18. Multi-colored snowfalls and the land of the midnight sun
The year without a summer offered memorable events which were recorded by writers and observers other than Thomas Jefferson and his multitude of correspondents. In Europe Lord Byron, who spent most of the summer months in Switzerland (which suffered monsoon-like rains and abnormally cold temperatures for more than two years), observed that sunset, or rather the appearance of sunset, occurred near midday. Dreary skies never filled with morning light, and by early afternoon, darkness, no doubt aided by the shadows of the imposing Alps, had settled in. Byron’s apocalyptic poem was written during his stay in Geneva, describing the experiences of the last man on earth, watching the world fade away into darkness. Byron described the poem as having been written on a day when the “candles were lighted as at midnight” though it were only noon, despite the roosters already having retired to their roosts.
In Hungary, snowfall covered the mountains and rooftops, though the snow was brown instead of its usual white. In Italy, a similar event left red snow, the color of rust, covering the landscape. The high content of volcanic “ash” in the atmosphere left staggeringly beautiful orange-tinged sunsets, inspiring painters throughout Europe to attempt to reproduce them on canvas, though the paintings failed to convey the human misery left by the lack of normal summer weather. That summer saw the worst (and to date last) of the great famines to strike the European continent in its recorded history. Combined with the typhus and cholera epidemics worsened by the incessant heavy rains and resulting floods, the summer of 1816 saw a mortality rate more than double what was normal, and is regarded as the cause of more than 200,000 deaths on the continent, as well as an additional 100,000 in Ireland.