Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  4

  THE MOMENTS WHEN THE MOUNTAIN MOVED

  There was a sign from the sun, the like of which had never been seen or reported before. The sun became dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months. Each day, it shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow. Everyone declared that the sun would never recover its full light again. The fruits did not ripen, and the wine tasted like sour grapes.

  – an eleventh-century plagiarism by an Antioch patriarch called Michael the Syrian, of a document supposedly written by the sixth-century historian John of Ephesus, describing the punishing climatic effects of an event that some believe to have been an early eruption of Krakatoa

  Man has been recording his memories for about 30,000 years, in cave-paintings or songs, in carvings or writings, and during this time the small cluster of volcanoes and off-islands that for the last 300 years we have come to call collectively Krakatoa has exploded once, twice, four or even eleven times, depending on just how the runes of geology, myth and circumstance are read and interpreted.

  Four of these eruptions are generally accepted to have emerged from the mists of uncertain history into the realms of possible reality. And yet, of these four, one is widely thought of now as most unlikely to have occurred at all; the date of a second is very reluctantly agreed to; a third is known to have been very poorly reported and subject to wanton hyperbole; and only the most recent truly survives as the one of the four that is incontrovertibly regarded as having taken place.

  There is some evidence that a very long while before that – perhaps 60,000 years ago or more – there once was a very much larger mountain that some geologists like to call Ancient Krakatoa, which they believe was something like 6,000 feet high and centred on an almost perfectly circular island about nine miles in diameter. But then a gigantic eruption, witnessed only by gibbering hominids and Neanderthals, if indeed by anyone, may have devastated the island and its peak, blowing almost all to smithereens.

  Once the dust had settled, what remained of Ancient Krakatoa was a group of four quite small and apparently stable-looking islands. At the northern end of the group were two low and crescent-shaped skerries – one to the east called Panjang, about three miles long, and to the west its larger colleague, four miles long, called Sertung.* Embraced within the parenthesis created by these twins was both the Polish Hat, a tiny chunk of the finegrained volcanic rock known as andesite, and the northern end of the island that we truly once regarded as Krakatoa proper. This was then a lozenge-shaped mass, six miles long by two wide, and half a mile high at its higher southern end. The southern summit was called Rakata; to its north were a pair of smaller crater-peaks. The first of these peaks, roughly in the island's centre, was called Danan; and nudging up into the sky from the island's narrower northern spur was the second, known as Perboewatan.

  This main island was found by early visitors to be always well forested, with an abundance of fresh-looking lava flows and steaming hot springs and outcrops of sulphur that were once worked by Batavian dynamite-makers. Over the centuries it had been used variously as a VOC naval reconnaissance station, as a place to build small ships, as a base for a small northern Sunda Strait fishing fleet, and, in 1809 and for the decade following, as a remote and barely accessible Alcatraz for those recalcitrant native prisoners whom the Dutch could not control on the mainland.

  A few have suggested that it was an island of evil reputation, a lair for pirates, a place that visitors from Java and Sumatra, who sailed over in their prahus to collect wood or wild fruit, found so disenchanting that they failed to leave offerings for Krakatoa's local gods. In fact, there is little evidence of this, however seductive the symbolism and the symmetry – the island of vile repute that exploded and killed thousands. From most credible accounts, Krakatoa's real reputation was actually rather the reverse.

  For by the reports of most Western visitors, there were from time to time a number of contented, if somewhat impoverished, little settlements on the island. The great English circumnavigating explorer Captain James Cook, for example, stopped on the

  The presumed geological evolution of the Krakatoa islands, viewed from the north. The original great island – Ancient Krakatoa – is thought to have exploded some 60,000 years ago.

  main island of Krakatoa twice. In January 1771 his colleague Joseph Banks, the renowned botanist and polymath, noted: ‘At night Anchor'd under a high Island call[ed] in the draughts Cracatoa and by the Indian Pulo Racatta… this morn when we rose we saw that there were many houses and much Cultivation upon Cracatoa, so that probably a ship might meet with refreshments who chose to touch here.’ Six years later, when Cook called in again, a village and fields of cultivation were still to be found – pepper was being grown and harvested, as well as other cash crops.

