Lost Empire

CHAPTER 41

ASHISTORY BUFFS, SAM AND REMI WERE WELL FAMILIAR WITH the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. The archipelago, which covers roughly eight square miles of ocean, sits almost dead center in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra and consisted of three islands prior to the cataclysm: Lang, Verlaten, and Rakata-the largest island in the group and home to the three volcanic cones collectively known as Krakatoa. Having undergone three major eruptions in the centuries prior to 1883, Krakatoa was no stranger to turmoil.

On May twentieth, three months prior to the final explosion, a great slash appeared in the side of Perbuatan, the northernmost cone, and steam began venting, along with plumes of ash that rose twenty-two thousand feet into the atmosphere. The residents of the nearby towns and villages, having witnessed such activity before, paid little attention, and by the end of the month their disinterest seemed validated. Krakatoa settled and remained mostly quiet for the next month.

On June sixteenth the eruptions began again, blanketing great swaths of sea and land with jet-black smoke for nearly a week. When the haze cleared, massive ash columns could be seen streaming from two of Krakatoa’s cones. Tides in the straits began running high, and ships at anchor had to strengthen their moorings lest they be beached.

Three weeks passed. Krakatoa’s two cones were joined by the third, and soon ash began accumulating on nearby islands, in some places up to two feet thick, killing flora and fauna and turning once-lush forests into moonscapes.

The eruptions continued through the end of June and into mid-August. On the twenty-fifth of August, at one o’clock in the afternoon, Krakatoa went into its paroxysmal phase. Within an hour, a black cloud of ash had risen eighteen miles into the sky, and the eruptions were nearly continuous. Fifteen and twenty miles away, ships were bombarded by hot pumice stones the size of softballs. By early evening, as darkness fell over the strait, minor tsunamis were rolling ashore on Java and Sumatra. The next morning, just before sunrise, Krakatoa went into its final death throes. A series of three eruptions, each one more powerful than the next, shook the area. So loud were the explosions that they were heard in Perth, Australia, two thousand miles to the southeast, and in the Mauritius Islands, three thousand miles to the west.

The resulting tsunamis, one for each eruption, radiated outward from Krakatoa at speeds up to one hundred twenty-five miles per hour, bulldozing their way onto the shores of Java and Sumatra and inundating islands as far away as fifty miles.

AT 10:02, KRAKATOA ISSUED its final salvo with an explosion equal to twenty thousand atomic bombs. The island of Krakatoa tore itself apart. The erupting cones, having ejected all their magma, collapsed in on themselves, taking with them fourteen square miles of the island and gouging out a caldera four miles wide and eight hundred feet deep. The resulting tsunami wiped out whole villages, killing thousands within minutes. Trees were uprooted, and the land stripped of every scrap of vegetation.

Following on the heels of the massive wave came the pyroclastic flows, gargantuan avalanches of fire and ash that roared down Krakatoa’s flanks and into the Sunda Strait. Traveling at eighty miles per hour and reaching temperatures in excess of twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the surge boiled the ocean’s surface below it, creating a cushion of steam that carried it thirty miles or more, charring or entombing everything in its path, man-made and natural alike.Within hours of final explosion, what remained of Krakatoa fell silent. In the space of thirty hours, between 36,000 and 120,000 people lost their lives.