Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  The captain of the Charles Bal, W. J. Watson, found himself in a more perilous situation yet – somehow embayed, horribly pinioned in the sudden dark rain of rocks and compelled to beat around purposelessly, navigationally blinded. He was for a long while during the Sunday night just ten miles away from Krakatoa, closer to it than anyone else who survived. It enabled him to leave a record that was vivid in the extreme – except that chronologically (since it is thought that in the confusion he forgot to set his bridge chronometer to Batavia time) it was different by a single hour from everyone else's.

  We first encounter Captain Watson * when he was beating northwards, with Java Head and First Point, Welcome Bay and Pepper Bay to his starboard, the great mountains of Sumatra to port, and the islands in the narrows of the Sunda Strait directly ahead. Then suddenly, at what he incorrectly records as 2.30 p.m. (it was in fact only 1.30 p.m.):

  ... we noticed some agitation about the point of Krakatoa, clouds or something being propelled from the northeast point with great velocity. At 3.30 we heard above us and about the island a strange sound as of a mighty crackling fire, or the discharge of heavy artillery at one or two seconds' interval.

  At five the roaring noise continued and was increasing [wind moderate from the SSW, notes Captain Watson here, his mariners' routines never quite deserting him]; darkness spread over the sky, and a hail of pumice-stone fell on us, of which many pieces were of a considerable size and quite warm. We were obliged to cover up the skylights to save the glass, while our feet and our heads had to be protected with boots and sou‘westers.

  … we sailed on our course, until at 7 p.m. we got what we thought was a sight of Fourth Point light; then brought the ship to the wind, SW, as we could not see any distance, and knew not what might be in the Strait.

  The night was a fearful one; the blinding fall of sand and stones, the intense blackness above and around us, broken only by the incessant glare of varied kinds of lightning, and the continued explosive roars of Krakatoa made our situation a truly awful one.

  At 11 p.m…. the island became visible. Chains of fire appeared to ascend and descend between it and the sky, while on the SW end there seemed to be a continued roll of balls of white fire. The wind, though strong, was hot and choking, sulphurous, with a smell as of burning cinders, some of the pieces falling on us being like iron cinders. The lead came up from the bottom at thirty fathoms, quite warm.

  From midnight to 4 a.m. of the 27th… the same impenetrable darkness continued, while the roaring of Krakatoa less continuous, but more explosive in sound; the sky one second intensely black, the next a blaze of light. The mast-head and yard-arms were studded with corposants * and a peculiar pink flame came from fleecy clouds which seemed to touch the mast-head and the yard-arms.

  At 6 a.m., being able to make out the Java shore, set sail, and passed the Fourth Point lighthouse. At 8 a.m., hoisted our signal letter, but got no answer. At 8.30 passed Anjer with our name still hoisted, and close enough in to make out the houses, but could see no movement of any kind; in fact, through the whole Strait we did not see a single moving thing of any kind on sea or land.

  At 10.15 a.m. we passed the Button Island, one half to three quarters of a mile off; the sea being like glass all around it, and the weather much finer looking, with no ash or cinders falling; wind light, at SE.

  At 11.15 a.m. there was a fearful explosion in the direction of Krakatoa, then over 30 miles distant. We saw a wave rush right on to the Button Island, apparently sweeping entirely over the southern part…

  ... by 11.30 we were enclosed in a darkness that might almost be felt, and then commenced a downpour of mud, sand, and I know not what… we set two men on the lookout for‘ard, the mate and the second mate on either quarter, and one man washing the mud from the binnacle glass. We had seen two vessels to the N and NW of us before the sky closed in, adding not a little to the anxiety of our position.

