Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  Later he would see more commonplace left-to-right activity on his declinometer – but only when the ash had begun to drift down over the city that evening. Then he surmised quite rightly that the magnets were going wild simply because the falling ash was rich in iron, like a blizzard of tiny compasses.

  For now, though, it was all vibration and rumbling and the occasional period of low and menacing thuds. Van der Stok knelt down and put his ear to the ground. Nothing. Nothing deep-seated. And what was more, these vibrations were continuing for long, long periods – an hour already, with no signs of abating. Earthquake vibrations last for matters of seconds only, a few minutes at the most – followed by periods of quiet, and then aftershocks, and then more movement and mayhem. This was very different.

  And all of this made him now, at noon on that Sunday, quite certain that he knew what was happening. These particular kinds of vibrations were absolutely typical of those caused by a volcano. And so each time a fresh explosion of trembling started again, he noted the time in his official log-book. Had it been an earthquake, there would be less need to catalogue the aftershocks, the timings of which were in any case mathematically predictable. But this was evidence of a volcano, somewhere, and the measuring of its palpitations might give some clue as to its future behaviour.

  All the while van der Stok was kept busy fending off inquiries from worried Batavians – men and women who flooded to his Observatory, even on this sunny Sunday, wanting to know just what was happening? This, most of them said, was like nothing they had ever known before. There had been a curious trajectory about each person's morning on that day. They had awakened to the unusual sounds, and they had been then merely puzzled. By the time they breakfasted, they had become concerned. The Christians among them had gone off to their churches, feeling moderately alarmed. After matins they had ventured back out on to the streets, by now in their droves, and they were, at least privately, in moods that were at first quite agitated and, as the thunder wore on, very apprehensive indeed.

  The director noted with the dispassion of a trained observer a distinct racial difference in public attitudes to the events. The Dutch who called in to see him appeared to be outwardly calm, the men displaying either the equanimity of their long experience in the Orient, or the public stoicism, the stiff upper-lip, the code of pas devant, that they felt appropriate to their standing as proudly indifferent colonials. The native Javanese, on the other hand, seemed to be much more deeply concerned, with many frightened and, in more than a few cases, quite terror-struck.

  To the Javanese and Sumatrans, and especially to the coastal people called the Sundanese – who were and still are a very distinct group well known for their mystical beliefs and deep piety – an event like this out in the Sunda Strait was heavy with suggestive power. In their view the eruptions showed that the spirit of the mountain, the widely feared Orang Alijeh, had for some reason been made angry, was now roaming abroad, breathing fire and smoke and displaying his displeasure. Such a happening could only bode ill for all. Most of the colonials officially and instinctively disapproved of the natives' superstitions, and van der Stok himself was icily dismissive. And yet some of the wiser old colonials did wonder about such things – at least, they would wonder after the terror was fully over, many months hence: what had it really meant?

  For the moment, though, what was of more immediate concern was the need for a widespread battening down of the hatches, with the inhabitants of western Java and southern Sumatra waiting to see just what Nature – or the gods – had in mind to hurl down at them. For the next two days they had a great deal to keep them anxious.

  The little south Sumatran town of Ketimbang is at the best of times a dreadfully vulnerable place: not only is it on a funnel-shaped bay, where the spring tides can rush in most dangerously; not only is it sited on mangrove swamps and mud-flats, ready to be inundated by every rising of the waters; but it also lies directly beneath a small volcano called Rajabasa – the mountain's flanks rise steeply to more than 4,000 feet immediately behind the cluster of coastal houses and their tiny fishing port. Willem Beyerinck, the colonial controller who had been one of the first to note the ominous initial rumblings five days before, was in time to be tested harshly by what happened. His wife maintained a close watch on the entire affair, from beginning to end, and kept a detailed journal. In May, or so it seemed from her detached and insouciant tone, the early stages of the eruption appeared to her more inconvenient than truly alarming.

