Krakatoa

by Simon Winchester

  At this point the man's specific recollections become confused, his sudden panicked flight jumbling all conscious experience together into one amorphous mass. He is not alone in his confusion. The event must have been unforgettably dreadful, but in its details liable to the highly selective amnesia of those caught up by it.

  Each of those snared by the Telok Betong wave speaks of running, wildly, panicked, trying madly to stay ahead of the wave, following natives running wildly too; and, in the particular case of the anonymous European writing in the Java Bode, of running behind a woman who stumbled and dropped her baby and could not abandon it and so was swept away, of running behind another woman who was somewhat incredibly, it must be said – in the very process of delivery as she raced on, screaming and bloody, of seeing a man desperately trying to avoid the wall of water by climbing up as high as possible, by running up every slope that he found, of snatching hurried looks behind him to see, horrible in its immensity, the ever pursuing wall, which from time to time smashed against some obstacle and broke, disintegrating into huge and dirty grey piles of spray and wreckage-filled foam, but then regrouping and following him always with a roaring relentlessness, with an unstoppable energy, with a dogged and seemingly murderous resolution such that he could only continue to run, despite being so leaden-legged and air-starved and exhausted, run ever onwards, always impelled by the frenzied gale that howled ahead of the wave, and by the certain knowledge that if he stopped or took a wrong turn that set him downhill rather than up he would be brought down drowned and his body crushed and hurled against the broken walls and jagged edges of spars and smashed glass and masonry that was rising up all around him.

  Any doubts about the power of this single awful wave would be dispelled later by the discovery of a single compelling piece of evidence: the position of the Dutch steam gunship, the Berouw. The brief fame of this doughty little craft – four guns, a draught of six feet, a thirty-horsepower reciprocating steam engine, paddle-wheels and a crew of four European officers and twenty–four

  The Berouw, well and truly stranded – but very little damaged – a mile and a half up the Koeripan River. Hunks of rusting iron remained in the jungle until the 1980s.

  native ratings – provides a singular measure of the ocean's ferocity.

  The captain of the Berouw had been the first to warn the mate of the Loudon that too strong a sea was running for him to risk a landing. That was at about 6 p.m. on the Sunday. The Telok Betong harbour-master then spotted her in difficulties about five hours later, in the middle of the night she was well lit, and her plight was clearly visible through the gloom. Exceptionally strong waves were breaking about her, and the official feared that not only might she break her mooring lines, but that the heavy chains holding down the two-ton conical steel mooring buoy to which she was attached might snap as well.

  Then early next morning, disaster struck. There were two eyewitnesses: both the anonymous European in Telok Betong and the Loudon passenger R. A. van Sandick saw her lifted up on high by one of the 7.45 a.m. waves, then saw the mooring springs part one by one. The ship broke free of her buoy and was transported high on the crest of the mighty wall of green water. She was swept westwards for a quarter of a mile until, as the wave broke, she was crashed down precipitously on the shore, at the mouth of the Koeripan River.

  It is thought that this fearful crash – in which the vessel remained upright – killed all of the crew. But it was not the end of the ship's own nightmare. When the great wave of 11.03 a.m. hit, the ship was picked up once again and carried westward a further two miles. She was driven all the way up the Koeripan River valley, along which the tsunami sped, and crashed down when the wave was spent, about sixty feet above the level of the sea from which she had been plucked. She lay askew across the river, forming a bridge. She was upright once again, a macabre tomb for the twenty-eight members of the crew.

  She was found and inspected the following month by the crew of a rescue ship: ‘she lies almost completely intact, only the front of the ship is twisted a little to port, the back of the ship a little to starboard. The engine room is full of mud and ash. The engines themselves were not damaged very much, but the flywheels were bent by the repeated shocks. It might be possible to float her once again.’

  But whether possible to float her or no, no one ever seemed interested in trying to slide her back all that way to sea. This was no Fitzcarraldo. And so the Berouw remained where she was thrown, lying athwart the river for the better part of the next century, picked apart by scavengers over the years, like a carcass, or rotting quietly in the steam and sun.

