Island on Fire Page 7
Europe fared little better. That summer turned out to be the coldest in Britain since 1750. Heavy rains fell across western Europe, drowning crops in the field. In July 1816 in Alsace, a farmer wrote: ‘The rainy weather continues. The hay has not been made anywhere. The grass is rotting on the meadows, all mountains are full of water. There is nothing but misery everywhere.’
Perhaps the only bright spot in that dismal and depressing summer of 1816 was its gift to literature, though it was a dark offering. The poet Lord Byron – escaping a disastrous marriage, accumulating debts and allegations of unseemly behaviour in England – had settled at a country villa near Lake Geneva. The soft summer weather he expected, however, had fallen into a consistently cold and rainy trend. Soon thereafter, he met up with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary, and the couple moved into Byron’s manor. Although they had hoped the weather would break, it remained too inclement for outdoor activities. Trapped and bored inside their rented villa, the group decided that, to pass the time, each of them would write a ghost story. Thus was born Mary Shelley’s greatest creation, Frankenstein.
Not to be outdone, Lord Byron generated his own tale of gloom: the poem ‘Darkness’, which begins with these glum lines:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, 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.
Byron goes on to depict ships rotting at sea, famine preying upon entrails, and dogs turning upon and eating their masters. Suffice it to say, ‘Darkness’ is a downer. But it accurately reflects the gloom that enveloped much of the world in 1816 – perhaps because of political unrest following the Napoleonic wars, but also in part because of the obscure volcano that had erupted in Indonesia.
Visual arts may also have benefited from Tambora. The volcanic aerosols scattered the sunlight, dramatically reddening sunsets for years after the eruption. It has been speculated that some of the fantastically coloured skies painted by J.M.W. Turner were in part the creation of Tambora.
But as agriculture failed, famine soon arrived in Europe. Families became refugees, begging for food or scavenging in the fields for rotted crops. Prices for staples such as bread rose dramatically, especially in the rural areas. In England, hungry farmers rioted and torched barns. In Switzerland, government officials offered to teach people to distinguish poisonous from non-poisonous plants, so that they could forage on the hillsides safely.
Weakened by lack of food, people became more prone to disease. Typhus ravaged the British Isles, and a doctor in Ireland wrote: ‘I consider the predisposing causes of the present Epidemic to have been the great and universal distress occasioned among the poorer classes, by the scarcity which followed the bad harvest of 1816, together with the depressed state of trade and manufactures of all kinds.’ Around the same time, the world’s first true cholera epidemic began in Bengal. Some scientists have linked this, too, to the general vulnerability of people following the explosion of Tambora.
Missing in all this misery was an explanation of its cause. Europeans had read Indonesian reports of Tambora’s massive eruption, but few thought to link the volcano to weather changes halfway around the world. Struggling to understand what had happened, researchers generated a long list of possible causes for the year without a summer. Some scientists thought the cold in western Europe must come from sea ice that had discharged from the Arctic and drifted south in the North Atlantic. Sunspots were another popular theory: fewer sunspot numbers led to colder weather, many speculated. Others blamed the recent introduction of lightning rods, which were thought to discharge the electricity that triggers cloud formation, hence allowing far more rain than normal to fall. Some people, of course, blamed God.
Not until the early twentieth century did scientists finally link the year without a summer to Tambora. In 1912 the Katmai volcano in Alaska blew up, in what would be the largest eruption of the century. Meteorologist W. J. Humphreys, noting the effect of the volcanic dust on surface temperatures, linked Tambora to the extreme cold of 1816 and claimed that volcanoes could be responsible for many past climate changes. ‘Through it, at least in part, the world is yet to know many another climatic change in an irregular but well-nigh endless series,’ he wrote. ‘Usually slight though always important, but occasionally it may be, as in the past, both profound and disastrous.’
