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).