5.

DAY AFTER DAY

“This end of the World Weather is sadly against me…”

AT THE INDEPENDENCE Day celebration in Boston, John Adams glanced around at the assembly of four hundred guests in the main hall of the State House, and discovered that he was the only signer of the Declaration of Independence present. For that matter, few members of the Revolutionary generation remained alive in New England. “Death is sweeping his scythe all around us,” the eighty-one-year-old Adams wrote that summer, “cutting down our old friends and brandishing it over us.”

Adams spent much of his time reading, especially history. He recently had finished (for the second time) Mary Wollstonecraft’s sympathetic chronicle of the French Revolution, scribbling his dissenting opinions—often at voluminous length—in the margins of his book. It would be all very well, he argued at one point, if the “empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown; but if all religion and all morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained?” Clearly optimistic about his own future—a reporter on July 4 noted that the former president “still retains the appearance of health and cheerfulness”—Adams embarked upon a new reading project: a sixteen-volume history of France.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, was feeling the effects of time. “Here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will give way,” Jefferson grumbled in a note to Adams. He could no longer walk very far, although he tried to ride two or three hours a day. He needed glasses to read at night (and during the day for small print) and, Jefferson admitted, “my hearing is not quite so sensible as it used to be.” Having recently sold his personal library to Congress to replace the books burned or purloined by British troops when they sacked Washington in 1814, Jefferson was trying to rebuild his literary collection at Monticello, just outside Charlottesville. In the meantime, he had his hands full supervising the care of his gardens. Although his plants had survived the June cold wave, the persistent drought threatened to destroy everything. “In June, instead of 33⁄4 inches, our average of rain for that month,” Jefferson informed a friend, “we only had 1⁄3 of an inch.”

Thirty miles away, President Madison hosted an Independence Day banquet for ninety guests at Montpelier, with dishes spread out along a long table on the lawn under an arbor. It was a nearly all-male affair; Dolley and the president’s mother, sister, and niece were the only women present. Dressed in his customary black coat, black breeches with buckles at the knees, and black silk stockings, Madison was determined to enjoy the last few months of his presidency. (In fact, his four-month stay at Montpelier in 1816 remains the longest continuous absence of any president from Washington.) Madison’s reputation as a gracious host was based partly upon his generosity with his collection of fine wines (especially Madeira, which he imported by the case and stored in the hollow pediment of his front portico), partly upon the vivacious personality of his wife, and partly upon the excellent fare served up by his French cook. “One could not be in a company more amiable, better versed in good manners, and possessing to a higher degree the precious and very rare art of leaving to the persons who pay them a visit, the comfort and freedom they enjoy in their own home,” claimed Attorney General Richard Rush.

Twenty-two years earlier, Jefferson had persuaded Madison to keep a record of the weather at his home, so Jefferson could compare atmospheric temperatures between Monticello and Montpelier. Madison and members of his family had dutifully compiled detailed weather statistics from 1784–1802, but apparently they discontinued the practice shortly after Madison joined Jefferson’s first administration as secretary of state. Jefferson, however, continued his own observations on meteorological events while he was president, including notes on the depth and duration of every snowfall in the nation’s capital.

Scarcely had the dishes been cleared from Madison’s Independence Day repast when a company of four French diplomats, including the recently appointed ambassador, Jean-Guillaume Hyde de Neuville, arrived at Montpelier for a visit. Although de Neuville—who had spent the last few years of Napoléon’s reign in exile on an estate in Brunswick, New Jersey—appreciated Madison’s diplomatic tact in not mentioning Napoléon during their conversations (pretending that “Louis XVIII had just succeeded Louis XVI”), the French minister was outraged to learn that a member of Madison’s cabinet had described the reigning king of France as “an imbecile tyrant” during a July 4 toast in Baltimore. De Neuville insisted the offending official be sacked; Madison demurred. In a private note to Secretary of State Monroe (who was the only Cabinet member spending the summer in Washington), the president wondered if de Neuville “hoped to hide the degradation of the Bourbons under a blustering deportment in a distant country.” Small chance, since the antimonarchical brouhaha in Baltimore was not an isolated incident.

