Cold Open

It’s the evening of April 10th, 1815 on Sumbawa, an island in the Indonesian archipelago.

The local governor, the Rajah, strolls through the crowded streets of the fishing village Saugar. This small seaside town sits in the shadow of Mount Tambora, the tallest point on the island.

Weaving through wooden carts, cattle, and rice farmers, the Rajah surveys Tambora’s distant peak. For hundreds of years, this volcano has been quiet. But five days ago, rumblings started echoing down its slopes. At first, locals thought the sounds were from a naval battle being fought somewhere offshore. But there was no sign of any warships and, the next day, clouds of ash started rising from the mountain. The air became heavy and still. But life on Saugar went on as usual, and by the third day, the rumblings had stopped and the ash had blown away in the wind. 

Nearing his home, the Rajah decides to forget his concerns about Tambora, but then… he is almost thrown to the ground as the entire island shakes.

Horrified, the Rajah looks to the volcano. And its peak has disappeared. The sky above the mountain has turned black. And three columns of fire shoot hundreds of feet into the air.

The Rajah runs for the safety of his home, as rocks the size of fists begin to rain down on the streets, knocking people to the ground. The Rajah drops to his hands and knees, scrambling toward the shelter of a nearby doorway… but then powerful winds slam into the village.

The hurricane of hot ash and rock tears roofs off houses and rips trees out by the roots. Pressing himself desperately into the ground, there’s nothing the Rajah can do to help his people now. The village of Saugar is being wiped off the map.

The eruption of Mount Tambora is lethal for the local Indonesian population, but it has devastating consequences for the global climate as well. The ash ejected into the atmosphere by the volcano causes storms and bad weather all across the world, altering the course of politics and eventually leading to the disastrous “Year Without a Summer”: a cold and bleak time that all began with an explosion on a remote island on April 10th, 1815.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is April 10th, 1815: Mount Tambora Erupts in Indonesia.  

Act One: Rubble

It’s April 11th, 1815, the day after the eruption of Mount Tambora, in Batavia, a city 700 miles west of the volcano.

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the British Governor of Indonesia, is sitting by his window looking out over the city. It’s early morning, but the sun is nowhere to be seen. The sky is dark, the air is still, and ash is wafting down over the rooftops. Already, it's several inches thick, covering the streets like snow. And in the distance, Sir Thomas can hear rumblings that sound like cannon fire.

Sir Thomas has governed Indonesia since 1811 when the British seized the archipelago from the French, who had earlier taken it from the Dutch. The British are primarily interested in Indonesia because of its sugar and coffee supplies. Sir Thomas, though, has a distinct personal interest in the islands too. He is fascinated by the local ecosystem. He often takes trips into the jungle surrounding Batavia, bringing along with him botanists and zoologists to identify and catalog the wildlife and flora he finds. He is fluent in Malay, the native language, and compiles further scientific observations from the locals. Recently, he measured the temperature difference between sea level and the summit of nearby Mount Gede, a figure he used to roughly estimate the mountain's height.

Sir Thomas is writing a natural history of the islands based on all the observations he’s gathered. But in his four years here, Sir Thomas has never witnessed anything like what he can see out his window right now. He assumes the dark clouds have been caused by a volcano that has erupted somewhere in the archipelago. But it doesn’t cross his mind that the ash he’s watching rain down could have originated as far as 700 miles away.

Thomas calls his assistant, Lieutenant Owen Phillips, to his office. He orders him to dispatch scouts all over Indonesia to locate the source of the eruption and send aid if necessary.

When the scouts return, they report the worst. An eruption of unprecedented size has occurred on the remote island of Sumbawa. Immediately, Sir Thomas orders Lieutenant Phillips to sail personally for the city of Bima on the island to establish the situation there and what aid might be required.

It takes weeks for Lieutenant Phillips to reach Sumbawa. But what he discovers on the island when he finally arrives is total destruction.

