Disturbing History - The Year Without a Summer

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

In June of 1816, snow fell on Vermont and killing frost swept through New England in the middle of what should have been the growing season. Frost returned in July and again in August, the corn crop collapsed across the northern states, and families who grew their own food watched a year's survival vanish from the fields. Nobody in America knew why.In this episode I trace the answer back 14 months and 10,000 miles to Mount Tambora in the Indonesian archipelago, where the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history blew away the top mile of a mountain in April of 1815, killed on the order of 100,000 people, and threw a veil of sulfur into the stratosphere that dimmed the sun over the entire planet.I walk through the eyewitness accounts collected by Stamford Raffles, the science of how a single eruption starves a hemisphere, and the American year that followed, the dead sheared sheep, the sunspot panic, the mackerel dinners, the seed corn crisis of 1817, and the preachers who read the failed summer as divine judgment. The cold pushed thousands of families out of New England and helped fill Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and it carried one Vermont farm family to Palmyra, New York, where their 10-year-old son Joseph Smith would grow up to found an American religion.Across the Atlantic the same volcanic winter brought famine to Switzerland, typhus to Ireland, and bread riots to England, and it trapped Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori in a rain-locked villa on Lake Geneva, where a ghost story contest produced Frankenstein and the modern vampire in the same month.From the buried kingdom of Tambora to the frost-killed cornfields of Vermont, this is the story of the Year Without a Summer, told through the diaries, ledgers, and letters of people who lived through a climate disaster no one on earth could explain.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. On the morning of June 6th, 1816, farmers across northern New England walked out of their houses and found winter standing in their fields. Snow was falling in Vermont in the second week of June. Newly sheared sheep

froze to death in their pastures. Corn that had just broken the soil turned black. Before the year was over, frost would strike in every month of the growing season. The harvest would collapse, food prices would triple, and thousands of families would abandon farms their grandfathers had cleared and head west. Nobody in America knew why it was happening. The answer was hanging invisibly in the sky above their heads, and it had come from a mountain on the other side of the world,

a mountain that had torn itself apart 14 months earlier in the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history. This is the story of the year without a summer, the cold that starved America, and the strange places that cold reached before it was done. On the 5th of June 1816, it was warm in New England. In parts of Vermont and New Hampshire, the temperature climbed into the 80s. Farmers had their corn in the ground.

Most of it planted late because the spring had been cold and stubborn, and a hot day in early June felt like the season finally turning the way it was supposed to turn. That night, the wind swung around to the northwest. By the morning of June 6th, the temperature had fallen. 40 degrees in some places. Rain turned to sleet, and sleet turned to snow. Not flurries that melted on contact, though there was plenty of that in southern New England, but real accumulating snow in the hill country of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

In Danville, Vermont, the local newspaper, the North Star, reported snow and sleet falling for hours, with the hills around town whitened like January. Travelers in the higher elevations reported drifts. In Quebec City, a few hundred miles north, the snow piled up close to a foot deep, and people drove sleighs through the streets in the second week of June. The cold held on for the better part of a week. On the nights of June 7th and 8th, a hard freeze came down across the interior of New England, the kind of freeze that turned standing water to ice and kills anything green that isn't rooted deep. Farmers had sheared their sheep in late May, the way they did every year,

because sheep carrying a full fleece into summer heat will suffer. Those naked sheep were now standing in snow. Thousands of them died. There are accounts from Vermont of farmers finding wild birds dead in their fields and dooryards, songbirds that had flown north on schedule and then simply froze. Some farmers reported birds so desperate for warmth, they flew into open barns and houses. The corn was the real casualty. Corn was the foundation crop of the northern farm economy.

The thing that fed the family, fed the hogs, fed the cattle through winter. A June freeze killed it right down to the ground. Farmers walked their fields on June 9th and 10th looking at rows of blackened seedlings, and then most of them did the only thing they could do, which was replant and hope. A clockmaker in Plymouth, Connecticut, named Chauncey Jerome later wrote in his memoir about working outdoors that June, in a thick overcoat and mittens, and about clothes laid out to dry. that froze stiff. He remembered it decades later because it never happened again in his lifetime. You don't forget the year you needed winter clothes in June. One detail matters for everything that

follows in this story. Those farmers had no forecast. There was no weather service, no telegraph, no way for anyone in Vermont to know what the atmosphere was doing over the Great Lakes or the North Atlantic. Weather arrived unannounced and when it left, nobody could tell you whether it was a fluke or the start of something. So when the June snow melted and the sun came back out, people replanted their corn and told each other it had been a freak cold snap. Strange, sure, worth talking about it at the meeting house. But a one-time thing. But it wasn't a one-time thing. Frost came back in July. It came back again in August, twice, and the August frost finished what June had started. Across the northern half of New England, the corn crop of 1816 essentially did not exist.

in a society where most families grew most of what they ate, that is not an inconvenience. That's a survival problem. And through all of it, from the June snow to the August frost to the hungry spring that followed, nobody in America could tell you why. The newspaper's guest, the preachers preached.

Farmers studied the sky and argued about sunspots. Some people quietly concluded that the climate itself was failing, that the earth was cooling towards some permanent winter. Others concluded that God was sending a message, and they acted on that conclusion in ways that ended up reshaping American religion. Thousands of families gave up on New England entirely, and rolled west, and that migration helped fill Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and it carried one particular farm family out of Vermont, whose 10-year-old son would go on to found an entirely new American faith. All of it traced back to a single event that almost no one in the United States connected to their dead corn, because the event had happened more than a year earlier and roughly 10,000 miles away.

