Crescent City Burndown

French New Orleans, born a rough riverside outpost in 1718, died on Good Friday seven decades later. The settlement had come under Spanish administration in 1769, and the local paymaster, Vicente Nunez, had in honor of the holiday lit altar candles in his home. While Nunez went off to have dinner, the candles ignited his ceiling, and high winds spread the flames from roof to roof. By late afternoon New Orleans lay in ashes. Eighty percent of the inhabitants’ houses had burned down. The hospital and Ursuline convent survived the fire, but most public buildings did not. It had been a mournful day indeed.

French Quarter, Sept. 2013. Photo by author.

The colonists, free and enslaved, rebuilt the town, which occupied too important a location for abandonment. Where possible they rebuilt in brick and stone, in conformity to a new urban fire code. When feasible they rebuilt in the Spanish Baroque style: buildings now featured distinctive iron-railed balconies and interior courtyards, after the fashion of other contemporary Spanish administrative centers. New Orleans now more resembled Havana or Santiago than Montreal.      

New Orleans’s 1788 fire also initiated the community’s Americanization, or rather its integration into the economy of the United States. The port had suffered from supply problems throughout the 1780s, and the conflagration destroyed nearly all of the warehouses. Governor Esteban Miro ordered flour from Philadelphia, and American territorial governor Arthur St. Clair offered to ship food downriver from the Ohio country. While Spain’s minister plenipotentiary politely declined St. Clair’s offer (he claimed that Spanish merchants had already “glutted up the [provisions] market”), in subsequent years Miro allowed at least some riverine shipping into New Orleans. Spanish regulations barred American farmers from using the Mississippi River, but the Orleannais’s need for cheap food and timber remained too great. By the turn of the century New Orleans retained a French name but was full of Spanish architecture, American goods, and a large African-descended population. It is always easier to think of cities as monocultural, but much of the Crescent City’s unique identify comes instead from its contingent, disaster-ridden history and the blending of cultures that resulted.

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Sources: Primary inspiration comes from this short narrative by Cindy Ermus. See also her article “Reduced to Ashes: The Good Friday Fire in Spanish Colonial New Orleans,” Louisiana History 54 (Summer 2013): 292-331; Arthur St. Clair to Diego Gardoqui, 16 July 1788, in W.H. Smith, Arthur St Clair Papers (Clarke and Co., 1882), 2: 59-60 (quote); David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale UP, 1992), 207; Kevin Barksdale, “The New Orleans Fire of 1788 and the Transformation of Iberian-American Relations in the West,” paper presented at the 77th Meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Baltimore, 30 Oct. 2011.

Huaynaputina's World

Few people outside of South America had heard of Huaynaputina, a volcano in the Bolivian Andes, prior to its eruption. Few knew of its existence afterward. Events do not have to be well-known to disrupt or even end people’s lives. Huaynaputina killed more than its share of human beings. During a two-week period in February and March 1600, the mountain ejected thirty billion pounds of magma, tephra, volcanic ash, and sulfur dioxide. The solid ejecta obliterated nearby towns and promptly killed 1,500 people. The ash and gas shot into the troposphere and dimmed the Sun’s rays over much of the planet for more than a year. The Earth cooled, the winters lengthened and deepened, and crops failed in China and Japan, which could endure a failed harvest or two, and in Russia, which could not.

Thames Frost Fair, ca. 1605

Russia’s peasants already lived on the edge of subsistence, raising barely enough grain during the four-month growing season to feed themselves. (The early Russian state actually raised more money from taxes on the fur trade than  agricultural duties.) One bad harvest could kill them. The 1601 harvest was bad indeed: frost gripped the soil through the spring and into early summer. 1602 brought more cold temperatures and more dead or withered crops. By the time normal harvests returned in 1603, two million Russians, or twenty-five percent of the kingdom’s population, had died. The famine undermined the authority of Russia’s ruling monarch, clearing the way for civil war and the eventual accession of the Romanov Dynasty.

North America also saw colder-than-usual weather in 1601, and New Mexico was visited by hunger, though cold had less to do with this than drought. Low rainfall and the depradations of Juan de Onate’s army started the first of several famines that the Pueblo Indians, who normally grew enough food to trade the surplus with their indigenous neighbors, would endure in the seventeenth century. Those who did not wish to starve had two unpalatable options: they could seek refuge with neighboring Indian groups like the Navajos, or they could beg newly arrived Franciscan priests, whose missions had their own food supplies, to succor them. Many made the latter choice, came under pressure from the missionaries to accept the Spaniards’ faith, and, under duress, consented to convert. By 1607 the Franciscans reported 600 Pueblo converts in the newly conquered province, enough to persuade the Crown to retain New Mexico. The immiseration of the many usually provides some form of opportunity to the few, whether those few wear the habiliments of a Muscovite prince or the cassock of a Spanish missionary.


Sources: K.L. Verosub and J. Lippmann, "Global Impacts of the 1600 Eruption of Peru's Huaynaputina Volcano," Eos 89 (2008), no. 15; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (1974); Andrew Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (1995).

Then Iceland Struck Back

The Economist of 22 July 2017 reports an intriguing piece of historical detective work that ties together an early medieval famine, a buried volcano, ice cores, and tree-ring isotopes.

Shortly after the death of Charlemagne, western Europe experienced three years (821-24) of terrible weather: hard winters, frozen rivers, failed crops, and famine. The Frankish monk Paschasius Radbertus recorded these “years without summer” but could only attribute them to the wrath of God. Environmental scientists tend to associate “summerless” years not with divine displeasure but with volcanic eruptions, and a large one apparently occurred in this period. Ice core extractions from Greenland show elevated levels of sulfate particles, a marker for volcanism (which ejects sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere), during the third decade of the ninth century.

Identifying the specific volcano responsible for Radbertus’s famine would seem impossible, but in 2003 serendipity provided an important clue. Flooding in southern Iceland uncovered the remains of an old forest 20 miles from the Myrdalsjokul glacier. 2,200 feet beneath that glacier lies Katla, a volcano that periodically erupts through its ice cover, producing powerful floods. Such a flood likely killed the now-buried forest: the ancient trees, which had all been knocked down at the same time, pointed away from Katla, indicating that some force from that direction had felled them. 

According to Ulf Buntzen (Cambridge), the trees’ rings give a precise date for their demise: 47 years after 775 CE, when an unknown event (probably heightened solar activity) deposited high levels of Carbon-14 isotope in tree rings worldwide. The flood thus took place in 822, soon after the start of the frigid weather observed by our Frankish monk, and during the period of elevated sulfate levels found in the Greenland ice. This is as close to absolute proof of a volcanic eruption in Iceland as one can get in the absence of on-the-spot observers, who wouldn’t arrive on the island for another half-century.

Iceland has suffered a great deal from outside illnesses and calamities, but one should recall that it is contributed to one or two of its own (crop failures, disrupted air travel, bad music) over the centuries. The world is a small place, and small places can exert an outsized influence on it.