Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (4 page)

Huge plumes of flame issued from the mountain for three hours, until the dark mist of ash became confused with the natural darkness, seeming to announce the end of the world. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the column of fire collapsed, the earth stopped shaking, and the bone-jarring roars faded. Over the next few days, Tambora continued to bellow occasionally, while ash drifted down from the sky. But for the raja the emergency appeared over. His first concern was for the imminent rice harvest. The villagers toiled night and day in the fields to
clean the thick film of gray, sandy dust from the rice plants—a messy business.

Meanwhile to the southeast in the capital Bima, colonial administrators were sufficiently alarmed by the events of April 5 to send an official, named Israel, to investigate the emergency situation on the Tambora peninsula. We don’t know if he stopped to discuss the situation with the raja of Sanggar, but by April 10 the unlucky man’s bureaucratic zeal had led him to the very slopes of Tambora. There, in the dense tropical forest, at about 7:00
pm
, he became one of the first victims of the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history.

Within hours, the village of Koteh, along with all other villages on the Sanggar peninsula, ceased to exist entirely, a victim of Tambora’s spasm of self-destruction. This time three distinct columns of fire burst in a cacophonous roar from the summit to the west, blanketing the stars and uniting in a ball of swirling flame at a height greater than the eruption of five days before. The mountain itself began to glow as streams of boiling liquefied rock coursed down its slopes. At 8:00
pm
, the terrifying conditions across Sanggar grew worse still, as a hail of pumice stones descended, some “as large as two fists,” mixed with a downpour of hot rain and ash. A decade after the event, a native poet from Bima described the horrific scene:

The mountain reverberated around us

As torrents of water mixed with ash fell from the sky.

Children screamed and wept, and their mothers, too,

Believing the world had been turned to burning ash.
¹²

On the north and western slopes of the volcano, whole villages, totaling perhaps ten thousand people, had already been consumed within a vortical hell of flames, ash, boiling magma, and hurricane-strength winds. In 2004, an archaeological team from the University of Rhode Island uncovered the first remains of a village buried by the eruption: a single house under three meters of volcanic pumice and ash.
¹³
Inside the walled remains, they found two carbonized bodies, perhaps a married couple. The woman, her bones turned to charcoal by the heat, lay
on her back, arms extended, holding a long knife. Her sarong, also carbonized, still hung across her shoulder. She had been interrupted by fiery death while at a mundane domestic task—preparing the evening meal—much like the petrified figures of women, children, and household pets at Pompeii already famous in the early nineteenth century. The Tambora woman’s charcoal state, however, is evidence of immolation at far higher temperatures than those generated by Vesuvius in AD 79.

Back on the mountain’s eastern flank, the rain of volcanic rocks gave way to ashfall, but there was to be no relief for the surviving villagers. The spectacular, jet-like “plinian” eruption (named for Pliny the Younger, who left a famous account of Vesuvius’s vertical column of fire) continued unabated, while glowing, fast-moving currents of rock and magma, called “pyroclastic streams,” generated enormous phoenix clouds of choking dust. As these burning magmatic rivers poured into the cool sea, secondary explosions redoubled the aerial ash cloud created by the original plinian jet. An enormous curtain of steam and ash clouds rose and encircled the peninsula, creating, for those trapped inside it, a short-term microclimate of pure horror.

First, a “violent whirlwind” struck Koteh, blowing away roofs. As it gained in strength, the volcanic hurricane uprooted large trees and launched them like burning javelins into the sea. Horses, cattle, and people alike flew upward in the fiery wind. What survivors remained then faced another deadly element: giant waves from the sea. A British ship cruising offshore in the Flores strait, coated with ash and bombarded by volcanic rocks, watched stupefied as a twelve-foot-high tsunami washed away the rice fields and huts along the Sanggar coast. Then, as if the combined cataclysms of air and sea weren’t enough, the land itself began to sink as the collapse of Tambora’s cone produced waves of subsidence across the plain.

It is hard to believe anyone could survive such a hellhole of destruction, but the raja of Sanggar and members of his family somehow did get away, along with a few dozen members of his village. Perhaps the raja exerted his royal privileges in claiming the best horses from the stables and set out early enough on the terrible evening of April 10 to escape the eruption’s reach, following an inland southerly course away from the sea, whose interaction with the pyroclastic streams created the deadly whirlwind and tsunami. Keeping to the narrow route between Koteh and Dompu—the sole band of the peninsula spared from lava inundation—their unimaginable flight involved five-meter-high molten rivers spitting and smoking on either side, their escape like a latter-day miracle of the Red Sea. The raja of Sanggar and his band of survivors owed what life remained to them to both the topography of Tambora, which directed the magmatic flow of the April 10 eruption more to the northwest and south, and the trade winds, which blew the volcanic ash in a westward direction toward the islands of Bali and Java.

On the sunless days following the cataclysm, corpses lay unburied all along the roads on the inhabited eastern side of the island between Dompu and Bima. Villages stood deserted, their surviving inhabitants having scattered in search of food. With forests and rice paddies destroyed, and the island’s wells poisoned by volcanic ash, some forty thousand islanders would perish from sickness and starvation in the ensuing weeks, bringing the estimated death toll from the eruption to over one hundred thousand, the largest in history.
¹⁴
Even the wealthy raja of the now vanished kingdom of Sanggar could not save his beloved
daughter, weakened by terror and an unrelenting diarrhea brought on by ash-poisoned water.