Across the United States, the fortieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence followed a familiar pattern of parades, public readings of the Declaration (often by elderly Continental Army veterans), and patriotic speeches. Along with Thanksgiving, it was one of only two holidays observed in all eighteen states. (Some New England communities refused to celebrate December 25 as a holiday on the grounds that no one knew for sure precisely when Jesus was born.) Fireworks were readily available in most states, although their unfortunate tendency—in the wrong hands—to set afire the roofs of houses led New York City officials to ban all but government-sanctioned public displays.

In the aftermath of the recent war against Britain (the “Second War of Independence”), the day’s themes leaned heavily toward military valor and national unity. Toasts praised President Madison (“A ruler more respected for his merit, than his power, and greater in the simple dignity of his virtues than the proudest monarch on his throne”), and Jefferson (“He gave to this day its celebrity—On this day Freemen will ever remember him as first among the first”). They lauded the Union itself (“With it, there is strength, safety and happiness—dissolve it, discord and civil commotion would soon make us the fit subjects of a despot”), while comparing the United States favorably with the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. Speakers denounced the reactionary monarchs of Europe (“They have warred against liberty, and ‘hunted virtue and valor to the tomb’”) and sympathized with the unfortunate citizens of France (“degraded and abject … May the voice of liberty incite her to action, and lead her to glory”) and Spain (“sinking back into the night of ignorance and the gloom of superstition—ruled by an idiot and a tyrant”) and even England (“grinding her subjects to the earth to bribe other powers”).

Temperatures in New England had rebounded nicely, for the most part, since the snowstorms of June 6 and 9. Waltham and Williamstown in Massachusetts reported highs above 90 degrees in the third week of June, and Salem reached 101 degrees on Sunday, June 23. The cold returned briefly on June 28 and 29, when Professor Dewey reported a light frost. It had been the coldest month of June ever recorded in New Haven, Connecticut, but the Vermont Register and Almanac cheerfully predicted “sultry hot weather” for the start of July.

It missed the mark completely. July 4 was cool across much of New England. In Plymouth, Connecticut, clockmaker Chauncey Jerome noticed a group of men pitching quoits at midday in bright sunshine, wearing thick overcoats; “a body could not feel very patriotic in such weather,” Jerome recalled. Two days later, another cold front swept through from the northwest. Montreal reported snow west of the city—where the growing season already was three weeks behind schedule—and ice about the thickness of a half-dollar on ponds.

On Monday, July 8, frost struck crops from Maine to Virginia. In Franconia, New Hampshire, the cold snap destroyed the bean crop. Along the eastern shore of Lake Erie, where crops had been suffering from a lengthy drought, “the wind was N. West with some snow,” and the day “so cold as to render fires necessary for comfort within, and great coats over woolen clothing” outdoors. In Richmond, frost was clearly visible on the ground. “Our climate is far from having ripened to the Summer heat,” noted the Richmond Enquirer, “the nights and mornings are yet surprisingly cool.” The morning of July 9 brought even colder temperatures and hard frosts across New Hampshire, much of Vermont, and western Massachusetts. One Connecticut farmer who had recently burned off part of his land showed a visitor a log that was “frozen down, about 4 feet in length, and 8 or ten inches in breadth; I saw the ice cut up with an axe, and it appeared solid as in winter.”

Although this cold wave did not have the devastating impact of its predecessor, it did sufficient damage to raise warning flags of impending scarcity up and down the East Coast. Even though most crops survived, the growth of young plants was sufficiently retarded to make them vulnerable to early autumn frosts. Accordingly, the governor of Lower Canada (including Quebec and Montreal) issued a proclamation “in consequence of the backwardness of the season” prohibiting the export of wheat, flour, beans, and barley until September; simultaneously, he opened Canadian ports to the importation of grain from the United States, free of tariff duties.

Most of Maine’s early crop of hay—used as fodder for livestock—perished, and the July freeze killed beans, squash, and cucumbers. In much of Vermont and New Hampshire, the first crop of hay was only half its usual size. As far as wheat and rye were concerned, one observer confirmed that “the most gloomy apprehensions are entertained for the latter harvest. Indeed, if the present cold and dry weather continues a very little longer, the Indian corn, potatoes, beans, &c. cannot escape the autumnal frosts.” The New-Hampshire Sentinel agreed. “Season very unpromising,” it noted. “We begin to despair of corn, hay will come extremely light.” The New-Hampshire Patriot claimed to have heard “fears of a general famine.”