  When it all began on the Sunday morning she had been taking the air on her veranda, idly watching the ships that passed by up and down the ever crowded Strait. She would derive hours of pleasure from watching the long-distance boats fresh out from Batavia, their sails all slipped and bellying in the breeze as the craft began scudding their way towards Europe. There was always a great deal of shipping to see: the view from the controller's elegant little house was magnificent.

  But then, without warning, she was jolted from her reverie: another hammer-blow, another set of violent tremors started up once more. ‘We were much bothered,’ she wrote. The vibrations were best seen in the water barrels kept stored in the bathroom, she said, since their surfaces rippled prettily with every detonation. She took up her diary, and began to make notes of yet another subterranean interruption.

  She was writing all this in her journal when, quite unannounced, a prahu arrived and was hurriedly slithered up on to the mud, its long bamboo outrigger propping it to one side. Eight frightened-looking fishermen leaped from it, ran up the beach and made straight for Beyerinck's office. They jabbered excitedly, in a mixture of Sundanese and pidgin Dutch. They were from the island of Sebesi, they said, and they had all been together that morning – on Krakatoa.

  They had gone there to gather wood for boat-building. They had been felling trees and stacking cords, chatting contentedly among themselves, when suddenly they heard what they assumed was a burst of cannon-fire from a warship. It was probably, they thought, a Dutch man-o‘-war exercising out in the Strait. At first they paid little attention, and carried on felling trees – until there was a second, terrifyingly loud report, which made them dash down to the beach to see what was going on.

  As soon as they got there, they said, they saw the very beach itself split wide open, and jets of black ash and red-hot stones roared out into the air. They fled in terror, running for safety and then diving into the sea to swim out to where they had left the boat. The tide had risen dramatically, they said: just an hour beforehand they had been able to wade to the mooring-place.

  The controller's wife, by all accounts a sceptical and somewhat hard-bitten lady, was in no mood to listen to these excitable natives. She told her husband, acidly, that it was simply impossible for a beach to erupt. He was ready to agree, to shoo the fishermen away. But then Beyerinck's superior suddenly arrived from his own headquarters further up Lampong Bay, in the little port-city of Telok Betong.

  He was a Mr Altheer, then just a month away from the end of his five-year posting as Resident of Lampong, and he was keenly eager to do the right thing and leave with his reputation in good standing. He had just been telegraphed by the governor-general, he told his junior; he had been ordered to investigate a situation that could be heard by, and was now fast alarming, the entire Batavian citizenry. Whatever the risks, he and Beyerinck must leave for Krakatoa immediately.

  And so the two men jumped into the official government launch that had brought the Resident down from Telok Betong, and they bumped out into the rough waters of the bay, turned due south and sped through what turned out to be, quite bizarrely, wave upon wave of floating pumice stone. They headed past the two islands of Sebuku and Sebesi that hid Krakatoa from their view, dodged masses of pumice and charred and floating trees, were drenched by massive sudden waves, enveloped in clouds of choking gas and a miasma of falling ash. It is twenty-four miles from Ketimbang to Krakatoa: it took the men four hours to bring the coastline of the island into some kind of view.


  And though we do not know from their records whether the pair actually landed, we do know that they spotted exactly what it was that had so alarmed the fishermen before them: the northernmost beach of Krakatoa was indeed belching fire and smoke, and the smallest and most northerly of the three cones of the island, Perboewatan, was in the process of erupting, the roaring and belching and noise of its concussions getting stronger with every minute.

  The two officials turned tail, their worries for their own safety finally taking precedence over Mr Altheer's concern for his colonial career. They sped back through an ever more dense coagulation of hot grey pumice, making their way through the fast-falling tropical night to the coast and the Ketimbang telegraph station. Shortly before midnight they sent a hurriedly composed message in Morse code, marked for the eyes of the governor-general only.

  Within minutes came a reply: the Resident of Bantam, on the western side of Java across the Strait, reported seeing essentially the same thing: flames, belches of fire, rafts of floating rock, ash falls. And he had heard it too: the noise of what was undoubtedly an eruption, memorably terrible, and sounding to him like the crashing, screeching roar of a great ship's anchor chain that was being endlessly raised, its shackles banging hard and rustily against the vessel's sides.