  The hulk was more or less intact when it was visited in 1939: it was rusting and swathed in vines, and had become home to a colony of monkeys. Pieces of her were last seen in the 1980s. Nowadays she is all gone. The Koeripan River trickles uninterrupted past where she lay, and the only memorial is her great mooring buoy, sitting on a plinth at the site where it was washed up, two miles from where it had last floated, and fifty feet higher than the level of the sea. The name Berouw is the Dutch word for ‘remorse’.

  The devastation in Sumatra was fully matched by that across the Strait in Java. The tales from the survivors are every bit as memorable and dismaying. In the main towns – Anjer especially – the ruination was near total. There were only momentary lapses into levity: a telegram received in Batavia reported tersely Fish dizzy and Caught with Glee by Natives. For the rest, all was melancholy. And for the most melancholy memorial of all, a symbol on the scale of the Berouw over on the far side, one need only look at the great granite lighthouse on what was called Java's Fourth Point, a little way to the south of Anjer.

  It survived the first onslaught, as had the gunship; it survived the wave that drove the Berouw up on to the beach; but when the wave that hit Telok Betong at 11.03 struck Anjer – about fifteen minutes earlier, since Anjer is closer to the volcano – it picked up an immense piece of coral rock, weighing perhaps six hundred tons, and dashed it against the column. Despite its iron cage of reinforcing ribs, the light crashed down, extinguishing one of the most important navigation beacons of the entire Sunda Strait. And although his wife and child were drowned, the keeper himself survived. With the phlegmatic way of both the well-trained lighthouse keeper and the fatalistic acceptance of a true Javanese, he returned to his duties as soon as was physically possible, and had a temporary light erected, and lit, within a matter of hours.

  The stone stump of his lighthouse can still be seen, standing like an old and rotten tooth, rising no more than ten feet above the ever grinding waves of today's more peaceful sea. A replacement, built by the Dutch government three years after the eruption, is close beside it – except that it has been placed a prudent distance, probably about a hundred feet, back from the shore. And it has been constructed entirely of iron, just in case.

  The stump of the Fourth Point light remains. And the carcass of the paddle-steamer gunship high in the river valley. But that is about all. The town of Anjer did not survive. Nor did Ketimbang. Nor Telok Betong. Nor Merak. Nor Tyringin. The Anjer Hotel, from whose veranda the first signs had been spotted weeks before, was no more than foundations and twisted banyan roots. The massive Dutch fort walls, which had survived the depredations of centuries, were cracked and tumbled into no more than a shapeless mass of weathered stone. Railway tracks were twisted and scattered across the ground like so many yards of iron ribbon. Iron gearwheels, shards of broken iron and fractured lumps of machinery seemed to be everywhere. Giant boulders sat in entirely improbable places, picked up and smashed down as though they had been pebbles. Thousands upon thousands of houses and settlements up and down the coasts of Java and Sumatra were ruined, flattened, everyone in or near them crushed or drowned or never to be found again.

  And what also did not remain was the volcano that had caused it all. To everyone's astonishment, it was seen, once the dust had cleared and the gloom had been swept from the sky, to have totally vanished. Krakatoa, after the final majest
ic concatenation of seismic and tectonic climaxes that occurred just after ten on the Monday morning, had simply and finally exploded herself out of existence.

