Krakatoa

by Simon Winchester

  †Maurice of Nassau, after whom another Dutch-settled island, Mauritius, was named.

  * Included were a pair of Mediterranean-style rowing galleys, surely inconveniently lumbering beasts for handling in the open waters of the Bay of Bengal.

  * Known also because one of its neighbour islands, Pulau Ran, was seized by the British and later swapped for a Dutch-held North American island, Pulau Manhattan.

  * Modern navigational charts call what remains of the island Pulau Anakrakata. The official details of its ever changing condition can be found in this chapter's epigraph.

  † As to why Krakatoa, and not the more properly Javanese Krakatau, it is said – but not proven – that this was a spelling mistake made in an early telegraphic cable to London – a spelling error that, thanks to British domination of so much nineteenth-century science and geography, came to be accepted for many years after as the preferred (but technically incorrect) spelling. Robert Cribb, editor of The Historical Atlas of Indonesia, wonders if the ending -oa simply sounded, to the British ear, more euphonious and charmingly like an idyll in the South Pacific. I shall revisit what is to some a very vexing matter in Chapter Six, when I look in more detail at those first telegraphic messages about the eruption.

  * I have no wish to belabour a historical nicety that will be familiar to most, but it seems worth while pausing to underline the fine irony of the coming change of power-centres in the East. Since the early sixteenth century the Netherlands were in fact under Spanish control, as a province of the Spanish branch of the Hapsburgs. A revolt led by William of Orange ensured that the seven most northerly districts – including the best known, Holland, Zeeland and Friesland – became independent in 1579. In 1648, under the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia, Spain recognized the independence of these seven and an additional southern group of provinces as what was then called the Republic of the Netherlands, headed by members of the Orange-Nassau family as stadhouders, or governors. The Netherlands only became a monarchy – as it remains today – in 1815. What is now the Kingdom of Belgium – those additions that were to be known colloquially as the ‘Spanish Netherlands’ – split back away in 1830. The sudden rush of Dutch colonial energies and anti-Iberian zeal in the 1600s came just after their first emergence from under the yoke of Spain.

  * And well beyond – Dutch outposts in Japan, Formosa, India, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mauritius, Ceylon, even the Cape Colony in southern Africa were all, at various times, run from this Javanese HQ.

  * The governor-general soon took on airs: he used to walk around town with an umbrella-carrier, a dozen halberdiers and a detachment of sentries armed with muskets.

  * And who under the peculiar rules of the VOC were, as Christians, permitted to wear hats: the only non-whites in Batavia allowed to do so. †When slavery was abolished in the Dutch East Indies it was still widespread in America. Indeed the final slave ship, the Clothilde, had arrived in Alabama's Mobile Bay with her grim cargo only a few months before.

  * The third and present incarnation of the Batavia Stadhuis, built in 1707, remains intact, serving as the Jakarta History Museum.

  * Evidence both geological (fresh lava flows on the island) and anecdotal (references in Javanese oral histories) suggests that Krakatoa had erupted as many as ten times prior to whatever happened in 1680. Few of the dates of these previous eruptions can be pinned down with any certainty.

  * Or he may have been on international duty, journeying to and from the British possessions in India: the record is not clear as to whether the Aardenburgh's destination was Bengal or a Sumatran port named Bengalen.

  * Helena Blavatsky, the creator of the genial Hindu–Buddhist religion called Theosophy, seized, upon Lemuria as the likely home for a people she insisted were the Third Root of Mankind. As she described them, they lacked classical beauty: they were fifteen feet tall, brown-skinned hermaphrodites with four arms, some possessing a third eye in the back of the skull. Their feet had protruding heels enabling them to walk either forward or backward, and their eyes were sited so they could see sideways.

  * The spelling was an error by Usk's Registrar of Births; Wallace also long thought, to compound the mistake, that he had been born on 8 January 1822 – it was in fact 1823.

  † This was the title of a 1966 biography of Wallace by Amabel Williams-Ellis: well known as a Strachey, the editor of a number of science-fiction anthologies for Victor Gollancz, and the wife of the Portmeirion architect and stylish eccentric Clough Williams-Ellis.

  * With a descendant of Charles Darwin on hand to observe.

  * At my school we were more than familiar with at least the shape of the Celebes, since its long, finger-like upper peninsula runs almost exactly along the equator, and thus provided us (as did Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon on the other side of the planet) with an easy way of drawing the line of zero latitude on to any blank map of the world.

  * He is memorialized by the names of two rare ice-crystal halo arcs and by the magnificent eponym of the Wegener-Bergeron-Findeisen procedure, the mechanism that creates the peculiar shape of raindrops, which Wegener helped to discover.