So let me take you there, because the eruption itself is one of the most violent things that has happened on this planet in the last thousand years, and most people have never heard of it. The island of Sumbawa sits in the Indonesian archipelago, east of Java and Bali, in what was then called the Dutch East Indies. In 1815, the region was actually under British control because the Napoleonic Wars had scrambled colonial holdings all over the globe. And the man running Java for the British was a lieutenant governor named Thomas Stamford Raffles,

the same raffles who would later found Singapore. That accident of imperial politics matters to us for one reason. Raffles was a compulsive documentary. He collected reports, sent officers to ensure. investigate things and wrote it all down. Because of him, we have eyewitness accounts of what happened on Sumbawa, and without him, we would know far less. On the northern peninsula of Sumbawa stood a volcano called Mount Tambora. Before April of 1815, it was one of the tallest peaks in the Indies, rising somewhere around 14,000 feet above the sea. The people living around it

had no reason to think of it as dangerous. There was no tradition of eruption in living memory. Villages sat on its slopes and around its base, and the peninsula supported a small, independent kingdom, also called Tambora, with its own ruler, its own trade in honey and horses and sandalwood, and its own language, a language that linguists now believe was unrelated to the Malay languages spoken around it. That last detail is going to matter again at the very end of this episode. The mountain started talking in early April. On the evening of April 5th, 1815, a series of explosions rolled across the Java Sea. On Java itself, hundreds of miles from Sumbawa, the sounds were so sharp and so regular that British officers assumed they were hearing

cannon fire. This is documented in the accounts raffles collected. Troops were mobilized in the interior of Java because commanders thought a neighboring post was under attack. On the coast, boats went out looking for a ship in distress because the booming sounded like distress signals fired at sea. Nobody found a ship. The sound was a mountain clearing its throat from as far as 800 miles away. For the next five days, Tambora rumbled and coughed ash, heavily enough that ash fell on the eastern end of Java. And then, on the evening of April 10th, the mountain let go. The best surviving eyewitness account comes from the ruler of Sangar, a small kingdom on the peninsula next to the volcano. Raffles sent an officer,

Lieutenant Owen Phillips, to Sumbawa afterward to distribute rice and gather information, and Phillips took down the ruler's description. According to that account, at about seven in the evening, three distinct columns of flame rose from the summit and merged into one, and the whole mountain appeared to turn into what he described as liquid fire. Stones fell out of the sky at Sengar, some of them by his description, as big as a man's fist. Then came a wind unlike anything anyone there had experienced, a violent whirlwind that tore off roofs,

carried them away, uprooted trees, and by the ruler's account lifted horses and cattle off the ground. The sea rose and came ashore, a tsunami that struck coastal settlements around the region, with waves reported over 12 feet in places. What was happening in the language of modern volcanology is that the eruption column had grown so massive that it collapsed under its own weight,

sending pyroclastic flows down every side of the mountain. A pyroclastic flow is an avalanche of superheated gas, ash, and rock, moving at highway speeds or faster, and it kills essentially everything in its path. The flows off Tambora reached the sea on multiple sides of the peninsula and boiled into it. The village of Tambora, the seat of that little kingdom I mentioned, was buried. Everyone in the path of the flows died.

The reasonable essence of the rivered. estimates put the immediate death toll on Sumbawa at 10,000 to 12,000 people, killed by the flows, the falling rock, and the tsunami. The eruption continued in force for days and did not fully quiet down for months. When it was over, Mount Tambora had blown away roughly the top mile of itself. A mountain of about 14,000 feet now stood at a little over 9,000, with a caldera at the summit close to four miles across and well over half a mile deep. The volume of rock and ash thrown out is estimated in the tens of cubic miles. For comparison, the famous eruption of Crockatoa in 1883, the one everybody has heard of,

was several times smaller. Mount St. Helens in 1980 was smaller than Tambora, by a factor of somewhere around 100 in terms of erupted material. Volcanologists rate eruptions on an explosivity index that runs from zero to eight. And Tambora is the only eruption in recorded human history, confidently rated a seven. The ash cloud turned day to night across the region. On islands hundreds of miles away, the accounts raffles gathered described darkness so complete at midday

that you could not see your hand in front of your face, lasting in some places for a day or more. Ash fell measurably on Borneo and Sulawesi. The sea around Sumbawa was so thick with floating pumice that ships plowed through rafts of it, and vessels crossing those waters years later were still reporting pumice fields miles wide drifting on the currents. Then the famine started. The ash had buried cropland across Sumbawa and the neighboring island of Lombok. It fouled the fresh water.

The rice was gone. The livestock were dead or dying and disease moved through the survivors. People sold what they had and then sold themselves or their children into servitude for food and then starved anyway. Phillips reported villages emptied out. The dead left. along the roads. When historians tally the eruptions toll in the Indies, counting the flows, the tsunami, the starvation, and the disease that followed, the estimates generally land somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000 dead. Whatever the exact number, Tambora killed more people than any other volcanic eruption in recorded history, and it had not even started on the rest of the world yet. The suffering in the Indies was visible and immediate, and the British

and Dutch recordkeepers wrote it down. But nobody on earth in 1815 understood that the most far-reaching part of the eruption was the part you couldn't see, the part that went up instead of out. A big explosive eruption doesn't just throw rock. It injects gas, and the gas that matters for climate is sulfur dioxide. Tambora blasted tens of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide not just into the sky, but through it, past the weather layer of the atmosphere and up into the stratosphere, somewhere above 15 miles high. That altitude is the whole ballgame. Ash is heavy, and it rains out of the lower atmosphere in days or weeks. But up in the stratosphere, there is no rain to wash anything out. The sulfur dioxide reacted with water vapor and turned into a haze

of tiny sulfuric acid droplets, what scientists call a sulfate aerosol, veil. And that veil just stayed up there, riding the stratospheric winds. Over the following months, the veil spread. First, it wrapped around the tropics, carried by high-altitude winds, and then it worked its way toward both poles, until by late 1815 and into 1816. A thin, reflective film of volcanic sulfur covered essentially the entire planet. Each droplet was microscopic, but there were unimaginable numbers of them, and together they did. They did one thing very efficiently. They bounced a fraction of the incoming sunlight back into space

before it could reach the ground. Dim the sun even slightly and the whole climate system feels it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The best modern estimates say Tambora knocked global average temperatures down by something like 1 degree Fahrenheit, with some regions cooling considerably more. One degree doesn't sound like much until you

understand that climate averages are like a person's core body temperature. Small moves in the average produce big moves at the extremes. A cooler atmosphere shifted storm tracks, weakened the Asian monsoon, and let outbreaks of polar air plunge farther south, deeper into the summer than they otherwise would have. That is what kept marching down out of Canada into New England in June, July, and August of 1816.

