Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  * That he was up and about at 3 a.m. suggests either that he had learned enough about the May eruptions, presumably from his stops in various ports like Port Said and Singapore, to be wanting to catch a glimpse, or that he was a chronic insomniac.

  * The phrase was born in the foreword to a book called Explorations in Communication, published in 1960:

  * Post-literate man's electronic media contract the world to a village or tribe where everything happens to everyone at the same time: everyone knows about, and therefore participates in, everything that is happening the minute it happens. Television gives this quality of simultaneity to events in the global village.

  * The telegraphic transmission of news about Krakatoa, disseminated simultaneously throughout the entire newspaper-reading world, had much the same effect.

  * The vexatious question of the proper spelling of the island arises here, not surprisingly, given that within the space of a single day, because of the telegraphic equivalent of Chinese whispers, the spelling changed from Krakatau to Krakatan (probably a misreading of Agent Schuit's handwriting) to the rather puzzlingly elaborate Krakatowa. By the next day, however, 25 May 1883, The Times had settled for Krakatoa, which is how the name of the mountain has remained, in most of the English-speaking world, for most of the following century, and since. An anniversary book published in 1983 tried gamely to turn its back on all but the supposedly proper spelling of Krakatau; but the old wrong-headed one persists, despite all best efforts to do away with it. Searching for the possible orthographic villains in the piece: the Lloyd's men seem innocent; the telegraph operators may have made an honest mistake; a Times subeditor working that night with the Lloyd's copy seems to have made one executive decision on the first night – Krakatowa – and then changed it the night after. All told, the newspapermen seem to have made the greater error – but in doing so created a name that has stuck.

  * The telegraph office was a pair of single-storeyed buildings that still stand and now form the core of a convent for Jakarta's Ursuline nuns.

  * Well fortified and ‘known for its mud volcanoes’, according to the 1882 Lippincott Gazetteer.

  † The Emden was also, coincidentally, the name of the German surface raider that ransacked the cable station on Cocos Island, off southern Java, in 1916.

  * In 1917 The Times started producing a limited-run late edition on very high-quality paper that was christened the Library Edition. Five years later this was renamed the Royal Edition, and it was printed every day – except for a pause during the Second World War – until formally abandoned for budgetary reasons at the end of 1969.

  † A Times columnist named Edward Sterling, known for his trenchant editorializing, wrote in 1829 that his paper had ‘thundered out' in support of social and political reform – the phrase was widely noticed, and for at least the next century and a half the epithet stuck.

  * From the surname Josaphat.

  * These subsequent items settled on Krakatoa as the volcano's name.

  * The Resident, who at the time of the eruption was a Mr van Spaan, administered the region from the headquarters of the Residency in Bantam, thirty miles away. Anjer town itself merited only an Assistant, a Mr Thomas Buijs, who died in the disaster.

  * It was the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, DC, in 1884 that formally established the system of twenty-four time zones, each of which were essentially fifteen degrees wide (though which had deviations around countries, states and islands, where necessary, for neatness and convenience). The International Date Line was also set to run from pole to pole through the Pacific, though it had to be jiggled about because of various mid-Pacific islands that turned out not to exist. The whole notion of time zones was essentially the brainchild of a man named Charles Dowd, principal of a women's college in Saratoga Springs, New York, who wore his beard and hair in a design that perfectly emulated his hero, Abraham Lincoln.

  * In an 1884 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, in a long interview conducted in San Francisco (to where the Charles Bal sailed after visiting Hong Kong) by the journalist E. W. Sturdy.

  * This is the old name for those spheres of charged and luminous electrical clouds – known commonly to sailors as St Elmo's fire – frequently seen about the masts of sailing ships during storms. The word comes from corpus sanctum, ‘holy body' – a reminder that in peril a sailor can do aught but put his trust in God.

  * Not the least of which was an endemic South American leaf blight caused by Michocyclus ulei. The five plants sent on the Berbice were free of blight, and the plantations of South-East Asia have still not yet been infected, which many regard as akin to a miracle.

  * This was the kind of man whose like we do not see today. A London-born Passionist minister, amateur geologist and naturalist, he was compelled by ill-health to move abroad when he was in his twenties, and became an expert on the conchology and palaeontology of Tasmania during the time he worked as a travelling missionary for the Catholic archbishop of Sydney. He left the priesthood in 1883, when he was fifty-one, and travelled to Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies – where he became fascinated by the eruption of Krakatoa – and then on to the Philippines, China and Japan. He returned to Australia and died in Sydney six years later, in 1889 – ‘a man of wide culture, a musician, an artist, and something of a poet’, as well as a writer of hymns, the author of a book on the fishes of New South Wales, another on the history of Australia, and more than 150 other contributions to the scientific literature.

  * These reports were also collected by Tenison-Woods, a reliable and properly disinterested observer.

  * For some unexplained reason, Mr Hatfield left little by way of an interesting record of the Krakatoa events – and his report of the ash fall, which he timed much later than Tenison-Woods's very detailed and exact description (‘pale yellow… gloomy… very dense’), suggests that certain of his consular faculties might have been wanting.

