Krakatoa

by Simon Winchester

  The Loudon's captain, T. H. Lindeman, kept well away from the island. But he loaned Schuurman a small boat, in which the engineer and a small party of curious daredevils approached the northern end of Krakatoa. The beach was covered with pumice; they struggled on shore through ash, into which they sank up to their calves.

  Following the tracks of the most courageous, or perhaps the most stupid, we climbed inland with no further obstacle than the ashes which gave under our feet, the route being over a hill from where we could see, emerging from the ash, some broken tree trunks showing signs that their branches had been violently stripped off. The wood was dried, but nothing indicated that it had been alight, or smouldering. No leaf or branch could be found in the ash, and it is therefore likely that the deforestation must be attributed to a whirlwind…

  The foolhardiness of the explorers knew no bounds. They climbed the crater, knowing how dangerous and unpredictable it had to be, and stared down in amazement into the deep, dish-shaped basin. Its bottom, Schuurman noted, was covered with a ‘dull, shiny crust’, which occasionally emitted a rosy glow, through which a powerful column of smoke escaped with what he then admitted was a truly frightening noise.

  The clouds of smoke appeared to break through as with difficulty but with unmatched force, and they seemed to flee in numerous but closely linked, tremendous bubbles whose internal friction caused the turning and convoluting movement of the clouds in the lower part of the column of smoke… only at the edges of the point of eruption could the exhalation of steam from a number of cracks and gaps be observed.

  The men stayed for most of the day, burning the soles of their shoes, coughing and spluttering in the clouds of ash, occasionally darting for shelter when the crater burped out a greater than usual bubble of smoke and sulphurous gas. And then, just after six o'clock, the tropical darkness began to fall (as Krakatoa is only six degrees south of the equator), and Captain Lindeman sounded the Loudon's steam-horn to urge everyone to get off the island. One passenger, a Mr Hamburg, stayed a few moments longer to take photographs. Then everyone pulled out. ‘We started our return trip to Batavia at 8 o'clock in the evening,’ Schuurman noted at the end of his official report, ‘thankful for the beauty and for a spectacle which made a deep impression on all, and an unforgettable one on most.’

  For the next eight weeks, all seemed quiet – so quiet that, even though technically speaking the eruption was still going on, with smoke screeching from the Perboewatan crater and ash blowing high into the skies, ‘visitors to Batavia, unless they had made inquiries, might have failed to hear of its existence at all’. The geologist H. O. Forbes, pleading for information about this unknown period of Krakatoa's life, added that many of the ships' reports that had come in from this time seemed to have been written ‘either with the mind bewildered and confused by the terrifying incidents amid which the officers found themselves, or from the after-recollection of the events, of which under such circumstances the important dry facts of time, place and succession are liable to be unconsciously misstated’.

  One seemingly reliable report that did come to light – though half a century later – was from a young Liverpool seaman named R. J. Dalby, who in June was aboard the barque Hope, six months out from South Wales bound for Saigon. While his vessel called in at Anjer for telegraphed orders – this was in the days before ships' radios, of course – Dalby was given shore leave, and he took a canoe across the Strait. The view on all sides, he remembered for a radio audience in 1937, was

  ... a real paradise, a profusion of vegetation rising from the seashore to the summit of hills several thousand feet high. I well remember one particular evening, just at the time when the land and sea breezes were at rest, the very atmosphere impressed one with a mystical awe. It was enhanced by the subtle scent of the spice trees, so plentiful on the island and, to crown it all, the sweet yet weird and melancholy chant of some natives, paddling their canoe close in to the dark shore. There were three of us in the boat, and we rested a long time trying to take in the strange grandeur of our surroundings; it was at this time that we noticed a long straight column of black smoke, going up from the peak of Krakatoa Island…

  Was Dalby's recollection new evidence, perhaps, that by June the high peak of Rakata had now joined Perboewatan in erupting? Certainly a second crater had opened up later on that month – after a stiff wind had died down on 24 June, people on the Javan coast could see quite clearly that two separate columns of smoke were rising, and that the most northerly of the two was rising majestically. The controller of Ketimbang, the doughty Mr Beyerinck who had first paddled out to the island in May, went back again in July and found two craters – but the more northerly was not on Rakata, but at the foot of the insignificant peak in the island's centre, Danan.

