By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
This essay is adapted from Traversal.
On April 5, 1815, as Napoleon is assembling his troops for the Battle of Waterloo, where he would meet his final defeat, the lieutenant-governor of Java leaps to his feet upon hearing the unmistakable roar of cannons in the distance while the setting sun is honeying the marble of his colonial mansion. Having taken advantage of the Napoleonic Wars to claim the island for the British crown from the Dutch and the French, he is all too aware that enemies might return for what we now call Indonesia — Earth’s largest archipelago, a geological treasure lush with ecosystems and betempled with human reverence, turned into a political trophy.
On Sumatra, chieftains hear the explosions and attribute them to a combat between spirits — the local version of the Devil endeavoring to keep their dead ancestors from reaching the local version of Paradise.
A thousand miles away, off the coast of another Indonesian island, a cruiser belonging to the British East India Company — the mercantile mutation of colonialism that metastasized into capitalism — hears the cannons from the south and assumes pirates are after its wares. For days, the ship patrols the horizon and neighboring islands. The sailors keep hearing the cannons, which seem to be drawing nearer and firing in quicker succession, but they find no enemies. Instead, they are plunged deeper and deeper into a sensescape that grows more and more surreal.
Morning comes, bringing not daybreak but nightfall. At eight o’clock, the ship’s captain anxiously observes that “some extraordinary occurrence” is clearly taking place.
The face of the heavens to the southward and westward had assumed the most dismal and lowering aspect, and it was much darker than when the sun rose.
What has at first appeared as a curtain of thunderclouds hanging low and heavy over the horizon now begins radiating an eerie dark-crimson glow, slowly charring the whole sky. By ten, the ship is hardly visible across the mere mile from the shore; by noon, the dark hemorrhage has spilled across the entire firmament. “I never saw any thing equal to it in the darkest night,” the captain recounted; “it was impossible to see your hand when held up close to the eye.” Being sufficiently versed in astronomy, as all ship commanders had to be, and in possession of reliable lunar tables, he knows that the next predicted solar eclipse is months and hemispheres away. No — this is something entirely unpredicted and entirely strange, constricting comprehension in the narrow neck of an hourglass of unreality, suddenly inverted to make every known and trusted thing — time, space, light, color — drip into its opposite.
And then, black rain begins showering the deck. Dry rain. The sailors, awestruck, dip their fingers into the strange substance and lick. (We are always children in the most cataclysmic moments.) It has no taste at all, only a faint burnt odor. It comes down so fast, and in such vast quantities, that within hours it has piled a foot in many places; the crew set about tossing it overboard with buckets — several tons, in one officer’s estimate, by the time the first sunbeams finally puncture the blackness a week later, revealing the colossal floating pumice stone that was once a ship.
An Erupting Volcano by Night by David Humbert de Superville. (Available as a print, a blanket, and more.)
Eons before humans began slicing Earth’s surface along artificial lines, trading and translating across them, warring over their subtlest curve, staking personal identities and nationalist ideologies relative to them, Earth itself divided the lithosphere below into enormous, drifting jigsaw pieces — the product of processes that began in the planet’s adolescence, long before we descended from the trees to invent the consensual reality of countries and currency and the writing systems in which to encode those ever-contested consensuses. Friction along the boundaries of these restless plates would cause the roiling open mouth of an Indonesian mountain to exhale one million tons of ash eighteen miles skyward in an era when the geological reality of tectonic plates was less real to the human imagination than the religious mythology of a punitive underworld for imperfect souls.
Climaxing on April 10, 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora was the deadliest in recorded history, a hundred times more violent than the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Two billion years after colossal volcanic eruptions melted Earth’s ice-entombed earliest life-forms from out of the planet’s first global winter, nine thousand years after a cave artist drew the first surviving map of spatial relations to depict her location relative to a nearby volcano, the people who had built their lives and mapped their loves at Tambora’s foot had no chance to escape. An artillery of magma fired in every direction as the volcano heated the air above to thousands of degrees and filled the sky with twice as much pumice and ash as there is water in Lake Geneva — enough to bury all of Great Britain to the knee. Lava poured from the lip of the mountain toward the sea, leveling every mortared illusion of security, every spell cast against uncertainty in stone and wood, until no houses were left. It decimated every tree, flower, and animal on all sides of the peninsula, scorching the ocean itself as the rivers of molten rock vanquished all marine life in their path. The ocean lashed back fifteen-foot tsunamis loaded with the trunks of trees, destroying everything that had escaped the lava’s path ashore. The explosive collision of hot lava and cool salt water blasted even more ash into the air and blackened the white sand beaches with endless fields of pumice stones, fields soon drawn adrift onto the ocean to remain there as surreal antimatter icebergs, menacing ships for years to come.