Similar reports came from Worcester, Massachusetts, where the weather had cut the crop of hay in half. Without hay, farmers would either have to slaughter their livestock in the fall or keep them alive through the winter with other crops such as oats and Indian corn, which would require another two months of warm weather to ripen. In eastern Ohio, the crop of hay also had failed, but there was still time for a second cutting if warm weather returned. Farther south, “the effects of an atmosphere thus cool and dry, are visible in our corn-fields,” reported the Richmond Enquirer. “The plant wears generally a stinted look. From present appearances, the crop threatens to be a very short one.” On the bright side, the cool weather had destroyed several summer pests that usually plagued the wheat in Virginia.

Speculation on the cause of the July frost centered on the sunspot theory, whose advocates claimed that diminished solar heat also explained the prolonged drought. On July 4, noted a letter to the Stockbridge Star, one large spot was surrounded by sixteen others, “and there was a considerable space around them which appeared less light than other parts of the sun.” As the New Hampshire Farmer’s Cabinet pointed out, however, “we have had several days of uncommon heat, and it is remarkable that these hot days have happened at the precise time when the sun has exhibited the largest spots; and the days which throughout the country have been the coldest, have been at the time when no spots were visible.”

Warm weather returned to the East Coast by July 11, but the drought continued. Keene, New Hampshire, went twelve weeks without rain. Northern Vermont was halfway through a four-month summer drought with no precipitation except snow. “Think I never saw our street so dry,” muttered a minister in East Windsor, Connecticut.

*   *   *

THOMAS Stamford Raffles returned to England on July 11, 1816. At the request of the directors of the East India Company, the British government had returned Java to the Dutch, now that the Netherlands had regained its independence from France. “The possession of Java, so far from yielding the advantages expected to arise from it, has proved a heavy burden on the finances of the parent State,” explained a member of the East India Company’s council to Raffles. Four years of administering Java and the surrounding islands had cost the company more than 7 million rupees, according to its own estimate.

Raffles protested the decision, which he considered remarkably shortsighted in its neglect of Britain’s long-term strategic and commercial interests in South Asia. Java “cannot longer be kicked about from one place and authority to another like a shuttlecock,” he argued. “All our interests in this part of the world are sacrificed.” To no avail. Lord Castlereagh and the East India Company had their hands quite full governing the territories they had acquired in India, and had no intention of adding any responsibilities in that region, especially considering Parliament’s insistence upon slashing government expenditures.

Raffles spent his last months in Java touring the island, examining the ruins of ancient Hindu temples and statues, and continuing his study of Java’s geography and wildlife. Although his health deteriorated toward the end of his tenure (“Anxiety soon pulls a man down in a hot climate,” Raffles acknowledged), he undertook a series of initiatives to restrict the importation and sale of opium in Java, and to encourage exports of the island’s sugar and coffee to Europe. And he gathered the information forwarded by the residents at the company’s stations throughout the islands in response to his inquiries about the effects of Tambora’s eruption. Once he had assembled their replies, he asked a colleague to prepare them for publication.

Tambora was still rumbling desultorily when Raffles departed Java on March 25, 1816. As the island faded into the distance, tangible evidence of the eruption still floated in the seas around Raffles’ ship. Immense pumice rafts, some as large as three miles across, littered the Java Sea, moving steadily to the west on the South Equatorial Current.

While passing through the South Atlantic, Raffles stopped at Saint Helena for a brief conversation with Napoléon Bonaparte. The former emperor greeted Raffles and a friend, Captain Travers, rather brusquely and then—after he asked Raffles to repeat his name more distinctly—began peppering Raffles with rapid-fire questions that barely gave him time to answer. Where had he been born? Had he spent much time in India? Had Raffles served in the British military force that captured Java five years earlier? How fared the local spice plantations on the islands? How did the king of Java (there was no king of Java) spend his time? Was Britain also returning the Spice Islands to the Netherlands? And which coffee was best—Java or Bourbon?

