Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  Backer looked sceptically at the notion that all Krakatoan life had been destroyed, a theory agreed by almost the entire botanical establishment of the day, and proclaimed it to be near-total nonsense. He looked in particular, for example, at sweeping statements like that written by his superior, the Botanical Gardens' director, Melchior Treub, who had led the major post-eruption expeditions to Krakatoa and had written:

  … at the time of the eruption the trees felled or smashed by violent outbursts must have been half-carbonized, in view of the extremely high temperatures that certainly prevailed over the whole island. After that, Krakatoa had been covered, from the summit right down to sea-level, in a layer of burning ash and pumice. This layer had a thickness varying between one and sixty meters. In those conditions it is clear that no vestige of the flora would have been able to exist after the cataclysm. The most persistent seed and the most protected rhizome must have perished…

  Backer weighed into them with the kind of rhetoric hitherto unheard of in the genteel world of Edwardian botany. In 1929 he wrote and self-published a 300-page monograph that denounced the ‘hasty’ and ‘careless’ botanical work that had gone before, which, he insisted, resulted in the lazy, easy conclusions that all Krakatoan life had been wiped out. *

  He had a venomous disregard for those who had carried out the early studies. Treub, he declared, was a prime example, a man who ‘was no florist, and whose knowledge of tropical plants was very limited’. Treub's expedition to Krakatoa had been ‘much too short’, the data acquired ‘very incomplete’, and his trip so shoddy an exercise that it was not worth calling it a scientific exploration at all but rather ‘a mere excursion of persons interested in the problem but not seriously devoted to trying to solve it’.

  Other botanists went later to catalogue the growth of new plants. Backer accused them of ‘misspending their money’, acting under ‘childish delusions’, indulging in ‘vague speculations’ and making a series of expeditions that was ‘a complete failure’.

  The tone of his remarks set off a firestorm of criticism from scientists around the world. But the underlying points he made were all seen to be valid: the principal one being that no one, he said, had ever spent enough time or carried out a systematic enough survey to be totally sure that nothing had survived the original cataclysm. It was easy to take a look at the island and surmise that nothing could have lived through the fire; but it had since become well known that some kinds of seed not only survive fire but actually need high temperatures of this magnitude to germinate properly. Was it not in fact highly likely that such seeds had existed, and survived, on Krakatoa?

  The ash layers on the upper slopes of Rakata were thin, and would have been washed away by heavy rains. What if some roots and rhizomes that had been lurking beneath the earth's surface had lived – surely they would begin to sprout once tropic warmth and moisture and sunshine flooded their now ash-free setting?

  Then again – the first expeditions had all noted (but had never properly investigated) the presence of greenery in the deeply scored valleys that lay between Rakata's summit ridges. Why had this greenery, whatever it was, never colonized the two lower islands, Sertung and Panjang? Why had these islands been given their vegetative resurrection much later than the upper slopes of Rakata? If airborne and seaborne immigrants were the source of this life, then all three islands should be gifted with new life at the same time. But they weren't. The upper slopes of Rakata got it first.

  The answer to this and a number of similar unconsidered conundrums, Backer suggested, was that Rakata's colonization probably came from within – that surviving plants on the island's upper slopes had created the new life there; this was an upper-slope phenomenon that was entirely lacking on the islands Sertung and Panjang, which were lower in altitude.

  It all made excellent sense – but it was a theory that was now, thanks to the sloppy field work and hastily written conclusions of the first years after the eruption, quite impossible to prove. And that was the shame of it: no one could henceforth ever be sure what had happened on Krakatoa's relic islets. Bad science, in short, had left mankind puzzled, a raft of questions unanswered, and the Krakatoa Problem essentially unsolved and, very likely, for ever insoluble. *

  *

  The same was not the case, however, over on Anak Krakatoa. For this was an island that was wholly new, and one whose newness precluded any possibility of there being survivors at all. Survivors of what, one might well ask. * And science was not about to make the same mistake that Backer accused it of making with Krakatoa. A later director of the Botanical Gardens, Karel Dammerman, † whose 1948 study of the islands became revered as the biological equal to Verbeek's famous geological study, said that in Anak Krakatoa

  … we have an island originally entirely devoid of animal and vegetable life, with even a completely sterile soil. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the flora and fauna of this island should be constantly examined, and at regular intervals, and it is greatly to be hoped that this unique opportunity will not be neglected, as it was in the case of Krakatoa itself. [My italics.]

