Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (22 page)

Volcanic enhancement of the AMOC is produced not only by reduced air temperature, which suppresses evaporation. Wind also plays its part in draining water vapor and energizing ocean circulation. As we saw in
chapter 3
, gales swept across the North Atlantic with unusual force and frequency in the Tambora period. A major tropical eruption enhances the normal gradations in temperature between the equator and the poles. Differentiated temperatures in turn influence the density and pressure gradients that power winds, strengthening wafts into breezes and stiff breezes into gales. For the North Pole region, this meant an amplified, positive phase of the Artic Oscillation, its major circulatory weather system. These stronger-than-usual winds further cooled the sea-surface temperatures of the North Atlantic, adding to the positive inputs at work on the AMOC. In short, environmental change in the Arctic in the Tambora period was driven mostly by changes in oceanic currents and winds, which overrode the general atmospheric cooling of the planet. And because wind and ocean currents behave nonlinearly in response to atmospheric change, the Arctic ice pack was vulnerable in turn to extreme transformations.

It is important to note how regionally specific the strange phenomenon of volcanic heating of the Arctic was (and is). Anywhere outside the warming embrace of a steroidal AMOC, it was cold, cold, cold. The Hudson Bay in 1816 and 1817, for example, in the Canadian subpolar
region, witnessed its coldest temperatures and greatest ice extent in 120 years of record keeping.
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The trading ships of the Hudson Bay Company, on their annual voyage from England for precious Canadian furs, met with an impenetrable peninsula of ice past the Hudson Strait, drifting helplessly for months at the mercy of the pack. To the north, however, the weather, as Kotzebue found, was eerily “delightful.” Thanks to Tambora—grand saboteur of the global climate system—the seaward door across the top of the world stood tantalizingly open.

THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BOOTS

Because the atmospheric residence of volcanic sulfate aerosols—even those of a major tropical eruption—is no more than three years, John Barrow’s dreams of an easy passage across an ice-free Arctic, not to mention balmy English winters, never materialized. The polar north warmed dramatically in the years 1816–18 before just as suddenly entering a renewed cold phase. A baffling and tragic irony, then, that these same cold decades witnessed the most concerted British assault on the Arctic.

So confident was Barrow in the first polar missions of 1818 that he directed Captains Ross and Buchan to rendezvous in the Pacific after completing their pleasure cruise across the Arctic Circle. But Buchan’s mission to the east of Greenland quickly came to grief on the massive ice pack north of Spitsbergen. Not equipped with sleds for an overland bid at the pole (as William Scoresby had advised), Buchan had no alternative but to turn back with nothing to show for his efforts. In this case, the arch spinmeister Barrow chose silence as the best public relations policy. A written account of the failed Buchan expedition didn’t appear until the 1840s.

Barrow reserved a more aggressive reception for John Ross, who returned early from his expedition to Baffin Bay to declare that he had encountered a range of mountains to the west of Lancaster Sound, terminating any northwest route across the Arctic. Barrow was crushed. But when rumors reached him that other officers in the expedition—notably
Edward Parry, who commanded Ross’s companion ship—by no means concurred with their leader’s view, and that the “mountains” were likely the figment of a frostbitten captain’s imagination, he launched into print with a withering assault on Ross’s competence and courage.

The clouds of 1818 contained a silver lining for Secretary Barrow. The embarrassing Ross expedition had turned up a likely hero in the form of Lieutenant Parry, whom Barrow immediately entrusted with a follow-up expedition for the summer of 1819. Sir Joseph Banks himself entertained the dashing young officer in his study, pulling out a newly drawn map that showed the vast Greenland seas empty of ice (Scoresby’s reports had quickly become official geography). Positive results were immediate. Parry’s ships sailed blithely
through
Ross’s mountain range named, ever so briefly, “Croker’s Mountains,” after Barrow’s immediate superior at the Admiralty (the same baleful Croker who published a scathing review of
Frankenstein
in the
Quarterly Review
later that year). Passing through Lancaster Sound, Parry encountered encouragingly open waters, and his two ships reached as far as Melville Island at 110°W by summer’s end, the farthest point west ever reached.

With a generous Admiralty reward already earned for their extravagant longitude and dreams of completing the northwest passage the following year, Parry made the critical decision to spend the sunless winter months on the Arctic ice. A superb officer and “man-manager,” Parry kept spirits high through the long months of darkness with a lively schedule of games and theatricals. He even founded a polar newspaper, with dubiously witty contributions from the officers copied out in journal format, one for each ship. Parry never made it any farther toward his Pacific destination, but the homosocial romance of his winter quarters—his happy, orderly Little-Britain-on-Ice—delighted the public and made him an instant celebrity. Parry of the Arctic embodied a new leadership ideal for postwar Britain: virile, liberal, and humane—just the sort of “new man” Jane Austen’s heroines fall for in her novels published that same decade.

Most important, Parry’s success had secured a generous stock of credit for Barrow’s long-term polar enterprise—a deep public goodwill that, despite repeated disappointments, would not be fully exhausted until after Barrow himself had died of old age. Long before then, however, both Barrow’s influence on the narrative of Arctic exploration—and that of his hero-designate Parry—had been eclipsed by the iconic figure of John Franklin, “The Man Who Ate His Boots.”

