Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  Very much later – indeed, at about the exact time of the Krakatoa eruption in the late nineteenth century – this was all to change. Orthodox Islam, its revival in part triggered by tragic events such as the great cataclysm, was totally transformed in Java during the nineteenth century, with fundamentalism, militancy and profound hostility to non-Muslims its watchwords. But that was later. At the time of the building of early Batavia, the Dutch had little reason to be fearful of the Javanese as Muslims. They had other reasons to be uncertain, true; but it was not the thought of a fatwah or a jihad that made most of them jumpy. They built their fortress Batavia for more mundane reasons, bowing to the kind of unspoken fears such as anyone camped in an unfamiliar jungle might experience, and that might prompt him to mount a picket, light a bonfire or be ready with a gun. Or to construct a wall.

  At first the Dutch created a series of high wooden palisades around their little town; but after thirty years of growing insecurity the governor-general agreed to raise funds to enclose an area of about a mile square within a formidable laager of stone. In some places this was simply provided by the massive outer walls of the dockside spice warehouses; elsewhere sappers built a twelve-foot-high masonry structure, with embrasures, barbicans, donjons, battlements, a moat and a sentry-walk. Beyond it stretched the jungles, hot, dense, soggy and ever hostile, alive with animals: the tiger and the panther, the tapir and the one-horned rhino, black apes and giant rats, a range of giant pythons and venomous cobras together with a gaudy wealth of cockatoos, parrots and birds of paradise.

  Inside the walls grew up the curiously compounded population of this quintessentially Company town. Dutchmen were at first reluctant to come – the ‘scum of the earth’, complained Coen, were the ones who wanted to settle – and in the early years only a vanishingly small number of Dutch women appeared on the scene. In fact there were so few females that Coen was forced to appeal to Holland: ‘Everyone knows that the male sex cannot exist without women… if your Excellencies cannot get any honest married people, do not neglect to send underage young girls: thus do we hope to do better than with older women.’

  At first only Company servants from the other Asian outposts of the VOC would deign to work in Batavia: Company employees, their slaves (for slavery, usually of men from faraway islands or from elsewhere in Asia, was permitted, and was extraordinarily widespread in the early years of Dutch rule in the East), a motley garrison of soldiers (with troops from as far away as Japan and the Philippines brought to do guard-duty under their bewildered Dutch officers), and, on occasion outnumbering everyone else, a very large number of Chinese.

  There had been Chinese in Java long before the Dutch, long before the Portuguese. Along with squadrons of coolies hired to perform the hard work, scores of Chinese merchants had sailed down from the southern ports of Fujian province and set up a prosperous agriculture on the Javan shore. They cultivated sugar and made gallons of the coco-palm toddies and rice-and jaggery arracks that so beguiled (and rendered happily insensible) generations of visiting Western sailors.

  Coen immediately spotted their usefulness. He insisted they

  A milliner weaves topis and bonnets from alang-alang grass, the better to keep off the sun and the flies.

  stay and become part of his new community – offering them (unlike his fellow Dutchmen) the right to trade privately, and to take pepper and birds' nests and sea-cucumbers, all of which were readily available in Java, back to their homes across the South China Sea without interference from the monopoly of the Company. ‘They are an uncommonly clever, courteous, industrious and obliging people,’ wrote one of Coen's colleagues. ‘There is nothing you can imagine that they do not undertake and practise… Many keep eating-houses or tea-houses… or earn money fishing or carrying or conveying people.’ It has been 400 years since this was written. So far as the impression offered by the diaspora of overseas Chinese is concerned, very little seems to have changed.

  Slowly the community was born and struggled to its feet, matured and began to grow. At first no Javanese were allowed to live within the city walls – and no Javanese were employed as slaves, lest they band together and conspire against the Dutch. But by the middle of the seventeenth century the ban had been relaxed somewhat, and a census in 1673 records the presence within the walls of 27,000 inhabitants, of whom 1,300 were classed as ‘Moors and Javanese’. Two thousand were Dutch, nearly 3,000 Chinese and 5,000 were members of a curious group called Mardijkers, who were Portuguese-speaking Asians, most of them freed slaves from Malacca and India who had been converted to Protestant Christianity.* The result was that Batavia had a cosmopolitan air of the most exotic stripe: there were turbaned Macasserese and long-haired Ambonese, Chinese with festoons of black queues, Balinese Hindus, ‘black Portuguese’ vegetable hawkers, Moors from Kerala, Tamils, Burmese, a few soldiers from Japan. And overseeing them all, with the haughty disdain that is born of vague fear, were the stout and pale-skinned burghers from Holland and Zeeland and Friesland and elsewhere in the flat and cold European north.

  And then there were the others, now nearly 16,000 of this counted population of 1673, the slaves. Their use (which remained legal until abolition in 1860†) made life exquisitely comfortable for some. Since no one would risk having slaves from Java, they had to be brought in by ship from elsewhere – an efficient process, one slave-pedlar complained, after noting that of a consignment of 250 slaves sent down to him from the Arakan hills of Burma, only 114 had been delivered. And some slaves did flee over the city wall, gathered into gangs that lived in the jungle and raided parties of wandering Dutch; one, a Balinese named Surapati, had a band of rogues so large and powerful he formed his own fiefdom in east Java, which was ruled as an independent state for more than a century.

