Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester

  The Confusions of AD 416 or AD 535

  There is, however, quite abundant evidence that some kind of titanic event occurred about a century later. It can be seen from a very considerable body of tree-ring, ice-core and worldwide anecdotal evidence that a massive volcanic eruption most likely occurred somewhere in the region of Java or Sumatra around AD 535. Could this perhaps also be Krakatoa? Could perhaps the Shaka date in Ranggawarsita's history be an error – but all the other supposed observations, at least for his first account, be substantially correct?

  A slender and somewhat tenuous body of evidence suggests error to be the explanation. This evidence derives from the observation that volcanic eruptions, especially truly large ones that occur close to large places of habitation, trigger widespread social dislocation. People die in their hundreds, communications are severed, there is disease, ruin, a collapse of social order. And a barely recognized consequence of all this mayhem is that historical record-keeping suffers. It becomes patchy and incomplete. Historians, like everyone else, have little other than personal survival on their minds.

  And the Javanese Book of Kings exhibits this patchiness, at just the right time. For all of the fifth century, the book contains its fairly routine and regular selection of entries – there appears to have been no interruption, no trauma, that ever caused a historian to stop writing about Javanese trivia for a protracted period during the hundred years between AD 400 and AD 500. That century on Java seems to have been blessed with an absence of awfulness. The year AD 416 appears with the account of the explosion itself, but, very pointedly, seems not to have been followed by years of disruption, with historians taking time off from their duties to attend to their own needs. There is just as much inconsequential detail in the Javanese palm-leaf history books for the ten-year period between 420 and 430 as there is for the period between 400 and 410.

  But in the next century, the sixth, this is not the case at all. For the first thirty years of the sixth century, fully three quarters of the years have journal entries – the normal strike-rate, as it were. But for the eighteen years that follow the crucial year of AD 535, however, fewer than one fifth display journal entries. And then for the thirty years following that, the rate of mention of ordinary matters rises back to a little under three quarters the normal rate. So it looks very much as though something occurred in or around AD 535, something that sent the palm-leaf scribes of Java into a tailspin, into a state of historical catalepsy, for almost the following two decades.

  And what is more – there is confirming ice-core and tree-ring evidence aplenty from the world outside as well. Dating of both cores and trees is these days highly accurate, and it does now seem that between the years AD 510 and 560 some major event that sifted dust around the world and caused the sun to dim and arboreal growing conditions to slacken surely did happen (even if the error rate of twenty-five years is taken into consideration). There is also a Chinese record attesting to a huge detonation heard at around that time – an account that intriguingly adds, moreover, that the noise came from the south – to the south of China, in other words. And Krakatoa is of course due south of China.

  It would be stretching matters to say that any of this evidence is wholly convincing: but it seems fair to say that of those two supposed early eruptions, only the later – that occurring in 535 – seems likely to have involved Krakatoa. The other record, if it is not simply a mistaken date, may have related to an eruption of any one of Java's other twenty active volcanoes – or it may simply be a mélange of myth, confusion, legend and embellishment, and may never have happened at all.

  The Likely Eruption of AD 535

  Assuming, then, that the first Krakatoa eruption did occur in 535, and not a century beforehand, it is fair to say from what little we know of the social conditions in the western Java of the time, that there were probably precious few people around to be aware of it. In particular there seems to have been no city worthy of the name within a hundred miles of the eruption. Chinese traders, ships' captains who made voyages along the northern and eastern coasts of Java and Sumatra, appear to have left the most comprehensive written records of the region: a number of these speak of a community of the time known as Si-tiao, which was most probably on Java and which was possessed of ‘fertile lands and communities with streets’.

