Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  And on the Loudon herself Captain Lindeman found himself dealing with the unimaginable waves, the close presence of land and a host of other ships near by (a perilous combination that sailors fear most in a storm, denying the vessel vitally necessary sea-room) – as well as a terrified crew. The locally hired men in particular were petrified by the eruption of St Elmo's fire in the riggings, and they left their posts in droves to try desperately to beat them out, to extinguish what was in fact inextinguishable. The phosphorescence was, they insisted, evidence of ghostly spirits: if these phenomena found their way below they would eat their way through the hull and the vessel would sink like a stone.

  There was an almost endless succession of other, very similar reports. There were those from nine other nearby ships – like the magnificent American barque W. H Besse, forty miles north of Krakatoa; the British vessels Sir Robert Sale and the Norham Castle, both of which were hove to off Sumatra; the Norwegian

  The Royal Dutch Navy's armed paddle-steamer Berouw about to be picked up by one of the giant tsunamis generated by the eruption.

  barque Borjild, eighty miles north-east of the volcano; the Welsh cargo vessel Bay of Naples, under way to Singapore and 120 miles south of Java Head; the Rotterdam Lloyd's steamship Batavia, well to the south-west of the entrance to the Strait; the steamer Prins Frederik which had passed Krakatoa on 25 August and was by the time of the explosion also well out into the Indian Ocean; the Annerley, southbound, and at the time of the eruption standing to the north of the Strait; and the British-flagged Medea, whose Captain Thomson had managed to measure with some accuracy the height of the volcanic cloud at the outset of the eruption, at seventeen miles.

  There were all manner of curious survivals. One man had fallen asleep at home and awoke to find that the wave had lifted him and his bed to the top of a hill, and deposited him there in perfect safety. Another grabbed on to the corpse of a cow and floated to high ground. More bizarre still – and barely credible – was the man who reportedly found himself being swept inland next to a crocodile: he clambered on to its back and hung on for grim death with his thumbs dug deep into the creature's eye-sockets.

  And there were in addition statements and newspaper interviews and private letters home from lighthouse keepers and Residents, Assistant Residents, contrôleurs, agents of Lloyd's, telegraph operators, harbour-masters and sharp-eyed civilians of all stripes, as well as an enterprising member of the Catholic clergy named Julian Tenison-Woods * who wrote an exceptionally long letter about the events to the Sydney Morning Herald. From this mass of information a broad summary can be distilled.

  Krakatoa's final twenty hours and fifty-six minutes were marked by a number of phases. First, from early afternoon on Sunday until about 7 p.m. there was a series of explosions and eruptions of steadily increasing frequency and vigour. From early evening the ash falls and the deluge of pumice began. By 8 p.m. the water had become the next medium of transmission of the volcanic energy, and as night fell the temper of the sea in the Sunda Strait became one of unbridled ferocity.

  Then, just before midnight, a series of air waves – fast-moving, low-frequency shocks sent out invisibly and inaudibly by the detonations – began arriving in Batavia. The time-ball on the astronomical clock down at Batavia's harbour stopped dead at eighteen seconds after 11.32 p.m. because of the ceaseless vibrations. Audible evidence of the explosions began to radiate outwards too, and there was a report from Singapore and Penang * that thudding sounds could be heard at about the same time. In Batavia a large number of people, kept awake by the explosions and for want of something better to do, were walking around the Koningsplein; they noticed that the gas lanterns suddenly dimmed at about 1.55 a.m. Along Rijswijk, the main shopping street, several shop windows suddenly and inexplicably shattered at about the same time.

  Then at about 4 a.m. the nature of the explosions reportedly changed, very slightly, becoming less continuous but more explosive. Someone described the sounds as like a steam-engine, emitting full-throated whoomphs as it gathered speed. At about 4.56 a.m. an enormously powerful air wave was detected at the Batavia gasworks – suggesting, if travel time over the ninety miles to the volcano is allowed for, that something else had just happened deep within Krakatoa's heart. The culminating explosion – though no one on the ground at the time knew it – was soon about to happen.

  There were four gigantic explosions still to come. The first was noted at 5.30 a.m. The Sumatran town of Ketimbang was then destroyed at 6.15 a.m., and Anjer, her Javan sister-port across the Strait – according to the few who survived to tell the tale – was inundated and wrecked very shortly thereafter. The second mighty explosion came at 6.44 a.m. – forty-one minutes after a dawn that, to those in all of western Java, never arrived that day. Ashes began to fall on Batavia at 7 a.m. – although Oscar Hatfield, the American consul in Batavia, reported seeing them falling in the consulate grounds two hours later. * At 8.20 a.m. a third, quite terrible explosion was felt in Batavia, and many of the buildings started to make what were described as ‘crackling’ noises. And then finally, at 10.02 a.m., came the culminating, terrifying majesty of it all.

  Two minutes to go and, according to simultaneous reports: the sky was completely darkened in all of southern Sumatra; the Loudon was weathering heavy ash falls in Lampong Bay; the nearby Marie reported ‘three heavy seas came after each other; at once a fearful detonation; sky in fire; damp’. The Annerley lit all her lights, noted that it was raining pumice stone, that the barometer was rising and falling half an inch a minute. In Batavia it became eerily dark again, and – most significantly – it started to get cold. From 10 a.m. the temperature began to fall – as many as fifteen degrees Fahrenheit over the coming four noontide hours.

  Explosions like a battery of guns are heard across in Telok Betong. Lightning strikes the lighthouse at Vlakke Hoek in southern Sumatra. The lighthouse at Fourth Point, just to the south of Anjer, is hit by a vast wave and destroyed, ripped off at its base, leaving only an amputated stump of jagged masonry. An immense wave then leaves Krakatoa at almost exactly 10 a.m. – and then two minutes later, according to all the instruments that record it, came the fourth and greatest explosion of them all, a detonation that was heard thousands of miles away and that is still said to be the most violent explosion ever recorded and experienced by modern man. The cloud of gas and white-hot pumice and fire and smoke is believed to have risen – been hurled, more probably, blasted as though from a gigantic cannon – as many as twenty-four miles into the air.

  ‘A fearful explosion.’ ‘A frightful sound.’ Captain Sampson of the British vessel Norham Castle wrote simply in his official log: ‘I am writing this blind in pitch darkness. We are under a continual rain of pumice-stone and dust. So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered. My last thoughts are with my dear wife. I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come.’

  The British consul in Batavia at the time was one Alexander Patrick Cameron; and five days later he sat down in his study and had his confidential clerk write out, in the usual impeccable sweeps of fine Victorian copperplate, his summary of what he then knew of the disaster. The document remains today in the Public Record Office in London, largely unread and unconsulted because of a confusion that has led those who have chronicled the Krakatoa events to believe the British consul was in fact a man named Henry George Kennedy.

  The error is understandable. Kennedy had in fact been consul in Sumatra, and was called in to replace Cameron when the latter asked for leave in November 1883. Kennedy wrote a summary of the terrible events for the Royal Society in September 1883. His name is known to what might be called the Krakatoa community today as a result, and most indexes of most books will have a reference or two to him. Alexander Cameron, on the other hand, remains forgotten and unsung. What he wrote, though, seems today a model of diplomatic felicity, as perfect a summary of the events as could be imagined, considering the awful circumstances of the moment.
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br />   The elegant copperplate and exquisitely courteous tone of Consul Cameron's lengthy Krakatoa dispatch to Lord Granville, in London.

  His report is dated Batavia, 1 September 1883, and is addressed to Gladstone's foreign secretary, the Earl Granville:

  My Lord:

  Enclosed I have the honour to hand Your Lordship a copy of my telegram of yesterday, giving notice of the volcanic disturbances which have lately taken place in the neighbourhood of my Consular district.

  The spot where the subterranean forces have found vent is the island of Krakatau * lying in Longitude 105°27'E, Latitude 6°7'S, at the southern entrance to the Straits of Sunda. This island was the scene of a volcanic eruption of less importance on the 20th May last which, although on that occasion an entirely new crater was formed, had no such disastrous results to life and property as have attended the explosions which commenced on the 27th inst.

