Island on Fire Page 9

  Laki’s lava flows today form a rolling landscape covered with soft moss.

  Into the middle of this calamity, in April 1784, stepped one Magnús Stephensen. The Danish king had dispatched him, a twenty-two-year-old law student at the University of Copenhagen, to investigate the eruption. By birth Magnús was a member of the island’s gentry – the son of Ólafur Stephensen, one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in Iceland, who in 1790 would be appointed governor, the first Icelander in history to represent the Danish government.

  After graduating from university, Magnús Stephensen would go on to become a lawyer in Iceland’s northwest district and, in 1800, the first chief justice of the Icelandic High Court. But that spring in 1784, he was responsible for being the eyes and ears of the Danish king in a place that had practically been blasted from the face of the earth. His instructions were to collect as much information as he could about the eruption and its lava flows, and to assess its social effects for helping with disaster relief.

  According to his official report, Stephensen set out from near Prestbakki on the morning of 16 July 1784, to find the source of the devastation. With his servant and a ‘brave old man’ he had persuaded to accompany them, he made his way over the moors and toward the blackened edge of the eastern branch of the lava. The little group followed this flow northward until they reached a small mountain, which the lava appeared to have embraced on several sides. Toward the north, he saw smoke issuing from a ‘lava stream… an appearance equally terrible and indescribable’. Squinting through the pall, he saw something else:

  We could discern a considerable hillock, or small mountain, greater in its diameter than in its height, whence there also proceeded a thick and black smoke. There I concluded must be situated the source of the eruption.

  Stephensen’s account, published in Copenhagen in 1785, was one of the first reported eyewitness reports to reach the world outside of Iceland, and thus one of the first to pinpoint Laki itself as the cause of all the suffering. Subsequent researchers, though, have questioned Stephensen’s accuracy. Thor Thordarson, the pre-eminent modern expert on the Laki eruption, argues that the report has so many errors regarding the nature and timing of events that it has no practical value. He notes a local rumour that Stephensen never ventured far enough into the highlands to actually reach the source of the eruption.

  Stephensen may not have made it all the way to Laki, but he was in southern Iceland when the hardships were at their worst. At the very least, his comments provide a vivid description of the awful reality there:

  The volcanic eruption having thus been productive of devastation and sickness, both among man and beast, a great famine and unexampled misery throughout the country, naturally ensued. The peasant, who, with the loss of his cattle, was likewise deprived of his sole means of subsistence, and of the best and most valuable part of his property, had nothing else (after having eaten the animals that died by famine and sickness) wherewith to satisfy the painful cravings of hunger, but skins and old hides, which he then boiled and devoured.

  And occasionally, his observations penetrate to the very heart of desperation and the lengths people go to survive:

  From respect to my readers I forbear to enumerate a variety of other things, which, as articles of food, were in equal or greater degree nauseous and disgusting, and which, were I to detail them, would serve to show what shocking expedients the extreme cravings of appetite will drive men to have recourse to, and how that it is possible to convert almost every thing to food.

  There is no credible evidence that Icelanders resorted to cannibalism, but the hint of unspeakable deeds shows just how hopeless people were in these dark days.

  Eventually, Jón himself began to break down. He had lost all his livestock, including his only cow, and his acts of charity on behalf of the displaced had brought him and his family to the brink of destitution. Between 12 August 1783 and late June of 1784, he, his wife and daughters had no milk, butter or cheese, and only contaminated meat to eat and foul water to drink. Now, for the first time, his physical strength was beginning to flag.

  Jón decided to travel west and ask for help from the headquarters of the Danish administration at Bessastadir, near Reykjavík. (Today Bessastadir is the official residence of Iceland’s president.) There, he was given a sealed moneybox containing 600 rigsdaler,* and instructed to deliver it to the senior official presiding over his administrative district, in the village of Vík. The official would break the seal and oversee the distribution of the money to those farmers most afflicted by the disaster. On his way, Jón stopped overnight at another village where he met the monastic proprietor of Klaustur, who was supposed to help the senior official distribute the money. The next morning, while Jón was out tending to a sick villager, the proprietor broke the seal to the moneybox and removed twenty rigsdaler for himself and eight for a farmer so he could buy a cow.

  Now travelling alone toward Vík, Jón met a large group of his parishioners who, impoverished and weakened, were coming west in the hope of acquiring livestock. Without cash, however, their only recourse was to buy them on credit. They had heard that Jón had a great quantity of money at his disposal, and they implored him ‘in God’s name’ to save them from starvation. Given that the seal on the moneybox was already broken, Jón handed them 245 rigsdaler – one or two per man – so they could buy some animals.

  When he arrived in Vík, the district overseer was furious to find that the government seal had been broken, and brought charges against Jón before the Danish governor. Jón pleaded extenuating circumstances. His bishop stood by him, and the case was closed in 1786 with a minimal penalty: Jón was fined five rigsdaler and had to make a public apology for his ‘crime’.

