.6 degrees Celsius, more than 3 degrees below the thirty-year average. ‘A winter so tedious and severe has never been experienced in this country,’ wrote London’s Morning Herald on 23 March 1784. ‘In England men were found frozen to death on roads and in the open country,’ Gentleman’s Magazine noted. ‘Great apprehensions were entertained for the poor, who it was feared would freeze to death.’ A letter from Edinburgh reported that ‘the poor people are in a very distressed condition for want of meal, and many of the sheep and cattle are dying.’
Relief, when it came, was short-lived. In a letter to Reverend Newton in February 1784, Cowper gives thanks for a brief thaw:
My dear Friend – I give you joy of a thaw that has put an end to a frost of nine weeks’ continuance with very little interruption; the longest that has happened since the year 1739.
All of Europe was in the grip of extreme weather. In Denmark, ‘the winter came so early and so suddenly that the navigational marks in the Sound [between Denmark and Sweden] were lost’ as the waterway iced over. In Holland, two skaters travelled 25 kilometres along the frozen North Sea coast. In Sweden, Stockholm recorded its lowest March temperature ever, at -33.7 degrees.
In Vienna, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who had just completed his Piano Concerto no. 14 in E-flat major, found himself distracted by the bitter cold. In a letter to his father dated 10 February 1784, he writes: ‘I have just one more question to ask, and this is, whether you are now having in Salzburg such unbearably cold weather as we are having here?’ In Vienna, so many people died that the newspaper Wiener Zeitung took to publishing lists of the dead from the city and its suburbs. On average that winter, 15 to 25 people died per da
y, from a total population of just under 210,000, with the largest number – 53 – occurring on 7 January 1784. The newspaper also reported heavy snows that buried people in their homes, and collapsed roofs and city towers.
Major rivers such as the Elbe and the Danube froze over entirely, halting transport across much of the continent. Snow packs built up in the mountains, so that once the spring thaw began, so too did the floods. These turned out to be some of the most devastating in recent European history. In Prague, water levels rose some four metres in just twelve hours. Downstream, in Dresden, a hundred ships under construction were destroyed. In Paris, the Île de la Cité was underwater, and the inspector-general for public health issued brochures on how to safely re-inhabit flooded homes. In the Carpathians, entire villages vanished. The devastation was so great that officials chiselled the floods’ record water levels onto bridges and towers along the waterways, so that future generations would know how bad things could get.
Ice breakup in Prague flooded the city bridges in spring 1784.
The European flooding came with political overtones. Marie Antoinette, the French queen, found herself donating 500 gold coins to flooding victims after she made a thoughtless remark about how snow-bound streets were all the better for her sledging outings. Her husband Louis XVI, perhaps hoping to stave off unrest, ordered government coffers to be opened to aid disaster victims.
Intolerable heat, violent thunderstorms, bitter winters, flash floods: so many disasters seem to come in the year of wonders. Scientists, both professional and amateur, lost no time speculating on possible links. An anonymous account from Klosterneuburg, Austria, drew a connection between the previous summer’s dry fog and the fog seen in the subsequent chill: