Forty-eight further pages give the details of the 800 places where unusual phenomena had been seen, organized into chronological order. The list actually starts some months before the cataclysm, presumably to give an observational base-line from which the deviations that follow can be measured. So the first report comes from a town called Graaff-Reinet, in the centre of the South African tablelands, beginning during the southern winter – with someone noticing the presence of ‘fine sunsets, gradually increasing from February to June’. The very first eruption of the final paroxysmal cycle, it will be recalled, took place towards the end of May.
And thereafter came a cascade of responses from people who had seen or had been told about the Royal Society's announcements in the newspapers. A seemingly endless string of reports is included, from a bewildering variety of places and people and ships and lighthouses – all with news of strange phenomena, most of them seen in the skies. A blue moon was spotted by a Mr Haughton in Kokkulai, Ceylon. The lighthouse keeper at the Chinese city then called Chefoo – now Yantai – saw a pale-red glow, like fire, in the west. There was a blue sun seen by a Dr Earl Flint in Rivas, Nicaragua. Captain Faircloth of the Caribbean Signal Service saw ‘a lurid glare’ emanating from the sun setting over Nassau in the Bahamas. The scientific journal Nature – which collected dozens of such reports in tandem with the Society – had first a report of a green sun seen in Colombo, and then a letter from a Reverend W. R. Manley, a missionary in Ongole, south India, who saw ‘splendid twilight glows… deep red more than one hour after sunset’.
And Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Victorian poet and Jesuit priest, then teaching classics at Stonyhurst College, wrote a lengthy essay for Nature, outlining in detail what he had seen – in a style unusual for the normally arid magazine, but easily recognizable to those who know their Wreck of the Deutschland:
… the glowing vapour above this was as yet colourless; then this took a beautiful olive or celadon green; not so vivid as the previous day's, and delicately fluted; the green belt was broader than the orange, and pressed down on and contracted it. Above the green in turn appeared a red glow, broader and burlier in make; it was softly brindled, and in the ribs or bars the colour was rosier, in the channels where the sky shone through it was a mallow colour…
There were four main kinds of phenomena, all amply evident from these pages and pages of reports. There were the sunsets themselves; there were the vivid and highly unusual colorations of the moon (often blue, * sometimes green), the occasional colorations of the sun and, very rarely, of some of the larger planets; the whitish solar coronas that were frequently seen just before sunset; and the monstrously flaming afterglows.
The afterglows in fact turned out generally to be a more dominant and widely noticed feature than the actual sunsets themselves. They are brilliantly hot-looking glows that appear from time to time some way up in the sky above where the sun has set some minutes before. The geometry of their origin is well known – having been studied assiduously after the eruption. They are caused when the rays of the sun, at an ever increasing distance from the observer, pass tangentially to an optically unusual layer in the atmosphere. In the case of the afterglow sightings that were made after Krakatoa, the optically unusual layer was the drift of ash – the ash particles absorbing and reflecting and causing a fiery reddening of the red light that is the last to be bent from the source, before, thanks to the disappearance of the sun and all of its light now coming from well below the horizon, they eventually vanish altogether.
A pattern also emerged swiftly from the Royal Society's massive catalogue of observations. There could be no doubt that the immense cloud of stratospheric ash that spread out from Krakatoa wound itself around the planet in a westerly direction – as one might expect, with the world turning eastwards underneath it – and spread both northwards and southwards as it did so. At first, in other words, the blue suns and moons and the fiery afterglows and the Bishop's Rings and the extraordinary sunsets appeared in the low latitudes, close to the latitude of the volcano: during all of September in places no further north than Honolulu, no further south than Santiago in Chile.
But then the cloud spread itself further afield. By the beginning of October the phenomena were seen in the Gulf of Mexico, then Nashville, Buenos Aires, the Canary Islands, Shanghai. By now, six weeks after the eruption, the particles were refracting and reflecting and dissipating and dispersing light over fully sixty-two degrees of latitude and had spread, quite literally, half a world away from their birthplace.
And so the trend continued: by late October the amazing sunsets were causing bystanders to gasp and write poetry, to send letters to newspaper editors, and to paint vivid pictures in places like Tasmania, South Africa and the southern cities of Chile. After which the cloud of volcanic aerosols, still wafting and widening north and south, performed a strange shiver and apparently began to move backwards and outwards at the same time, so that sometime around 23 November, after touching western Canada and California, it became apparent not in Alaska, the Aleutians or Hawaii but in England, Denmark, Turkey, Russia and (coming from the west) Siberia.
Examination of all of the northern hemisphere records – including the 500 sunsets of the Chelsea artist Mr Ascroft, who started to paint in earnest in November what he saw each evening on the Thames – appears to show that countries lying to the east were to be affected later. It looks, in other words, as though the cloud that had in its early days been sliding ever westwards was now moving in the opposite direction, as though it were trying to describe a long and lazy spiral across the surface of the earth.