  The present outburst commenced on Sunday last, and on that night the inhabitants of nearly the whole of Java and Sumatra were alarmed by loud noises resembling the reports of heavy artillery, which continued throughout the night and at rarer intervals during Monday 28th inst. It soon became known that these noises were produced by a fresh eruption of Krakatau and since Monday intelligence has been slowly reaching Batavia from various quarters apprising us of the extent of damage done, and proving by the loss of life and property that this is one of the greatest calamities of this century.

  The residencies of Bantam and Batavia were darkened throughout the early hours of last Monday by a thick cloud of grey ashes, the light diminishing gradually, as the cloud progressed from west to east, from twilight to almost total darkness at midday, and a continuous shower of ash fell during the forenoon giving the ground an appearance as if covered by snow. At about 11.30 a.m. at Batavia and at earlier periods of the day in the more immediate vicinity of Krakatau the sea suddenly rose, presumably owing to the subsidence of part of Krakatau and other islands or to a submarine upheaval, and a wave of considerable height advanced with great rapidity on the shores of western Java and southern Sumatra, causing greater or less damage according to its distance from the centre of disturbance. A second wave higher than the previous one followed the first at an interval of about an hour with even more serious results. It is now reported that part of Krakatau island, the island of Poeloe Temposa and other small islands in Sunda Straits have disappeared, and that a reef has been formed between Krakatau and Sibesie islands, the channel usually taken by steamers. Dwars-in-den-weg/Thwart-the-Way, an island at the northern entrance to the Straits, is reported split into five pieces, while numerous small islands are said to have been raised which had no existence previously.

  These reports however still require verification and with a view to ascertaining the extent and nature of the changes caused by the volcanic action a Government survey-steamer has been dispatched to the neighbourhood to take a new survey of the Straits.

  The destruction caused by the waves on shore both to life and property, although known from reports already to hand to be very widespread, can hardly yet be estimated with any degree of certainty, as owing to the action of the sea and the heavy rain of ashes, telegraph and road communication has been either entirely interrupted or is much delayed.

  It appears beyond a doubt however that the whole of the southeastern coast of Sumatra must have suffered severely from the effects of the sudden influx of the sea, and thousands of natives inhabiting the villages on the coast must have almost certainly perished.

  The west coast of Java from Merak to Tjeringin [has] been laid waste. Anjer, the port where vessels bound for the Java and China Seas call for orders and a thriving town of several thousand inhabitants (natives), no longer exists, its former site now being a swamp.

  The lighthouse at Anjer (Java's Fourth Point) has also been much damaged.

  Many Europeans, including numerous officials, and many thousands of natives have been drowned, in the district of Tjeringin alone on the southeast coast of Java it is reported that no less than ten thousand persons have lost their lives. The result to agriculture in west Java [is] not yet officially known. The fact however that owing to the covering of ashes which spreads over the whole country, the cattle are deprived of their ordinary nourishment, is in itself a very serious consideration and measures have already been taken to supply the afflicted districts with food for man and beast. It is to be feared that the natives will be greatly impoverished by the damage done to fruit and palm trees which form a source of wealth, while coffee and tea gardens and standing crops of all descriptions must have suffered severely.

  With a view to rendering safe the navigation of the Sunda Straits the Rear Admiral, Commander in Chief of the Netherlands Indian Navy, has stationed one man-of-war to cruise off the southern and another to cruise off the northern entrance to the Straits to warn vessels to proceed with caution.

  In view of the quantity of shipping (principally British) which daily passes through Sunda Straits and the important nature of the circumstances above related I have thought it my duty to dispatch the telegrams mentioned in the accompanying memorandum, and trust my action will meet Your Lordship's approval.

  I have the honour to be,

  My Lord,

  Your Lordship's Most obedient, Humble Servant,

  A. P. Cameron

  Her Britannic Majesty's Consul, Batavia

  The island of Krakatoa, meanwhile, had in essence disappeared. Six cubic miles of rock had been blasted out of existence, had been turned into pumice and ash and uncountable billions of particles of dust. The rumblings and roarings continued for some while, then on Monday afternoon became ever fainter. By dawn on Tuesday they had stopped completely. That last great detonation at two minutes past ten on that Monday morning had blown the island apart, and sent most of it to kingdom come.