  The first creatures to appear and to be noted on any of the four Anak Krakatoas (the first three islands were eroded to nothing by the waves: it was the second of these that was visited by scientists) were insects – first a very desiccated black cricket and next a female brown ant, both of which were already known to exist on Rakata, two miles distant. But their existence was cut short by the vanishing of their home; and the third Krakatoa did not survive long enough or peacefully enough for anyone to venture out to survey it.

  But once the fourth edition of the island appeared in August 1930, and once it seemed to be enjoying some permanency, the scientists came out in their droves. One of the first was William Syer Bristowe, the English arachnologist who had enumerated the wild profusion of spider species on Rakata. * He was sailed over to the ashy shores of Anak, and in short order discovered a beetle, a mosquito, some ants – and three species of spider.

  Plants came next: fifteen months after the emergence of the fourth Anak Krakatoa the northern coast of the island was littered with floating tree stumps, bamboo stems, roots and decaying fruit – eighteen seeds were discovered, and of these ten had already taken root. Another visit added four more plant species to the list, all of them already well bedded-in, together with moths, fungus and a number of migratory birds, mainly sand-plovers. All seemed set fair for an explosion of new life – when the volcano at the edge of the new island unexpectedly and catastrophically erupted once more, and all life appeared to have been snuffed out.

  This was to happen three more times. Not until after a spasm of truly devastating eruptions in 1953 did some kind of volcanic stability return to the troubled young island – and yet then, and very unfortunately, it turned out to be a quarter of a century more before scientists returned in any significant numbers to the region.

  For some curious reason, scientists stayed away from the new island. Perhaps biologists were just too fearful of the region's unpredictable vulcanicity; or perhaps they were afraid of the political troubles of the Indonesia of the time; or perhaps there were more mundane reasons, such as cuts in departmental budgets or the reordering of academic priorities. Dammerman's plea of 1948, that the world keep a very close watch on the island, was widely ignored – with the result that considerably less is known today about the resettlement of the island than should be known.

  Krakatoa had itself suffered from bad and lazy science at the beginning of its post-eruptive phase. Now Anak Krakatoa was suffering from twenty-five further years of insouciance and benign neglect. It was left until the 1980s for research work on both mountains to begin again in earnest. It continues to this day – with every botanist and zoologist suddenly realizing that in order to learn as much as possible about these uniquely interesting and remarkably contrasting biological situations, there is much catching up to do.

  The geological make-up of the island has changed in recent year
s, and in the 1960s lava flows – which were hitherto unknown in the Krakatoa region – began to cascade from the crater and flow down to the sea. More than half of today's island is currently covered by congealed black lava – meaning that large areas of Anak Krakatoa previously vegetated are now barren once again. Students of island biology find this irksome, to say the least.

  Ian Thornton, an Australian biologist with a long-standing fascination for Anak Krakatoa, devised a simple experiment to see how rapidly insect life flooded into one of these seemingly barren lava flows. He placed plastic containers filled with sea-water on top of the flows – and waited to see how many airborne arthropods * they might catch. In ten days he found seventy-two species, including wasps, earwigs, moths and beetles: the aeolian tide of life appears to be quite as unstoppable as King Canute once found the sea to be.

  A thick coastal casuarina forest on Sertung island, with Anak Krakatoa and Rakata in the background.