  * Francis Bacon, the philosopher, wrote about the ‘fit’ as far back as 1620; the great French naturalist the Comte de Buffon, author of a majestic 36-volume Natural History, a pioneering palaeontologist who suggested that geological history had developed in a series of identifiable stages, speculated on the reason in 1778; and in 1858 a noted catastrophist named Antonio Snider-Pellagrini went so far as to propose that a single continent had once existed and then broken up, its parts torn away from one another to create today's arrangement. Eduard Seuss, an Austrian, posited the existence of a Gondwanaland in 1885 – but to create the oceans he imagined sinking and foundering, not creeping and drifting. An American geologist named Frank Taylor wrote in 1908 about the likelihood of continents inching towards the equator. But few of these men are now remembered for their geology; and Wegener was soon to be rudely rebuffed for his.

  † For a while he and his brother Kurt held the world hot-air balloon endurance record, at 56 hours.

  * This was necessary because of an added complication: the lines of magnetism in very high latitudes in northern North America (of which Greenland is, technically, a part) are so close, and vary so wildly each year, that a normal magnetic compass is worse than useless. All fishermen and navigators working these waters know this well; we suspected it might be the case, and decided in Oxford to obtain all our alignment readings via the one true invariable, the position of the sun.

  * Vening Meinesz was a rather over-large person, uncomfortable in a small submarine. The captain had to remind his crew to draw in their breath every time the good doctor sat down.

  * The idea of remanent magnetism was first put forward by Pierre Curie, who discovered that rocks that are cooled in a magnetic field assume the polarity and direction of that field as they do so. The crucial temperature at which the magnetism is locked in (for study by later geologists) is known as the Curie point, and varies from rock type to rock type – 582 °C for the mineral magnetite.

  * The instrument was originally designed to be mounted in a low-flying aircraft, with the aim of detecting enemy submarines in the waters below: its acronym, MAD, indicated it was a magnetic airborne detector. It was easy enough to modify the instrument so that it could be towed behind a ship in the water itself, by placing it inside a fish-shaped, non-magnetic container.

  * And which showed, for every ocean, ridges where new sea-floor was being made, and giant rafts of magnetized rock moving steadily away from them – the Atlantic Ocean being by far the most spectacularly regular of them all.

  * ‘History of Ocean Basins’ in Petrologic Studies: A Volume in Honor of A. F. Buddington, Geological Society of America, pp. 599–620.

  * As in an essay by William Dickinson, emeritus professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona: ‘In my youth as a geoscientist I was a casual stabilist, assuming that the continents had maint
ained their relative positions on the globe throughout geologic time. That outmoded stance stemmed less from informed conviction than from sheer ignorance.’ Professor Dickinson is now a leading evangelist for the theory, and has as one of his proudest possessions a plate – of china – given to him and adorned with the motto Hero of Plate Tectonics and In Subduction We Trust.

  * Geographical place-names present a problem that is peculiarly endemic to those scores of places that have suffered under history's various colonial yokes, and often result in places having been given three names – the early indigenous name, the colonially applied name and then its post-colonial successor. The islands that make up the Krakatoa group display this complexity: Panjang – the Ur-name – first became Lang Island, and is now Rakata Kecil; Sertung became Verlaten (lonely, forsaken island) during Dutch times, and is currently back to being Sertung. Mercifully for this footnote, which would be further awash in explication, the island in the group that had the English name Polish Hat no longer exists, since it disappeared, a victim of the eruption.

  * Building among other monuments the immense and ornate temple of Borobudur, the world's largest Buddhist structure.

  * By dint of writing three pages every day for thirty years, he wrote six million words, all in the elaborate language known as Court Javanese. The supposed reference to a possible fifth-century eruption of Krakatoa appears in an early part of Ranggawarsita's history, called ‘The Book of Ancient Kings’, the ‘Pustaka Raja Purwah’.

  * By the time Ranggawarsita was writing, the name Krakatoa, or at the very least Krakatau, was in common use. So it is puzzling that he chose to use the name Kapi, unless of course it was a direct transliteration of the original documents he was using for his research.

  † According to an English translation published in Nature – then awash in narratives of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa – in August 1889.

  * Volcanoes that eject immense amounts of dust into the atmosphere leave behind two kinds of easily recognizable signature. Slender bands of the deposited dust can be found trapped in ice-cores. And – because the dust causes a filtering of the sun and a lowering of worldwide ambient temperatures – there is also evidence that the growth of trees is at the same time briefly slowed. Tree rings appear much closer together in the cooler years, when there is slower growth. So the ring record provides a neat and easy way (providing always that a cut tree of suitable antiquity is at hand) of establishing the climatic record for hundreds of past years.

  * Financed by the British television company, Channel Four.

  * The locals liked to use the beaches for their ablutions.

  * The western trees – mainly dipterocarps, with winged sepals – are very different from the eucalypts and gum-trees that are found in the forests of the eastern islands. The former are distinctly Asian species, the latter Australian, separated by a Wallace Line of their own, echoing as one would expect the distribution of the islands' other living beings, such as the cassowaries, cockatoos, thrushes, kangaroos and apes.

  * France and the newborn United States of America concluded their own peace with Britain; Holland, however, kept fighting for some while more, placing still heavier burdens on her faraway colonials.

