Island on Fire Read online

  Yet the consequences of the Laki fires would damage his parish in all sorts of awful ways.

  The days following the Fire Mass turned out to be a brief interlude in a lengthy drama. Five major eruption episodes had already occurred along a line southwest of Mount Laki, each opening up new surface fissures. Much of the lava travelled along the Skaftá gorge that had once been as much as 200 metres deep and 60 metres wide, but was now filled to the brink with molten rock. A second fork of lava flattened itself out on the floor of the Varmárdalur valley and eventually merged with the main Skaftá flow.

  The combined rivers of lava raced down the gorge – sometimes covering six kilometres in a day – and emerged onto broad cultivated plains at its mouth. Unable to veer east towards Klaustur, because of the quenched flows in that direction, the lava devastated the southern lowlands instead. Layer after layer of black, barren rock buried what had once been verdant fields full of sheep, cattle and farm buildings. By early September that flow ceased.

  Between June 1783 and February 1784, two great arms of lava flooded down from Laki to embrace each side of the town of Klaustur.

  But just days after the Fire Mass, unbeknownst to Jón or anyone else, the rift was beginning to rend the landscape north and east of Mount Laki. The great seam that had opened up in the earth on 8 June was now lengthening. This shift would change the character of the eruption and create new bedlam for residents in Klaustur and in the lowlands to the east. (The modern volcanologist Thorvaldur Thordarson has unravelled these steps of the eruption in great detail, discovering that at least ten separate episodes made up what Jón and his parishioners saw as two phases of the eruption.)

  The herald of this new phase, Jón wrote, was an intense fiery glow observed in the sky on 24 and 25 July, followed on the 28th by rain and thunder that brought fine ash and a strong foul smell. On 29 July, Jón spotted ‘a frightening cloud’ rising into the sky, accompanied by rumbling and cracking sounds. A second black cloud appeared and blocked the sun, bringing absolute darkness and a shower of fine ashes. The next day, although the weather was mild, ‘thuds, cracking, and thundering’ could be heard without pause, coming seemingly from all directions.

  On 31 July, it became obvious that Laki’s lava was about to vapourize another major river. To the north and east of Klaustur, ominous clouds of steam could be seen moving along the gorge of the Hverfisfljót River. In some of its channels, water boiled as if in a cauldron. The destruction that had been visited on parishes to the west was clearly about to be visited on those to the east.

  By 3 August the Hverfisfljót had dried up completely. On 7 August, the first visible stream of lava gushed from its gorge, and continued to follow that course for the next two days. The lava slowed considerably thereafter, but steadily piled up in layers until 14 August. By then, however, it had ravaged a pair of sizeable sheep farms that stood on opposite sides of the channel. Now the people of Sída found themselves trapped between two monstrous arms of lava. One, the Skaftá flow, lay to the west and south of Klaustur; the other, the Hverfisfljót flow, lay to the north and east but was stretching its tendrils around to the south. No one knew whether the two arms might close around them, perhaps in the dead of night, in one last fatal embrace.

  Dark clouds hung over the district, even as the skies beyond were clear. Ash and sand rained down; lightning flashed, followed by percussive claps of thunder. An all-pervading stench settled across the land. Each arm of lava had its special stink: Jón thought the lava in the eastern canyon reeked of burning wet weeds ‘or some such slimy material’, while that in the western canyon smelled ‘as if burning coal had been doused with urine or another acrid substance.’

  Jón, being Jón, was determined to continue his ministries ‘no matter how the sparks flew and crackled about me.’ One of his immediate concerns was an isolated church farm called Kálfafell, just a few kilometres east of the new lava flow. As one of the few remaining priests in the region, Jón decided that the Kálfafell church and its ornaments – the altar, chalice and other sacred items – were, for the time being, his responsibility.

  But he could not rescue the church’s treasures until the wind changed direction enough to drive off the noxious clouds. He waited until 14 August and ventured halfway to the church, scouting out whether it was possible to cross in front of the advancing lava flow. By then, however, the lava extended well to the south of Kálfafell and a torrent of water was surging seaward just to its east, making a crossing doubly impossible.