(Close study of these upper-air movements later turned out to be quite crucial for modern meteorology. Analysis of the effects of the Krakatoa eruption – which still continues today, particularly at universities in Hawaii, Rhode Island, Oxford, Auckland and Melbourne – has informed very many areas of science, but in particular has quite revolutionized the business of weather-forecasting, helping to nudge it from its earlier and rather dubious standing as a mere drawing-room fancy into something that approaches the modern science of today. Each time, for instance, that one sees a map of the unfolding patterns of the jetstream, it is well worth remembering that it was the study of the stratospheric movement of the Krakatoa aerosols that led to the understanding of this particular weather-making phenomenon. Reverend Bishop in Hawaii seems to have been the first to notice, and called the initial spread of ash the Equatorial Smoke Stream.)
The eruption particles continued to move ‘at about 73 mph’ – such again was the scientists' exactitude – until, by the end of the year, they settled wherever they were and stayed, moving downwards under gravity's pull with an infinite slowness. And so they seemed to hover permanently in the sky and, though having effects not quite as radiantly beautiful as in those first months, gave the greatest of pleasure to all below who saw them, for the next two or three years. Mr Ascroft chronicled the entire long life of these sunsets from his Chelsea studio: they did not, he wrote, ‘entirely fade from view until the early part of 1886’.
And the spectacle was only the half of it. The cloud reached the environs of New York in December. In the city itself they saw one thing. ‘The entire island seemed ablaze,’ said the World. * ‘Great tongues of flame shot up from across the water, reddening the southwestern sky and tinting the Jersey shore with delicate shell colors.’ The Times, then a less restrained newspaper than today, was only marginally more circumspect: ‘The clouds gradually deepened to a bloody red hue, and a sanguinary flush was on the sea; the brilliant colours finally faded to a soft roseate [Peter Mark Roget's Thesaurus had been available since 1852], then into pale pink, and finally died away upon the darkening horizon.’
Out in the countryside, the results were very different, and the florid sunsets caused no end of confusion. In Poughkeepsie, seventy miles north along the Hudson valley, the Daily Eagle noted with wry pleasure on Wednesday, 28 November, Thanks-giving eve, that:
Po'keepsie firemen
have always been noted for their zeal and promptitude in going to fires, and their efficiency in putting them out, but the effort last night was a little too much for them. The light of an immense conflagration was visible, the bells pealed out vehemently and the boys ran vigorously down Market to Montgomery, down Montgomery to Riverview Academy they rushed – and when that point was reached it became evident that the fire was on the other side of the river, and a few moments of cooler reflection convinced them it was too far to reach, although it could probably last until they got there. Still, there was no means of transport available, and no likelihood of water. The fire being located 91,000,000 miles off, it would have taken the boys somewhere in the neighborhood of seven or eight million years to get there, let them run their best, and their terms would have expired before getting back. The sun is rather a large customer to tackle in the ways of fire, it beats a barn to death. We think the boys did well not to run out of hose.
Various causes are assigned for the peculiar light in the sky, the main one being the reflection of the rays of the declining sun upon the haze in the horizon. For several days past also there has been a peculiar state of atmosphere, which may or may not have something to do with it.
The no doubt embarrassed ‘boys' who were duped so nicely by the sunset belonged to the town's Hose Company No. 6 (of seven), better known as the Young America Hose Company, and they were based close enough to the river to be invariably the first called out to deal with a fire in the western end of town. A few days later, trying to assuage their pain, a meteorologist wrote helpfully to a neighbour paper, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, to say that the same confusing light had been experienced at his end of the state as well; and in his opinion whatever it was that had prompted the volunteers down in Poughkeepsie to dash off on their horse-drawn pumping engines was caused by ‘a stratum of decomposed vapours in the upper atmosphere’.
The Poughkeepsie Sunday Courier went further, suggesting with some prescience that ‘the apparent reflection of a large conflagration, which called out our fire department' was caused by the sun's rays bending through ‘extremely small water droplets… perhaps mixed with dust and smoke, sifting out the blue and yellow rays’. But another correspondent, probably taking down the office copy of Old Moore, offered only that the light show, all lumière and no son, was simply an augury of fine, anticyclonic weather in the days to come. Given the coming coldness of the season – made much worse by the dust – he could hardly have been more wrong.
Certainly the month of November 1883 was a time of unforgettable light shows throughout the northern world. In addition to the fire-spotters believing they had seen a blaze in the western suburbs of Poughkeepsie, there were reports that the fire-engines from New Haven, Connecticut, had been sent out too, for much the same reason. There was for a while a curious, half-panicked mood about people who had to see these ghastly skies night after night: to some they seemed almost apocalyptic, often unnerving; and it was only when they were explained away as being caused by dust from a distant volcano that people began to relax, and to bask in the simple sight of a terrible beauty they would long remember. But it was not to be a permanent fixture, there or anywhere.
And then there was the matter of temperature. Batavians noticed the chill immediately. At dawn on the very Monday morning of the eruption – though it was less a dawn, more a vague lightening of the drab ash-filled gloom – it was colder than records had shown for years – 65°, fifteen Fahrenheit degrees lower than normal. People were seen shivering in the streets – though perhaps as much from fear as from a need to keep warm. Dense clouds hung in the air for days afterwards, enveloping the city and an area perhaps 150 miles in diameter in a grey shroud through which the sun's rays could not penetrate.