Two centuries after Johannes Kepler was ridiculed for conceiving of Earth as a living organism with a circulation, a metabolism, and a breath, Tambora exhaled so forcefully that its 55 million tons of sulfur dioxide shot up twenty miles, filling the troposphere — the moist lowest layer of the atmosphere, curled with clouds. It then punctured the dry, stable stratosphere — a region of the sky that would be discovered some seventy years later, nesting the planet’s natural thermostat: the ozone layer, its discovery a century away from Tambora, fundamental to the understanding of what makes our planet a habitable world.
The sulfur dioxide clung immediately to the hydrogen gas permeating the stratosphere, bonding into more than 100 million tons of sulfuric acid — a herd of 25 million deadly elephants suspended in the sky, made of droplets each a fraction of a flea in size, turning Earth into a temporary Venus, whose thick cloudscape is composed primarily of sulfuric acid droplets. Powerful jet streams accelerated this aerosol cloud to sixty miles per hour and hurled it toward the other side of the globe. Injected into the bloodstream of the stratosphere, Tambora’s aerosol cloud circumnavigated the globe eighty times faster than Captain Cook, shape-shifting as it traversed the skies, pulled apart by varying wind speeds and gravity acting on differently sized particles.
By the time winter came, a thin film of ash had enveloped the entire planet, returning sunlight to its sender. Temperatures began dropping, weather patterns grew wild, and the seasons — those handrails of stability in a war-torn and uncertain world — came unbolted.’
Painting by 19th-century Norwegian artist Knud Baade. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
By the spring of 1816, entire chunks of landmass seemed to have been torn off from their time and place and hurled back into some otherworldly winter by a strange seasonal time machine. Across Europe and America, across farmsteads and newspaper pages, people inveighed disbelievingly against the “backward” season that rendered the young Mary Shelley so bored in her indoor captivity amid the downpours that she wrote Frankenstein. Summer sleet came down on English towns. Hail pummeled Scotland. Snow blanketed Pennsylvania and New York in the last week of June. An inch of ice crusted ponds and rivulets from Ithaca to Maine, blocks of it drifting down the St. Lawrence River. Heavy black frost sank its teeth half an inch into the Trenton soil. Enormous snowflakes covered the ground in Bangor. The hopeful embryonic life budding on New England branches was frozen dead, leaving entire hillsides of trees looking scorched. June blanketed Boston in snow, never recorded before or since, and covered the hills that Emily Dickinson’s father was then wandering as an adolescent. The icy apocalypse drove flocks of wild birds out of the forest and into barns and cities, seeking warmth. Many froze, their small lifeless bodies dropping from the sky onto the streets. Farmers picked up handfuls of dead hummingbirds from their fields. Unsweatered for human backs, shorn sheep perished. In town after town, elders could remember nothing like this.
No one connected this uncanny weather to the Tambora eruption. News of it didn’t even reach Europe and America for months. In Ireland, the first mention of Tambora appeared nine months after the eruption, which had savaged the island’s harvest and unleashed a famine-fomented typhoid epidemic that killed sixty thousand people. Meteorology was an unborn science. These were calamities without causal link. An enormous hand seemed to have shaken the snow globe of spacetime until the parts came loose and fell in all the wrong places across the miniature of life.
Pattern-seeking animals that we are, often blind to causality, often seduced by correlation, the surreal weather following Tambora’s draconic exhale was blamed on everything from the devil that always hovered on the shoulders of the pious to the sudden appearance of sunspots that so transfixed the era’s astronomers before it was understood that these temporary flecks of darkness are a function of our star’s magnetic field. No event in recorded history, save perhaps a total solar eclipse, would stir superstition and science with equal vigor. As the Seine rose to alarming heights, Parisian priests instructed parishioners to pray for better weather, and a candlelit procession of young women unspooled onto the streets, praying to the city’s patron saint for clear skies. In England, churches began offering public prayers for sunshine. In France, a physician claimed to have diagnosed the Sun as diseased and the Moon as terminally ill. Throughout the continent, cathedrals began filling with the terrified. From the elevated lookout of his scientific orientation and his opium delirium, Coleridge smirked that his chief complaint about the apocalyptic weather was that it kept him from exercise.
