Krakatoa

by Simon Winchester

  The elephant, denied the company of his mistress, clearly unaccustomed to the luxury and comfort on offer in the East's premier hotel, and perhaps –just perhaps – sensitive to what was going on in the earth beneath his feet, promptly went berserk. He trampled through and across all the furniture in Miss Loch-art's room, smashing it to smithereens. He trumpeted. He roared. He stamped his not-yet-enormous feet so aggressively that other guests thought the entire hotel was about to fall down.

  And in the end the Batavia constabulary were called. They found Miss Lochart; they demanded that she persuade her two-ton charge to leave the room without further ado; and M. Cressonnier further demanded that the entire troupe, and such animals that others among them might have sequestered in their chambers, leave the hotel forthwith and find other accommodation.

  This they did. And no one thought any more about it.

  Except that then shortly afterwards, on Monday, 27 August 1883, the mountain that had been grumbling and groaning for the previous ninety-nine days finally exploded itself into utter and complete oblivion.

  For sixty million years the two tectonic plates that converge on Java had been grinding slowly and steadily towards each other, four inches every year. Now, on the very morning after the Great World Circus had given its best performance yet – with the artistes now all newly accommodated and the little errant elephant by all accounts behaving obediently and impeccably once again – the event that would be consequent upon all those years of subterranean shiftings and slidings was at last about to occur.

  8

  THE PAROXYSM, THE FLOOD AND THE CRACK OF DOOM

  And I thought: I would give all these people's lives, once more, to see something so beautiful again.

  – Dutch pilot in Anjer, quoted in ‘Krakatau’, a short story by the novelist Jim Shepard, 1996

  1. The Event

  The death throes of Krakatoa lasted for exactly twenty hours and fifty-six minutes, culminating in the gigantic explosion that all observers now agree happened at two minutes past ten on the Monday morning, 27 August 1883. The observers, as is often the way of such things, agree on precious little else. Thousands of people, far and wide, suddenly became aware of the events in the Sunda Strait – but their accounts of it, like the accounts of any monstrous and traumatizing event, present today a morass of conflict and confusion.

  The countdown to the final hours of the mountain's existence properly began at six minutes past one in the afternoon of the previous day, the Sunday. All across the colony, Dutchmen and Javanese alike were looking innocently forward to the long lazy stretch of the afternoon of a much needed day of rest.

  The first indications that all was not right became apparent more or less simultaneously to a number of people near by. They were at the time almost all completing the last moments of their familiar Sunday ritual: pushing their chairs away from the luncheon-table, folding their napkins, draining the last dregs of the coffee, standing up and stretching their legs, picking up their cigars, dogs and wives for the Dutch tradition of the afternoon family walk.

  In Anjer, from where most of those very early reports originated, the relaxed mood of the afternoon must have seemed peculiarly suited to the place. Anjer was a sedate, pretty little port-town, as pleasant a posting for a visiting Dutchman as it might be possible to find. It was situated in a shallow bowl in the volcanic coastal range, a place where the hills dipped steeply down to the sea and formed a cosily protective natural harbour. The beaches were wide and white, the fringing palm trees leaned into the trade winds, there were flowers and banyan trees and a paradise of birds, and everywhere a heavenly scent of spices.

  The local people lived in kampongs of small thatched cottages, the colonials in neat white stucco houses with red roofs. The finer of these mansions – some, like that of the Assistant Resident, * sporting a Dutch flag flying from a staff in the middle of its magnificent lawns and a private dock with the official's impeccably maintained launch – could be seen to best advantage from out at sea, where they seemed separated from one another by acres of deep-green jungle. There was usually a flag-signal flying from the pilot-station that spelt out: CALL HERE FOR MAIL; and the inbound ocean-going ships would indeed invariably call, giving with their presence an air of vibrancy to the town; and, because they were stopping for orders and not for stevedores, Anjer was free of the slums and squalor of a cargo port.