  Another state, which in the annals of the Peking mandarinate was called P'u-tei – probably in southern Sumatra – was populated by a race said to be ‘as black as lacquer’; its members liked to row out from their settlements to sell chickens and fruit to the emperor's passing sailing junks. There are also records of a rather dyspeptic-sounding community called Holotan, who grumbled to the Chinese that they were unceasingly subject to attacks by their neighbours. And cannibals ‘with tails’ – probably early versions of the ceremonial long headdresses still to be found in parts of southern Borneo – also caught the attention of the Chinese court's punctilious scribes.

  But neither the Indian nor the Chinese traders who passed by with their gold and jade and sandalwood and cloves noticed a large city or any kind of sophisticated urban population in Java or Sumatra. Fires might have lit the sky, and torrents of ash and pumice rained down from the clouds, but the people of Nusantara (the old Malay word meaning ‘the islands between’) who saw and heard and were duly astonished, horrified or hurt, were villagers only, artless country folk whose descriptions of those early and startling events were inevitably vague and imaginative.

  In 1999 a British television documentary, based on a remarkable book, Catastrophe, by a London-based author named David Keys, suggested powerfully that the AD 535 eruption of Krakatoa not only happened but was the primary cause of an extraordinary number of seemingly unrelated yet world-changing events.

  The climate changes triggered by the eruption – if that is what it was – helped to bring about an astonishing series of utterly apocalyptic events: among these, the television programme suggested, were occurrences of no less magnitude than the Fall of the Roman Empire, the outbreak of the rat-borne Great Plague, the historyless miseries of the Dark Ages, the birth of Islam, the invasion of Europe by the barbarians, the collapse of Central America's Mayan civilization and the birth of at least four new Mediterranean states – the list goes on and on. And though the arguments promoting such ideas appear at times more than a little speculative, everything eventually distils into a single fact: something enormous did take place somewhere in the world in the first half of the sixth century AD, and it had a staggering effect on the world's climate. But what exactly was that something?

  A volcano, by all accounts. Evidence used to suggest that nothing at all took place in AD 416 is the same evidence that indicates something very major indeed occurred 119 years later. Dust in the ice-cores, acid snows in Greenland and Antarctica, compellingly seductive data from thousands of tree-ring samples – all point to an event, somewhere, in the first half of the sixth century. And thanks initially to Ranggawarsita's writings, however unreliable, the finger points alluringly to Krakatoa as the site for whatever that event might have been.

  Surprisingly, very few halfway reliable scientific tests have ever been undertaken to indicate the date of Krakatoa's previous eruptions. It somewhat defies belief that science has been generally content to allow historians to determine the story of Krakatoa's past, when rather more accurate methods – radiometric dating principally among them – could give the answers to a degree of accuracy that poets to the court of Solo unsurprisingly could never really match. The television programme-makers saw to it that this sorry state of affairs was remedied.

  In 1999, as a response to the wide interest over the remarkable suggestions made in Catastrophe, the resident specialist on Krakatoa at the University of Rhode Island, Haraldur Sigurdsson, went on an expedition to Krakatoa* to use the magic of modern chemistry to try to find a definitive answer to the puzzle that Ranggawarsita had set. He attempted this by taking samples of charcoal from a number of various and evidently very ancien
t lava flows that he found on Rakata, the surviving relic-mountain of the 1883 eruption. He performed dating tests on the samples using the well-known half-life of the carbon-14 isotope.

  The results were, however, only moderately conclusive. The event that had burned the charcoal had occurred, Professor Sigurdsson was able to say, between AD 1 and AD 1200. There had, in other words, been a very large volcanic eruption on Krakatoa during the first 1,200 years of the Christian era – and it may well have been a large enough event to trigger the climate changes that would in turn cause the economic and social dislocations (and the migration of plague-carrying rats) that would cause the profound events that are the central thesis of Catastrophe.

  But as to whether that single event can be pinned down to any one year – and whether that year is likely to be AD 416 or AD 535, there is no ready answer still. Perhaps only Ranggawarsita really had any idea.