  At noon the darkness was so intense that we had to grope our way about the decks, and although speaking to each other on the poop, yet we could not see each other. This horrible state and the downpour of mud and debris continued until 1.30 p.m., the roaring of the volcano and the lightning from the volcano being something fearful. By 2 p.m. we could see some of the yards aloft, and the fall of mud ceased; by 5 p.m. the horizon showed out to the northward and eastward, and we saw West Island bearing E by N, just visible. Up to midnight the sky hung dark and heavy, a little sand falling at times, and the roaring of the volcano very distinct, although we were fully 75 miles from Krakatoa. Such darkness and such a time in general few would conceive and many, I daresay, would disbelieve. The ship, from truck to water-line, was as if cemented: spars, sails, blocks and ropes were in a terrible mess; but thank God!, nobody hurt nor was the ship damaged. But think of Anjer, Merak and other little villages on the Java coast!

  Other ships, more distant, experienced even more drama. The Berbice, a German paraffin-carrier bound from New York under the command of a Glaswegian, William Logan, found herself in a peculiarly exposed situation. When Logan saw the towering black clouds and lightning flashes ahead of him, from his position in the Strait's western approaches, he supposed it to be no more than a tropical storm. But as soon as flaming ashes began to fall on deck – a wooden deck that was only inches from his highly flammable cargo – he recognized what was going on, understood the perils of his position and promptly hove to in the lee of a protective island. He huddled there for the next two days – even though the island, by all accounts, afforded him precious little protection:

  The lightning and thunder became worse and worse. Lightning flashes shot around the ship. Fireballs continually fell on deck and burst into sparks… The man at the rudder received heavy shocks on one arm. The copper sheathing of the rudder became glowing hot from the electric discharges.

  The electricity in the air proved an even more serious problem, as Logan later recalled in an interview with an Australian newspaper:

  Now and then when any sailor complained that he had been struck, I did my best to set his mind at ease, and endeavoured to talk the idea out of his head until I myself, holding fast to the rigging with one hand, and bending my head out of reach of a blinding ash shower which swept past my face, had to let go my hold, owing to a severe electric shock in the arm. I was unable to move the limb for several minutes afterwards.

  Logan's crew were gripped with terror, volcanic dust covered the ship ‘at least eight English thumbs deep’, his masts and sails were alive with fire and sparks, his barometer fell impossibly low, all the ships' chronometers mysteriously stopped, and the world beyond him was concealed in a frequently impenetrable miasma of whirling dust and smoke. His account does, however, conceal one note of incongruous optimism.

  As well as his thousands of gallons of paraffin, Captain Logan carried in his cabin a small package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, addressed to the curator of the Botanical Gardens at Buitenzorg. Inside were five specimen seedlings of a variety of spurge found in the forests of the Amazon, known as Hevea brasiliensis – wild rubber. There had already been numberless plans to harvest rubber commercially from such trees where they grew wild in Brazil, but, for a variety of reasons, * all of the schemes failed: the Berbice was now bringing Amazonian plants to the Indies from which, it was hoped, plantation rubber could in due course be grown. The conditions of weather and soil made it likely that it would grow well in the East, the botanists predicted: dozens of related plants, like tapioca, castor bean and poinsettia already flourished there.

  And this particular small story does have a happy ending. Despite the rigours of his passage through the Strait, Captain Logan, together with his ship, his cargo of paraffin and his infant rubber trees, all survived Krakatoa; and the parent-plants of what are now some of the most economically important rubber plantations in the world remain today in the Buitenzorg Botanical Garden, duly and safely delivered.

  But otherwise the story of that long Sunday night makes for grisly
reading. ‘Everything became worse,’ wrote an elderly Dutch pilot at Anjer. ‘The reports were deafening, the natives cowered panic-stricken, a red fiery glare was visible above the burning mountain.’

  Hevea brasiliensis, Brazilian rubber.

  At 6 p.m. the cable linking Anjer and Batavia finally broke – the line going dead at the very moment Telegraph-Master Schruit was telling government officials that yes, the eruption was continuing and indeed intensifying still. Schruit, tapping frantically at his Morse key, found he could not even make contact with the small town of Merak, seven miles up the coast. With his assistant telegraph operator in tow, he promptly dashed out into the gloom, ran through the old Dutch fort, fully intending to press on up the coast road to find and repair the rupture. He found it soon enough, just as he reached the drawbridge at the mouth of the harbour:

  ... there, a fearful sight met my eyes: a schooner and twenty-five or thirty prahus were being carried up and down between the drawbridge and the ordinary bridge as the water rose and fell, and nothing remained unbroken, including the telegraph wires which had been snapped by the schooner's mast.