  The wealthier Europeans in seventeenth-century Batavia might own a hundred or more slaves, and the town's main slave-market was from the beginning a bustling, crowded place. These Malays, Indians, Burmese and Balinese workers were trained to occupy the tiniest of niches in the household labour structure – advertisements spoke of a need for lamplighters, coachmen, pageboys, tea-makers, bakers, seamstresses and, most specialized of all, makers of a spicy side-dish known as sambal.

  The ladies' maid-slaves would be put to work as masseuses or hairdressers; these girls were skilled in fashioning hair into the bun-shaped style known as the conde, much favoured in the salons of the time. Since they were so plentiful and so cheap, slaves frequently had little to do and sat around gambling their days away. But if they ever tried to escape, or, worse, if they ran amok – the word is Malay for a state of frenzy and was used as a legal term in the VOC courts – punishment was severe: they could be whipped or imprisoned. A Dutchman who shot one of his slaves dead and injured three others was merely told to leave Batavia, and not to do any further business with the VOC for the rest of his days.

  Though the townsfolk in those closing years of the seventeenth century did not yet know it, their neighbour island of Krakatoa was itself also, and for the first time within their sight, about to run amok.

  No one had yet noticed that the island in the Sunda Strait had any potential for trouble. None of the navigators who had passed northwards into the Java Sea and gazed, as seamen do, at the island with the ‘pointed mountain’ on their port beam had supposed that one day it might do something quite terrifyingly and world-shatteringly dramatic. They, like the citizens of their destination-city, were blissful in their ignorance of the tectonic complications then beginning to unravel many miles beneath their feet. They carried on instead with the serious business of colonial life, with a magnificent insouciance that was to be their motif for the next two centuries – right up to the moment of the cataclysm that engulfed their lives when the tiny parrot-filled and palm-covered island finally went mad.

  But on the eve of this first recorded volcanic throat-clearing, life for the European men and women who lived eighty-three miles east in Batavia had assumed an atmosphere of near-settled urbanity. Perhap
s the frantic gaiety that would characterize life in the nineteenth century was not yet apparent: seventeenth-century eve-of-eruption life tended to the more formal, strict, luxurious and, at times, terrifyingly cruel.

  The buildings that were being constructed in mid century were by now quite substantial affairs. The warehouses were massive with teak and mahogany. The grand mansions along the Jacatra Weg that were built for the pepper planters and ship-dealers, with their ornate wrought-iron gates, their gilded carvings and delft tiles, moved an otherwise forgotten Mr Speenhoff to song:

  At long last I enjoyed myself

  Outside Batavia

  Along the green heather

  On the Jaketra road.

  And the great Town Hall was first built during this rather sedate and pompous period:* a cupola, shutters, columns and the porte cochère all part of the standard architecture of the East.

  This building served a myriad of functions: the magistrates' bench was here, licences were issued, slaves were freed, ships were sold. On the cobbled square outside was a set of stocks, with miscreants frequently seen locked into them. Inside and below ground there were dungeons, and many are the stories of how the VOC security officers, who ran their Company town with a ferocious rectitude, resorted to torture to extract confessions. A visiting German soldier named Christopher Schweitzer wrote an account of the harshness he saw:

  The 29th. Four Seamen were publicly Beheaded at Batavia (which is here the common Death of Criminals) for having killed a Chinese. At the same time, six Slaves that had Murthered their master in the night were broke upon the Wheel. A Mulatto (as they call those that are betwixt a Black-a-Moor and a White) was Hang'd for Theft. Eight other Seamen were Whipt for Stealing, and running away, and were besides this Burnt on the Shoulder with the Arms of the East India Company. Two Dutch Soldiers that had absented themselves from the Guard two days, ran the Gauntlet. A Dutch Schoolmaster's Wife that was caught in Bed with another Man (it being her frequent Practice) was put in the Pillory, and Condemn'd to 12 years Imprisonment in the Spinhuys, the women's prison.

  Christopher Schweitzer's account is dated 1676. It is suggestive of a certain public unhappiness, of a draconian degree of Dutch response, of a current of distemper in the land.

  And then, four years later, with the situation between rulers and ruled still uneasy, Krakatoa very noisily awakened its slumbering self. It was an event that astonished and perhaps even briefly terrified the new European arrivals. Yet most Javanese, long immersed in a balm of myth and legend relating to their volcanoes, would later say that with all the evident unhappiness abroad, they could have seen it coming.

  Orang Alijeh, the Javan god and mountain ghost whose task is to superintend the emissions of smoke and fire into the eastern heavens, is said to breathe sulphur from his nostrils when all is less than well on his earthly dominions. Krakatoa, which, along with Tambora and Merapi and Merbapu and Bromo, was one of his most potent mountains, had been blessedly quiet, or comparatively so,* for at least the previous 1,200 years. The only event that some might say had taken place to tax his patience was that foreigners, white men from far away, had now come by sea to rule over the people of Java. This, not a few Javan mystics liked to say, was one of the reasons why volcanoes occasionally made their fire, the more forcefully to display the degree of Orang Alijeh's grave displeasure.

