'Krakatoa': An intriguing look at the explosion

'Krakatoa': An intriguing look at the explosion

Caroline Cooper, Contributor, Jakarta

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Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883
Simon Winchester
Harper Collins, 2003
416 pp
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The bare facts associated with Krakatoa's 1883 eruption describe
a force so powerful that indeed it could be heard across the
region and into India.

To wit, six cubic miles of rock and ash (nearly the sum total
of the island's material) flew up to twenty feet into the air,
waves nearly (and in one case over) one hundred feet high were
thrown in every direction radiating out from the site, killing
36,000 of the 37,000 people to die with the eruption, and whole
floating islands of pumice washed up on the shores of Zanzibar,
the skeletons of Indonesian people and animals entombed inside.

Firefighters in the United States raised the alarm a dozen or
more times on fires seen far in the distance, disturbances that
were little more than the spectacular sunsets the eruption was to
produce around the world.

The startling numbers and facts are, however, just a platform
for Simon Winchester in his latest book, Krakatoa: The Day the
World Exploded: August 27, 1883. With fluid writing, perhaps not
commonly found among those trained in geology, Winchester steps
back from the eruption to illuminate the land and its people
before ash, lava and saltwater changed everything.

The book builds unhurriedly to the moment of eruption,
describing first the strange tussle for Dutch control of spices,
and later the inhabitants of Indonesia. Equally central are the
technological developments that would later facilitate rapid
worldwide knowledge of the massive explosion (such that only four
hours later, residents of Boston saw the event splashed across
their front pages and were talking excitedly about places not
previously pronounceable).

The theory of shifting plate tectonics and the Wallace Line
(that imagines a significant split in biodiversity down the
archipelago) suggested several decades in advance the enormous
amount of tension building under the earth's surface in this
region, confirmed by Krakatoa's eruption.

"It does play, if unwittingly, a very significant part in the
much newer theory of plate tectonics, the evolution of the
earth," he writes.

While even today it is impossible to predict exactly when a
volcano will erupt, scholarship from this time tells us why.

Beyond the scientific and technological advancements that
describe Krakatoa's chaotic awakening, however, are the social
components of the story.

Winchester, unusually, accesses his subject through tireless
trolling through archives and personal letters in Holland (he
placed ads in Amsterdam's local papers, soliciting personal
documents from ancestors based in Indonesia and was overwhelmed
by the response).

Moreover, his research in Indonesia uncovers a complicated
social reaction to the eruption, with Muslim scholars such as
West Java's Abdul Karim interpreting the eruption as a heavenly
sign of displeasure with Indonesia's position as a colonial
subject.

Winchester links the explosion of Krakatoa with "extreme
religious zeal" and "weirdly fanatical anger" in some curious
ways. In what is his most delicately written passage, Winchester
describes the shifting social tide against the Dutch and draws an
arch of rising Muslim militancy through the Revolt of Banten in
1888 and on to the present.

While this assertion, perhaps, deserves closer scrutiny,
particularly in the light of the purely nationalist sentiment
that would shape the emerging nation as much as Islamic belief,
Winchester makes a compelling case in linking the destruction of
Krakatoa with the fall of the Dutch.

Krakatoa is a crucial, current look at an event that rocked
Indonesia and yet remains largely dormant in the public
consciousness. With wit and grace, Winchester probes the multiple
dimensions of the mountain's eruption, leading the reader all
over the world in a wild tale replete with geological detail,
social relevancy and a circus troop from Scotland.

The book is the creation of Winchester's longstanding interest
in Indonesia, dating to the 1970s when he worked as a reporter in
the region and first examined the slopes of Krakatoa. Perhaps the
steady rise of Anak Krakatoa, the lesser volcano to spring from
Krakatoa's eruption, will coax him back again to revisit the
unending development of the earth's surface -- and the many
narratives people tell to understand it.