Tells Chiefly of the Wonderful Effects of this Eruption on the World at Large.
The great explosions of that morning had done more damage and had achieved results more astounding than lies in the power of language adequately to describe, or of history to parallel.
Let us take a glance at this subject in passing.
An inhabitant of Anjer—owner of a hotel, a ship-chandler’s store, two houses, and a dozen boats—went down to the beach about six on the morning of that fateful 27th of August. He had naturally been impressed by the night of the 26th, though, accustomed as he was to volcanic eruptions, he felt no apprehensions as to the safety of the town. He went to look to the moorings of his boats, leaving his family of seven behind him. While engaged in this work he observed a wave of immense size approaching. He leaped into one of his boats, which was caught up by the wave and swept inland, carrying its owner there in safety. But this was the wave that sealed the doom of the town and most of its inhabitants, including the hotel-keeper’s family and all that he possessed.
This is one only out of thousands of cases of bereavement and destruction.
A lighthouse-keeper was seated in his solitary watch-tower, speculating, doubtless, on the probable continuance of such a violent outbreak, while his family and mates—accustomed to sleep in the midst of elemental war—were resting peacefully in the rooms below, when one of the mighty waves suddenly appeared, thundered past, and swept the lighthouse with all its inhabitants away.
This shows but one of the many disasters to lighthouses in Sunda Straits.
A Dutch man-of-war—the Berouw—was lying at anchor in Lampong Bay, fifty miles from Krakatoa. The great wave came, tore it from its anchorage, and carried it—like the vessel of our friend David Roy—nearly two miles inland! Masses of coral of immense size and weight were carried four miles inland by the same wave. The river at Anjer was choked up; the conduit which used to carry water into the place was destroyed, and the town itself was laid in ruins.
But these are only a few of the incidents of the great catastrophe. Who can conceive, much less tell of, those terrible details of sudden death and disaster to thousands of human beings, resulting from an eruption which destroyed towns like Telok Betong, Anjer, Tyringin, etcetera, besides numerous villages and hamlets on the shores of Java and Sumatra, and caused the destruction of more than 36,000 souls?
But it is to results of a very different kind, and on a much more extended scale, that we must turn if we would properly estimate the magnitude, the wide-spreading and far-reaching influences, and the extraordinary character, of the Krakatoa outburst of 1883.