  Three days later the lava flow was slowing considerably, although its rushing sound could still be heard issuing from the eastern canyon. Rain showers mixed with ash fell from time to time, but the floodwaters began to subside. On the 20th, Jón decided to risk journeying eastward. As he could not load all of the church’s possessions onto his horse by himself, he sought help from among the locals, but most were too afraid to join him. He finally found a willing lad from a nearby farm, and the two made their way mostly without incident, though at one hamlet they became mired in quicksand and were forced to swim the horse from one bank to the other.

  Jón then made his usual rounds, looking in on the few souls still living in the shadow of the Hverfisfljót flow. At the Kálfafell church he took as many of its precious objects as he could load onto his horse. To get home he decided to take a different route further inland, thinking the streams would be shallow and easier to ford. The streams were indeed shallower, but so much silt and floodwater had accumulated on the flats that it took the pair fifteen hours to make the crossing. By the time they reached Klaustur they were exhausted and soaked to the bone. No one would ever take that route again, but the church ornaments, at least, were safe.

  The volcanic fury kept coming. The first of September saw a second surge of lava emerge from the Hverfisfljót canyon, destroying outbuildings and fields of farms that had stood for centuries. A branch of the flow made its way eastward, engulfing hay meadows and damming a river. On 10 and 11 September, a new surge poured out of the canyon, cascading over the lava that had preceded it. On the 14th, a heavy shower of ash fell through the central part of the highlands. Thereafter, the lava’s advance slowed and water once again began flowing through the river gorge. From his home, Jón could see the ruddy glow of distant fires flashing above the mountains at night.

  On 26 September, vigorous earthquakes shook the eastern parts of the district, followed by a lava flow so great it dried up most of the remaining rivers and streams. Great columns of smoke and steam rose high into the air. The upheaval continued until 24 October, when powerful earthquakes once again shook the region. The following day, Jón saw ‘a great spout of flame’ shooting upward, followed by rain mixed with sandy ash. That same day a ‘terrible surge of fire’ with ‘crackling and thudding’ emerged once again from the Hverfisfljót gorge.

  Although Jón didn’t know it, this was to be the last, as well as the most prodigious, surge of lava to come out of the gorge. Lava flowed continuously for five days, filling the lowland area between two mountains. The fire stream then turned westward at a former farm, filling up that valley, and coursed over lava laid down in August, raising it to more than double its previous height.

  On Sunday, 2 November, Jón held a service at Kálfafell for those few souls who remained. A north wind brought showers of ash so thick that only the outline of the church could be made out from a distance, but by evening the wind abated to a gentle breeze and the ash clouds dwindled with it. Now it could be seen that the area northwest of Kálfafell, up to the edge of the newly laid lava, was one ‘continuous sea of flame’. The light cast by the fires at night was as strong as bright moonlight. The next evening, as Jón and some men set about gathering wood down by the tidal flats, the eerie incandescence illuminated what would otherwise have been a difficult, pitch-black path.

  Throughout November lava continued to stream from the Laki fissures, but the flows did not break out of the highlands. Rainfall mixed with ash fell sporadically, and on 24 No
vember a strong earthquake jolted the region. In early December, the fiery glows that had been seen practically every night began to die down, although lava continued oozing from the fissures, which, in turn, produced occasional spouts of steam. A bluish haze, like that seen before the eruptions began in June, crept over the ground, preventing the grass from returning green and strong. The sun and moon, however, were as bright as they ever were, except when clouds of smoke passed over them. Far into the winter, the moon would turn bright yellow in the smoke.

  The holidays crept closer, yet no one felt like celebrating. Christmas Eve saw an atmospheric manifestation ‘not unlike a work of sculpture’, as Jón put it. The weather that day was calm and clear, but a little before sunset a thick cloud drifted over the steep slope behind the Klaustur church and soon took on the form of an oval wreath. As Jón described it, the cloud-wreath had a light blue bulge in the middle, with red, black, yellow, pink and saffron ‘branches, curls, and spheres extending out into the wreath itself.’ The apparition, seen by many, hung motionless in the sky until it vanished before sunset.