  But we felt no alarm as the water did not overflow its banks. Not entertaining any idea of danger, I sat down to table at about half-past 8. Of course I had made the necessary arrangements for beginning the repair of the broken line the first thing in the morning.

  It was not to be. Anjer would not speak to Batavia again for the duration of this crisis – and Batavia would thus be wholly unaware of the terrible fate that would soon befall the town, and would befall all its neighbour villages up and down both the Java coast and across on the far side, in Sumatra.

  The astronomical logs for 26 August note that civil twilight in Anjer port began that night at 6.22 p.m., half an hour after the sun had set, when artificial lights were first needed in the street; nautical twilight, the time when the horizon ceases to be the sharply delineated line that a navigator deems essential for working with his sextant, began at 6.47. Both periods would in normal circumstances endure for thirty minutes. This night there was no such thing. It had been dark in Anjer since mid-afternoon, and when the invisible sun did set, the darkness was Stygian indeed the air a hot, ashy breath, filled with grit and sulphur, disorienting, confusing and poisonous.

  By late evening it was the turn of the ocean to take over as the more terrifying manifestation of Krakatoa's gathering power. As the great volcanic engine pumped and stoked more and more explosive energy into the atmosphere, so the sea surrounding the dying mountain became progressively more and more disturbed – and communities that were already huddling, frightened, along the low coastline of the Strait began to experience ever greater waves, ever more dangerous seas.

  The reports from after sunset speak continually of smashed boats and inundations of low-lying land, of ruined houses and of bystanders pulled off their feet into the raging waters. The first and most melancholy accounts were those later given to a number of newspapers in Java by the colonial contrôleur in the south Sumatran town of Ketimbang, Willem Beyerinck – the man who had given the first official news of the impending eruption back in mid May, when he telegraphed to the Resident of Lampong to say he had felt an outbreak of ominous tremors.

  From that first Sunday afternoon, Mr and Mrs Beyerinck and their three children were to endure a week of the most exquisite agony – much of which they remembered well; and by so doing they provided one of the more reliable chronicles of this very complicated series of events.

  The Sunday had begun innocently enough, with the opening of a new village market. There was the ritual slaughter of a baby buffalo, the playing of a gamelan orchestra, perhaps a wayang kulit puppet show – the kind of ceremonial that the Beyerincks had seen countless times during their tour. But these were strange times. Krakatoa had begun to rumble again that afternoon, and it somehow cast a shadow over an opening that was not, in consequence, an entirely happy affair. There had been a local outbreak of cholera too – a housemaid had just died, and Mrs Beyerinck was worried about the health of her children. The children's ayah had seemed agitated for other reasons – complaining among other things that the birds that normally flocked around the family house had lately seemed restless, and that the auguries were not good. And Mrs Beyerinck, warily watching the smoke roiling about the summit of Rakata, was wise enough and prescient enough to accept that one ignored the superstitions of the local people at one's peril.

  When they returned from the market, Mrs Beyerinck made what at the time seemed a strange request – that the family not go home, but make right away for a tiny village in the hills, where they rented a holiday cottage. Her husband, however, wouldn't at first hear of it. The locals, he said, would wreak havoc in Ketimbang town if he did so; and the wilder elements who had only lately been hired to pick the summer pepper harvest up in the highlands would soon hear that the Dutch controleur had run away, and would descend on the town in short order. No, he declared; the family would stay. Mrs Beyerinck went off to her room to sulk, only remembering later the distant tinklings of the gamelan and the rhythm of a great drum sounding what she thought was a threnody.