  Lloyd's agent in Batavia, the Scotsman Mr McColl, was able to send the following message within the week to his colleagues back in London, as concise a summary of the reality as that from his diplomatic colleague Consul Cameron down the road, and only a little less elegant:

  We shall probably not be in possession of full particulars for some days yet, as telegraph lines are damaged and roads destroyed, but so far we can give the following particulars. The island of Krakatoa, the summit of which peak was 2,600 feet above water level, has totally disappeared beneath the sea, and the neighbouring island of Dwaisin-deweg * is split in five parts. Sixteen new volcanic islands have been formed between Krakatoa and Sibesie, † and the sea bottom in the Straits of Sunda has completely changed. In fact the Admiral Commanding-in-Chief has issued a circular stating that till new soundings have been taken the navigation of the Straits of Sunda is likely to be extremely dangerous. Anjer and lighthouse and the other lights of southwest Java have all been destroyed. The subsidences and upheavals we have alluded to caused a large wave about 100 feet in height to sweep down on the southwest coast of Java and south of Sumatra. This was swept in for a great distance, thereby doing great injury both to life and property. We are here only twelve miles away from one of the points on which the wave spent its fury. The whole coastline to the southwest has changed its configuration. The inhabitants of the island of Onrust were only saved from the flood which swept over the island by taking refuge on board two steamers. At Merak government establishment the inhabitants took refuge on a knoll, fifty feet high, but were all swept off and drowned, with the exception of one European and two Malays, who were saved. Mauk and Kramat, on the west side of Batavia roads, have been laid waste, and about 300 lives lost. In Tjeringin only one house has been left standing. Both the native and European officials have perished. A rain of mud also fell at the above place, which is situated opposite to where Krakatoa once lay.

  Anjer seems to have been completely destroyed. Lloyd's sub-agent there wires from Serang: ‘All gone. Plenty lives lost.’

  3. The Experiences

  Not much of great excitement seems ever to have happened on the island of Rodriguez, which in the late nineteenth century was one of Britain's more remotely idyllic tropical possessions. According to the 1881 census some 5,000 people lived there, contentedly farming the forty square miles of agreeable farmland and happily fishing the 200 miles of sandy coastline (the relic of an old volcano itself) that had been set down in a lonely corner of the western Indian Ocean. Mauritius, the notional mother-ship of which Rodriguez was then and still remains a dependency, lies 350 miles away to the west. There is ‘a regular steamer service’ today, and an occasional plane; in the latter part of the nineteenth century there were infrequent supply calls by a chartered sailing ship. A telegraph cable connecting the capital village of Port Mathurin with the capital of Mauritius, Port Louis, was not built until the beginning of the twentieth century.

  The people of Rodriguez, who were Creole speaking and (according to a short book written in 1923 by a civil servant who claimed ‘no pretence of fine writing’) possessed of ‘a deep brown velvety skin… hair of a very deep black, woolly and curly… protruding thick red lips… and magnificent snow-white teeth’, were descendants of slaves imported by the French to cultivate their sugar plantations. They had been left behind when the French were thrown out by the British at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

  Their lives were run under the genial superintendency of four British imperial administrators, a quartet who might well have found their way into a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta – a magistrate, a medical officer, a chief of police and a ‘First Class’ priest (the last paid an annual government stipend of a thousand Mauritian rupees to remind the woolly-haired local people that God was, most naturally, an Englishman and, in this corner of the world, a Catholic Englishman to boot).

  Placidly unexciting though Rodriguez may have been through its three centuries of inhabited existence, it did make an appearance in the history books, courtesy of the volcano in the far-off East Indies. In August 1883 the chief of police on Rodriguez was a man named James Wallis, and in his official report of the dependency for the month he noted:

  On Sunday the 26th the weather was stormy, with heavy rain and squalls; the wind was from SE, blowing with a force of 7 to 10, Beaufort scale. Several times during the night (26th-27th) reports were heard coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns. These reports continued at intervals of between three and four hours, until 3 p.m. on the 27th, and the last two were heard in the directions of Oyster Bay and Port Mathurie [sic].

  This was not the roar of heavy guns, however. It was the sound of Krakatoa – busily destroying itself fully 2,968 miles away to the east. By hearing it that night and day, and by noting it down as any good public servant should, Chief Wallis was unknowingly making for himself two quite separate entries in the record books of the future. For Rodriguez Island was the place furthest from Krakatoa where its eruptions could be clearly heard. And the 2,968-mile span that separates Krakatoa and Rodriguez remains to this day the most prodigious distance recorded between the place where unamplified and electrically unenhanced natural sound was heard, and the place where that same sound originated.