  Jón the scientist might have seen this as the product of mineral vapours arising from fresh lava. The priest within him, though, saw it as a harbinger of famine and death. Or, at least, that’s what Jón wrote in his account of the Skaftár fires five years later. One wonders how he would have viewed the cloud-wreath if 1784 had brought happier consequences.

  The New Year began auspiciously enough with mild weather, but in mid-January a bitingly cold north wind arrived. Snow fell from smoky clouds, accumulating into crusts of ice on the ground; in Jón’s church, a pint bottle of communion wine turned to slush. On 7 February the fires were seen in the distance for the last time. This date is usually considered as marking the end of the lava-production phase of the Laki eruption, but earthquakes, clouds of steam, foul odours and occasional ashfall were to plague the region for months. Spring 1784 also saw devastating glacial floods that surged over the sand flats down to the sea. In one such flood, three men were carried away as they attempted to cross a river. Their bodies were never found.

  Though the eruptions had eased, the disaster had only begun. Already the people of Sída had lost profitable farms, meadowlands, trout streams and lakes, and salmon fishing along the coast. Now they began losing their lives.

  First came the toxins. The volcanic ash destroyed wild plants harvested for food, such as Icelandic moss, angelica root (wild celery), crowberries, blueberries and sea-lyme grass (which was ground up for gruel and bread). The ash also salted the ground with what Jón simply called ‘poison’. Nobody knew what this substance was, but within two weeks of grazing in pastures polluted by ash, animals began exhibiting symptoms not seen in recent memory. Horses shed skin, and their tails and manes began to moult. Hard, swollen lumps grew from their joints, especially the fetlocks. Their heads became swollen and their jaws so weak they could barely graze. Unseen, the ingested ash created a caustic acid in the animals’ stomachs, which, in turn, corroded their intestines, leading to fatal haemorrhages. Cattle suffered similar afflictions. Large growths appeared on the jaws and shoulders, and the legs of some animals became so fragile they cracked in two. Hips and other joints were disfigured, often fusing and becoming immovable. Tails and hooves fell off, ribs became warped, and the animals’ hair dropped out in patches.

  Sheep farmers try to round up a flock as they walk through a cloud of ash pouring out of the erupting Grímsvötn volcano on May 22, 2011. Ash deposits were sprinkled over the capital Reykjavík, some 400 kilometres to the west.

  Sheep, the mainstay of rural life, exhibited even more bizarre symptoms. They developed severe bone and teeth deformations in which their jaws became so swollen they protruded from the skin. Incisors fell out, to be replaced by fragile teeth that were studded with yellow and black spots – ‘ash-teeth,’ as they were called by a farmer who first described these symptoms after the 1693 eruption of Hekla. As the disease evolved, bone spurs appeared in the joints and ribs, along with spinal deformities. Over time, the wretched animals’ molars weakened so that chewing the cud became impossible. When the sheep were slaughtered, the lungs and heart were sometimes found to be distended and covered with pustules. Other times they were shrivelled and inflamed, while some organs had putrefied. Eating such creatures was highly inadvisable, as Jón noted:

  What passed for meat was both foul-smelling and bitter and full of poison, so that many a person died as the result of eating it. People nevertheless tried to dress it, clean it and salt it as best they know how or could afford to.

  Jón’s parishioners soon began suffering from a scourge that he referred to as advanced stages of scurvy or dropsy. The symptoms, however, seem to resemble those manifested in the livestock:

  Those people who did not have enough older and undiseased supplies of food to last them through these times of pestilence also suffered great pain. Ridges, growths, and bristle appeared on their rib joins, ribs, the backs of their hands, their feet, legs, and joints. Their bodies became bloated, the insides of their mouths and their gums swelled and cracked, causing excruciating pains and toothaches.

  In some cases painful cramps contracted the tendons, particularly at the back of the knee, and there was painful swelling in the hands and feet, as well as the neck and head. Hair fell out. Teeth became loose and often disappeared beneath swollen, bloody gums, whereupon they would rot and fall out. In the most severe cases, the victim suffered putrid sores inside and outside the neck and throat and, in many instances, the tongue ‘festered away or fell off’. Other symptoms included shortness of breath, rapid heartbeat and incontinence. In chapter eight we’ll see how most of this was probably due to fluorine poisoning.