  The Europeans, in their white tropical suits and topis, would leave their houses – servants had their Sundays off – and saunter on an afternoon along broad seafront avenues, under groves of tamarind trees. There would be crowds of local Javanese, children running everywhere, pye-dogs sleeping under upturned boxes, chickens, pigs, goats, creaking bullock-carts, insistent pavement salesmen – all of the carefree magic of an Eastern street, in other words, out for entertainment and fun on what seemed likely to be an easy, lazy summer Sunday.

  Relations between colonizers and colonized in the East Indies were less than perfect – indeed much less than perfect, for the Dutch were not very kindly in the ways they wielded their imperial powers, and they are consequently remembered with much less affection today than are most of those other Europeans who ruled far-flung territories around the globe. Yet, by all accounts, on this particular Sunday any feelings of antipathy were soothed and muted by the holiday mood. People smiled at one another, Dutchman muttered cordial greetings to Javan, everyone sauntered contentedly along in the broad heat of the early afternoon.

  And then, without warning, from out to sea in the west – a sudden sound.

  The first two accounts to be written were of a kind that was to be repeated, in essence, many dozens of times that day. ‘We plainly heard,’ wrote one, ‘the rumbling of an earthquake in the distance.’ ‘We didn't take much notice at first,’ wrote a second, ‘until the reports got very loud.’

  The newly appointed Anjer telegraph-master, Mr Schruit, was once again idling on the veranda of the Anjer Hotel, which was owned by his new friend, the confusingly named Mr Schuit, the local Lloyd's agent. It was clearly Schruit's preferred place to spend his Sunday mornings. He was a young man, and cut rather a lonely figure. His wife and children were still in Batavia, and, after weeks of searching, he had only now found them a suitable house in Anjer, and was at long last looking forward to a family reunion.

  But until then, as for the past few months, his holiday Sundays were spent on the veranda, puffing on a cheroot, gazing out at the view. Three months earlier he had been there too, trying under Schuit's tutelage to decipher the flag message that was flying from the yards of the German warship Elisabeth, then sailing down the Strait – a message which almost certainly told of the first eruption. He did nothing about it then: he was new to the area, he was not on duty, and in any case the local Lloyd's agent had the matter in hand, was well able to read the Elisabeth's flags, and was already sending his historic dispatch about what the telegraph operators would misread as ‘Krakatan’ spewing out its great clouds of smoke and ash.

  But on this occasion Schruit was on duty, and much more observant than before. He remembered later seeing a fully rigged barque heading north, a billow of white sails gliding along the blue mirror of the sea. Then he spied the much less pretty steamer Gouverneur-Generaal Loudon, the locally familiar government-chartered vessel that had taken the eighty-six tourists to Krakatoa back in May, heading into Anjer port.

  (On this occasion she was undertaking more mundane and customary tasks: first picking up a hundred coolies who had been hired to help build a local lighthouse and ferrying them across the Strait; then going on up the eastern Sumatran coast to the troublesome region of Aceh, of the north, and there delivering, among others, some 300 miscreants, all members of a chain gang destined to be put to work on a variety of government building sites.)

  It was at the very moment when Schruit was watching the Loudon steaming towards the safety of port that there came the first roar of an explosion.

  It was an extraordinary sound, he thought:
far, far louder than anything he recalled from before. He looked sharply over to his left and saw, instantly, the unforgettable sight of a tremendous eruption. To judge from the billows of white smoke that were now tumbling up from the mountain – ‘as if thousands of white balloons had been released from the crater' – it was a far, far larger eruption than anything he had witnessed when he was standing at this exact spot back in May.

  Moreover, whatever was happening on the mountain was also having an immediate effect on the sea. It was rising and falling, strongly, irregularly, in bursts of sudden up-and-down movements of the sea-water that seemed immediately unnatural and sinister. It wasn't tide, or wave, or wash: it was some terrific disturbance, and the water was slopping up and down, dangerous and unpredictable.