Raffles answered as best he could, until Napoléon (who remained hatless throughout the interview) finally grew bored and gave a slight nod of his head to let his guests know their time was up. Uncertain how to salute their host—should they call him “General”? “Emperor”?—Raffles and Travers merely bowed and made their way back to their ship.

Upon landing at Falmouth on July 11, Raffles spent a few days resting in Cornwall before setting off for London. “Although I am considerably recovered,” he informed a friend, “I yet remain wretchedly thin and sallow, with a jaundiced eye and a shapeless leg.” The countryside through which Raffles traveled was beginning to show evidence of the deepening economic downturn. Ironworkers and the colliers who worked in the iron trade were especially hard-hit. Before the recession, ironworkers’ wages were high enough that the men could rent small cottages and provide their families with a modest degree of material comforts, sometimes even saving a small percentage of their earnings. But as the furnaces shut down and coal pits closed in the postwar years, the workers were forced to sell their furniture and leave their homes, often wandering about the country searching for relief from private charities.

Parliament remained in a contentious mood, still unwilling to raise taxes and doggedly unsympathetic to the growing ranks of the unemployed. On July 2, the speaker of the House of Commons informed the Prince Regent that while the government had provided some relief to distressed rural workers, it would do little more. After all, hard times were to be expected after a lengthy war, “and for the remedy for which they trusted much to the healing influence of time.” In reply, the Prince Regent lamented “the distresses of some classes of the people, [and] trusted that they would bear them with fortitude and energy.”

Following the tumultuous “Bread or Blood” riots in East Anglia in May, protests during June and July remained remarkably well-mannered, despite the steadily rising price of grain and what William Cobbett called “the miserable state of things in England.” The most famous incident involved a delegation of colliers and laborers from Bilston, about 125 miles northwest of London, who embarked on a march to the city to present a petition to the Prince Regent detailing their difficulties. Carrying placards that read “Willing to work, but none of us to beg,” the marchers dragged several carts full of coal behind them as a gift to the prince. They covered about twelve miles a day, subsisting on gifts of food and money from the residents of towns along the way. Since the colliers did not beg, they were not subject to the restrictions of the Vagrancy Act; moreover, they were exempt from turnpike tolls, since the turnpikes imposed tolls only on vehicles drawn by horses or other beasts.

But the government would not permit them to complete their mission. There would be no audience with the Prince Regent, for there could be no admission that either Liverpool’s ministry or the Crown bore any responsibility for the nation’s economic difficulties. As they neared London, the colliers—who conducted themselves “with the most perfect order”—divided into two columns: one was met by magistrates and police at Henley-on-Thames, and the other at St. Albans. The magistrates explained that the processions could advance no farther, but they offered to purchase the coal and distribute it among the poor; then they treated the marchers to beer and gave them money for their journey home.

Through it all, the summer remained stubbornly cold and wet, even by English standards. Spring temperatures had been nearly three degrees colder than average, and June and July started off even further below the norm. In Northamptonshire, just north of London, the high temperature had risen above 67 degrees only twice in the first three weeks of July; most nights the lows sank into the 40s. “The season has been so unusually and constantly cold that fires have been kept without intermission in almost every house,” wrote United States Ambassador John Quincy Adams in his diary. Adams, who had been meeting regularly with Castlereagh in London to implement the details of the Treaty of Ghent, knew a thing or two about cold weather, having spent much of his early life in Massachusetts. Yet even this native New Englander claimed that “I have not yet ventured to throw aside my flannel waistcoat, nor as yet for one night to discard the blanket from the bed.” Across the greater part of Europe, he concluded, “the weather has been equally extraordinary.”

Indeed it had. The strong trans-Atlantic westerly winds that provided so effective a barrier to Arctic air during the mild winter of 1815–16 began to slow during the spring. Like a river whose course has been disrupted by fallen rocks or trees, the Atlantic jet stream began to develop wide meanders to the north and south of its usual track. Where the jet stream dipped south, Arctic air and frequent storms spilled into the lower latitudes. In the ridges between these troughs, mild air flowed from the south, higher pressure dominated, and conditions remained relatively stable. These ridges formed what meteorologists call “omega blocks”—the distortion of the jet stream around them resembles the Greek letter omega (Ω)—and stalled the progress of cyclones.

