Derek Pugh - Tambora: Travels to Sumbawa and the Mountain that Changed the World

It all started two hundred years or so ago on the fifth day of April in 1815. For over five days a huge volcano named Gunung Tambora that towered over the remote island of Sumbawa in the East Indies, erupted in a spectacular fortythree kilometre high, multicolumn display of fire and smoke.

Indonesia, as the East Indies are now known, takes up a lengthy part of the Pacific Ring of Fire where volcanoes line the edges of massive tectonic plates. Hundreds of them stand in sentinel all along the shores of the Pacific Ocean like giant Viking beacons.

Indonesia is a massive country. Thousands of islands stretch for more than 5000 kilometres from West Papua in the east to Aceh on the western tip of Sumatra. There are more than one hundred and twenty volcanoes in Indonesia alone, and many are intermittently active. Somewhere in the archipelago, you can expect at least one of them to be rumbling, or even erupting, at any one time.

Most of their conniptions are small, but they still cause local disruption and a little damage. Tamboras awakening was very different indeed. The April 1815 eruption was probably the biggest eruption the earth has seen in 10,000 years. Its ash cloud spread over an area the size of Australia, blocking out the sun in many parts for several days. People waited, terrified perhaps, as they scurried from shelter to shelter in pitch black at noon in search of sustenance, friends or family. As the ash fell to earth it buried crops, collapsed roofs, and sank ships. Tens of thousands of people perished immediatelyplucked from their homes and hurled skywards by the pyroclastic winds or crushed and cooked by superheated pyroclastic flows, swept away by tsunamis, bombarded by huge lava bombs, or in the months and years after the eruption, they died a slower, equally tragic death, through disease or starvation.

But that wasnt all. Tambora pumped millions of tons of chemicals into the stratosphere and formed an aerosol blanket of sulphuric acid that covered our planet and lingered for at least three years, reflecting much of the suns heat and light back into space. The result was a cooler earth and the Year Without Summer. In postwar Europe, North America, and Asia crops failed, diseases like cholera took hold, and civil unrest grew. Millions of people had died or had been displaced, and whole populations had changed dramatically.

And here was the genesis of both Frankensteins monster and the bicycle: the continuous foul weather in Switzerland caused Mary Shelley to stay indoors where, instead of larking about in boats on Lake Geneva and whiling away the long summer evenings reading poetry, she wrote of Dr Frankenstein and his monster, arguably the first science fiction novel the world had ever seen. At the same time in Germany, as horses starved around them because the weather was too inclement to grow hay, two enterprising young men invented the first bicycle. Both were products of Tambora.

As a resident of Sumbawas neighbouring island of Lombok, I had long been intrigued and drawn to this island, and the mountain that had such a wide and dramatic effect on our planet. So, with the bicentenary of the eruption looming, I took a number of trips by motorcycle through Sumbawa to see what life is like in modern day Indonesia, explore for myself the island, and climb the mountain that had changed the world.

I met tiny, yet experienced race jockeys the same age as my preschooler son and an aged princess who is a direct descendent of the Rajah of Bima who was ruling at the time of the eruption; I visited mining towns, surf camps, and the small island of Bungin whose residents claim they live on the most densely populated island in the world and whose goats are rumoured to survive eating nothing but plastic and rags. Everywhere I went Tambora was omnipresent, like a school bully leering over my shoulder. And when, at last, I climbed to its crater rim, stared out across a hole seven kilometres in diameter and a nearly a kilometre deep, and smelled its sulphurous fumes, I was in awe. Tambora is an extreme mountain in every way. Huge gas plumes regularly burst from vents far below where I stood on the precipice, and the continuous crashing of rocksfalling and echoing around the craters cliffsgave me a feeling that this mountain is still very much alive and just biding its time.

Then, looking east to Sangeang Api, west to Rinjani on Lombok, and further to Agung on Bali, I realised that any of these huge volcanoes, which stand in line like giant boils along the archipelago, could take their turn and release their fury on our planet, just like Tambora did two hundred years ago. Standing on the summit, I wondered if we would be prepared. Now, writing safely in my home, I still doubt that we would be.