One day, after many weeks, the raja heard that Englishmen had come to the island with a ship full of rice. He hurried to Dompu, where he used his title to gain an audience with the English chief, Lieutenant Owen Phillips of the navy. Desperate and grief-stricken as he was, the raja could not but be wary on being led alone into the presence of the English governor’s envoy. In the local zoonomia of races, the Dutch overlords were horse leeches draining the native people of their blood, while the Sumbawans themselves resembled the buffalo: solid, long-suffering beasts of burden. But these new conquerors, the British, appeared like red-faced tigers, down to the animal skins the officers wore to decorate themselves: dazzling but deadly.
¹⁵

Having survived the terrible eruption of Tambora, however, the raja of Sanggar possessed courage and wit enough for Lieutenant Phillips of the Royal Navy. He gave Phillips his description of what had happened on the Sanggar peninsula on April 10, 1815—the sole existing eyewitness account of Tambora’s mighty explosion. He told his story well enough that the English officer awarded him several tons of rice to feed his people and quoted him at length in dispatches. The raja thanked the Englishman with emotion but left quickly, no doubt with a mind still focused on survival and little recognizing his service to history.

THE GOLDEN KINGDOM OF TAMBORA

Amazingly, Tambora’s twin plinian explosions accounted for only about 4% of the volcano’s eruptive production. While the skyward eruptions lasted only about three hours each, the boiling cascade of pyroclastic streams down Tambora’s slopes continued a full day. Hot magma gushed from Tambora’s collapsing chamber down to the peninsula, while columns of ash, gas, and rock rose and fell, feeding the flow. The fiery flood that consumed the Sanggar peninsula, traveling up to thirty kilometers at great speeds, ultimately extended over a 560-kilometer area, one of the greatest pyroclastic events in
the historical record. Within a few short hours, it buried human civilization in northeast Sumbawa under a smoking meter-high layer of ignimbrite.

The rivers of volcanic matter that plowed into the sea redrew the map of Sanggar. Forests were incinerated along with villages, and kilometers of coastline added to the peninsula, like a giant volcanic landfill. Once Tambora had disgorged itself of its subterranean sea of magma, its mountain shell imploded. With so vast a volume of interior matter expelled, catastrophic subsidence was inevitable, and sometime on April 11 or 12 Tambora sank into itself, forming a six-kilometer-wide caldera where once its lofty peak had been. This giant volcanic sinkhole is among the largest to have formed on Earth since the retreat of the last glacial period around twelve thousand years ago and is comparable in size to the volcanic Crater Lake in Oregon, formed seven thousand years ago. In all, Tambora lost a kilometer and a half in height during its week-long rage of self-destruction. Where once it rose to a classical conical peak, it now rested from its labors like a long, recumbent giant on an expanded lava bed, denuded of life.

Tambora’s cacophony of explosions on April 10, 1815, could be heard hundreds of miles away. All across the region, government ships put to sea in search of imaginary pirates and invading navies.
¹⁶
In the seas to the north off Macassar, the captain of the East India Company vessel
Benares
gave a vivid account of conditions in the region on April 11:

The ashes now began to fall in showers, and the appearance altogether was truly awful and alarming. By noon, the light that had remained in the eastern part of the horizon disappeared, and complete darkness had covered the face of day…. The darkness was so profound throughout the remainder of the day, that I never saw anything equal to it in the darkest night; it was impossible to see your hand when held up close to the eye…. The appearance of the ship, when daylight returned, was most extraordinary; the masts, rigging, decks, and every part being covered with falling matter; it had the appearance of a calcined pumice stone, nearly the colour of wood ashes; it lay in heaps of a foot in depth in many parts of the deck, and I am convinced several tons weight were thrown overboard.
¹⁷

For years after 1815, ships encountered vast islands of pumice stone as far away as the Indian Ocean, thousands of kilometers to the west. These great pumice pontoons were littered with burnt slivers of trees, the carbonized residue of Sumbawa’s once dense and valuable forests.

During the eruption, on Borneo to the north, where the earth shook amid a great roar, the indigenous people believed the sky was falling, while on the eastern coast of Java, the birds kept a stunned silence until 11:00 the next morning. Visibility shrank to a few feet, so thick was the fallout. Driven west by the beginning monsoon, Tambora’s ash cloud consumed Sumbawa and Lombok before descending on Bali, covering the island in ash a half-meter deep.
¹⁸
The same gigantic cloud “dreary and terrific”—Tambora’s pyroclastic plumes drifting westward—could then be seen approaching the Javan shore from the direction of Bali, and the air grew very cold.
¹⁹
Across a 600-kilometer radius, darkness descended for two days, while Tambora’s ash cloud expanded to cover a region nearly the size of the continental United States. The entire Southeast Asian region was blanketed in volcanic debris for a week. Day after dark day, British officials conducted business by candlelight, as the death toll mounted.