  In the first half of 1784, some 150 locals fell to the ravages of this epidemic, Swedish geologist Carl Wilhelm Paijkull reported in his 1868 travelogue A Summer in Iceland. The isolation of some of the farms only magnified the horror. At one farm northeast of Klaustur, all of the occupants were struck down almost simultaneously and lay where they had died until passing travellers discovered their bodies.

  By late autumn, the situation for both humans and animals was dire. Laki’s ash had spread across nearly all of Iceland, poisoning the landscape far and wide. Huge areas of grassland had been destroyed, and much of the existing hay stocks contaminated. Deprived of pastureland and fodder, sheep and cattle perished. People began starving to death by December 1783, and thousands more of all ages and classes were to follow as winter progressed.

  Jón recorded the many appalling measures taken by the starving. Some ‘cooked what skins and hide ropes they owned, and restricted themselves to the equivalent of one leather shoepiece per meal, which was sufficient if soaked in soured milk and spread with fat.’ Others resorted to cutting up hay into fine pieces and mixing that with meal to make porridge or bread. Fish bones found half-buried along the shoreline were collected, cleaned, boiled and crushed in milk as a gruel. Some in Jón’s parish took to eating horsemeat; most of them died. Others, Jón dryly observed, ‘would rather die than eat it’.

  To relieve the misery of his parishioners, Jón employed his medical background where and when he could. Pigweed and angelica root became a purgative to treat painful diarrhoea and worms. Intestinal ailments were treated with well-boiled curdled milk and whey, porridge, hard-baked rye bread and water, or, failing those remedies, boiled seal meat (without the fat). Swelling of the mouth and gums responded well to warm milk straight from the teat. For swollen joints and contracted tendons, Jón prescribed a dish consisting of dandelion greens thickened with meal, or a ‘mercury plaster’ or a salve of yarrow and roseroot. Sulphurwort alleviated chest ailments, as did a tea made from thyme. To drive out fetid smells from ulcers, abscesses and other sources, ‘it was wholesome to burn bark and juniper wood’.

  For all Jón’s doctoring, however, people were still dying. That left just one more grim duty for him to oversee: burying the dead. From the time of the first eruptions until the beginning
of 1784, the number of deaths was manageable. ‘But from the beginning of that year onwards,’ he wrote, ‘as the winter passed the number grew and grew’. The chapel that had seen the miraculous Fire Mass was turning into a place of death. The winter snows, however, were often so heavy that the dead could not be brought to church. Worse yet, there was not a horse left healthy enough to bear corpses, except one owned by Jón. The animal, stocky and old, somehow made it through winter, though when it wasn’t grazing in the poisoned pasture it ate contaminated hay.

  In 1784 Jón recorded 76 deaths in his parish. The unprecedented number of corpses created logistical difficulties: it was hard to dig graves in the frozen ground and to find enough space on church land to bury them all. Some weeks, as many as ten bodies collected at the church until the following Sunday, when they would be buried in a single grave. All 76 victims were interred in the same corner of the churchyard, the one spot not inundated by ash and water. For whatever reason, no one had been buried in this section before, and it seemed to the priest as if it had been ‘set aside and reserved for this use’.

  In keeping with custom, no one was buried on farms or out in the open, except, Jón noted, one man by the name of Vigfús Valdason, who ‘cursed practically everything and everyone around him’. Fittingly, it seems, he died alone of exposure on the barren sands of a glacial outwash. His grave was in a nearby lava field, marked by ‘a cairn of stones piled over him’.

  As the famine extended into spring, people became more demoralized, and social order began to break down. In some houses, there was scarcely anyone healthy enough to tend to the afflicted. In every quarter, it seemed, people were reduced to skeletal vagrants, thieving, begging or dying. Those who were still able to walk fled westward in an attempt to find new land or good fishing, but to do so they had to leave almost all of their possessions behind. Anything not placed in the custody of trustworthy individuals was eaten or stolen by others. Locked stores were broken into and ransacked, and houses and farms looted and burned. Of the 85 farmers who lived in the region before the eruption, only 21 remained. Of the 613 residents, including spouses, children and farmworkers, only 93 stayed behind to eke out a new life.