Art by Ryōji Arai from Every Color of Light by Hiroshi Osada
As the downpours continued in Europe through what would have been summer — 1816 would come to be known as the Year Without a Summer — the shoreside vineyards from which harvest songs had risen the previous summer were now swallowed by the river, silent under the leaden skies, the flooded fields afloat with the fetuses of grapes that had failed to ripen. Entire villages were submerged, entire crops devastated. Eight continuous weeks of rain. Storms, hail, and torrential downpours never before seen in the land. Threefold the seasonal rainfall in many regions of England, Ireland, France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. Ice stilling the Thames in September — an anomaly never recorded before or since.
Famine was rising over this uncanny horizon stretching between continents and warring nations. The price of hay doubled. The invisible hand of exploitation began wringing the wrist of need as merchants started buying up all the high-quality grain they could get their hands on in anticipation of the poor harvest, then bidding up the price. Crops in the rice-growing region of China were devastated, sweeping mass deaths across the land as the Chinese Empire bent under its own scale in the face of towering subsistence needs; when the weather finally improved, the surviving peasants replanted the rice fields not with rice but with a far more valuable cash crop, one with a growing global market in an increasingly ailing, increasingly interconnected world: opium. Southwestern China thus became the dominant opium-growing region of the nineteenth century, fueling the visions of the Romantics and the living nightmare of the opioid crisis that would savage the world two hundred years later.
While Great Britain, with its developed maritime trade and ample ports, was less impacted by the famine, landlocked central European countries struggled for survival. In the frozen ground of central Italy, farmers had been unable to sow their wheat at all. Governments began bribing key geopolitical fulcrums with food — the city of Mainz, on the banks of the Rhine, a vital defense point against French invasion, received 300,000 pounds of flour from Austria; Prussia promised the same weight of wheat come harvest time.
Storm Cloud by Georgia O’Keeffe. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Karl von Drais watched menacing clouds steel the sky on his thirty-first birthday in Germany; he watched the specter of famine rise over his homeland as spring refused to bloom into summer, withering into winter instead. The young man — a radical nobleman and forester who would later recant his inherited title of Baron and drop the von from his name in solidarity with the revolutions that swept Europe in the middle of the century in defense of liberal principles and working-class rights — was moved to allay the suffering in some way. Observing the vicious cycle — failing crops causing shortages of fodder causing horses to die of starvation causing humans to starve, unable to travel in search of food and carry their paltry provisions back home — he set about devising a mechanical substitute for the horse, one that would require no feed or fuel, only human will and light exertion. Having lived through the French Revolution, he understood how widespread famine on the heels of a bitterly cold winter could rouse people to bloodshed.
By his thirty-second birthday, Karl had perfected his Laufmaschine — the “running machine,” first progenitor of the modern bicycle, christened vélocipède in France and derided as “dandy horse” in England. No gears, no chain, no tires or pedals even — just a seat atop two in-line metal wheels, to be straddled and propelled with strides pushing off the ground — a precarious high-speed waltz between footfall and wheelroll.
Karl Drais with his vélocipède
On June 12, 1817, Karl tested his creation up and down Baden’s best road, traversing the round trip of seven miles in a little more than an hour.
His proto-bicycle was soon banned in Germany, England, and America as a public hazard when riders struggling to balance the contraption migrated from the carriage-rutted streets to the smoother sidewalks, bolting past startled pedestrians. But once a culture developed around the novelty, once reason and regulation enveloped that culture, the bicycle did for the human foot what the telescope had done for the eye. A new era of traversal began. More than five thousand years after a forgotten sapiens invented the wheel, another ignited the Promethean fire of mechanized personal transport by inventing self-propulsion on two wheels. For the first time in the history of our species, human beings could traverse land faster than on foot, beholden to no other creature and relying only on the internal combustion of their own metabolism, propelled only by where they wanted to go and how hard they were willing to push to get there — in this glorious prosthetic stride, an allegory for life itself.
Art from Bicycling for Ladies, 1896. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Had Tambora erupted in a world less vulnerable, less riven by conflict and less razed of resilience by the Napoleonic Wars, the global impact might have been different; the biological, ecological, social, and cultural costs — as well as the gains — might have been different; so many lives, millions, might have been spared; among them might have been another Mary Shelley, another Albert Einstein; the bicycle might not exist, Frankenstein might not exist, the opioid crisis might not exist. Over and over chance reaches into the loom of the possible to unspool the events of our lives, lives livable only if we never think about how unrecognizable the tapestry would be had any one thread been different. To be a thinking creature is to slip the tendrils of thought into every if that fissures the monolith of is; to be a feeling creature is to pulsate with the thrill and terror of every might bridging the two.