And I need to add an honest complication. because the real story has one. Tambora didn't act alone. The 1810s were already a cold decade before Tambora fired. Ice cores drilled from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which trap a chemical record of the atmosphere year by year, show a large sulfate spike in 1809 from another major tropical eruption, one so obscure that scientists still argue about which volcano did it.

Nobody witnessed it, or at least no account of it, has been securely identified. On top of that, the sun itself was running slightly quiet during this period. A stretch of low sunspot activity astronomers call the Dalton minimum. So the global climate was already leaning cold, and then Tambora hit it with the biggest sulfur injection in centuries. The 1810s ended up as one of the coldest decades in the last 500 years, and 1816 was the bottom of it. None of this was knowable at the time. There were no instruments that could detect a stratospheric aerosol layer. There was barely a science of the atmosphere at all.

What people could see were the side effects. And looking back, the side effects were everywhere. Through late 1815 and 1816, observers in Europe and America describe strangely spectacular sunsets, deep reds and oranges that lingered long after the sun went down. The sky lit up by volcanic particles scattering the light. Some accounts describe a persistent dry haze, a dimness to the sky that fog couldn't explain because it didn't burn off and didn't dampen anything. In parts of the northeastern United States during that period, people noted that the sun could sometimes be looked at directly, reddened and weakened, without hurting the

eyes. Nobody knew they were looking at Indonesia. They were, though. Every strange sunset was Tambora signing its work. There was exactly one well-known thinker on record who had already worked out the general idea, and he was 26 years dead. After the Lockheescher eruption in Iceland in 1783, filled European skies with haze, and was followed by a brutal winter, Benjamin Franklin wrote a paper suggesting that volcanic emissions might screen out sunlight and cool the earth. It was conjecture, but it was the right conjecture. In 1816, with Franklin gone, almost nobody in America reached for it. A handful of newspaper items over the following years floated volcanic dust as a possibility,

but it never took hold, and honestly, why would it? News of a volcano in the Dutch East Indies had appeared in American papers in 1815 as a brief foreign curiosity, months after the fact, and there was nothing connecting that item to a cold morning in Vermont. The distance between cause and effect was simply too big for the information systems of the day to bridge. That gap between what was happening and what anyone could know is where the fear grew. And to watch the fear grow, we have to go back to New England and live through the rest of that year. The year had felt off from the start.

The winter of 1815 and 16 was strange in its own right, mild in stretches across parts of the northeast, which farmers noted without alarm. Spring came in cold and stayed cold. May brought frost that nipped buds and killed early plantings in northern New England, and planting ran late almost everywhere. Late springs happened, though. On their own, none of these things would have earned the year, a place in memory. Then there were the sunspots. In the spring of 1816, a group of sunspots grew so large that people could see them with the naked eye, usually by looking for the sunspots. through smoked glass, sometimes just at sunrise or sunset when the sun was dim enough to study. Newspapers wrote about them. And when the cold kept coming, the sunspots became the leading

popular suspect. It was not a crazy theory. People could observe dark blemishes on the sun with their own eyes, and they could observe that the sun's warmth seemed to be failing, and they connected the two. Some argued the spots were cooling the sun directly. Others worried about what the spots might mean, whether the sun itself was sickening or burning out. The irony, which nobody could have appreciated, is that they had the right instinct pointed at the wrong object. Something really was dimming the sunlight reaching their fields. It just wasn't on the sun. It was a veil of volcanic acid floating 15 miles over their heads, far too thin to sea. Before we go back into the summer itself, I want to tell you how we actually know what we know about it, because the

Sourcing on this story is one of its quiet strengths. Scattered across New England in 1816 was a small, unofficial network of obsessive record keepers, and their paper is the bedrock everything else stands on. College men kept instrument records. At Yale and New Haven and at other colleges around the region, professors read thermometers at set hours every day, and wrote the numbers in ledgers, year after year, and those ledgers survive. There why we can say with confidence that June of 1816 wasn't just remembered as cold,

but measured as one of the coldest June's in the entire New Haven record, which runs back into the 1700s. Alongside the professors were the diarists, and New England bred diarists like it bred stone walls. Ministers, farmers, and merchants across the region kept daily journals, and in 1816, those journals fill up with weather. The Reverend William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, one of the great diary keepers of the age, tracked the strange season entry by entry. Farm diaries from Vermont and New Hampshire record the

frosts, the replanting, the state of the corn, in the flat bookkeeping prose of men writing for themselves. When a historian tells you frost struck such and such a town on such and such a night. This is where it comes from. Some farmer who wrote it down before bed, because his livelihood depended on remembering. I've already walked you through the June cold wave, the snow on the sixth, the killing freezes on the seventh and eighth, the dead sheep and the blackened corn. What I want to add is what people did next, because the response tells you who these people really were. They replanted. Corn mostly, though some farmers hedged and put in more of the crops that could take cold.

Crops like oats and rye and potatoes. But seed was not unlimited, so replanting was a gamble, and everyone knew it. A farmer who put his reserve seed corn in the ground in mid-June was betting that the calendar still meant something, that a freeze in June was an aberration, and the rest of the summer would behave. For a few weeks, it looked like the bet might pay. Late June turned genuinely hot in parts of New England. into the 90s in places, which tells you something important about how this year actually worked.

