Blown to Bits: The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago

by R. M. Ballantyne

One peculiar feature of the records is that some ships in the immediate neighbourhood of Krakatoa did not experience the shock in proportionate severity. Probably this was owing to their being so near that a great part of the concussion and sound flew over them—somewhat in the same way that the pieces of a bomb-shell fly over men who, being too near to escape by running, escape by flinging themselves flat on the ground.

Each air-wave which conveyed these sounds, commencing at Krakatoa as a centre, spread out in an ever-increasing circle till it reached a distance of 180 degrees from its origin and encircled the earth at its widest part, after which it continued to advance in a contracting form until it reached the antipodes of the volcano; whence it was reflected or reproduced and travelled back again to Krakatoa. Here it was turned right-about-face and again despatched on its long journey. In this way it oscillated backward and forward not fewer than six times before traces of it were lost. We say “traces,” because these remarkable facts were ascertained, tracked, and corroborated by independent barometric observation in all parts of the earth.

For instance, the passage of the great air-wave from Krakatoa to its antipodes, and from its antipodes back to Krakatoa, was registered six times by the automatic barometer at Greenwich. The instrument at Kew Observatory confirmed the records of Greenwich, and so did the barometers of other places in the kingdom. Everywhere in Europe also this fact was corroborated, and in some places even a seventh oscillation was recorded. The Greenwich record shows that the air-waves took about thirty-six hours to travel from pole to pole, thus proving that they travelled at about the rate of ordinary sound-waves, which, roughly speaking, travel at the rate of between six and seven hundred miles an hour.

The height of the sea-waves that devastated the neighbouring shores, being variously estimated at from 50 to 135 feet, is sufficiently accounted for by the intervention of islands and headlands, etcetera, which, of course, tended to diminish the force, height, and volume of waves in varying degrees.

These, like the air-waves, were also registered—by self-acting tide-gauges and by personal observation—all over the world, and the observations coincided as to date with the great eruptions of the 26th and 27th of August. The influence of the sea-waves was observed and noted in the Java sea—which is shallow and where there are innumerable obstructions—as far as 450 miles, but to the west they swept over the deep waters of the Indian Ocean on to Cape Horn, and even, it is said, to the English Channel.

The unusual disturbance of ocean in various places was sufficiently striking. At Galle, in Ceylon, where the usual rise and fall of the tide is 2 feet, the master-attendant reports that on the afternoon of the 27th four remarkable waves were noticed in the port. The last of these was preceded by an unusual recession of the sea to such an extent that small boats at their anchorage were left aground—a thing that had never been seen before. The period of recession was only one-and-a-half minutes; then the water paused, as it were, for a brief space, and, beginning to rise, reached the level of the highest high-water mark in less than two minutes, thus marking a difference of 8 feet 10 inches instead of the ordinary 2 feet.

At one place there was an ebb and flood tide, of unusual extent, within half-an-hour. At another, a belt of land, including a burying-ground, was washed away, so that, according to the observer, “it appeared as if the dead had sought shelter with the living in a neighbouring cocoa-nut garden!” Elsewhere the tides were seen to advance and recede ten or twelve times—in one case even twenty times—on the 27th. At Trincomalee the sea receded three times and returned with singular force, at one period leaving part of the shore suddenly bare, with fish struggling in the mud. The utilitarian tendency of mankind was at once made manifest by some fishermen who, seizing the opportunity, dashed into the struggling mass and began to reap the accidental harvest, when—alas for the poor fishermen!—the sea rushed in again and drove them all away.

In the Mauritius, however, the fishers were more fortunate, for when their beach was exposed in a similar manner, they succeeded in capturing a good many fish before the water returned.

Even sharks were disturbed in their sinister and slimy habits of life by this outburst of Krakatoa—and no wonder, when it is recorded that in some places “the sea looked like water boiling heavily in a pot,” and that “the boats which were afloat were swinging in all directions.” At one place several of these monsters were flung out of their native home into pools, where they were left struggling till their enemy man terminated their career.

Everywhere those great waves produced phenomena which were so striking as to attract the attention of all classes of people, to ensure record in most parts of the world, and to call for the earnest investigation of the scientific men of many lands—and the conclusion to which such men have almost universally come is, that the strange vagaries of the sea all over the earth, the mysterious sounds heard in so many widely distant places, and the wonderful effects in the skies of every quarter of the globe, were all due to the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883.