  Three years later still, the Resolution and the Discovery stopped at Krakatoa one further time – but on this occasion, in February 1780, they were without James Cook himself, since he had been bludgeoned to death in Hawaii the previous November. They stopped in the crescent-shaped roads between Krakatoa and Panjang Islands for five days, giving the fleet artist, John Webber, time to make elaborate drawings of the village houses and the luxuriant vegetation – palms, tall grasses, ferns – in the valley on Krakatoa between the two more southerly peaks of Danan and Rakata. The expedition's day-book recorded the details of the party's sojourn on the island:

  The Resolution refilled its barrels at a stream located at the southern extremity of the little island, a short distance from the shoreline. A little to the south, one finds a heat-source, where the islanders bathe. While we were on a level with the southern extremity of this island the Master went to find an aiguade, but he disembarked with difficulty, and returned without finding any sweet water.

  The island of Cracatoa is considered very healthy in comparison to those thereabouts. She offers elevated ground which rises little-by-little from the shoreline on all sides; she is covered with trees, except in several places where the islanders have cleared them for growing rice. The population is not very considerable. The chief is subject to the King of Bantam, just as those of the other islands in the Strait. One finds on the coral reef a large quantity of little turtles, refreshments which elsewhere are very rare, and have an enormous price.

  The pepper groves had all but disappeared ten years later, when the Dutch administrator visited; such people as lived on Krakatoa were then raising chickens and goats, and made small sums selling firewood, water and food to stopping ships. There may have been people living on the island at the time of each of

  The lush coastal jungle of Krakatoa island, drawn by John Webber, expedition artist for Captain James Cook, during the fleet's visit in 1780.

  the early eruptions; at the time of the cataclysm Krakatoa was, quite widely, vacant. But there is no suggestion that it had an evil name.

  *

  The three early occasions that, according to most modern history books, possibly saw eruptions were (according to the Western calendar, only lately adopted in Java) the anno Domini years 416, 535 and 1680. There is the vaguest of suggestions that between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries there were also no fewer than seven additional eruptive episodes, and that during the single century when the Buddhist kings of the Cailendra Dynasty were on the throne in central Java* Krakatoa became so notoriously active that it was called ‘the fire-mountain’. This figure of seven, when added to the three possible eruptions and the single certain catastrophe, gives the tally of eleven – a number that is rather doubtful, it must be said.

  The one subsequent occasion when Krakatoa went wild is the only year that is fixed with total certainty, and that is 1883. Of the three earlier occasions (I am going to dismiss the Cailendra Seven – for want of any evidence at all, other than the somewhat less than illuminating ‘fire-mountain' remark in a Buddhist manuscript) we are rather less sure just when or what took place, if indeed anything did at all.

  For completeness' sake, thoug
h, it is probably worth first exploring something of the shadowy world of old Java, to see if it is possible to establish with any certainty the early volcanic history of the island – if for no other reason than that the establishment of Krakatoa's eruptive past may offer us some useful clue as to her probable future.

  The Possible Eruption of AD 416

  The most frequently quoted source for the first (and, perhaps, also the second) of these three rather questionable event-dates is a monumental modern history written in the nineteenth century, known as the Javanese Book of Kings. Its author, a Javanese court poet called Raden Ngabahi Ranggawarsita, was well connected to the Dutch colonial establishment of the day, as well as being a key figure in the most distinguished of traditional circles. He worked in the sultanly estate of Solo, which is unarguably the most refined of all Javanese courts, a place where the gamelan playing, the wayang kulit puppetry and the poetry still have few equals for their elegance, style and cultural purity.