  More evidence had meanwhile been streaming in from all quarters. The northbound sailing vessel Conrad, enveloped in an inferno of choking ash and dust in which the ambient temperature was at least ten degrees higher than it had been elsewhere, had battled for well over five hours to pass through a near-impenetrable field of floating pumice, its grey masses packed tightly, like ice-floes. Forests on the flanks of Krakatoa were seen to be ablaze. The doctor on board the southbound Sunda saw bright-red clusters of fire, ‘like sheaves of wheat’, bursting from the column of smoke that poured from Perboewatan. He saw a new crater on the island's western side spurt a torrent of dark-red fire. Later that evening, when the Sunda was thirty miles away from the eruption and almost in the open ocean, the doctor asked a sailor to drop a bucket into the sea, and the man pulled back up only pumice, with barely any water at all.

  Peculiar, ominous sounds had been heard up in Singapore, more than 500 miles to the north. An English plant-collector named Forbes, working more than 1,300 miles away in Timor, reported a sprinkling of ash around his grass hut. There were some fanciful reports as well: someone reported that all the chronometers in the government observatory at Surabaya in east Java, 500 miles away, had mysteriously jumped forward, and that the time ball by which ships in harbour might learn the hour had somehow stuck on its shaft. These later turned out to be nonsense.

  On the other hand the usually circumspect Lloyd's agent – a man who in Anjer owned a small pension, the Anjer Hotel, down by the docks* – turned in what sounded like an entirely responsible report. He scribbled a hasty telegram to his head office in Batavia, for eventual transmission to the insurance exchange in London, with the first impression of what he was seeing: ‘Krakatan [sic] casting forth fire, smoke and ash, accompanied by explosions and distant rumblings.’ Only later in the day was he able to send a rather more discursive account.

  So now, more than a week after the initial feeble quiverings had first been felt at the lighthouse, the cause and the source of it all had been seen, and in action. It was now well beyond any doubt that the long-dormant (but apparently not extinct) island of Krakatoa was in an entirely new phase of its geological development, active once again and fast starting to erupt. What would happen next, the scale of the catastrophe that would envelop the region in a little more than ten weeks' time, would positively beggar belief.

  And yet two days later, after its alarming opening salvo, the island quietened down again. A thin plume of white smoke and steam still rose above the Perboewatan crater, hinting that something was continuing to roil beneath the surface. But outwardly, all looked tranquil once more. The low, triple-cratered island and its neighbours slumbered hotly, surrounded by a calm and deep-blue sea; and when viewed from the ports of west Java, they again became near-invisible, compared to the hazily violet and distantly looming silhouettes of the truly enormous volcanoes of Sumatra.

  The two peaceful days went past, then three. After a fourth the governor-general decided that if all were really quiet, it might now be prudent to go and take a closer look at Krakatoa, both to see what had already transpired and, more importantly, to see if such an event looked likely to take place again.

  The first-ever government inspector to visit the island had done so just three years before. He was a mining engineer from Doorn named Rogier Diederik Marius Verbeek, and he would make his name in later years with his monumental, 546-page study of the great eruption of '83. But in July 1880, when he first set foot on the ‘geologically completely unknown terrain' of the island, he was himself quite unknown, a specialist only in the coal mines of east Borneo. He found himself near Krakatoa while on temporary

  Rogier Verbeek.

  attachment to Holland's splendidly named Imperial Beacons & Coastal Lighting Service, which had a small ship named the Egeron bound for an inspection of a lighthouse on a clifftop with the rather less regal name of Flat Corner. ‘On my return trip to Batavia I was able to pay a short visit* to the islands in the Sunda Strait,’ of which Krakatoa was by far the most interesting.