An analysis of weather records by H. H. Lamb suggests that one such block existed across the central Atlantic in the summer of 1816. A second formed in eastern Europe near the Ukraine, which experienced exceptionally hot conditions that were likely due to the stagnant air that persisted within the ridge of high pressure. Between these ridges, the jet stream veered far to the south, allowing air from Greenland and Iceland (where ice-covered seas persisted into June) to sweep across Britain and Ireland and into central Europe. Low-pressure systems cascaded down from Iceland along this stream. Unable to penetrate the block to the east, they would continue to wreak havoc over Europe for much of the summer. A second prolonged dip in the jet stream formed upwind of the Atlantic block, affecting eastern Canada and New England; the June snowstorms in that area resulted from a particularly severe southward excursion of the jet stream.

The weaker trans-Atlantic westerly winds and meandering jet streams signaled a reduced North Atlantic Oscillation Index. During the winter, the aerosol cloud from Tambora had strengthened the Arctic cyclonic vortex; by springtime it had begun to have the opposite effect on Atlantic pressure systems, and hence on the North Atlantic Oscillation Index and the jet stream. As the aerosol cloud reflected sunlight, the temperatures of the land and ocean cooled gradually, due to the heat stored under their surfaces. By the summer, more than a year after the eruption, this cooling most likely had begun to overtake the stratospheric warming. Since the tropics cooled more than the Arctic, the temperature difference between the two narrowed, leading to reduced trans-Atlantic westerly winds, a weaker and meandering jet stream with several blocks, and frequent intrusions of Arctic air into North America and western Europe.

Computer simulations of the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate provide evidence for this strengthening of the Atlantic jet stream in the first winter after the eruption, with a delayed weakening of the jet that can last for up to a decade, depending on the strength of the eruption and the lifetime of the stratospheric aerosol veil. The timing of the weakening varies among the simulations, however, even for the same volcanic eruption. While all simulations produce global cooling and a weaker Atlantic jet, some produce stronger cooling than others or delay the appearance of the negative North Atlantic Oscillation. The disagreements between these studies on the precise details of the climatic response to volcanic aerosols demonstrates that, even almost two hundred years after Tambora, there are still unanswered questions about how strongly the eruption affected the weather. A study by Drew Shindell and his colleagues, for example, concluded that the negative North Atlantic Oscillation Index did not emerge until two or three years after Tambora erupted. The exceptionally cold and stormy weather in Europe and North America in the summer of 1816, combined with the jet displacements noted by H. H. Lamb, however, argues that Tambora caused a transition to a negative North Atlantic Oscillation Index and a meandering jet stream within one year.

As July slid and splashed to its sodden conclusion, British newspapers echoed the concerns of their American counterparts about the effects of the unusual weather on the coming harvest. “The continuance of the present very unseasonable weather has been attended with the most baneful effects in various parts of the country,” reported The Times of London on July 20. In the southern counties, incessant rain already had ruined the hay and clover crops. Farmers in that area feared that if the heavy rains continued, their wheat crops might fail as well, “and the effects of such a calamity and at such a time [i.e., during the economic downturn] cannot be otherwise than ruinous to the farmers, and even to the people at large.” As in the United States, reliable historical temperature records were scarce, and so The Times, too, resorted to comparisons through anecdotal evidence: “Such an inclement summer,” it ventured, “is scarcely remembered by the oldest inhabitant of London or its environs.” And on the Corn Exchange in London, the price of wheat continued to rise due to “the quantity of fine Wheat at market being small, and the weather continuing unsettled.”

From Sweden to northern Italy, and Switzerland to Spain, great rain-bearing clouds seemed to darken the skies every day. “Melancholy accounts have been received from all parts of the Continent of the unusual wetness of the season,” mourned the Norfolk Chronicle; “property in consequence swept away by inundation, and irretrievable injuries done to the vine yards and corn crops.” Some of the worst damage occurred in the Netherlands. In the province of Guelderland, a region of rich grasslands crisscrossed by numerous rivers that was already suffering from the postwar agricultural depression, the rains had destroyed so much of the hay and grain crops usually used for fodder that farmers already had begun to kill their livestock, knowing they could not feed the cattle through the winter. Nor was there sufficient food for the human population. “An indescribable misery has taken place,” reported one observer, “so that the lower classes of people have been obliged to feed on herbage and grains.” Facing insufficient supplies of bread and potatoes, the governor of the province asked local magistrates to establish relief kitchens (at public expense) to provide their needy residents with what was known as Rumford’s soup—an inexpensive, filling, and reasonably nutritious concoction made from dried peas, vegetables, and sour beer. (Rumford’s soup had been invented about twenty years earlier by an American physicist and entrepreneur named Benjamin Thompson, who lived most of his adult life in Europe under the name Count Rumford.)