  But then everything changed, very suddenly. Her husband sauntered down to the shore to see what effects the new eruption might be having – and came on a scene that astonished him. While in the distance the mountain was roaring and boiling from behind an immense pillar of clouds, here enormous waves were breaking on the beach, and the level of the sea was piling up, rising and falling alarmingly, crashing with a weird randomness against anything solid on the shore. There was no wind, no storm. But the surface of the sea had a terrible, writhing, coiling awfulness about it.

  He could see the Loudon, with its cargo of Anjer coolies bound for the pepper fields of Telok Betong, beating up Lampong Bay towards him, then trying desperately to dock. It was being tossed every which way, one moment corkscrewing high on the crest of a huge mass of water, the next being twisted as if by an unseen hand and plunged deep down into a trough. The master then evidently lost his nerve and gave up the struggle, for, as Beyerinck watched in horror, the boat, now looking so vulnerable and fragile, suddenly turned away, presumably to try to ride out the fury in mid channel.

  The contrôleur stared, now momentarily dumbstruck, as the thrashing waters rose higher and higher up the shore, soon reaching the outbuildings of his own Residency. Water began crashing against the stucco, breaking hard against what looked like increasingly insubstantial structures. It was this very sight that finally made up his mind for him. His earlier decision had been wrong, he told his servants: Mrs Beyerinck and the children should leave right away. Everyone should flee to their summer cottage up in the hills.

  For a few moments, it seemed unlikely that they would make it. For at 8 p.m., as a hail of pumice began to rain down, the waves began their first orgy of destruction. They were eventually to reach well over a hundred feet in height, and right from the start even the precursors of the mighty waves, even the first tentacle-feelers of water, did the most amazing damage. In an instant Beyerinck's office suddenly came crashing down, along with a clutch of outbuildings. The family and their servants escaped drowning only by shinnying up coconut palms and waiting until the waters receded for a few moments' respite. Then they climbed back down, gathered up valuables, set the horses and their other animals loose and ran, as far as they could manage, inland.

  Their flight was the stuff of the cinema epic. There was a dreadful roaring behind them as they stumbled, half blind, frightened, soaking wet, through miles of paddy, sinking into thick mud while trying desperately to outrun the ever pursuing monster. At one stage Mrs Beyerinck, by now covered with mud from head to toe, tried to shout, but her throat was horribly sore and she couldn't utter a sound. She felt her neck – it was thick with a collar of leeches. They ran on and on, getting lost, from time to time joining forces with other local people, who themselves were fleeing in great crowds from the thundering, roaring floods behind them. Pieces of pumice hurtled down fro
m the sky, burning fiercely like jagged meteorites.

  The family and such servants as had run with them reached the hilltop cottage at midnight. They broke out supplies, fed their terrified children, settled them to some kind of fitful sleep. The adults then knelt on the slatted floor and peered through the window towards the raging volcano, which they could see distinctly through the fog of falling rock. Outside the hut lay thousands of local people, all crying and wailing in desperation. Some of the more sober were praying to Allah for relief from the nightmare.

  But it was not to end for some hours yet. One of Beyerinck's servants arrived just before dawn, saying that the entire Residency had been ripped from its foundations by a gigantic wave at about 2 a.m. All the signs suggested the waters were getting higher and higher, and the entire town of Ketimbang would likely go under. And indeed when the contrôleur sent scouts downhill at dawn to see the damage, it had been destroyed, totally. An enormous series of waves had flooded over every rooftop at about 6 a.m.: nothing was left standing.

  Up at Telok Betong, where the Resident later said water had come within ten yards of his house, which was perched at the top of a hill 120 feet high, there was a mass of destruction. The harbour-master, waiting in vain for the Loudon, said he was swept off his feet eight times before he ran for his life. From up on the hills surrounding the town he watched as the Dutch Navy's well-armed paddle-steamer Berouw strained mightily at her mooring buoy. It looked to him as though not only might the chains give and the vessel founder, along with her crew of twenty-eight, but that the buoy might free itself too and be hurled about the harbour, destroying all other ships there including the barque the Marie, which was waiting in the roads. Mass destruction seemed to be waiting in the wings.