Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  It was a busy time for the governor-general. On the Sunday he had church service to attend, alms to dispense, military parades to bless – and then came unwelcome news about the weather and the consequent cancellation of the following day's cavalry tattoo. And on the next day, the Monday, ‘s Jacob had to get himself gussied up in his finest raiment once again and travel down from Buitenzorg to the sweltering and now rain-soaked capital for the much more formal (but paradeless) day of festivities. Every Dutch building was festooned with flags of red, white and blue, and the ships in the harbour flew pennants and signal bunting. In Waterlooplein, with its palaces and military barracks,* thousands of soldiers – both the regular officers from Holland and levies from the ‘loyal races’ throughout the islands – were arrayed in tidy ranks for inspection.

  The king's representative in the Indies, who, when he deigned to come down to hot and steamy Batavia, held court at his immense and newly completed white marble Doric-columned palace on the Koningsplein – the King's Square – staged an official morning audience that day. He ordered to be arrayed before him his entire Council for the Indies, his senior civil servants, the generals, the bishops, the foreign diplomats (including the British consul-general, a Mr Cameron, and his American counterpart, Oscar Hatfield) and the favoured elite of Batavia high society. He announced, as was customary, an amnesty for a slew of prisoners. He also told his sweltering audience that a dozen or so banned persons – the concept of ‘banning’, so much a feature of later apartheid rules in that other former Dutch possession in southern Africa, was very much in force in the East Indies of the time – were to be relieved of their ordeal, as a birthday bounty from the representative of His Majesty.

  The rest of the happy day was then devoted to games – which included cricket, a sport that had infected the East Indies after a visit from the Singapore Cricket Club ten years before – or to parties at the two principal clubs, the Harmonie and the Concordia Military, or to a massive public display of fireworks. ‘The Governor-General gave a gala dinner at the palace,’ reported the next day's Javasche Courant, in the breathlessly sycophantic tones of the times. ‘The palace was magnificently decorated and illuminated. All of the high authorities of the colony were invited, and they cheered with delight when the Governor-General raised his glass to the health of the King. Then there were wonderful fireworks on the Koningsplein, and thousands of people came out in the evening to enjoy the sight.’

  Whether the worse than usual rains and the attendant cancellations were seen as any kind of augury or not, all seemed otherwise perfectly normal in a colony that this day of celebrations had already demonstrated was run with strict and meticulous order. The colonized people were at this time in their history by and large content, the merchants were prosperous, the big Javanese cities – Batavia, Surabaya, Bandung, Jogjakarta, Solo and Anjer among them – were generally peaceful and well mannered.

  And yet, unknown to all but a few academics and seers, and to a few in those deeper recesses of Javanese and Sumatran kratons where the sultans lived and ruled, a multitude of strange and unrecognized forces were busying themselves – social, political, religious, economic forces that would erupt across the colony within just a very short while. The seeds of impending troubles – of risings, insurgencies, militancies that would in time mature to become generally anti-imperialist and specifically anti-Dutch – were just then starting to take root, were growing unseen, like mushrooms in the dark. We shall return to them later; for now they provide the faintest, barely audible basso continuo sounding beneath the more dramatic events that were to dominate the year.

  Whatever might have then been going on beneath the outwardly content surface of East Indies society, it happened that at this very same time quite another array of unseen forces, which some historians would later link with the coming societal changes, were also gathering. These, though, were physical forces, forces related to the then unrecognized phenomena of tectonics and subductions and fault-zones and sea-floor spreading, forces that were regrouping after years of quiescence and that now – just as invisible as the coming changes in politics and social life – had begun to prepare for their awakening once more.

  They were at work particularly beneath the surface of western Java, readying themselves for a six-month period of violent and nightmarish activity. They would first become apparent, and violently so, just a scant ninety days after the smoke and flames and thunder of the last fireworks of His Majesty's birthday party had died away.