During the first week of July, the Rhine rose at Arnhem “to the almost, at this season, unparalleled height of 15 feet, 7 inches,” and still the rain poured down. “In every part of the neighbouring country, where the lands are rather low, they are in a state of inundation,” read a report in The Times of London. The districts along the Maas and Waal Rivers were almost entirely under water. In Zutphen, northeast of Arnhem, farmers reportedly had given up any hope of saving even a portion of their crops. “Our rich grass lands are already under water,” reported one correspondent, “and the grass which is not yet spoiled can only be got at by mowing in boats, for the immediate use of the cattle, which we have been obliged to stall.”

Along the river Yssel, “the grass which was cut on Tuesday last the farmers have been obliged to pick up with boats on the following day, to give their cattle food: in many places they have been obliged to cut the corn for that purpose: and as there is no fodder, such corn as can be got at must be cut, or the cattle will have nothing to subsist on.” Some desperate farmers reached into their stores of winter seed corn to feed their cattle, thereby endangering next year’s harvest as well. Dispatches from Overyssel and Friesland provinces were equally alarming. “Even if the weather were to take a favourable turn,” noted The Times of London, “the injury already sustained, and the calamitous consequences of a summer inundation, cannot be repaired.… This appears certain—that an unusual scarcity and high price of all provisions must be the consequence.”

Conditions were no better in most of the German states. “We continue to receive the most melancholy news from Germany on the extraordinary weather which afflicts nearly the whole of Europe,” noted a correspondent in Paris. “The excessive abundance of rain has caused disasters almost every where.” Crops in Saxony and Würzburg failed, leaving farmers “in utter despair.” To the south, Upper Franconia—famous for its breweries and grain—lay waste under “continual rains, torrents the like of which we have never before seen, [and] storms followed by hail.” The Rhine and the Neckar Rivers rose nine and a half feet above their usual level, flooding the area around Manheim and leaving whole villages under water. “The hopes of a very fine harvest have been almost ruined,” wrote one witness to the devastation. “The loss in hay, corn, tobacco, and pulse is incalculable.”

Switzerland fared even worse. Frances, Lady Shelley (no relation to the poet), left Paris in early July and headed for Switzerland with her husband, Sir John Shelley, an English nobleman notorious for his self-indulgent lifestyle and his friendship with the Prince Regent. As they approached the Swiss border after eight days of incessant rain, Lady Shelley noted that “the country was flooded, and the crops everywhere suffering from the unusually wet season. The hay in many places has been washed down the stream.” On July 15 they reached Lac de Bienne, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau had lived, and found “the whole country … completely inundated, and the three lakes now form but one. The season has been calamitous. All the crops were destroyed, and much of the beauty of the scenery has been spoiled by the wintry aspect of the meadows.”

From the canton of Glarus, a center of textile production in eastern Switzerland, came word that the inhabitants, due largely to “the severity of the present season, are sunk to the last degree of wretchedness.” The only glimmer of hope came from a private charity which was trying to build a settlement for the poor on the banks of the river Linth. In the plains of the canton of Basel, fields of wheat and potatoes lay submerged in water as the Birsig overflowed its banks; only the crops planted on higher ground held out any hope of survival. As the prospect of famine increased, the government of the canton of Bern issued an ordinance prohibiting the export of bread, flour, and grain.

Things seemed a little brighter in Austria. A report from Vienna on July 12 noted that “the harvest, which has been delayed in Austria by the continuation of the cold and bad weather, has at length begun every where.” Although the grain had been damaged by late frosts and damp weather, it appeared as if the yield of wheat, barley, and oats might actually exceed the diminished expectations in some regions. But the region from Calabria to Tyrol was already suffering from “an unexampled dearth” of grain, while the grape harvest throughout Austria “does not give any hopes either with respect to quantity or quality.”

