Floating Belly Up On The Churning Water

Early in the morning of August 27 the ocean reached the volcanic center of the islands of Krakatoa, and attacked the molten cores of Danan and Perboewatan. Even the fury of the previous explosions was but a faint prelude to the final cataclysm as the heart was ripped out of Krakatoa and 14 cubic miles of rock streaked upward straight into the sky. The sun was blotted out behind a curtain of ebony torn by jagged lightning. Miles away, Krakatoa's Pyrotechnics awed the sailors of the English ship Charles Bal, who saw the island shoot up over the horizon, "shaped like a pine tree brilliantly illuminated by electric flashes." Suddenly the sea was covered with innumerable fish, poisoned and cooked, floating belly up on the churning water.

A sailor dropped the lead and brought it up—hot. Long afterward came the noise—the loudest ever heard by human ears. "The concussions were deafening," wrote a Lloyds agent in Batavia, almost a hundred miles away. They hammered every eardrum in Java and Sumatra, alarmed the Dutch officials on Celebes and Flores, and put fear into the hearts of Borneo's headhunters. Thev reached Timor, Halmahera and the Philippine Islands, and Victoria Plains in Australia, 1,700 miles away. The sound waves struck Daly Waters in South Australia, 2,023 miles from Krakatoa, and traveled 2,968 miles in the opposite direction to Rodriguez Island near Madagascar. With the noise, concentric waves of air started on their way around the globe. A day and a half after the explosion, the first of them hit London from the west. Then a second wave rushed over the city from the east. Four times the eastbound wave swept over London—and over Berlin, Palermo, St. Petersburg and Valencia as well—and three times it swept back.

The stratospheric seesaw continued for more than ten days before the blast had spent its force. Far more violent was the effect of the eruption on the sea. In Anjer, on the east coast of Java, a retired sea captain was looking at the fantastic spectacle in the skies when suddenly he noticed a new island. The next moment he was running for his life. The island was a wall of water, 50 feet high, advancing across the narrows at incredible speed, battering down the wharves, engulfing Anjer, racing uphill, a dark, roaring, compact mass of rocks and trees and houses smashing everything in its path. The wave flung a log at him, and he went down. When he regained consciousness he was sitting on the top of a tree half a mile inland, stripped of every shred of clothing but otherwise unharmed. He was one of the few who saw the wave and lived to describe its fury.

By: davidbunch

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