  It began with a sudden trembling. At first it was slight, more of a quivering of the air, a series of windy rumblings, of vague flutterings of atmosphere that were barely to be noticed at all. In normal times they would probably have passed without comment, other than by some Dutch planter in a bar who might point with amusement to the surface of his genever and get others to peer down at how shaken and rippled it was. Seismic events, where the rocks themselves moved, were a commonplace throughout the islands. Earthquakes and eruptions seemed as everyday as thunderstorms and plagues of mosquitoes.

  But this one was a little different. For a start, the year had already been curiously quiet across the entire colony. Between January and May the Observatory at Batavia had logged only fourteen earthquakes, and, of these, four were in eastern Java and seven in Sumatra. The year was calm, people were lulled into a kind of easy complacency.

  And western Java was in any case a quietish corner of the archipelago, seismically speaking. Everyone had heard the stories about ancient eruptions, true; and there were those who looked at maps and thought they had heard tell of when Java and Sumatra were one island that had broken apart during some terrific volcanic event, ages ago. But most believed that Krakatoa was long since extinct, inactive, peaceful and, most likely, dead. The Batavians who came out from town to swim on the clean white western beaches; the local bird-sellers who hawked pretty Anjer swallows to passengers on the ships setting off for the long sea passage back to Europe;* the bum-boat skippers who sold fruit and coral and curios to sea-borne passers-by: all thought of this corner of their islands as endlessly tranquil, a place far removed from the more violent activity that was so common near mountains like Bromo, or Merapi, or Merbapu.

  But then the vibrations began. It was just after midnight, early on the morning of Thursday, 10 May, when the lighthouse keeper at what was then called First Point – the more southerly of a pair of lights on the enormous rocky headland at the south-eastern entrance to the Sunda Strait, known to approaching mariners as Java Head – felt what he knew only too well was a tremor in the air. The lighthouse suddenly seemed to shift on its foundations. The sea outside whitened, appeared to freeze briefly (as we now know it does above a depth charge), became uncannily smooth like a mirror, shivered slightly and then returned to its usual sickly swell.

  It was really nothing much. There was no suggestion of where the vibration might have come from. The keeper checked his records: the last volcano to erupt anywhere near by was Lamongan, and that lay 600 miles to the east. Whatever had prompted this particular rumbling was probably closer than that. Though it caused no obvious damage, it was strong enough, unusual enough in pattern and curious enough in location for the lighthouse keeper to log it, and to note in a report that he wrote during the following weekend and sent off to Batavia with his other weekly summaries.

  Five days after the initial vibration the same happened again, except that this time it was stronger and more sustained, more widely felt. What had been felt in west Java was now felt on the other side of the Sunda Strait, in Sumatra. The Dutch contrôleur in the south Sumatran town of Ketimbang, Willem Beyerinck, was sufficiently roused by the thudding, rumbling bangs occurring beneath his feet on the night of 15 May to send a telegram, an official confidential message presenting all the facts to his superior, the Resident of Lampong. It took him five further days to pluck up the courage to send it: he had to make sure he was right. In the end he made the call: powerful tremors, he reported, were now being felt continuo
usly up and down the Sumatran coast on the northern and western side of the Strait.

  This was the first official word that something untoward was in the offing. And coming from a civil servant with the rank of controller, the news had considerable weight. Controllers in the colonial service of Holland were not a breed of men given to panic.*

  The ships were the next to take note. The Sunda Strait – seventeen miles across at its narrowest – was then, as today, a frantically busy waterway. The number of vessels passing between Java and Sumatra on their way to and from Europe and the Americas on the one hand, and China and the more distant reaches of the East on the other, was prodigious in the 1880s. There were at least ten ships in the vicinity when Krakatoa's first eruption began: those definitely known to be near by included the American brig A. R. Thomas; the British barque Actaea, commanded by a Captain Walker; the Dutch mail-packet Zeeland, commanded by a Captain MacKenzie, on her way from Batavia to the Indian Ocean and then by long sea to the Netherlands; the Sunda, a steam ferry-boat skipping her way from Batavia to a series of local ports; the Archer, an Australian passenger steamship of the Queensland Royal Mail Line; the Conrad, a Dutch mailboat heading northwards from Europe to Batavia; a Dutch barque, the Haag, under the command of a Captain Ross; the German warship Elisabeth, heading south from Singapore; and, more mundane than romantic, the hoppers Samarang and Bintaing, both shuttling between Java and Sumatra, performing harbour drudgery on behalf of the Batavia Port Authority.