  * Note that the consul spells the volcano's name correctly: as already suggested, the misspelling Krakatoa seems more a consequence of the carelessness of journalism than diplomacy. However, in the same paragraph Cameron makes an error with his dates. Even Homer nods.

  * The term sea-wave, or its Japanese equivalent, tsunami, is now generally preferred by the scientific community; tidal wave, a term that yet survives, is condemned as inaccurate, since the waves caused by earthquakes or volcanoes are in no sense tidal:

  * There were precious few survivors: the best known was a prisoner named Louis-Auguste Ciparis (or Sylbaris), who was in solitary confinement in an evidently well-insulated and nearly airtight cell. When found to be a survivor a miracle was promptly declared and he was set free. Barnum & Bailey had him perform in their travelling circus for some years before he got into trouble again and ended up in an American jail. He was fired from the circus when people lost interest, and died a pauper in Panama in 1955. His cell in St Pierre still stands as a tourist attraction; visitors are taken there in a bus called the Ciparis Express.

  * It seems now a measure of the Chinese labourer's legendary tolerance for appalling working conditions that so many were still hewing stone in Merak, despite the terrifying nearby concussions, to say nothing of the flames and the clouds of ash.

  * The speed of a tsunami is directly proportional to the square root of the depth of sea through which it travels. In mid ocean, where the depths are measured in thousands or tens of thousands of feet, it can move at speeds of up to 500 mph; where the water is 900 feet deep it will slow to 115 mph. In the Sunda Strait, where the water depth varies from about 500 feet in mid channel to twenty feet and less at the edges, the speed of travel appears to have averaged about 60 mph. When a fast-moving deep-sea wave encounters the shore, it changes shape drastically: out in mid ocean it will be fast moving but only a few feet high; as it reaches shore it will slow down, pile up on top of itself and very swiftly become enormous. A wave generated by Krakatoa might have started out with a height of ten feet and a speed of 100
mph; when it got to Telok Betong, or Anjer, or Merak, it may then have slowed to only 20 mph –but it could have been as tall as a ten-storey building, with frightening consequences for anything or anyone in its path.

  † The nearest land is Point Tikus in southern Sumatra, on the west side of Lampong Bay – but happily it is in the shelter of a small island, which would slow the wave's momentum.

  *. The accuracy of these figures comes from the Royal Society report, which calculates the speed of the onrushing waves as the square root of the product of gravity and the water depth, V = √gh. The Dutch mining engineer Verbeek came up with slightly different figures and used a more complicated equation to find V, the wave speed: V = √g/2h(h + E)(2h + E), where g is gravity, h the water depth and ε the height of the wave crest above normal.

  * A wedono was an indigenous colonial official of almost the same rank as the European contrôleur, who acted as his district officer. Dual administrative rule was a permanent feature of Dutch colonialism – a native official called a regent supposedly worked alongside the Dutch Resident, for example – and, provided both sides acknowledged where the power truly lay, the system generally worked well.

  * This is the skerry that British Admiralty charts were wont to call Thwart-the-Way. Mr McColl, just like Consul Cameron, was wrong to suggest it had split: it retains its insular integrity to this day, sitting smugly as a large navigational hazard at the northern entrance to the Strait.

  † This also turned out to be untrue.

  * He was also a world expert on the poisonous bites of the tarantula.

  * Diego Garcia has an exceptionally unhappy recent history. To help the US create what is presently its most strategically important overseas base, the British in 1970 leased the Americans the islands, assuring the Pentagon they were uninhabited – when officials in Whitehall knew this to be palpably untrue. The 2,000 islanders were forcibly removed to Mauritius, to make way for the base. In 2001 the High Court in London ruled their exile illegal and suggested they be allowed to reclaim their former lands.

  * Daly Waters, with a current population of about thirty-five, once had Australia's first international airfield, since Qantas used it as a refuelling stop. The telegraph cable from Singapore and Batavia once terminated here, and a pony express would, until 1872, take messages further south across the desert to where the cable to Sydney began once again.

  † The Hammersleys are now the site of one of the world's largest iron-ore mines, at Mount Newman.

  * From whence came the eponymous sweet-smelling hair-oil, the bane of countless English chair backs and the cause of the creation of the protective lace furniture shroud called, somewhat unoriginally, an antimacassar.

  * The thirteen-member committee was esteemed in the extreme: among the members was the hydrographer of the navy, the great geologists Archibald Geikie and Thomas Bonney, the physicist who discovered fluorescence, Sir George Stokes, and the aforementioned General Richard Strachey, who was such a towering figure of Indian engineering that he had a bridge over the River Jumna named after him.

  * Sir George Darwin's contribution to science was mostly theories that were later to be disproven. Most egregiously he calculated mathematically that the moon was created by being torn away from the cooling earth – an idea now universally discredited. He also wrote papers on contemporary fashion, and claimed never to do more than three hours' work a day.