  Dr Verbeek himself then saw Krakatoa, on 3 July, as he passed by on his way back to Batavia from Europe. One must suppose he knew nothing about what had just taken place: while Krakatoa had been busily erupting, he had been sunning himself, somewhere between Gibraltar and Suez, aboard the eastbound packet vessel Prinses Marie. The last time he had seen the island was in 1880: now, in the dark of the small hours,* he could see very little more than a vague red glimmer on the vessel's port side.

  And finally, on 11 August, a Dutch army captain named H. J. G. Ferzenaar, who had been ordered to prepare a survey of the island for the military topographic service, landed and spent two days there. He went alone – the local governor (‘unable to keep his promise‘) refused to go, and all the other officials he approached were too timid.

  Ferzenaar found a bewildering variety of signs that the island might be readying itself anew for something quite spectacular. There were now at least three craters erupting – one, which he thought looked especially potent, was on the southern side of the mid-island peak, Danan. All told, he counted fourteen vents in the rocky surface – fumaroles, one would call them now – from which

  The last map ever made of Krakatoa, sketched sixteen days before the eruption by Captain H. J. G. Ferzenaar. All but the southernmost peak of Rakata vanished in the cataclysm.

  greyish or pink smoke was rising. Most of these vents were also on this highly unstable-looking southern flank of Danan.

  He paddled his prahu around the eastern coast of Krakatoa, turned around the northern headland, passed on the outer side of the small sliver of an island on the north-west side – and then called it a day. Heavy smoke made visibility difficult; navigation, especially in a vessel without power, was exceptionally trying. He drew a map that showed as much detail as possible, including the tiny spots and streaks of red from which the new eruptions were beginning.

  This small and handsome map would have to do: any proper survey of the island had ‘to wait until later, because measuring there is still too dangerous; at least, I would not like to accept the responsibility of sending a surveyor. A large portion could be mapped from other islands, but I consider a survey on the island itself inadvisable.’

  His caution was well founded. Captain Ferzenaar was, as it happened, the last human soul ever to set foot on Krakatoa. His map represented the final time that anyone would be able to see the entire fifteen square miles of tropical island – an island of people and forests and wild animals and visitors and history, which had existed in this place for at least the previous 60,000 years. The good captain sailed his tiny craft away from Krakatoa on the evening of 12 August. Two weeks and one day later most of the island that he had drawn suddenly exploded; its billions upon billions of tons turned into vapour and disappeared from the surface of the earth, for ever.

  6

  A LEAGUE FROM THE LAST OF THE SUN

  ... it could not tell why the telegraph company caused it to be sent a full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia, a missionary banquet in Madagascar, the price of kangaroo leather from Borneo and a lot of nice cheerful news from the Archipelagos – and not a line about the Muskegon fire.

&n
bsp; – a contemporary account of the vexed mood of Michigan's Alpena Evening Echo, quoted as an example of information overload in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, 1998

  The first that the outside, Western world knew of the extraordinary events that were starting to unfold in the distant and exotic East was a nineteen-word entry close to the bottom of the second column of page twelve of The Times, in London, on the morning of Thursday, 24 May 1883.

  It appeared just below a story about a police raid on a suspected betting-ring in a pub in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and just above an announcement by the London police that the number of paupers known to be in town (‘exclusive of lunatics in asylums’) was 52,032 indoors and 37,898 on the streets. There were advertisements in columns beside the entry: readers were invited to buy Negro Head Gin for thirteen shillings and sixpence a gallon, John Brinsmead's Pianos for thirty-five guineas, Moir's Mulligatawny Soup, Epps's Cocoa or, a brand still familiar today, Rose's Lime Juice Cordial.