  He sketched the four islands of the group; he took a small boat to the northern end, close to the soon-to-be-notorious 400-foot peak of Perboewatan; he chipped away with his hammer at what was evidently a recently made lava flow; he took samples of what he later decided was a rather unusual dark andesitic obsidian – a glassy,* evidently very rapidly melted-and-cooled rock that in this case had, most interestingly, a highly acidic character.

  Its composition was in fact much more than simply interesting: it was highly suggestive of its having come from a melt of the half-oceanic, half-continental mix of materials that had been made deep inside what geology now knows to be a typical subduction zone. But Verbeek could not possibly have known this, nor could he have made any but the most primitive surmises about the rock's observed and rather curious acidity. The very concept of a subduction zone was wholly unknown back in the nineteenth century; along with the mysteries of sea-floor spreading and continental drift, these zones were only to be understood almost a century later.

  And in any event Verbeek was not going to be allowed to make any further observations, since the crew of the Egeron's pinnace were champing at the bit, eager to steam on home, and they kept blowing their siren to bid him stop hammering. He was frustrated too: it turned out to be far too difficult for him to pass along the Krakatoa shore through the dense jungle that stretched clear down to the sea. ‘There was no time,’ he admitted lamely, ‘to collect any rock samples from the southern part… that is, of the peak.’ But, he added drily, ‘Little did I think that the places where I hammered rocks would disappear altogether three years later.’

  Three years later Dr Verbeek very nearly missed what would be for him the culminating event of his geological career. He had left for Utrecht, to supervise the making of a geological map of south-western Sumatra, and only by the greatest good fortune did he come back to Java on leave in the summer of 1883. He actually completely missed the first part of the eruption, even so – his ship steamed past the fire-torn and half-ruined island in July, six weeks after these first eruptions had begun. His absence forced Governor-General 's Jacob to choose in his place one of his deputies, an obscure mining engineer named A. L. Schuurman, to make the hazardous first journey across to Krakatoa. His mission was simple: to see what might be seen, and to make an official report on whether anything devastating was likely to happen again.

  There was no problem in finding a suitable boat for Mr Schuurman. A combination of a widespread popular fascination with what had taken place and the eagerness of local shipowners to satisfy that fascination – the force of the market, in other words – were to supply him with exactly what he needed.

  The British chaplain
in Batavia, the Reverend Philip Neale, was to write later that since ‘the spectacle was regarded by the Dutch as a curiosity… an agreeable excursion was made to the island by one of the mail steamers trading in the Java Sea’. The Netherlands Indies Steamship Company* was the first to recognize the tourist potential of the event, and came up in short order with an excursion vessel, the 1,239-ton Gouverneur-Generaal Loudon. On Saturday, 26 May, representatives from the Company tacked up notices in the Harmonie and Concordia Clubs advertising the delights of such an ‘agreeable excursion’ and announcing a competitive price of only twenty-five guilders. By Sunday morning they had closed their lists, such was the press of interest – and on Sunday evening the party set off. It was seventeen days after the first vibration, only a week after the first eruption. The Loudon was filled to its capacity of eighty-six passengers, and the government's Mr Schuurman was very much among them.

  After steaming through the night towards a ‘purple, fiery glow' that could be seen in the middle of Sunda Strait, the passengers watched as dawn finally broke.

  The view of the island was fantastic: it was bare and dry, instead of rich with tropical forests, and smoke rose from it like smoke coming from ovens. Only the high peak [of Rakata] had some green left, but the flat northern slope [of Perboewatan] was covered with a dark grey ash layer, here and there showing a few bare tree stumps as meagre relics of the impenetrable forests which not too long ago covered the island. Horrible was the view of that sombre and empty landscape, which portrayed itself as a picture of total destruction rising from the sea, and from which, with incredible beauty and thundering power, rose a column of smoke. The cloud was only several dozens of meters wide at its foot, wheeling to a height of 1,000 to 1,200 meters while widening, then rising from there to 2,000 to 3,000 meters in height and in the meantime fading in colour, delivering its ash to the eastern wind which, falling as a dark fog, formed the background of the tableau.