  * Although Raffles is best known for having essentially founded Singapore, he was also lieutenant-governor of the East Indies from 1811 to 1816, Java's brief British-ruled interregnum during the Napoleonic Wars. The Dutch have long since accepted with equanimity the five years of their territory's rule from British Calcutta: a portrait of Lord Minto – Raffles's superior – hangs today without remark among other Dutch governors-general in the Regents' Room of the old Dutch Colonial Office in The Hague. Lady Raffles is buried in a pretty Grecian tomb in the Botanical Gardens at Bogor, south of Jakarta. Her husband is memorialized in many ways: by having discovered and restored the marvellous Buddhist temple at Borobudur, in central Java; by having written a near-definitive History of Java; and by having named after him the planet's largest flower, Rafflesia arnoldii, which has blooms a yard wide, weighs as much as twenty-four pounds, and has a memorably horrible smell.

  * Sukarno's private study is dominated by an immense oil painting of happy-looking workers toiling in a Russian soviet. It was the gift of a visiting politburo chief, and an indication of the clear left-wing leanings of the man who was eventually to be replaced by General Suharto in an American-backed coup d'état, which led to the corruption and civil strife that disfigure Indonesia still.

  * There was a tall monument to the victory at Waterloo (Willem's father had been Dutch commander in the field) surmounted by a very small lion – so small that it was regarded with amused contempt by most Batavians, who thought it looked like a poodle.

  * The birds, reported the Illustrated London News of the day, invariably died as soon as the ship encountered chilly weather: very few made it all the way to Europe.

  * A contrôleur was one of the more junior grades in the Dutch colonial service, presiding over a subdivision of a Residency known as an afdeling, or department; but junior or no, a candidate had to spend four years at the College of Delft and pass with honours a rigorous examination that included the Javanese and Malay languages (both very similar, to be sure), French, German and English language and literature, Islamic law, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, geology (no doubt helpful for his present task), drawing, land surveying and levelling as well as a host of other easier disciplines including, for some less explicable reason, the subtle mysteries of ‘Italian book-keeping’. An official warning of troublesome seismic activity sent by a contrôleur would certainly cause senior members of the colonial administration to sit up and take notice.

  * German commercial and military interests in the Far East were growing fast in the late 1880s, not least because the Manchus in Peking's Forbidden City had been vastly impressed by the Prussian-led strengthening of the Reich after 1871, and had asked the Germans to help modernize their own armed forces. Matters were soon to turn sour, however; and in 1898 Germany annexed for her own naval use – for vessels like the Elisabeth – the port of Tsingtao on the Shandong peninsula. The influence of the next fifteen years of German rule lingers still: German architecture remains highly visible in the town today, and Tsingtao beer, one of China's better-known exports, was for years prepared under the supervision of a Bavarian Braumeister.

  * This summit, Rakata, lay at the southern end of Krakatoa and, since it was by far the highest point, was the most visible feature of the thickly forested, lozenge-shaped island, which measured about six miles along its north–south axis, and was at its widest point in the south some two miles across. The other high points, apparent only on a close inspection, were Danan, a cratered peak in the middle of the island rising to 1,496 feet, and Perboewatan, on the narrow northern end of the island, which was 399 feet high. Two other islands are associated – Lang Island lying two miles to the north-east, Verlaten a similar distance off to the west. Both, as suggested before, are probably relics of an even greater super-Krakatoa of earlier times.

  * To get into the Sunda Strait the Zeeland, like all other vessels passing along this great waterway connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, had perforce to skirt around another – non-eruptive – island that seemed almost to block the northern entrance to the channel. The island is known today as Pulau Sangiang. In the nineteenth century, however, at a time when so many of the coastal features sported English names – Pepper Bay, Welcome Bay, First Point, Java Head and Polish Hat are all along the Sunda Strait – this navigational nuisance of rock and forest was officially called, on the Admiralty charts, Thwart-the-Way Island.

  * The agent was named Mr Schuit. But there is ample opportunity for confusion ahead, for in Anjer at the same time there happened to be a lighthouse keeper also called Mr Schuit, an unrelated widow-woman named Mrs Schuit and a newly appointed telegraph-master who was called Mr Schruit. Since all played major roles in the August cataclysm, it is as well to be forewarned.

  * Which h
e later said was for no more than ‘a couple of hours’.

  * The Ancient Romans used shards of Vesuvius obsidian as razors, since the rock had the property of fracturing with extremely sharp edges.

  * The timetables of the various shipping lines that served the region make for delightful reading. The Netherlands Royal Mail Line, founded in 1870, ‘maintains a regular fortnightly service between Europe and Java, leaving Amsterdam every alternate Saturday, calling at Southampton, Lisbon, Genoa, Port-Saïd, Suez, Colombo (occasionally), Sabang (Sumatra), Singapore and the beautiful island of Java as terminus. (Batavia, Samarang, Sourabaya, etc.) The best-equipped and most comfortable liners of today. Excellent cuisine. They carry the Royal Netherlands and Royal Italian mails to the Far East.’ The single fare from Southampton's Extension Pier (leaving every other Tuesday at a time that connected with the London boat train from Waterloo) was £65.

  * 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.