  Now it was time for those who could, together with those whose duty it was, to venture out to see just what damage the eruption had caused.

  Admiralty charts show the islands of Krakatoa before and after the 1883 disaster.

  2. The Effects

  It was just before dawn on the Monday, and an elderly Dutch harbour-pilot, one of those stationed in Anjer to guide ships to and from the Batavia roads, was walking on the beach. He couldn't sleep; besides, staying inside was perilous, not least because the intermittent hails of pumice stones, many of them too hot to touch, threatened either to set ablaze the atap thatch with which his house was roofed, or to smash holes in it and wreak who knows what damage inside. Much the better, he thought, to watch the great events from the comparative safety of the shore.

  There was not much visible through the gloom. The clocks said that the sun ought to be ready to rise; but the falling, swirling ash had effectively dimmed the view for more than a few yards in any direction. Krakatoa herself, thundering away angrily to the west, was quite invisible – except that there was a dark-orange glare to the ash clouds in the mountain's direction: it was like the view of a very distant furnace glimpsed, only half seen, through the dark clouds of its smoke.

  But then, all of a sudden, the image shifted. Suddenly the old pilot, who had spent a lifetime guiding vessels through dangerous and unpredictable waters, became aware of something that was just barely visible, something that shouldn't have been there at all. He related to the Reverend Philip Neale, the British chaplain in Batavia who later in the year set about collecting the stories of eyewitnesses, exactly what it was:

  Looking out to sea, I noticed a dark black object through the gloom, travelling towards the shore. At first sight it seemed like a low range of hills rising out of the water – but I knew there was nothing of the kind in that part of the Sunda Strait. A second glance – and a very hurried one at that – convinced me that it was a lofty ridge of water many feet high…

  In the aftermath of Krakatoa's eruption, 165 villages were devastated, 36,417 people died, and uncountable thousands were injured – and almost all of them, villages and inhabitants, were victims
not of the eruption directly but of the immense sea-waves * that were propelled outwards from the volcano by that last night of detonations.

  It was in this one respect – the production of a number of massive and highly destructive sea-waves – that Krakatoa was then and remains today so very unlike almost all of the other of the world's great volcanic disasters. Its scale was phenomenal. The number it killed was unimaginably vast. But it was the way that it killed all those people that still sets Krakatoa apart.

  Other volcanic eruptions around the world kill people in more direct and predictable ways – and they kill and injure, it should be remembered, a not insignificant number of people, since one in ten of the world's population is currently reckoned to live near volcanoes that are either active or have the potential to become so. So far as volcanoes are concerned, there are a great number of people – in the Philippines, in Mexico, on Java, in Italy even – who are currently living in harm's way.

  The types of hazards to which such people are likely to fall prey, or to which their forebears fell victim in the past, are many and manifest. Erupted boulders and lumps of partly congealed lava – generally known by the term tephra, from the Greek word for ash – scream back down from the skies and flatten anything in their path. Perhaps a relatively small number of people, fewer than a thousand, died in this way from the Krakatoa eruption. All of them were in southern Sumatra, in the path of the prevailing wind: the hot ash that burned them alive had sped westwards from Krakatoa on top of a cushion of superheated steam.

  Most of the other means by which volcanoes kill their victims were not experienced here. In other eruptions lava flows surround and trap victims, and sear them to death. Earthquakes associated with volcanoes destroy buildings, and huge seismically caused cracks in the earth swallow people and the buildings in which they live. The terrifyingly fast-moving clouds of hot lava, ash pumice and incandescent volcanic gases, known to the French as nuées ardentes and to the rest of the world as pyroclastic flows, sweep people up and incinerate them in seconds – as with, for example, almost every one of the 28,000 inhabitants of St Pierre, in Martinique, * who in May 1902 had been persuaded to stay in town for a supposedly important election, but were burned and suffocated by the sudden pyroclastic flows coursing down from the eruption of Mount Pelée.