1816 was not uniformly cold. It swung. The volcanic veil had destabilized the pattern, so brutal cold snaps alternated with stretches of real summer heat, and the whiplash was part of what made the year impossible to read. If it had simply stayed cold, people would have written the season off early and saved their seed. Instead, the weather kept offering hope, and then taking it back. The 4th of July, 1816 was cold across much of New England. There are recollections of men playing outdoor games at Independence Day gatherings, wearing overcoats. In the days right after the holiday, frost came again to the northern interior,

to the higher towns of Vermont and New Hampshire and inland Maine, and took a share of the replanted corn. A drought had also settled in across a good part of the region by midsummer, So what the frost didn't kill, the dry weather stunted. Hay came in short, and every farmer in New England could do the arithmetic on short hay. Hay was winter fuel for the animals. Less hay meant fewer animals were going to see spring. August was the executioner.

Around the 20th of August, a frost struck that reached well beyond the usual cold hollows. And then in the last days of the month, around the 28th to the 30th, A harder freeze came down across the region and killed what was left. Corn needs a long frost-free run to ripen, and the 1816 season, chopped up by freezes at both ends and the middle, never gave it a chance. Across the northern half of New England, the corn either died outright or stood in the fields as what farmers called soft corn,

unripened ears with no hard kernel, worth something as pig feed, and not much else. In the far northern districts, even the hardy crops came up short. The wheat and rye harvests were thin. Potatoes, which handled cold better than corn, did comparatively well in many towns and quietly saved a lot of families,

which is its own preview of a European story we'll get to later. One pattern in the destruction is worth pausing on, because the farmers noticed it themselves and it shaped what happened next. The frost did not fall evenly. Cold air drains downhill on a still night and pools and valley bottoms, and big bodies of water hold summer heat and shelter the land beside them.

So the freezes of 1816 drew a strange, patchy map. There were towns where the corn on the low interval meadows died while fields partway up a slope came through, and lakeside and riverside farms that ripened at least some sound corn, while the hill country around them lost everything. Farmers read that map closely in the fall of 1816, because it told them where next year's seed would have to come from, and it quietly rearranged local standing. A man whose warm-lying fields had ripened corn in the year without a summer, held something more valuable than money by the following spring, and everyone in his town knew his name.

Fall came and people took stock, and the stock-taking was grim. I keep coming back to the structure of that economy, because a modern listener can miss it. These were not commercial farms feeding distant markets. These were households that grew their year's food in one season and stored it. The margin was the harvest. There was no national relief system, no crop insurance, no rail network to move Midwestern grain east, because there was no Midwestern grain and there were no rails. What a town had that winter was what its fields had produced, plus whatever could be bought,

and buying got ugly fast. Prices did what prices do when supply collapses. Corn that might normally have sold for around a dollar a bushel went to $2 and higher in parts of New England. And in the hardest-hit districts, reports from the following spring put scarce sound corn at several times the normal price. One commonly cited figure has oats,

the fuel for horses, jumping from around 12 cents a bushel to over 90 cents in the space of the crisis, which functioned like a gas price spike since horses were transportation. Hay grew so scarce that farmers faced a brutal fall calculation, and many resolved it the only way available. By slaughtering cattle they could not feed through the winter, that dumped meat onto the market cheap in the short term, and made everyone poorer in the long term, because those animals were capital.

A farmer eating his herd is a farmer eating his savings account. Families adapted and the adaptations got recorded because they were strange enough to remember. On the coast, people leaned hard on the sea, and mackerel in particular became such a staple of the hungry stretch that in parts of New England the period picked up the nickname of the mackerel year. Inland, people foraged like their frontier grandparents. Accounts from Vermont and New Hampshire described families boiling nettles and wild greens, digging wild turnips, and eating porcupines, which country people called hedgehogs. But despite it all, none of this added up. to mass starvation. New England in 1816 and 17 was hungry, pinched, and scared, and the poor suffered genuine want, and town poor relief rolls grew. But the region did not see famine mortality on any large scale. That distinction matters, because in Europe, as we'll see, the same volcanic

winter crossed the line that New England never quite crossed, and people died in the tens of thousands. The winter of 1816 and 17 is where the ledger of that failed summer came due, and it's worth slowing down inside it, because this is the stretch that earned the year its hungriest nicknames. Winter came early and settled in hard on a region that had gone into it with half-empty corn cribs and thin haymows. The fall slaughter had put meat on tables in November that was missing from barns by February.

Families stretched what they had, the way farm families knew how. thinner bread, more potatoes, more fish where fish could be had, meals built around whatever the failed season had spared. Grain moved into New England by sea from the mid-Atlantic states, where the harvest had been damaged but not destroyed. And the price of that grain by the time it reached an inland Vermont town, hauled by sled over winter roads, put it out of reach of exactly the people who needed it most. towns did what New England towns had done since the 1600s, which was look after their own poor through the town meeting, and the poor relief entries in town books from that winter in the following year

tell their own story. More names, more grants of firewood and meal, more warnings out of transient poor that towns feared they couldn't afford to support. Ministers preached charity sermons. Neighbors carried sacks of meal to households that had run out, and some of the surviving town histories name the men who did it, because that kind of thing got remembered. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. Nobody was keeping famine statistics. And as I said, New England did not tip into famine. What the record shows instead is a season of grinding universal shortage, the kind where nearly everyone is hungrier and poorer than the year before. The old and the sick go into the cold months with no reserve and a bad, fever in a weakened household, does quiet work that no one ever attributes to a volcano. The sharpest pain actually arrived the following spring, and it arrived in the form that shows

how subsistence farming really worked, which was seed. To plant in 1817, you needed sound seed corn from the 1816 harvest and across whole districts. Sound corn from 1816 barely existed. The little that had ripened, mostly from favored spots, low warm fields near water, suddenly carried the whole regions next year on its back. Prices for seed corn in the spring of 1817 hit levels nobody had seen, with accounts of four and five dollars a bushel in the hardest-pressed areas. And there are town histories that describe farmers traveling long distances, chasing rumors of a man with sound seed to sell. When you read about the desperation of that spring, that's the shape of it. Not just an empty pantry, but an empty future, unless somebody's seed came through.

