There were occasional acts of unexpected mercy. Mrs Dumas, for example, was found and – somewhat improbably – released after she had signed a paper saying she agreed to be converted to Islam. But otherwise the killing and sacking went on and on for hour after hour – until late in the day there arrived a full battalion of Dutch infantry and a squadron of cavalrymen. The infantrymen were armed with a new and quite terrifying weapon, just arrived from Holland: the repeating rifle. It was this weapon, above all else, that finished this fierce but, in the end, very brief rebellion.
The white-robed rebels believed, as Holy Warriors in any conflict are wont to do, that their piety would surely protect them against the Dutch bullets. But it did not. They died under the hail of Netherlands lead just as surely as would any godless infidel. And the Dutch military were quite evidently in the mood for killing that afternoon: when they opened fire with bullet after bullet, they did not intend to take prisoners. Thirty of the rebels were killed and thirteen more were wounded, out of a total of perhaps a couple of hundred. When the identities of the casualties were checked days later, almost all of them were found to be hajis, men who had waged war in the name of Allah the Merciful, as the legacy of their long-absent spiritual leader, Haji Abdul Karim.
The hajis' twenty-four victims were Hollanders and their Javan employees – kafirs too, in the eyes of the dagger-wielding fighters. There were civil servants, merchants, prison-warders, wives, daughters. They were regarded by the Muslims as the initial victims of what would be an eventual perang sabil, a Holy War, in which all trace of infidel behaviour and attitude – and people – would be rubbed out.
But, of course, no such thing happened. The rebellion had been crushed; an inquiry was staged; the Dutch slowly instituted reforms; taxation was eased; strictures on travel were relaxed; a new mood of tolerance and ethical standards took root. In the kampongs, talk of the Mahdi's coming evaporated, as did the fanatical mood for war. An accommodation – uneasy at first but more comfortable as the years progressed – was eventually reached between the competing requirements of the Muslim and the Christian faiths. The Peasants' Revolt of Banten faded in popular memory.
From today's perspective the rebellion is regarded very much as a way-station on the route to eventual Indonesian independence, the beginning of the end for this alien peculiarity of Dutch rule so very far from home. The Islam that had driven the Bantenese to fight so brutally in 1888 became, in time, more of an organizational structure for the coming revolution, and less the banner under which the revolutionaries might fight. But the Indonesia that was born in 1949 was a Muslim state, and it remains one today – with Islam in Java and Sumatra in a much more aggressive mood than it has been for a long, long time.
When the Muslims first turned aggressive, with the attacks on the soldiers in the late autumn of 1883, Krakatoa had just erupted, and the ruin and devastation that was its legacy made a wretched contribution to the miserable lives of millions of people around the Sunda Strait. Their misery was swiftly exploited – cynically, some might say – by the calculating Islamic leaders of the day. The melancholy condition of the Javanese and Sumatran peasantry was exploited by a corps of mullahs and scholars who had come back from their pilgrimages to Mecca and the Hadhramaut, eager to recruit like-minded East Indians to help wage an essential first strike against the godless Western infidels and kafirs who were posing such a threat to the purity of Islam.
To that degree, the eruption of Krakatoa did indeed help to ignite a political and religious movement that flared briefly and violently in Java, and that left an indelible mark on the polity of the East Indies. Had anyone been in prescient mood, the Banten rebellion might also have struck a tocsin note – a warning of similar events that could well occur very many years later.
The bombings that took so many lives on the island of Bali in the autumn of 2002, for example, seem a haunting echo of those happenings in north-western Java more than a hundred years before.
10
THE RISING OF THE SON
And then,
the most humble of plants,
a moss.
And then,
one morning,
the first sound of an insect,
so dry
you would think it
still mineral.
And then,
hope.
– Max Gérard, 1968
It would be a bold local fisherman indeed who, any time after the summer of 1883, would dare steer his craft between the cliffs and islets and shallows that form the outer shell of old Krakatoa, and drop nets into the waters directly above where the volcano had once stood.
The sea in these parts by now had a fearsome reputation. For a long while after the cataclysm the Sunda Strait was a place that terrified mariners, and those who had to pass through it did so as quickly as they might. The idea of lingering to catch fish was quite out of the question: merely to peer down into the seas and wonder what might be going on deep below would give most passers-by the shudders.
The danger of a further catastrophe remained for a long while uppermost in the minds of everyone who had survived the first. For months no one would venture near the charred ruins of the remaining islands; only those who went out on the scientific expeditions dared, and they were reckoned to be foolhardy in the extreme.
But economic necessity is a hard taskmaster; and by the time six months had passed, the fear and the apprehension dissipated, as they always do. The various Javanese gods had been placated (with flowers and sweetmeats and offerings) and their anger assuaged (in part by the attacks on the Dutch soldiery). Slowly, one by one at first, and later in companionable little fleets, the prahus and the smacks were out bobbing among the Krakatoa reefs again, looking for fish. This time they may have been dodging the occasional clumps of pumice and stranding on the odd unanticipated shoals, but their doughty and long-experienced captains soon took to behaving as though nothing much had ever really happened.