  The worst blow came on 4 October 1784, when Jón’s beloved wife Thórunn, who had been ill for years with kidney disease, died. They had been married for 31 years, and now he found himself alone and with his house in a wretched state. He had no fuel for the lamps and languished in constant, cold darkness. At night, in bed, his hands and feet became swollen from frost. At Christmas he injured his arm and for five weeks could hardly get himself dressed. He began suffering from insomnia and depression, and by the middle of winter was considering suicide.

  The entire country was suffering like never before. Deaths had eased off during the summer of 1784, but rose again in the autumn and winter. Failure of the hay crop and the unavailability of pasturage brought renewed starvation to the central and eastern parts of the country during the first half of 1785, while the west and southwest saw another mortality peak in the spring of 1785.

  As the summer of 1785 waned, the Danish superintendent revoked orders to distribute money to farmers who desperately needed it. He also decreed that all the homeless people still living in the three districts to the west be forcibly relocated to Sída. The refugees numbered about 40 in all, but it might as well have been 4,000. Food was in such short supply that there was no way anyone already living in Sída could take in one more soul. The only possibility, observed Jón grimly, was to find them a place to die.

  These dire days, however, were not to last. During Sunday services on 16 October 1785, Jón led his parishioners in beseeching God ‘to send us and these wretches relief’. Afterward, not having much in the way of alternatives, they decided that a small group would travel east to the beaches in search of whatever the sea might provide. One of the men went ahead of the group, accompanied by two boys, to scout out the situation. The rest of the party arrived at the coast on 21 October and, to their amazement, saw that the scouts had killed 70 male seals and 120 pups. It took almost 150 horses to carry this bounty back to Kálfafell, where Jón held a service of jubilant thanksgiving. More than two years after the fires of Laki first arose, this killing of the seals marked an unofficial end to the famine.

  The Laki eruption might be looked upon as Jón’s moral crucible, in which the fires of the earth tested both his faith and fortitude. He would eventually marry again and re
build his farm, grateful to be alive. The end, brought on by kidney disease, came on 11 August 1791. Jón was 63 years old. By his own account, he had baptized 309 children, buried 358 of the dead, confirmed 300 souls, married 69 couples, and medically ministered to thousands. This was a respectable enough record for any priest shepherding an isolated parish in an isolated region of an isolated country.

  But what Jón couldn’t have realized in those final months was how his account of the 1783–84 eruption would change science. Volcanologists still praise his chronicle for its descriptions of explosive activity, gas clouds, and rock and ash falls. It is the only record that describes such a massive lava flow in such detail, including the course the molten rock took down various river canyons. Taken together, such extraordinary detail provides information on the nature and timing of the Laki eruption that otherwise would have passed into history unrecorded.

  Footnotes

  *During Jón’s time, relatively little money circulated in Iceland. Most business transactions were by barter, especially of fish. When currency was called for, the official Danish rigsdaler was used. A silver rigsdaler was valued at 27 grams of silver and was equivalent to two rigsdaler; a crown rigsdaler was worth three. In Iceland at the time, a sheep normally cost 1 rigsdaler, a cow 7, and a horse 8, though, in the wake of the Laki disaster, these costs rose so that the price for a cow or horse was as high as 10 rigsdaler.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Horrible Phenomena

  Europe’s ‘year of wonders’

  ON 10 JUNE 1783, people living in the Faroe Islands, some 450 kilometres southeast of Iceland, witnessed a heavy fall of black ash and acidic rain that scorched the grass and leaves. That same day, an advancing haze appeared in western Norway and northern Scotland. This was the first manifest evidence beyond Iceland that something momentous had occurred. Icelanders were already suffering the consequences of the Laki eruption, but others across the United Kingdom, France and much of the rest of Europe would soon face a different kind of fallout – one they would observe first in naïve wonderment, then in mortal dread.

  Like so many factory chimneys, the Laki rift belched its sulphur-rich effluvium high into the air. The emissions were caught up in the eastward polar jet stream flowing toward Europe and then in a series of high-pressure systems. Subsiding air masses carried them back down toward the surface, spreading them in a spiral-like fashion. The result was a caustic fog that curled its poisonous tendrils across the continent.

  In Saint-Quentin, northern France, a haze rolled in from the northwest on 10 June; it would persist for about six weeks. Curiously, there was no alarm. Rather, the inhabitants thanked ‘Divine Providence that these fogs while stopping some of the sun’s rays have prevented the heat from increasing which would have been hard to bear.’ Of all the observations of this unusual phenomenon, this is, perhaps, the only one that saw the fog in such a favourable light. Although Europeans didn’t know it at the time, Laki was poisoning their entire lower atmosphere.

  Laki’s poisonous haze spread across continental Europe within weeks. Prevailing winds carried it in a spiral pattern across the continent.

  Reports of the vapour spread wherever it appeared. Some 300 kilometres south in Dijon, a fog, ‘by no means a common occurrence’, was seen a little before midday on 14 June. In the days that followed, the haze spread into Switzerland, Germany and much of central Europe. In Geneva, reports described how ‘fog of a singular kind appeared here, such that had not been observed by any previous students of Nature.’ By 18 June, the mist blanketed all of France and had drifted into northern and central Italy. In Le Havre, where it would persist until early August, observers noted how the particles scattered the sun’s rays: ‘We could look at [the sun] without getting blinded two hours before sunset, as it was then red as if we were seeing it through smoked glass.’