  A popular Victorian science writer, Eugene Murray Aaron, * explained to his readers why this figure of 2,968 miles should amaze them one and all:

  If a man were to meet a resident of Philadelphia and tell him that he had heard an explosion in Trenton [NJ], thirty miles away, he might be believed, although there would be some doubt as to his powers of imagination. If however he should make the same assertion of an explosion in Wheeling, West Virginia, three hundred miles away, all doubts of his accuracy would vanish. But if, with every sign of sincerity and a desire to be believed, he should earnestly insist upon his having heard an explosion in San Francisco, three thousand miles away, he would receive a pitying smile, and his listener would silently walk away.

  Yet just this last marvelous thing was true of those… on the island of Rodriguez…

  It was heard in a score of other equally exotic places besides. No sound was heard in Rodriguez or anywhere else before Sunday, the 26th, nor any after the night of the 27th. And there is general agreement (although among the usual welter of confusions, not the least of them caused by the same lack of time zones that frustrates attempts to make a chronology of the eruption and the sea-waves) that the loudest sounds occurred everywhere in the middle of the day on the Monday, suggesting that they originated on Java some short while before noon.

  So, for example, the detonations were clearly heard in early afternoon, local time, on what is now the notorious British-owned American base-island of Diego Garcia. * In those days it was also a Mauritian dependency, where local farmers pressed palm oil and made copra, and where there was a coaling station for steamers crossing the Indian Ocean. The plantation supervisors plainly heard the explosion while they were taking their lunch. ‘Nous avons cru telement à l'appel d'un navire en détresse, they later reported (‘We thought it was a ship in distress firing its guns’).

  There were scores of broadly similar reports. The explosions were heard in Saigon and Bangkok, Manila and Perth, and at a lonely cable station south of Darwin called Daly Waters. * From Port Blair, the capital of the Indian prison-islands of the Andamans, came news that someone heard a sound ‘as of a distant signal-gun’. No fewer than eighteen different sets of witnesses in what was then Ceylon came forward with stories (‘Captain Walker and Mr Fielder were puzzled at various times… by hearing noises as if blasting was going on’, ‘Sounds as of firing of cannon at Trincomalee’, ‘Mr Christie of the Public Works department… presumed some man-of-war was practising with her big guns, out of sight of land, as he could see no ships’).

  His Highness the raja of Salwatty Island, in
New Guinea, said he had heard strange sounds and demanded of a local doctor why the white men were firing their cannons. Stockmen driving cattle across the Hammersley Range † in western Australia heard what they thought was artillery fire to the north-west. In Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, the location then (as still now) of a fierce pro-independence rebellion, the Dutch garrison commander assumed a local fort had been blown up by insurgents, and ordered all his men to battle stations. The Honourable Foley Vereker, who, despite belonging to one of Ireland's leading military families, had been cast out to the remoter colonies as commander of HMS Magpie, off Banquey Island, near Borneo, recorded in his log how he and his crew all heard the sound. And close by them, those Dayak islanders who had recently murdered a local official named Francis Witti (and, according to lore, had eaten his torso and limbs and had shrunk his head as a keepsake) heard the extraordinary sound too, assumed it to be the authorities coming to get them and fled deep into the jungle.

  Ships were launched from scores of places by eager would-be rescuers and salvors, convinced there was an unseen vessel in trouble. A pair of fast ships set out from Macassar, * for instance, because they assumed another was in dire straits; two more set out from Singapore; a government boat went out to search off Timor; and when the sounds continued in Port Blair, the British authorities on the Andamans sent out a lifeboat too. In Singapore it became impossible, on one set of telephone lines, to hear yourself speak, since ‘a perfect roar, as of a waterfall, was heard, and by shouting at the top of one's voice the clerk at the other end heard the voice, but not a single sentence was understood. The same noise… was noticed on every line here.’