  Slipped in among the two gripping sagas and all the intimations of the prosperity and epicureanism of the Victorian readership, but with a journalistic economy that verged on the terse, was the following announcement:

  Volcanic Eruption. Lloyd's Agent in Batavia under date of May 23rd, telegraphs: ‘Strong Volcanic Eruption, Krakatowa Island, Sunda Straits.’

  It was perhaps appropriate that the first news of the explosion of an island in the middle of the sea came through the agency, in both senses, of the Society of Lloyd's. This was an organization that by now was quite venerable, it having been more than two centuries since London merchants met in Lloyd's coffee-house to discuss the coverage of risks to their far-flung fleet of cargo ships and set up a mutual-aid arrangement to cover themselves in the event of any losses. Lloyd's had become formally incorporated by parliament in 1871, and was by the latter half of the century respected as the world's oldest and premier society of insurance underwriters for ships. In that capacity the body employed or retained scores of agents or sub-agents, as they were formally known, at almost every port and capital city in the world.

  The Lloyd's agency system, which still exists, had been set up in 1811. In port-cities around the world, most often in the little streets close to the docks, there will still be an office with a brass plaque outside, or perhaps the enamelled crest with its cross-and-anchor badge and the words Lloyd's Agent picked out in scarlet. Filling the posts of agents of the Committee of Lloyd's has long been, from the Lloyd's point of view, quite simple: men have invariably been selected for being no more than ‘resident and well-established at the place concerned, and of high commercial status and integrity’. From the applicants' point of view, it was less easy. The privilege of appointment was considerable: many applied, and only a few could be chosen.

  The task of an agent was in good times one of great simplicity, in bad times one of formidable complexity. Agents were initially bound by their contract to do no more than ‘to collect and to transmit to the Corporation information of likely interest to the Lloyd's Market, and insurers worldwide’. But in those times, more frequent then than now, when ships went down, or where there were collisions or strandings or piracy or arguments over cargo, it turned out they were also there to settle suits, to adjudicate disputes and to pay just claims on the policies of insurance that were underwritten by the syndicates of Lloyd's.

  Although that first message about ‘Krakatowa’ reportedly came from the Lloyd's agent in Batavia, the colonial capital, it did so purely because of reasons of protocol. It was thought more appropriate to have the formal report of a major event like this come from the agent – in this case a Scotsman, a Mr McColl – who was based in the nation's heart, even if he were only transmitting second-hand information about an event he himself did not see. He may not have done; one of his deputies, however, most certainly did.

  For Lloyd's, which had (and still has) a truly worldwide presence, also had as agent a man on the spot, someone with a bird's eye view of Krakatoa and all that was going on there – too much of a bird's eye view, as it would later turn out. He was the already encountered Mr Schuit, the Dutch owner of the sea-front Anjer Hotel that he had conveniently set down close to the docks in the small Javanese port of the same name.

  The nature of Lloyd's business demanded that they have a presence in Anjer. Not only was it a bustling little coastal port in its own right, but it was the place where the northbound vessels, on passage for Batavia, would take on their pilot, and where southbound vessels would drop him. Anjer, principal pilot station of west Java, was the first port that newcomers would see in the island, their first landmark after passing the light on Java Head. It was a natural and necessary place for Lloyd's to have a man.

  And Mr Schuit had been chosen to fulfil the task – for which Lloyd's paid him a modest retainer – because of his view. His inn possessed a large wooden veranda overlooking the sea, and he and his guests would come of an evening to sit in lounge chairs there. A remarkably lovely spectacle was spread out before them: the island-filled, mountain-ringed, sunset-spectacular Sunda Strait, with the seemingly endless passage of ships sailing (or steaming: this was 1883, after all) along it, on their various ways between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. This last was what convinced the Lloyd's Committee that Schuit was the ideal man for them in the town where they particularly needed to employ one of the best.