  But for Ranggawarsita, who was intellectually as much scholar as poet, and who knew the European historical record well, the courtly life was evidently not enough. He had as his principal ambition something more than the fashioning of lyrical poems to mark significant moments in the life of the sultan of Solo. He wanted instead to create something of rather greater and enduring value: a truly comprehensive history of the entire island of Java, a document that could hold up its head alongside the great European tracts about their own countries and peoples. He spent most of his adult years working on the project – and in the 1860s, after decades of what must have been the most thankless toil, he finally achieved his goal, completing and uttering for publication a series of fascinating but undisciplined ramblings that make up what is possibly the world's longest book.* Unfortunately, according to his many critics, most of what he wrote he made up.

  That being so, there has been an understandably cautious reaction among scholars who have tried to use Ranggawarsita's tome as the basis for serious historical research. Scientists who have read it have been among the most sceptical of all – and most particularly vulcanologists, who have been both drawn to, and confused by, one highly alluring passage:

  the whole world was greatly shaken, and violent thundering, accompanied by heavy rain and storms took place, but not only did not this heavy rain extinguish the eruption of the fire of the mountain Kapi, but augmented the fire; the noise was fearful, at last the mountain Kapi with a tremendous roar burst into pieces and sank into the deepest of the earth. The water of the sea rose and inundated the land, the country to the east of the mountain Batuwara, to the mountain Raja Basa, was inundated by the sea; the inhabitants of the northern part of the Sunda country to the mountain Raja Basa were drowned and swept away with all their property…

  What does it mean? To which mountain – since Kapi is not a name known today – does the passage refer?* And when did whatever happened take place? Geologists, more familiar with gazing at fossils or down microscopes, have pored over this one paragraph of elegant Javanese prose and gone over it with a fine-tooth comb.

  It all would have been a good deal more helpful and a sight less confusing if Ranggawarsita had only written once about the supposed great eruption. In fact he went back to it twice. The paragraph quoted above comes from the 1869 version of his book. By the time of his second edition of 1885 he had decided to take another look at it (whatever, wherever and whenever it was), and he wrote about it as follows:†

  ... in the year Saka 338 [i.e. AD 416] a thundering noise was heard from the mountain Batuwara, which was answered by a similar noise

  coming from the mountain Kapi, lying westward of the modern Bantam. A great glaring fire which reached to the sky came out of the last-named mountain. The whole world was greatly shaken and violent thundering accompanied by heavy rains and storms took place.

  But not only did this heavy rain not extinguish the eruption of fire of the mountain Kapi, but it augmented the fire. The noise was fearful. At last the mountain Kapi burst into two pieces with a tremendous roar and sank into the deepest of the earth. The water of the sea rose and inundated the land.

  The country to the east of the mountain called Batuwara, to the mountain Kamula, and westward to the mountain Raja Basa, was inundated by the sea.

  The inhabitants of the northern part of the Sunda country to the mountain Raja Basa were drowned and swept away with all their property.

  After the water subsided the mountain Kapi which had burst into pieces and the surrounding land became sea and the single island [of Java–Sumatra] divided into two parts. The city of Samaskuta, which was situated in the interior of Sumatra, became sea, the water of which was very clear, and which was afterwards called the lake Sinkara. This event was the origin of the separation of Sumatra and Java.

  The second of the two passages is more amply filled with geographical detail: the references to Sumatra and Java splitting apart, the identification of ‘the Sunda country' and of volcanoes like Kamula – which is now known from other sources to be the western Javan volcano called Gede, south of today's Jakarta – Batuwara, in western Banten, and Rajabasa, which is a 4,000-foot peak at the southern tip of Sumatra, that still bears that name. Given all these circumstantial pieces of cartography, it looks more than likely that ‘the mountain Kapi’ is in fact Krakatoa.