The city of Bima is in ruins, and every village within twenty miles of Mount Tambora is buried under forty inches of ash. All crops have died, suffocated by ash, and most other plant life on the island has wilted. Massive trees lie across roads, uprooted and tossed about by the hot winds. Fish float lifeless on the surface of ponds, dead birds lie scattered everywhere.

And nearly all the 12,000 people who lived in the villages surrounding the volcano have been killed. Some of their blackened bodies are frozen upright, preserved by the pyroclastic flows which buried their villages before they even knew what was happening. Others were killed by the air itself, which suddenly heated to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The desperate survivors are now living on stored rice, coconuts, and the stalks of papaya and plantains. But sickness is spreading - the drinking water on the island is contaminated and the ash that still chokes the air is causing widespread respiratory infections.

Lieutenant Phillips sends word back to Batavia, requesting urgent emergency supplies, but there’s little food to spare in Indonesia now. The spreading clouds of ash from the eruption have wiped out crops hundreds of miles away. There is nothing more Lieutenant Phillips can do but help search the rubble for food and bury the victims of the disaster. For weeks, that is how the people of the island occupy themselves under the dark volcanic clouds, until finally, a series of storms blows the ash out to sea and the sun returns to the skies over Sumbawa.

Scientists will later estimate that Mount Tambora has thrown one hundred cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, forming a dark cloud in the sky the size of Australia. In the aftermath of the eruption, nearly ninety thousand Indonesians will die from starvation or disease. But the effects of the volcano will not be confined to Southeast Asia. The entire world will suffer from the cooling effect created by the ash cloud. Powerful storms will be unleashed that whip across the oceans. And in Europe, one of those storms will help bring down a dictator and change the course of history.

Act Two: Mud

It’s the night of June 17th, 1815, outside Waterloo, a village in Belgium, two months after the eruption of Mount Tambora.

In a ramshackle farmhouse, the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte sits at a table surrounded by his officers. As a heavy rain falls outside, the men lean over a large map, ironing out the final details of a battle plan. 

Napoleon is at war with practically all of Europe. His enemies have already defeated him once and exiled him to the Mediterranean island of Elba. But three months ago, Napoleon escaped and returned to France. Since then, he has been gathering forces in an attempt to win back the empire he built and lost.

Always an aggressive commander, Napoleon’s strategy is to act quickly in the hopes that his British, Russian, Austrian, and Prussian enemies will not be able to unite in time to stop him. Currently, he is trying to prevent two forces from combining: a Prussian army led by field marshal Gebhard von Blücher, and a multinational army led by the British Duke of Wellington.

Two days ago, Napoleon led his army into Belgium. Half of his forces defeated the Prussians at Ligny, and the other half fought Wellington and drove his army to the small village of Waterloo. Napoleon now hopes to win a decisive victory with an early morning assault on Wellington’s troops. That will pave the way for Napoleon to reconquer Europe.

But the heavy rain poses a problem. Speed is of the essence, but the mud will make it hard for Napoleon to quickly maneuver his troops and artillery. The violent storm raging outside is unseasonable for the Belgian summer, and Napoleon and his officers haven’t factored the possibility of rain into their plans.

No one in that farmhouse can know that the storm has been caused by ash thrown into the atmosphere by a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Sixty miles above the Earth’s surface, an ash cloud the size of a continent has been moving slowly west from Indonesia. As it travels across the world, the cloud blocks out the sun’s rays and cools the atmosphere below. That drives down temperatures on the ground and creates unusual and unpredictable storms - just like the one now raging in Belgium. 

The rain continues to fall all night, and when Napoleon wakes the next morning on June 18th, he finds the ground drenched and muddy. But he’s still confident. He declares that the British general, Wellington, is an unskilled military leader, and even accounting for the unexpected rain, Napoleon predicts that winning this battle will be no more difficult than eating breakfast.