And such remained the case, the fishing improving, the waters placid and unremarkable and comfortingly deep, the volcanic dangers steadily receding in the public memory – until one day, after almost exactly forty-four years had passed. Then, on the evening of 29 June 1927, a group of fishermen who were hauling up their nets after a day spent innocently trawling for wrasse and sweetlips, and trolling by line for grouper and skipjack, witnessed something entirely unexpected and wholly extraordinary.
With a great roiling and rumbling sound, a clump of enormous gas bubbles suddenly broke the surface of the sea. The bubbles seemed to be all around, to be rising in strange and random combinations to port, to starboard, ahead, abaft. * It was very confusing, and very frightening. Exactly where under the sea these bubbles – which exploded in clouds of spray and ash and foul-smelling sulphurous gas – were coming from, and whether they were coming from one point or from many, was difficult to say. The panicky sailors, caught in the midst of them, seemed to think they were concentrated a point more or less above where Danan, the middle of the three former Krakatoa peaks, had once been.
As a sea-mark, a point of reference, there had long been near the centre of the caldera a curious clump of needles of light-coloured rock that mariners (and the hastily printed new navigation charts) named Bootsmans Rots – Bo'sun's Rock. These guano-stained pillars, nearly vertical sheets of andesite that are, with the peak of Rakata, the only real relics of the old Krakatoa, rise fifteen feet out of the ocean directly above the old central peak of Danan – like ‘a gigantic club which Krakatoa lifts defiantly out of the sea', as one early visitor had it. Around the islets the waters, alive with scores of sharks, are 600 feet deep at least: the pillars rise from some unfathomable depths, and most fishermen still regard them today as they did back in the twenties, as a warning to keep back, a reminder that the volcano, if not all fully there in person, was still there in spirit, at the very least. *
And as if to underline the warning on this evening in June, the eruption of bubbles appeared to be
coming almost from directly beneath the pillars, perhaps just a little to the north-west of them, and thus a little to the west of the old crater. Moving through the bubbles the fishermen felt the water quickly grow warm† – and there came a point where steam could be seen rising from where the bubbling had become most fierce. As the men paddled and sailed away as fast as they could, and as night began to fall, so they saw a diffuse red glow settle on the water, as if the bubbles were somehow mingled with fire.
Dr Verbeek, who had been the first to step on to the remains of the ruined mountain back in October 1883, and who had compiled his masterly study of the eruption two years later, would have known well what was happening. He died in 1926, but in 1885 he had written, with astonishing foresight:
… in any renewed activity of the volcano it is to be expected that islands will arise in the middle of the sea basin that is surrounded by Rakata Peak, Sertung and Panjang, just as the Kaimeni arose in the Santorini Group, and just as formerly the craters Danan and Perboewatan themselves formed in the sea within the ancient crater walls.
The bubbles were the first indication at the surface that a new volcano, lurking somewhere deep on the bed of this bathymetrically uncharted corner of the sea, was trying to build itself up. It came as something of a surprise, despite Verbeek's prognosis: when a survey was made in 1919 a shoe-shaped ridge was found to have developed to the north-west of Bo'sun's Rock, but there was no evidence that it was part of a developing volcano. But swiftly, in the aftermath of the random eruptions of bubbles and clouds of steam of June 1927, a distinct line of froth and bubbles and plumes of steam started to develop in the water – such that by the end of the year scientists were able to map a quarter-mile course through the water that appeared to mirror a rent in the seabed's surface, a thousand feet below.
The tenor of the activity then changed. The bubbles became more fierce, large fountains began to play from the surface of the sea, black froth, steam, spurts of ash and bombs of pumice began to surge from between the waves. Cones of water sixty feet high shot into the air, with rays of black magmatic material, like needles of jet, rising fifty feet further above the water-cones. As the eruptions became ever stronger, so domes of water, half a mile across, rose out of the sea, and the mixture of volcanic material within them gave a curious flecked appearance, with mottled layers of black and white and grey, so very different from the vivid blue seas all around.
And then, most bizarre of all, flames started guttering on the surface of the water, and then shooting out in huge yellow jets and sheets of fire: observers had the impression that the water itself was now ablaze, or had been covered with flaming oil, as if the scene were the aftermath of some terrible maritime tragedy.
Finally, on 26 January 1928, the volume of bubbles and flame transmuted into ash and solid rock, and broke surface: a thin curve of brand-new land appeared for the first time above the sea. This new land grew, black and sickle-like, for several days, until it formed a humped and scimitar-shaped island. It looked like a
A current official depiction of what the Hydrographer of the Royal Navy styles Anakrakata – the island of Anak Krakatoa, growing steadily at a rate of five inches every week.
sand dune 500 feet long and ten feet high, with a concave steeper side on its south-western edge and a rage of smoke and explosions discharging from its base. A Russian geophysicist named W. A. Petroeschevsky was on hand to see * the birth of this new piece of the world's real estate, and he gave it the name its successor still has today: Anak Krakatoa – the ‘son of Krakatoa’.