  About 150 species of plant now inhabit the island: there are casuarina forests on the low and soft-soiled north-eastern shore; so-called wild sugar-cane, the aptly named Sàccharum spontaneum, bursts out of the hot and ashy slopes; delicate ferns are growing in the shaded parts of some of the jagged lava cliffs.

  Once the plants were there, providing seeds and fruit and shade and moisture, and once the insect colonies that were first to be established had grown more varied and abundant, so the birds arrived and settled. The first to do so had to be ground-nesters (there being in the early years an inconvenient absence of trees) – birds like the savannah nightjar, the collared kingfisher (which can build its nest in the sides of gullies) and the white-breasted waterhen, which can settle in the mesh of salt-grasses at the margin of the sea.

  Then, when the casuarinas were tall enough to allow nesting, in came the fruit-eating and insectivorous birds like the bulbul and the crow. And as the forests thickened, some amphibians that had somehow found their way across the sea began to slink in and make their nests – monitor lizards, paradise tree snakes. And, inevitably, rats.

  Next a generation of fig trees started to flourish – and fruit-eating and fig-eating pigeons and doves arrived to feed on them. They began to jostle for space and, in doing so, began to drive out some of the lesser first arrivals, among which were the ground-nesting birds whom the jungle law dictated had now probably outstayed their welcome. Raptors then took over from the doves. In time the peregrine falcon arrived, established himself as Anak Krakatoa's avian monarch and, together with the barn owls, began to feed sturdily on the rats.

  Thus, steadily and slowly, the population strengthened, evolving in appearance and flavour from being just the result of casual happenstance, becoming the ever more determined and rugged collection of island species that it remains today. And yet: nature proposes, but fate disposes. All of this happy development has been interrupted again and again – in the seventies and the nineties – by the mountain blowing its top.

  Today the population that has consolidated itself is distinctly different from that on the relics of old Krakatoa, as well as from that on Java or Sumatra. But the degree to which the animals and plants are actually going to be permitted to sustain themselves is far from clear: the ash and the lava that falls nearly continuously now is wreaking havoc with what could otherwise be a vastly theatrical biological experiment, laid on for the world to see. What could be grand theatre turns out, all too often, to be just a tease.

  The Great Chain of Being, an idea that has been in existence since the time of Aristotle, connects every living thing into one vast and seamless hierarchy – a system in which the Almighty, with Man just below, stands at the apex. If one wishes to look at illustrations of the processes that lie at the lower end of this grand and somewhat fanciful scale, one need only look at the creation of life that can be seen on Anak Krakatoa and at the re-creation of past life that can be seen on the relics of old Krakatoa. In both places the processes are in fact remarkably similar, though varied in detail.

  Both processes seem to have begun with the making of films of bacteria, which clung to the beds of volcanic ash and coated the ragged, burned ruins of once-hot rock. Matters got properly under way with, on the one hand, the arrival of fungi and simple grasses, and with, on the other, the addition of spiders and crickets and beetles. Things continued with the establishment of ferns and orchids and more general plants, a mix of botanies into which were eased the herbivorous birds and a scattering of small animals; then came the fruit and fruit-eating insects and the perching, nesting birds – and finally the larger animals with teeth and snapping jaws that would, in time, prey on all of these.

  The list is seamless, the Great Chain set down for all to see. Bacteria. Plant. Insect. Fruit. Herbivore. Carnivore. It is the classic development of life – a development a little more complicated on old Krakatoa perhaps, because of what lived there before and may have survived – but in all other senses, and assuredly so on Anak Krakatoa, entirely classic.

  To the outside world the eruption of 1883 may have spelled death and devastation. To the world of biology and botany, however, the subsequent energetic happenings on islands in the Sunda Strait represent nothing more or less than a freeze-frame picture of the future of life itself – a demonstration of the utterly confident way that the world, however badly it has been wounded, picks itself up, continues to unfold its magic and its marvels, and sets itself back on its endless trail of evolutionary progress yet again. The crucible of life turns out to be the most difficult of vessels to break: not even the world's most dangerous volcano could do it truly irreparable damage.

