Look west of the Americas for December 1808
The eruption was tropical and, judging by silent Spanish colonial archives, not in Latin America. That points to the Pacific, Indonesia, the Philippines, Melanesia or East Africa. A first search on 24 October 2026 found no compiled Asian or Pacific record of a dim sun, red skies or ashfall in December 1808; the published studies used only South American eyewitnesses and British East India Company ship temperatures. The two kinds of glass in the ice (andesite in Antarctica, dacite in the Yukon) might mean two volcanoes, which would widen the search.
First Asian check, 25 October 2026: the Joseon Royal Secretariat Diary in Seoul, read day by day for November 1808 to January 1809, records no dim or red Sun and no haze; that winter was clearer than the one before. Weak evidence against a volcano close enough to Korea for its haze to be obvious, but the diary's weather line is too brief to rule out a thin high veil. Bogota and Lima remain the only places known to have noticed.
What to check next
- Johnson's Fire Mountains of the Islands: any navigator's report of an eruption or ash in 1808 to 1809 in Papua New Guinea, Rabaul or the Solomons
- Fiji sandalwood traders and whalers in the southwest Pacific, late 1808 (the sandalwood rush was at its height then)
- Plunkett 2023 and Hutchison 2023: what the glass chemistry says about the Indonesian candidate
- Wikipedia's suggested zone: tropical, probably southern hemisphere, no further than 20 degrees south, between Indonesia and Tonga