The Year Without A Summer

A peasant looks up at the sky in the summer of 1816 to see snow falling on his fields.  That would be  threatening enough on its own, as snow tends not to be great for growing food, but this snow isn't the classic white of a imagined Christmas.  It's red, yellow and brown.  Not to mention that this weather follows heavy rains and other anomalies.  Food will be difficult to come by in the coming year... but why?

Two Men by the Sea by Caspar David Frederich

Mount Tamboura, former Dutch East Indies

On April Tenth, 1815, almost a year before the summer snows, Mount Tamboura erupted, throwing ash 28 miles into the sky.  It was no small explosion, for the Dutch had noticed its beginning five days earlier from a distance of 200 miles.  They saw it with great fear, being an eruption on a scale not witnessed in centuries.  The one eyewitness account, by Rajah of Sangir, who lived in a village twenty-five miles from the summit.
He saw the eruption begin, at about 9 pm, noting the "stones, some of them as large as two fists, but generally not larger than walnuts" that fell on the village of Sangir.  But that was just a taste of the following catastrophe.  A whirlwind followed, destroying the village, and over the night a layer of ash settled on villages in the surrounding 40 miles.  Almost 12,000 were killed directly by the eruption, and due to crop destruction and famine, most of the 37,000 inhabitants of a neighbouring island would die.

Yet this is the sixth in a line of eruptions that have been throwing ash into the atmosphere over the past decade.  In 1808, a volcano in the southwest Pacific that erupted.  In 1812, volcanoes in the Caribbean and the Dutch East Indies erupted.  The Ryukyu Islands had a volcanic eruption in 1813, and the Philippines in 1814.  Through all of this, tons of volcanic ash were thrown into the sky, worsening the world climate.

After the Eruption

Asia

Crop harvests were devastated in China.  Provinces reported crop yields of less than 60% in many counties, with the entirety of the Hebei and Henen provinces reporting losses of over 40% even into 1817.   The weather was also different, as heavy snows filled the Yangtze River Basin in the early part of 1816, and the Basin flooded heavily later in the year.
Japan, on the other hand, did not report any crop losses, and did not have any affected weather patterns, with the polar front (a border between warm and cold air) remaining in similar locations when compared to more modern data.
India did not have massive crop losses, but did get excess rain in 1816-17.  In the wake of all of this rain, a strain of Cholera developed, that would kill millions.

Europe

It rained, and the skies were dark.  Due to cooler temperatures and unhelpful weather, crops failed, and Europeans rioted as food became more expensive.  A famine, the worst of Nineteenth-Century Europe, came as there was little food.  Following the famine, typhoid swept through the region.  This did not bother the storms, which stayed devastating throughout the Summer, causing the Rhine and other major European Rivers to flood.  They would freeze over in August.  During these months, our peasant from the introduction, probably residing in Italy or Hungary looks up to see snow coloured by ash.  Conditions deteriorated so much in Switzerland that the government declared a national emergency.  

European Artists responded to this by making their paintings darker and moodier.  The presence of the Sun in paintings would yield relatively little light upon the rest of the image.  Redder colours would appear as well, tainting sunsets to be more reflective of reality.  Sunrises and sunsets would stay reddened for years following the eruption.

In this Summer full of rain, where some 130 days from April to September let water fall upon Europe, a group of four writers are forced to stay indoors on Lake Geneva, and read a collection of ghost stories.  They are inspired by it, and tell their own ghost tales.  Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein there and Lord Byron "A Fragment", which led to The Vampyre by Polidori and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

North America 

The winter lasted long, freezing crops in August, eventually causing the harvests of corn to be almost worthless.  Even animals couldn't eat the corn.  Pennsylvania was confronted with frozen lakes in July and August, and Virginian crops died because of frost in late August.  Snow in Maryland in May took on blue, yellow, and brown colours.  Canada ran out of basic foods, like bread and milk.  Parts of North America were drenched in a fog, that could be dispersed by neither rain nor wind, that is referred to as a "stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil", which consist of a mixture of sulfuric acid and water and cool down the earth.

It was described as "Weather Backward" by Sarah Bryant of Massachusetts.

As a result of crop failures, the populations in New England fell, because families moved to the more fertile ground of the American Heartland.  Indiana would become a state in 1816 and Illinois would join the Union a short two years later.

South America and Africa

 These two continents saw mostly colder temperatures, with South Africa receiving more than normal excess rain.  

Brazil had a severe drought in 1816 and 1817, and the rest of South America was dryer than normal.

The Hurricane season was active in 1815 and 16.

Further Resources:

Basic Information:
https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-year-without-a-summer

On the Eruption of Mt. Tamboura:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060615181454/http://indodigest.com/indonesia-special-article-19.html

Weather Patterns:
https://archive.org/details/yearwithoutsumme1992hari/page/430/mode/2up

A record of Ships' logs and findings:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/bams/article/77/9/2077/55686/Ships-Logbooks-and-The-Year-Without-a-Summer