  The Near-certain Eruption of AD 1680

  Pure fancy was not so much of a factor 1,100 years later, however, when Krakatoa may have lifted her skirts once again. May have, though, has to be the operative phrase. We have already seen how possibly vague and imaginatively drawn were the descriptions of the supposed events of 416 and 535. There is no evidence at all for any eruptions during the Buddhist Cailendra Dynasty. The descriptions of whatever took place in 1680 do not exactly amount to a paragon of scrupulous exactitude either.

  As we have seen, there were just three European witnesses to what might have occurred: the silver assayer named Johan Vilhelm Vogel who first saw evidence of ruin on the island; the writer named Elias Hesse who produced his all too vivid account of an event that, according to him, was still playing itself out more than a year later; and the unnamed captain of a Bengal trading vessel Aardenburgh.

  The first two of these witnesses wrote accounts of a volcanic event that seem highly coloured, to say the least. And while the Aardenburgh's master may well have spoken robustly of an eruption to attentive and well-lubricated audiences in Batavia's dockside bars, he seems to have written nothing in his log that was of sufficient interest to alert his masters in the Castle: the official records, comprehensive in all other respects, are silent. Something did definitely occur on Krakatoa, of that there is little doubt; but whatever it was, it was probably much less significant a happening than the eruption that seems to have taken place in the sixth century; not to mention what took place two centuries later, in the nineteenth century.

  It did none the less take place within a respectable distance of a newly settled urban population. For Batavia, the primary Company town of the VOC, was in 1680 a full eight decades old, and it had attained some kind of settled maturity. It had a walled quarter and turreted administrative offices, a Chinatown and a collection of godowns, and any number of small terraced houses with streets and canals and taverns, forming a dreamy, steamy simulacrum of the VOC employees' much missed homes back in faraway Amsterdam or Leiden, Delft or Utrecht.

  The Dutch who settled in seventeenth-century Batavia were not an especially content people, by all accounts. Their lives were a succession of uncomfortable trials. They were seldom fully well: they tended to succumb to a variety of tropical ills – malaria, cholera, dengue fever – and they were morbidly afraid of the air on which they suspected the responsible germs were borne. The foul smells from the coast,* brought in by the sea-breezes that usually began to blow at breakfast-time, prompted everyone in the city to keep their doors and windows firmly shut until dusk; and then to shut them once more soon after, to keep out the evening mosquitoes. Everyone bathed in the city canals. ‘The ladies unblushingly dived into these general public bathtubs,’ wrote one Bernard Vlekke, ‘a custom which was vainly forbidden… because the canals were used as sewers and were therefore, rather filthy.’

  And then there was the drinking and partying and the smoking, and the slightly desperate merriment of colonial life. No less an authority than Jan Pieterszoon Coen himself, the founder of it all, had decreed the beneficial effects of spirits: ‘Our nation must drink or die’, he is quoted as having once remarked – an epithet the Dutch distilling industry still likes to remember today. The average seventeenth-century Hollander in Batavia would take a glass of neat genever before his breakfast, and would then while away the day consuming glass after glass of arrack as he sat sweltering in his dark, airless house. And with small Dutch cigars costing no more than a few guilders for a box of a thousand, with big Havana cigars only a few guilders more, and a nut of dark shag big enough to fill a meerschaum bowl going for just a few pence, the Batavian air was always blue with tobacco smoke.

  Down by the Jakarta waterfront at Sunda Kelapa there is still the slenderest of reminders of those times, barely preserved in a city that is eternally busy, endlessly and boisterously changing and (given its bewildering jumble of races and religions) all too often bickering with itself, sometimes very violently. Down where the oily waters of the dock slap against the splintered timber piers, the old Dutch spice godowns remain, huddled among the tenements of the fish market. There is a massively built ship-repair dock, with flagstone floors and teak beams, now turned into a restaurant that serves rijsttafel and ice-cold Bintang beer. There is a portion of the old city wall, with a round-topped lozenge of a sentry-box, badly in need of care and repair. And there is the Culemborg bastion, with a nineteenth-century watchtower and customs office, Chinese characters carved into the floor and, it is said, a marker showing the hour meridian, the centre-point of Java Time (Bali being so far away east it is an hour later, Aceh in Sumatra, to the west, an hour before).