Vineyards in Burgundy were faring no better, as the Saône River flooded its banks: “All the fine plain of the Saône is covered with water.” In Chancey, about one hundred and fifty miles north of Geneva, rivers reportedly rose so high that rafts could pass over the bridges. Facing a shortage of grain in the province of Lorraine, the prefect of La Meurthe forbade the brewing of beer or the use of grain to make distilled liquor. In Montauban in southwestern France, unusually large hailstones pelted crops in mid-July and “completely destroyed the hopes of the harvest wherever this storm reached.” And throughout France, landowners resigned to minimal harvests resisted the collection of the land tax, which in turn exacerbated the government’s budget difficulties.

Like their American counterparts, many Europeans assumed that God could alter the weather if He wished. As reports of the damage to grain and vineyards poured into Paris—where the Seine rose eight feet over several days—priests directed their flocks to pray for an end to the deluge, and so the cathedrals of Paris were filled with suppliants praying for dry weather. John Quincy Adams similarly reported that “the churches and chapels have been unusually crowded” in both England and France. In Sweden, too, prayers were “offered up in the churches daily to the Deity for a favourable change.”

The same sunspots that fascinated Americans in the spring and summer of 1816 created even more consternation in Europe. Sometime in the late spring, an astronomer in Bologna (alternately referred to in some news reports as “a mad Italian prophet”) proclaimed that the extraordinary size and number of sunspots meant that the sun would soon be extinguished, an event that would bring life on Earth to an end on July 18. The forecast provoked so much anxiety among the local populace—already shaken by darkly colored snow and unusually cold, wet spring weather—that government officials reportedly locked the astronomer in jail to silence him.

Other self-appointed prophets sounded similar alarms. In Naples, a priest announced that the city would soon be destroyed by a rain of fire that would last for four hours, “and those who escaped the fire were to be devoured by serpents.” He, too, was placed under arrest.

Nevertheless, news of the prediction spread rapidly throughout Europe, prompting a variety of panicked responses. “Old women have taken the alarm,” scoffed The Times of London on July 13, “and the prediction is now a general subject of conversation.” Outside Vienna, frightened residents of several towns gathered together for protection; afraid that the crowds signaled the start of an insurrection, local authorities dispatched troops to prevent any disorder. From Ghent came a report of frightened women crowding into churches, “to prepare themselves against this dreadful catastrophe.” On the evening of July 11—“the weather was gloomy, the thunder roared, and flashes of lightning furrowed the dark clouds accumulated over the town”—a regiment of cavalry which had recently arrived in Ghent sounded the retreat at 9 P.M. by several blasts of trumpets, as usual. Nervous bystanders, however, thought the sounds had come from the Seventh Trumpet, the apocalyptic signal prophesied in the New Testament Book of Revelation. “Suddenly cries, groans, tears, lamentations, were heard on every side,” recalled a witness. “Three fourths of the inhabitants rushed forth from their houses, and threw themselves on their knees in the streets and public places. It was not without infinite trouble that the cause of this extraordinary terror was discovered.” On the same day in Liège, “an enormous mass of clouds appearing … in the shape of a huge mountain over the city” created a similar panic.

Nor were France and Britain exempt from the hysteria. “In France as well as in this country, and generally throughout Europe,” acknowledged The Times, “the prediction of the mad Italian prophet, relative to the end of the world, had produced great dread in the minds of some, so that they neglected all business, and gave themselves up entirely to despondency.” And in Britain, the newspaper’s editor claimed, anxiety over the sunspots—“added to the severe distress to which the country is otherwise reduced”—had “infused into the minds of the people generally the greatest apprehension and alarm.” In the United States, the prophecy received considerably less publicity, although one writer in the Atheneum noted that it had “fairly frightened some of our own old women out of their lives.”