Some people freeze, some improvise, some look for a villain, and some look for a message. New England in 1816 ran through that whole range, and since there was no police report to pull and no science to consult, the search for explanation went to the two institutions the region actually had, the newspaper and the pulpit. The newspapers of 1816 make for fascinating reading, because you can watch intelligent people work a problem with no good evidence and a lot of pressure. Editors printed weather reports from other towns, which was about the only data sharing that existed, and readers could at least learn that the cold was regional, not local. That was cold comfort in the literal sense.

Then came the theories, and the theories in circulation over that year, and the years just after cover a remarkable range. Sunspots led the field, for the reasons I described. Others reached for ice. There were reports of unusual amounts of sea ice drifting in the North Atlantic, and newspaper writers argued that great ice fields had broken loose in the Arctic, and were chilling the winds that crossed them on the way to America. Other writers blamed earthquakes for disturbing the order of the seasons.

There was a running argument, older than this crisis, about whether clearing America's forests was changing the climate, though that debate cut the wrong direction, since the popular version held that clearingland made a country warmer, which the year 1816 seemed to flatly contradict. And there was a strain of theorizing, part joke and part genuine suspicion, that blamed Benjamin Franklin's lightning rods for draining the electrical fire out of the earth and disturbing nature's balance.

Franklin, dead for 26 years, was the one man who had published the actual answer, and the public discourse had him as a suspect instead. Here's the detail from the newspaper record that I find most striking, and it's an absence rather than a presence. American papers had actually carried the news of Tambora. Word of a tremendous volcanic eruption in the East Indies crossed the oceans at the speed of sailing ships, which meant months,

and items describing the disaster on Sumbawa showed up in British and American papers in the later part of 1815, drawn from the accounts coming out of Java. readers in Boston or New York could have learned that a mountain in the Indies had exploded with terrible loss of life. And then the item did what foreign disaster items did. It ran its course as a curiosity and disappeared. When the summer failed the following year,

essentially nobody in the American press reached back to that story because there was no framework that connected a far-off eruption to next year's frost. The two facts sat in the same newspapers, sometimes probably in the same reader's memory, unlinked. As someone who has spent a lot of hours connecting records that were never meant to talk to each other, I find that gap almost physically frustrating to look at across two centuries. The answer had been printed, but nobody knew it was an answer. Underneath the theorizing ran a darker current, which the papers reflected in a quieter way.

People began to ask whether the change was permanent, whether the seasons had shifted for good, whether the earth was cooling towards something that would end agriculture in the northern states. That fear sounds extravagant until you put yourself behind their eyes. They had two data points that mattered. Last year and this year, no baseline records worth anything, no theory of climate, and a growing season that had just failed for reasons no one could name. A permanent cooling was not a fringe reading of the evidence available to them. It was one of the more logical ones.

And then there was the pulpit, which had an explanation ready-made. New England in 1816 was still a deeply Protestant society. Drought, plague, frost, and blight were understood in scripture as instruments, the kind of thing a displeased God sends to call a people back. Preachers across the region took up the failed summer in exactly those terms, as a judgment and a warning, and congregations heard sermons on the withered harvest drawn from the prophets. The Book of Joel, which describes a land stripped of its crops and a call to repentance,

was tailor-made for the moment. I'm not interested in mocking those congregations, because given their information, the theological reading was doing the same work every other theory was doing, which is filling an explanatory vacuum with the tools at hand. What I am interested in is consequences, and the consequences were real and measurable. Religious revivals swept through New England and upstate New York in 1816 and 1817.

Church admission records from the period show membership surging in town after town. Historians of American religion count those years among the waves of what became known as the Second Great Awakening. And while revivals have many causes and were already a feature of the era, contemporaries themselves drew the line between the fearful seasons and the crowded meeting houses. When the natural world stops making sense, the supernatural market booms. I've seen the small-scale version of that dynamic in crisis situations in my own career. 1816 ran the experiment on an entire region. Some of the anxiety went past revival and into outright end-times reading.

Scattered accounts describe people treating the June snow and the red-dimmed sun as signs of the last days. And you can understand the reasoning, because a darkened sun is. is straight out of the apocalyptic playbook of Scripture. Most of New England did not go there. Most people gritted through the year as bad providence rather than final judgment. But the season left a deposit of religious dread in the region's soil, especially in the districts of Vermont and upstate New York, that would spend the next two decades erupting in revivals,

new sex, and new profits so regularly that upstate New York earned the nickname of the Burndover District. That district is where one thread of this story leads, because the year without a summer physically moved at least one family into that landscape. First, though, I want to widen the lens inside America, because this was not just a New England event, and one of the best documented victims was a former president. Thomas Jefferson was 73 years old in 1816, retired at Monticello, and farming for income he badly needed because Jefferson was chronically, catastrophically in debt.

Virginia caught its own version of the year. The cold reached deep into the south that summer, with frost damage reported at points well below the Mason-Dixon line, and Virginia paired the cold with a severe drought. Jefferson's own correspondence from that fall describes the season as extraordinary, with the harvest around him falling drastically short, and in a letter to his old Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, he laid out just how miserable the agricultural year had been in his neighborhood. For Jefferson personally, the failed crops of 1816, followed by more bad years, tightened the debt spiral that would eventually consume Monticello itself after his death.

