Author’s Note

 

1816, the Year Without a Summer, also called the Poverty Year and Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death, was a world-wide volcanic winter that produced widespread suffering due to the destruction of crops.

The immediate cause was the dust spewed into the atmosphere and cooling the air from the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the largest volcanic eruption in 1300 years. But increased volcanic activity from 1809 to 1814 likely brought about the poor harvests in those years and exacerbated Tambora’s effects. Add in the diminished solar activity of the Little Ice Age, which gripped the earth from the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century, and the world was ripe for disaster.

1816 brought cold, excessive rain, crop failures, and famine—especially in marginal areas—to the Northern Hemisphere, most notably in New England, Atlantic Canada and Europe. Grain prices rose out of many people’s reach, and riots, arson and looting occurred in many European cities. Unfortunately, these effects lingered for the next several years from the Americas to China.

There were also cultural effects, not all of them bad. Artist J. M. W. Turner’s paintings featured the spectacular sunsets the volcanic dust caused. German Inventor Karl Drais may have investigated non-animal carriage transportation as a result of the lack of fodder to feed horses. In the United States, New England farmers who lost everything migrated to the heartland, opening up the country. And in that rain-soaked summer in Lake Geneva, Switzerland, Mary Shelley, competing with her friends to write the scariest story, produced Frankenstein.

The Corsairs were privateers, a polite term for state-sanctioned pirates, who operated in the Mediterranean Sea. From the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century, both Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire employed them along with regular navies to secure domination of the Mediterranean. “Corsair” contains an added religious connotation since the conflict raged between Muslim and Christian powers.

The most notorious of the Corsairs were the Barbary Pirates, Muslim corsairs based on the north coast of Africa from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In Europe and the Americas, the term “Corsairs” usually refers to these pirates. The United States, Great Britain and France all fought the Muslim corsairs, and the French finally put an end to the Barbary Pirates in 1830.

The Corn Laws, passed in 1815, were not repealed until 1846.