The French army consists of 72,000 men. Wellington can command 68,000. The two forces seem closely matched, but many of Wellington’s soldiers are inexperienced and feel no particular affection for their commander. By contrast, Napoleon’s troops are men whose loyalty to him has never wavered, even when he was forced into exile. Napoleon believes that, in battle, morale is everything, and so he feels certain that his more dedicated force will easily overwhelm the enemy.

Still, Napoleon delays the assault. He had planned to attack at dawn but now decides to wait until midday, hoping that the sun will dry out the battlefield and make it easier for his troops to maneuver.

Then when he finally decides he can wait no longer, Napoleon orders a prolonged volley from his cannons before sending in his infantry. Wellington’s troops repel the first assault but are forced back by repeated French attacks.

By mid-afternoon, the outcome of the battle is still unclear, but Napoleon then receives word that the Prussian army he defeated three days earlier has regrouped, and is approaching fast. The French army is fighting well, but just as Napoleon feared, their cavalry is getting bogged down in the mud. They need a quick victory to prevent Wellington and the Prussians from joining forces and overwhelming them.

So, in a desperate bid for fast success, Napoleon orders his most experienced troops, his Imperial Guard, onto the field. They engage Wellington’s main force in a brutal exchange. But the Guard are outnumbered and are soon forced to retreat. Napoleon’s other forces are demoralized by the sight of their defeated companions. And they soon flee as well, pursued by the Prussians who have now joined the fray. The battle has turned and Napoleon has lost.

Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo turns out to be his last. He is sent back into exile, this time on a tiny island in the South Atlantic where he will remain until his death. But before Europe can recover from the war unleashed by the French, the continent will have to overcome another obstacle, a force so powerful that it contributed to the defeat of Napoleon. That’s because the unseasonable rain which fell on Waterloo is only the first sign of what will come. The following year, 1816, will soon become known as “The Year Without a Summer.”

Act Three: The Monster

It’s July 1816, in Geneva, Switzerland, fourteen months after the eruption of Mount Tambora.

Eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin sits in the damp living room of a small house on a cold, stormy day. The unseasonable weather has trapped her inside along with three others: her lover, Percy Shelley; the famous author, Lord Byron; and Mary’s half-sister, Claire.

Mary is young and looking for adventure. Percy is five years older than her, and already making a name for himself as a poet. He is also married and a father. But he left his family to elope with Mary, and the couple brought along Byron and Claire as fellow adventurers.

Their European getaway has been less than romantic, though. The ash from Mount Tambora has migrated west, lowering average temperatures in Europe by eighteen degrees Fahrenheit. The effects have been devastating. In Hungary, brown snow tinted by rock and ash covers the land. Famine is widespread, especially in France, where the economy is still in shambles following the defeat of Napoleon. In Germany, the Rhine River has repeatedly flooded, washing out farmland and wiping out villages. And a continent-wide shortage of oats means livestock are going hungry and dying in the fields. Everywhere Mary goes, she sees signs of destruction.

Now she is trapped by thunderstorms in a house in Switzerland with nothing to do and nowhere to go. To pass the time, Lord Byron suggests each of them write a ghost story. So, returning to her room, Mary thinks back on the suffering she has seen on her travels. She spends several days plotting out a story about a scientist who creates a living man out of corpses but pays a grim price when his creation haunts him for the rest of his life. It’s a story about transgression, and the power nature has to reduce human lives to misery. She titles her story Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Mary and Percy Shelley will return to England five months later and marry. Storms, snow, and flooding will follow them wherever they go, and 1816 will later become known as “The Year Without a Summer.” But two years later, Mary’s story Frankenstein will be published shortly after the world warms and finally begins to recover from the ash which blotted the sky and cooled the globe following the explosion of Mount Tambora, on April 10th, 1815.

Outro

Next on History Daily. April 11th, 1981. Following police brutality toward Black people in London, the Brixton Riots break out, heralding a watershed moment for race relations in the UK.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Gabriel Gould.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Owen Long.

Edited by Dorian Merina.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.