I'm not going to claim Tambora bankrupted Thomas Jefferson because his finances were a self-inflicted disaster decades in the making. But the volcano kicked him while he was down, and his letters are one of the clearest windows we have into how the year looked from the mid-Atlantic. Farther south and west, the damage shaded off, and that gradient is the hinge of the next part of the story. The Ohio Valley and the new lands beyond it had a rough year too, but a survivable one, and the contrast did not go unnoticed. Letters came back east, land agents advertised, and a lot of New England farmers standing in dead cornfields started doing a new kind of arithmetic. Migration out of New England was not new. The region's hill farms were rocky, tired, and small, and young people

had been leaking west since the revolution. What the year without a summer did was convert a leak into a rush. The logic was brutally simple. A farm that could not reliably ripen corn was not a farm, and after 1816, thousands of families in northern New England concluded that their land had just told them what it was. The phrase people used at the time was Ohio fever, and the fever spiked hard in 1816 and 1817. The numbers, as far as they can be reconstructed, back up the stories. Vermont, which had been one of the fastest growing places in America for decades, essentially stopped growing. The census counted Vermont's population growth across the whole decade, from 1810 to 1820 at just a few thousand people, a stunning flatline for a young farm.

farm state, with big families, and historians of the state generally credit the cold years with driving out somewhere in the range of 10 to 15,000 Vermonters in the aftermath of 1816. Maine saw its own surge of departures during the same window. Town histories across northern New England record the same scene in different words. Families auctioning what they couldn't carry. Wagons headed for the turnpikes. Farms going up for sale with no buyers because everyone selling had the same idea at once. Where they went, the country changed shape. The westward stream helped swell Ohio,

poured into the Genesee country of western New York, and pushed into Indiana and Illinois at exactly the moment those territories were bidding for statehood. Indiana entered the union in December of 1816. Illinois followed two years later, but the fact is that migration had plenty of engines, besides the weather. Cheap federal land,

the end of the war of 1812, the collapse of Indian resistance in the northwest after the war, all of that was pulling people west, regardless. Tambora didn't create the road. What the famine year did was shove a lot of hesitating families through a door they were already standing in front of,

and it concentrated the shove into a couple of years. Population historians looking at the spike in land sales and new settlement in 1816 and 1817 consistently find the cold years fingerprints on it. Now let me tell you about one of those families. In 1816, a farmer named Joseph Smith Sr. was living in Norwich, Vermont, with his wife Lucy and their children. The family had already been ground down by years of bad luck

and a failed business venture, and they were renting farmland, working other people's soil. According to the family's own history, written later by Lucy, their crops in Norwich failed three years running. And the third failure was the summer that never came. 1816. That was the end of Vermont for Joseph Smith, Sr. He went ahead to Western New York, to the town of Palmyra in the Genesee country,

and sent for the family, and Lucy brought the children out to join him. One of those children was a boy of about ten, the couple's namesake, Joseph Smith Jr. Palmyra sat in the heart of the burned over district, that stretch of upstate New York I mentioned, where revival, fires swept through so often in those years. The Smith family landed in a religious environment at full boil, competing preachers, camp meetings, families splitting over which church held the truth. By his own later account, the young Joseph Smith was troubled by exactly that competition, the problem of which of the contending churches to join. Out of that setting over the following

decade and a half came his reported visions, the Book of Mormon, and in 1830 the founding of the church that became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Today, a worldwide faith counted in the millions. Nobody can say Tambora caused Mormonism. What the record supports is narrower, and to me, more interesting. A volcanic eruption in Indonesia wrecked three growing seasons worth of hope for one Vermont family. That documented failure is the reason the family itself gave for leaving.

And the move placed a religiously preoccupied 10-year-old in the one American landscape most saturated with revivalism at its most feverish moment. A fever, the cold years, had helped stoke. Every link in that chain is attested. What the chain adds up to, how much weight the volcano really carries in the story of a world religion, is a judgment call, and historians who studied this period make it in different sizes. The geography, though, is not in dispute. The road from Norwich, Vermont to Palmyra, New York,

runs through the year without a summer. New England itself came out of the crisis changed in quieter ways. The scare pushed farmers toward hardier crops and better methods, and the years right after saw a boom in agricultural societies, county fairs, and farm journals across the region. Institutions built by men who had just watched tradition fail and wanted something better than folklore to farm by. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Some historians see the episode as one of the nudges that tilted New England's long slide, away from grain farming toward livestock, wool, and eventually the mills. The hill farms that emptied in 1816 and 17 mostly never refilled.

If you've ever hiked in Vermont or New Hampshire and come across a stone wall running through mature forest, miles from anything, you've walked through the physical residue of that abandonment, Walls that once penned sheep and framed cornfields, left behind by families whose decision year, in a lot of cases, was the year it snowed in June. That's the American story, the hunger, the fear, the migration, the revival. Now I have to take you across the Atlantic because everything America suffered in 1816, Europe suffered worse. And it's in Europe that the volcano did the thing it is most famous for, among people who know this story at all. It helped write a monster. Europe in 1816 was a continent with no shock absorbers left.

The Napoleonic Wars had ended at Waterloo barely a year before Tambora's veil arrived overhead. Economies were exhausted. Treasuries were empty. Hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers were looking for work, and trade was still untangling itself from two decades of blockade and war. Into that convalescent patient walked the coldest, wetest summer in living memory. Where New England got frost, Western Europe mostly got rain, cold rain that barely let up through the summer of 1816, and the rain did to wheat and oats what the frost did to corn.

Harvests failed or came in badly across the British Isles, France, the low countries, the German states, and Switzerland. Grain prices roughly doubled across much of the continent within a year, and in the worst-hit inland regions, they went far higher. The historian John Post, who wrote the standard study of this crisis, called it the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world. And the phrase is stuck because it's accurate. This was the final time that weather alone pushed large parts of Western Europe over the line from hardship into actual famine. The social order strained visibly. In England, hungry laborers in the eastern counties rose in the spring of 1816 under slogans demanding bread or blood, smashing property and riots that ended with troops, trials, and hangings.

France saw grain riots and had to move harvests under armed guard as crowds attacked shipments. The German lands hit bottom in the famine year of 1817, and in the southwestern kingdom of Wurttemberg, the disaster cut deep enough that King Wilhelm I founded an agricultural school. And, with the first good harvest, an annual harvest festival at Kandstadt, to modernize farming and mark the recovery. That festival never stopped. It runs in Stuttgart to this day as one of the largest folk festivals in the world, which means there are people drinking beer in a festival tent every autumn at a party that exists because of Mount Tambora, and almost none of them know it. Thousands of Germans didn't wait for recovery. 1816 and 17 sent columns of immigrant families down the Rhine to the ports.