Barrow arranged Franklin’s first expedition on the cheap. Critically under-resourced, and with no experience in Arctic conditions, Franklin’s overland trek across the Canadian north in 1819–22 quickly descended into a mobile purgatory of starvation, insanity, murder, and cannibalism. Franklin and his ever-dwindling band of men wandered the snowy tundra for months on end like living skeletons, subsisting on mossy lichen and burnt leather. Whatever distress the nation felt at the news of Franklin’s Arctic disaster, however, quickly gave way to pride. At last, in Franklin, the nation might welcome a worthy naval successor to Lord Nelson. After all, the man had eaten his own boots for king and country. Franklin’s wife, the poet Eleanor Porden, had published some jingoistic verses on the eve of his first expedition with Buchan. As she eerily foresaw in her 1818 poem “The Arctic Expeditions,” her beloved Franklin would “furnish tales for many a winter night” for the British public to feed upon “with strange delight.”
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When presented with the choice between Parry’s wholesome sociability on the ice and the horrors of Franklin, the people chose horror.

When Franklin returned to the Arctic a final time in 1845, he commanded two vessels laden with tinned food, fine china, chandeliers, and a complete gentleman’s library. The Admiralty wished, it seemed, to make amends for the scant provisioning of his earlier tour. This time, he would preside over a miniature maritime empire while floating serenely through the northwest passage. But in Lancaster Sound—where, a quarter-century earlier, Parry had sailed clear through Croker’s Mountains—Franklin’s expedition ran into a wall of ice. Hopelessly trapped and disoriented, they eventually abandoned their ships. Of the 128 crew on Franklin’s mission, not a single man returned. The indigenous people of the Arctic looked on in wonderment and sorrow as bands of ghostlike men wandered over the ice, hauling their china and books with them. Some succumbed to lead poisoning from their tinned provisions, the rest to hypothermia and starvation. In their extremity, they resorted to feeding on their dead messmates. Franklin himself was spared the worst, being one of the first to die.
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With Franklin’s death, the objectives of polar exploration underwent a sea change, from a scientific inquiry into the northwest passage and its commercial prospects for the British empire to a morbid quest for Franklin’s salvation, or his remains. On one of Parry’s unsuccessful return trips to the Arctic in the 1820s, he had difficulty explaining to the Inuit inhabitants he met of the purpose of his voyage. The tribespeople decided among themselves that he could only be in search of his ancestors’ bones. Nothing else made sense.
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Franklin wasn’t yet dead, but
their judgment proved unerringly prophetic. When Robert McClure, during one mission for Franklin’s recovery, actually mapped the course of the northwest passage, putting an end to the centuries of speculation and desire, his achievement received muted treatment in the press. It is a statue of Franklin, not McClure, that stands in central London, with its famous inscription by Tennyson:

Not here! The white north hath thy bones, and thou,

Heroic sailor soul,

Art passing on thy happier voyage now

Towards no earthly pole.

Only according to the gothic metrics of Victorian Arctic romance could Franklin, who only ever failed, outdo the brilliant and resourceful Parry by virtue solely of his body count, a victory certified by his own martyrdom. Barrow’s optimistic 1818 proclamation of a new golden age of global warming, and an open polar sea, had long been forgotten. The polar seas had opened briefly in the Tambora period—just enough for Parry’s 1819 expedition to raise the nation’s hopes for completion of the fabled northwest passage to the Pacific. But post-1819, with North Atlantic ocean circulation returned to normal, the polar ice abruptly closed over once more, like a grave.

Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
stands for so much in Western culture—hubris, horror, and schlock—that it’s easy to forget the novel also contains the first significant statement of polar skepticism in the nineteenth century. Like most educated Europeans of her day, Shelley was addicted to travel literature. She had been reading anthologies of old voyages for pleasure and was preparing her own Alpine travel journal for publication when she came across Barrow’s
Quarterly Review
article calling for a new generation of polar explorers to complete the quest for a northwest passage.
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After two and a half years living with Percy Shelley, Mary had a gimlet eye for dangerous romantic excess in men. She saw it plainly in the “boy’s own” Arctic propaganda of John Barrow. Barrow’s roll call of
patriotic polar adventurers, for “men zealous for their country’s weal, and the honour of science,” inspired in Mary the idea of an Arctic frame narrative for her novel.
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The opening and closing chapters of
Frankenstein
feature an idealistic but inept polar explorer named Walton who rescues Frankenstein, his doomed alter ego, on the frozen northern wastes. His role in the novel is to bear sympathetic witness to Frankenstein’s death and to record his tragic history. If Barrow intended his polar journalism to rouse the spirit of masculine adventure and national ambition in his readers, he thus failed utterly with Mary Shelley. Instead, through the figure of Walton, she turned a laser-like skepticism on Barrow’s windy mythology of the Arctic, in which she detected the same hubris and reckless disregard for human costs that characterize her protagonist Frankenstein.