Relevant lessons from climate change and a global pandemic in the 19th century
- A powerful volcanic eruption in 1815 set off a chain of events, from extreme weather and crop failures to a global cholera pandemic
- In 2020, the world should know better than to waste time squabbling about the origins of Covid-19
Weird as it may seem, the Tambora explosion, unnoticed outside Java, not only unleashed devastating weather, destroying crops and communities around the globe. As you discover in gory detail in Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s 2014 book Tambora, it also transformed cholera from a local nuisance in Bengal into one of the world’s most virulent and feared diseases.
Wood writes: “Tambora’s Frankenstein weather, wild and weird, created a microbial time bomb in the waters of the estuarine Bengal delta. Once exploded, life on Earth, at least for human beings, became a far more dangerous proposition.” In 1817, a global cholera pandemic suddenly erupted, a “phantom agent of death that was brutal, unknowable, and potentially limitless in its reach”.
From India, where in weeks it consumed 10,000 followers of Indian governor Lord Hastings’ British army, a newly virulent strain of cholera spread to Myanmar and Thailand in 1819 and 1820 and Iran in 1822 before reaching France in 1830 and eventually the United States in 1832.