In theory, the mini
ice-age might be the reason St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated far and wide.
By the mid-eighteen-hundreds, the potato—a New World
crop—had become big in Ireland. It th. Imagine life
without the parades—and green beer, of course. (My mom was born in Dublin so
it’s all pretty cool to me!)
had become so big, in fact, that the country
was dependent on in. By 1849—tail end of the mini ice-age, since most
scientists agree it ended about 1850—the land was so ravaged and decimated that
the potatoes were growing black and inedible. In starving droves, the Irish
were forced to immigrate to survive. As we know, the Irish came to the United
States in massive numbers. And thank the Lord! While they went through a pretty
wretched period at first (read Gangs of New York—yes, read the book, though I
was a fan of the movie, quite different!) they began to settle in quite nicely
as the decades rolled by and we began to pick on whatever new immigrants from
different countries began to flock in and it was their turn to be ostracized.
Yes, bring us your poor and wretched . . . we’ll bitch about them and forget
we’re a nation of immigrants, but hey! Back on track here. So the Irish came
and we have delightful celebrations every March 17
So maybe another reason to party in this country isn’t
so important. But many or our leaders are of Irish descent, um, hm—like
Kennedy! And Obama apparently can go back as well. Maybe Congress could
actually agree on something if they were just to figure out that many of them
were of Irish descent!
Oh, well. Still digressing here!
And on that note, the first President of the Republic of
Ireland was an American. Yup. An Irishman (via his mom,) but born in the US of
A, which meant, that when he was caught with a number of men who were hanged
for their rebellion, he was spared the noose—no one wanted the Americans
getting up in arms against what was going on. So Eamon de Valera lived to be
the first pres. Lots of connection here—and maybe because of the weather.
Who knows just what else might have had to do with the
extreme cold? Not that the shift was that big—just big enough to ruin crops and
keep snow on the ground. Enough to make people really, really hungry.
But here’s to the point of the story—and we’re going to
backtrack a little. On April of 1815 the volcano at Mt. Tambora on the little
island of Sambawa erupted. The eruption was by far the worst of the nineteenth
century although it’s presumed that it wasn’t noted as much as the later
eruption of Krakatoa because by the time that top was blown, the telegraph was
shooting news all over the place—the Facebook of the age.
But Mt. Tambora was about 12,000 feet high—the eruption
knocked off 4,000 feet to bring it down to 8,000. That’s a lot of footage to lose—and
a lot of dirt and ash and matter flying around in the air. It’s hard to
estimate the deaths with the tsunamis created-much less being there at the
initial impact.
The volcanic sky began to travel, right around the
globe.
The year 1816 was not a good one in the states. It
wasn’t that they were having the coldest days ever—it was that the cold
wouldn’t go away. (Kind of like this year, 2014. I just left Chicago. Damn!)
Spring hinted of an arrival—and then just went away.
The sky was eternally overcast. Add the fallout into the
air and you had one cold year without much sun penetrating down to earth.
But, good things came of it.
1816.
Writers at the time could be a Bohemian lot. Take Lord
Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori. They were hanging around
Geneva, Switzerland and were known to take lovely holidays. Now on these
holidays the group usually did fun things—outside. They loved to boat on the
lake, take hikes, and, in general, play games and enjoy the great outdoors! But
when they arrived, it was cold. It was dark. It was the year without a summer.
And sitting around by the fire one cold wretched night
at the Villa Diodati, they began to tell ghost stories. And as they told ghost
stories, they decided that writing was something that could be done indoors.
Since it was eternally gloomy, day often turned to night with little being
different. There were eternal shadows surrounding them. Gray hung over the lake
like a miasma of death and waiting.
Lord Byron proposed they all write a ghost story.
Well, couple that with Mary’s upbringing—a feminist
mother, a father who liked to entertain the brightest minds of his day—and the
fact that she was very up on recent experiments with electricity and the
concept of “galvanism” and “re-animating” corpses, and you have a story.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was born, no pun
intended.
Without the mini ice-age, this wonder of the literary
world might not exist. Hundreds of actors, film-makers, producers, and what
have you might not have had jobs over the decades upon decades since. And
writers playing upon the first chills they felt while reading it might not have
created their new works of fiction. If you want to get down to it—people might
not have been frightened into the backseats at drive-ins and who knows? Some of
us might not have even existed!
While it’s fanciful to take it too far, it is amazing
what the weather can cause and create and how it has influenced history. A
story is a small part of it, of course.