  But there is a small difficulty. The second description, filled as it is with journalistic colour – glaring fires, fearful noises, marine inundations, sea-destroyed villages – was written some two years after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. And since it is a much richer account than that written in 1869, to the sceptical eye it looks as though Ranggawarsita – having read all the newspapers and perhaps interviewed some residents of Banten (where most of the 1883 flood destruction took place) and spoken to friendly Dutch officials and perhaps to a few scientists too – took his first account of 1869 and fifteen years later, to put it bluntly, embellished it. He seems to have scattered some 1883 details, like glitter, on top of his rather bland descriptions of that earlier event.

  And, by doing so, if that is what indeed he did, the poet suffers the inevitable fate of any writer of non-fiction who makes anything up: he finds that readers call into question everything he writes. His entire history is then suspected of being flawed – and readers look even at his first description of the explosion of ‘Kapi’ and the inundations and deaths that followed, and wonder not just when it happened, but if it happened at all.

  Except, of course (and here I spring to Ranggawarsita's defence), at the time he wrote his first edition in 1869 he did not have any means of embellishing what he wrote. Yes, he might have seen accounts in the history books of the supposed eruption that took place in May 1680. But could he have made all of it up? Probably not. Most probably his writings for the first edition of the Book of Kings do come from his research into original sources. The trouble is – which sources? We know little of his historiography: we can only surmise that his description of an eruption in the Sunda Strait probably came from those ancient, peculiarly beautiful and very fragile Javanese manuscripts written on palm-leaves, and of which the kraton library at Solo had a very great number.

  Matters here start to become somewhat vague. Of the 10,000 or so surviving palm-leaf texts – which are written in a variety of manuscript styles, including Balinese, Court Javanese and a curiously complex calligraphy called Mountain Script, with which Ranggawarsita (and a mere handful of others) was familiar – only a very small number actually relate the ancient history of Java. Most of them appear to stop (or start) in about the ninth century. Before that, very little of which we can be certain appears to be known about Java at all.

  To give some of the flavour of this uncertainty: there are references in Ranggawarsita's work to a mysterious monarch called Jayabaya, who supposedly oversaw the writing of the accounts of the eruption that are to be found in some of the older palm-leaf texts. Jayabaya in turn is supposed to have been told about the eruption by a Hindu god named Naraddha, wh
o descended from heaven and related fabulous stories that, he insisted to the king, should be inserted into all and any accounts of the history of Java.

  So here we have it: an account that arrives from an ancient god, via an enigmatic tenth-century king who dictated material to scribes who wrote on leaves, and is then related through the good offices of a nineteenth-century court poet who, yes, could read those leaves but who was clearly also a man much taken to flights of fancy. Small wonder that the scientific community has received this basic story of Krakatoa's first recorded eruption with a healthy degree of scepticism.

  Except for two things. First, the details are very good (even the relatively unadorned first account of 1869) and fairly convincing geologically. And second, there is a firm date given for the event: AD 416. Of that Ranggawarsita has no doubt: the Hindu god seemingly told Jayabaya that the event took place in the 338th year of the Shaka Calendar. This is a widely recognized Hindu dating system used only on these islands, which began in Western terms in the year AD 78, when Hinduism was supposedly brought south from the Champa Kingdom in what is today's Vietnam. To get the modern date of 416, one simply does the maths.

  But there is not one other shred of independent contemporary evidence – not a line of dust in any of the ice-cores taken from either polar ice-cap, not a millimetre of shrinkage in the size of any tree ring* taken from any of the world's ancient forests – to suggest that there was a volcanic eruption anywhere in the world in the early part of the fifth century. The error rates from these techniques are in the range of plus or minus twenty-five years. So it seems clear from scientific evidence that no volcano of consequence erupted in the world during the first quarter of the fifth century; that much appears certain, the Shaka year, those glaring fires, the inundations of the sea and the explosion of the mountain Kapi notwithstanding. Without firm scientific evidence, and with the historical evidence little more than a vividly told tale from a Victorian poet–fantasist, one has to wonder seriously whether there was a fifth-century eruption at all.