Many of them bound for America, one of the first big waves of the German migration that would reshape the American Midwest. Switzerland may have had it worst in the West. Landlocked, mountainous, and dependent on its own thin harvests, parts of Switzerland crossed into true famine in 1816 and 17. Reports from the worst districts describe people eating moss, sorrel, and boiled nettles, and mortality in some Swiss regions rose measurably above normal.

The cold also fed the alpine glaciers, and that had a delayed cost. In the Valdaban, an advancing glacier dammed a river with ice. The lake behind the dam grew, and in 1818, the dam failed, and the flood killed dozens of people downstream. Even the ice was collecting Tambora's debts years later, in Ireland. Ireland's rains ruined the oat harvest and rotted potatoes in the ground, and hunger came in over 1816 and 17. And with the hunger came typhus, the classic famine fever, spread by life, through crowded, weakened populations.

The epidemic ran through Ireland into 1819, and the estimates for excess deaths in Ireland from the famine and fever of those years run into the tens of thousands, with some scholars putting the toll near 100,000. It was, in miniature, a preview of the catastrophe that would hit Ireland 30 years later, down to the potato and the fever,

and like the later famine it unfolded under a government in London that responded slowly and inadequate, When we count Tambora's dead, the Irish typhus graves belong in the ledger. So that's the backdrop, a hungry, frightened, rain-hammered continent. Now put a small group of English tourists on the shore of Lake Geneva in June of 1816, in the middle of all of it. The poet Lord Byron had fled England that spring, one step ahead of scandal, debt, and a collapsed marriage, and he settled into a rented house called the Villa Diodati, above the lake,

bringing along his young personal physician, John Palladoury. Nearby in a smaller house stayed the poet Percy Shelley, traveling with an 18-year-old named Mary Godwin, who would soon be Mary Shelley, and Mary's step-sister Claire Claremont, who had engineered the whole rendezvous because she was pregnant with Byron's child. The plan, as much as there was one, involved boating, riding, and alpine scenery.

Tambora had other ideas. The lakeside summer they'd come for did not. exist. The party's own letters and journals from that June describe relentless rain, cold, and violent thunderstorms over the lake, weather that pinned them indoors at Diodati for days at a stretch. Mary later famously remembered it as a wet, ungenial summer. Confined to the villa, the group passed the nights the way clever bored people did then, talking. The conversations ran to galvanism and the reanimation of dead matter. The scientific gossip of the day, and to ghost stories.

They had been reading aloud from a French collection of German ghost tales. And at some point in mid-June, Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story of their own. Out of that parlor game came two monsters.

Mary, by her own later account, struggled for days to think of a story, until a night of talk about experiments on dead tissue, left her with a horrifying, waking vision of a student, kneeling beside the thing he had put together,

watching it stir. She started writing it down. Percy encouraged her to extend it, and over the following year and a half, the ghost story grew into a novel. Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus, was published in January of 1818, when its author was 20 years old.

It has never been out of print, and there's a fair argument that it founded science fiction as a genre. Palladori, the doctor, took a fragment Byron had started and abandoned, and worked it up into a short tale about a corpse pale aristocratic predator who moves through high society feeding on the living, a character transparently modeled on his employer. The vampire was published in 1819, initially and infuriatingly under Byron's name,

and it took off across Europe. Vampires existed in folklore long before Palladouri, but the vampire, as we mostly imagine him, the elegant, seductive gentleman monster, walks out of that same rain-locked summer. Bram Stoker's Dracula, eight decades later, is that character's direct descendant. Byron's own contribution to the season wasn't the abandoned fragment. In July, he wrote a poem called Darkness, which opens with the line, I had a dream, which was not all a dream,

and goes on to imagine the sun extinguished and mankind freezing and starving in an unlit world, burning forests and thrones for warmth and finally turning on itself. Scholars connect the poem directly to that summer, and some accounts point to specific days when the darkness and gloom over the region were remarkable enough to comment on. Whatever the immediate trigger, Byron was doing consciously what the preachers in New England were doing scripturally, taking a summer where the sun had visibly failed and following the failure to its imagined end.

He just didn't know, any more than they did, that the dimming had an address and a date, a mountain on Sumbawa, and the evening of April 10, 1815. The eruption through a veil over the sun. The veil wrecked a summer. The wrecked summer trapped five specific people in a villa with a book of ghost stories. And out of that trap came Frankenstein's creature and the modern vampire, the two load-bearing monsters of Western horror, both conceived in the same house and the same month,

both children of the same volcano. In nearly 40 years of chasing strange stories, I've not run into many stranger chains of custody than that one. The veil didn't stop at the edges of the Western world, and I'd be selling the story short if I let the map end at Geneva, because the deadliest chapters may have been the ones the Western newspapers never heard about at all. In southwestern China, in the mountain province of Yunnan, the cold arrived the same way it did in Vermont, as summers that failed. Chinese records document three consecutive ruined rice harvests in Yunnan, beginning in 1815, killed by cold and unseasonable weather. What followed was full famine.

The provincial records and local accounts describe grain prices out of reach, government relief overwhelmed, and families driven to the last resorts of famine everywhere, including parents selling children to keep both alive. A local poet named Li Yu Yang lived through it and wrote about it directly, verses about the cold rains and about what hunger did to his neighbors, and his poems have become primary sources for historians reconstructing the disaster. The scholar Gillen Darcy Wood, who wrote one of the major modern books on Tambora,

has argued that the famine years pushed Yunnan's farmers toward a hardier and more profitable crop than rice, the opium poppy, and that the province's later emergence as a great opium-producing region has roots in the volcanic famine. That argument is just that, an argument, a scholarly interpretation rather than a settled fact, but the famine itself is not in question. Yunnan buried its dead by the tens of thousands. India's story is more contested. The eruption disrupted the Asian monsoon, in 1816 and 17 brought drought

and then flooding out of season to parts of the subcontinent. In 1817, a virulent epidemic of cholera broke out in Bengal and began to spread, first with armies and trade across India, then over the following decades along shipping routes to the rest of the planet. In the first of the great cholera pandemics that would eventually reach and terrorize Europe and America.