Newspapers published scholarly articles from professors and professional astronomers to reassure their readers, but to no avail. As the panic spread, skeptics mocked the gullible public. On July 9, the London Chronicle dismissed the prophecies as “outrageous fooleries,” and later lamented that “the multitude are more ignorant and credulous than in the most barbarous times.” The Times of London referred to “the Italian mountebanks” who circulated the prophecy, and hinted that they had darker motives, perhaps attempting to foment revolution. The London Examiner agreed that the prophecy was “not unconnected with political circumstances, and the naturally wondering spirit to which the events of the time have given rise.” The Times also pointed out that the prophecy was most likely false, because everyone familiar with the Book of Revelation knew that “the end of the world is to be announced by the Anti-Christ, and there are yet no accounts of his appearance.” On July 17, numerous papers in London and Paris published satirical guides with outlandish recommendations on how to prepare for the end of the world. For his part, Samuel Taylor Coleridge lamented to a friend that “this end of the World Weather [i.e., more cold rain] is sadly against me by preventing all exercise.”

Credulity sometimes brought tragic results. In London, an elderly cook who was prone to bouts of depression decided to hang herself “in a fit of melancholy,” as John Quincy Adams observed, “at the prospect of the world’s coming to an end. Such is human credulity!” (The coroner’s inquest brought in a verdict of insanity occasioned by the notorious prediction.) And on the morning of July 18, an eight-year-old girl living in Bath chose to awaken her aunt, a devout believer in the prophecy, by screaming “Aunt, Aunt, the World’s at an end!” The words so startled the poor woman that she fell into a coma, and remained insensate throughout the following day.

Any sighs of relief when July 18 came and went were short-lived; the heavy rains continued. “Another wet morning,” recorded British diarist Joseph Farington. “The season very remarkable.” As a severe storm approached Lancashire in northwest England on July 21, villagers in Longpark saw “a dense whitish cloud … which advanced with great rapidity, and, on its nearer approach, presented the appearance of the waves of the sea tumultuously rolling over each other.” Within ten minutes, jagged hailstones up to one inch in diameter had shattered windows and destroyed virtually all the vegetation in the area. The nervous residents dropped to their knees and began to pray, fearing the apocalypse had arrived just a bit off schedule. The same storm produced almost total darkness in Argyllshire, Scotland, setting off a similar bout of terror of impending annihilation. And in France, a workingman in L’oise who had just returned from mass suddenly began shouting that he, too, was a prophet, and that the end of the world was indeed approaching.

*   *   *

ONE Vermont farmer decided to give up and head west even before the summer was over. Since 1814, Joseph Smith and his wife, Lucy, and their nine children had been renting a farm in Norwich, Vermont. More than a decade earlier, Smith had owned his own land, but a bad business investment in 1803 forced him to sell and become a tenant farmer, moving frequently with his family, back and forth across the Vermont–New Hampshire border, looking for the best deal. They had lived for a while in Sharon, Vermont—where his fourth son, Joseph Jr., was born in 1805—and then in Royalton; in 1811 they moved to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and finally Norwich. Besides working the land they rented, Joseph and his older sons hired themselves out as farmhands at harvest time, or performed odd jobs in town. For a while one of the boys, Hyrum, attended Moor’s Charity School in Hanover. Lucy helped earn extra cash by painting oilcloths used as table coverings.

The Smith family’s stay in Norwich proved disappointing. In 1814, their crops failed. The following year brought another poor harvest. “The next year [1816] an untimely frost destroyed the crops,” Lucy later recalled, “and being the third year in succession in which the crops had failed, it almost caused a famine.” And it persuaded Joseph to emigrate. Several of Joseph’s brothers already had moved to northern New York State, and the Vermont newspapers regularly carried advertisements for land in the Genesee Valley available for two to three dollars an acre. “This was enough,” noted Lucy. “My husband was now altogether decided upon going to New York. He came in, one day, in quite a thoughtful mood, and sat down; after meditating some time, he observed that, could he so arrange his affairs, he would be glad to start soon for New York.”

Joseph chose to leave alone, and promised to send for his family—which now included a three-month-old baby, Don Carlos—once he established himself. He settled in Palmyra, a small town of about fifteen hundred people twenty miles south of Rochester, where he opened a small shop that sold “cake and beer”: light refreshments such as gingerbread, pies, boiled eggs, and root beer. Joseph’s family joined him soon thereafter. It was a region, as Joseph Jr. subsequently pointed out, of “unusual excitement on the subject of religion.… Indeed, the whole district of country seemed affected by it, and great multitudes united themselves to the different religious parties.”