Logic would suggest that a veil of dust particles spreading around the world would in time produce much the same effect, with those places that languished under the sunset-inspiring dust clouds feeling chillier than normal – though on a lesser scale than places near by. And to an extent they did. Oddly, the Royal Society, so assiduous in cataloguing the sound and light shows put out by Krakatoa, never bothered to consider the idea that the world might be cooled down by all the particles in the upper air. The Society's editors present a catalogue of the world's barometric pressures but none of the world's ambient temperatures. Those studies had to wait until much, much later – a rather puzzling omission, considering the time's enthusiasm for climate-related studies, and one never satisfactorily explained.
And when these studies of temperature came – the first carried out in 1913, the second in 1982 both found that as expected there had indeed been a worldwide drop in temperature. It had amounted on average to about one Fahrenheit degree and it had occurred, according to all the surviving records, at a time that appeared to be coincident with the eruption of Krakatoa. What has not been established, and what still concerns the scientific community, is which came first: did the eruption lower the world's temperature? Or did a lowering of the world temperature because of some other reason perhaps – unthinkable though it seems – somehow prompt the crust to undergo stress and strain and crack, and a rash of volcanoes to explode?
There is no doubt that there is a correlation, a definite link. Benjamin Franklin * was the first to notice it, and told an audience at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society that the ‘dry fogs' that had seemed to cool the European summer of 1783 and made the ensuing winter exceptionally bitter were almost certainly the work of dust in the air. He had examined the volcanic records and found a fissure volcano called Lakagíar, or Hekla, in Iceland that had erupted earlier in the year (curiously, exactly a century before Krakatoa). It had produced great clouds of dust, for week after week, which tumbled up high into the atmosphere. This, he declared, must surely be the culprit. †
The infamous eruption in 1815 of Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, 700 miles east of Krakatoa, ejected twice the volume of material into the atmosphere (eleven cubic miles of rock, ash and dust, compared with Krakatoa's six). The devastation it caused locally was profound – supposedly 50,000 dead, an entire language (Tambora) extinguished, an entire island rendered uninhabitable for years. But its climatic effects were astounding too. For it lowered the world's temperature by almost one Centigrade degree, on average: for every day when the normal temperature might be 33 °F, just above freezing, the temperature in the year after Tambora would be 31°, and ice would have formed on every pond and, more fatally, in every newborn crop, flower and hatching egg.
So in New England the farmers claimed that 1816 was ‘the year without summer’. There were frosts as far south as New Jersey in late May, in upper New England in June and July, and the growing season was slashed from the usual 160 days to seventy. Soup kitchens opened in Manhattan. Livestock had to be fed on fish carried over from the Atlantic seaports – 1816 is also still remembered as ‘the mackerel year’. There were crop failures – ‘the last great subsistence crisis of the Western world' – and, as a result, there was emigration to the western states. No small number of today's Californians can rightly lay responsibility for their being Californians squarely at the door of the proximate cause of that year's ruinous cold – Tambora, a volcano unknown to most of them, and 10,000 miles away. (Although there was migration into California from Europe, in Newfoundland the reverse took place: migrants were sent back east across the ocean, because there was not enough for them to eat.)
And yet back in Europe it was quite as bad. The weather for 1816 is the worst recorded, with low temperatures stretching as far south as Tunisia. French grapes could not be harvested until November. The German wheat crop failed entirely, and prices for flour had doubled in a year. In some places there were reports of famine, and in others there were riots and mass migrations. The diaries and newspapers of the day presenta litany of miseries. It is said that Byron composed his most miserable poem, ‘Darkness’ – Morn came and went –and came, and brought no day – the influence of that dismal year; an
d Mary Shelley may have composed Frankenstein while gripped by a similarly unseasonable melancholy.
Nowadays sophisticated instruments and the measurements they take have usurped the role of anecdote and diary. Ice-cores show minute layers of ash, or increases in sulphuric acid, as indicators of eruptive material in the atmosphere. And there is stunting of tree rings – the creation of a ‘frost ring’ in trees that have suffered through an exceptionally cold winter. The examinations of deep ice-cores, and of such trees as were living in the nineteenth century, have confirmed what the stories had long suggested: that eruptions of any of the world's larger volcanoes tend to coincide with periods of a cooling of the earth, some of the periods longer and with a very much lowered temperature, others shorter and with less of a fall in the mercury (the precise decisive factors are still not quite agreed). Tambora's eruption of clouds of ash coincided with a cooling of the world in 1815; and so, in 1883, did the appearance of the clouds of ash from Krakatoa.
The most tragic of cargoes to move out from the volcano happened also to be the slowest. The audible sounds and the unhearable shock waves may have sped away at more than 700 mph, and the dust may have wandered across the globe at more than seventy. The immense rafts of floating pumice that drifted away from where they splashed into the seas around Krakatoa made it as far as the south-east coast of Africa – but they did not make landfall for more than a year, travelling half a mile each hour, at best.
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded Page 27