  * That this particular wave was so unusually large is hardly surprising: the coastline between Durban and Port Elizabeth is notorious for giant waves, caused when northbound Antarctic storm systems slam into the southwesterly-flowing Agulhas Current, concentrating the confused water into shallows above a peculiarly narrow continental shelf. It is one of the most hazardous coastlines in the world – and the arrival in 1883 of a four-foot Krakatoa-induced tidal wave would have only served to remind local mariners about sorrows, single spies and battalions.

  * It has long been supposed, but never proven, that J. M. W. Turner, whose impressions of sunsets made him an international institution, was painting evening skies coloured by the aftermath of the 1815 eruption of Tambora. The link between Krakatoa and the sunsets of the late 1880s is well established; the similar effects of Tambora can only be surmised, with Turner's paintings usually offered as evidence.

  * It is privately owned by a collector in Philadelphia.

  * This was the Reverend Sereno Bishop, who while sporting a name well known in Hawaii where he worked as a missionary, was not related to the founder of Honolulu's famous Bishop Museum.

  † The stratosphere, a band of near-vacuum that lies between about eleven and thirty miles above the earth's surface, differs from the lower band of the troposphere in one important way: while the temperature declines steadily with height in the troposphere (as any climber or flier well knows), it does not do so in the lower reaches of the stratosphere. And in its upper few miles the temperature, so long as the sunlight is not cut off by the earth's shadow, actually begins to climb.

  * When a centenary study of the eruption was published in Washington by the Smithsonian Institution in 1983, members of the public were similarly asked to send in reports of anything to do with the eruption. The editors received not a single response.

  * Though the phrase ‘blue moon' dates back to the sixteenth century at least, and has no connection.

  * Of baseball's World Series fame.

  * He was at the time – 1784 – the first American ambassador to France.

  † Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, an essential bedtime companion for many an English reader, mentions the weather during the summer of 1783 as being unusually cold, with his Hampshire village experiencing ‘thick ice on 5 th May’.

  * Zanzibar, a British Crown protectorate, became the empire's leading producer of cloves, after seeds were brought from the Spice Islands of the Dutch East Indies in 1818.

  * Sir Harold was one of the last hold-outs against the theory of continental drift, writing into the late 1950s that the earth's crust was simply too rigid to permit it. He was widely regarded as a brilliant figure – an expert on the monsoon, and on the physics of cyclones – but was a memorably bad lecturer, devoting much time to the dynamics of boiling porridge and confiding its secrets not to his Cambridge classes, but to passers-by outside the open window to whom he customarily spoke. Like George Darwin, mentioned earlier, he also held the Plumian Chair in Astronomy.

  * This is a complex subject, well beyond the scope of this story: since it involves phrases and concepts such as enthalpy, adiabatics, isobaric entropy and mole fractions, this is perhaps just as well. However, it is vitally important to a proper understanding of plate tectonics, and I have included references to useful books on the topic in the ‘Recommendations for Further Reading’.

  † Mount Nyiragongo, in the East African Rift, is one of the more malign of the volcanoes to be found at a place where plates are pulling apart from one another. The lava flows are immense and unpredictable (though the calamitous eruption of 2002 happened to have been predicted, accurately, by an unpaid and heroic Congolese vulcanologist named Dieudonné Wafula, whose reports were widely ignored), and its gas emissions kill people and wildlife, including large numbers of elephants, who are suffocated and then covered with a thin coat of lava.

  * From which comes the word andesite, one of the more common indicator-rocks found in a typical subduction-zone volcano.

  † Despite its generally unfamiliar name, this rather small Peruvian volcano had one of the biggest eruptions in world history, in February 1600 – creating a ‘spike’ in Greenland ice-cores rarely equalled, even by Tambora and Krakatoa.

  * Krakatoa, by Rupert Furneaux, had the unfortunate distinction of being published in 1965, almost on the eve of the announcement of the discovery of plate tectonics.

  * The Indian Mutiny – or the First War of Indian Independence, as it is called retrospectively in the subcontinent – took place in 1857 and, though eventually quelled, was
a sure indication that the writing was on the wall for the British in India, as well, in time, as for the rule of foreign settlers elsewhere around the world.

  * A mere coincidence, the government insisted.

  * Three times during the 1880s there was what was called a Haj Akbar, a ‘Great Haj’, when the ceremonies on Mecca's Plain of Arafat happened to take place on a Friday. Such a haj occurred in 1880: no fewer than 9,544 Javan and Sumatran pilgrims took part that year, with Banten supplying by far the greatest proportion.

  * Most notably in the Sudan, where between 1880 and 1885 a number of insurrectionary leaders described themselves as Mahdis, and caused enormous political and social unrest.

  * He left in 1876, given the kind of send-off one might expect for a pope or a saint.

  * The pesantren were Islamic boarding-schools or seminaries that still exist in large numbers across modern Indonesia. They exerted a powerful influence on the attempt to spread Muslim orthodoxy and dogma in the nineteenth-century East Indies, and have considerable social force still. That Indonesian Islam is so mild remains irksome to the pesantren leaders: their eventual hope is to bring the stray sheep of Java and Sumatra fully back into the Muslim fold.