  Yet, however displeased Alijeh might have been, what followed was by all accounts not the greatest of pyrotechnic performances. And no one who witnessed what happened ever came forward to write a first-person account. All we know comes essentially from one man, a Dutch silver assayer from the western Sumatran mining town of Salida, named Johan Vilhelm Vogel.

  Vogel, who was said to be so ‘pious and studious a servant of the Compagnie’ that he eventually became mayor of Salida, first passed Krakatoa in the usual way en route from Holland to Batavia – thus with the island to his port side – aboard the long-range packet Hollandsche Thuyn in June 1679. He waited ten weeks in town, then left Batavia for Sumatra in September aboard the yacht Wapen van ter Gos, this time Krakatoa passing by to starboard. He saw nothing that struck him as remarkable.

  But then in due course he fell ill. The Company, sedulous in caring for their more valuable employees, ordered him to visit their doctors in Batavia, and he left the Sumatran port of Padang in January 1681 aboard the yacht de Zijp. This time the Krakatoa he saw presented a very different aspect.

  I saw with amazement that the island Cracketovv, on my first trip to Sumatra completely green and healthy with trees, lay completely burned and barren in front of our eyes and that at four locations was throwing up large chunks of fire.

  ... the ship's Captain told me this had happened in May 1680. That time also he had made the trip from Bengal, had run into a heavy storm, and about ten miles away from the island had experienced an earthquake. This was followed by a tremendous thundering crash which had made him think that an island or otherwise a piece of land had split apart… He and the whole ship's population had smelled a strong and very fresh sulphur odour. Also the sailors had retrieved with water pails from the sea some very lightweight rocks, very much resembling pumice stone, which had been thrown from the island. They were scooped up as a rarity. He showed me a piece of the island. He showed me a piece of it a little larger than a fist.

  By checking the port records of vessels sailing in and out of Batavia, we can see that the captain of the de Zijp had indeed travelled between Batavia and the port of Bengalen* in May 1680 aboard the cutter Aardenburgh. The story, in this respect, does thus seem to tally. If it is true, then this long-forgotten and so far anonymous sea-captain and his crew were the first Europeans ever either to see the volcano of Krakatoa erupt or to see the results of its recent eruption. The Aardenburgh's log, however, has never been found; and the day-register of Batavia Castle, an official journal that records all ship movements in and out of the harbour and any pertinent comments from the vessels' various masters, is silent.

  A writer named Elias Hesse then wrote a vivid account of an eruption, suggesting that it was continuing in November 1681 when he and Mayor Vogel left together aboard a Sumatra-bound ship called the Nieuw-Middelburgh. He first mentions passing an island he calls Zibbesie (today's Sebesi, a couple of miles north of Krakatoa) and being unable to sleep because of the crying of ghosts (which the apparently rather more sober Vogel later reported were orang-utans, ‘which produce a terrible howling, often when the weather is about to change’). He continues:

  then still north of the island Cracatou, which erupted about a year ago and is also uninhabited. The rising smoke column of this island can be seen from miles away; we were with our ship very close to shore and could see the trees sticking out high on the mountain, and which looked completely burned, but we could not see the fire itself.

  Later the Nieuw-Middelburgh and its crew of company servants and miners were forced to heave to in the Sunda Strait, where they experienced heavy sea-quakes and learned of an earthquake that, Hesse reported, ‘did considerable damage to the buildings of the Company’.

  A close study of the records of other ships passing through the Strait at the time – and for a variety of reasons there were very many – shows no other suggestion of an eruption or earthquake in 1681. And further – the day-register has no information even in May 1680 of anything of interest having taken place in the Sunda Strait. The register reports the most mundane occurrences of city life: a tiger found outside the walls, crocodiles captured in the city streets, a comet seen in the sky, servants running amok. Yet nowhere in 1680 or 1681 is there any mention at all of an eruption on an island that was passed by scores of Company ships every week.

  From this dearth of information it is perhaps fair to conclude only three things: first, that Elias Hesse was an inventive fantasist and probably made up his entire account of volcanic activity in November 1681. Second, that the silver assayer and sobersided mayor Johan Vogel was similarly afflicted, and that his suggestion of seeing ‘lar
ge chunks of fire’ at ‘four locations’ on Krakatoa in February 1681 is also fictional. He did, however, probably see evidence – burned trees, barren plains of ash – that some disaster had befallen Krakatoa a while before. And third, the captain of the de Zijp and the Aardenburgh almost certainly did see something of an eruption in May 1680. But since no other passing vessel did, and since no mention was made of anything grave having occurred to the ever vigilant bureaucrats in the Castle, whatever had happened was small beer indeed, and the captain had, like many men of the sea, made the story into a considerably better one the moment he stepped ashore.

  3

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