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The Big Bang!

© Meg Greene Malvasi

The telegram, received in Singapore from Batavia (now Djakarta), then the capital of the Dutch East Indies, on the morning of August 27, 1883, sounded the alarm: "During night terrific detonations from Krakatau audible as far as Soerakarta--ashes falling as far as Cheribon--flashes plainly visible from here." A second telegram, received at noon, informed the telegraph operator at Singapore that: "Serang in total darkness--stones falling. Village near Anjer washed away. Batavia now almost quite dark. . . . Unable to communicate with Anjer--fear calamity there. . . . believe all lost." Two final telegrams sent during the late morning and early afternoon of August 28 further clarified the situation. The first reported: "Anjer, Tjeringin and Telok Betong destroyed." The second read in terse eloquence: "Where once Mount Krakatau stood the sea now plays."

Located in the Sunda Straits between Sumatra and Java, Krakatoa was a small but fertile island that supported a flourishing and prosperous culture. The hundreds of persons who lived there in 1883 had no idea of the disaster that was about to befall them.

Krakatoa itself formed as the result of hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity. As late as 1680 regular volcanic eruptions continued to spew out hot ash and pour forth molten lava onto the island. Then, for more than two hundred years, the line of volcanic mountains that ran along the center of Krakatoa became silent and inactive.

Early on May 20, 1883, a deafening explosion shattered the morning quiet and a massive column of smoke and ash shot upward into the sky. The volcanos on Krakatoa had come suddenly and violently to life. Within a week, however, the mountains seemed calm again. During the summer several minor eruptions and small earthquakes occurred, but residents dismissed these incidents as unimportant. They could not have been more wrong.

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 26, 1883, another fierce explosion shook Krakatoa. Increasingly severe eruptions continued throughout the night and into the next day, while enormous, smoky clouds buried the island under a profusion of ash. Some inhabitants headed for the high ground, seeking the best shelter they could find; others, more frightened and perhaps more prudent, fled to sea in their fishing boats.

At approximately five-thirty on the morning of August 27 the first of four culminating blasts occurred. A second followed at 6:44 A. M. and a third at 8:20. These paled into insignificance by comparison with the intense explosion that hammered the island at ten o'clock in the morning, the destructive force of which has never since been equaled. Four hours after the explosion had taken place, the noise of it reached the island of Rodriguez, which lay some 3,000 miles (4,776 kilometers) west of Krakatoa. This eruption sent rock soaring fifty miles (eighty kilometers) into the air and produced an immense haze of ash that darkened the sun as far as away 150 miles (240 kilometers). It killed everyone who had remained on Krakatoa and obliterated the island itself, most of which disappeared beneath the sea without a trace.