  He was fascinated by the passing trade, and so were his guests. He bought and mounted a large brass telescope under his porch, so that he could identify the more distant vessels. With this he could see well enough to read the signal flags (there would be no marine radios for almost another thirty years) and could pass on messages to owners and agents as asked. He would look out especially for the distinctive arrangement of three flags that read ‘ZD2’ – this shorthand was known by all agents to mean ‘Please Report My Passing to Lloyd's, London’.

  He knew the Anjer harbour-master, who kept him fully up to date about all the vessels that docked to load or unload cargoes, or that simply stopped by to bunker, victual or de-rat. Schuit would thus send to London almost every day the names of ships that stopped, copies of the signals he had received, and statistics about the number of quintals of pepper, or piculs of coffee, maunds of this and catties of that, which had passed across the Anjer quays. And as well as all the shipping and commercial information, he would also from time to time send to London entirely unrelated ‘information of likely interest’ – of which the entirely unexpected burst of activity on Krakatoa was certainly a prime example.

  It was of interest to the underwriters back home not merely because of the fascination provided by the explosion of any big volcano but because this particular volcano lay almost directly athwart the main navigational passage of the Strait, and so would be bound to interest any master whose vessel might soon be making passage in those waters.

  In many ways the mechanics of Mr Schuit's job were, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, changing fast. The ships themselves were altering their appearance, drastically. Sail as a means of moving them across the oceans was steadily giving way to steam. Wooden hulls were being replaced by steel, copper nails by iron rivets. The Suez Canal had opened for business, making passages to and from Europe more rapid and less risky. There was a steady growth in traffic, with more cargoes as world trade increased, and with ships from more nations. Congestion in the shipping lanes reflected the ebb and flow of global business and global politics; and it also reflected (as with the warship Elisabeth, on her way home from a posting off China) the rise and fall of distant empires.

  And the ways in which Mr Schuit and his like were transmitting their reports was changing too. For most of the previous seventy years he and his predecessors would have sent their signals to Lloyd's by hand of messenger, the packages of bundled slips going back to London on the very homebound ships about which men like Schuit were reporting. But now, ever since mid century, technology was beginning to make the lives of all kinds of far-flung intelligen
ce-gatherers – Lloyd's agents, diplomats, traders and foreign correspondents among them – a good deal easier and much more efficient.

  For the previous ten years Schuit had been sending all of his messages from Anjer – including the information about the first explosion of Krakatoa, which the still extant records show was transmitted at precisely 3.47 a.m. on 23 May – by way of two related and newly invented devices. The first was the electric telegraph, which, as we have already seen, came to the East Indies in 1856; the second was the submarine telegraph cable, which was to play a highly significant role in the unfolding of the Krakatoa story. This underwater cable arrived in Java after many fits and starts – the first one failed after sitting on the ocean bottom for only a month. But by 1870, thirteen years before Mr Schuit needed to get his story out to London as quickly as possible, the international cable connecting Batavia was working well, and his message was received only a short while after he sent it.

  It took an event like Krakatoa's eruption – which astonished and mystified an entire educated world – to underline the real revolution that this new technology was visiting upon the planet. True, other events had already been recounted by means of the new machinery; and its utility – to commerce, diplomacy and news-gathering in particular – was in no doubt. But with the explosion of Krakatoa came a phenomenon that in time would come to be seen as more profound. This eruption was so enormous an event, and had so many worldwide implications and effects, that for humankind to be able to learn and know about it, in detail, within days or even hours of its very happening entirely changed the world's view of itself. It would not be stretching a point to suggest that the Global Village – the phrase is modern, and was coined by Marshall McLuhan in 1960, referring to the world-shrinking effects of television, even pre-satellite* – was essentially born with the worldwide apprehension of, and fascination with, the events in Java that began in the summer of 1883. And Agent Schuit's first telegram to London was one small indication of that revolution's beginnings.