Some scholars, would among them, have argued that Tambora's scrambling of the monsoon created the conditions in Bengal that let the epidemic strain emerge and explode when it did. Other researchers push back and consider the link unproven, since cholera was endemic to Bengal long before the volcano. I can't settle that fight for you, and I won't pretend to. What I can say is that the timing is real, The pandemic is real. And the question of whether the world's first cholera pandemic belongs on Tambora's account

is a live scientific and historical debate. Not a crank theory and not a certainty. The far north produced one last strange ripple. In the years right after the eruption, whalers coming back from the waters around Greenland reported the Arctic ice unusually broken up and open, with enormous quantities of ice apparently having drifted south into the Atlantic. that news reached the British Admiralty, where an official named John Barrow had been itching

to revive Arctic exploration, and the reports of open water helped him make his case. In 1818, Britain launched fresh naval expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage, opening the great and often fatal era of Victorian polar exploration. The physics of why a cooling event coincided with reports of loosened Arctic ice is still discussed, and I'll spare you the details of the argument. The paper trail from Whalers reports to Barrow's expeditions, though, is solid, and it adds one more entry to the list of things the eruption touched. Even the search for the Northwest Passage carries a little volcanic ash on its boots. There's also a small, half-charming footnote from Germany that I'll pass along with the

appropriate warning label. In 1817, in Baden, an inventor named Carl Dreis, unveiled a two-wheeled running machine, the ancestor of the bicycle. Some writers have suggested a connection to the famine, reasoning that oats had become ruinously expensive, horses were being given up, and a horseless personal vehicle suddenly had a market. It's a tidy story. It is also, as far as I can tell, an inference nobody can nail to Drice's own stated motives, so take it as a maybe. Even if it's just a coincidence of timing, I like knowing that the bicycle and Frankenstein are the same age, and that both were born in the shadow of the same dirty sky. The weather broke eventually.

1817 was still a lean, cold, nervous year in much of the affected world, since the aerosol veil took time to settle out of the stratosphere, but the summers began climbing back toward normal, and by 1818 and 19, the crisis was over as a matter of climate. Grain prices came down, in some places crashing hard enough to cause a whole whole different set of economic problems for farmers who had borrowed against famine prices. The panic faded. The sunsets went back to ordinary, and the year without a summer passed into local memory as a story old men told, the year of the two winters, the year it snowed in June. The explanation took another hundred years to arrive. Through the 19th century, the pieces

accumulated without assembling. Crockatoa's eruption in 1883 gave scientists a smaller scale rerun. complete with worldwide brilliant sunsets and measurable dimming of sunlight, and observers started taking the idea of volcanic influence on climate seriously. In the early 20th century, an American meteorologist named William Humphreys pulled the threads together, arguing in detail that volcanic dust and haze in the high atmosphere could depress global temperatures, and pointing at Tambora as the cause of 1816. The clincher came decades later from the ice. When scientists learned to drill deep cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and read them layer by layer,

they found the sulfuric acid fallout of Tambora, sitting right there in the snow of 1815 and 16, at both ends of the Earth, exactly as a global stratospheric veil predicts. Tree ring records from around the northern hemisphere show 1816 as a year of stunted growth and frost damage. Modern climate models fed with Tambora's sulfur output reproduce the cold. The case, at this point, is about as closed as historical science gets. The farmers were right that something had dimmed their sun. It just took humanity a century to find the fingerprints. Beyond reasonable dispute, Tambora erupted in April of 1815 as the largest eruption in recorded history,

killed on the order of 100,000 people in the Indies, and veiled the planet in stratospheric sulfur that drove 1816's global cold. That cold destroyed harvests across the northern hemisphere, brought frost through the New England summer, famine to Europe and Union, and typhus to Ireland. Strongly supported, though tangled with other causes, are the surge of westward migration out of New England, the revival wave in the churches,

the German immigration to America, and the birth of Frankenstein and the modern vampire in a rain-locked villa. Genuinely contested are the cholera pandemic and the opium fields of Unan. And past all of that stretches a category no one can quantify. The ordinary private losses. The farm sold.

The marriage postponed. The child who didn't survive a hungry winter fever. All the small histories bent by a mountain nobody involved had ever heard of. That last point is the one I keep coming back to. Because it's the actual lesson of the evidence. Every person in this story acted inside a fog of missing information. The Vermont farmer replanting doomed corn, the preacher reading Joel over a frostbitten congregation.

The newspaper editor squinting at sunspots through smoked glass. Mary Godwin listening to the rain on Lake Geneva. The Raja of Sengar watching three columns of fire become one. None of them could see the whole. We can. And it took ice cores, tree rings, colonial archives, and two centuries to build the sight line. There's one more piece of the record I want to leave you with, and it's the one I mentioned at the beginning. In 2004, a team led by the volcanologist Haraldor Sigurdson dug into the buried flank of Tambora

and found the remains of a house from the vanished kingdom, sealed under the deposits of April 1815 with the carbonized remains of two people inside, along with bronze bowls, ceramics, and the other furniture of an interrupted life. The site has been called the Pompeii of the East. An excavation there has barely scratched what the flows entombed. And of the kingdom's language, that isolated tongue unrelated to its neighbors. What survives is a word list. A few dozen words that raffles as people wrote down from survivors before the famine, and the diaspora finished what the eruption started.

That's it. That's the entire remaining vocabulary of a nation. About enough words to fill an index card. Those two documents set side by side, In an archive, a colonial officer's word list from a kingdom that no longer exists. In small town historical societies across New England, farm diaries from the summer of 1816, men writing down June, snow, and August frost and careful, worried entries, with no idea what they were actually recording.

One paper holds the cause and the other holds the effect, and they were written by people who never knew the other paper existed. It took the better part of 200 years to introduce them. that introduction is this story and now you know it too your skin of gold a taste phone is out