  Each had a story to tell. The first to note something unusual in the log was the Elisabeth, a German corvette returning home to the motherland after two years in China and Japan, time spent doing picket duty on the Imperial Navy's Far Eastern Station.*

  The ship had called briefly at Singapore and then, though it bypassed Batavia, had stopped instead at Anjer to coal, take on water and drop off a single passenger. The Elisabeth left the tiny port's quayside on the morning of Sunday, 20 May. She turned towards the south, trimmed her sails and set a course that would take her down the Sunda Strait and out into the open ocean.

  Her master, a Captain Hollmann, then became the first European to see the very beginning of the eruption of the mountain. He was the first to write a report about what now seemed to be behind all the rumbling and trembling that had been noticed around the region since the lighthouse keeper's summary of the curious vibrations that he had experienced earlier in the month. It was 10.30 on the hot, cloudless summer morning. Captain Hollmann was looking from his bridge directly across to starboard towards the 2,625-foot southern summit of Krakatoa,* when suddenly something took place that he never imagined possible. Without warning:

  ... we saw from the island a white cumulus cloud, rising fast. It rose almost vertically until, after about half an hour, it had reached a height of about 11,000 meters. Here it started to spread like an umbrella, probably because it had reached the height of the anti-trade winds, so that soon only a small part of blue sky was seen on the horizon. When at about 4.00 in the afternoon a light SSE breeze started, it brought a fine ash dust which increased strongly… until the entire ship was covered in all parts with a uniform fine grey dust layer.

  Faced with the astonishing sight of a white cloud that was streaking up into the heavens, reaching what his navigating officer calculated was fully seven miles into the clear blue sky, the ship's marine chaplain, Father Heims, allowed himself a little more latitude than his superior in the Imperial Navy, and wrote:

  ... the crew had assembled on the upper deck in clean Sunday clothes, to be mustered in divisions. The commander had just looked at the parading crew and started to inspect his pretty clean ship, when a certain motion was noticed among the officers which were assembled on the upper deck and bridge in their Sunday clothes. Glasses and heads all turned towards the lonely countryside in which the shores of Sumatra and Java coincided with the small island of Krakatau: there, at least 17 nautical miles distant, an enormous shining wide vapour column rose extremely rapidly to half the horizon, and reached within a short time the colossal height not below 11,000 meters, contrasting in its light-coloured snow-like appearance with the clear blue sky. It was convoluted like a giant wide coral stock…

  At this point the right reverend's prose turns rather more purple than he probably would on reflection have wished. He compares Krakatoa's rising plume of steam and smoke first to a giant cauliflower, then to a billy club, next to ‘the convoluting steam column from the smoke stack of a gigantic standing steam locomotive’ and finally to an odd confection that he christens ‘three-dimensional steam balls’.

  Mercifully, after only a few lines of such description, he abandons his quest for literary permanence, and returns to writing for his parishioners back home, who were no doubt eagerly awaiting his reappearance in the pulpit. In doing so, he provides some highly useful evidence for those who would later study this first phase of the eruption:

  We did not hear any detonations. The veil over the sky was so dense and uniform that the almost full moon was only barely visible during the night… on the next morning… the ship, which was so clean 24 hours ago, looked very strange: it looked like a mill ship or, more precisely, like a floating cement factory. On the outside everything – ship's wall, torpedo pipes, the entire masts, etc. – was covered uniformly with a grey sticky dust… it had accumulated thick and heavy on the sails; the steps of the crew sounded muffled… The people enjoyed collecting the lava dust as polishing material, and it was not very heavy work to collect the stuff in sacks and boxes.