Profound and disastrous indeed was the next great eruption, Indonesia’s Krakatau in 1883. Krakatau once rose majestically in the heavily travelled Sunda strait between Java and Sumatra. It lay 1,400 kilometres west of Tambora, but with nearly seven decades having passed since that devastation, many Indonesians had forgotten what their mountains could do. Krakatau changed all that. It would annihilate itself and some of the loveliest areas of Indonesia, sending huge tsunamis racing across its vulnerable environs. Within a day, 36,000 people would be dead.
Krakatau had been quiet for millennia before it began spouting a few ash plumes throughout the summer of 1883. Then, with little warning, it erupted with a vengeance on 26 August. The captain of a German vessel passing through the Sunda strait spotted it first, a white cloud rising from the mountain’s summit. The cloud soon reached high into the atmosphere and spread out into the characteristic umbrella shape of a plinian eruption. That afternoon, ash and pumice began to pour from the sky. Then at 3.34 p.m. the first major explosion shook the mountain; three minutes later the first tsunami rushed into the main canal of Batavia, 150 kilometres away. Explosions fired off again and again, reverberating across the ocean and surrounding islands. Larger pieces of pumice began to fall, some still warm to the touch.
In the darkest hours the eruption began sending pyroclastic flows directly into the ocean. The captain of a passing ship described the eruption: ‘Chains of fire appeared to ascend and descend between it and the sky, while on the southwest end there seemed to be a continual roll of balls of white fire.’ Daybreak was barely visible through the black clouds that obscured the sun. Explosions thundered on and on until Krakatau obliterated itself in a final mighty roar, at precisely 10.02 a.m. The detonation was so loud that people heard it in Singapore, Ceylon, and on Rodrigues Island, more than 4,700 kilometres away.
Some of the pyroclastic flows were so fast and furious that they travelled on top of the sea, hot enough to burn victims as far as 80 kilometres from the eruption. A survivor in Sumatra, some 40 kilometres north of Krakatau, recalled the fear: ‘Suddenly it became pitch dark. The last thing I saw was the ash being pushed up through the cracks in the floorboards, like a fountain… I felt a heavy pressure throwing me to the ground. Then it seemed as if all the air was being sucked away and I could not breathe.’ The writer, who was the wife of a local government official, escaped alive but only barely. Her skin was badly burned, and only when she tried to nurse her infant son did she realise he was dead.
Krakatau’s 1883 eruption, in Indonesia, sent sound waves reverberating around the globe seven times.
Nearly all of Krakatau’s victims perished not by fire but by water. The volcano’s violent shuddering kicked up tsunami after tsunami, which raced across the ocean and swept across the neighbouring islands. Wave heights reached 40 metres. Boats were picked up and tossed kilometres inland, and entire villages were engulfed. On the island of Sebesi, 15 kilometres north of Krakatau, every single one of its 3,000 residents was drowned.
Wave after wave obliterated coastal villages that were little more than clusters of mud and stick huts. No one knew the tsunamis were coming until they arrived, running up suddenly to great heights as they shoaled upon the beaches. Because of the flatness of the Indonesian coasts, those away from the beach weren’t safe either. One farmer who was working in his ri
ce fields, around eight kilometres inland in Java, described ‘a great black thing… very high and very strong’ coming towards him. Everyone ran for higher ground. His survivor’s tale could not be more grim: ‘There was a general rush to climb up in one particular place,’ he wrote:
This caused a great block, and many of them got wedged together and could not move. Then they struggled and fought, screaming and crying out all the time. Those below tried to make those above them move on again by biting their heels. A great struggle took place for a few moments, but… one after another they were washed down and carried far away by the rushing waters. You can see the marks on the hill side where the fight for life took place.
Corpses piled up in the water, so thick you could walk across them. Some became lodged in rafts of floating pumice. Eleven months after the eruption, African schoolboys playing along the beach in Zanzibar found pumice stones strewn along the beach; human skulls and bones were piled up at the high-water mark.