  He ran down to the beach, where he had spied his deputy telegraphist watching the eruption, transfixed. He said he too was utterly perplexed by the movement of the sea. Perhaps the tide was on the turn, he said. But, as he spoke, a furious rush of water roared towards them, sending them scurrying back up to the roadway. The two men ran to the small white stone building that was the Anjer telegraph office – and, as they did so, the enormous cloud from the volcano began to drift down on them. Within moments all Anjer was enveloped in dust and cloud and became strangely dark.

  Some remember the cloud as black; others, like Schruit, are equally certain it was white. One of the pilots waiting for orders at the Anjer pilot-station, a Mr de Vries, swore it alternated in colour, from white (when presumably it was largely made up of steam) to black (when it was composed largely of eruptive smoke). But no matter: it was so thick and heavy that within moments an artificial night had descended on Anjer port, and the two men who groped their way to the cable office then found they had to light lanterns, in the middle of the afternoon, in order to be able to send their first message. They timed it at 2 p.m. Krakatoa, they tapped out in urgent Morse to their head office in Batavia, was beginning a major eruption. It was ‘vomiting fire and smoke’. It was so dark in town that it was now no longer possible to see one's hand before one's eyes. What were the instructions?

  Batavia replied, with equal urgency. Yes, they had already become aware that something was taking place. The governor-general himself, his sabbath ease disturbed, had been inquiring. People were milling about in the streets, worried. Chinese traders in particular seemed to have a peculiar sense of unease: the cable office reported hearing wailing. So it was important for Anjer to keep its telegraph station open and the information coming in, the operator tapped out. For the next six hours the operators did just that, giving the Dutch officials in Weltevreden (the name, ‘Well Contented’, must have prompted on this occasion a sardonic smile or two) a moment-by-moment chronicle, in the staccato language of the telegraph, of the unfolding events. ‘Detonations increasing in loudness.’ ‘Hails of pumice.’ ‘Rain of coarse ash.’ ‘First flooding.’ ‘Vessels breaking loose in harbour.’ ‘Unusual darkness.’ ‘Gathering gloom.’

  The Anjer harbour-master, who was by now aware that the crisis was frightening many of his friends and colleagues – ‘the Day of Judgement has come' was a common belief – tried to collect as many of the local expatriates together as he could, to reassure them. How he imagined he might accomplish this is left unsaid. But he did manage to assemble a fair number of the colonial establishment – the Assistant Resident, the public works supervisor, the lighthouse keeper, the registrar, the town clerk, a local doctor and a prominent local widow – and tried to tell them that what they were witnessing would soon blow over, that it was, in his considered and experienced view, nothing to worry about. He could hardly have been more wrong.

  At 2.45 p.m. the Loudon, all passengers aboard, set off for the forty-mile journey to the port of Telok Betong, at the head of Lampong Bay across in Sumatra. Her master, Captain Lindeman, steamed well to the east of the exploding island, trying as best he could to avoid the showers of rock and ash cascading down from the plumes of smoke. One British ship in the vicinity, the Medea, estimated that by mid-afternoon the column had risen to a height of seventeen miles, more than three times the height of Mount Everest; the Medea's Captain Thomson said there were ‘electrical displays’ in the cloud, and explosions every few minutes were shaking his ship – even though he was at the time at anchor off Batavia, more than eighty miles to the east.

  In the centre of the capital, meanwhile, people were very rapidly becoming aware that matters were getting out of hand. Two seasoned observers of Krakatoa's earlier throat-clearings – Dr J. P. van der Stok down at the Observatory in Batavia and the mining engineer Dr Rogier Verbeek up in the hills above town – had already telegraphed one another to find out what was going on. Van der Stok – the man whose wife had lost her delft dinner-plate in the May eruption and who himself had noted with great precision the time of the very beginning of the earlier events – once more swung into official Observatory mode, even though yet again this was a Sunday. He checked his watch at the very moment he heard the first loud rumblings, dashed from his house to the Observatory buildings and wrote the time down in the official log: 1.06 p.m. That time remains today, etched in official records, as the one known certain commencement of Krakatoa's final phase.

