A Colossal Cataract Roared

By davidbunch

The island of Anjer had vanished. The mighty power of the Krakatoa volcanic eruption had caused it to be swept away by the same wave, which, rising to a height of a hundred feet, had overrun, the towns of Karang, Merak and Tji-ringen. Tens of thousands of people were killed. Even before it struck, a rain of rock and pumice bad fallen on the low-lying islands in the Sunda Strait; incandescent ashes had covered the huts and forests with a layer more than a hundred feet thick and extended the shore lines far into the ocean. So much was the sea filled up that half a dozen new islands rose above its level. But now a colossal cataract roared over the new land and washed it away, cinders, villages, jungles and all. In the harbors the wave pounded ships to pieces or picked them up and whirled them ashore on its lofty crest.

On the coast of Sumatra, the wave tore the warship Brownfrom her moorings and drove her, anchor dragging, two miles inland, leaving her stranded in the middle of a jungle 30 feet above sea level. Farther out the wave smashed steamboats, proas, sampans and junks. It raced across the entire width of the Indian Ocean, played havoc with the shore installations of Ceylon, swept on, skirting Madagascar, and when it reached Cape Town, 5,100 miles away, it was still a foot and a half high. It rounded the Cape of Good Hope, turned northward into the Atlantic, along the coast of Africa, and at last disappeared among other waves near the British Channel. Ashes had fallen on Indonesia like snowflakes in a blizzard. Whole districts were buried, their jungles choked, their rice paddies changed into deserts. The sky was so filled with ashes that for a time lamps were needed all day in Batavia. But what covered the land and the sea was only a small part of the volcano.

Clouds of volcanic dust hung suspended in the stratosphere for months. Air currents picked them up and carried them across oceans and continents. In Europe and Australia, all over the world the rays of the sun were filtered through a veil spun in the depths of Sunda Strait. Paris, New York, Cairo and London recorded a long series of the most glorious sunsets; the sun appeared blue, leaden, green and copper-colored, and at night the earth was steeped in the light of a green moon. Even the stars shone with an eerie green light. The phenomenon lasted into the spring of 1884; then the colors faded, and Krakatoa's magnificent shroud disappeared. The final chapter in its history seemed to be over. Krakatoa was dead, utterly dead. Nothing was left of it but a few square miles of rock buried under a mountain of ashes. A submarine abyss yawned where men and beasts had breathed. All plants and insects and birds and mammals had been dissolved in a fiery cloud on August 27, 1883.

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