Krakatau’s 1883 eruption was the loudest explosion ever heard. It rang the planet like a bell, the sound waves encircling and reverberating around the globe seven times. A pressure gauge at the gasworks in Batavia recorded an atmospheric pressure spike of more than two and a half inches of mercury, blowing right off its scale.
In the end, Krakatau erupted for 100 days before sinking beneath the ocean. A telegram sent from Batavia read simply: ‘Where once Mount Krakatau stood the sea now plays.’ Since then a small island, known as Anak Krakatau or ‘child of Krakatau’, has risen from the waters in its place. It smokes and belches occasionally, but shows no signs of other activity.
For months Krakatau’s aerosols spread around the globe, reflecting sunlight and creating lurid colours in the sky, just as Tambora had done. The moon appeared blue at times, as did the sun. Sunsets were a spectacular marbling of red, gold, orange and other hues. In New York and Connecticut, people called the fire department because they thought the red glow on the horizon was from a conflagration. The fantastically coloured cloud bands in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream might have been inspired by Krakatau-tinted skies that the artist had seen in Norway. Even Alfred Tennyson took a stab at describing the spectacle in his poem ‘St. Telemachus’: ‘Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak/Been hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe?’
Just a century after Laki erupted, Krakatau showed just how far global science and communication had come. By 1883 the first seismometer arrays had been installed in Indonesia and elsewhere. Tide gauges recorded the phenomenal tsunamis. Most significantly, submarine telegraph cables linked Indonesia to the rest of the world, allowing messages to cross the world in hours. Stories from Batavia streamed back to Europe, where newspaper readers hung on every word of the fabled disaster.
In his book Krakatoa, Simon Winchester makes the argument that Krakatau was ‘the event that presaged all the debates that continue to this day: about global warming, greenhouse gases, acid rain, ecological interdependence. Few in Victorian times had begun to think truly globally… Krakatoa, however, began to change all that.’
But the seeds for this change had been planted a century earlier, in the Sída district of Iceland. There, Jón Steingrímsson was struggling to make sense of the unimaginable disaster that had just descended upon him and his parish.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fire, Famine and Death
The poisoning of Iceland
SUNDAY MORNING, 20 JULY 1783, dawned on the village of Klaustur devoid of light and hope. By now, everyone knew that the snout of Laki’s lava was just around the bend in the Skaftá River channel, not three kilometres to the west as the crow flies, and drawing ever nearer. The sky was heavily overcast, the air sulphurous and acrid, charged with lightning and reverberating with unnerving thunder. For forty-two days and nights the fires of the earth had assailed the villagers, stifling them with fumes and humbling them with the awesome destructiveness of molten rock. It was clear to Jón that God’s retribution was far from over. Perhaps the Lord was testing him, his faith and his ability to inspire his dispirited flock.
The villagers had fair reason to feel bereft. Some, just days before, had watched as fires overran their villages, homes and farms. And now the lava had nowhere else to go except straight down the river gorge toward Klaustur. Those fit enough would be forced to flee southward toward the sea, where the lava was sure to follow, or scramble up the steep cliffs to the north and make their way along precipitous paths worn by grazing sheep. The old and the infirm would have to fend for themselves.
And so on Sunday the people gathered for services, perhaps for the last time, in their only remaining refuge – the church. The journey must have been grim. Ash choked the air and cut off the sun. As the villagers passed through the gloom, they could glimpse only the low stone wall and arched gate at first, then the chapel’s steeple and cross. Inside the church, the only light came from a succession of lightning flashes, followed by claps of thunder so loud the steeple bells chimed in response.
Jón couldn’t help thinking about two other churches in the region that had already been consumed by lava. It looked entirely possible that today his would meet the same fate. But there wasn’t much time to dwell on such gloomy thoughts. Once everyone was assembled in their usual rows, Jón took his place at the pulpit. What he was about to do would become legendary in Iceland and earn him the nickname Eldprestur or ‘Fire Priest’. The words he was about to speak would, to this day, be known as the Eldmessa or ‘Fire Mass’.