  EPILOGUE

  THE PLACE THE WORLD EXPLODED

  The cars that sweep swiftly southwards along what passes for west Java's corniche have to be prepared for all manner of delay and interruption – lumbering bullock-carts, stalled lorries, lurching cyclists drunk on palm wine, sprawling street fairs, impromptu political demonstrations, undisciplined scatterings of chickens and goats and cattle, and on every corner of the roadway small children, children everywhere. It is frustrating driving; by the time the cars reach the outskirts of the small town of Carita, few on board will be in any mood to notice a small, undistinguished and yellowing wooden structure that is set well back from the road at the north end of town, on the brow of a low hill above a tapioca plantation.

  Most probably those passing, especially if they are from afar – and Carita is these days a seaside holiday destination, so the coast road is frequently crowded with prosperous Indonesian families trying to escape the oppressive heat and crush of Jakarta – will be looking to their right, and not to where the building stands on their left. For on the right-hand side, the west, the view is quite soothingly magical – especially so at about six each evening, when the sun is setting over the distant blue hills of Sumatra.

  Just as in an old Chinese watercolour, so the shades of evening blue seem to merge in an infinite series of layers: the deep aquamarine of the sea in the foreground, the bold azure of the darkening twilight sky, the pale powder blue of the Sumatran mountains behind, and in between them the scattering of islands of the Krakatoa archipelago. Edged in pastel blues that are dark or light according to their distance, the islands change with the shadows that they cast upon one another, or as the smoke that is usually rising from the peak in the centre of the group drifts and curls above and around about them.

  And yes, you find yourself saying to yourself in an almost incredulous whisper, this is where it all happened. This is Krakatoa, the place with a name now firmly annealed into the language, welded into the world's public consciousness, a name that has become a byword for nature's most fearsome potential for destruction.

  The steep, sharp, instantly recognizable peak on the left-hand side of the little cluster of islands is Rakata, the dead relic, the ruined husk of the great eruption. The low and less distinguished islands of Panjang and Sertung hug the horizon, the wrecked parentheses of the ancient caldera. Sometimes, in certain lights, they can be tricky to
distinguish against the pale backcloth of Sumatra: their distances seem compressed, so that from the Java shore they look as though they are a single uninterrupted island, even though they are in fact two, and one is a good deal closer to shore than the other.

  And rising from the mid-point of the pair, in fact almost exactly in the middle of the neat little archipelago, is a peak that, though lower than Rakata, has at this distance and from this angle the shape of a perfectly formed cone – with a plume of smoke sometimes rising slowly above it and, on the line where mountain-top and smoke cloud meet, a sinister, beautiful, ominous-looking orange glow of fire. This is the centrepiece of the tableau, both in fact and in fable: this is the dangerously fast-growing adolescent child of the cataclysm, Anak Krakatoa.

  The beauty and strange menace of the scene is memorable: small wonder that passing southbound motorists are enraptured, and look steadily across the sea to their right. The yellow-painted buildings above the tapioca trees on the left, hold no attraction at all, and they are generally ignored, passed by and, if glimpsed at all, instantly forgotten.

  Perhaps they should not be. For the buildings are the field station of the Krakatoa Volcanic Observatory, and in one of the simply furnished rooms within the small cluster of structures there is a device – its electronics a little long in the tooth these days, but its metal casing, dials and instrumentation cleaned and oiled and cared for still – that measures as exactly as it is possible to measure what is going on beneath the earth below Krakatoa. This is the machine that will warn the region, the country and the world, one hopes, in the unlikely event that things begin to go awry.

  The device, which many years ago was gifted by the Americans, is designed to alert all those in Indonesia whose task it is to watch out for signs of trouble – the civil defence agencies, the army, local hospitals, managers of food depots and blanket stores, and everyone who lives in those low-lying coastal areas that might be inundated by tides – if another catastrophic eruption is imminent.