  But the loveliest sight in Sunda Kelapa has nothing to do with the Dutch, the VOC or, seemingly, with Krakatoa at all. It is a far more elemental, far more timeless vision: the sight of the serried ranks of enormous and gaily painted wooden sailing ships – maybe fifty of them, on a busy day – that are to be found tied up alongside the long quay. They are a type of schooner known as pinisi, sailed by rough-and-ready Bugis from Sulawesi, or matelots from Kalimantan and the outer islands of the archipelago. They bring in wood – most often illegally cut from the great forests of Borneo and Sulawesi – and sell it in the Jakarta market before sailing home with televisions and washing machines and other necessities less easy to come by on the distant islands.

  In one of the local waterfront bars I had fallen in with a forester who had been kind enough to explain to me, over a number of beers, the nature of the distribution of harvestable and protected hardwood trees throughout the archipelago.* Later in the afternoon, when it was still insufferably hot, he took me down to the cool of the docks, and (to illustrate a point he was making about the ruin of Indonesia's rain forests) we walked past the ranks of traders' boats – all moored on the slant, their enormous prows arching over the quayside, young men and pye-dogs sleeping in the welcome shadows they cast.

  The forester had mixed views about the traders who owned and sailed the ships. He admired them for their courage, their seamanship, their derring-do. He knew they travelled vast distances without proper navigational equipment; he liked their songs and poetry and wild romancing; he knew they would rarely permit a woman to sail on a vessel with them, that their seafaring tradition was everything. He marvelled at the physical strength of the sailors – was amazed still (though he had lived on Java for twenty years) at the way the minute, wiry and barefoot Bugis sailors would unload huge baulks of mahogany, pieces weighing twice as much as a man, and carry them down narrow and slippery gangplanks. But it was the timber they carried that vexed him: these seamen were unwittingly a part of the distribution chain that turned rare Javanese teak into baubles for Western living rooms, and they should, in his view, be stopped.

  We went back to his flat, in a miniature skyscraper on the edge of the fish market. He lived on the twentieth floor, with his Chinese wife and three children. He had recently installed a steel front door, four inches thick, with bolts that made it look like the entrance to a bank vault. It was because of the anti-Chinese riots of 1998, he said
– the scars and scorchmarks of which were still everywhere to be seen in Glodok, the Chinese area south of the docks. Mobs of Javanese had raided his apartment that terrible day, driven his wife and family into the street, stolen everything they owned. They had left his wife alone only because he was a Westerner, a foreigner.

  But though this was all fascinating, and though his views on the rain forests and the Bugis traders were admirable, I found myself rather more enthralled by a picture that hung on his living-room wall. It was a fine eighteenth-century etching by the well-known Dutch cartographer Jan van Schley. It showed two well-laden Company ships, both heeling slightly before a good breeze, passing in front of an island with a pointed mountain. There was a row of trees a few feet up from the island's shore; but otherwise the island was made up of naked rock. Flaming from its summit were great tongues of fire and a roiling, boiling mass of dark smoke that towered above the pair of galleons, and almost mingled with the clouds above. The picture was called simply Het Brandende Eiland – ‘The Burning Island’ – and it was a depiction, without a doubt, of the otherwise little-chronicled eruption that supposedly took place in 1680.

  He had picked up the etching in an antique shop in Jogjakarta some years before. He knew that it looked somewhat fantastical and was more likely to be a figment of van Schley's normally restrained imagination than an accurate picture of a real happening. But it was a powerful image none the less – a reminder for his living-room wall of the awful power of the volcano near which they all then lived. And a more general and emblematic reminder, given his own domestic circumstances, of the highly precarious, often highly tenuous nature of life in the East Indies.