Oddly, Jón – a man so adept at chronicling local history – left behind only a few sparse sentences describing his Fire Mass. But here’s what we know happened. He began by urging everyone to pray to God ‘with proper meekness’, and to ask that in His mercy He should not be so quick to destroy them or the church. Great as the calamity was, ‘just as great was His almighty strength in our weakness’, Jón told his parishioners. Tumult raged outside as he spoke, but those inside the church appeared calm and resigned to their fate:
Each and every person was without fear, asking His mercy and submitting to His will. I have no reason to believe otherwise than that every man was prepared to die there, if this would have pleased Him, and would not have left even if things had become worse, because now it was impossible to see where there was a safe place.
Jón’s impassioned entreaty drew out the service a little longer than usual. Under the circumstances, he felt, no length of time spent talking to God could be too long. The churchgoers apparently agreed. Even though they all felt the lava would soon be upon them, no one tried to flee.
This modern altar from the Prestbakki church commemorates Jón’s famous Fire Mass, which he preached as lava threatened to destroy his village.
Finally the service ended. The villagers ventured outside, wondering if their homes had been swallowed by lava. But they could see no new devastation. No molten rock, no fires, no destruction had come upon them as Jón had preached. Puzzled, a group of men hiked up the river channel to see how much closer the lava had come. To their astonishment, they saw that it had advanced not a metre during the service. ‘During the time which had elapsed,’ Jón later wrote, ‘it had collected and piled up in the same place, layer upon layer, in a downward-sloping channel some 70 fathoms wide and 20 deep, and will rest there in plain sight until the end of the world, unless transformed once again.’ What seemed like an inexorable advance had, inexplicably, halted.
Today, the place where the lava stopped is still visible, a few kilometres upstream from the spot where the Klaustur chapel stood. It is a low, weathered wall of black rock in the middle of the Skaftá River channel. It seems a comfortable enough distance from town, but only because we know the outcome of the story. For those suffering that day in 1783, the halting of the lava must have seemed a wondrous deliverance. Perhaps God had intervened on their behalf after all.
It was, indeed, a miracle of sorts – but not necessarily one of divine intervention. As we have seen, Jón was a keen observer of t
he natural world. He had been watching the lava advance and noting how it flowed along the Skaftá channel. He also knew that heavy rains had swollen two tributaries of the Skaftá, which fed into the river gorge just upstream of Klaustur. These two tributaries turned out to be crucial in explaining what happened during the Fire Mass. As Jón describes in his journal:
The rivers Holtsá and Fjathará poured over the dams which the new lava had made them, and with great torrents and splashing smothered the fire, which was churning and rumbling in the channel, then poured forwards and off the front of the aforementioned pile, streaming and splashing. There was so much water that horses could not cross the river at all by the cloister all that day.
This powerful flood inundated the lava, cooling and solidifying it and halting its advance. The miracle was not that the lava halted; the miracle was that the rains and resulting deluge came when they did.
Did Jón know that the lava flow would stop? Did he co-opt a phenomenon of nature to pull off a seeming miracle in front of his congregation? We’ll never know for sure. Jón credited God with saving his village in July 1783, and to many that explanation would suffice. Others surely didn’t care what had stopped the lava, as long as it did stop. In any case, the Fire Mass turned Jón into an eighteenth-century celebrity, the ‘fire priest’ whose faith could stop a volcano.
For Jón, the halting of the lava was an almost indescribable relief:
We left the church more cheerful than I can describe and thanked God for the very visible protection and deliverance that He had granted to us and His house. Yes, and may everyone who sees this almighty work and hears of it spoken whether alive or yet unborn, praise and proclaim His worthy name. From this day onwards the fire did no major damage to my parish in this way.