The mortality rate for new marine volcanoes is very high, and this one son did not survive for long: after a week the relentless power of the surf wore it away, and all that was visible in mid February was a patch of muddy-coloured water, occasionally pierced by a funnel cloud of smoke, steam, ash and, every so often, small ragged pellets of hot and plastic lava. Then, some months later, a new island appeared once again. This time eruptions from two separate points created a pair of cones that rose 700 feet above the sea and were joined to one another by a slender spit of land: but then the volcanic activity died away, the waves attacked and chewed away, and this new confection, after all too brief a life, slipped back beneath the surface.
Corrosive encounters between this matched pair of seemingly equally relentless and powerful forces – the volcano and the ocean – went on for the better part of the next three years. On some occasions the process of volcanic creation won the day, and land was produced that survived for a while. Sometimes the equally awesome power of the rainy-season seas and tides and currents made maritime mincemeat of it all, and reduced it to a pile of submarine grit.
The number of explosions was prodigious: during the twenty-four hours from noon on 3 February 1928, no fewer than 11,791 separate detonations were counted; on 25 June, an even more remarkable 14,269 – ten eruptions every minute of the day and night. The second of the islands stayed where it was long enough for scientists who were in Batavia attending the Fourth Pacific Science Congress in May 1928 to arrange an excursion there and do some real-time fieldwork: they were vexed when it slid back
Anak Krakatoa – the highly eruptive ‘child of Krakatoa’ – shown in 1979, nearly half a century after its explosive birth from below the sea.
beneath the sea again, destroyed by the relentless power of the waves.
Sometimes it was not just the waves that did the destroying: the newly appearing volcanoes occasionally self-destructed, blowing themselves to pieces, as happened with the third of the Anak Krakatoas in early August 1930. But gradually, and as a tacit reminder of the gigantic and unopposable forces of the subduction zone that was working away beneath it, the volcanic forces began to gain ground, and the island they were trying to create began to achieve a certain permanence.
On 11 August 1930 the submarine vents made their fourth concerted attempt to sculpt a lasting memorial on the surface. They put up a ring-shaped island that had the appearance of a large black doughnut – and it stayed put for two days. On its second day of existence a monumentally large phreatomagmatic eruption – the kind that results from the mixing of hot lava and hot gas with cold sea-water – tore upwards into the sky, reaching a height of almost a mile, and then dumped an enormous quantity of volcanic detritus back on top of the fragile wisps of island below.
Those that witnessed the explosions noticed a feature that would soon be regarded as typical of this kind of eruption – the so-called ‘cock's tail’ jets. The upward jets of the explosions are black with the material they carry, but they have outer edges that are rich with condensing steam, and so are starkly white. The whole phenomenon looks much like the tail of the more dramatic kind of male chicken.
And the dumping of an enormous volume of new material, all at once, seems to have done the trick. It allowed the island a degree of permanence that enabled it to stabilize and consolidate itself. Ever since then, the rate at which fresh ash and rock accumulate on the surface of the new island has managed to exceed the rate at which the island's edges are eroded away by the ceaselessly ruinous action of the sea.
The moment that Krakatoa's son was fully born it could be assured of the continued existence that it enjoys today. On the charts of the region the hydrographers of the various navies, recognizing the new status, steadily changed the colour of the island's outline from stippled blue, signifying new, temporary and uncertain, to the unbroken black that means established, permanent and fixed. It has been designated so ever since: Anak Krakatoa (or Anakrakata, as the Royal Navy's latest chart of the region now calls it) has been from August 1930 onwards as permanent a feature of the East Indies as Java and Sumatra have long been or, to be more realistic, has been as permanent as the islands of the Krakatoa complex that came before it.
It has, however, been an extraordinarily active volcano, growing rapidly and unstoppably ever since its birth. The observatory set up on Panjang Island by Petroeschevsky proved invaluable for the steady monitoring of its progress – as it gr
ew from the twenty-foot-high weakling, half a mile long, that started life in 1930, to the 500-feet-tall peak, a mile long and half a mile wide, that it had become in 1950, to the 1,500-foot-high double-cratered monster of an island that it is today.
Its growth in size – from nothing – has been matched precisely by the growth – also from nothing – of its population of plants and animals.
For when Anak Krakatoa rose from the sea it was in all probability totally empty, * devoid of life and, in essence, quite sterile. Both its surface and its interior were, it was thought, far too hot to permit the existence of almost any kind of living thing; and the island was far too new to have any history, to possess any former biology or botany that might have the potential to generate a resurgence of life. The mountain was, to the fascination of biologists from around the world, a tabula rasa, ready to have the polychrome marvels of life painted upon it, layer upon layer, year upon year. It was a Garden of Eden, yet a Garden without plants, without animals and without mankind – and with a whole world of scientists waiting to see what might grow there, and what -might not.
But of course what remained of old Krakatoa was a clean slate too, the island remnants most probably all burned and sterilized by the flames of 1883. These two locations – the ruined remnant of old Krakatoa, and the newborn innocent of Anak Krakatoa – have thus become sites of huge international interest, where answers are still being sought to two fascinating questions. On the ruins of old Krakatoa – how did and how does life recover? And on the virgin-island that was later created in the midst of those same ruins – how did and how does life start? What were the differences, if any, between life returning and life beginning?
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