  The fog encountered its most eloquent observer as it drifted into Selborne, in southern England, and the home of naturalist and ornithologist Gilbert White. White, regarded by many as England’s first ecologist, kept a detailed journal in which he made notes of everything from the weather and the state of his garden, to musings on local birds and animals. In late May and early June 1783, he had made several entries describing the return of several plants that had been damaged by winter frost. ‘Honey-suckles still in beauty,’ he wrote on 7 June. ‘My columbines are very beautiful; tied some of the stems with pieces of worsted to mark them for seed.’ But on 23 June, White saw something more perplexing and unwelcome. The day, he wrote, was hot, hazy, and misty: ‘The blades of wheat in several fields are turned yellow and look as if scorched with frost.’ The following day he dropped in a line from Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘The sun “shorn of his beams” appears through the haze like the full moon.’

  Over the next several days White kept noting the fog’s remarkable effect on the sun: ‘Sun looks all day like the moon, and shed a rusty red light.’ Its unusual appearance alarmed the uneducated locals, he reported: ‘The country people began to look with a superstitious awe at the red, louring aspect.’ White observed the haze daily between 23 June and 20 July, noting that the wind, no matter from which direction it blew, did not disperse it.

  At sea level, where the haze was most noticeable, it took on a bluish or reddish tint and limited visibility to about two kilometres. Many people assumed that it was confined to the lower atmosphere, but, judging by the brightness and colour of the moon and sun, French botanist and meteorologist Robert de Lamanon suspected that it rose quite high. He confirmed this by climbing to the summit of Mont Ventoux in Provence (1,900 metres), where he noted that the haze was still above him. He later learned that shepherds in the Dauphiné Alps (with peaks well above 3,000 metres) had reported that it was perceptible, though more dispersed, at those elevations.

  Also telling was how the haze dimmed the light of the stars, a phenomenon astronomers call atmospheric extinction. Barring light pollution, stars can normally be observed in almost every part of the sky, and so they make excellent indicators of a fog’s density. Under normal circumstances, the faintest star that can be seen with the unaided eye is rated as magnitude 6. Brighter stars range between magnitudes 5 and 1, with 1 being the brightest. During the nights of densest haze in the summer of 1783, first-magnitude stars could not be seen at low sky altitudes from Scandinavia to northern Italy. In Mannheim, Germany, stars vanished below about 40 degrees (where 90 degrees is directly overhead); in Narbonne, in southern France, stars could be seen rising and setting at about 10 degrees. From locations such as these, the Big Dipper could barely be discerned.

  The German-English astronomer William Herschel, who was surveying the sky with his handbuilt telescope from Datchet, near Windsor, noticed a ground-hugging haze on 4 July. He was trying to observe a rich cluster of stars in the constellation Sagittarius which, from England, never rises more than 15 degrees in the sky to the south. In his journal he noted the difficulty in seeing it very clearly: ‘The night is extremely hazy near the horizon’, he wrote. On 18 August, while estimating the colour of a pair of stars in the southern reaches of the sky, Herschel complained that ‘a dry fogg [sic] probably tinges them too deeply’.

  There was nothing pleasant about the haze. At times it emitted a sulphurous stench, burned the eyes and throat, and left a bitter taste in the mouth. It was almost impossible to breathe in such a miasma, and those already afflicted with heart conditions or respiratory difficulties took to their beds. In Franeker, in the Netherlands, physics professor S.P. van Swinden described the situation:

  Astronomer William Herschel may have seen the Laki haze as he was trying to observe the night sky from the village of Datchet, near Windsor.

  On the 24th day it brought with it as a companion a sulphurous odour very readily perceived by the senses, crawling through everything, even closed houses. Men with delicate lungs experienced that same sensation, as if they were turned towards a place in the neighbourhood of burning sulphur. They were unable to contain a cough, as
soon as they were exposed to air.

  The environment fared no better. ‘The fields showed a very sad appearance’, wrote van Swinden; ‘the green colour of the trees and plants had disappeared and the earth was covered with drooping leaves. One would easily have believed that it was October or November.’ Insects perished atop the blighted leaves.

  Suspecting that acid was to blame, some experimenters took things into their own hands. Outside Neuchâtel, Switzerland, paintings left out in a meadow during the fog exhibited strange reactions indeed. Red colours turned to orange, then purple, while black was partially washed out. It matched well what happened when the scientist du Vasquier dunked a painted canvas in diluted hydrochloric acid. ‘These observations leave no doubt’, van Swinden wrote, ‘but that this haze united some acid, or rather some acid gas.’

  In some places the haze was accompanied by obvious ashfall. In Caithness, at the northeastern tip of Scotland, 1783 became known as the ‘year of the ashie’ because of the dark material that rained from the sky. In Italy, a magnet could be used to attract iron particles from the dust that settled over Venice.