  The sky above this ash rain disaster appeared like a large bell made of rather dull milky glass in which the sun hung like a light blue lamp… for another 75 German miles we had to sit in the evening with our faces looking backwards as we sat together trying to get some air. The distribution of the ash-fall would be over an area at least as large as Germany…

  One by one the other ships in the neighbourhood reported their news. Some of the reports were made public within days or weeks of the event; in later years the logs were found and published, or private letters surfaced from their amazed commanders or crew, as well as messages from passengers who had been aboard and knew that they had seen something strange and wanted, earnestly, to tell of it.

  The British ship Actaea, for instance, which was sailing eighty miles west of Krakatoa, noticed a peculiar green colour' in the morning skies to the east-south-east; by mid-afternoon her sails and rigging were covered in fine ash and dust; and when the sun set it did so as ‘a silver ball’.

  The hopper Samarang, en route to the port of Merak, felt a sudden swell, massive enough to lift her and her screw clear out of the water.

  The Zeeland, sailing with her full complement of passengers and mail back towards Holland, passed within five miles of Krakatoa.* Her compass needle suddenly began to spin round and round, uselessly. When it settled it showed a deviation from normal of twelve degrees. Steam and debris then roared up from the most northerly of the three cones that could be seen on the island, and to the crew a deafening noise began to sound, seeming to combine the thunder of heavy artillery and rattle of continuous machine-gun fire.

  Captain MacKenzie next saw to his astonishment a huge column of black cloud. Not white – despite what others had said he was sure it was, at this moment, black. It rose swiftly above the mountain, with lightning flashes deep within the clouds, and a continuous crackling sound. The sea all around the island was punctured by immense grey waterspouts rising into the air; it became so dark he had to reduce speed to five knots. There being no radio at the time, he frantically raised a string of coloured signal flags, alerting all who might be watching him. The Lloyd's agent at Anjer certainly was, for he noted in his log that MacKenzie was fast standing into danger, and others who came near him might suffer the same fate.

  And then came the moment when a delft dinner plate fell off a dining-room table in the old part of Batavia and broke into a thousand pieces.

  The plate had belonged to Mrs van der Stok, a middle-a
ged Dutch lady who at the time of its breakage – shortly after ten minutes to eleven on the Sunday morning – was quite probably laying her table for family luncheon. It had been a part of her dowry on the day she had married Dr J. P. van der Stok – the distinguished scientist from Utrecht who had brought her out to Batavia some years before on his appointment as director of the colony's Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory. The couple lived in a single-storey house attached to the Observatory, and on that hot and cloudless Sunday morning both could not help but notice that something, somewhere, had gone badly awry.

  First there was the plate, lying smashed on the marble floor of the dining room. Then in the living room Dr van der Stok himself, reading the Sunday edition of the Java Bode – the word means ‘messenger’ – heard all the windows and doors rattle and bang. From somewhere to the west came a low, rumbling sound, like that of distant artillery. He got out his pocket-watch and noted the time: 10.55 a.m.

  He walked across to the Observatory, noticing immediately that the needles and pens suspended by their cocoon-threads on his magnetic declinometer were ticking and trembling violently – not in the usual side-to-side sweeps that one might expect from an earthquake, but in a series of buzzing up-and-down motions that did not register properly on the paper rolling from the drum. The more he thought about it, the more he realized something odd: the vibrations were not so much being felt through his feet, as if they had emanated from somewhere deep in the earth; they were in fact being felt in the air. True, there were ground tremors, and buildings were shaking – this was self-evident. But most of the shaking was coming through the very atmosphere itself. And vibration of this kind was the particular hallmark of an erupting volcano, not of the subterranean shaking of an earthquake.