  *

  Confirmation of these figures then came from a totally unexpected source: the city's gasworks, to the south of Batavia old town. They proved, quite uncannily, to be of the greatest use to scientists who later studied the eruption. And they did so, quite simply, because of the way they had been built.

  The most visible parts of any plant that produces gas from coke are the tall drum-shaped metal containers for the flammable gas – containers that are in essence telescopic, which ‘float’ on enormous ponds of water or mercury and which grow taller or shorter, higher or lower, depending on the amount of gas pumped from the works to be stored inside them. (Today's gasometers tend to stand tall against a city skyline in the morning, fall gradually over the day as the gas inside them is consumed, and then are replenished as more gas is manufactured overnight. In those cities like Batavia in the 1880s that had gas street lamps, the profile of variations in pressure, and thus the times of the varying heights of these gas containers, would necessarily be rather different. They would stand tall in the early evening and fall away during the dark, during the gas-illumined hours.)

  What superintendents of gasworks have long known is that these storage containers – commonly, but in fact wrongly, called gasometers – also act as gigantic barometers. The pressure inside them, and in the lines leading from them, goes up and down by infinitesimal amounts according to the rise and fall of atmospheric pressure outside them. Normally one would never notice these small amounts of movement, since they would be superimposed on the much larger movements resulting from the consumption of gas. But an eagle-eyed superintendent, in charge of arranging the pressure in the gas lines according to demand, could indeed notice. Moreover, a paper register of the gasometer pressure is always produced (and was, for most of the time, in Batavia), which would show all the movements with great precision.

  The pressure records are being taken constantly, but they can in fact record the minute fluctuations in the atmospheric pressure

  The invisible and inaudible pressure wave from Krakatoa's cataclysmic final explosion, measured – until it blows off scale – at the Jakarta Gasworks.

  (and hence also the fluctuations caused by an event like Krakatoa) only when the base pressure is low enough for the recording meter to be affected by them. The gasworks superintendent would increase this pressure each evening, when the street lights were illuminated; he would keep it high until the middle of the evening; and he would then lower it in hourly stages until dawn. So the best recordings of changes in the atmospheric pressure would be made during daylight hours, when the pressure in the gas lines was kept low because of the low demand.

  Which is exactly what happened – after a hiccup. For when the very first explosions occurred at lunchtime on Sunday there is no reco
rd, mysteriously. But then whatever problem existed vanished, and the recording trace begins properly at 3.34 p.m. Batavia time (which, since this was still some while before the formal international establishment of time zones, was a little more than five minutes ahead of Krakatoa time). * From that moment on until dusk, and then throughout all of Monday morning after dawn, the Batavia gasworks pressure gauge provides an incredibly accurate, minute-by-minute record of the massive air-pressure waves that radiated out from the volcano, each and every time it erupted. The paroxysmal eruption itself at 10.02 on Monday morning blew right off the scale: it caused a pressure spike of more than two and a half inches of mercury, unheard of in any other circumstance.

  By five o'clock on Sunday evening, when in normal circumstances ordinary civil twilight would be only an hour away, it was, in fact, nearly totally dark up and down the entire west Java coast, and was becoming similarly so in the capital. It was at this point that enormous chunks of pumice began to rain down from the sky.

  There were three European ships inside the narrowest part of the Sunda Strait at the time – the Loudon with Captain Lindeman, which, because of the bucking sea, failed to reach Telok Betong and so anchored well out in Lampong Bay instead; the Danish salt-carrying barque Marie, which also rode out the enormous and ever-growing waves in the same Sumatran bay; and the cargo-carrying barque Charles Bal, reaching the end of her long voyage from Belfast to Hong Kong. All three vessels were deluged with pumice: dangerous, heavy, sharp, fast-moving masses of rock, the larger pieces still warm to the touch.